Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations 2020041595, 2020041596, 9781138232273, 9781138232297, 9781315312811

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MAGIC REALISM, WORLD CINEMA, AND THE AVANT-​GARDE

This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key ­figures –​art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson –​drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism.The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-​realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-​garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema –​moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand –​that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-​philosophy. Felicity Gee is a senior lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include surrealism, women theorists and critical theory, and film-​philosophy. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach, spanning film, art history, literature, and critical theory. Recent publications include articles on Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington,Vera Chytilová, and authorial affect in Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well.

Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations Series Editors: Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-​Mann Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations rewrites the territory of contemporary world cinema, revising outdated assumptions of national cinemas, challenging complacent views of hegemonic film cultures and questioning common ideas of production, distribution and reception. It will remap established territories such as American, European and Asian cinema and explore new territories that exist both within and beyond nation-​states such as regional cinemas and online communities, while also demarcating important contexts for global cinema such as festival circuits and the discipline of film studies itself. This book series is jointly coordinated by B-​Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies based at the University of Birmingham, the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Film and Media Research at the University of Kent. Advisory Board Michele Aaron Tim Bergfelder Chris Berry William Boddy William Brown James Chapman Paolo Cherchi Usai Ian Christie Anne Ciecko Timothy Corrigan Virginia Crisp Sean Cubitt Stuart Cunningham Jonathan Driskell Rajinder Dudrah Thomas Elsaesser Dunja Fehimović Rosalind Galt David Gauntlett Felicity Gee Jeffrey Geiger Aaron Gerow

Christopher E. Gittings Catherine Grant Olof Hedling Mette Hjort John Horne Anikó Imre Dina Iordanova Geoff King Mariana Liz Gina Marchetti Laura U. Marks David Martin-Jones Alessandra Meleiro Xavier Mendik Madhuja Mukherjee David Murphy Lúcia Nagib Lydia Papadimitriou Chris Perriam Catherine Portuges Charles Ramírez Berg Jonathan Rayner

Ian Malcolm Rijsdijk María Pilar Rodríguez Joanna Rydzewska Karl Schoonover Deborah Shaw Marc Silberman Murray Smith Paul Julian Smith Song Hwee Lim Ann Marie Stock Stephen Teo Kian Teck Niamh Thornton Dolores Tierney Jan Uhde Marije de Valck Ravi Vasudevan Belén Vidal Ginette Vincendeau James Walters Emma Widdis Vito Zagarrio Yingjin Zhang

The Routledge Companion to World Cinema Edited by Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-​Mann Cinema Against Doublethink Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History David Martin-​Jones Remapping Brazilian Film Culture in the Twenty-​First Century Stephanie Dennison Contemporary Lusophone African Film Transnational Communities and Alternative Modernities Edited by Paulo de Medeiros and Livia Apa Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-​Garde Felicity Gee For more information about this series, please visit:  www.routledge.com/​Remapping-​World-​ Cinema/​book-​series/​RWC

MAGIC REALISM, WORLD CINEMA, AND THE AVANT-​GARDE

Felicity Gee

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Felicity Gee The right of Felicity Gee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Extracts of featured in Chapter 4 © Fundación Alejo Carpentier, 2017. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Gee, Felicity, 1976– author. Title: Magic realism, world cinema, and the avant-garde / Felicity Gee. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Remapping world cinema; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020041595 (print) | LCCN 2020041596 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138232273 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138232297 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315312811 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental films–History and criticism. | Magic realism (Art)–Influence. | Magic realism (Literature)–Influence. | Arts, Modern–20th century. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E96 G44 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.E96 (ebook) | DDC 791.43611–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041595 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041596 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​23227-​3  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​23229-​7  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​31281-​1  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

A note on terminology  A note on translation  Foreword: Magic realism –​The chronicle of a discourse  Acknowledgements  1 Introduction 

vi vii viii xi 1

2 Magischer Realismus and the ‘demon fantastic’: painting, photography, film 

31

3 Ethno-​magic-​realist documentary: ecstatic practice 

60

4 Lo real maravilloso americano: prismatic reality and the screen 

91

5 Magic realism: the prehensile toe – Jameson, Magritte, and affect  126 6 ‘Soviet magic realism’ and world cinema 

149

7 Hyperreality, understatement, atmosphere, and ambivalence 

170

Coda 

193

Bibliography  Index 

198 224

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Magischer Realismus –​or its English translation magic realism –​is used to refer to Franz Roh’s categorisation, or any discourses/​modes/​movements that are directly related or drawn from his work. lo real maravilloso americano –​or ‘marvellous realism’ or ‘the marvellous real of the Americas’ –​is used to refer to Alejo Carpentier’s preface essay to The Kingdom of This World and work directly related to it. Subsequent to the ‘boom’ novel in Latin America, Carpentier’s marvellous becomes ‘magical realism’. This is the most frequently used term in literary criticism, and what I refer to as ‘vernacular magical realism’. le réalisme magique is Johan Daisne’s Flemish strain of literary magic realism, which is later taken up by Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux. le merveilleux –​or the ‘marvellous’ –​is used to refer to the surrealist usage. Cinematic magic realism is my preferred term for twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century films post-​boom, or after Fredric Jameson’s 1986 essay ‘On magic realism in film’. This distinction –​in particular the loss of the ‘magical’ –​is important as it not only refers back to Roh’s original term but also marks a separation from the literary mode. magic(al) realism (after Bowers, 2004) combines the art historical and later literary terms. It is used here to indicate a literary genre that is predicated on and refers to the Latin American boom novel. When writing about the early twentieth century, what has often more recently been described as Latin America, is at times stated as ‘America’ or ‘American’ in line with the Carpenterian usage of americano. I have reflected Jameson’s capitalisation throughout. Lastly, ‘magic-​realist’ is the adjective I use to describe any work of art, film, or literature characteristic of the mode and discourse of magic realism.

A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

Where titles are commonly known in their original language they have not been translated into English. For ease, some have been abbreviated. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Rahul Bery has translated a significant number of archival documents and essays written by Carpentier especially for this book, many of which were found in the personal archive of the Fundación Alejo Carpentier. These are signalled in the footnotes as RB.

FOREWORD Magic realism –​The chronicle of a discourse

MAGIC REALISM, compound noun. Socio-​cultural critique as self-​reflexive storytelling, by which one proposes to express –​in painting, photography, film, literature, music, or in any other manner –​the dialectical process1 of thought and its strange affects. Dictated by sensory apprehension, formal experimentation, and a resistance to the acceleration of capital, exempt from binary or fixed polarities. ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Magic realism is based on the belief in the mysterious realities of unseen, unexpected, illusory, and often ordinary associations. It is critically poetic, aesthetically unordinary, and revels in the vital intensity of the present moment. It resists the sea change from modernism to postmodernism, resolutely uneven, and optimistically radical. It resists assimilation into the vernacular.2 Key works of magic realism remain effective in their avant-​garde qualities in the quest for meaning without resolute conclusion.3 Comprised of seemingly antithetical aspects of lived experience and its cultural representation, magic realism, sometimes also known as magical realism, magic(al)4 or marvellous realism, appears to contradict itself. Somewhere between the assumed facticity of ‘realism’ and the oft-​perceived non-​rational possibility of ‘magic’, magic realism hovers, resistant to assimilation or sober, regulatory boundaries. It invites us to consider what lies beyond, or deep within, the exterior world apprehended through our senses. Magic realism is equally interested in subjects and objects, blurring the division between them. It rejects the commodification and slick structures of capitalism, interrupting its flows with intense, affective events that exceed or arrest the arrow of linear time, and the boundaries of space. Magic realism revels in its inbetweenness. It looks to poetry, philosophy, and experimental form in order to ‘work through’ the poly-​dimensional experience of individuals adrift in worlds that coagulate in mass and enforced systems. Magic realism is rebellious, ambitious, and radical. It can be sardonic and witty. It is often weird and uncanny, and its ‘magic’, regardless of type or denomination, opens up the

Foreword  ix

mundane and the habitual to a new and unforeseen character. It has been claimed as a regional literature throughout Latin America, a mode of painting in Germany, a means of revisiting classicist painting in Italy and the Netherlands, a marginal cinema in East Central Europe. But magic realism has taken root throughout the world, employed by writers, artists, ethnographers, anthropologists, musicologists, filmmakers, journalists, and theorists to express the discourses of transnational and diasporic experience, and the liminality of exile and exclusion. It becomes an intellectual practice, compounded in the form of essays, translations, manifestos, art and literary criticism, where the antagonistic tension and contingency of magic can assist in articulating intense socio-​cultural issues –​from the metaphorical and allegorical to the literally catastrophic. If we conceive of magic realism as a discourse, it allows much more openly for discussion of the ways in which it has been deployed as a critical as well as an artistic tool.5 It finds inspiration in the struggles of exile and oppression, poverty, and wealth; across geographical boundaries and geo-​political conflicts; and in the advances in technological reproduction and shifts in religious and secular belief systems. Magic realism is a world discourse as opposed to a globalising narrative. It contributes to the realisation of ‘a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can circulate, intersect and converse with one-​another’ at the frontiers of semi-​peripheral geographies rather than contained within national boundaries. What might be said to occur in works of magic realism is an ‘aesthetics of peripherality’.6 It oft resides in the twilight, or a lugubrious hyperreality cast through artificial lighting.

Notes 1 In Negative Dialectics [1966] Adorno makes a distinction between Hegel’s ‘positive’ analysis of emergent identity –​created in the relations between thought and being, subject and object world –​and replaces it with his own ‘negative’ version (in the vein of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’), in which he asserts that identity is achieved negatively through social suppression and regulation. In place of diversity and difference or originality, he argues, socially constructed boundaries restrict the growth of identity, thus negating its potential (1973, p.143). His motivation is human suffering: ‘Suffering is the corporeal imprint of society and the object upon human consciousness’ (pp.17–​8). The primacy of suffering is upheld in Jameson’s discussion of magic-​realist film. 2 The term vernacular is used by Miriam Hansen to discuss new modes and movements in modern twentieth-​century culture that became inseparable from the new ways in which art was produced and transmitted –​i.e. through mass production and commodification. Hansen eschews the ‘ideologically overdetermined’ adjective ‘popular’ in favour of vernacular as it ‘combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability’. While Hansen focuses on a rather homogenised model of Hollywood cinema, I  use it here rather tongue-​in-​cheek, to critique a conceptualisation of magic realism that while very international and formally diverse in scope is nevertheless boxed into a very homogenous corpus (Hansen, in Gledhill and Williams, 2000, p.333). This usage is distinct from Aga Skrodzka’s deployment of ‘vernacular magic realism’ which she uses to define the parameters of an East Central European strain of cinematic magic realism: ‘I

x Foreword

use it [vernacular] here to valorise these filmmakers’ art as an ex-​centric discourse that challenges the official history (as well as the hegemonic forces that write it)’ (2012, p.22). I agree that magic-​realist cinema is indeed an art of ‘ex-​centric discourse’ but one that I further categorise into third, ethnographic, documentary, art cinema, avant-​garde, and experimental filmmaking. 3 This definition is inspired by, and modelled after, André Breton’s definition of surrealism in ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’ [Manifesto of Surrealism] (1924). 4 As coined by Maggie Ann Bowers in Magic(al) Realism (2004). 5 In 1975, Fredric Jameson presented what I still consider to be one of the best articulations of the differences between a genre and a mode in ‘Magical Narratives:  Romance as Genre’. Treading the ground between Northrop Frye’s and Vladimir Propp’s respective field-​defining works on romance literature and the fairy tale, put simply he considers the structural analysis of a ‘fixed form’ genre (Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, 1968) in contradistinction to the phenomenological and intertextual mode of romance in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). There are, of course, overlaps between the two, and in Jameson’s approach to Romance literature, he finds the idea of transformation central to his thesis, whereby both diachronic (historical) and synchronic (shared generic characteristics irrespective of period) approaches to a utopian romance genre are possible. The role of magic in the romance is, as Jameson quotes from Northrop Frye, not concerned with flight from reality:  ‘the quest-​romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality’ (Jameson’s emphasis, 1975, p.138). 6 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), formed by members of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University in 2007, expand upon Jameson’s term ‘combined unevenness’ (discussed in Chapter 5) in their study of combined and uneven development of capital throughout the world, and the world of literary studies (2015, pp.22; 57).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I had no idea when I originally started this project that it would involve so many tangents, layers, and contingencies. It began as a PhD thesis under the supervision of Mandy Merck and Christopher Townsend at Royal Holloway, University of London, and my sincere thanks go to my supervisors for their sage advice and enthusiasm for the project. I am deeply grateful to my readers, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and to series editor Rob Stone, for their patience, support, and helpful comments. Rob, thank you for commissioning that Buñuel chapter all those years ago.Thanks also to my editor at Routledge Jennifer Vennall, you have been a joy to work with. Thank you to Tom McEvoy for your graphic designer skills in turning my scrawl into a stylish diagram (Chapter 7). Thanks to the Department of English and Film at the University of Exeter, for granting me a period of research leave to work on the book, and to my colleagues for their brilliant discussions. In particular, thanks to the World Cinema/​World Literature team convenors Florian Stadtler, Ranita Chatterjee, and Chris Campbell –​ and to Jana Funke and Jane Feaver  –​working with you is inspirational. Thanks to my wonderful friends and colleagues in film studies and surrealism:  Jonathan Eburne, Anna Watz, Kristoffer Noheden, Catriona McAra, Barnaby Dicker, Anna Backman Rogers, Jenny Chamarette, and Neil Fox. The British Academy generously funded my research trips to Havana, Cuba, to visit the Fundación Alejo Carpentier, where I could view vital archival documents relating Carpentier to film; and to visit the Havana Film Festival, where Jameson first alighted on the concept of a cinematic magic realism. Visiting Carpentier’s house, his grave, the city that he writes so eloquently about, and experiencing the Cuban weather contributed to a more profound understanding of lo real maravilloso americano. Thanks go to the staff at Fundación Alejo Carpentier who patiently facilitated my visits –​Graziella Pogolotti, Xonia, and Marile.Thanks to my gracious

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xii Acknowledgements

translator Rahul Bery, for your expertise and precision. Thanks also to my friend and filmmaker Lisa Stock, for your wonderful films and allowing me to interview you for this project. There are too many friends to whom I owe immense thanks for boundless love and support throughout the process of writing this book –​Jana and Florian (#JFF forever) and my London gang in particular. As well as offering intellectual support, you have provided me with much needed diversions from the desk, for which I am eternally grateful. Thanks to my mum, who was always fascinated by the books I read, and the ideas I had. She did not get to see me publish this work, but I know she would have been so proud.Thank you to David, for treading the path alongside me, and for always believing in me. Lastly, thanks to Angela Carter and The Passion of New Eve, which is where my initial interest in magic realism was born. It has been a fascinating journey, but I  vow that my next book will possibly involve fewer geographical regions, a shorter time period, and fewer characters! I began with a determination to reattribute depth and criticality to the term magic realism especially to its cinematic variant, and to treat it as a discourse not a genre. I am thankful to all my colleagues and friends over the years, with whom I have had sometimes very frustrating but always inspiring conversations about this. In 2020, more than ever, we must seek to find critically poetic discourses with which to challenge and alter mainstream representation. Very special thanks to Anocha Suwichakornpong for graciously allowing me to use a beautiful still from her film By The Time It Gets Dark [Dao Khanong] as this book’s cover image, and to Paul at Electric Eel Films. This image encapsulates what magic realism means to me.

Publisher’s acknowledgements The publishers would like to thank Fundación Alejo Carpentier for granting permission for the usage of extracts within Chapter 4.

1 INTRODUCTION

Part one: pioneers –​Roh, Carpentier, Jameson Magic realism first emerged as a mode of painting in the early twentieth century and soon disappeared, falling out of favour, superseded by neighbouring movements, and later resurfacing as an enduring literary genre (Warnes 2005). Since its inception in the early 1920s German avant-​garde, it has proved persistent as an intermedial mode spanning literature, painting, photography, film, philosophy, gender studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism. Why does magic realism persist in the twenty-​first century? What does it offer as an alternative discourse on subjective experience and world politics? The answers to these questions are addressed within these pages. But this is no linear journey, and there is no fixed point of conclusion. This book tells the story of marginality and creative resistance, remapping a new cinematic discourse through the creative and critical texts that have kept magic realism relevant. It is the story of an interdisciplinary cinema informed by literature and art history in non-​traditional and innovative ways, hence my deliberate usage of the art historical term ‘magic realism’ which involved collaborative, polyvalent innovation from the outset. It recognises that any attempt to understand the genesis and evolution of magic realism must take into account its intermedial and multi-​generic aspects, what Jameson describes in relation to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as ‘distinct diegetical elements […] transformed into a stream of affect’ (Jameson 2015, p.63). The films while geographically, politically, and stylistically varied, share aesthetic, poetic, philosophical, and ideological factors. My interest in magic realism in relation to world cinema lies in its radical potential to undermine fixed hegemonic rationality and certainty, and therefore critique dominant systems of power and orthodoxy. In terms of film specifically, this involves a formal experimentation aimed at capturing the fleeting presence of magic within the everyday. This book argues that magic-​realist films expose

2 Introduction

and interrogate cognitive and phenomenological apprehension of exterior reality through avant-​ garde practice, or in non-​ mainstream, non-​ conventional modes of representation that focus on becoming or metamorphosing. Early writing on the cinema such as Antonin Artaud’s ‘Sorcery and Cinema’ (c. 1928), Ado Kyrou’s Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1952), and André Breton’s discussion of the magical space of the movie theatre in ‘As in a Wood’ (1951) saw the experience of cinema-​going, of a psychological identification with oneiric screen images, as magical. Artaud writes that: ‘In essence the cinema reveals a whole occult life, one with which it puts us directly in contact’ (cited in Hammond 2000, p.104). Given the anti-​rationalist sentiment that drives much modern art of the early twentieth century, technological ‘magic’ proves a crucial stage in the development of ‘new realisms’. Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert’s A General Theory of Magic (1902), the wide dissemination of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (translated into French in 1923), Guillaume Apollinaire’s tongue in cheek ‘Little Recipes from Modern Magic’ (1916), Pablo Picasso and Man Ray’s work with indigenous objects, the rise of ethnological and ethnographic studies, promote plural forms of magic as narrative or visual strategies with which to approach the subjects of reality, and realism. The cinematic apparatus and its manipulative réalisation magique (Colville 2006, p.119), is vital to the particularity of the films that I present here as examples. This is also true for literary works, where the relationship between magic and the real ‘has to be defined technically or textually; the mere contextual presence of two world-​views is not enough to distinguish magical realism from any type of writing that deals with different cultures’ (Aldea 2011, p.16). I first began research on magic realism inspired by the symbiotic relationship between mental and physical transformation in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1988) and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), and in the films Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001), Orlando (Sally Potter, 1993), Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987] and Céline et Julie vont en bateau [Céline and Julie Go Boating, Jacques Rivette, 1974]. Each of these examples takes a psychological desire for transformation and represents it through corporeal metamorphosis. Often based in trauma, such desires for change are realised in varying degrees of ‘realism’  –​changing one’s sex, escaping poverty and boredom, transgressing social lines of ‘propriety’ and ‘order’, or exorcising pain through imaginative recourse to the divine or supernatural. In each of these works there is dynamic potential for a metamorphosis in thought based in acute social and personal issues related to identity, temporality, and utopia. There seems to be a general consensus among theorists of magic realism that the reader/​viewer of the magic-​realist text must accept that there is a possibility for many ‘truths’, many versions of reality to exist simultaneously. Maggie Ann Bowers writes of a disruption of fixed categories of truth and history, which creates ‘a space beyond authoritative discourse, where the unrepresentable can be expressed’ (2004, p.81). The creation of a space and time for the expression of the unrepresentable, the presentation of the taboo or a multiplicity of selves, seemed to me inherent to the mode of magic realism. But the more I read and watched, the more I realised

Introduction  3

that drawing on a literary model to understand films described as magic(al)-​realist, was simply insufficient without actually thinking in depth about the mode’s visual roots in painting and photography, and its philosophical enquiry outlined in critical writings. Literary criticism on magic-​realist fiction has underestimated the centrality of the cinematic apparatus, the camera, to magic-​realist discourse.1 This book unearths film criticism, film scenarios, and screen adaptations that intersect with critical magic-​realist discourse and illuminate the relations between cinema and what essentially began as a discourse on photo-​realist painting. Magic realism as a term has endured the geopolitical shifts of the twentieth century, popping up in critical and creative work, but also more amorphously in popular, vernacular versions (see fn2) which still seem to find use for the term in the twenty-​first century. These ‘legacy’ versions are by turn directly and tangentially affiliated with its critical discourse, films that encourage philosophical engagement through affective resonance. Magic realism emerges from a complex web of historical and cultural influences that are typical of flux and uncertainty, and as it continues to migrate and transform in the hands of different writers and artists, it becomes clear that the strength of magic realism as a critical discourse is its mutability. Without doubt many magic-​ realist works highlight the importance of the role of philosophy, which can be traced to the role of wonder in Plato’s writing. In Plato’s dialogues, most famously in Theaetetus (c. 369 bc), wonder [thaumazein] accompanies the genesis of philosophical thought, like a lightning bolt or the stimulus of mathematical problem. Theaetetus:  Oh yes, indeed, Socrates, I often wonder like mad what these things can mean, sometimes when I’m looking at them I begin to feel quite giddy. Socrates: […] It seems that Theodorus was not far from the truth when he guessed what kind of person you are. For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering:  this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.2 The dialogue is an epistemological discourse seeking to interrogate links between knowledge, perception, and affect. It ends without resolution, in an impasse, or, more optimistically, doesn’t end but continues on, metamorphosing like thought itself, never still, and always capable of strange and startling observations. This book argues that philosophical investigation defines written magic-​ realist discourse. For a mode of film, of world cinema, to fall under the title of magic realism it must also be defined by philosophical wonder, evoked in the combination of its technological, political, and creative forces. As Socrates implies, wonder is everywhere, an anthropocentric position that prioritises the feelings and knowledge of humans facing the world –​as Hernán Cortés famously declared regarding the ‘new world’:  ‘No language on earth can describe its magnitude and originality’.3 The magic in magic realism is variously marvellous and mysterious, as well as magical. Film has a special relationship with reality and magic in its technical feats of processing and editing (celluloid and digital), as well in the elements of chance and accident

4 Introduction

that may occur in the developing stages. But more than this, film affords an audio-​ tactile-​visual immediacy that can make thought visible (by focusing on interiority, the ineffable, the dream, the micro-​wonders of modern life) as well as technically reproduce the sensations of human perception. Magic realism promulgates intense, strange, and challenging ideas that question the oppositional borders between what is known and felt, imagined and experienced, or what is immanent or transcendent. Magic-​realist film explores the expansion from modern newness and alienation into different subjectivities that take the form of non-​human, as well as human entities. This book aims to explore magic-​realist cinema as it develops and metamorphoses, not as a genre, but as a means of expressing a philosophical and socio-​critical discourse where ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ shimmer in a complex spectrum of metaphysical and ordinary elements. Above all, these combined elements contribute to a ‘feeling’ or ‘atmosphere’ that remains seductive and useful to contemporary creatives. In order to reach an understanding of this film variant, I follow the key voices –​ or chroniclers –​for whom the mode proves instrumental as a discourse of enquiry, enchantment, and revolt, in their respective critical and creative practice. These threads connecting magic realism, theory, and avant-​garde practice run through the book, formal and philosophical connections, correspondences, and palimpsests that build a cinematics of magic realism, in which there remains a strange seductiveness (Jameson 1986, p.302), something that moves between critical, philosophical thought and affective response. It raises ‘many problems, both theoretical and historical’ (p.301). Various critics have raised questions about allegiance:  does an insistence on magic undermine the political context of a given work (Cooper 1991; Aldea 2011), or is magic sided with Marxism, against religion (Wilson 2013)? A widely consensual verdict is that magic realism allows for antithetical aspects of lived experience to appear together (spatially and temporally): ‘In magical realism, the supernatural is not presented as problematic’ (Chanady 1985, p.23). Some of the most useful critiques of the term involve a condensation of its antinomy: ‘magical-​ realist texts often conflate sight and insight, thus collapsing the literal and figurative meanings of “vision” by making the visible world the very source of insight’ (Zamora 2005, p.31). This also holds true for pre-​capitalist (so-​called ‘primitive’) cultures and their belief systems when presented alongside ‘modern’ culture (frequently delineated by technical and first world influences).What unites my examples above is an acceptance of difference, which often leads to a non-​conclusive dialectical exploration of culture(s). This is an important point of distinction, because throughout this book I argue that the acceptance of difference, and the philosophical and creative means of thinking through difference, is at the heart of cinematic magic realism. I agree with Stephen M. Hart that the widely accepted formula of magic(al) realism presented in the works of Gabriel Garcia Márquez ‘erodes any distinction between the marvellous and the real,’ peaking in Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967] where ‘reality is not real if it is not simultaneously magical’ (1982, p.44 –​note how magical and marvellous are used interchangeably here). Weaving together the marvellous tales of his Caribbean childhood, supernatural events in the fictional world of Macondo where the novel takes place, and

Introduction  5

the horrific reality of Colombia’s colonial past, Márquez creates a mytho-​historical narrative focalised through characters who are to various degrees marginalised and oppressed. Juxtaposed with the unfathomable and unjust reality is a magic which does not seem completely antinomous because it represents a subjective perspective. Magic often functions allegorically, presented in an idealised or utopian vision, or a past event. Márquez’s novel illustrates perfectly the critical contention that ‘Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-​century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind’s reason’ (Mikics 1995, p.372). Rationality, to a large extent, is what magic realism rails against, despite an oft-​privileged emphasis on order and clarity in magic-​realist painting. As humans, our interaction with exterior realities, and interior (virtual) thought processes engenders a constant state that bridges certainty and uncertainty. These sensory interruptions, whether they expand and become intellectual questions or not, constitute a tension, where the mystery does not descend from on high, but dwells within the everyday. As magic-​realist filmmaker Lisa Stock puts it, magic realism involves:  ‘The small glimmers that maybe only you see. […] The challenge then, may be in creating new metaphors or images not attached to a kind of nomenclature, that transcend cultures and generations, as does [Borges’s] Book of Sand’.4 In our contemporary moment, magic realism can prove fruitful as a language of change, of becoming: a subtle poetic-​politics. In the 1990s, a renewed interest in literary magic(al) realism sparked a flurry of critical anthologies and publications in the English language, building on Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic:  Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985); Raymond Trousson’s ‘Du Fantastique et du Merveilleux au Réalisme Magique’ (1985) and María-​Elena Angulo’s Magic Realism Social Context and Discourse (1995) among many others, which argue for magic realism as a distinct mode. William Spindler’s (1993) ‘Magic Realism:  A Typology’ considers the overlap between European and Latin American variants, setting out three thematic categories: metaphysical magic realism; anthropological magic realism; and ontological magic realism.5 Lois Parkinson Zamora’s and Wendy Faris’s Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community (1995), followed by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-​chin Ouyang’s A Companion to Magical Realism a decade later (2005) provide translations of key foundational texts, as well as a reassessment of magic(al) realism in later twentieth-​century postcolonial and commonwealth writers. Although Márquez’s One Hundred Years cemented magic(al) realism as firmly Latin American, the scope of the material presented in these anthologies gathers influence from disparate places: British and Anglo-​Indian fiction, North American Jewish crime novels, nomadic writing in the Maghreb, Australian and Canadian fiction, Japanese fantasy fiction. At this point, the reader begins to question whether the ambiguity and perpetual antinomies that mark magic(al) realism leave it openly applicable to any work of art or literary text combining fantasy and social realism. Indeed, Hart and Ouyang raise this question in the introduction to their anthology:  ‘If Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone can be magical-​realist, then, the argument goes, surely anything can be part of the discourse of magical realism?’ (2005, p.12). The Harry Potter franchise resides

6 Introduction

firmly in the children’s fantasy genre, where magic, despite Harry’s ‘backstory’, is cartoonish and bombastic; empty of subtlety or poetry, and the antithesis of magic-​ realist discourse. There is also the issue in Western studies of magic(al) realism, a criticism frequently levelled at Jameson’s essays on ‘Third World’ film and literature, that local particularity, including folklore, is superficially understood, or generalised. In his review of Zamora and Faris’s anthology, Eduardo González critiques Faris’s chapter, where ‘Scheherazade becomes […] a bit like the Muse of Comparative Literature, less a talking princess on death call than a mountain deity with a brood of prematurely postmodern children’ (1995, p.1000). This is a fairly persistent criticism of magic(al) realism studies throughout the 1990s, and one that I  feel has clear reason to take issue with the sometimes breezy and all-​encapsulating manner in which non-​Euro-​American texts are folded into this new canon. However, González demonstrates that he is not above glossing the female-​centred narratives of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989) and Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993), which he labels ‘sexy feminism’ (p.999). This disagreeable remark reveals that the sides are not so clear-​cut. More recent volumes have considered its relation to diasporic and cosmopolitan experience in the twenty-​first century (Alonso 2015; Sasser 2014), Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, and the history of the emotions (Aldea 2011; Arellano 2015), or the excesses of the Nigerian oil industry, through a conjoined literary mode comprised of the political ecological term ‘petro-​magic’ and magic(al) realism (Wenzel 2014).This scholarship continues to be pertinent to any study of magic realism in film, which necessarily includes postcolonial, ethnographic, eco-​critical and political filmmaking. Hart and Ouyang stress that critics need to cast off the ‘Latin American straightjacket’ and move beyond purist readings of magic(al) realism that are embedded in postcolonial discourse even when magic-​realist codes ‘can be an excellent vehicle for political views and issues’ (pp.20; 4). I  argue that it is impossible to assume a ‘purist’ critical position if we follow the discourse of its pioneers. Carpentier’s oeuvre (Chapter 4), for example, illustrates how European artistic influences on the Latin American consciousness lead to gradual processes of transculturation6 that have immense political ramifications in and beyond regional specificity. Here I speak of the obvious shock of sudden colonisation, but more importantly, of the potential for later, reciprocal, cultural exchanges in spite of hierarchical caste, class, racial, or ethnic divides. Silvia Spitta sees in Latin American literature between the First and Second World Wars a mediation between so-​called ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds which spawns a plethora of terms such as hybridity, métissage, and syncretism and works with the world of objects on two levels: ‘its violent deracination from the originating culture and displacement into a world to which it is alien (which forces a reorganization of that world)’ and ‘a reorganization of European collections of objects under the impact of a changed consciousness’ (2009, p.29). Essential to avant-​garde fascination with magic at this time is the potential in revolution, by way of the marvellous: ‘The marvellous with all its assumptions of surprise, chance, the fulgurant vista of something more than what we can fully grasp, has never known in the plastic arts the triumphs which are accomplished in great number in Oceanic objects’.7

Introduction  7

As a result of increased exile and migration among artists and writers, issues of cultural appropriation, purloining of native objects, casual idealisation, and exoticism have rightfully been addressed in relation to the modernist avant-​garde. Martinican surrealist and philosopher René Ménil (1941–​1945) reflects on how transnational avant-​gardes evolved out of the very particular conditions of the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in a ‘panoply of philosophies’ born of historical materialist, surrealist, and spiritual concerns (cited in Richardson 1996, p.77). Modernist periodicals form an essential part of this exchange, providing new artistic and critical vocabularies for oppressed communities to explore their own cultures, but from which, as in the case of the Martinican avant-​garde, the non-​Western culture ‘contradictorily keeps its distance in a constant engagement’ (p.72). Transculturation is a long, slow process that, in the case of Latin America, reflects ‘utopian longing for liberation, revolution and self-​determination […] Resistance is understood in terms of the struggle to construct and maintain a cultural specificity by appropriating elements that will characterize the diverse historical, social, cultural and political contexts’ (Pick 1987, p.45). Such complex interrelations are seldom made evident in the marketing of magic-​realist (or surrealist8) films, despite the crucial dialogue between avant-​garde form and geopolitical content that lies within.This book is born out of taking magic realism seriously; it sets out to find greater clarity and reasoning in the ‘tendencies’, ‘affinities’,‘influences’, and ‘overlaps’ that constitute a magic-​realist work –​its objects, environments, and politics. Often criticised for a certain political ambivalence, it is my contention that many of the films, and indeed books, tracts, and plastic art that are labelled magic-​realist include radical formal element(s), as well as fierce political and cultural critique that is discursive and philosophical. I choose to focus on its avant-​garde roots and legacies, because to chart magic realism’s historical (diachronic) and artistic (synchronic) journeys requires an analysis that accounts for the amorphous and indefinite coordinates of its trajectory during a period riven by seismic socio-​cultural and geopolitical change, and characterised by tension. The films I discuss encourage us to think through modernism, as well as modernity, from a truly world perspective, but also, in tracing magic realism’s roots and growth through the international avant-​garde, the focus allows for an alignment of experimental form (magic) with a more radical politics (realism) that resists stasis or fixity.9 Aiming to reinject criticality, particularity, and philosophical enquiry with a view to opening out rather than closing off the films’ affective potential, this book reveals a magic realism that is antithetical to the whimsical, vernacular meaning assigned to it in recent years. This book does not court the reading of magic realism as a hyperbolic narrative form in which all that is magical is real. It asks why humans rely on the unknowable, invisible, and inexplicable aspects of existence to imagine the future. Why things that seem irrational or puzzling can be magical or real, or both; and how delving into the ontological implications of representing such conundrums generates genuinely radical and affective bodies of work. There are three major figures who have sustained and transformed the discourse of magic realism: German art historian Franz Roh, who coined Magischer Realismus

8 Introduction

[Magic Realism10] in 1923, publishing Nach-​Expressionismus:  Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei11 in 1925 [Post-​ expressionism:  Magic Realism. Problems of the New European Painting]; Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, whose concept of lo real maravilloso americano12 [the marvellous real in the Americas] made the case for a specifically [Latin] American marvellous in opposition to the surrealist merveilleux13 that he encountered while working with members of the French Surrealist Group during 11  years spent in exile in Paris (1928–​1939); and North American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, who in the mid-​1980s begins to employ the term magic realism to film, and to an extended theoretical enquiry into the shift between modernism and postmodernism. In a crucial passage from Roh’s Nach-​Expressionismus, he writes: To depict realistically is not to portray or copy but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world in their particular primordial shape. The old Aristotelian idea of imitation had already gained a spiritual quality. For the new art, it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world. (Roh, in Zamora and Faris [1925] 1995, pp.23–​4, original emphasis)

Roh highlights a tendency in German art of the Weimar period (1918/​19–​ 1933) for a sensory rendering of a world shaken by the First World War, paused to ‘reflect on the hope and the compromises of the 1920s’ (Gale 2018, p.94) often with an exacting verisimilitude. They speak of inner and outer worlds colliding, of a mutual relationship between exterior phenomena and human perspective, feeling and seeing, and what Spindler terms ‘making the ordinary seem supernatural’ (1993, p.77). Influenced by his mentor Heinrich Wölfflin’s contrastive analysis of renaissance and baroque styles in the influential study Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe [Principles of Art History, 1915],14 Roh clarifies Magischer Realismus as a shift away from Expressionism, and orders the principle differences between the two styles into a table of 23 pairs of traits (see Table 2.1). Published, significantly, just after Breton’s 1924 ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’ [Manifesto of Surrealism],15 Nach-​Expressionismus seeks to categorise a new realism in German painting that is nevertheless influenced by classicism, Romanticism, and concurrent avant-​garde movements. From the outset magic realism seemed to have close affinities with the Italian pittura metafisica artists [metaphysical painting] (see Chapter  2) and in particular painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose work Roh encountered through the pages of Valori Plastici (1918–​1922).16 Art historian Jean Clair describes de Chirico’s oeuvre as being based in a ‘waiting and melancholy’ that later came to characterise magic realism: If the world of modern man is still inhabited by memories of demons and gods, then the appearances of the world are the manifest signs of the most secret relationships that the psyche establishes with the configurations of the visible world. […] it is necessary to reproduce the appearance of what is

Introduction  9

visible with the greatest accuracy –​its colour, its form, its structure and everything that communicates with our senses. (1997, p.276, emphasis in original)17

For Clair, the affinities between de Chirico and magic realism amount to a shared interest in the lives of objects, objects that contain their own meaning, part of which is hidden, or partially obscured, ‘half-​alive and half-​dead’ (González 1997, p.280).The airless landscapes in his early paintings provide an important touchstone for magic-​realist film, and later for Latin American writers of the 1940s and 1950s. It is difficult to say definitively how and why a term as diffuse as Roh’s Magischer Realismus later found currency across the world, but its migration is in large part thanks to the concurrent publication of excerpts of the preface to Nach-​ Expressionismus as ‘Realismo mágico. Post Expresionismo. Problemas de la pintura europea más reciente’ (1927) –​in Revista de Occidente (April–​June, No. 48, pp.274–​ 301), edited by Ortega y Gasset; translated by Fernando Véla,18 and the Franco-​ Italian journal 900, edited by Massimo Bontempelli and Cuzio Malaparte. Latin American scholars would later question the inherently subjective quality of its ‘spirituality’: ‘Roh’s flaw, from their point of view, lies in his attempt to subtract from the phenomenon he describes a transcendental and religious impulse that appears inherent to it, in order to preserve the phenomenological and formalistic purity of his theory’ (Echevarría 1977, pp.115–​16). The division between these ‘formal’, ‘phenomenological’ aspects of magic realism and a more overtly political Latin American strain later come to define the heterogeneous qualities of cinematic magic realism. The majority of English-​language scholarship on Alejo Carpentier focuses on his essay lo real-​maravilloso de america19 (originally published in the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, April 1948), which later became the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World, 1949] with the slightly altered title lo real maravilloso americano.20 The prologue addresses the ontological magic of ‘the Americas’  –​an ‘authentic’, immediately graspable reality, which on the one hand heavily critiques, and on the other remains indebted to what he deems the ‘manufactured’ reality of surrealist Paris (Chapter 4). Written following an inspirational trip to Porte-​au-​Prince with the actor Louis Jouvert in 1943, it is a theoretical negotiation of the gap between his philosophical questioning of faith, art and culture, and the physical reality and historical weight of what he encounters in Haiti. Latin America is a continent, he says, ‘where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies’ or begun to catalogue the marvellous that springs from its ‘unexpected richness of reality’ and ‘amplification of scale’ (1995, pp.86–​7). These extraordinary physical and historical aspects of the landscape overwhelm him, and immediately conjure images of the African slave uprising centuries earlier which lead to the Haitian revolution (1791–​1804): I was lucky enough to visit Henri Christophe’s kingdom –​such poetic ruins […] and I saw the still-​Norman Cape Town, the Cap Français of the former

10 Introduction

colony, where a house with great long balconies leads to the palace of hewn stone inhabited years ago by Pauline Bonaparte. […] I saw the possibility of establishing certain synchronisms, American, recurrent, timeless, relating this to that, yesterday to today.21 The theme of cultural syncretism –​a term used by Carpentier for ‘the simultaneous expression of distinct cultural systems in the same expressive forms or […] the accommodation of multiple (and often conflicting) cultural meanings in a shared expressive context’ (Zamora 2006, xv) –​years of colonial struggle, slavery, immigration, emigration, and a rise in world travel –​is at the core of his marvellous. But so too is the spell of the European avant-​garde, and a formal self-​reflexivity honed amongst artists and intellectuals. In his writing an extraordinary transformation occurs whereby the cultural and social traits of the coloniser and the colonised intersect are reproduced and proliferated in multivocal histories of colonial power and Black, Indian, and creollo insurgence. He aims to ‘strategize belonging’ (Sasser 2014, p.210) through the mode of lo real maravilloso americano, finding ways in which regional, non-​first world cultures challenge Eurocentric power, conventional forms of mimetic realism, and the idea of modernity as progress. The slow crescendo that culminates in Cuba’s Revolution, as well as the country’s on-​going relationship with both the United States and the Soviet Union, are factors that bubble beneath his creative evolution. Lo real maravilloso americano is born out of personal experience, but it also articulates the ‘narrative fissure’ between ‘expectations of modernization and the realities of the course of events’ (Moreiras 2001, p.49). Carpentier with one foot in Europe, one in Latin America, bears witness and testimony to the beginnings of a ‘negative globality’ (Moreiras 2001) in which the grand narratives of capitalism and Communism are eventually shown to no longer constitute a dichotomy. His work constitutes a celebration of the heterogeneity of the Caribbean via the marvellous and the baroque, an optimistic stance that is later taken up in Jameson’s theory of magic realism. Carpentier was an ardent cinephile, and his relationship with film and filmmaking germinated in his early journalistic and production work (Chapter 4). His articles on avant-​garde film and art, as well as his involvement in the Cuban film industry –​ICAIC [Instituto Cuban del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos] –​are illuminating, positing a Carpenterian legacy of magic realism beyond the ‘boom’ novel: ‘In Cuba there had been only a few unremarkable attempts at filmmaking, purely commercial in nature […] But the 1959 Revolution heralded the opening of a new film school in Latin America, a continent in which many countries still have no representation in the field of cinema’.22 Julio García Espinosa tells of how with the arrival of the first Lumière Brothers’ technology from France in 1895, Cuban filmmakers documented the war with Spain and created some of the earliest moving images in the world: ‘Since that time we have been trying to maintain a leading role in the creation of our own image’ (2008, p.122). Espinosa and Carpentier knew that while independent Cuban identities drove the need for a Cuban cinema, they were united with filmmakers across Latin America in promoting a ‘Third’ Cinema’

Introduction  11

which parallels magic realism ‘in the context of neocolonial resistance, the tradition of the artist’s vindication of the imagination and subversion of hegemonic models’ (Chanady, quoted in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.141). Carpentier’s fascination for the moving image is, I  believe, profoundly integrated into the broader discourse of lo real maravilloso americano, surfacing in his highly cinematic, poetic novels.The tension between the real and the marvellous is constant, nuanced rather than polarised, a latent mutability characterised by its ‘discontinuous intensities’ (Jameson 1986, p.142). The next critical moment for the discourse occurs in the 1980s when Jameson notes the ‘shared features’ of a ‘certain magic realism’ (1986, p.303) across a number of ‘Third World’ films, marking the first sustained theory of a cinematic vein of the mode. His magic realism with its grip on the modernist avant-​garde and a critical resistance to ‘globalisation’ is deeply engaged with questions of affect,23 aspects that he famously saw waning in first world culture after 1945. He writes two key essays: ‘On magic realism in film’, Critical Inquiry (1986), and ‘Soviet magic realism’, a chapter in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992). This essential contribution to the discourse of magic realism has been almost entirely overlooked in magic realism studies, as well as in relation to his wider philosophical ideas on capital and neoliberalism.24 Highly subjective in their response to the selected films, these essays seem to lack method, and because until more recently the films have not been available to view on DVD or in cinemas, Jameson’s readings may well have been lost on readers at the time. It is difficult to fully comprehend his fascination with magic realism without an understanding of ideas circulating in his writing from the late 1970s and into the early 1990s (‘The Ideology of the Text’, 1975; The Political Unconscious, 1981; Fables of Aggression, 1981; ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 1984; and ‘Third World Cinema’, 1986, for example).These texts address the modernist axioms of individualism, alienation, newness and emotionality, asking whether they still have relevance in the 1980s at a time when a material and psychological fragmentation –​the cultural logic of late capitalism –​means that ‘our cognitive relationship with the social totality’ is eroding (1977, p.978).25 These essays on magic realism are a philosophical investigation into the resistant potential of certain ‘third’ world films to challenge the tendency towards postmodern affectlessness, and thereby disrupt any notion of uniformity in the spread of capitalism. The films are political allegories –​obtuse, poetic, experimental, slow, and dark –​and his rationale for selecting them seems contingent at best. From my point of view, this contingency is apt and symptomatic, following a great line of antecedents beginning with Roh’s eclecticism. Each film is resolute in its countering and problematising of ‘Western’, or ‘First World’ perspectives on late capitalist culture. Produced in Poland, Colombia, Venezuela, and various regions of the former Soviet Union, they all, at some level, engage with hierarchies of power, but there is no obvious stylistic or generic magic-​realist thread that draws them together. In ‘On magic realism’ Jameson recalls two films that he sees by chance at the Sixth Annual International Film Festival in Havana, which he visits with Michael Chanan in December 1984. He described them as Third World film, a now obsolete term –​examples of minor world cinema retaining ‘tendencies

12 Introduction

of the modernist art cinema’, which include ‘the long take, slow-​motion narrative, a web of allusions, and morbid subject matter’ (Jameson 2006, p.2). In ‘Soviet magic realism’ he focuses primarily on Alexander Sokurov’s Dni zatmeniay [Days of Eclipse, 1988], which foregrounds experimentation, and eschews narrative clarity in favour of abstract and obfuscated concepts and allegorical allusions to state power and corruption. Colour palette, artifice, defamiliarisation, and phenomenological response constitute the critical and aesthetic emphasis of this discourse. An amplification of suffering and violence, rather than butterflies and miracles, constitutes magic realism for Jameson.This distinction –​the magic of pain, discrimination, and anarchy –​is what pushes his definition of magic-​realist film beyond more popular generic definitions of magic(al) realism. As with all debates encompassing local, world, or ‘global’ concerns, ambiguities of nationhood and belonging, and the tense dichotomy between centre and periphery, create space for vibrant discussion of tradition, oral histories, sacred and supernatural beliefs, and, of course, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sex. Magic realism is often highly subversive in content and aim, yet manages to circumvent censorship and mainstream expectations by appearing to mimic or reproduce dominant structures and codes. Suzanne Jill Levine reminds us that Márquez’s One Hundred Years is a deliberate parody:  ‘an affirmation of Fiction’s truth over History or of History as an infinite series of contradictory stories’ (1983, p.56). In the case of Soviet magical-​realist awakenings after the publication of Márquez’s novel in translation (1970), Erika Haber describes how non-​ Russian Soviets ‘borrowed’ from Márquez to develop a new style that could bring ‘novelty, stylistic innovation, and experimentation into official literature without being judged anti-​Soviet’, and which ‘under the guise of Socialist Realism […] used the system’s rhetoric against itself ’ (2003, pp.1–​2). For Jameson this sly aesthetic politics hinges on subversive sensory affect. For example, in his detailed analysis of Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse he writes: What I have called its meaning [… lies] in the problem of the indeterminacy itself and that of assessing the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which, by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your own and cannot be matched, by definition also transcends your capacity to understand it or to conceptualize –​better still, to represent –​ it. (1992, p.88)

The omnipresent threat of the totalitarian regime is realised through a complex allegory that signals beyond the frame, beyond the action, and towards the incomprehensible yet all pervasive presence of its magic ideological powers. Take the case of East Central European films, which, as Aga Skrodzka describes, probe the value of tradition within their broader political and philosophical agendas. More than two decades after Jameson, she gathers together diverse filmmakers and films in the post-​Wall era of New Europe, highlighting in this work a shared trauma and intention to preserve the past, which, in the magic-​realist tradition embraces: ‘the

Introduction  13

shameful, parochial, wrecked, forgotten and naive. Frequently uncanny, even abject, the characters, events and places featured […] speak of the ways in which global, political, historical and economic shifts affect local culture’ (Skrodzka 2014, xi).This charged perspective expands upon the Latin American strain of the mode (choosing not to ‘enter into debate’ with it [p.15]), from the vantage point of ‘being somehow alien in the house of Europe’ (p.1). Skrodzka, like Jameson, finds that: ‘Magic realism, with its smart and always mobile juxtaposition of centre and periphery, offers a very attractive way to oppose the discourses of the centre […] and thus gain the space and voice for the periphery’ (p.15). In a similar vein, magic realism has found purchase in studies of certain Polish films of the 1980s and 1990s, which combine idealised portrayals of the lost Communist regime in a ‘disappointing’ present with ‘exuberant magic’ (Klonowska 2010; Mazierska 2000).26 Magic realism is ‘a kind of ethnographic folkloristic form’ (Klonowska 2010, p.194) in that each narrative carefully preserves traditional values, ‘rescuing them from oblivion’ (p.186). If the convention of magic realism seems ‘unlimited and universal’ (potentially applicable to any national cinema), in practice it is employed ‘to explore rather particular themes and specific perspectives’ and a ‘national collective memory’ (pp.186; 194), which may also reveal a ‘technological and cultural backwardness’27 (Mazierska 2000, n.p.). In terms of a contemporary Polish cinema, magic realism operates as an ‘implicit rather than overt’ political discourse (Klonowska 2010, p.185); social issues are expressed and worked through the imaginary or supernatural events, while magical objects engender a material symbiosis of social realism and cathartic wish-​fulfilment on screen.The magic-​realist film in its regional specificity puts forward a counter-​assertion through an aesthetics of ineffability, and the deflection, or defamiliarisation, of hegemonic power. Jameson’s critical oeuvre is in constant evolution; earlier work is reflected through reconfigured frameworks (affect theory or contemporary politics, for example), and theoretical impasses are challenged. In magic realism he comes closer to a philosophical dialogue that directly targets issues from the margins –​racially, ethnically, economically, from queer and non-​human perspectives. The aesthetic, geopolitical, and spatio-​temporal potential of magic-​ realist film is predicated on two key principles: 1. Magic realism somehow reflects the more complex and contradictory nature of postmodernity, which contains within it a modernity that is not yet dead, nor fully realised, its avant-​garde radicality lying in wait. 2. Magic realism combines the radical nature of the avant-​garde with a world systems geopolitics that sits between vernacular and political filmmaking. The work of these pioneers is essential to understanding the intersection of theory, philosophy, art history, literature, and film in my theory of magic realism. Central is their articulation of non-​hegemonic identities, marginal and exilic social and political experience, and insistence on formal experimentation as a means to express thought, or to represent material objects and matter that exceed the bounds of semiotics or logic. This book explores a (non-​exhaustive) selection of films that

14 Introduction

align aesthetically, thematically, and critically with the ideas expressed in these foundational texts, each resistant to vernacular pastiche or the ‘facile’.28 Some of the films explore a more ordinary relationship with exterior reality via an aesthetics that is in line with the new German art of the 1920s. Others are clear allegories of specific political unrest, connected by their repetition of marginal, and liminal, or uncertain habitats, and critical, resistant, and radical thinking. Many of the writers and filmmakers discussed within these pages were considered enemies of the state, revolutionaries, or ‘degenerates’; both Roh and Carpentier served time in prison for their perceived anti-​establishment views; Chilean filmmakers Raúl Ruiz and Miguel Littín, and Transcaucasian Sergei Parajanov (also imprisoned) were prevented from filming in their native homelands. Few filmmakers refer to their work directly as magic-​realist (André Delvaux –​ Chapter 7 is an exception), but the term has without doubt served as inspiration for their work. Some are innovators in world cinema, documentary filmmaking, or experimental filmmaking. Other examples originate from auteurs or stand-​alone films  –​filmmakers such as Ruiz, Jean Cocteau, Miguel Gomes, Guillermo del Toro, or Lucile Hadžihalilović; and stand-​alone films such as Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Jean-​ Pierre Jeune’s Amélie (2001), the Quay Brothers’ The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), Jaromil Jireš’ Valerie a týden divu [Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1970], and Rungano Nyoni’s debut film I Am Not a Witch (2017).

Between the vernacular and the avant-​garde –​some examples Vernacular magic(al) realism as a mode or visual style has often centred on film adaptations of magic-​realist novels. This is a highly problematic course of pursuit, and, as Chapter 4 reveals, there are many precedents illustrative of the failure to translate magic-​realist literature to film. While it is not my desire to focus too heavily on the role of adaptation, there is an underlying preoccupation on the part of producers, directors, and even Hollywood stars, to bring magic-​realist novels by Carpentier, and Márquez, for example, to the big and small screens. The technical realities of filming which enable image, movement and sound to leap, loop, blend, vanish, or defy logical chronology or plot, seem an attractive means of realising the complex, confounding, compulsive, and ‘polyperspectival’ narratives of these writers (Stam 2005, p.317).Yet, most of the resulting films are unsuccessful in capturing the marvellous qualities of the original text. The films that most closely replicate the ambiguity and magic of the literary works on which they are based, engage only partially or obliquely with the material. A key example of the type of ‘facile’ magic-​ realist commodification is evident in the hyperbole surrounding the release of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), an adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel. The film is spectacular in its hyperrealistic computer-​generated imagery, as Lee ‘piles visual miracle atop emotional epiphany’ while unbelievable events are focalised through the titular protagonist, Pi, whose perspective renders them believable. ‘Magical realism was rarely so magical and never before so real’ gushes Time critic Richard Corliss (2012, n.p.). This superficial application of magic(al) realism to the film is characteristic of

Introduction  15

a kind of vernacularism reliant on tropes (the natural miracle, empty and uncritical hybridity, seamless CGI rendering the impossible believable) and empties the term of critical and radical potential. The meeting of magic and reality (the miracle of endurance that the young Pi and anthropomorphised Bengal tiger, Richard Parker display, occurs against the turbulence of primordial Nature in the Pacific Ocean, and the context of India’s internal ‘Emergency’ (1975–​1977)) is experienced at the level of spectacle, with the issues of world migration reduced. Erik Camayd-​ Freixas lampoons Márquez for taking the ‘new aestheticism, [… and] deliberate primitivism’ in Carpentier’s novels, to ‘the verge of caricature and parody’ in an ‘imaginary ethnography’ constructed from ‘a conventional image of the primitive’ which is stylised into ‘a sort of pastiche or simulacrum corresponding to a mixture of beliefs and myths’ (2000, pp.112–​14). The criticism levelled here finds that magical realism in the vernacular vein, relies upon a flattening out of cultural and ethnological specificities, as well as a shared, conventional perspective of ‘internal otherness’ (p.114), whereby surface, approximation, and exaggeration potentially steer the viewer from deeper philosophical or political engagement. Márquez as the most well-​known exemplar of magic(al) realism proves divisive on this point. Life of Pi in its positive conclusion and structured narrative arc retains very little of what Chanady coined the ‘unresolved antinomy’ of magic realism (1985), with no real charged moments of perplexity that could be said to constitute a ‘hermeneutics of vagueness’.29 For the sake of example, we might consider how a range of low-​budget, more experimental ‘adaptations’ of Márquez’s texts, direct the content in an altogether amplified magic-​realist direction through avant-​garde self-​reflexivity, playful anarchy, and unpolished audio-​tactile-​visual montage that achieves a radical ambivalence. The correspondences between the films and the texts are oblique, leaving large gaps for the viewer to feel or contemplate their path through. Márquez adaptations La langosta azul, [The Blue Lobster, 1954, Álvaro Cepedia Samudio and Márquez]; En este pueblo no hay ladrones [There Are No Thieves in This Village, 1965, Alberto Isaac]; Ruy Guerra’s Eréndira (1983, based on La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, 1972); Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes [A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,30 Fernando Birri, 1988, based on the 1955 short story]; and Shūji Terayama’s Saraba Hakobuneさらば箱舟 [Farewell to the Ark, 1985, inspired by One Hundred Years] arguably reproduce core aspects of an historical magic-​realist discourse in an incomplete, prismatic pro-​filmic world, through a synaesthetic rush of the senses. The Blue Lobster was the first of over 50 screenplays that Márquez wrote for the Mexican film industry in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in a silent, Buñuelian, black and white short of 29 minutes. An American arrives at a coastal town, carrying a suitcase filled with plastic-​wrapped lobsters. The creatures, we learn from a close-​up on a document, are blue, tasteless, odourless, and inedible. When a cat walks in and steals one, the man embarks on a futile hunt to retrieve it. The anachronistic techniques (iris ringed sequences, accentuated shadows) combine with photorealist images –​the graphic lines of architecture, iron bars, kites flying, boats in the water, and white expanses of sky and sand. The lobster hunt is bizarre

16 Introduction

and disjointed, ending with the man on the threshold of the sea, looking out at the horizon. There is insufficient space to discuss each film here, however, Terayama’s homage to One Hundred Years is of particular note. A  Magrittean concrete cube spins weightlessly above a widening black hole, yellow butterflies promise marvellous encounters, sequences are heavily tinted in the director’s characteristic kaleidoscopic palette, and time and technology are sided with magic drawn from tiny kernels of ideas inspired by Márquez’s novel. Terayama was denied the film rights to make Farewell to the Ark, but stubbornly dedicates it to Márquez and his novel in the credits. The opening shot of a violet-​tinted furrow of cracked earth is followed by the burial of all the clocks in the village. Later, we discover that buried time, like death, is subject to strange laws, just as human time can affect the natural laws of sunrise and sunset. Okinawa, Japan’s southern-​most island, a region famed for longevity, is the setting for the film’s mythical village, threatened by extinction due to the number of people fleeing for the neighbouring town, which seduces with its new commodities –​electricity, photography, and telephones –​echoing the gypsies who bring new tools and technologies to Macondo. Flower petals placed under pillows access diving powers through dreaming; Tsutekichi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) weaves a house papered with signs for objects to aid his failing memory, Sue (Mayumi Ogawa) wears a crude, metal chastity device that has been fixed to prevent incest with Tsutekichi (her cousin), and a tunnel connects to dead villagers as well as prematurely aging anyone who falls into it. The mood is bawdy and irrational, and the film presents these weird intimacies of rural life through violence, poverty, perversion, spiritual exorcisms, and theatricality –​resolutely anti-​vernacular. Magic realism often trades on the anachronistic, a belatedness, or recycling of earlier philosophical and cultural trends, and outlined in Eugene Jolas’s 1929 call for a revolution in literature inspired by ‘magic reality’:  ‘The novel of the future will use telegrams, letters, decrees, fairy tales, legends, and dreams as documents for a new mythos. The novel of the future will be a plastic encyclopedia of the fusion of subjective and objective reality. […] The novel of the future will express the magic reality in a language that is non-​imitative and evolutionary’.31 Jolas, ventriloquising the multiple voices of the European avant-​garde, redirects the marvellous potential of collage towards the novel, where language must evolve in order to accommodate spontaneous, automatic, and irrational elements of everyday life. An alchemical poetry develops, Jolas believes, from the ‘conflict’ between rational and irrational forces; and, citing Novalis’s term ‘magic Idealism’ he argues this to involve both visible and invisible borders, where natural and supernatural coalesce: ‘At the extreme limits of his [the poet’s] consciousness there is a reality that presents immediately a transfiguration of the concrete. […] He strives for the immediacy of a metaphoric mental perception’.32 Magic realism involves antitheses that never resolve, but that constantly move through creative dreaming and practice. Jolas approaches the mundanity of the everyday through Novalis’s cosmological theory of magic Idealism (see Part two). Magic reality, as he describes it, sees modern disorder and disassociation transformed through experimentations of poetic form into liberation, a reorientation, I believe, of affect. A quintessential

Introduction  17

Terayama film, Farewell to the Ark fuses the indigenous folklore with technological magic, while the non-​linear episodes focus on the queer absurdity of modern existence. It presents the exterior world through a cruel black humour as simultaneously nightmarish and utopian, there is no gloss. Similar in tone, Guerra’s Eréndira revels in the cruelty and greed of the grandmother (Irene Papas) who sells Eréndira (Claudia Ohana) to men for sex. The film’s magic-​realist effect emerges from the weird capitalism, and the projections from Eréndira’s mind (a floating fish) which condense virtual and actual thought. Birri’s film is a crammed collage of superstitions rendered in multivalent forms: disorientating sepia close-​ups, colour tinting, fears imagined as animations, superimposition, a clash between early cinema and 1980s pop culture, chaotic noise, and levitation. The films discussed in this book tend to have much more in common with experimental and avant-​garde cinema (at their most radical) or Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s ‘global art cinema’ (2010).Their circulation as ‘a resolutely international category’ often involves questions of ‘foreignness’ as they travel (Galt and Schoonover 2010, p.7). They demand that ‘we watch across cultures and see ourselves through foreign eyes, binding spectatorship and pleasure into an experience of geopolitical critique’ (p.11). As Skrodzka wryly observes in her book on magic realism in East Central European film: ‘the cinema discussed in this volume does not sell well’ (2014, xi) Magic-​realist cinema, however, does not preclude moments of spectacle and classical thrill as a film such as del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno [Pan’s Labyrinth,  2006] has proven. Pan’s Labyrinth is widely considered to epitomise the mode of cinematic magic realism (Kolker 2009; Bordwell and Thompson 2010; Klonowska 2010; Colman 2011)  and its overtly fantastic allegorical fable falls somewhere between the vernacular and the art film. However, Victor Erice’s portrayal of rural Spain under Franco in El espiritu de la colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973] –​also portraying the same period of Spanish trauma through the eyes of a young child –​is a far better example of cinematic magic realism. A large part of a magic-​realist film’s spell arrives via a set of correspondences and palimpsests that seem to cohere into an idea. Erice’s film does not have the magical tracking camera or elaborate digital effects and costumes of Pan’s Labyrinth, and on the surface might seem less overtly or literally magical –​Paul Julian Smith compares Navarro’s ‘deliriously inventive camerawork’ to ‘Erice’s austere and minimalist drama’ (2007, p.6). But the subdued, and slow interiority of the latter conveys a magic that constitutes a stronger national allegory (Jameson) through a sparse deconcealment of corporeal violence and depression. Erice’s Beehive commences with the naive notes of a flute accompanied with images of a child’s drawings and the words ‘Once Upon a Time […]’The viewer also learns that sometime around 1940, somewhere in the Castilian Plateau, a small village and its inhabitants await the exciting arrival of the travelling cinema. Ana (Ana Torrent), with her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), watches James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, and is immediately confused by the death she witnesses on screen. Her empathy grows with an idea of the monster’s plight, and as she searches outside in the hope of finding him, she comes across a wounded soldier, who is eventually shot by Franco’s officers. Unlike the authentically realised bodies

18 Introduction

of the monsters in Pan’s Labyrinth, Ana’s monster only appears reflected in the water of the lake, a trace whispered on her lips as she calls out for him from a window. He never materialises.The film obscures its politics through symbolism –​the worker bees despised by her beekeeper father, the horror of mob rule, the isolation of rural life, and the cruelty in others. The connections, however, are entirely magical –​the inner life of a child beguiled and horrified by cinematic images, the hexagonal design of the beehive lit in soft golden hues, the silence and solitude of daily life, and a sense of being slowly forgotten. Ana’s trauma is intrinsically tied to the images of Boris Karloff ’s tragedy, but also to the pain in her parents’ marriage, and the film uncovers the reality of a child’s engagement with moving images, which, to her, seem conjoined with everyday reality. Ana’s belief in the monster is completely real because she is unable to comprehend the world of images as being distinct from her family life.This conflation sets up a perpetual tension mirroring the mechanism of magic realism –​it never strays into complete fantasy, and the magic chanterelle mountain that Ana’s father describes appears, like the titular bees, in a honeyed sepia, the colour of magic, and of memory.

Part two: methodologies Ancestral spirits: Magischer Realismus and the German tradition ‘The fact that magic realism existed before it existed that is, before we knew what to call it, suggests that its definition will not be limited to any particular region or set of experiences’ (Schroeder 2004, p.4). To define it, we must rely on convergent nodal points along the trajectory of its evolution –​key figures, tracts, or ‘manifestos’ –​ which signal and validate its existence as an alternative to neighbouring movements and modes. But as Schroeder suggests, it is also encircled by a priori ideas relating to human affective response. Magischer Realismus emerges in dialogue with the philosophical ideas of Early or ‘Jena’ Romanticism (1795–​1800), a group formed around poet-​philosopher Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (known by his pseudonym Novalis, meaning ‘one who opens up new land’). As Guenther (1995) and Warnes (2006) have discussed, the label Magischer Realismus is most likely inspired by Novalis’s philosophical concept of magischer Idealismus. Put simply, by combining magic and idealism with realism, magischer Idealismus challenges the hotly debated binary opposition of mental and physical being (interior and exterior, mind and matter). Novalis’s ‘syncriticism’ directly informs Roh’s art historical mode with a metaphysical philosophy: Either the subject is the cause of the object (idealism) or the object is the cause of the subject (realism). But since these entities are so self-​sufficient and heterogeneous, even such a causal interaction becomes impossible.To get beyond this aporia, it is necessary to conceive the relation between subject and object in more organic terms such that each becomes what it is only through the other. (Beiser 2008, p.433)

Introduction  19

As Warnes surmises, the idea of a ‘magical truth’ is ‘a subjective, self-​referential truth that depends on an inward-​looking mystical intuition’ (2006 p.489). ‘Mystical’ here, links to the idealist notion that thought, and its object, are immediately co-​existent and unified. Novalis begins my chronicle of magic realism not only because of the direct link to Roh, but because his philosophical fragments forecast the modernist preoccupation with making thought visible through things, a ‘synthetic poetry  –​ analysis of the external and the internal at the same time’ (Novalis cited in Stoljar 1997, p.129, emphasis in original). Broadly, this period of German Romanticism heralded new investigations into the relations between human and cosmos, and between poetry and philosophy –​ ‘Poetry is for the sensations  –​what philosophy is for the thoughts’ (Novalis, in Stoljar p.134). Contrary to principles outlined from the mid-​eighteenth century onwards in die Augklärung, or German Enlightenment, Novalis believed that the past could serve to illuminate the present: ‘the classical world is so to speak the other of modernity; it is different, yet a fundamental part of it. […] Furthermore, any modern culture […] understands itself in critical interaction with other cultures, including those of the non-​Western world’ (Gjesdal 2014, n.p.). This is typical of a proto-​modernist attitude in that the new artistic forms are valued and used to critically challenge tradition. Novalis’s writing moves swiftly between wide ranging ideas; it is characterised by self-​reflexivity and emotion, and by a rejection of the rational in favour of poetic, metaphysical thinking. It seems that his ‘magical philosophy is a way of constructing a worldview independently of extrinsic knowledge, much as language arises innately and independently of sensory knowledge. It is a creative act indistinguishable in essence from art’ (Stoljar 1997, p.20). The paradoxical allure of synchronically innate, yet independent, knowledge, is an allure that we will come to recognise in magic realism, which proposes that the vast complexity of the cosmos can be collapsed into human experience. Secular and sacred ideas intersect; and formal concerns as to the representability of ineffable, indistinct, overwhelming, unlikely, or inexplicable aspects of modern life dominate thought. What might sound all-​encapsulating, and by turn ineffectual, as a means of delimiting magic realism, is exactly what results in its longevity and continued use. Novalis provides the story of magic realism with a fitting founder-​figure, not only because ‘new land’ refers to the colonial and exilic journeys into the ‘New World’ that thread through its history; but also because it describes the ‘quicksilver movement between subjects’ and the ‘developing ideas’ of its major theorists and practitioners (Stoljar 1997, p.2). For Walter Benjamin, the blue flower desired by the protagonist of Novalis’s unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) provides something of the anachronistic, elusive magic of modern life. In ‘Dream Kitsch’ (1925) he writes that ‘No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept.The history of the dream remains to be written […] No longer does the dream reveal a blue horizon.The dream has grown gray’ (2008, p.236).The downgrading of a magical blue horizon to the fantastic gray of war indicates the extent to which fantasies of structural power had usurped those of ideal love. Novalis’s magic lived on in the European avant-​garde; the surrealists

20 Introduction

shared with him ‘the intense and sometimes desperate need to reenchant the world’ (Löwy 2009, p.9) but through poetry, not religion.33 Benjamin also alludes to Novalis in his explanation of the central paradox of film, whereby the pro-​filmic, seeming real, is the height of artifice –​interpenetrated by the apparatus –​‘the vision of immediate reality [has become] the Blue Flower in the land of technology’ –​the dream is now at the level of popular art (p.35). Benjamin’s concept of an ‘optical unconscious’ (p.37), a technical rather than psychoanalytic uncovering of latent content, emerges in the desire to capture the immediate moment, all-​at-​once: ‘We dream of traveling through the universe –​but is not the universe within ourselves? […] Eternity with its worlds –​the past and future –​is in ourselves or nowhere […]’ (Stoljar 1997, p.25). In these words science fiction melds seamlessly with the metaphysical, and the philosophical in the infinite potential of the instant. There is much to unpack here, and many of these ideas resurface in the writings of Roh and Jameson in particular. Importantly, what Benjamin understands about film is its particular ability to capture extreme states of being, or extraordinary aspects of real life. The antithetical pull between magic and realism seems to emanate from a tension between a historical German spirit in earlier works of philosophy and Romanticism, and the possibility of apprehending and capturing this spirit in new, photo-​realistic means. This aspect of Magischer Realismus, as well as Roh’s own experiments with various mediums of photographic reproduction, is largely absent from histories of magic realism. Widespread fascination with photographic experimentation in early twentieth-​century Europe (negative prints, superimposition, solarisation, photograms, photomontage) imagines technology as a form of enchantment which subsequently surfaces in radical, and popular works of magic realism across the world. Cinematic magic realism invokes the possibility of the Blue Flower in both psychoanalytic and optical senses because it combines the magical Idealism of Novalis’s philosophical Romanticism with the ‘diverse aspects of reality’ materialised by the camera, revelling in a time of ‘gray’ horizons.

Critical phenomenology –​affective magic realism Scholarship on magic realism has oft revisited Tzvetan Todorov’s tentative theorisation of genre in literary works neighbouring or participating of ‘the fantastic’. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975) (along with Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 1981) proves useful, but not definitive, in the seemingly endless debates on the overlap between fantasy, the Gothic, the surrealist marvellous, science fiction, and the fairy-​tale. What is useful, however, is Todorov’s privileging of the reader, whose apprehension of a given text is deemed tantamount to its affective potential. Breton, in the preface to Pierre Mabille’s Le Miroir de Merveilleux [The Mirror of the Marvelous, 1940] writes: ‘the marvelous illuminates the furthest extremity of vital movement and engages the entire emotional realm’ (1998, p.4). Todorov’s spheres of the marvellous and fantastic ‘co-​exist’ in magic realism, a discourse where infinite possibility for disruption, and metamorphosis of the real –​Breton’s ‘vital movement’ –​becomes evident. If we align

Introduction  21

magic-​realist affect with the senses, then we must account for strange, unknown, or fantasised elements to unsettle but not divide the realms of interior and exterior life. From my own perspective, phenomenological reaction is what magic-​realist discourse and magic-​realist films privilege at all cost. Attempts to theorise affect have been numerous (Spinoza 1677 in Eliot 2020; Tomkins 1962; 1963; Deleuze and Guattari (across all their work); Sedgwick and Frank 1995; Massumi 2002; Brinkema 2014), and it remains a vast and contradictory field. In Part III of his five-​ volume Ethics: ‘On the origin and nature of the emotions’ (1667), Baruch Spinoza (1632–​1677) defines affect as mixed emotional responses to objects and ideas in the exterior world that may or may not be conscious: ‘For every one acts in all things according to his strongest passion […] the decision of the mind and the appetite or determination of the body are naturally simultaneous, or thate are one and the same thing.’ (Spinoza and Eliot, 2020, Ethics Part III, Prop1., p.167). Affect is comprised of both ‘primal’ (instinctive) and cognitive processes, yet it needs, like the structure of magic realism, some contradiction or tension to proceed. Spinoza divides affect along positive and negative lines, with joy, pleasure, and love belonging to the former, and suffering, pain, jealousy, and hatred to the latter. Each emotion, or affect, is replaced and overpowered by subsequent affects in the constant metamorphosis of existence –​of becoming. Spinozan affect is, for the most part, structured by social influences in which certain common links between objects and emotional response exist (e.g. fear or hatred of an object that has been publicly constructed). However, there is also room in his list of emotional responses for ‘vacillations of spirit’ or ‘Wonder’ (Spinoza’s capitalisation), an affective state linked to things never experienced before: a ‘mental modification, or imagination of a particular thing,’ that is ‘alone in the mind’ (III, Prop LII). Imagination is described as an active, conscious process in which the subject deliberates over a set of images based on prior experience. Jameson’s use of the term affect is also based in socio-​psychological readings, but it is to Freud’s theories of the uncanny that he turns, rather than to Baruch Spinoza’s, or Silvan Tomkins’ much later theory of ‘innate’ primary affects.34 Affect is closely aligned with wonder and the marvellous in magic-​realist film, where spaces open up for philosophical debate. The viewer encounters exterior reality from an uncertain, or not always easily definable point of interiority. More recent criticism on affect has tended towards commentary on the ‘virtual’ or ‘unrepresentable’ aspects of existence: the accumulation of affect in the relation between the living and the non-​living; the affect created in the political relations between states and systems; incremental shifts in the relations between things that go beyond earlier theories of emotional response. Not all theories of affect are political, but most implement a structural analysis that examines transition, crisis and convergence in the relations between the subject and the socio-​historical. Deleuze’s materialist theorisation of cinematic affect as a dialectical process shares many of the hypotheses central to Jameson’s theorisation of magic realism, in which the magical is conceived of as a structural process of deconcealment. There are recurring links between perception, poetic affect, atmosphere, transformation of the exterior /​ interior world, Wonder, enchantment (Bennett 2001) and sensory apprehension,

22 Introduction

which are set into play in accounts and analyses of magic realism. Newness, and the obsession with present-​tense events –​‘the variability of affect’ which produces an ‘unstable and well-​nigh neurotically variable subjectivity’ in works of modernism (Jameson 2015, p.41) –​are woven into a chromatic scale (Massumi, 2002) of sensory and bodily affects that in magic-​realist discourse are contingent on the interplay between exterior and interior states and the ineffable qualities of a subjectivity in becoming. Jameson’s theorisation of magic-​realist film aligns with Massumi’s argument that the twenty-​first century: ‘is characterized by a surfeit’ of affect: ‘If some have the impression that affect has waned [Jameson’s postmodernism] it is because it is unqualified. As such it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique’ (Massumi 2002, pp.27–​8). Affect is also contingent on the interplay between technology and viewer and can be located in films which enact a dialectical montage  –​a philosophical montage  –​that is formally complex. The intersection of thought, sensation, and form is essentially open-​ended and disruptive, a chromatic scale rather than Carpentier’s cyclical return, perhaps. As Eugenie Brinkema states in the closing paragraph of The Forms of the Affects:  ‘Taking forms and affects as mutually consequent, reading for their shaping of each other, instructs us in a lesson about the possibility for the new, the not-​yet vitality of both form and affect. […] We do not know all it is that form can do’ (2014, p.261). The not-​yet-​realised futurity of total subjective cognition, or of world systems, or of experiments in cultural expression, constitutes the affective flow of magic realism. And as Brinkema suggests, objects, sensations, affects, also exist outside the anthropocentric, a fascination held by practitioners of early photographic experiments, such as Roh.

Enchantment and essay form In 1983, Jean Weisgerber edited an essay collection embracing the intermedial fields of magic realism:  Le Réalisme Magique:  Roman, Peinture, Cinéma [Magic Realism: Novel, Painting, Cinema], which, due to the absence of an English translation, has not had the international influence of the collections mentioned above. His decision to curate essays straddling three mediums (four if we include photography) is testament to the mode’s transferable aspects: mimetic realism, a philosophical modernism, a combination of painterly and narrative structural framing, and a sociological context (1983).35 Certainly, these elements can be traced in Delvaux’s films, which are the subject of the two essays directly addressing cinematic magic realism in this anthology. Weisgerber maintains that unlike other avant-​ garde movements of the period, magic realism was in no way revolutionary: On the contrary, in most cases the subversive element is lacking; declarations, strictly individual, follow the discursive forms of the essay, of the exposition; recourse to tradition abounds; […] the magical realists, isolated individuals, situate themselves, out of preference, according to the past and the present, and lean towards the essence of things. (1987, p.7)

Introduction  23

The privileged vantage point of the writer who seems apart from social life, is accurate, although not entirely true of the chroniclers of magic realism. But Weisgerber makes an important distinction in highlighting the essayistic form central to the history of magic realism. However, I  disagree that the subversive element is lacking. The essayistic discourse of magic realism, even a strand as poetic as Roh’s, is potentially capable of finding weaknesses in the rationale of the status quo (he was incarcerated for crimes against the state, and his photomontage engages overtly with anti-​war sentiment). Carpentier, Jameson, and Delvaux, to varying degrees, also approach world politics from a formally revolutionary, stance. We might consider how, as Theodor Adorno believed, the essay operates against ‘the rules of the game’, revolting against the idea that ‘the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy’ (1984, p.158): ‘The essay […] wants to blow open what cannot be absorbed by concepts, or what, through contradictions in which concepts entangle themselves, betrays the fact that the network of their objectivity is a purely subjective rigging […]’ (p.170). The principal chroniclers of magic realism employ an essayistic discourse to capture the transitory traits of magic or marvellous reality, each challenging the ‘rules of the game’ to reach further into the mysteries of subjective experience, whether from a metaphysical or Marxist standpoint. Magic-​realist discourse is inseparable from the essay form and its experimental, sensory, and non-​conclusive arguments, and magic-​realist films produce audio-​tactile-​visual affects that materialise or conjure ‘what cannot be absorbed by concepts’. In Essayism, Brian Dillon considers the difficulty of defining the essay, from a multiplicity of authorial voices –​fictionalised and autobiographical –​which perform ‘a combination of exactitude and evasion. A  form that would instruct, seduce, and mystify in equal measure’ (2017, p.12). This self-​reflexive navigation of the mysteries of existence is a key characteristic of magic-​realist films. They combine the essayistic with dramatic fiction, whilst appealing to the subjective worlds of the audience, encouraging: ‘a public circulation of experience that troubles and comments on the aesthetic experience and the subjectivity that articulates it’ (Corrigan 2011, p.182). Non-​linear, meandering, and non-​concluding stories and ideas are the hallmarks of magic-​realist cinema. The subjects/​objects of magic-​ realist investigation ask the viewer or reader to consider the world at an unaccustomed angle, where it is ‘easier to explore questions about “(semi) peripherality” in the world-​literary [or art, or film] system through reference to “modernist” or “experimental” modes that through reference to “realist” or “naturalist” ones’ (WReC 2015, p.57). It is this reorientation, a tipping of the axis, that also reveals the historical flaw that magic-​realist works always expose –​the world has never not been enchanted. Magic and enchantment are not exclusive to non-​Western cultures. Moreover, they do not constitute a realm opposite, or apposite, to rationality, capital, or science. There are a number of exciting critical works that oppose disenchantment:  Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993); Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); and Jason Ā. Josephson-​Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment (2017) are salient examples. Each counters the myth ‘of magic’s

24 Introduction

exit from the henceforth law-​governed world’ (Josephson-​Storm, p.3) in the tales of modern science and disenchantment in Western culture. The mythic qualities of magic, here considered as relating to stories of Pagan and Christian gods, but also to alternative occult and superstitious practices, and a Romantic vision of nature and human life, are set in opposition to myths of modernity and modernisation. Such thinking presupposes grand narratives in which an alienation from nature is experienced. Roh struggled with how to unify humans and their spirit –​to re-​enchant the objects and processes that determined their culture and to erase the division posited between subjective and objective experiences. Yet, ‘when described in terms of the de-​animation of the world, the end of superstition, the decay of myth, or even the dominance of instrumental reason, modernity signals a societal fissure that never occurred’ (Josephson-​Storm, p.306). This is a key idea for magic realism, one that challenges any idea that magic is ‘other’ to realism. The question is not of binaries, nor of grand narratives, but of the world perceived in a minor key. Magic realism does not offer the return of the ‘sacred’, the ‘primitive’, or the ‘supernatural’ as challenges to ‘modernity’. Magic has as many possibilities as the real when we factor the infinite possibilities that perception and awareness bring. I  have not encountered a better description of this than Bennett’s tale of ‘contemporary enchantment’:  ‘Imagine a place, then, where reason engenders, where faculties play, where nature hints, where molecules mutate, where tomatoes morph, where flies zoom, where curves spiral and fields buzz, where ants swarm and vertigo reveals, and where thinking unexpectedly shouts out from the dutiful litany of thought. That world is not disenchanted’ (2001, p.54). She emphasises the importance of thinking, and of our ‘affective attachment’ to the world (p.3), arguing above all that the world has never been devoid of sensation or mood; humans have always had the capacity to feel, to experience wonder, shock, surprise, fear, happiness, just as they have always been subject to chance, or ‘the strange agency of physical systems’ (p.4). Magic realism creates the perfect conditions for enchantment, leaving clues, gaps, highlighting or plunging into shadow those strange agencies that move us. It concerns the ordinary experienced ‘in a momentarily immobilizing encounter’; ‘it is to be transfixed, spellbound’ for an instant (p.5). Bennett’s theorisation of enchantment insists on minor, perhaps incremental or unexpected, causes for major social, cultural, and political eventualities. It is aligned with theories of magic realism where fixed, monolithic approaches to time, space, geography, culture, identity, or politics are disrupted and dislodged. Enchantment can be found in the small, in the manufactured, and in mundane repetitions; and technological advancements may in fact charm rather than disaffect viewers and participants. She concludes her book with Wenders’ Wings of Desire36 as ‘a cinematic site of enchantment’ (p.173), highlighting the angels’ yearning for the wonder they perceive to exist in human existence, the ‘extraordinary attachment to life’ that humans are less likely to discern (p.173). The angel played by Bruno Ganz comforts the dying victim of a motor crash by asking him to list the things that he has loved. The list forms a litany:

Introduction  25

the stains from the first raindrops the sun the bread and wine hopping Easter the veins of the leaves the color of stones37 From the writings of Albert Camus, to Stromboli and the magic of the horizon, this dying man’s list represents the smaller things that discourse on enchantment often omits –​‘these enchantments are already in and around us’ (p.174). Bennett pinpoints the unsettling magic of real life, in the moment lived. In the image of a man suspended between life and death, an angel by his side, is an event imprecise in its time and location, which, while evoking Christianity, is expansive in its touchstones and reference points. As Gene H. Bell-​Villada reminds us, the portrayal of magic, unreality and the supernatural has occupied an active role in European life –​he cites the mythical deities in the Iliad and the Odyssey, or Virgil’s Aeneid, medieval hagiography, miracles, Christian and Catholic deities, French fables, gothic horror and beyond (2014, pp.49–​51). Haitian artist and Voudou expert André Pierre’s A World Created by Magic emphasises the absolute reach of magic in everyday life  –​where ‘No one lives of the flesh. Everyone lives of the spirit’ (1995, p.76). For Pierre, this ancient religion is not limited and contained within national borders but transcends the physical reality of the human race altogether. Belief systems, as the chronicles and migration of magic realism demonstrate, are not necessarily limited by geographical place, and surprising similarities arise in the conditions and behaviours of marginalised and oppressed cultures across the world, while the discourse remains absolutely committed to exposing abuses of power and inequality across those cultures.

A map to the stars The story of magic realism is wild and nebulous, frustrating and rewarding in varying measures, and this book draws together its myriad webs, adventures, repetitions, and shimmers. It is impossible, and inadvisable, to try to separate film from art historical or literary modes of magic realism as they are inextricably linked through common concerns, histories, and practice. Each chapter of this book is designed to draw the reader closer to an affective, as well as contextual, understanding of the discourse and the cultural works that have, to an extent, shaped and expanded it. There are some surprises here too! Chapter 2 makes the case for Roh as a pioneer in a new light, where magic realism springs from early experiments in photographic reproduction. Chapter 3 posits an ethno-​magic-​realist documentary film form that can be traced through the work of Eisenstein, Buñuel, Murnau, Deren, Jean Rouch and into the more recent work of Ciro Guerra. This leads to a discussion of Carpentier’s film criticism and the failed project to bring The Lost Steps to the big screen, in Chapter 4.

26 Introduction

These two chapters investigate some of the crucial aspects of a world cinema that is inherently, overtly, magic-​realist according to the critical discourse set out in Roh and Carpentier’s writings. Chapters 5 and 6 are the cornerstone chapters of the book; they examine Jameson’s theory of a cinematic magic realism across Latin American, East Central European, and former Soviet cinemas, a crucial intervention in the field that warrants close readings of the films. Chapter  7 focuses on atmosphere, understatement, and the potential in non-​fixity, in the works of filmmakers such as Delvaux, Tarsem Singh, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and Anocha Suwichakornpong. My aim is not to classify magic realism as a movement or style. Rather, with many twists and turns, resonances and tangents, magic realism is revealed in its true ecstatic potential –​a crucial and creative force in becoming, a provocation for change.

Notes 1 Magic realism is most frequently referred to as a mode (Zamora and Faris’s anthology in 1995 has been instrumental in popularising this terminology). I refer to it as a mode in the historical evolution of the term, but more pointedly as a ‘discourse’ –​a set of ideological and aesthetic concepts that are shared, transmitted, and modified in the speech acts, essays, and artworks created in the name of magic realism. Discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, reflects the conjoined structures of knowledge and power in a given social context, and through discourse one is able to unfix or act upon these structures. Magic-​realist discourse is, undoubtedly, a means of challenging and unfixing patterns of hierarchy and dominant ideology. Additionally, it implies voice and dialogue –​intrinsic to the philosophical aims of magic realism. 2 Plato. ‘Theaetetus’, 155 d. In John M. Cooper (ed.) 1997, p.173. 3 Hernán Cortés on ‘the Americas’, quoted by Carpentier 1985, p.107. 4 Lisa Stock is a filmmaker based in New York who describes her work as magic-​realist. See https://​inbytheeye.wordpress.com/​, interview between myself and Lisa via email correspondence 14 March 2018. 5 Metaphysical magic realism references the influence of the Italian pittura metafisica, and more specifically the enigmatic style of de Chirico on Roh’s art historical mode, ‘the arrangement of natural objects by the means of tricks, devices or optical illusion’ combined with ‘a serene and melancholy atmosphere’ (1993, p.80). Anthropological magic realism particular to Latin American art, includes ‘a thematic and formal preoccupation with the strange, the uncanny and the grotesque, and with violence, deformity and exaggeration’ (p.81). Ontological magic realism ‘resolves antimony’ within the text without ‘recourse to any particular cultural perspective’ (p.82) and, according to Spindler, is more clearly dominated by a sense of realism than the other two categories. This can be achieved through a subjective narrative device that lends imagined elements an objective presence in the text. However, such delimitation strangles the potential for the co-​existence of actual and virtual aspects of lived reality, and as such does not work for my own definition of a cinematic magic realism that involves an interpenetration of Spindler’s categories. 6 Cuban essayist Fernando Ortiz (1881–​1969), unsatisfied with the term ‘acculturation’ –​a gradual loss of one’s culture –​began to use instead the term ‘transculturation’ to define a mutual interaction and exchange across different cultures. With this term he wished to offset the tendency of anthropologists and historians to stress the impact of the coloniser on native peoples without considering the inverse situation (Ortiz 1940). Silvia Spitta gives a detailed analysis of these two terms in Between Two Waters (1995, pp.1–​70).

Introduction  27

7 André Breton, “Oceania” (1948), La Clé des champs, 278–​80. Cited in Löwy 2009, p.39. 8 As will become evident through the course of the book, surrealism and magic realism are inextricably linked historically, which has led to a vernacularised cultural reproduction of their respective thematic overlaps. 9 As well as the recurring baroque eon (Chapter  4), this proliferation of contradictory forces finds its visual equivalent in Breton and Man Ray’s explosante-​fixe [fixed-​explosive]. In L’amour fou (1937), Breton explores three components of convulsive beauty:  the explosante-​fixe, magique-​circonstancielle [magic-​ circumstantial] and érotique-​voilée [veiled-​ erotic] (1988, p.19). The explosante-​fixe refers to a moving entity frozen in photographic capture or mineral calcification; the term originates from Man Ray’s 1934 photograph of a dancer captured mid jump.The dress fans out in a blur around her, which combined with her arms held aloft above her head, exudes a strong kinetic energy, erotic tension, and perverse contradiction. 10 This translation has been adopted throughout critical studies of magic(al) realism –​see Guenther (1995). 11 Throughout the chapter, Magischer Realismus is used to determine the German art historical mode, and its English translation magic rather than magical realism, in adherence with the majority of art historical sources and criticism pertaining to Roh’s text. This also accords with Jameson’s usage of magic, rather than magical, to refer to the cinematic mode. 12 Carpentier was not the first to link magic realism to Latin American literature, it was the Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri, who, in 1948 wrote: ‘What predominated in the short story and left an indelible mark there was the consideration of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts, a poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of another name could be called a magical realism’ (cited in Leal 2007, p.62). 13 The surrealist merveilleux, ‘is the eruption of contradiction within the real’ (Aragon [1926] 1994, p.204) the ‘spark’ that comes to the artist ‘spontaneously, despotically’; and the ‘luminous phenomenon’ that results from the juxtaposition of two disparate realities (Breton 2010, pp.36–​7). In an oft-​cited declaration from the 1924 manifesto Breton famously states that ‘the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful’ (p.14). This is no conventional beauty, rather a beauty that is fecund, irrational, and improbable. 14 Roh’s academic thesis already demonstrated a tendency in his work to prioritise the image over text; it contained two hundred photographic illustrations (see Witkovsky 2007, p.17). 15 Between 1924 and Carpentier’s prólogo on lo real maravilloso americano in 1948–​1949, a number of significant texts were published in which writers questioned traditional realism through discussions of magic or the ‘marvellous’. For Breton le merveilleux is identified as the moment at which the mysterious or unexpected erupts into everyday life. In the marvellous Breton seeks a reality unbound by social limitations or conventions. Roh, pushes against Breton’s ‘ism’ (surrealism as a defined movement) while simultaneously drawing upon its central tenets. In 1932, Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges wrote ‘Narrative Art and Magic’ which explores textual magic through the literary heritage of the ‘psychological novel’ in European and North American fiction for a re-​evaluation of Latin American writing. In 1940, Pierre Mabille pens Le Miroir de Merveilleux which also turns the reader’s attention to questions of literary heritage, connecting mythical and folkloric literature to the marvellous, and the ‘spirits and demons inherent in the “life” of objects’, talismans capable of opening up the world (Mabille 1998, p.183). 16 Incidentally, de Chirico’s 1913 The Uncertainty of the Poet is reproduced on the dust cover of Jameson’s The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On The Historicity of Forms. When I asked

28 Introduction

him if the image was his deliberate choice, he answered, no, but expressed how great it looked! (private email correspondence, 30 June 2017). 17 Salvador Dalí’s essay ‘Sant Sebastà’ in L’Amic de les Arts (16 July 1927) also discusses the influence of metaphysical painting and mentions Roh’s Nach-​Expressionismus in passing (see Chapter 1). 18 The following issue of the journal carried a review by Antonio Espina of Roh’s book in its entirety. 19 Although Carpentier uses americano to stand for Haiti, Cuba, the Antilles, Venezuela, Mexico, and so on, ‘our America wrongly named Latin’, he predominantly describes the marvellous as being a latent and omnipresent fact throughout latinoamericano [Latin America] (Carpentier in Chao, 1998, p.182) and for the purpose of this research I refer to Carpentier’s mode as Latin American. 20 The prologue was first published in the Mexican edition of Kingdom, in 1949, appearing a year earlier in El Nacional (18: IV 1948) under the title ‘Lo real-​maravilloso de América’. The removal of the hyphen is indicative of the deliberate shift from a concept to the physical reality that Carpentier emphasises in the 1949 version. The novel was subsequently translated in 1954 (French), 1957 (English), and 1962 (Russian). 21 A former slave of Bambara ethnicity, Christophe openly declared allegiance to the Haitian Independence leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, and fought the colonial invaders, eventually defeating the French under commander Jean-​Jacques Dessalines. In 1811 he declared himself King Henri I  of northern Haiti (after his rival Alexandre Sabès Pétion secured a majority in the south), where he built the ridiculous fortress Citadelle Lafferrière that had so impressed Carpentier on his visit: ‘I breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, monarch of incredible undertaking, much more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists’ (Carpentier, in Faris and Zamora 1995, p.30). The section of the novel in which a young and naive Pauline Bonaparte experiences life in the New World highlights the clash between European religion and Haitian superstition, a central theme that runs throughout Carpentier’s works. All citations of this essay are taken from the English translation by Faris and Zamora, 1995. 22 Carpentier, ‘El cine cubano es el product auténtico de la Revolución’ (2013, pp. 389–​91. Trans. RB.). 23 In his theorisation of magic realism, Jameson’s usage of ‘affect’ describes both cognitive and instinctual responses to objects on screen. In ‘Trauma, Pleasure, and Emotion in the viewing of Titanic: A Cognitive Approach’(2009), Carl Plantinga presents a ‘cognitive-​ perceptual’ theory of emotion in which he describes ‘structured mental states’ as opposed to ‘shapeless feelings’. He concedes that the line between emotion and affect is unclear, but offers the hypothesis that whereas emotions have a stronger cognitive component, ‘affect’ can be conceived of as ‘ “primitive” feeling, states such as moods, affective mimicry and contagion (by which affect is “caught” by or transferred to a viewer)’ (p.239). 24 A recent volume on Jameson’s writings on film and television completely omits the question of cinematic magic realism (Burnham 2016). 25 Jameson follows the historical trajectory formulated by Marxist historian Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (1972), which attempts to find correlations between the general laws of the motion of capital (periods of equilibrium, disequilibrium, expansion, war, crisis, migration) and the histories of the capitalist mode of production. Mandel divides the history of capitalism into three stages: 1) the classical or national market capitalism (after Marx); 2) the moment of monopoly capitalism or the stage of imperialism (theorised by Lenin); and 3) the post–​Second World War global phase that he terms ‘late capitalism’, in

Introduction  29

which a combination of past modes and the present mode of increased mechanisation and full industrialisation result in an uneven spread, both an acceleration and deceleration of capital accumulation: The specific socio-​economic formations  –​“bourgeois societies” and capitalist economies –​which arose in these different areas in the course of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and which in their complex unity […] reproduce in varying forms and proportions a combination of past and present modes of production, or more precisely, of varying past and successive stages of the present mode of production. (1971, p.23, Mandel’s italics) Mandel includes Africa and Oceania in his analysis, but more recent theoretical work on the uneven sprawl of ‘world’ systems illustrates the challenge of any attempt to ‘map’ using the framework of ‘stages’. Postcolonial readings of magic realism, for example, have shown how such assumptions and generalisations in Western academia are problematic. Jameson’s corresponding historical analysis parallels Mandel’s three stages, in three cultural shifts: the moment of realism in literature; the moment at which high modernism emerges; and the waning of modernism and rise of postmodernism, none of which can be mapped onto a specific timeline. 26 See, for example, Mazierska’s discussion of the work of Jan Jakub Kolski. Kolski’s films borrow many of the literary devices that Mazierska defines in her summary of magical realism and its global dissemination, and as such are closer to the work of Márquez, or Rushdie, where the supernatural has a greater role in the narrative (2000). 27 I disagree with the term ‘backwardness’ used here and prefer to frame this particular aspect of magic-​realist politics within the ‘combined’ and ‘uneven’ patterns of development identified by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015). 28 The editors of The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism cast contemporary magic realism –​stemming from ‘antagonist’ Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso americano –​ in a rather dismissive light, seeing its twenty-​first century legacy as ‘facile’. See Richardson et al. (2019,Vol. 1, p.535). 29 This term is a compound derived from the work on magic realism of Stephen Slemon and Sheila Roberts (in ‘Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse’ (1995) and ‘Inheritance in Question:  The Magical Realist Mode in Afrikaans Literature’ (2000) respectively), which Warnes combines to further investigate the need for rigour in defining magic realism’s vagueness (2005). 30 Birri’s adaptations,Wenders’ aforementioned Wings of Desire, Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy and Takashi Miike’s Chūgoku no chōjin中国の鳥人 [The Bird People in China,  1998] all feature winged figures, allegorical embodiments of transition and of possibilities (not impossibilities) beyond human socio-​political impasses. 31 Eugene Jolas, ‘The Novel is Dead –​Long Live the Novel’ (November 1929). (In I2009, pp.113–​14). 32 Jolas, ‘Novalis, the Mystic Visionary’ (Undated). (In 2009, pp.309–​26; 319). 33 Löwy reminds us that Breton also derived his concept of magic art from Novalis, quoting his ‘Sur l’art magique’, Perspective Cavalière:  ‘In his enquiry into magical art, Breton declared that they ‘both elaborated the ways and the means of enchanting the universe’ (2009, p.37, emphasis in original). 34 For a concise discussion of affect in Tomkins’ research, see Sedgwick and Frank (1995, pp.496–​522).

30 Introduction

35 This approach is later taken up by Liam Connell (1998), who also finds magic realism to be inextricably tied to European modernism, avant-​garde practice and material concerns. 36 One of few films mentioned in Bowers’ Magic(al) Realism (2004). 37 The dialogue for Wings of Desire was co-​written by Wenders and Peter Handke, who wrote the opening poem ‘Lied Vom Kindsein’ [A Song of Childhood].

2 MAGISCHER REALISMUS AND THE ‘DEMON FANTASTIC’ Painting, photography, film

Franz Roh (1890–​1965) was born in Thuringia, Germany, and studied philosophy, art history, and literature before embarking on his doctoral thesis on Dutch art under Heinrich Wölfflin at the University of Munich. He became a renowned art historian, championing contemporary art, and frequently contributing to among others, Das Kunstblatt, Der Cicerone, Werk, and Die Kunst. Roh was fascinated by developments in photography and wrote extensively on the subject. This included a photobook that he co-​edited with typographer Jan Tschichold entitled Foto-​ Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit [Photo-​eye: 76 Photographs of the Period], one of three photobooks published to coincide with the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart.1 In the early 1930s, he also produced a considerable portfolio of photographic experiments that were greatly influenced by the work of László Moholy-​ Nagy and Max Ernst. His critical, and practical work focuses on new ideas that were circulating regarding tradition, mimesis, and modernity, to which he adds the philosophical question of umsetzung –​a turning, transposition, but also a dislocation, of exterior reality via the camera (Roh 1929, p.15). His writings on photographic reproduction bear similarity to the ideas of Pierre Mac Orlan, who wrote, in 1926: The cinema has made us see the social fantastic of our time. It is enough to wander at night to understand that these new lights have created a new shadow. […] Films [can] give life a disturbing meaning [signification inquiétude] through very slight deformations of social appearances. (‘Le Fantastique’ [1926] cited in Dicker 2018, p.46)

With clear links to later twentieth-​century avant-​garde experiments in film and ethnography, this chapter explores Roh’s ideas against the preceding artistic movement of Expressionism (with reference to Cubism and Dada), and the coterminous emergence of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity, New Sobriety] –​which was popularised

32  Magischer Realismus and the ‘demon fantastic’

through Gustav Hartlaub’s exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit. Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus [German Art since Expressionism] at the Kunsthalle in the summer of 1925, which eventually eclipsed Magischer Realismus as an art historical term.2 Shearer West observes how a small, yet significant, linguistic difference further distinguishes Hartlaub’s Neue Sachlichkeit from Roh’s Magischer Realismus. The word ‘sachlichkeit’ ‘signals an objective fact, as opposed to a tangible object’ (2000, p.160), whereas Roh’s description of objectivity in Nach-​Expressionismus takes the word ‘gegenstandlichkeit’ from ‘gegenstand’ which literally means physical object. Roh’s semantic choice stresses the animate ‘thingness’ of the object, lending it greater significance and affect. It is also worth bearing in mind, considering the legacy of magic realism and its subsequent migration to literature, that in terms of the modernist avant-​garde neither Neue Sachlichkeit nor Magischer Realismus were considered central, or significant, in defining the terrain. Certainly Alfred H. Barr Jnr. (the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art) did not think so, as both were omitted in his 1936 diagram of modernist art movements.3 As Irene Guenther wryly observes: Because of the fluidity of boundaries, the ambiguity of definitions, and the sometimes untraceable transformation of concepts, conjecture and fact have intertwined in the history of magic(al) realism and its eventual dissemination. In effect, Roh’s artistic child of the 1920s has become a present-​day historian’s nightmare. (1995, p.34)

Roh stresses that his mode of Magischer Realismus is distinct from surrealism, despite many shared philosophical interests: Surrealism shared with Magic Realism the urge to leave nothing veiled, to grasp all things as sharply as possible. But it went further to construct a new world, a world none of us had ever seen before, possibly not even in our fantastic dreams. The ordinary things of life were bewitched; constellations, ideas of space and the function of gravity were transformed. Without this transformation we are still in the realm of Magic Realism, and many artists shifted from one area to the other and back again. (Roh 1968, p.137, author’s emphasis)

Roh is incorrect in his assertion that surrealism departs from our world, creating something that is new even to our ‘fantastic dreams’, as Breton always claimed that even the most fantastic image had its roots in reality. In Yves Tanguy’s abstracted dreamscapes, or Juan Miro’s Constellations series (1939–​1941), Roh believes that the viewer must travel to a new world in which natural and man-​made objects have new purposes. The slippage between ordinary, real life, and our fantasies, is for him, much slighter in Magischer Realismus than in works of surrealism (despite his inclusion of key surrealist works in Nach-​Expressionismus).These conflicting ideas prevent a definitive description of magic realism and contribute to its eventual eclipse by surrealism and others, and I will return to them later on.

Magischer Realismus and the ‘demon fantastic’  33

The preface to Nach-​Expressionismus begins with the now much-​cited phrase: ‘I attribute no special value to the title “magical realism” revealing a central ambivalence that persists in all subsequent attempts to define the mode’ (cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.154).To describe painting that privileges the deconcealment of magical elements in modern life, he follows Novalis’s magischer Idealismus rather than using the term mystical. He makes clear that such magic is not that of religious spirituality or fantastical dreamscapes: ‘[it] does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it’ (1995, p.16). Roh’s magic is of the world, and draws inspiration from ‘terrestrial things’, which, after the terrors of the war, can be approached with ‘more mature knowledge and earthly substance’ (p.17). Nach-​Expressionismus is a manifesto of sorts, a lengthy text accompanied by 88 monochrome plates of paintings, lithographs, and collage, that generate ‘a most prolific and detailed tactile feeling’ that he associates with the new painting (although 14 of these illustrate the démodé style of the previous ‘generation’, Expressionism, p.18). No doubt influenced by Wölfflin’s contrastive analysis of Renaissance and baroque styles in the influential study Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe [Principles of Art History, 1915],5 Roh clarifies Magischer Realismus ordering the two styles into 23 pairs of traits (see Table 2.1).

TABLE 2.1  Roh’s 1925 schema for the characteristics of Magischer Realismus

Expressionism

Post-​expressionism

Ecstatic subjects Many religious themes Suppression of the object Rhythmical Emotionally arousing Extravagant Dynamic Loud Summary Close-​up view Producing an immediate reaction In large forms Monumental Warm Thick colour texture Rough Like an uncarved stone Emphasis on the visibility of the painting process Expressive deformation of the object Emphasising diagonals or Ecstatic subjects slanting motion and acute angles Centrifugal Primitive and spontaneous

Sober subjects Very few religious themes The object clarified Representational Intellectually absorbing Puristically severe Static Quiet Thorough Close and far view Demanding more than one look In large as well as split up forms Miniature Cool to cold Thin paint surface Smooth Like a blank sheet of metal Effacement of the painting process

Source: Menton (1983, p.17).

Harmonic purification of the object Emphasising right angles within a framework of parallels Centripetal Refined and professionally artistic

34  Magischer Realismus and the ‘demon fantastic’

There is no genre or theme; landscapes, nudes, self-​portraits, and still life paintings present pastoral, urban, and fantastic scenes. In the frontispiece to the first edition of Nach-​Expressionismus, Roh leaves a clue in the form of Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau’s (1844–​ 1910) oil painting La Bohémienne Endormie [The Sleeping Gypsy,  1897]. It depicts a nocturnal desert scene, in which a recumbent female figure sleeps peacefully under a bright moon, a walking stick in her hand suggesting a tiring journey. A lion stands motionless contemplating her. The improbability of the scenario suggests that the lion is an apparition, or a manifestation from her unconscious dream world. Roh ‘realized the importance of Henri Rousseau’s naive, neoprimitivist influence within magic realism’ in terms of the remote, mythical elements, the ‘airlessness’ and his ‘strong sense of reality’ (Menton 1983, p.18).6 He praises the painting’s magical effect, noting how the dark blue-​g reen night and the brilliance of the sand dunes are constrained into a uniform substance under the light of the moon, to which the uncanny presence of the lion adds a mythical element (1925, p.125). A tension arises from the peaceful scene, its affect rooted in an imagined scenario: ‘Rousseau, who had never travelled in his life [… painted] completely convincing landscapes which were in fact purely imaginary’ (Raynal 1950, p.26). Clearly, the landscapes that Rousseau paints are not ‘real’ in the sense that they are not mimetic translations of actual locations, but instead spring from his imagination, his dreams, or his nightmares. Salvador Dalí, who had read the preface to Nach-​Expressionismus in translation, picks up the connections that Roh makes between Rousseau, Italian metaphysical painting, and the new tendency in European art in his essay ‘Sant Sebastià’ (1927) where he discusses The Sleeping Gypsy and metaphysical painting in relation to his own painting: Tactile intensification of the reality of the object, condensation of the air, the world of Valori Plastici from which the themes of ‘Sant Sebastià’ are drawn is compressed with a new exactness in the objectivity of which Roh starts with the ‘tactile feeling’ which things arouse in use, and the existence of those things in their ‘unperturbed duration’. (cited in Lahuerta 1997, p.288)

Reflecting on Roh’s inclusion of Rousseau’s painting in Nach-​Expressionismus, Carpentier writes: ‘we see an Arab sleeping peacefully in the desert, a mandolin to one side, a lion standing there and a moon in the background; that is magical realism because it is an unrealistic image, impossible but fixed there nonetheless’ (cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.103). Carpentier draws a clear line between his real maravilloso americano and Roh’s Magischer Realismus, a line which becomes fuzzier over time, especially in light of their respective critiques of surrealism. Turning the pages of Nach-​Expressionismus, the reader must work to connect the underlying affinities between artists whose style, context, or intent varies so greatly. Rousseau’s painting marks Roh’s delta point, from and into which all paintings flow. More broadly, Rousseau’s oeuvre reveals ‘a poetic approach’ (Raynal 1950, p.25) that is alert to the hidden magic in even the most well-​known scenes, an approach that

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cares little for classical perspective, and which renders Paris spectral and alien (much as de Chirico does for Florence, for example); Rousseau injects ‘Surprise!’ into his tropical jungle paintings (Tiger in a Tropical Storm, [AKA Surprised!] (1891)); plays with strange flatness and altered scale in portraits of children and eschews logic in strange and fantastic reversals of temporality. Roh’s critical consistency stems from the inconsistency of his e­ xamples –​Rousseau and de Chirico, wildly different, are nevertheless drawn together in his fascination with stillness, detail, everyday magic, and the unexpected elements in composition.The paintings in Nach-​Expressionismus are united by ‘the rigorous dedication to the object’ (1995, p.27), with a tendency towards precise lines and shading and often an exaggerated foreshortening. Landscapes depict the world at night, often with frontally lit sections bathed in an unnaturally bright moonlight. As Roh explains, these versions of the exterior world are cold, decanted, sober, flat, and detailed, but, and here is the major difference between Magischer Realismus and Neue Sachlichkeit, the poles of mimetic and imaginative realism can be reversed. The ‘crystallising’ moment for Roh is when a viewer momentarily pinpoints the tension between the objects, and the gaps and strangeness of their shape and volume against the background.The effect of stillness and weird familiarity in the paintings gradually transforms into what he describes as a throbbing, explosive sensation of movement: ‘the deadest, most useless thing is capable of suddenly emanating this great force lying within it, of making it palpable’ (Orend [1928] 1994, p.494). The ‘radiation of magic’ to take Roh’s phrase, is a visual alchemy in which stylistic effect reveals the hidden, non-​objective elements of life ‘miraculously’ through the solid forms of objects. An evocative example is his reaction to Franz Radziwill’s Todessturz Karl Buchstätters [Karl Buchstätter’s Fatal Dive, 1928], in which a pilot is frozen mid-​air against a nocturnal sky in the plunge to his death. The painting is imbued with an eerie light suggestive of a presence beyond and in excess of the reality. Roh notes a lugubrious, eerie quality, characteristic of Radziwill’s wider oeuvre: ‘The silence of the grave dominates his miniature like pictures, in which strange events are always taking place against a darkling sky’ (1968, p.117).7 Roh admires the slippage between realism and the staging of dramatic, creative, imaginative responses to real events: ‘Only when the creative process achieves its goal from the inside out can it generate new views of reality, which is at most built in pieces, never imitated as a whole’ (1995, p.25). Switching between ‘inside-​out’ and ‘outside-​in’ is essential to his theorisation of a convergence, or an interpenetration, of mind and matter that is evoked and provoked in and by the paintings –​a state also advocated by his friend Ernst: ‘The wonderful sense […] Of being simultaneously outside and in, free and imprisoned. Who can solve the riddle?’8 The word ‘fantastic’ punctuates Roh’s essays (as both phantastich and fantastik), with links as far back as the baroque (a period of art history that enters the history of magic realism through the painting of Monsù Desiderio [aka François de Nomé] in Carpentier’s 1962 novel El siglo de las luces [Explosion in a Cathedral] along with Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who is referenced in his lecture on the baroque-​ marvellous, see Chapter 4); and in the juxtaposition of paintings in the Fantastic Art,

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Dada, Surrealism exhibition of 1936.9 In January 1922, medical student Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–​1974) arrived back in Berlin fresh from his encounters at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire10 and gave the ‘Erste Dada-​Rede in Deutschland’ [‘First Dada Speech in Germany’] along with readings from his 1916 book of sound poetry Phantastische Geberte [Fantastic Prayers] (Doherty 2006, p.87). The ‘fantastic’ in these rhythmic, liturgical poems equates to forms of resistance and creative power intended to rise against civilisation and connect with ancient civilisations (the poems were accompanied by woodcuts created by Jean (Hans) Arp, 1886–​1966). Although Roh found Berlin’s Club Dada –​Huelsenbeck, Hannah Höch (1889–​ 1978), John Heartfield (1891–​1968), George Grosz (1893–​1959), Hans Richter (1888–​1976) et al. –​too politically confrontational and stylistically anarchic, it bears reminding that they shared a belief in a spirituality within the function of the fantastic. Huelsenbeck describes sitting in New York with Arp, trying to comprehend the significance of Dada with fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. […] Religiousness […] is the experience of constructive will in the world which lends wings to the course of the stars despite all the fallen angels and helps man […] to understand the archetypal symbols of his existence.11 Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) examines the history of mathematical and aesthetic perspective in an era dominated by photographic and moving images, noting that the psychological and physical conditions of the visual impression’ are contingent on the senses (1991, p.67). This contingency is influenced by new terms through which ‘the object’ ‘wants to bring to bear, unimpeded, its own formal lawfulness’ (p.68).The seeming antithesis between a subjective, phenomenological perspective, and the new attitude of objective reality in the modern era is, of course, irresistible to Roh, but what of magic? For Panofsky, the modern, phenomenological perspective ‘seals off religious art from the realm of the magical, where the work of art itself works the miracle’. ‘But then’, he continues, ‘it opens it to something entirely new: the realm of the visionary, where the miraculous becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in that supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural, visual space and so permit him really to “internalize” their supernaturalness’ (1991, p.72). This is an objective magic, and Roh’s Nach-​ Expressionismus strives to express the dialectic of a secular magic that realises the inseparability of the unmapable and untested realms of the fantastic supernatural from the cold, hard, facts of modernity, and the constant mental activity necessary to apprehend it all. The emphasis on tactility and sensorial pleasure that Roh signals in relation to the new painting might come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the works of say, Expressionists Emil Nolde, or Ludwig Meidner, whose thick impasto, and bold colours, curving black lines and clouds of white sfumato12 privilege passion and tactility. Expressionism places the visual representation of emotion at its

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forefront (nowhere more striking that in the figural distortion and sonic vibration of Edvard Munch’s Skrik [The Scream], 1893)  to ‘affect the spectator from afar’ (Roh 1925, p.20), promoting ‘an intense subjectivity which had no reluctance in destroying the conventional picture of reality in order that the expression be more powerful’ (Furness 1973, p.14). As Hugo Ball elaborates, Kandinsky and the Expressionists: ‘voluntarily abstain from representing natural objects […] They become creators of new natural entities that have no counterpart in the known world’ ([1917] 1993, p.264). Roger Cardinal locates the power of Expressionist art in the transmission ‘without delay or interruption, of the vibrations he [the viewer] has absorbed from the object’ (1984, p.119, original emphasis). The impression of instantaneity is, as Cardinal notes, not only the result of an emotive response, but also of experimentation with form that tends to emphasise the physicality of the painting process (p.29). Meidner’s Apocalyptic Landscape, 1913, is the apotheosis of dramatic, dystopian imagery, while Nolde’s intensely coloured oil paintings of Northern German coastal landscapes in the early 1910s illustrate how ‘vision’ replaces ‘likeness’ (Vogt 1980, p.56). Conversely, Magischer Realismus involves ‘realistic depiction’ through the immediate translation of the concrete facts of the everyday. In a chapter subtitled Gegenständlichkiet Überhaupt [General Conditions of Objectivity] Roh outlines how: ‘Post-​expressionism attempts to reinstate reality in the context of its visibility. The elementary joy of re-​recognition comes into play again’ (1925, p.27). And part of this, wittingly or not, derives from Roh’s seeming adherence to a Spinozan phenomenology in his delimitation of Magischer Realismus. His perspective on the mysterious reality of the everyday corresponds to the claim for affect as a spiritual stirring in the emotions inextricably tied to social experience Foreword: Magic realism. The invention of a new style of realism, of seeing anew, is a reaction to the impassioned chaos of Expressionism and its ‘wasted forces’ (cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.18), but also a response to seismic social and political change. An accelerated metamorphosis occurred, which altered the exterior world, shattering space, place, customs, and habits: The goal of this post-​World War I  art was a new definition of the object, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated. […] The juxtaposition of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ reflected […] the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings of which both Freud and de Chirico wrote. (Guenther 1995, p.36)

Guenther’s analysis pinpoints the complexity of influences and paradoxes that drive his attempts at categorisation; and her nod to Freud and de Chirico is absolutely spot on. While Roh does not cite Freud as a significant influence, parallels with unheimlichkeit, latency, and the visual tropes of neurosis are obvious. De Chirico’s painting displays a peculiar clarity that Roh believes necessary to a post-​ war realism:  ‘It manifests its interior point of departure more purely than does nineteenth-​century Realism, revealing its compositional structure with a different

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kind of clarity. It continues to approach the ultimate enigmas and harmonies of existence through a hidden stereometry’ (1995, p.23, author’s emphasis). There is an understatement or restraint to which I will return in Chapter 7. In the tangle of approaches to reality and realism in the interwar period, a persistent thread can be ascertained running through the new avant-​garde movements: ‘a new connection with the classical tradition’ (Ferrari 1997, p.298). Coinciding with le rappel à l’ordre [The Call to Order] and Dada’s ‘Return to Objectivity [gegenständlichkeit]’ (Hausmann), a flurry of magazines, and periodicals exploded across Europe, but few held as much sway as the opinions and works of Italian artists appearing in the short-​lived magazine Valori Plastici (edited by Mario Broglio 1918–​1922) published in Rome, in both Italian and French editions. The first issue showcased the ideas of artists Carlo Carrà, de Chirico, and his brother Alberto Savinio, and outlined the foundational principles of metaphysical art, signalling the need to re-​evaluate the human relationship with exterior reality and that of the artist to ‘the classical values of their own cultural substrate’ (Carrà 1997, p.295). We know that this issue was advertised in Das Kunstblatt in Germany, 1919 (Guenther 1995, p.38), proving instrumental in helping to define the German strains of Magischer Realismus and Neue Sachlichkeit, as well as inspiring a number of surrealist artists.13 Significantly, the second double issue of February/​March 1919 included illustrations and texts by Cocteau, Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Picasso, and Fernand Léger among others, illustrative of the collective conversations and collaborations that traversed national borders and allegiances through printed editions (later made physically possible for those travelling or in exile).14 These shared ideas are representative of a core sensibility and approach to ‘the real’ that also produced magic realism, and underpinned its continuance into Latin American literature: all will subscribe to Chirico’s dictum: ‘[…] Thought must draw so far away from human fetters that things may appear to it under a new aspect, as though they are illuminated by a constellation now appearing for the first time’. (Angel Flores [1955] cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.114)

In literature and philosophy, there were other influential figures, most notably Guillaume Apollinaire, Novalis, Gaston Bachelard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Isidore-​Lucien Ducasse (known by the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont). But in painting, de Chirico’s oeuvre, and his ‘revelatory’ practice contributed more than any other single figure (save only for Picasso) to the proliferation of post-​war European modes and movements. De Chirico relished the solitude, the metaphysicality of life, transferring it onto the canvas through exactitude and a heightening of the illogical. The ‘new’ painting might have been a return, but as de Chirico was always clear to explain, this was not the same order; it had been reinvested with shock, bearing the stubborn vestiges of post-​war trauma, and required a new ‘stereometry’ to interpret it. In 1913, de Chirico wrote a series of notes that lead to his essay in the first issue of Valori Plastici ‘On Metaphysical Art’. At the centre of these preliminary ideas is

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the concept of ‘revelation’, akin to the ‘surprise’ of Friedrich Nietzsche’s exclamation: ‘I was surprised by Zarathustra’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–​1885): When the revelation results from the sight of an arrangement of things, then the work that presents itself on our thought is closely connected to what has provoked its birth; it resembles it too, but in a very strange way. […] I believe and have faith that just as the ways a person is seen in dream may be, from certain points of view, a reflection of his metaphysical reality, the revelation is a demonstration of the metaphysical reality of certain things that happen to us from time to time; of the way, of the disposition in which certain things sometimes present themselves and awaken in us unfamiliar sensations of joy and surprise: the sensations of revelation.15 De Chirico’s reading of Nietzsche’s philosophical (and formally experimental) exploration of mankind’s eternal return in Zarathustra is illuminated from a rather unusual perspective. He compares his experience of reading it with his childhood wonder at reading Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881–​1883). This is an instinctual, rather than an intellectual apprehension of Zarathustra, an observation that spurs a new confidence, evidenced in his most famous and lauded works –​Piazza d’Italia (1913); The Red Tower (1913); The Song of Love (1914); The Disquieting Muses (1918); The Enigma of a Day (1914) –​and ‘On Metaphysical Art’. It is without doubt that revelation, enigma, and metaphysics are linked to Roh’s later ideas regarding magic, spirituality, and sensory apprehension via the beholder: The appearance of a metaphysical work of art is serene; it gives the impression, however, that something new must happen amidst this same serenity, and that other signs apart from those already apparent are about to enter the rectangle of the canvas. (de Chirico, [1919] 1971, p.90)

In de Chirico’s paintings of the teens, disquiet and enigma reign in squares absent of human presence, and dominated by sculptural and architectural forms, whether ancient Roman gods, cheap model casts, or mass-​produced rubber gloves and tropical fruit: ‘The metaphysical enigma is concealed in any readily available example of architecture or object […] The Eternal and the Spectral can co-​exist anywhere’ (dell’Arco 1987, p.13). Spectrality was enhanced, of course, by the commonplace interruption of artificial lighting, X-​ray photography and mechanisation which haunted spatial and corporeal realities. The ‘hidden’ aspects of objective reality in Magischer Realismus echo de Chirico’s assertion that the spiritual is not something from Nature, but a phenomenological apprehension of the uncommon, often inflected through technology. The idea of the eternal return –​of the human compulsion to repeat, create, and destroy  –​‘with the addition of a current, perhaps precocious spirit’ (Savinio quoted in dell’Arco 1987, p.26) is heavily invested in the intersection of dreams and the everyday: ‘Humanity seems destined to oscillate

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forever between devotion to the world of dreams and adherence to the world of reality. And really, if this breathing rhythm of history were to cease, it might signal the death of the spirit’ (Roh in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.17). What I have described of Magischer Realismus up to this point may seem to lack socially critical awareness, favouring a subjective, phenomenological theorisation ‘open to a thousand spiritual possibilities’ (Roh, cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, pp.23; 25). However, ‘The new position, if it survives, will exist on a middle ground not through weakness but, on the contrary, through energy and an awareness of its strength. It will be a sharp edge’ (p.23), its revelatory stance a rejection of traditional bourgeois and state values. Roh is arrested for Kulturbolschewismus (cultural bolshevism) in 1933 during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, for which he spends three months in Dachau concentration camp, and which later sees the Entartete Kunst drive to ban and remove modernist art from German museums and galleries (Roh 1962). He recalls how: ‘The Hitler people took all the good books, all the good and living literature out of the libraries and burned them. Of my own books at least four were prohibited and burned [including Foto-​Auge16]’ (quoted in Lukach 1983, pp.281–​2). Put simply, avant-​garde art was considered radical, it threatened the Nazi propaganda machine, and unsettled bourgeois audiences and readers. Although there are more obviously subversive and transparently political painters considered under the umbrella of Magischer Realismus who tackle the horrors of the sex trade, degeneracy, post-​traumatic stress disorder, and alienating technologies with directness and black humour (Grosz; Otto Dix [1891–​1969]), it is the more opaque, or at least less overt, critiques, disruptions and attacks on the social order that Roh prizes. The following sections observe further influences on Roh’s evolution, followed by an in-​depth consideration of photographic art and technological magic.

Roh’s Muse: Max Ernst –​magic realist? Emblematic of the confusion in Nach-​Expressionismus is Roh’s insistence on Ernst’s place in it. Two of Ernst’s artworks feature in the plate reproductions at the end of the book, and three photocollages in Foto-​Auge. Ernst was similarly influenced by pittura metafisica, recalling his encounter with Valori Plastici as a Freudian release: I had the feeling of rediscovering something which I had long been familiar with, as when an event already seen opens up an entire region of our personal world of dreams, a world that due to a kind of censorship we had not seen or not allowed ourselves to see.17 Ernst’s self-​awareness is very telling (much like Dalí’s encounter with de Chirico). His anecdote, without transcending the real, reveals the world that has been repressed, or hidden, and is now seen. Roh seems less aware of, or interested in, the Freudian aspects of dream/​phantasy, and the qualities he singles out for praise in de Chirico’s oeuvre are loneliness and melancholy –​in other words what Apollinaire considered its ‘modern sensations’ or, as Hans Belting describes, ‘the consistency of

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the atmosphere, of the Stimmung’ (2003, p.19, author’s emphasis). Born in Brühl, Ernst studied philosophy before turning to art and literary pursuits, becoming one of the founding members of the Cologne Dada group18 (1919–​1922). The group’s collaborative textual and visual collages, along with Ernst’s individual pieces, caught Roh’s attention. Through Ernst’s individual works Roh traces a metamorphosis whereby the visible joins and deliberate clash of materials characteristic of early Dada collage and photomontage are gradually smoothed and effaced. The first of Ernst’s pictures in Nach-​Expressionismus is La belle jardinière [The Beautiful Gardener, 1923]19 an oil painting with additional line drawing. It is an example of Ernst’s ‘overpaintings’ in which he bases drawings on earlier collage works, or alters existing paintings, creating ‘palimpsests that recorded resolutions of contradictions’ (Spies 1988, pp.55–​7). In Ernst, Roh finds the artist whose work most closely embodies his own shifting dialogue on the metamorphosis in perception through mechanical reproduction.20 He makes a distinction between Dada and surrealist experiments that cause transformations in the objects themselves through ‘tumultuous’ interjections (Roh in Zamora and Faris 1995, p.129), and the more subtle psychological or affective metamorphosis in Ernst’s work. The background of La belle jardinière depicts a view facing outwards across the sea from a strange ‘jetty’. At the edge of the ‘jetty’, half-​balanced on the sea, a woman is poised naked, save for a propeller/​tail fin held over her chest, and a white bird that has settled on her right thigh, covering her genitalia. Subtle chiaroscuro gives the body some depth, but the overall impression is of a flat image pasted onto the background. Behind her, floating in the sky, is a line drawing of a figure through which the background can be seen, with bodily markings and garlands of fruit tied about the torso and neck. Roh’s accompanying text reads as follows: The torso opened for inspection; the fantastic configuration of the nude, half-​bird, half-​propellor; the weblike figure attached to the woman like a shadow –​all these are reverberations of Dada, to whose phantasms Max Ernst, seemingly a Hieronymous Bosch reborn, remains faithful. But in addition […] reveals new, classical traits; in the present case, the slender elongation of the nude above a tranquil, natural landscape.21 Bosch and Ernst are drawn together in their perceived commitment to the bizarre in times of trauma and upheaval (Roh 1968, p.138), while something of de Chirico’s cool classicism pervades in the statue-​like figure, the flattened, stuck-​on body parts, and the still landscape. Tranquillity and meticulous craft are set into conversation with Dada experimentation; nature oscillates between the pastoral and the nightmarish. Still Roh is unable to fully separate the ‘new’ German painting from Dada and surrealist practice. The second work reproduced in Nach-​Expressionismus is a collage taken from Ernst’s illustrated book collaboration with Paul Éluard, Les maleurs des immortels [Misfortunes of the Immortals,  1922]. Roh uses the title of this book of collages and poetry, rather than the work’s title la parole  –​ femme-​oiseau [The

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Word –​She-​Bird, 1921]. A female nude and a monstrous male figure, whose musculature is revealed from head to toe, are set against a white background. The male has been split in half with a front and rear view held together by a white strip through which the skeleton is revealed. The female is headless, the right leg amputated to reveal the blood vessels beneath; birds peek between her legs and in front of her breasts.Viewed all at once these elements seem monstrous: the interior has been exteriorised, skin and head removed, and the figures appear disjointed and inhuman, frozen during a horrible metamorphosis. And yet the anatomical detailing of the bodies is chillingly realistic. Roh describes it as a ‘print [that] evinces passages of detailed reality drawn with the most exquisite care while simultaneously maintaining the highest level of fantasy’ (cited in Spies 1991, p.177). Spies notes the confusion that Ernst’s work notoriously posed for art historians: ‘[Roh’s] praise verges on the ridiculous when you consider that the headless woman in the foreground was lifted from a Dürer etching’ (p.77). In correspondence with Roh in 1926, Ernst writes: It meant less to me to construct new entities than to create electric and erotic tensions by relating elements which until now we have felt were alien and unconnected. This resulted in explosions and high voltage, and the more unexpected the associations (…) the more surprising was the flashing spark of poetry. (Roh 1968, pp.139–​40, original ellipsis)

In this analogy, made famous in Breton’s eulogy to Ernst,22 a vivid, kinetic energy is felt. Breton likened Ernst’s work of the early 1920s to film, something that has clearly influenced Roh’s own appraisal: ‘resolved to do away with still-​life, mystic-​ charlatanism, he projects before our eyes the most captivating film in the world […] as he illuminates the innermost depths of our internal life with an unparalleled light’ (Breton 1996, p.61). Elza Adamowicz identifies the material effect of text and image in surrealist collage as a dialectical structure, ‘a creative act of détournement’, of turning the image or the word against itself, of re-​imagining and re-​using materials. But also a ‘dépaysement’, a defamiliarisation that enables an encounter with the marvellous without leaving the realm of the real: ‘Collage effectively anchors surrealist activities in the real, thanks to the “reality effect” of its processes, which unmask, critique and renew the perception of utilitarian reality and modes of representation and expression’ (2005, p.11). For Marxist Andy Merrifield a similar dynamism resides in the creative force of poetry:  ‘somewhere else, somewhere inaccessible to power […] the unity of dream and action is reconciled in the poetic act, in the poetic moment, and that can produce its effect with the certainty of lightning’ (2011, pp.162–​3).This kind of ‘electric’ tension, whether in collage, photography, or painting, is what Roh considers essential to works of Magischer Realismus, and for his reader it is clear just how magic realism has always depended on subjective chance, singular examples, and the thematic overlaps between certain favoured artists.

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Roh was impressed by Ernst’s technical ability to create a ‘comprehensive order’ out of heterogeneous fragments, and his commentary also illustrates how fantastical elements –​zoomorphism, the meeting of scientific and ancient symbols, abstraction –​become plausible in Ernst’s figures: ‘creatures which remind us of ourselves but have insect eyes and bird feathers’ (1968, p.139). In ‘au-​déla de la peinture’ [beyond painting, begun in 1919)  Ernst describes a metamorphosis in perception that occurs when he scrutinises a patch of wallpaper, or stares at an object: ‘a mosque in place of a factory, a drummers’ school conducted by angels; carriages on the highways of the skies; a salon at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries, a vaudeville poster raising horrors before my eyes’ (2009, pp.20–​1). In order to reproduce these strange sensory shifts and ocular mysteries, he moves ‘beyond painting’, his collages evoking the slippage of momentary mental indistinction or sensory misapprehension. There is, within this procedure, a structured intention, even though the result can be non-​determined and associative. Roh believed surrealism ‘transformed’ ideas of space and gravity, ‘bewitching’ the ‘ordinary things of life’ and yet Ernst’s ‘magical sophisms’ (Ernst 2009, p.21), along with those of Magritte (Roh 1968, p.138), proved exceptions that retain a level of recognisable reality.23 Roh’s clear respect for Ernst’s believable magic rests with the art historian’s subjective response to the work, but it should be noted that in order for Roh to extol Ernst as a magic realist, (and later as an exemplary practitioner of ‘marvelous’ technical innovation), he needs to read the artist’s work against Dada and surrealism, extracting only that which fit his hypothesis –​selective in its heterogeneity. I can only retrospectively set Ernst’s words in dialogue with Roh’s, but in so doing the intersections are clear: So when the Surrealists are said to be painters of a continually mutable dream-​ reality, this should not be taken to mean that they simply paint their dreams […] It means that they move freely, daringly, and naturally on the physically and mentally quite real (‘surreal’), if still largely undefined, frontier between interior and exterior world, registering what they see and experience there, and intervening where their revolutionary instincts suggest.24 Ernst highlights the importance of dynamic movement between perception and objective reality, a quality Roh and Breton each saw as cinematic metamorphosis –​ ‘to disorient us within our own memories’ in ‘relative time’ so that we ‘should get used to seeing oak trees surge up and antelope soar’ (Breton 1996, pp.60; 61).These observations are of profound significance to the discourse of magic realism: montage (collage) + viewer + a new post-​war optical unconscious  =  a new mysticism, its fragments and comic audacity flickering in the time-​space continuum of perpetual perception. As Rosalind Krauss observes of Ernst’s plundering of images cut from 1880s and 1890s issues of La Nature, optical devices such as zoetropes, praxinoscopes, phaenakistisscopes fascinated him with their potential for creating illusion:

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it was perfectly evident to him that the nineteenth-​century audience of this magazine of popular science liked to play with both analysis [serialised progression] and synthesis [the whir of illusion] at the same time […] This both-​ at-​once, this being caught inside the illusion and this looking on nonetheless from without, would, he understood, suit his purposes perfectly. (1993, p.209)

Roh also has a particular interest in how the materiality of a given medium can simultaneously conjure an object, subject or world in becoming, contributing to the illusory, shifting effect of reality in flux. There is something in the palpitating worlds of Magischer Realismus that anticipates Roh’s later creative work in photography and photocollage –​his eye trained for the vital leaps in motion between reality and fleeting thought. David Sylvester demonstrates how a cinematic analogy might also apply to de Chirico: Chirico’s eye invariably gravitates, like an Expressionist movie director’s, towards the spectacular, picturesque, vertiginous viewpoint. A Chirico composition is a kind of collage in which every element has been seen from a different position and each position provides an ‘interesting’ angle:  a steep, high or low angle, or an acutely oblique angle, or an extreme close-​up or extreme long-​shot. (1997, p.209)

This cinematic thinking, attributing dynamic camera movement to mysterious, lugubrious, strange and uncanny paintings, is crucial to understanding how the films I discuss below by Hadžihalilović, Delvaux, or Singh, can be thought of as magic-​ realist, a continuance of this intermedial, avant-​garde legacy. The obsession with Ernst continues in Foto-​Auge, where le chien qui chie [Song of the Flesh, The Shitting Dog, c.  1920], is placed opposite le massacre des innocents [The Massacre of the Innocents, c.1920], and La Puberté Proche [Puberty Approaches,  1921]. Ernst asserts that the ‘most noble conquest of collage’ is the irrational made material through an alchemical process (2009, p.29).The systematic confusion and disorder of the senses of which he speaks is aided by openness to the irrational, to hazard. For example, both Le chien qui chie and La Puberté Proche feature a ‘phallustrade’ –​an Ernstian neologism to denote scrawled verbal collage, created from a compound noun combining ‘autostrade’, ‘balustrade’, and ‘phallus’ (2009, p.28). In the former the text reads: ‘The dog that shits. The dog, well coiffured in spite of the difficulties of the terrain, caused by an abundant snowfall. The woman with the beautiful throat […] the song of the flesh’. Accompanying the images –​ a bestial menagerie mid-​leap, juxtaposed with a fan and a spherical object from which a pointing human hand protrudes –​the words seem to have met by pure chance, and create endless possibilities for interpretation. In Le massacre des innocents, an aerial photograph of a city forms the backdrop for vertical strips of rail track, the traced outlines of three (massacred) bodies and layered images of a phoenix and

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a winged insect –​here Ernst links death to the city. Roh, like Breton, maintained that Ernst painted worlds in which the cohesive affect of incongruity and imagination creates a spark, projecting worlds that are from real life, but altered sufficiently to create a radical poetic vertigo, a détournement, in which order is re-​evaluated. Roh augments the détournement by placing La Puberté Proche opposite an archival photograph of a volcanic crater; the shape of which is repeated in the breasts of the faceless woman depicted in Ernst’s collage. The original image of a reclining nude is rotated by 90 degrees, embellished with additional layers of paint: ‘it [the original photograph] had been made newly pendent, a weightless vertical suspended in the strangely material, velvety ether of the gouache that covers the surface of the photograph like a hardened skin’ (Krauss 1993, p.47). The ‘phallustrade’ reads: ‘The gravitation of the undulations does not yet exist’. The poetry of this phrase, unlike the textual word play of Le chien qui chie contributes to a sense of liberation and weightlessness in the painting.The overriding eroticism of the naked body is intensified by Roh’s choice to situate it opposite the geological photograph, its central nipple a tactile invitation to touch.

Optical significance –​Foto-​Auge and the decentring of the eye The year 1929 was a significant year for photography, with many avant-​garde artists publishing statements on its potential. It was also the year that photography first became a taught course at the Bauhaus under the tutelage of Moholy-​Nagy. It marks the simultaneous emergence of ideas concerning temporality, commodification, reproduction, and objectivity in both the avant-​garde and in modern ‘mass’ culture, or ‘vernacular’ modernism.25 In 1929, Dalí writes:  ‘From the subtlety of aquariums to the swiftest and most fleeting motions of wild beasts, photography offers us a thousand fragmentary images that come together in a dramatized cognitive whole’ (Dalí cited in Philips 1989, p.35). Dalí could have been describing the collection of pictures in Foto-​Auge, which coincided with the touring Film und Foto exhibition, organised by the Deutscher Werkbund and initially held in Stuttgart from 18 May to 7 July (for which Hans Richter curated a separate film programme). The Deutsche Werkbund allegedly ‘sought for the reconciliation of art and technology’ through the ‘problem’ of photography (Newhall 1978, p.77). Combined with Roh’s enthusiasm for the photographic medium,Tschihold’s background as a graphic designer and typographer ensured that Foto-​Auge fit stylistically with modern design trends. The entirety of the textual commentary is printed in lower case, in keeping with the Bauhaus assertion that a word does not need two alphabets to represent it, and Roh’s influential photo-​essay ‘mechanismus und ausdruck: wesen und wert der fotografie’ [mechanism and expression: the essence and value of photography] takes up the helm as introduction. On the cover is El Lissitzky’s (1890–​1941) photomontage selbstbildnis [Self Portrait], also known as der konstrukter [The Constructor, 1924]. Lissitzky, a lecturer in architecture, was also a designer, typographer, photographer and painter, arriving in Berlin from Russia in 1921. His photomontage typifies the cross-​medium specificity beloved of Roh.The

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layers of the self-​portrait reveal the duality of the artist (insight)-​constructor (technique) through diaphanous superimposition. The central part of the image presents the act of seeing; Lissitzky’s partially translucent, superimposed hand hovers open over the eye, appearing to hold a draughtsman’s compass. The eye stares through the hand, thereby combining vision with the measuring instrument and inner sight and knowledge with technical production. Crucially, the self-​portrait comments on sachlichkeit and photographic reproduction, which here cannot be separated from the human aspect of seeing. Mechanical process is similarly at the heart of Foto-​ Auge, yet mechanics and objectivity form only part of the book’s organisational structure. As can be seen in The Conductor, ‘the hints of the failure of rationality within the image: the grid’s lack of registration, the jagged pockets of darkness and variable focus that disrupt the clarity of the surface’ are also suggestive of irrationality and disruption (Dickerman 2003 in Perlof and Reed, p.154). Engaging the reader immediately with this cover image, Foto-​Auge questions the ocularcentrism at the heart of debates on mechanisation and photographic reproduction. Foto-​Auge’s 76 images cover three aspects of the medium –​the historical, the technical, and the extraordinary possibility of a new vision –​and highlight ‘five kinds of applied photography’ –​the reality-​photo, the photogram, photomontage,26 photo with etching or painting, and photos in connection with typography. Some are works of art, others are meteorological or botanical photographs, documentary reportage or evidence from criminal archives, and others have been taken from catalogues, newspapers, manuals, and posters; collectively they represent the democratising principle of photographic reproduction. Gone is the stringent schema of Nach-​ Expressionismus, as Roh celebrates the dialogues between Bauhaus, Dada, Cubism, and surrealism, rather than delimiting Magischer Realismus against them. Foto-​Auge posits that all modern forms of photographic reproduction should be considered art. Even though Roh considered advertising to serve the ‘capitalistic upper classes’, the images nevertheless possess a ‘dämonisch-​fantastischer gehalt’ [demonic-​fantastic effect] (1929, p.18), which transposes into one of ‘the first polemically constructed photographic arguments in the history of the medium’ (Jennings 2000, p.23), addressing debates on photography directly through the images. It has been suggested that Roh’s initial interest in photography was stimulated by Moholy-​Nagy’s views on its experimental form and social aims in Painting, Photography, Film (1925),27 evidenced in this statement from Foto-​Auge: ‘I have placed the illustrative material separately following the text because continuity in the illustrations will make the problems raised in the text VISUALLY clear’ ([1925] 1969, p.47, original emphasis). Eugène Atget’s (1857–​1927) photograph of corsets displayed in a Paris shop window (1927) opens the book, an example of the mundane transformed by the camera into the uncanny: the white mannequins seem to float against the blackened background, trapped within the clear frame of the window –​a blurred white veil hovers by the door, its motion in the breeze frozen with a slow shutter to maximise the light. Harnessing technology to produce a visual image of even the slightest movement allows Atget to render visible ephemeral moments of chance, which enhance his portrait of a city in transition. His project to photograph the disappearing ‘old’

Magischer Realismus and the ‘demon fantastic’  47

Paris and document it for posterity began at the end of the nineteenth century. The combined effect of high contrast, fixed movement, the reflective skin of the glass, and the uncanny torsos creates ontological ‘estrangement’ –​an image caught mid-​transformation found in both magic-​realist and surrealist images.28 In fact, there are similarities between the images in a photobook such as this, and surrealist periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s.29 Foto-​Auge pushed for a consideration of the revelatory aspect of the medium, searching for the ‘miracle’ or accident produced in the developing process. Roh’s interest in the expansive capabilities of photographic reproduction produces a more sensory reading of photography and photomontage, a commentary on modern social life that prioritises affect above all, as a means of producing poetry and movement. Moholy-​Nagy’s early work (Barnes 2010) sees him experiment with the photogram (what he called ‘photoplastics’ 1969, p.36), where an object is placed on the surface of photosensitive paper and exposed momentarily to light. A chemical fixative is then applied to the paper resulting in a shadow image.Variations in the light refraction and concentration of the chemicals open the results to chance. Camera-​ less photography, the wondrous alchemy of light and reactive chemicals, was, of course, experimented with much earlier in the nineteenth century, when objects exposed to light finally came to be captured and fixed. One example is the work of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–​1877), whose salt and sodium hyposulphite solution realised the magic of freezing objects in time:  ‘He also discovered the “latent image”: an image created by exposure to light that is present in the paper but invisible, and brought out later by chemical development. The idea of images existing beyond the visible spectrum, unseen by the naked eye, was powerfully suggestive of supernatural forces’ (Barnes 2010, p.11), and for early twentieth-​century artists, fascination for magic, the unseen aspects of life and their link to the supernatural, did not wane in the slightest. The teens and early 1920s marked a period of ‘self-​consciousness’ regarding the short history of the medium, and artists pondered the ‘under-​ exploited rudiments’ of its reproductive potential (p.12). Certainly, by the time Roh writes Magischer Realismus there is return to the ethereal and floating forms of the photogram to explore the tactile realm of objects and their hidden aspects. Another striking example is that of playwright August Strindberg’s celestographs, so perfectly Rohian, that it seems impossible that they do not feature in his essays. Created by exposing chemically saturated photographic paper to the light of stars in the night sky, these images evolved alongside Strindberg’s essay ‘The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’ (1894). They summon a Romantic vision of the night sky, or cosmos, yet more likely register the traces of chemical reaction and particles in the air. David Campany notes how: Billowing and gaseous they certainly resemble the star-​strewn heavens seen through clouds. Yet it is misplaced to say they are ‘of ’ the night sky in the familiar sense. Here most of all Strindberg transgressed the very basis of what we think of as a photograph: a direct physical impression of the world through light. Hard proof and factual record give way to a wishful correspondence

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between image and object. The connection is not physical (what semiotics would call indexical) but implied. (2006, n.p., emphasis in original)

The observation here supports Roh’s thesis that imagination and desire –​‘wishful thinking’  –​bring animate and inanimate states into communion; traces made through contact with the exterior world need not be physical, but the ‘echo of objects’ conjured in the imagination (Roh 1929, p.16). Strindberg describes the capricious and energetic act of painting according to chance. Chance, it should be noted, relates not only to contingent happenings and accidents of the physical kind, but also to the random patterns of the brain as they seek to marry sensory stimuli with virtual recollection-​images: One beautiful morning, as I walked in the woods, I came to a fallow field surrounded by a fence. My thoughts were so far off, but my eyes spotted an unfamiliar, strange object on the ground. One moment it was a cow; shortly thereafter two farmers embracing; than a tree trunk, then […] The changing sensory impressions appeal to me […] my will is engaged, and I want to know more […] I know that the curtain of consciousness is about to rise […] but I don’t want it to […]. (Strindberg 2001, n.p.)

The world is magically transformed through pre-​conscious impressions, which he experiments with in his paintings and celestographs, as well as a more automatic form of play writing. Such creative practice resists order and fixed lexical or categorical distinctions. This illuminating example is a more recent (rather than classical) touchstone for twentieth-​century avant-​garde film and photography. It communicates something interesting about the medium, but also about the impact of science, invention, war, psychoanalysis, and mass culture on ideas. In order to reach into the world artists still needed to make sense of the new advances that were only just becoming commonplace, and the analogy of strange cosmic worlds and plant-​life facilitated access to the more otherworldly realms of technology and mimetic facticity. Photograms –​ iconised in Christian Schad’s (1894–​1982) schadographs (which he began making circa 1918) and Ray’s rayograms –​do not document the object, but rather reveal the unseen aspects of its apparent solidity. Moreover, they commune with a world of light and shadows in a manner that suggests a spiritual alchemy rather than sober objectivity. Nature intervenes in the process; it has a magical agency that is extra to the artist or the material. Surrealist poet Robert Desnos (1900–​1945) recalling Ray’s experimentation with handprints on citrus paper, describes these images as foreign planets and landscapes that reveal ‘something’ unexpected: ‘here the miracle allows itself to be captured without resistance and something else, besides, leaves its anguishing thumbprint on the revelatory paper’ (Desnos [1929] cited in Phillips 1989, pp.8–​9, author’s emphasis). This something else is the fleeting charge of magic

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that Roh is chasing. In recording the ‘other’ side of reality –​its magical, marvellous side –​technology reaches beyond the consciously-​functioning human and captures the non-​concrete, the ephemeral, secret, and ‘divine’ sensations of existence. It is this continuance of the spiritual that links Roh’s earlier work on Magischer Realismus to the photographic arts; but it is also symptomatic of the shell-​shocked response to the re-​entry into modern life, which, above all, needed a new belief system, a new way of communing with exterior reality. As Benjamin so vividly declares in 1928: Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-​frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky […] the immense wooing of the cosmos was reenacted [sic] for the first time on a planetary scale. (2008, p.59)

Such philosophical yearning, the macroscopic lens turned to the indefinable enormity of the cosmos, is a frequent touchstone for magic realism. The photogram is a form of poetic condensation, a suggestion or abstraction rather than a description of the world (Tschichold describes rayograms as a ‘modern poetry of form’ [1928] 1989, p.124). The invisible presence of air, the amorphous layers of light and shadow are captured, like Atget’s blur, preserved as an eternal event. This poetic shorthand for the functioning of thought is something that Jameson later ascribes to cinematic magic realism; its ellipses and condensed affective structure constitute a perpetual present tense, capable of rending time and space magically immediate: ‘The effect of photoplastics derives from the penetration and blending of things that are inherent though not always visible in life, the visual perception of the simultaneity of events’ (Moholy-​Nagy 1985, p.304). Ray famously argued in ‘The Age of Light’ that ‘no plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of an experience’ ([1934] quoted in Phillips 1989b, p.53) and this idea is clearly visualised and marvellously explored in his rayograms: ‘I have tried to capture those visions that twilight, or too much light, or their own fleetingness, or the slowness of our ocular apparatus rob our senses of. I have always been surprised, often charmed, sometimes literally “enraptured” ’.30 The charm that emerges from photograms (and in later short films, such as Autoportrait ou ce qui manque a nous tous –​c. 1930 –​in which the camera captures the duration of a soap bubble) correspond to the unsuspected aspects of reality that often the eye alone is unable to record. This enchantment recalls that of de Chirico and Ernst, who when faced with an assemblage of entities brought forth in the exterior world, find that they are intrinsically caught up with something else besides in their waking dreams. Roh includes two untitled rayograms in Foto-​Auge; a skeletal fan, two ‘gloves’ floating –​their stark outline recalling the eerie chalked outlines of recently deceased bodies –​and the bright halo of a lamp; these palimpsests overlap the grainier, cloudier images creating a spatial confusion. Photographic process is aligned with the [day] dream, in which often half-​formed ideas cascade. The ‘accuracy’ is magical and not mimetic and has been afforded by a super-​human eye that registers those polyphonic impressions that the human is incapable of holding

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on to. It fascinated Roh that something very ordinary, a small detail or a sight taken for granted, could exceed something that was generally considered to be much grander or more beautiful. Musing on the close-​up of a puddle, he comments that the image is superior to an aerial shot of the Atlantic Ocean ‘because it shows us optical significance in places that are usually overlooked by conventional people. (The world can become optically significant everywhere)’ ([1930] cited in Mellor 1978, p.41, emphasis in original). In the case of the photogram this impression is enhanced when the viewer’s brain organises the spectral echoes of solid objects on the paper: ‘schemes of luminosity are obtained that so change the colour, outline, and moulding of objects as to make them lose body and appear but a lustrous strange world and abstraction’ (Roh 1929, p.16). The strange worlds are created in the interaction between the original object and the photographic process, enabling a kind of detachment that produces, in turn, and paradoxically, a sense of nearness and intimacy. Raoul Hausmann speaks about Dada photomontage in the astronomical terms that Roh often uses to describe the magical properties of objects, claiming them to be ‘miraculous constellations in real material’ (Hausmann [1918] 1982, p.16). This is later echoed in Roh’s description of Grosz and Heartfield’s famous 1919 photomontage: ‘the crystal-​hard […] starry miniature world of Dada-​merica’ (1929, p.18).31 While this art is, to use Roh’s words, ‘non-​objective’ in the sense that it does not record a complete view of physical reality, it has an ‘object-​fantasticality’ [gegenstandsfantastik] (p.18). Roh’s analysis of photomontage is, like his definition of Magischer Realismus, one of opposing contrasts: a ‘plastic tension’ classically static yet with a demonic effect, corresponding to the central tenet that ‘the interior figure of the exterior world’ is revealed in and through photographic reproduction (pp.16; 18). His theory of a doubly augmented reality  –​through the technical apparatus and then through the senses  –​seems also aligned to the surrealist merveilleux, in which the contingent and unconscious aspects of the real are brought to the fore. Moholy-​Nagy’s wonder at the ‘visual power’ of a photograph to ‘capture the phenomenon of light in what seems to be an almost immaterial radiance’ (in Phillips [1927] 1989) was also influential across this period, his fascination regarding convergent and expansive temporal and spatial realms predicting formal preoccupations in the marvellous sensorial films of later magic realism. In the catalogue that accompanies the Erste Internationale Dada-​ Messe [First International Dada Fair,  1920] in Berlin, publisher Wieland Herzfelde (1896–​ 1988) proclaims that the works of art ‘proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world, which already finds itself in a state of disintegration, of metamorphosis’ (quoted in Witkovsky 2007, p.102). Roh is not interested in ‘disfiguration’ but in ‘metamorphosis’ and this is a very significant distinction that later permeates the discourse of literary magic(al) realism –​a readiness to behold what is always already there, emerging out of its erstwhile hidden or unobserved form. In his practice-​based work, he delights ‘equally in the object and the experiment’ (Heckert 2006, p.4), and Ernst’s inspirational influence becomes ever more apparent:  ‘He [Ernst] has created new technical procedures which [… allow] the creation of fantastic surface textures and effects […] resulting

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in a “terrifying Utopia” ’ (Roh 1968, p.139). Roh’s highly derivative photomontage Hommage à Max Ernst, (c. 1935) creates a world from natural, technological, and architectural forms, harnessing the fantastic potential of photography to disrupt our conventional sensory life. His ‘spiritualism’ begins to transform into a darker version of the magical, seemingly matching his time spent in the dark room. The glazed yellows and ‘darkling’ skies of the paintings he favoured of Magischer Realismus, are superseded by photographic prints and film images, resplendent in a monochromatic spectrum of ‘sublime possibilities of gradation between the poles black and white’ (1929, p.17). He is keen to keep abreast of experimental and avant-​garde photography, as well as new trends within the mainstream or popular, and combines theory and practice to further develop an analysis of the magical. In 1972, a catalogue entitled Metamorphosen des Herrn Miracoloss [Metamophoses of Herr Miracoloss] (Galerie Parnass, Weidingen) showcased the photomontages that Roh made between 1923 and 1950, its title encapsulating the general theme of collage as ‘miraculous’. In 2006, a retrospective exhibition of 85 of his works was held at New York’s Ubu Gallery: photographs made between 1927 and 1933; and collages dating from the 1920s into the 1940s. The viewer can clearly recognise the influences of Ray, Moholy-​Nagy, and Ernst in works that play with abstraction, negative reversal, scale and texture, juxtaposition, and montage. Only one of these works was published in Foto-​Auge: unter wasser [underwater], a series of nine photo-​negative silver gelatin prints, set in vertical succession –​four on the left and five on the right –​running parallel as if frames in a film strip and requiring the viewer to make connections in the tradition of film montage. The images are small in comparison to the full-​page photographs that comprise the majority of the book. We know that Roh was enamoured of Richter’s proto-​cinematic Rollbilder [scroll pictures], long horizontal paintings on which abstract motifs were painted, and repeated, and which ‘possessed a special faculty, allowing the single picture to remain static and the eye to jump forward and backward’ (1968, p.111). In unter wasser, light and dark are reversed in an indeterminate temporality.The manipulated images present landscapes that reverberate with an eerie brightness but also reveal expanses of darkened sea and sky that confound viewer expectation. Brightly lit skies and water reflecting solar rays in their dark incarnations render the buildings, figures, and other objects more vivid; they seem to loom out of the darkness. The style clearly recreates (copies) Moholy-​Nagy’s photonegatives, extolled for their ‘magical’ qualities (Roh, 1930, p.7).32 Roh also muses on the principle of inversion in the abstract forms and patterns created by music, or weaving, asking why this same principle should not be applied to the physical world of objects:  ‘We might perhaps speak of a world in the major and minor key, to indicate at least the completely changed expression of tone values’ (1929, p.17). This is not simply the exchange of darkness and light attributed to day and night, but the deliberate inversion of the tone attributed to the light or shadow of an object which results in its metamorphosis into something ghostly and unfamiliar. In unter wasser the left-​hand column follows a vertical trajectory downwards from the stern of a tall boat, down a set of corrugated steps, stopping at the image of a

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female body hugging her knees shot from above –​her ghostly white head devoid of features –​and finally resting on the sideways projection of a tall building against a black background. The right-​hand column continues the aquatic theme, tracing the gaze of a man staring out over the harbour, followed by a second upside-​down shot of a different stretch of coastline which, when joined to the first image, forms a continuous curve where the beach and the promenade meet.The next three images are not matched formally, but thematically; each object appears to float either on the water or in mid-​air. The third image is an aerial photograph of a man standing in water with a fire hose, next to a vehicle which looks like an apparition. The fourth image is a female nude suspended in the gauzy whiteness of a floor that has lost its solidity. The final image is unclear until re-​inverted positively, whereby the phosphorescent shapes are revealed as men and boats on the water. The eye, driven by match cuts and ellipses, where the ‘palpably plastic may be put next to the optically flowing’ (1929, p.17), actively participates in this mini-​travel-​film, tracing across expanses of sea and sand populated by abstracted figures and architecture. The sensation is of being underwater, or in a dreamlike state, finding oneself in a world reversed into a minor key, rotated and out of context. Roh’s unter wasser is a microcosmic representation of the concepts explored in Foto-​Auge as a whole, which for Michael Jennings, correspond to a fear of the drowning of Weimar society by technology, and of Weimar as the mythical Atlantis (2000, pp.23; 56). Additionally, water is not purely present as a metaphorical or allegorical theme, but also as part of a technical mise-​en-​scène (with glass, mirrored and other highly reflective surfaces) in which its role as a conductor of light and point of reflection/​refraction/​doubling is as formally significant as it is thematically –​a conduit of the marvellous. The objects set against the water are rendered indistinct and appear as hallucinatory or dreamlike ­figures –​‘exciting’ and ‘weird’ (1929, p.16), awash in the darkness. Roh’s experiments in photographic art deliberately concoct a space for ordinary reality to be made mysterious in ways that anticipate film. Indeed, Foto-​Auge’s final plate forecasts film as the ‘new’ medium of the future in a photomontage comprised of three frame enlargements from Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s (1869–​1954) The Man With the Movie Camera (1929), whose work is invoked in the title of Roh and Tschichold’s book. Arranged vertically, the images produce a visual commentary on the act of seeing. In the bottom image rows of suburban houses situated along a street appear to lean inwards, threatening to topple onto the otherwise ordinary scene in a manner that recalls the architectural distortions of German Expressionist cinema. In the centre image an eye in close-​up stares, a point of energy. And in the uppermost image, a woman, grimacing, lays on a pillow, her face partially covered by a sheet.The sense of sight is emphasised, offering the viewer alternating representations of reality through distorted vision, clear vision, and obscured vision in each of the frames. In ‘mechanism and expression’ Roh advocates for the potential of a ‘real dynamic’ in the cinema, as opposed to the ‘pretend dynamic’ of the pictures featured in the collection. He looks to ‘the most important utilization of photography, the cinema –​ a marvel that has become a matter of course and yet remains a lasting marvel’, as a furthering of the photography’s magic-​realist, fantastic effect.

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Of Roh’s work, most impressive are the socially critical photomontages, which display an increased level of confidence. In Vermauerte Existenz [Bricked Existence c. 1930], the head of the figure in the foreground is sliced, leaving only his chin and the left-​hand side of a torso with an amputated arm fashioned from plastic corrugated tubing and a sling.The figure references the facial disfigurement of war-​ wounded soldiers, but also the transformation of human form in Ernst’s works, or the equivalence of human and sculpted figures suggested in de Chirico’s oeuvre. The figure has turned its back to a row of chimneystacks, which symbolise the uniformity and monotony of modern living and working conditions. The mostly flat, ‘stuck on’ effect of the figure accentuates the alienation between it and the surrounding architectural order, Bricked Existence suggests that the rebuilding of towns does not function in the same way as the rebuilding of men returning from war. As Sabine Hake has discussed in relation to German cinema of this period, anti-​humanist representations of men correspond to a crisis in the definition of masculinity: the antithesis of an idealised, heroic soldier figure (2002). In Masken überleben [Masks Survive c. 1938,] an indigenous mask is reproduced from a 1922 publication title Masken [Masks], in which 48 objects from indigenous cultures in Africa, the South Seas and the Americas appeared.With its strange amalgamation of human and animal forms, the unusual beaked Luba mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo would have held particular appeal within a Surrealist framework. (Grossman 2009, p.88)

The background is largely blank, although the lower section is suggestive of a large expanse of ocean, upon which two hybrid forms float. The larger form combines images of a raffia dance costume and a beaked mask, from which protrudes the head and neck of a horse. The smaller figure is of a small child wearing a gas mask. In the top right and bottom corners of the collage, images of a piece of fruit and a Janus-​headed man (resembling Hitler) are stuck on: ‘Created against the backdrop of Nazi rule and the governmental ban of “degenerate art” […] Roh’s phantasmagorical collage signals a world on the edge of destruction’ (Grossman 2009, p.88). Dabbling with avant-​garde techniques Roh aims to materialise the ineffable concepts posited in his critical work by emulating his favourite artists’ work, with mixed results. Undoubtedly his magpie-​like gaze, what Marga Paz refers to as his ‘heterogeneity’ (1997, p.270), focuses on magical dynamism, putting the apparatus at the service of the ‘interior figure’ above all else. Before closing this section on Roh’s practice, I want to mention a favourite work from the early 1930s that shows his sense of humour in a rare Buñuelian take on reality via the chance encounter. In an untitled medium-​close-​up of a street, a group of passers-​by are dwarfed by two incongruously juxtaposed movie posters seemingly advertising sexualised murder and devout faith (the pre-​code murder mystery Murder by the Clock (Edward Sloman); and British film The Rosary (Guy Newall), both murder dramas of 1931), a rare. In contrast to unter wasser the viewer of a photomontage is required to make

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associations radially, rather than vertically, as graphic and pictorial fragments push at the boundaries of the frame.33 Unfortunately, Roh’s ideas were eclipsed by stronger group manifestos, and more internationally focused movements that adapted to a changing, accelerating world, where he seemed to stand still. Magischer Realismus was never applied to cinema during the modernist period, and its resurgence as a literary mode in Latin America more than two decades later mostly rejected Roh’s theories. In a review by Antonio Espina in Revísta de Occidente (July 1927, No.49) he describes ‘Nachexpressionismus’ as ‘a halfway aesthetics, resolutely installed between shapeless sensualism and superstructured schematism. It is an idealist realism […] magical insofar as it creates a new spirit whose form is contained in the supernatural, the super-​real’ (quoted in Echevarría 1977, p.115). The review dismisses Roh’s romanticism, and finds his categorisation superficial, an exercise in hedging one’s bets. While I argue that the ambivalence and the emotive rather than political thrust of Roh’s argument undermine orthodoxy or absolute binarism, Espina thought it weak and ineffectual, failing to fully grasp its ordinariness in the minor key.This ‘halfway aesthetics’ is precisely what makes magic realism so frustrating, but also so compelling. Does a magic-​realist genre in film exist alongside Roh’s Magischer Realismus?34 No, it does not. In Weimar-​era films fantasy is typically made manifest in the fairy-​tale magic of myths and legends, Gothic horror tales of monsters, the neuroses of analysands, or the dreams of protagonists. During this period, generic categorisation of central European films overlapped many of the movements of modern painting, for example: Expressionism (Der Golem, Paul Wegener, 1920; Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari], Robert Wiene, 1920); Neue Sachlichkeit (Diary of a Lost Girl, Pandora’s Box (Pabst) and May’s Asphalt)  –​films which displayed a ‘fascination with machines and Americanism’ (Kaes et  al. 1995, 618); and surrealism (Un chien andalou, Dalí and Buñuel, 1928), L’Étoile de mer, [The Starfish, Ray, 1928]; La cocquille et le clergyman [The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac,  1928]. Certain preoccupations surfaced repeatedly: exploration of the modern city, technology, fascination with glass and reflective surfaces, reinvention of classical and traditional motifs, and the figure of the ‘new woman’.35 ‘City Films’ such as Curt and Robert Siodmak’s, Menschen am Sontag, [People on Sunday, 1930] or Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt [Berlin Symphony of a Great City,  1927] explored the boundaries of documentary filming to record the structures and rhythms of the modern German city and its suburbs, charting what Ernst Bloch referred to as a ‘perpetual becoming’ (1998, p.366). Verist social realism in Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? [Whither Germany?  1932] tackled the doom of the Great Depression and its ensuing poverty. Unsurprisingly Magischer Realismus does not feature in this list. If we recall, the key visual characteristics of the mode are as follows: paintings should show sobriety, minute detail and sharp focus and be unsentimental, space is often rendered static and glass-​like, focus is directed towards the everyday, and a new spiritual relationship with the world of objects is created. To be sure: ‘Technologies such as electrical light and cinema –​with their impetus toward instantaneity, fragmentation and ephemerality  –​arguably frustrate the totalities and hinder the

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reconciliation between the world of things and that of the spiritual in technological modernity’ (Guerin 2005, p.20). It is certain that these technologies are able to manufacture self-​reflexive prompts that in film deliver a problematic world to the viewer of the early twentieth century, but yet there are certain films that also deliver something else besides because the filmmaker chooses to focus on the philosophical or poetic, rather than the spectacular or narrative. Such films reveal and then contemplate an exterior reality through the ephemerality, making it the focus. Angela Dalle Vacche makes an important distinction between the mise-​en-​scène in Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, and that of Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens [Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, 1922] which illustrates my point: Whereas in Caligari, the distorted quality of the sets makes apparent the internal working of an anguished self, and the Expressionist image is static and artificial, in Nosferatu the forces of evil may be intangible, but they constantly move and lurk beneath the surface of ordinary life. (2005, p.167)

Eric Rohmer found Murnau to be the ‘least expressionist’ of the German directors of this period, creating something entirely different in his painterly mastering of space and ‘architectural’ placing of objects (1977, p.26). His work follows ‘a general law of nature, of a drama which is inscribed in every visible form, and which is the very ambivalence of its meaning’ (p.31). Murnau’s is ‘an ability to naturalize artifice, and to heighten reality to the point where the action is suffused with an atmosphere at once lyrical and uncanny, ethereal and mysterious’ (Elsaesser 1987, p.3). Murnau more than any other filmmaker working concurrently to Roh employs an artistic framework that encapsulates many of the schema for Magischer Realismus; overtly overlapping, ephemeral, phantasmagorical, and insubstantial, elements grasp at the dynamism of life and the spontaneous and often non-​logical, or non-​rational, movement of human thought. As I have argued elsewhere,36 Murnau’s efforts to ‘photograph thought’ (Murnau cited in Petrie, 2002, p.92)37 and suspend and these ideas within a constantly shifting atmosphere –​‘a Stimmung’ –​ (Eisner 1965, p.47) are closely aligned with the tenets of Roh’s magic realism. What Espina fails to predict in his review of magic realism, is the relevance of ‘super-​real’ elements produced in the process of creating the image (the psychological, affective, and material) for relatively new mediums. Argentinian novelist Enrique Anderson Imbert argues that: ‘Roh’s dialectic is achieved through three categories: a thesis: the category of the veridical which produces realism; an antithesis:  the category of the supernatural which produces fantastic literature; and a synthesis:  the category of the strange which produces the literature of “magical realism” ’ (1975, p.1). Imbert credits his affinity and ease with Roh’s study to the circulation of Ortega y Gasset’s translation in Buenos Aires literary circles. Strikingly, and not coincidently, one of his anecdotes about the transmission of Roh’s term, involves Cocteau: ‘The first time I heard it applied to a novel was in 1928, when my friend Aníbel Sánchez Reulet […] recommended that I read Les enfants terribles

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by Jean Cocteau: “pure magical realism,” he told me’ (1975, p.2). Les Enfants Terribles transforms domestic lieux into spaces governed by a weird temporality, which to understand more clearly, we can look at how Cocteau envisages memory in his essay on the work of de Chirico –​‘Essai de critique indirecte’ (variously published as Le mystère laic and Essai d’étude indirecte, 1927–​1932): If you close your eyes in a room and recall a memory located in the same room, it is rare for one not to represent the room with the memory in another place, outside the room where one remembers it. We would like Chirico to paint the two rooms one inside the other. (cited in Cocteau 2009, p.113)

This spatial working out, where memory is neither flashback nor nostalgia but part of an eternal present, constitutes a significant part of Cocteau’s cinematic philosophising and is central to his definition of poetry (magic). Indeed, Cocteau’s name is often referred to in relation to magic realism38 –​the evocation of strange worlds, anachronistic classicism, disruption of temporal and spatial continuity, and metamorphoses of form –​and Imbert’s recollection is helpful to understand how his writing (and later films) was received at the time. Taken from this perspective, Roh’s affective and deeply subjective appraisal of modern art is deeply relevant for an investigation into whether a magic-​realist cinema exists. It is not until Carpentier’s film criticism in Chapter 4, which features articles on Cocteau, that we begin to understand how such a claim might be realised.

Notes 1 The official Film und Foto [Fifo] catalogue emphasised the work of the exhibition’s most well-​known artists in 23 plates. As well as Roh and Tschihold’s Foto-​Auge, Werner Gräff ’s Es Kommt der neue Fotograf!; and secondly a book Gräff co-​wrote with Hans Richter Filmgegener von heuete –​Filmfreunde von Morgen [Film haters today, film lovers tomorrow] were advertised in the exhibition catalogue, all aimed at improving the reader’s visual literacy. 2 Hartlaub credited Roh with having joint creative responsibility for the exhibition, although it is Hartlaub’s Neue Sachlichkeit that has survived to describe this particular era of German painting. Hartlaub saw Neue Sachlichkeit as having a right (neo-​classicist) and a left (Verist) wing. The classicist style demonstrates a search for what he called ‘the timelessly valid object’, a realisation of ‘the eternally valid laws of existence’ ([1925] quoted in Kaes 1995, p.492); while Verist artists, such as Grosz and Dix, uncover the violent and frightening side of modern social experience. The exhibition displayed 124 works, by 32 artists, of which all (except three) were German. (For more on the correspondence between Roh and Hartlaub, see Crockett (1999). 3 Alfred Barr Junior’s diagram of ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ accompanied the groundbreaking exhibition of the same name at MoMA, New York, between 2 March and 19 April 1936, and detailed the key modernist movements of the age. 4 Faris’s and Zamora’s translation (1995) is of the Spanish version of Roh’s preface [‘Réalismo Mágico’] from Reviste de Occidente (April–​June 1927).

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5 Roh’s academic thesis already demonstrated a tendency to prioritise images over text; it contained 200 photographic illustrations (Witkovsky 2007, p.17). 6 Apollinaire was, like Roh, struck by the marked realism of Rousseau’s work and the painter’s predilection for blurring the distinctions between the real and the imaginary, see ‘The Douanier’ (Les Soirées de Paris, 15 January) in Apollinaire and Breunig (1972, p.349). 7 For more on the significance of this painting, see Felicity Gee ‘The Critical Roots of Cinematic Magic Realism:  Franz Roh, Alejo Carpentier, Fredric Jameson’. Doctoral thesis. 2013. https://​pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/​portal/​en/​publications/​the-​critical-​roots-​ of-​cinematic-​magic-​realism-​franz-​roh-​alejo-​carpentier-​fredric-​jameson(d5f4e662-​ 5126-​4f9f-​9c47-​ea71d62af630).html 8 Max Ernst, ‘Les Mystères de la forêt’, was first published in Minotaure in 1934. (cited in Spies 2006, pp.3; 37). 9 Just over a decade later in 1936, Alfred J.  Barr’s catalogue for the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, describes how The fantastic and the marvelous in European and American art of the past five centuries is represented in a rather cursory way. […] Even the most casual observer will notice certain obvious resemblances between some of the works in the historical division and certain Dada and Surrealist works […] These resemblances, however startling, may prove to be superficial or merely technical in character rather than psychological. (Barr 1936, p.7) The exhibition draws from the renaissance to the contemporary, highlighting ‘the deep-​ seated and persistent interest which human beings have in the fantastic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the marvelous, the enigmatic, and the dreamlike’ (p.9). He notes how the exhibition intentionally omits fields such as the occult, astrology, spiritualism, magic, or alchemy. There is a tendency, even in the 1930s still to treat magic, and occult sciences with shame or embarrassment, a theme that is seeing increased scholarly attention in the twenty-​first century. 10 The ‘birthplace’ of Dada, where artists such as Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-​Arp, Emmy Hennings, and Tristan Tzara forged their experimental anti-​art art practice. 11 These poems were first published in the volume Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) in 1916 (Collection Dada, Zurich), then reissued in 1920 in an expanded edition with illustrations by George Grosz. The translation by Johannes Beilharz is based on the text of the 1960 edition published by Arche Verlag. 12 Sfumato is a type of painting in which strong, defined lines are erased in favour of softer, smoke-​like translucency. The term also applies to German Expressionist cinema to describe the effect of heavy smoke and fog. 13 David Sylvester (2009, p.72), notes that Magritte had read Valori Plastici. 14 Roh was extremely aware of the complex ideological issues regarding ‘nationhood’. In the foreword to his monograph on ‘German Art in the Twentieth Century’ he writes: ‘By “German Art” we mean here “Art in Germany”, the art that developed on German soil, even if it was created by a Swiss (Obrist), and Austrian (Kokoschka), a Russian (Kandinsky), or a Hungarian (Moholy)’, and is rooted in the ‘cultural environment’ of the epoch (1968, pp.7; 5). 15 De Chirico, Éluard-​Picasso Manuscripts, 15 June 1913, Paris (cited in Coen 2003, p.52). 16 See Hemingway, footnote 22, in which he cites correspondence on this matter between Roh and publisher Fritz Widekind (2017, p.286). 17 Max Ernst ‘Notes por une biographie’, cited in Spies (1991, p.48).

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18 Beginning with their publication Der Ventilator in 1918, Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld (1882–​1927) built up the Cologne chapter of European Dada, forging links with Hans Arp,Tristan Tzara, and later with André Breton in Paris when Ernst moved to the city in 1922. 19 The original collage santa conversazione was made by Ernst in 1921 and was followed by an ink line drawing traced directly from the collage bearing the same title as the painting reproduced in Nach-​Expressionismus: La belle jardinière. Reproductions can be found in Spies (1991), ­figures 175 and 176. Ernst reprised the painting in Retour de la belle jardinière (1967), in which the female figure’s head is replaced by a button, and the male figure’s genitalia with apples. La Belle Jardinière was included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, and according to the exhibition guide (1937), the caption underneath the painting read: ‘A slur on German womanhood’, cited in Spies 2006, p.96. 20 See Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in which he discusses the social, aesthetic, affective, and economic implications of the increased reproducibility of the image as a direct result of mass production (1999). 21 Originally in Nach-​Expressionismus, 1925, p.7. English translation in Spies 1991, p.124. 22 See André Breton, ‘Max Ernst’ reprinted in Les Pas Perdus ([1924] 1996, pp.60–​1). This essay was first published in the catalogue for the exhibition of Ernst’s work at Au Sens Pareil, Paris, in 1921. 23 Roh also praises Ernst’s later paintings (with particular mention to his 1953 work Father Rhine) in which the microscopic and macroscopic elements ‘exist in a state of tension with one another’ (1968, p.141). 24 Max Ernst, ‘Was ist Surrealismus?’ Exhibition Catalogue, Zurich 1934, trans. by John W. Gabriel and quoted in Werner Spies’ ‘Directions for Use’, 2006, p.121). 25 As I signalled in Chapter 1, Hansen’s term refers to the inseparability of art from the ways in which it was produced. It ‘combines the dimension of the quotidian of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability’ (Hansen 2000, in Gledhill and Williams, p.333). Magic realism, while engaging with these shifts, is clearly advocating for a resistance to this commodification. 26 Hausmann, Höch, Grosz and Heartfield claimed to have ‘invented’ photomontage. However, the art of photomontage begins with the invention of photography itself and the accidental effects that occurred in the developing and processing stages (Ades 1976, p.10). 27 Roh corresponded often with Moholy-​Nagy (an archive of his correspondence with various artists from 1911–​1965 is kept at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: www. getty.edu/​art/​gettyguide/​artMakerDetails?maker=1479&page=1 (accessed 15 December 2011). 28 Benjamin considers Atget’s Parisian photographs the ‘forerunners’ of surrealist photography: ‘He was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of decline […] It is in these achievements that surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings’ (cited in Mellor 1978, p.69). 29 For example: Breton and Ray had already featured Atget’s work in the surrealist periodical La Révolution surréaliste in 1926. In Foto-​Auge the 30th image captioned: ‘Kugelblitz durch funkenblitz’ [‘lightning’] uncannily doubles a similar photographic image of an electrical storm on the December cover of La Révolution Surréaliste published in the same year. The 73rd image is a criminal photograph of a murder provided by the Stuttgart Police Office. The blood-​soaked corpse left on the pavement, is a document of the grislier side of humanity. Ten years later, Breton’s essay ‘Souvenir de Mexique’ was published in Minotaure 12–​13 (May 1939), accompanied by Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s photograph

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Obrero en huelga asesinado [Sriking Worker Assassinated, 1934,] a photograph ‘disturbing and memorable in ways that the mere statement of fact cannot account for’ (Walker 2014, p.7). 30 Man Ray (1989a), ‘Deceiving Appearances’ [1926]. Quoted in Phillips (p.12). 31 In German Painting in the Twentieth Century, Roh’s ‘Dadaism’ chapter examines the ‘plastic tension’ and diverse materials of Hausmann’s, Kurt Schwitters’, Grosz’s and Ernst’s collage-​based works, (and strangely, as Dada had ended by the late 1920s, he selects Ernst’s Grasshoppers’ Song to the Moon (1953) as the first illustrative plate for the section on Post Expressionism (1968, p.79). 32 Three of Moholy-​Nagy’s works are included in Foto-​Auge: a photograph of a Paris drain (p.38), the photomontage entitled Leda (p.55), and a negative image of a boat (p.69). Each of these images focuses on banal and un-​aesthetic objects transformed by light and perspective, demonstrating ‘how expressive and almost symbolic such fragments of reality can become’ (Roh 1929, p.17). 33 Verticality and the interruption of linear ‘thought’ or historical progression, is for Roh a key aspect of the ‘new’ photography:  ‘The significance lies in opening astronomic perspectives so to say: vertical in this greater sense really is a radial position corresponding to an imaginary centre of the earth […] Here the taking of a vertical line (standing house, mast, or the like) obliquely, is stirring’ (1929, p.17). 34 After Raphaëlle Moine’s ‘From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema:  Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?’ (2006). 35 The ‘New Woman’ was at the centre of political debates about the ‘proper’ role of women in Weimar, particularly of the maternal, and in which feminists readily participated. ‘Consumerism was associated very much with the New Woman, especially in terms of her supposed love of fashion, her hedonism, and her attachment to mass culture’. The iconography of the femme fatale in Weimar cinema is prevalent, and McCormick’s Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and New Objectivity is a fascinating study of these themes and issues (2001, p.35). 36 Gee (2013); Gee (2009). ‘F.W. Murnau’s magical modernism’. Paper presented at Repositioning History 21st International Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow. 37 Taken from an interview with Murnau in Theatre Magazine, January 1928, p.41, (cited in Petrie 2002, p.94). 38 The original draft of this book included a chapter on Cocteau, for which there is unfortunately insufficient space, but he will be the subject of forthcoming work, based on an earlier paper given at the University of Kolkata, August 2019, entitled ‘Reflexivity and the “Anti-​Aesthetic Aesthetic”: The Essay Film –​a Surrealist Approach’ which also considers his relation to magic realism.

3 ETHNO-​MAGIC-​REALIST DOCUMENTARY Ecstatic practice

This chapter discusses a range of films, made between 1929 and 1955, where geopolitical and ethnographic specificity is framed. This is by no means an exclusive list, rather it indicates tendencies in filmmaking of a period in which increased interest in the lives and cultures of indigenous peoples led to new documentary subjects, and new perspectives on enchantment and the sacred. In the early twentieth century, international travel was prohibitively expensive, and film provided a means of access to far-​flung climes for those who could not voyage in person. As evidenced in the Film und Foto exhibition, film had importance as an educational tool, and the documentary film was a more prominent form of entertainment in the cinema than it is in the present day. Alongside newsreels and city films, a new type of documentary emerged, later known as the ethnographic film.1 Often beginning as travel films or personal essays, these were not always intended to study the people and cultures that often became their focus. The idea of film as an ethnographic document parallels the rise of visual anthropology and ethnography as academic research fields in the West during this period. The systematic study of peoples and cultures fostered new ideas on race and ethnicity in mostly white-​ led institutions. Ethnography, distinct from ethnology (cultural anthropology), involves the process of expressing what has been witnessed and felt, through creative, often experimental, work. James Clifford, an historian of anthropology, saw particular synergies between the avant-​garde and ethnographic research (through surrealism) which are integral to this chapter, especially when considering the case of more recent art films where the focus on ethnographic subjects has drawn comparisons with the mode of magic realism; El abrazo de la serpiente [Embrace of the Serpent, Guerra, 2015] is a key example. These paths are interconnected, and the ethnographic film provides a perhaps unsuspected bridge between Roh and Carpentier, and indeed between a Eurocentric avant-​garde and the transnational art film, what Jean Rouch called ‘ethno-​dialogue’ (2003 p.101). I consider how

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these films juxtapose the ‘real’ and the maravilloso in relation to Carpenterian discourse (Chapter 4), and later theorisation in magic(al) realism studies. Carpentier saw the mediums of film and radio as vehicles for exploring (Latin) American realities, but also prized their ability to combine story and music. In La musica en Cuba (1946), a work that considers every aspect of Cuban music from its roots to its copyists, he outlines the significance of a migratory culture that moves across the Latin American continent and beyond –​a direct counter to the acceleration of modernisation: we have tried to create […] a schematic study of the music of other Antillean islands  –​in particular Haiti  –​whose slave-​ led revolution unexpectedly brought to Cuba a number of rhythms and genres, altering certain aspects of its folklore. This method has convinced us that there is much that American musicology stands to gain in studying the music of the continent by geographic zones subject to the same ethnic influences, to the same migrations of rhythms and oral traditions, rather than by region or country. ([1946] 2001, p.61)

The idea of a ‘geographical zone’ is one that still carries much resonance in film studies today and reflects the complexity of a spatio-​temporal relationship between cultures that have experienced both free and enforced migrations and suffered under colonial rule and dictatorships. Carpentier is acutely aware also, that the degree to which a ‘zone’ is ‘pliable’ under European rule likely damages the development of local indigenous culture (p.65). Cuba, for example, produced music deeply influenced by the intrinsic cultural syncretism resulting from centuries of colonial oppression, slavery, and inter-​racial blending: ‘Two musical cultures –​one inherited from the Christian West and the Moorish tradition; the other, elementary, constructed on the basis of rhythms and percussive qualities considered as inherently worthy values –​would find themselves meeting in that maritime crossroads’ (p.93). It is at this crossroads where ethnography and lo real maravilloso americano meet. Music in Cuba ‘managed to popularize (or better, colloquialize) a story that had until then been imprisoned in ethnography of a technical sort’ (Brennan 2001a, p.3); the ethno-​magic-​realist documentary emerges concurrently to Carpentier’s mode, and experiments with further alternative methods to capture cultural and spiritual traditions in the moving image. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) throws into question the magic reality of Tahiti; Eisenstein’s Qué Viva México (1930) explores present-​day Mexico; Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1930)  rural Spain; Deren’s Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (1947–​51) enters into Voudou rituals in Haiti; and Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (The crazed masters, 1955) follows the Hauka sect’s ceremonies in Ghana. Penetrating previously unknown aspects of ‘modern’ life from their subjective perspective, each film offers a distinct and hybrid version of documentary filmmaking through which to ponder the physical and metaphysical affects of the space and time being witnessed. While the films follow Roh’s

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logic of interiority, each presenting unconscious and hidden aspects of life captured by the camera, they also tell stories. The results are hypnotic, magical, at times socially and ecologically critical, and formally radical in their push against mainstream narrative conventions (even Tabu, which is clearly designed as a drama). Each film raises questions about human existence, Buñuel, on rural poverty and its physical and mental effects in his birth nation; Murnau on Polynesian rhythm and labour; Eisenstein on the symbols of capital and religion in Mexico; while Rouch and Deren present embodied acts of possession in the French then British colony of Accra (now Ghana) and Haiti, respectively. Colonial and bourgeois patterns of hierarchy are, of course, evident to the modern viewer. The filmmakers’ position is one of privilege, and each of these projects is made possible through financial backing and private access, but there is certainly a clear intent to enter into non-​ hierachised dialogue, to participate and not simply to record, as well as to push form to its limits. In Rouch’s opinion: ‘Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us now call “shared anthropology” ’ (2003, p.101). As a white French man, he works with unconscious bias, and while his aims are lofty and ethically considered, it is almost impossible to eradicate hierarchy or power from this ‘sharing’ of culture.Yet his films exist as important documents of the marvellous, which, against all odds, reveals itself to camera. As in all magic-​realist films, emphasis is drawn on emotional and affective participation, while a focus on life outside the known and familiar materialises the worlds of the future not yet.2

Background: migration, dispersal, and non-​Eurocentric magic Chroniclers of the ‘New World’ responded imaginatively, and problematically, to the lands, peoples, cultures, flora, and fauna that they witnessed on voyages of discovery, memorialising their experiences in logbooks and journals.These chronicles are evidence of abuses of power enacted on indigenous peoples, but also of a wonder associated with feelings of desire, fear, joy, and surprise on the side of the voyager. Wonder emerges as a sensation, a moment of frisson where the unbelievable and overwhelming is simultaneously experienced as pertaining to the real, the actual –​a defining characteristic of magic realism, and the subject of decades of postcolonial scholarship. Stephen Greenblatt notes that: For the early voyagers, wonder not only marked the new but mediated between outside and inside (Milton’s ‘sees/​Or dreams he sees’). Hence the ease with which the very words marvel and wonder shift between the designation of a material object and the designation of a response to the object, between intense, almost phantasmagorical inward states and thoroughly externalized objects that can, after the initial moments of astonishment have passed, be touched, catalogued, inventoried, possessed. (1991, p.22).

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This passage immediately reveals the horrific issues of possessing, appropriating, and cataloguing indigenous artefacts that is ongoing in museums and collections across the world, where objects are only now slowly being returned to the places and peoples of their origins. It is also relatable to the concept of magic realism, and to Carpentier’s real maravilloso americano which can be understood as part of a long literary tradition re-​worked in the early twentieth century: ‘the magical, writ large from the earliest –​in the letters of Columbus, in the chroniclers, in the sages of Cabeza de Vaca  –​entered the literary mainstream during Modernism’ (Flores [1955] 1995, p.112). In one of the first accounts of its time, Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca charted his participation in dangerous expeditions between 1527 and 1537, including the infamous Narváez voyage ordered by King Charles I of Spain to establish a permanent settlement in Florida, from which few returned. His detailed, emotional journal reveals the process of acculturation taking place in lands where enforced migration and slavery led to the violent suppression of indigenous people, as well as widespread death from disease. He describes violence, suffering, trade, climate, the Palaeolithic and Neolithic cultures of coastal, riverside forest, desert and open lands, and tribal rituals that are later evoked in lo real maravilloso americano and re-​worked in the Latin American boom novel. Carpentier’s anti-​colonial, anti-​capitalist critique is responsible for the turn in magic-​realist discourse towards a literary strain of magic(al) realism in which geopolitics coincides with lo real maravilloso americano. Magic realism poised between fantasy and social realism on the one hand, and between wonder and colonial and postcolonial realities on the other, is an alchemical process that never solidifies. Concurrent to Carpentier’s awakening as a cosmopolitan outsider travelling in the Caribbean, are growing numbers of filmmakers and students of ethnography travelling to Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Oceania, to better understand their own cultural realities from the outside. Camayd-​Freixas’s concept of a ‘narrative primitivism’ in magic(al) realist novels, argues that primitivism is based in a celebration of difference, where the unrealised utopian vision of the West, is replaced with ‘an aesthetic utopia’ (2010, p.131). Through the ‘image’ of the Americas, where ritual magic, the natural and the divine still reign, writers, he argues, deploy ‘primitive epistemic conventions’ based in the myths of conquest, that form an ‘imaginary ethnography’ that mix these myths into ‘a sort of pastiche or simulacrum’ (pp.114–​5). There is a deep contradiction at work where ‘difference’ and ‘simulacrum’ are held in tension. Here the difference refers not only to the singular expression of the Other, but also to regional and cultural differences; simulacrum suggests a copy without depth, an approximation of the real. In vernacular magic-​realist films, this binary tends to translate into hyperreal, Technicolor landscapes of the imagination which either (a) mark a utopian departure from a traumatic social reality; or (b) emphasise the richness of indigenous and/​or primitive cultures. For the ethnographic filmmaker, there is a risk that the film may end up speaking for, rather than speaking with the cultures and peoples it presents. This is a process that is often about absence as much as presence; the rhythm that emerges will not be the rhythm of life as it truly exists, the peoples will not perform their daily routines in their totality, the slow

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and ordinary might well be jettisoned to make room for the active and sensational or the anachronistic and elliptical. Dan Marks proposes that Félix Régnault made the earliest examples of ethnographic films in the nineteenth century for non-​commercial purposes, serving as source material for sketches and studies in animals, and human locomotion (1995, p.339). The subject of these four short reels were: ‘a Wolof woman from Senegal fashioning a clay pot, a Wolof woman thrashing millet, three Muslims performing a salaam, and four Madagascans passing the camera while carrying the photographer on a palanquin’ taken at the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale in Paris (p.339).This is an interesting example given that the subjects of the films were ‘performing’ themselves within the colonial context of an ‘ethnographic’ exhibition, creating an uncomfortable tension, which is indicative of the kinds of debates that accompanied such studies at the time. The field of ethnographic study originated in works such as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the western Pacific (1922) and in the work of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1882–​1936) which later became the Musée de l’Homme under Paul Rivet (1938 –​). Originally designed to study and preserve cultural objects taken from the colonies, the later iteration of the museum also involved educational research, a laboratory and library, and was frequented by a number of figures central to the avant-​garde, such as Michel Leiris, Lévi-​Strauss, and Mauss. The wonder involved in interactions with objects and peoples from colonised nations re-​housed in European museums or represented on film, alongside the crimes of colonial plundering and stereotyping, presents a problem for ethnographic study. Originally perceived as an interactive, or participatory study, ethnography does not necessarily relate easily to filmmaking. To film is to be a voyeur; it is to take an image, to capture the magic of the distant, rare, or unknown. It was no surprise that Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), a study of an Inuit family and their rituals, would delight and offend in equal measure. For Carpentier, Flaherty’s Nanook was, alongside the films of Lang, Wiene, Chaplin, and Eisenstein, one of the marvels of the epoch,3 an opinion similarly held by Rouch and Murnau. Like Flaherty, who spent time learning about the culture he was to ‘participate’ in, the filmmakers in this chapter had a personal investment in the subject matter of the films, driven by a fascination that often stemmed from picture books read in childhood, or, in the case of Buñuel, to attack state politics and inequality from an unfamiliar vantage point. Many avant-​garde artists and writers were fleeing Europe for the Americas, North and South, while others fled dictatorships in Latin America in the direction of Europe or North America. War, conflict, enslavement, and threat of incarceration were certainly catalysts for this migration, but not all movements were an urgent means of escape. A  plethora of exceptional stories prevent these histories from cohering into a singular myth of exilic exchange. The mutual intellectual dialogue between writers and artists in Haiti, Chile, Martinique, Cuba, and France, or between Mexico, Russia, and England, for example, continues to broaden the reach and purpose of avant-​garde art, and certainly changes journalism and advertising for ever, but this does not always result in socio-​cultural and political change until

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much later. The world is expanding and becoming smaller, and the films discussed below capture the magic of ritual life over the impossibility of distance. They form a bridge to later films in the history of magic-​realist discourse –​films made in the 1960s alongside the novels of magic(al) realism in Latin America, which focus on inequalities and revolution in Third Cinema movements, as well as avant-​garde adaptations of magic-​realist texts. The cultural exchange of avant-​garde principles and practice provides a formal microcosm through which to imagine the processes of deterritorialisation, and transculturation, (both negative and positive), and to consider the implications for an international, or world, magic realism. Carpentier often deploys free indirect discourse to present a poly-​vocal, multivalent History, while still giving omniscience to the narrator. This narrative strategy is mobilised differently in an ethnographic film –​where the viewer sees the actual figures and faces of the subjects –​but may be transferred through movement and sound that remains un-​translated, such as in Deren’s focus on the corporeal affects of spiritual possession. Magic realism has always been accused of lacking political acumen, or radical grit, but the ethno-​magic-​realist documentary raises awareness, and making the choice to focus on non-​Western, non-​dominant forms of art for the audience ‘back home’4 is, for these filmmakers a radical act. Opposing binarism, the discourse is self-​reflexively, critically aware, searching to find polyvocal representation for Myth and History. In this chapter I unpick the idea that a world modernism, or a world film culture, is always defined by exploitative power relations on the part of the creative (Anglo-​European) artist. In what kinds of ways might a strain of magic-​realist film –​the ethno-​magic-​realist documentary –​realise Richardson’s call to ‘recognize otherness without being seduced by it and without using it to define power relationships, but as the starting pint of genuine conversation’ (1996, p.30)? Martinican Édouard Glissant’s analysis is useful here: ‘Myth disguises while conferring meaning, obscures and brings to light, mystifies as well as clarifies and intensifies that which emerges, fixed in time and space, between men and their world. It explores the known-​unknown’ (1989, p.71 emphasis in original). Glissant poses that myth conceals the relationship between History and Culture. Myth, he says, is emotional, it prefigures History, and it haunts the individual with future possibility (citing the narrative spirals and quests of Borges, Carpentier, and Márquez). In his extensive work on magic and ethnography, Michael Taussig agrees with Clifford that surrealism imaginatively re-​works the ‘predictable compositions of bourgeois reality’ through an ethnographic lens, but draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and lo real maravilloso americano: Carpentier’s magic realism as a Latin American mode built on the ruins of colonial power and class injustice is a ‘counter-​hegemonic force’ (Taussig 1987, p.167). From his Marxist perspective, all societies live by fictions that are taken as real (Church, economy, state) and need to be dissected and dismantled. He believes that what distinguishes Carpentier’s resistance to these ‘fictions’ from surrealist rebellion is a targeted dismantling of the myths of hierarchy that persist in Latin America’s hybridised culture. Taussig’s aligning structures of myth with magic realism is crucial, but myth is also a significant thread running through surrealism, and the two are, as we know, not opposed.

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Many among the Parisian surrealist group in particular desired to dismantle colonial hierarchies as part of their practice.5 The ethno-​magic-​realist documentaries below offer various challenges to ‘official histories’ (according to ‘Western ideology’) via philosophical contemplation of the known–​ unknown ambiguities of M/​ myth, posing questions through its haunting tensions. Differing in style and approach, the ethno-​magic-​realist documentary is unified in its poetic, essayistic critique of jaded and conservative observational practices. It encourages the viewer to look beyond what they know in order to find something valuable and critical in what they do not, every story magically touching the viewer at a distance. Jameson assigns to magic realism an important agency in the reconfiguring of ‘World’ literature and ‘World’ film whereby magic-​realist film can spin: ‘an impossible newness back upon us to confront us in bewilderment with the unthinkable conjunction between our own present in time and this ancient history’ (1986a, p.306). He is referring to a Polish film from the 1980s, but the sentiment resonates with the major affective principles of the ethno-​magic-​realist documentary: bewilderment (gaps in information), fascination, comparison, and participatory engagement (philosophically, phenomenologically, psychologically). Tabu; Qué viva México; Divine Horsemen; Les maîtres fous; and Las Hurdes may not have been marketed or critiqued as magic realism, but each present and critique the uncertain position of the filmmaker to magic-​realist affect: an uncanny tension between class, biting black humour, and the ethnographic lens (Buñuel); weird exoticism in a fictional romance narrative (Murnau); a utopian avant-​garde perspective on the eternal present of Mexican history (Eisenstein); and the performance of gods and humans in dialogue (Deren, Rouch).

Les maîtres fous and sacred (magic)realism? In interview in 1988, Rouch recalls his childhood encounters with the surrealist periodical Minotaure, which left an indelible impression: One was the cover of the issue about the Mission Dakar-​Dijbouti,6 with a reproduction of a Dogon painting in red, black, and white. The other was by Giorgio de Chirico. […] And I will remember all of my life the photography in that one issue –​I think it was by Griaule –​of the Dama masks dancing on the terrace. It was something very strange. And all the issues of Minotaure were carrying this same strange stimmung. It was the same that was in the paintings of de Chirico, the same as you find in the first paintings of Salvador Dalí, in Max Ernst, in the collages. It was this way to ‘jump’, to ‘imagine’.7 Rouch’s stimmung immediately draws de Chirico, Ernst, and African religion into conversation, additionally, his emphasis on the emergence of something ‘strange’ echoes sentiments that we have heard before in magic-​realist discourse. Even the choice of the word stimmung seems to point to an affective nexus at the heart of this memory. Clifford hoped in pairing ethnography and surrealism, to highlight

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the modern ‘fragmentation and juxtaposition of cultural values’ through two non-​ fixed categories of exploration:  ‘ethnographic surrealism is a utopian construct, a statement at once about past and future possibilities for cultural analysis’ (1998, pp.117; 119). Through the subjective encounter, the surprise or shock of the before unconsidered sympathies and gaps when two distinct lifestyles meet, the possibility for change and resistance is made possible: ‘Intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees,“inauthentic”: caught between cultures, implicated in others’ (p.11). An ethnographic documentary filmmaker ventures into new realities, the impulse to grasp something of the spontaneous –​stimmung, le merveilleux, or lo real maravilloso  –​ever-​present, searching for that transformative spark. The transformation of this dynamic force into a film, requires formal innovation to replicate a sense of surprise, uncertainty, wonder, or hypnotic affect. For Rouch this involved the ‘sensitive camera’ of Flaherty and the ‘mechanical eye and ear of Vertov’, filmmakers he considered to be ‘on the edge of things […] poets’ (Rouch in Fulchignoni 1989, p.  278). Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog’s idea of ‘poetic ecstatic truth’ is helpful in forming a clearer analytic path between magic, realism and documentary film: ‘It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization […] and yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their truth seem unbelievable’ (2012, ix). In his manifesto on truth and fact in documentary cinema ‘The Minnesota Declaration’ (30 April 1999), the documentary genre is set up, much like ‘realism’ in magic realism, as a boundary to be constantly tested and expanded; it is ambivalent and elusive, not categorical. Herzog’s documentary films show the viewer that the ‘truth’ about ecological life cannot be accessed through observation alone. In ‘Detour by the Direct’ (1969), Jean-​Louis Comolli similarly argues that a documentary film is necessarily ‘manipulated’ by those involved in its creation: ‘The more manipulation there is involved, the more firmly fiction takes hold, and the stronger the mark of the (critical/​aesthetic) distance taken, which modifies the reading (and nature) of the event recorded’ (1980, p.227). Jameson takes Comolli’s idea in a slightly different direction when he writes that if magic realism can be considered a ‘formal mode’, it ‘is constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present; or, to generalise the hypothesis more starkly, magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’ (1986a, p.311). The collaborative voices of WReC’s Combined and Uneven Development8 contend that ‘the features of “combined unevenness” that Jameson identifies in magical realism [sic] are evident also (although not in quite the same ways) in other modern(ist) literary forms: primitivism, early surrealism, Kafka’s supernatural naturalism, even critical realism’ (2015, p.22). As ever, the overlaps with neighbouring modes and movements threaten to undermine its value, but this interstitial position opens up heterogeneous vantage points to reflect upon the fractured and uneven world that it overlooks.We might consider how, for example, Las Hurdes and Qué viva México dart between questions of fictionality and truth, of artifice and artlessness, of montage and voice-​over narration to present their ambivalent portraits of life in rural Spain

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and Mexico in relation to modernity and ‘progress’. The magic stems from the way in which the natural world is presented; the way in which encounters always seem magical because they are so unlikely. A sense of wonder creeps in, bound up with expectation and curiosity, where a strange lag between expectation and experience for the filmmakers is evident. Narrative continuity runs in counterpoint to the subject matter –​too huge, too complex –​and a voice-​over track ventriloquises the pro-​filmic subjects, their agency and specificity dependent on a corporeal vitality. In conversation with anthropologist and filmmaker Lucien Taylor, Rouch recounts his entry into the world of cinema through the border between fiction and documentary, how watching Nanook and Douglas Fairbanks’s rendition of Robin Hood (1922) at a similar point in his childhood confused his understanding of death and reality. Later in life, studying in Paris, he expounds on the vitality that the French surrealists represented for him, particularly the painters de Chirico, Dalí, and Magritte. Like the surrealists, he viewed the ‘new’ through the past: ‘We knew that some people possessed the keys to “go back”. We were under the influence of the new –​in discovering De Chirico I discovered Bakunin, in discovering Bakunin I  came back to Nietzsche. Discovering Breton, we discovered Gérard de Nerval. There was this kind of mixing; we discovered people like Novalis and the German romantics’ (Rouch 2003, p.132). Surrealism had a profound affect on the young Rouch, demonstrated in his participation in the Musée de l’Homme during the German Occupation of Paris.9 The group’s ideas provided a structure for expressing what was to be a long and involved relationship with French colonial Africa, particularly Niger (which only received independence from France in 1960). In an anecdote from 1946, Rouch and a group of friends meet up with Marcel Griaule in the Dogon, and after months travelling on the Niger River are further astounded by what they see: ‘The fabulous spectacle of the Bandiagara cliffs was a reality that no photograph, no story, no film could really convey. Immediately I lapsed back into an adolescent nostalgia for the mineral landscapes of Dalí, the perspectives and hard light of De Chirico, and the smell of the old Trocadéro’ (2003, p.109). The metaphysical and architectural aspects of Mali seem so fresh, strange, and limitless to Rouch, with Paris of the 1930s an evocative touchstone against which to measure these new experiences. Vacillating between his intellectual foundation and the field of ethnographic documentary opens Rouch up to a highly self-​reflexive10 and imaginative mode of filmmaking; and he is quick to criticise others not doing more to engage with the cultures that they visit. He felt that a writer like Leiris, for example, was ‘more fascinated by a poet like Césaire than in the Martinique people themselves’ (p.138). Mindful of such pitfalls, he pushes his filmmaking to engage more deeply at a participatory level. However, it is under Griaule’s academic guidance at the Sorbonne that this  –​a symbiosis between intellect and immersion in documentary practice –​is achieved, when he studies for a doctorate on possession (published as ‘La religion et la magie Songhay’ in 1960). Rouch’s first visit to Niger was as an engineer in 1941, when he lived in the then capital city, Niamey, a colonial outpost that filled him with despair, with its absence of masks, statues, and altars. Gradually he distances himself from

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the European community and starts to explore at night and weekends the spaces frequented by his friend Damouré, whose grandmother taught him to understand the water and thunder spirits. Rouch advocates the thrill of the instant, the ‘grace’ (his version of le merveilleux) allowing fortuitous encounters between light, technology, mood, and subject. But he is equally concerned with slowness and the time required to fully apprehend the scenes unfolding before his eyes. Possession rituals and Dogon cosmography are aspects of African culture that he warns must not be dismissed: ‘besides our so-​called scientific explanations, there are others. To ignore them means that we have an imperialist attitude’ (Fuchignoni 1989, p.273). He is hyper-​aware of his own shortcomings, realising that in order to capture the psychological, mythical, and metaphysical aspects of death he needs time: ‘it’s not easy. I began to shoot those films about death [Les Funérailles à Bongo: le vieil Anaī] among the Dogon of the Bandiagara Cliffs in 1951, and it’s only thirty years later, that I have begun to understand’ (p.268). Les maîtres fous is an early version of ‘ethnofiction’, a neologism that Rouch created to describe the participatory act of filming. The film depicts members of the Hauka spirit-​possession cult. Drafted to work in the city, migrant workers spend their free time enrapt in possession trances that simultaneously act out the gestures of their colonial masters and allow members to converse with their spirit gods, with any kind of boundary eradicated: ‘The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another’ (Rouch 2003, p.185). Rouch approached his subjects from a point of instability and spontaneity, and in so doing entered into a ‘ciné-​ trance’ (p.186) where hazard, caprice, improvisation, and laughter bring subject, mise-​en-​scène and filmmaker into a frenzied accord. This, unlike Deren’s account of possession, distinguishes between spiritual and ciné trance, the latter attributing the effects of the film to a technological disruption. Les maîtres fous is an enactment and deconstruction of the colonial regime. It is violent, at times incomprehensible to the non-​participant. On its first screening at the Musée de l’Homme in 1954, the film was met with outrage, but went on not only to win the 1957 Venice Grand Prix but became ‘a controversial classic’ (Cooper 2002, p.483). For Sarah Cooper, Rouch’s ethics do not lie in his voice-​over narration, or in the ‘otherwordliness of the images,’ but ‘in the absences that verbal and visual imagery cannot convey, cannot know, and cannot understand’ (p.494). This is an example of ethno-​magic-​ realist documentary where lacunae generate meaning and affect; where commentary or factual information is not designed to aid comprehension, but to encourage thought. The encounter with Les maîtres fous is strange, but personal. It cracks open any fixed notion of reality, because returning unchanged to one’s own reality after watching is highly improbable. The film shows the viewer a moment that is fused with the non-​synchronous spirit time of possession, which is dynamic, and outside the ‘calendar’ or ‘clock’ time that marks capitalism. It animates the gap –​we cannot see the spirits, we know that they are invisible, and yet their physical manifestation and doubling through the

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entranced figures on screen reveal them. Similarly, we cannot see the colonisers, the workers, or the animals in any other way than combined with spiritual possession. Even looking at stills from the film, an uncanny vitality that is of this world, yet not, questions our gaze; the twisted bodies of those possessed seem at times ordered, even though the process is governed by a transcendent order. Elizabeth Cowie pinpoints how Rouch puts the roles of logic and completeness into question: ‘The unrepresented as the unacknowledged, unexplained and inexplicable in the contingent reality shown, negates the documentary feel of the images and sounds we see and hear, and as a result we may apprehend not merely the unrepresented but also the unrepresentable’ (2007, p.205). Here, perhaps, is where the Western viewer locates magic; yet this magic cannot easily be syncretised with the coloniser’s religion as it exceeds the symbolism of idols and fetishes and falls more towards the miraculous and ultimately unknowable physical acts attributed to god in Christian religions. Naturally, there are issues with determining the unrepresentable on the side of black Africans of the colonised Gold Coast, which as a result also deems their performative mocking of the colonial administration (each Hauka takes on the role of an officer or monarch) beyond comprehension, fous. Cooper reminds us that the film’s title is ‘a double-​edged portrayal of master madmen and mad masters in which neither party occupies a comfortable position of mastery’ (2002, p.482). Part of the uncanny affect is achieved in the direct connection between the everyday labour of the participants in the ‘presence’ of their costumed (fake) masters, and the spirit world. The Hauka originated in French colonial Niger before migrating to the British-​governed Gold Coast, and the possession ceremonies reflect this composite History. Cooper insists that we read the film against Rouch’s commentary, against the grain of parody and performance to consider a way out of the colonial bind: ‘That reflective mechanisms are at work is an incontestable fact, but to view the entire film on this basis is to ignore the interaction of different processes that challenge rather than support reflective relations between the “us” and “them” of the commentary’ (2002, p.486). Rouch’s intimacy with his subjects, and the way in which he imagines his camera and his self as actants within the continuum of the possession, led him to define ‘ciné-​trance’ and ethno-​fiction as a cinema of collaboration. Les maîtres fous expresses the ineffable through a transference of intimacy, in which attempts to dissolve racial hierarchies and power structures are real, but imagined magically, outside the realm of the week-​day labour rituals. In September 1947, while Rouch was in West Africa, avant-​garde filmmaker Maya Deren set out from America for an eight-​month trip to the Republic of Haiti.11 Loaded with 16-​mm camera equipment, her intent was to film Haitian dance, a project that took four years, and was still incomplete upon her death. Her journals tell the story of her ‘defeat’ and ‘failure’ to realise the original idea, and the resulting shift in her own understanding of her role as a filmmaker outside of her native habitat: ‘I had begun as an artist […] I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations’ (Deren 1998, p.6). Deren spent 18 months in Haiti altogether, during which time she came to see her position as

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an artist as somehow mirroring that of the non-​industrial Haitians (as she puts it). This naïve assumption, spoken from a position of privilege, nevertheless encouraged Deren to approach her documentary with a different sensitivity than when she set out. She transfers her focus on form to help her consider the ‘entire metaphysical system’ of Haitian dance as a mythological ritual rather than a ‘dance’ (p.10). This allows her, in turn, to circumnavigate the pitfalls of stereotyping, by an acute attention to particularity within this cosmic system (of the island’s Indian and Spanish pasts), ‘without nostalgia’ (p.10). Her understanding of possession by the loa spirit is enhanced by a filmmaker’s understanding of representation, of entities standing in for other entities, of ontological and spiritual realities. Deren died in 1961 before her footage had been edited into a film; the reels were posthumously edited in 1977, and a voice-​over narration added (taken verbatim from her written account) by her husband, the composer Teijo Ito, and, after his death, his widow, Cherel. As in Les maîtres fous, the idea of ‘living’ spirits, or gods, is captured in the sensations of ritual possession; Deren films from a position of instability, as an exiled Ukrainian Jew, who finds a means of expression in a psychologically driven film narrative. Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1942) –​arguably one of the most watched and discussed films of the American avant-​garde –​plays with ritual in the form of repetition from a world poised between conscious and unconscious life. In Divine Horsemen Deren once again films the rhythms of intimate, non-​conscious time, through bodily experience, but rather than as a character in a daydream, here she participates in ritual ceremonies for which she has no personal referent. Unlike Rouch, she does not attempt to ventriloquise the participants, she abandons ego, and waits for the loa to speak through her. Divine Horsemen seems to adhere to Michaela Django’s definition of a magic(al)-​ realist approach to ethnography, ‘Dwelling in the spaces that take place at the periphery of our research […] and recording what strikes us at the visceral level […] allows us to connect to a culture and a people at a more intimate level’ (1998, p.356). Reflecting on her films in the 1961 ‘A Statement of Principles,’ Deren rejects the social formation of difference between peoples: ‘. […] If philosophy is concerned with understanding the meaning of reality, then poetry –​and art in general –​is a celebration, a singing of values and meanings’ (2005, p.57). Deren’s work in Haiti puts into practice this dualism of thought and ecstatic release, and like Rouch, it is in the delayed, retrospective reflection where the philosophical arises from the ecstatic poetry of the instant. In her position as an experimental filmmaker, and not an ethnographer or documentarian, Deren hoped to ‘to permit the culture and the myth to emerge gradually in its own terms and its own form’ and was rewarded ‘by a sense of human bond which I did not fully understand until my first return to the United States’ (Deren 2005, p.7). In Divine Horsemen she is adamant that the artist –​ with emotional perspective and ‘sensitivity to form’ (1998, p.11) –​is able to access and represent nuances in the Haitian Voudou rituals by focusing on the acts and practices that lead to physical and spiritual immersion; but she also acknowledges a debt to ethnographers such as Gregory Bateson and Joseph Campbell, whose work on Iatmul and Hauka tribes, helped to connect cosmological and mythical

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aspects of ritual to her own instinctual approach. She implies that the true ‘magic’ of possession, results from participation, which for the modern (Western) artist cannot be translated into a corresponding socio-​cultural discourse, and therefore meaning is transferred through formal artistic structures. However, these formal elements are historically and culturally wrought: It became clear to me that Haitian dancing was not, in itself, a dance-​form, but part of a larger form, the mythological ritual. And the respect for formal integrity that makes it impossible for me to consider Cézanne’s apple as an apple rather than as a Cézanne, made it equally impossible, in Haiti, to ignore the total integrity of cultural form, and to cut up the canvas into apples and pears to be catalogued or compared with other apples and other pears. […] they were of a different character –​a canvas by another painter altogether. (Deren 1998, p.11)

She identifies a major issue punctuating an Anglo-​European avant-​garde modernism focused on non-​Western cultural forms, where form becomes an intermediary and transcultural means of representation but runs the risk of ignoring cultural specificity. In Carpentier’s prologue to Kingdom he compares surrealist André Masson’s paintings inspired by the Martinican jungle with Cuban Wifredo Lam’s La Jungla [The Jungle,  1943] painted two years after Lam’s return home from Paris. Masson, he argues, cannot fully grasp the metamorphosis and hybridity inherent to the landscape, ‘it had to be an American painter […] who taught us the magic of tropical vegetation’ (cited in Zamora and Faris, 1995, p.85). But Lam, ‘conversant with both the concerns of the European avant-​garde and the mythical mysteries of the “creolized” cultures of [his] homeland’ (Sims 1985, p.91) clearly expresses his homeland through European avant-​garde form.12 This involves hundreds of years of erasures of tradition; for Lam, according to Mabille, ‘it was through the intermediary of European anthropologists and collectors that contact could be resumed with the ancestral art from which other Europeans had brutally separated them’.13 As Deren suggests with her example of Cézanne, something exceeds form, and the altogether ‘different character’ that she defines contains not only a magic that is spiritual, metaphysical, but additionally, a magic that correlates to difference. And by difference I do not mean solely the question of regional and cultural specificity, but the difference inherent to a cultural hybridity that is highly subjective and personal, linked to ecstasy and intimacy (the phenomenological) as much as to ancestry, power relations, and modern cosmopolitanism. Mabille, Carpentier, Deren, and Breton’s experiences in Porte-​au-​Prince, for example, are significantly different, each reacting to the Haitian culture in markedly distinct ways that resist any totalising framework. It is the extraordinary history of King Henri Christophe, of Revolution, of usurped power, as well as the architecture and landscape witnessed in Haiti that spur Carpentier to write his manifesto of lo real maravilloso americano. Mabille was stationed in Haiti as a surgeon during the Second World War and remained in the country after the war’s end in his role as French

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Cultural Attaché, assisting in the establishment of the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology, which was largely maintained by Haitian ethnographers.14 He was expertly versed in Voudou, and according to Breton who visited Haiti at his invitation in 1945: ‘he was always received with great consideration by the houngan or the mambo who would preside over the ritual’ (Breton 1998, p.4). Breton’s far shorter visits to Haiti, Mexico, and Martinique, like Deren’s, nevertheless ‘gave him an awareness far greater than that of most Europeans of the reality of Caribbean life and, more generally, of the world’s black population’ (Rosemont 2008, p.10).The central philosophy of the marvellous underpinned a wealth of art and critical essays during this period of dialogue, which advocated potential change through radical poetry. Breton’s lecture at the Rex Theatre in 1945, for example, received high praise from Haitian poets Paul Laraque and René Depestre, who eagerly received ‘the angel of revolt’ in Porte-​au-​Prince15 and his speeches outlining the need for a war against capitalism, uniting all people in the quest to liberate the mind: ‘Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first because it has always taken their side against all forms of imperialism and white banditry […] and secondly because of the profound affinities that exist between surrealism and so-​called “primitive thought”, both of which seek the abolition of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory emotion’.16 There is something in these sentiments, of a virtual liberation, of a relinquishing of the ego, that resonates with Deren’s Haitian project, where mind and action are privileged above understanding and categorisation (which were the mainstays of ethnographic field work). Importantly, her definition of ‘ritual’ is illuminating on this key distinction: ‘a ritual is characterized by the de-​personalization of the individual […] The intent of such a de-​personalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension, and frees him from the specializations and confines of “personality” ’ (1998, p.10). Beyond the personal dimension, magic can be accessed. Certainly this links to Herzog’s ‘ecstatic poetic truth’, as well as to Carl Einstein’s evaluation of Masson’s artworks (in contradistinction to Carpentier’s critique): ‘One thing really matters: to shake up what is called reality by means of unadulterated hallucinations, so as to change the hierarchies of values of the real. […] they will introduce chunks of “a-​causality” into this reality’ (Einstein cited in Ades and Bradley, 2006, p.245). Einstein intimates that Masson’s drawings evoke a ‘mythical reaction as if through a kind of infection’ (p.247), a perspective that also applies to Deren’s (and Rouch’s) experience of hallucinatory witnessing/​participating, or ecstatic ‘infection’ through Hauka and Voudou ceremonies. Divine Horsemen is the story of the African working classes, those Haitians not interpolated into the colonial hierarchy where Catholicism reigns,17 but still subject to its social structures and labour patterns. Deren makes her stance quite clear: ‘this book does not share the distaste of the “educated” Haitian (as this class has chosen to designate itself) for Voudou, but, on the contrary, was inspired by the conviction that this is a religion of major stature, rare poetic vision, and artistic expression’ (1998, p.15). The film is a poetic montage of ceremonies and preparations, where the poetry stems from the ‘observational’ narrative voiceover (John Genke and

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Joan Pape) derived from key chapters in Deren’s written account. The mesmeric sequences unfold, blurring into shadowy, as well as shimmering images, which ‘flare from over-​exposure to the luminescence of the ritual’s symbolic white’ (Warner 2007). Slow-​motion enhances the effect, as if the actions we see need slowing in order to capture their significance. Against this startling wooziness the number and variety of rituals seem to correspond to an enormity; the drumming, bells, and cries intensify, layer upon layer. In absolute contrast to Hollywood’s othering of Voudou in B-​movie horrors such as Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Deren emphasises the light and the goodness: its protection of communities, especially the legacy of children; fertility; wisdom; and good health. The voices of possession are those of the gods, who advise. Her observations stage a crucial intervention in ethnography of the period by allowing the principles and practices to speak through her as part of the community: in Haiti ‘the artist as a singular individual did not exist’ (1998, p.14). In the final chapter of Divine Horsemen, she recalls the intensities felt in possession rituals, referring ironically to her starting point as ‘the denim-​ dressed serviteur’ (p.247), who is transformed, at the mercy of the ‘white darkness’ that courses through her veins and dazzles her in white light: my sense of self doubles […] as in a mirror, separates to both sides of an invisible threshold, except that now the vision of the one who watches flickers, the lids flutter, the gaps between moments of sight growing greater, wider. […] The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploded upward at once. (p.260)

None of this experience makes it into the film as it would require too much of Deren as subject. In actively lessening ego, de-​personalising the ethnographic documentary, we can say that a magical space opens up where the centrality of the human subject is made unstable. As the voiceover intones: ‘The crossroads is always the juncture where communication between worlds is established.Where the traffic of energies and the forces between them is set up’.

Tabu: a story of the South Seas –​colonial versus spiritual power After the huge success of Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann in 1924, the director signed a contract with producer William Fox and moved to Hollywood, where he filmed Sunrise (1927), 4 Devils (1928), and City Girl (1930). Working for Fox Studios was a far cry from the creative autonomy he enjoyed at UFA, but he struck up a friendship with Flaherty who was also in Hollywood at the time. The pair discussed travelling to make a film in the ‘South Seas’. Flaherty had already filmed White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) in Tahiti, and Murnau was keen to visit his close friend –​ and Roh’s  –​the Primitivist and Magischer Realismus painter Walter Spies in Bali. Originally the film was to be made in Technicolor and produced by the company Colorart Productions Ltd. (who ironically failed to pay for the film to be made in

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colour).18 Murnau travelled with Flaherty’s brother, David, and arrived at the island of Nuku Hiva (which belonged to French Polynesia) to much joy: When the ship pulled into port, I shouted jubilantly to my people: ‘We’re really here! We made it’! –​In that small boat –​more than 4000 miles […] I see these gorgeous people for the first time –​slim and sinewy in figure their manner noble and friendly. I hear my first Polynesian, soft and melodious –​ the ancient language of the natives on most of the islands in the South Seas.19 Murnau’s reaction is characteristic of the chronicler, but travelling around the neighbouring Marquesas, Islands, witness to the islanders’ dependence on export to the overseas markets, his vision was not uncritical. Tabu was initially penned as the story of exploitation at the hands of ‘vampiric’ Chinese pearl fishers (wonderfully referencing Nosferatu), but it became a love story woven from the footage shot at multiple locations, including Tahiti, Bora Bora, and the island Moorea. The strong natural light over-​exposes the image, flattening the frame and highlighting the movement of the islanders’ bodies, as well as the dazzling waters from which they often emerge. The magical monochromatic brilliance of the cinematography won Floyd Crosby an academy award, and its clarity and sharpness make the film feel modern, although Eisner is under no illusion as to Murnau’s intent: ‘The old argument about whether it is a documentary or a “feature film” is pointless. Murnau did not make an expedition to observe native customs and record them in scientific detail. He was an artist who had set out with the endless European nostalgia for beauty and the sun. What he sought he found. And he transformed it, and gave us a glimpse of it’ (1973, p.204). The exotic romance between fisherman Matahi and his lover Reri, delivers a mythical paradise governed from beyond (Reri’s body is forbidden in accordance with an ancient tabu that sees her as property of the gods). Tabu’s fetishistic appreciation of handsome bodies in idealised landscapes, translates the setting through an intensively personal form of desire. Islanders later interpreted Murnau’s death in a car crash in 1931 as the vengeance of the gods. The sense of foreboding, winding snake-​like through the film, represents the omnipresent belief in tabu and the inevitability of retribution held by the islanders. Reri tells Matahi, that even if she is killed, she will come to meet him in his dreams. Tabu turns superstition and its ‘real’ consequences into a film that on the surface appears to be an exoticist fairy-​tale, a love story informed by classical Greek myth, indigenous labour, homoeroticism, and Hollywood melodrama. ‘There is something tragic about the contrast he tries to make between his blessed isle, and the “civilized” island of the pearl-​fishers and Chinese merchants, a sad place steeped in alcohol and jazz’ (Eisner 1973, p.202). The film gestures towards the harsh realities of tourism in the region after more than three decades of colonial interventions, which bring disease, and force Christianity, and cheaply made goods onto the islands. After Murnau’s death, his brother, Robert, continued to engage with the islanders and eventually returned, while the Tahitian actor Reri travelled to America, later performing on Broadway (as Anne Chevalier). The circumstances of the film

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make an uneasy read for the contemporary reader, with the islanders idolised, yet simultaneously taking on exchange value as novel commodities, compounded with a complete ignorance relating to the sacred magic of the people:  ‘It was [also Murnau’s] intention to go back to the islands. He had started a plantation at Punaavia, and built himself a convenient, colonial house, a model of which was shown in the colonial exhibition in Paris’ (Ottilie Plumpe quoted in Eisner 1973, p. 23). To build on the sacred temple soils of Punaavia, was a tabu act. Ultimately, with this film, Murnau attempts to actualise his nostalgia through the inner reality of island life, its sacred objects and rituals, which allows him, one imagines, to evade memories of Berlin and the war. He arrives at a future-​past-​beyond, created from the fragments of cultures still persisting in far-​flung corners of the globe. It is a work of collage, and a work of cinematic magic. He faked the most convincing moon for the marshes in Sunrise, but these islands completely reversed the constants of day and night: ‘Never have I seen such moonlight. […] The sky was never dark nor nocturnal, but luminous and a brilliant blue. The light of the moon nearly blinded us!’ (Murnau cited in Eisner 1973, p.212). A version of Magritte’s painting series L’empire des lumiéres [Empire of Light, 1947–​65] in which night and day uncannily coexist, Tabu’s strangely somnambulant landscapes frustrate the viewer’s expectations, posing searching questions despite their weirdly anachronistic glow.

Qué viva México: montage and the enchanted realm Eisenstein’s famed early works Stachka [Strike! 1924]; Bronenosets Potemkin [Battleship Potemkin 1925]; and Oktyabr [October 1927] are bold experiments in dialectical montage and social critique, propelling his status to the film pioneer of ‘paradigms of Marxist art’ (Bordwell 2008, p.379). In ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’, he articulates a conscious decision to foreground the renewing principle of revolution not through aesthetics but in the material sphere that directly underpins ruling ideology: ‘heavy industry, factory production and the forms of the manufacturing process’; and to harness the ‘mass approach’ (rather than character-​driven plot) as anti-​bourgeois cinema, a ‘socially useful product’ that additionally generates ‘the maximum intensification of the emotional seizure (zakhvat) of the audience’ ([1925] 1988, pp.60–​1). Eisenstein did not repudiate art but insisted upon its communicability and affect upon the audience, hence his famous call to replace Vertov et al.’s Kino-​Eye with Kino-​Fist –​a knockout assault on the senses and emotions.20 There is no need here to revise opinions on Eisenstein’s theories of montage and dialecticism, save to highlight how the early films augment social reality through the affective.This interpenetration helps us to understand the direction of his post-​1931 critical essays; his philosophical stance on Mexico in the films Earthquake in Oaxaca (1931, never released); and his never-​completed ¡Que viva México! (1931–​32).21 The latter garnered attention in the media at the time, thanks to news stories such as Illustrado magazine’s ‘What is Eisenstein doing in Mexico?’ The film’s business manager/​producer Hunter Kimbrough, no ally to Eisenstein, released a memorandum mid-​shoot stating: ‘Our intentions are to make an artistic production of

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the evolution of Mexico. It is my belief that is will be the greatest and most sympathetic advertising Mexico has ever had, thereby immediately commodifying the project’.22 In December 1930, Eisenstein like Murnau, frustrated by Hollywood (where he was supposed to be working on an adaptation of Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy), embarks on a trip to Mexico –​partly funded by socialist writer Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906; King Coal, 1917) and steered under the auspices of Paramount studios. He travels with his assistant Grigori Aleksandrov (who edited the film after Eisenstein’s death) and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. Sinclair constantly refers to Murnau’s Tabu and its success as a benchmark for Eisenstein’s project. In The Making and Unmaking of ¡Que viva México!, the editors list the dramas of the trip (which ended in Stalin calling the crew back to Soviet Russia), and ponder the genesis of the project in Eisenstein’s mind. They suggest Jack London’s play The Mexican (1911), Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (1929), and his meeting with Diego Rivera in Moscow in 1926 (the same year in which Carpentier first meets the muralist in Mexico) as likely influences, adding: ‘The Mexico of his imagination was an enchanted realm, the Never-​Never Land of his childhood’ (Geduld and Gottesman, 1970, p.4, author’s emphasis). The film suffered many setbacks  –​financial, censorial, and editorial  –​ and upon Eisenstein’s return to Russia, it languished until producer Sol Lesser pushed forward an unauthorised cut, which premiered as Thunder over Mexico in Los Angeles, 10 May 1933. Sinclair’s statement was released simultaneously as a preface: The story of outrage, revenge, and punishment, is not to be taken as applying to Mexico today. The time is the regime of President Diaz, forty years ago. […] A great people, living in a beautiful land, are groping their way towards justice and liberty –​just as all the other people of the earth are doing. […] We join in their national cry, ‘Que Viva México!’. (Geduld and Gottesman 1970, p.376)

There are many assumptions we can make about this film given the production history, and Eisenstein’s reputation; ‘Mexico’ as both place and concept was firmly established in his mind before he set foot there, having already been introduced to the Trocadéro through Georges-​Herni Rivière and his pre-​Columbian exhibition, as well as to the dissident surrealists involved in the periodical DOCUMENTS: Doctrines (Variétés), Archéologie, Beaux-​Arts (1929–​31).23 The country’s geographical location neighbouring the United States continually repeated for him the strange juxtaposition and incongruity of capitalism (‘Nonindifferent nature’ 1988, pp.379–​80). His description of Mexican landscape involves a synaesthetic reaction rather than a gaze; but bound up with this sensory exploration is also the desire for a counter-​capitalist life force: in those moments at dawn or sunset, when the air is so transparent that it seems as if someone had stolen it, and distant slopes reddish mountains hang with blinding distinctness in the airless space between the ultramarine sky

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and the violet shadow of its own foothills –​and suddenly you feel clearly that our eye cannot see, but feels and senses objects just as a blind man does with his hands. […] Everywhere life forces its way out from under death. […] there is the possibility of everything developing. (1988, pp.382–​3)

His commentary lists the ecosystem, people, colours, light, heat, smells, and temporalities of this ‘emotional landscape’, reflecting upon his own sexual, intellectual, and hypnagogic relations to it. He is bewitched by what he sees, yet he attempts to intellectualise feeling in order to draw his experiences back to the creative process:  the graphic line of his sketches, the slowness of his film takes, and the on-​going philosophical pursuit of aligning human sensation and cinema through image and sound montage. Eisenstein understood the ‘danger’ of synaesthetic montage, of allowing oneself to fall under the spell of intoxication as a participant in landscape, and always self-​reflexively pulls back. Writing in 2016 of the tendency in Caribbean writing to understand ‘human and extra-​human natures as bundled together’, Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett argue that we must pay attention to the ‘differentiated moments’ in the ‘capitalist world-​ecology’: ‘The extirpation and enslavement of the indigenous peoples; the slave trade, slavery, the plantation regime, and indenture; and the massive transformation of biophysical natures –​all these are dialectically interconnected processes that together were integral to the emergence of the capitalist world-​system’ (2016, p.4). Campbell and Niblett highlight the Complex relations between human and non-​human entities that punctuate the long debates on local/​global, singular/​universal dialectics. Eisenstein’s Qué viva México ‘bundles’ human and non-​human into a dreamlike stream-​of-​ consciousness, dramatizing local poverty in the ‘Maguey’ sequence in particular, where he re-​imagines Cortés’s attempts to suppress indigenous religion, and the enslavement of women, into tragi-​comic drama. The overall tone is idealistic, with the Epilogue heralding ‘man’s triumph’ over death, and a truly free, ‘modern, progressive’ Mexico. Eisenstein eulogises the Revolution, undoubtedly channelled through his awakening in the fire of the October Revolution; he fails to critique the march of ‘progression’ and ‘modernity’ because this is his emotional landscape, and he cannot disentangle the hieroglyphs from his own symbolic system. From the original script notes, it is apparent that the structure, albeit a bare-​ boned sketch, follows the traumatic episodes in the weft24 of Mexico’s violent past (including the Spanish conquests, Porfirio Díaz’s pre-​revolution state of brutal suppression, the Revolution (1910–​1920), and present-​day poverty). The prologue proclaims: ‘The time is eternity. It could all happen today […] or a thousand years ago’. Yet, the effect is not one of fossilised time, but unearths ‘the different strata and modes of being that co-​exist within the space of the modern nation’ (Noble 2006, p.185). The film presents ‘Stone. Gods. People.’ in the time of prayer, siesta, fiesta, and courtship, drawing dreamlike associations between ancient artefacts, rituals, and contemporary life. Eisenstein describes Mexico as childish, eternal, a constant cycle of life and death etched into sarcophagi and frescoes and repeated in

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its festivals and feasts. The ‘Prologue’ and the film’s first episode ‘Sanduga’ (which focuses on pre-​ Columbian history) ponder the interconnected temporality of Mexican history, which, despite its modern subjects, is still framed through the prism of cultural mythology, and more specifically, the pre-​Columbian utopia of Tehuantepec: ‘a symphonic cinema, symphonic from the standpoint of construction and arrangement […] comparable in a sense to the paintings by Diego Rivera in the National Palace’ (Geduld and Gottesman 1970, p.149). Masha Salazkina’s powerful analysis of ‘Sanduga’ links the episode to the striking imagery redolent in Frida Kahlo’s Tehuana women, and Diego Rivera’s Rousseau-​esque mural Creation (which her research shows artist Tina Modotti had shown to Eisenstein in Moscow), but also to primitivism through the maternal, and a re-​ordering of biological time that is clearly his preoccupation across notes written in the last two years of his life. ‘Although his interest in the evolutionary development of life forms, both individual and collective, had started much earlier, his explicit linking of primitive art and the theme of the return to the womb came from a book that he “stole” from Robert Flaherty in Hollywood, Miguel Covarrubias’s book Island of Bali’ (Salazkina 2007, p.55). On the surface, Eisenstein performs the very same nationalistic gestures evoking indigenous history that modernist artists Rivera, Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco explore. He wills the origins to surface through the concerns of the contemporary world moment, and these ideas and images complement his essays and notes. Revolution as literal and metaphorical power is at the core of the film, but the director’s essays on ‘primitive’ and cosmic aspects of experience manifest through the film image at unexpected moments, with a vitality that exceeds the intertitles (and the posthumous voice-​overs). Carlos Fuentes cuts straight to the core of the suffering that the converging temporalities of past and future, death and life, generate for Mexicans: ‘In Mexico, all times are living, all pasts are present. Our times appear before our eyes dressed in impure cloaks, charged with resistant agonies.We face a double battle against a time that also diverts us, reverts back against us, subverts us, and converts us constantly’ (1997, p.16). This layered temporality holds for Fuentes a latent and as yet unrealised potential; he sees both the promises of the colonisers and those of the U.S.-​driven industrialists as persistent failures that are suspended in eternal frustration. This is not a romantic, nor a metatextual postmodern portrait, but a picture of perpetually thwarted potential. Covarrubias in his extensive research into the Tehuantepec region Mexico South (1946, begun in 1935) calls for a radically new conceptualisation of Mexico. He exposes the fascist roots of a system ruled by the triumvirate of the Church, the Military, and the Landlord/​Executive; and he describes a new Mexico (focused on the Isthmus of Tehuantec, Oaxaca, close to where Eisenstein and his crew filmed) as ‘a heterogeneous, unbalanced mixture’ of fresh, new generation Indians and enterprising Zapotec peasants (1946, p.xxvi). Covarrubias also directed the short documentary El sur de México (1926), which along with the work of photographers Lola Álvarez Bravo, Rose Covarrubias, and Modotti, did so much to present authentic quotidian Mexican experience. It is odd, perhaps, to think of Eisenstein as a romantic or

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nostalgic filmmaker, given his political views, yet certainly Qué viva México is full of wonder. Fisher’s distinction between ‘The intellectual mechanism of wonder’ and ‘the aesthetic idea of estrangement or defamiliarization, the romantic notion first proposed by Novalis’ is of some consequence here (1998, p.27). If we agree that to evoke wonder ‘It is essential that the event described is ‘a visual all-​at-​once-​ experience’ (Fisher 1998, p.28), then the language deployed by Eisenstein in his initial ‘Rough Outline of the Mexican Picture’ would seem to support this: ‘So striped and violently contrasting are the cultures in Mexico running next to each other […] Death. Skulls of people. And skulls of stone. The horrible Aztec gods and the terrifying Yucatan deities. […] The Virgin of Guadalupe worshiped by wild dances and bloody bullfights. By tower-​high Indian hair-​dresses and Spanish mantillas. By exhausting hours-​long dances in sunshine and dust …’ (1957, pp.251; 254). Similarly during Eisenstein’s visit to Paris in 1930,25 Desnos and Carpentier showed him alternative attractions of the city which elicited a rapturous reaction: the old house where Desnos had his study, which dated back to Napoleonic times, very much caught his attention because of the contrast between on the one hand the almost rustic architecture of the farmhouse built when what is now the Vaugirard neighbourhood was still countryside, and on the other hand, the pictures by Picabia, Man Ray and Duchamp that hung from its walls, together with a collection of starfish and seashells, scattered amongst the cylinders of a gramophone from the beginning of the century.Take note –​he said to Alexandrov [sic] –​Make an inventory of everything you see here.26 Eisenstein’s impressions of these two wildly disparate environments proliferate in positive and negative swells, relating to the newness and unexpectedness he feels. As a filmmaker his multi-​layered experience is unified into shots and sequences where realism is rendered magical through the emotion bursting in the flow of images.27 The Mexican Revolution as well as the country’s arresting rituals and landscapes inspired him in a manner that is not dissimilar from the ways in which it galvanised many European artists. In fact, one of the most important revolutionary tracts of the era –​‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’ –​resulted from Breton’s trip to visit the exiled Trotsky in Mexico, where at Lake Pátzcuaro they penned (later co-​ signed by Rivera) their stance on the fight for political and imaginative freedom (see Breton ‘Visit with Leon Trotsky’ [1953]1995, pp.36–​45). Eisenstein’s ‘Epilogue’ to Qué viva México was designed to reflect on ‘modern, progressive’ Mexico, ‘a liberated people’ and the art of the future, but in many ways the film does nothing to reconcile this with the pre-​Columbian imagery, or the exploitation of peasant labour in earlier sections of the film. The ethno-​magic-​realist film does not settle into a fixed polemic or worldview, because it privileges the ever-​shifting quality of reality, offering an ‘inexhaustible range of sensations from the mildest to the most insidious’ (Breton ‘Memory of Mexico’ [1938] 1995, p.24).What becomes apparent is that finished or not, Eisenstein’s film is a truthful reflection of conflicting states of being –​life and death –​as they feel to him at a given moment, including episodic

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bursts of fiction to dramatise events of the past as if they are encoded in a dream or nightmarish fairytale. The magical dialectical montage of his earlier films persists, but the revolutionary, political fervour is put squarely at the service of an ‘inexhaustible range of sensations’. Mikhail Iampolski makes an interesting comparison between Breton’s eidetic image, écriture automatique, and Eisenstein’s quest ‘to acquire the trappings of a magician or a detective by claiming a supreme knowledge, the magical ability to discern the scheme, line of principle through and beyond the realm of the visible’ (Iampolski 1998, p.234). The original concept for Qué viva México is rooted in Eisenstein’s psychological, ‘internal “graphs” ’ (p.229), which link the documentary and fictional sequences through the (invisible) lines of thought, as though magically juxtaposing fragments automatically. Rouch noted that a magician, sorcerer or creator-​participator alters the reality of what they see (2003, p.87). Aleksandrov’s post-​production work on the footage makes manifest Eisenstein’s intent to fuse fantasy with reality into a compelling, didactic, and uncanny film. The fictional segments, particularly the scenes shot in Tetlapayac and the village near Vera Cruz, have a weird theatricality and rhythm that is also mirrored in the seeming unreality of the bullfight. The switching back and forth between human and divine energies, ancient and capitalist rituals, can be described as having an ethno-​magic-​realist affect. It is worth noting that the word magic for Eisenstein does not have quite the same connotations as it did for Roh, and whatever methods he devises for expressing thought, the end result should not be to revel in the marvels of the experience, but to contemplate their significance for social change, and yet his writings of this time reveal a closer alignment with technological and phenomenological magic. His essay on ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’ (1929) articulates this cerebral and sensory dance fairly closely; it presents for the first time the category of ‘overtonal montage,’ which expands metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage, and ‘enhances perception from a melodically emotional colouring to a direct physiological sensation’ (1988, p.191). It expands the experience of tonal montage, which is characterised by emotional tonality and intensity: fogs, clouds, black stillness, an approaching storm, for example. Analogous to the outward vibrations of acoustics, Eisenstein postulates that over and undertones accompany every dominant tone in the cinematic (sound) image  –​‘all sorts of aberrations, distortions and other defects’; ‘stimuli’; a ‘complex unity of all its [the shot’s] component stimulants’; ‘the physiological process of a higher nervous activity’ (1988, p.183). Inspired by the sum of stimulation created in the apprehension of a Japanese kabuki theatre performance, he theorises a fourth dimension to montage that produces edits according to sound associations, feelings, and spatial resonance. As an example he presents his film Staroye i novoye [The General Line 1929, with Aleksandrov] in which a scene featuring a religious procession is comprised of individual shots ‘saturated with fervour’. This is the most unpredictable result of montage, as it incorporates not only the unintentional glitches or resonances within the image/​soundtrack, but folds in the viewer and the unaccountability for reaction, describing cinema’s occult mysticism as commonplace (1988, pp.184–​5). Eisenstein’s version of the something else

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besides –​reading the films alongside his critical writing –​attempts to demystify the mysterious by explaining it through technical (and to an extent neurological) terms, which in its affective, quiet revolution, results in a film closer to Magischer Realismus than we might have thought possible.

A conduit of the marvellous Buñuel lived in Mexico for 36 years, and his Mexican films occupy a midway point in the nation’s cinema between the classical era and the political Third Cinema of the 1960s, before his art-​house collaborations with producer Serge Silberman. The period that followed Los olvidados into the late 1960s, brought Buñuel ‘mythic prestige’ among Latin American literary and artistic circles, and alongside Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar, the filmmaker represented ‘the vanguard of Latin American modernity’ and was considered by many Latin American writers to straddle surrealist and magic-​realist film; Victor Fuentes considers Buñuel a key conduit of the marvellous, citing Luis Leal’s assessment of El angel exterminador [The Exterminating Angel, 1962] as ‘probably one of the first cinematic expressions of magical realism’ (2004, pp.97; 100). And: ‘On April 16, 1966 [Carlos] Fuentes writes to Buñuel:  “Here in Paris with Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Rodríguez Monegal, and Gironella we are always talking about you, about your work, that, it turns out, each time more clearly, is the great point of reference for creative production among writers and painters of Spanish roots” ’.28 The interest was mutual; of Juan Rulfo’s magic(al)-​realist novel Pedro Páramo, Buñuel once said:  ‘what I  find attractive in Rulfo’ s work is the crossing from the mysterious to the real, almost without transition. I really like this mixture of reality and fantasy, but I don’t know how to bring it to the screen’ (Fuentes 2004, p.100). Aspects of this uncertainty find expression through the experimentation with form in Las Hurdes, which strives to capture the absurdity of the dominant culture, within and without, spatially and psychologically. As an exile and former surrealist, Buñuel’s lens often reveals the cruel and profoundly comical aspects of inhabiting the space of the outsider. Buñuel’s work (along with that of Chilean Raúl Ruiz), straddles surrealism and magic realism; and his blend of magic-​surreality (Gee 2013, p.582) and social realism, most clearly lifts ethnographic documentary into a synthesis of Carpenterian and Jamesonian magic/​marvellous realism in the Spanish Las Hurdes –​as well as in the film that follows, his first Mexican subject, Los olvidados. Mexican photographer and cinematographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who assisted Eisenstein on Qué viva México, was confident in Buñuel’s decision to recommence his career in Mexico, assigning him with the ‘task of shaking up our values, stimulating our consciences and of delivering his vision of the Americas and of Mexico’ (Fuentes 2004, p.91). As an outsider, Buñuel’s initial success with Los olvidados, is, I  argue, closely linked to the ethnographic study of the people of Las Hurdes, Extremadura that he undertook in 1930. While from a contemporary perspective this project might seem like poverty tourism, Buñuel was captivated by the irrational borders dividing his homeland, driven to delve deeper into its inequalities: ‘The problem of

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Las Hurdes is so profound, so mysterious that it escapes a simple government pronouncement’ (Buñuel 1995, p.218). His portrait of the Hurdanos provides no clear signposts, and despite the unyielding climate and environment, the population continues to expand in a montage of irrational misery. A rooster hangs suspended over the crowds, part of a local ritual, while skulls embedded in the church entrance raise questions; low-​angle shots reveal unexpectedly tall and crooked living quarters; and the landscape is shown through horizontal panning shots, partially obscured by foliage, dirt, shadow, and buildings.With little time to grow accustomed to each new idea, shock, or diversion, the viewer follows at a rapid pace, the rhythm of metamorphosis beating from ancient funeral rites to school lessons and accumulating frogs. It is a disorienting, disturbing experience. Pierre Unik’s voiceover narration refers to the inhabitants as a ‘primitive civilization’, but insists that they share contemporary principles of morality and religion, and ‘speak our language’. It is the case with Las Hurdes as with Los olvidados that Buñuel feels that he speaks with rather than about the cultures that he represents (the orphans, the loners, and the workers). Similarly, Paz interprets Los olvidados as bearing witness to the age: ‘These children are Mexicans, but they could be from some other country, could live in any suburb of another great city. In a sense they do not live in Mexico or anywhere, they are the forgotten, the inhabitants of those wastelands which each modern city breeds on its outskirts. […] Art, when it is free, is witness, conscience’.29 Paz’s words are an apt description of what Buñuel achieves in these two films as a witness, and as an artist. The former is described variously as ‘a surrealist documentary’ (Acevedo-​Muñoz 2003, p.45); ‘deeply political’ (Sobchack 1998, p.73); and ‘capable of producing the shock of anachronistic contemporaneity characteristic of anthropological documentary’ (Resina 2009, p.204).The latter is ‘an important piece of “cine de arrabal” ’ (Acevedo-​Muñoz 2003, p.70); a ‘Surrealism with a profound vision of Mexican reality that finds its roots in pre-​Hispanic myths’ (Fuentes 2004, p.91). In its portrait via the nonsynchronous, disordered, absurd, and poor, Las Hurdes unleashes the mysterious in a gesture of participation with the silent human, animal, and mineral protagonists (which grates against Unik’s often ridiculous narration). In an essay on the ‘Cinematic Shot’, Buñuel expands on Jean Epstein’s adage that ‘Objects have attitudes’ and therefore still life in cinema does not exist, with his own: ‘As silent as a paradise, as animistic and vital as a religion, the miraculous gaze of the lens humanizes beings and objects’ (1995, p.128). The apparatus is trained on the object, waiting for it to come alive, to reveal itself. We might recall Leonora Carrington’s oeuvre, and its intercommunication of human, animal, plant, and mineral forms. In her novel The Stone Door (1977), the narrator perfectly sums up the seamless join of ordinary reality and dream/​irreality that we find in Buñuel’s worlds: ‘The morning has been tedious. I have not been able to move away from the window, watching the street, waiting for some sign outside my dreams’ ([1976] 1978, p.28). The sign as a form of event, rather than a referent, is common to both surrealist and magic-​ realist versions of the marvellous. Carrington’s sentence posits the alchemical glass at a pivotal point, skilfully undermining the separation between psychic layers of temporality. Tedium is subjectively felt, and the concept of ‘outside’ is given no

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greater reality than the act of day/​dreaming: ‘The magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-​sided mirror that reflects in both directions’ (Faris 1995, p.172). This Carrollian definition, in fact, exceeds two dimensions, looking simultaneously within, without, and beyond. The scenes witnessed by Buñuel in Extremadura do not correspond to rational explanation, and it is clear that the film wishes to suggest the impossibility of living through, as well as bearing witness to this terrible neglect. Elsewhere, I have argued that Buñuel employs a mode of visual condensation whereby socio-​political critique manifests in the interstices of everyday experience:  the poverty experienced by Pedro and Jaibo in Los olvidados, for example, is evoked when they hallucinate from hunger; the loss of an amulet brings about death (Gee 2013). The slums of Los olvidados are ghostly apparitions despite the reality from which they are taken.The skeletal forms of unfinished housing and the souls of the dead rise up from the cracked earth, two different but interconnected motifs of Mexico’s unequal society; they represent the displaced rural migrants who, through poverty, were forced into the city during President Miguel Alemán’s administration. Buñuel manipulates reality by emphasising its most cruel and strange events, but like Murnau’s micro-​photographic creatures in Nosferatu, the apparatus brings out the ghostly, tragic, and monstrous elements as facts. The magic is in this indistinguishability: ‘Magical realist ethnography seeks to dismantle the binaristic impulse that is part and parcel of the colonial imaginary by allowing for competing notions of reality to coexist. As such it displaces Western notions of “truth” in favor of a hybrid version of reality’ (Weinberg 2008, p.368). With regards to the form of ‘documentary’, Buñuel renders the limits elastic, tipping over into fantasies that are no less real than the destitution. As Camayd-​Freixas observes, an avant-​garde magic realism offers something more daring in its mode of cultural interpretation than the stalwart ‘testimonial narrative’ of conventional ethnographic documentaries (2000, p.113). In focusing on the ephemeral, spiritual, convulsive, and evasive aspects of lived experience –​those experiences that typically correspond to mental images roused in thought and perception –​the scale and significance of aspects within the everyday undergo a radical shift. Avant-​garde form is a prominent component of the magic-​realist countering of dominant discourse and binary oppositions. But it is also a modernist avant-​garde that exists at the point of an extreme, affective response to personal and professional alienation at home.Voyages to the South Seas, the Caribbean, and so on, whatever the original catalyst, take these filmmakers into the beyond, when life has become untenable, or at least deeply unpleasant. Annette Michelson locates a similarity in Deren’s and Eisenstein’s struggles within their respective professions, which ‘intensified the pace of theoretical investigation’: ‘From Mexico and Haiti, each returned […] with the memory of a determinant experience, one which was to permeate all subsequent theory and practice […] This was the memory of their encounters with the ecstatic’ (1980, p.52). The ethno-​magic-​realist documentary pivots on an alchemical transmutation:  disillusionment and frustration into ecstasy through encounters with the beyond. As Mabille notes regarding the practices of Haitian

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rituals: ‘What is strange and bizarre manages to disorient us in such a way that the ordinary boundaries separating us from the world are destroyed. Observations of natural curiosities and freakish scenes, because of their violence, their feverish pitch, thus acquire immense importance’ (1998, p.45). His version of the marvellous is participatory in the extreme, an ecstatic, feverish phenomenological engagement with life on shifting ground.Through the practice of poetic and philosophical filmmaking, magic realism always involves that which escapes and remains intangible, indescribable, felt –​grappling with Glissant’s known-​unknown. The ethno-​magic-​ realist documentaries in this chapter both produce, and engage with European and Latin American discourses on magic(al) realism; they require the viewer to work hard, rewarding with intensity and puzzlement in equal measure.

Coda –​ contemporary ethno-​magic-​realist  film Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent has been described variously as fantastic, mystical, marvellous, and typical of magic(al) realism. Antonia Quirke writing for The New Statesman describes its ‘strange combination of documentary-​style realism and hypnagogic magic’ (2016, n.p.), which, while an honest account of her reaction, fails to communicate any of the political or environmental aspects of the film. Serpent presents the fictionalised accounts of two intertwined journeys into the Amazonian rainforest based on the real-​life research diaries of early twentieth-​century German ethnologist Theodor Koch-​Grünbe, and American biologist Richard Evans Schultes, who followed in his footsteps 30 years later. The film commences in 1909 (in the period following the civil war known as the ‘War of a Thousand Days’), with a weakened Theodor (Jan Bijvoet) accompanied by his guide Manduca (Yuaenku Migue), travelling down the river in search of the rare medicinal flower yakruna. Together they call upon the local shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) for help and guidance in their quest. They find that white men have destroyed local tribes, rubber barons have enslaved the forest’s men, and Catholic missionaries have taken charge of the people’s spiritual care. The story is repeated years later, as biologist Evan (Brionne Davis), still searching for yakruna, encounters an aged Karamakate suspended in a timeless state of perpetual forgetting (played by Antonio Bolívar Salvador, one of the last surviving Ocaina). Shot in black and white on 35mm, cinematographer David Gallego’s fluid, high-​contrast, crystal-​clear images capture the wonders of the environment and the colonial devastation that has befallen it. Guerra hoped that the monochromatic photography would evoke the early daguerreotype photographic plates produced on late nineteenth-​century and early twentieth-​century expeditions: ‘It’s not the real Amazon you see in the film –​it’s an imagined Amazon –​but what we imagine would certainly be more real than what I  could portray’ (Guillén 2016). What is vital to ethnography, Clifford argues, is a plurality of opportunity for the reader to engage and participate in the learning, just as Guerra desires for his viewer. Enmeshed in the questions of realism, or reality, then, are the gaps that a lack of knowledge brings, and the expectation and curiosity on the part of the

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audience. What I have also argued is the case for magic-​realist films is that ambiguity and ellipsis in both narrative and form encourage greater engagement and active participation in the experience ‘of the real’ by inviting the border between states and realms to dissolve, thereby expanding the spatio-​temporality of wonder and uncertainty. The fact that so often films that combine social realism with a ‘mysterious’ or ‘magical’ aspect (whether fictional or documentary) are labelled by western critics as examples of magic realism, suggests a surplus of gaps (in knowledge about a given culture; or in the narrative arc). In such an instance, magic realism becomes a code word for the unknown, the strange (Roh’s term) and the feeling that exists when your expectation regarding a given reality or actuality is tested against the overwhelming screen presence of nature, meteorological and geological phenomena, or unknown rituals (since these elements occur time and again in descriptions of magic(al) realism). It is clear that the charged reactions to tribal ‘magic’ or superstitions, for example, persist in this understanding of the mode. I have argued above, that surrealist films, for example, set out to disrupt and dislocate, but magic-​realist films –​which have virtually no self-​proclaimed magic-​ realist filmmakers –​are, like Clifford’s modern ethnography, ‘perpetually displaced’ (1988, p.9), with multiple origins and destinations, their shocks and surprises diffuse. Similarly, in thinking through magic realism as a discourse, the onus is not on what it is but on what it does, how it moves through and alters things, allows things to become visible, heard, felt, as if anew, but often requiring an active engagement with a substantial socio-​political critique that travels alongside the ‘magic’. Clifford hoped that his Predicaments of Culture would stand for the ‘recognition of emergence’, and that, like art created as ethnography, it would show its thinking process from ‘an uncertain historical ground, a place from which we can begin to analyze the ideological matrix that produced ethnography; the plural definition of culture, and a self-​positioned [sic] to mediate between discrepant worlds of meaning’ (1988, p.113). To an extent, this ‘emergence’ is a utopian impulse, aware of the absence of any grand master narratives, and mindful of the essentialism that accompanies local particularity, that projects hope for a ‘collective future’ (p.4). Clifford dedicates one of his chapters to considering ‘ethnographic surrealism’ as ‘the theory and practice of juxtaposition’ (p.147). It interrupts the idea of a whole, or complete, national identity or history. Magic realism cut with ethnography, on the other hand, does not commence with wholes, but is already ‘caught between cultures, implicated in others’ (p.11). Serpent does not juxtapose the lives of German and American researchers with the imagined indigenous tribes of the Colombian Amazon to elicit shock and signal direct comparison, but interweaves the multiple voices of such a complex reality (the displaced tribes people; the rubber traders; the western ethnographer/​scientist; the Spanish conquistadors through to the modern government; the Colombian, Venezuelan, and Argentinian crew; the world audience) acknowledging the past, as well as emergent power structures and exchanges. The layering of dying/​evolving languages, stylised cinematography, fiction with actuality, modernity with contemporary life, and movement with stasis, creates a mode that is neither modern nor postmodern, but somewhere in between. In Guerra’s film the

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positions of self and other are complicated, as are questions of a diachronic history. Clifford cites René Depestre’s 1980 interview with Aimé Césaire on the subject of negritude to illustrate how identity politics shift from the early to late twentieth century, to a ‘broader modernism’ in which ‘To be “American” [Latin American] is to be hybrid, metis’; the true heirs of negritude are writers like Carpentier, Amado, Vallejo, Cortázar, and Márquez, and negritude is transmuted, ‘it is no longer about roots but about present process in polyphonous reality’ (Depestre quoted in Clifford 1988, p. 179). Guerra’s film engages with negritude at this ‘broader’, later juncture, evident in the film’s clear desire to tell Colombian history from a different perspective, and through indigenous languages: At the beginning of the project, I  wanted to make a historical and anthropologically accurate film. […] But then, as I started working with the Amazonian communities, I  realized that their point of view regarding the story had never been told. […] In order for the film to be true to that, I  had to stop being faithful to the ‘truth’ [the research diaries], because to them, ethnographic, anthropological, and historical truths were as fictional as imagination and dream, which for them was valid.The historical film needed to contaminate itself with Amazonian myth. […] I understood that the film needed to be a bridge. It couldn’t be either way of storytelling. It had to invite the viewer into discovering the world with respect and understanding. (Guillén 2016, n.p.)

The constants in the film are the river, the elusive yakruna, and the guiding spirit-​body of Karamakate, which intersect with the multifaceted atrocities of a Colombian history dominated by an accelerated capitalist exploitation (rubber, caca, gold). The film’s tribal people, unable to distinguish between Theo and Evan, see them as a continuum of a single person, an eternal ‘white male’, bound to probe and plunder, and yet also to listen, empathise, contribute: ‘If we can’t get the whites to learn’ says Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos), ‘it will be the end of us’. That this was the first film that many of the actors in the film had ever witnessed is, in itself, magical and special, and that it has been shown and applauded around the world is also magical. Serpent experiments with the form of ethnographic writing, crossing multiple times the borders between interior and exterior realities.The hallucinogenic sequence, for example, strongly recalls the trances of the Hauka in Les maîtres fous, and similarly layers capitalist exploitation, theatre, faith, and community. Ultimately, the only way that ‘man’ can heal, is to learn to dream –​hallucination, dreaming, and living are interchangeable –​and to exist outside (capitalist) time.The conditions of the rainforest are real, and yet, as Guerra suggests, they are imagined and miraculous; yakruna is a myth, a fiction; and a metaphor for pre-​colonial culture, resistant, unlike the rubber plants, to exploitation. And yet, the film leads us to ponder the impossibility of ever stemming the tide of fascination for the miraculous; like Novalis’s blue flower, yakruna will always symbolise a magical, utopian purity that proves irresistible.

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Notes 1 In the 1970s Jay Ruby devised further criteria to distinguish an ethnographic film, which are not particularly helpful here as the films I discuss do not adhere to an anthropological doctrine so much as they push against it (Ruby 1975). 2 The concept of the ‘future not yet’ is theorist Mark Fisher’s, who sees in the twenty-​first century the residual haunting of twentieth-​century science-​fiction versions of the future that never come to pass. The idea stems from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994). I use the concept here to refer to the modernist turn to primitivism exemplified in Paris and the study of ethnology and ethnography, as well as the fascination for indigenous objects held by surrealists who travelled widely throughout ‘the Americas’ (Fisher 2012). 3 Carpentier, ‘La cinematograría de avanzada’. Carteles, 4 November 1928 (1978b, p.353). 4 Arjun Appadurai revisits writers such as Cortázar and Rushdie, arguing that exile and displacement in Cortázar’s writing, for example, can lead to ‘violent and culturally peculiar innovations. […] Culture thus shifts from being some sort of inert, local substance to being a rather more volatile form of difference’ (1991, p.60). Appadurai’s emphasis on volatility, on imaginary and projected as well as ‘known scripts or predictable outcomes’ illustrates the ways in which culturally innovative narrative form takes on the non-​stop metamorphoses and diasporic displacements of contemporary world systems (p.61). 5 Encounters between French surrealists and Francophone Caribbean writers and artists proliferated in the period 1932–​46, in Paris and across the Caribbean. This involved the setting up of periodicals such as Légitime défence, Íman and Tropiques, which raised debates on indigenous versus European-​centred theories of colonialism, and on the ideas of the homeland, oppression, and slavery. Légitime défence, for example, was formed by a group of Martinican students who were studying at the Sorbonne, and who had found great affinity with the surrealists. One of the prominent voices in the group was René Ménil, who along with poets and critics Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, would bring vital debates on negritude, colonial power structures, cultural superiority, and homelands into conversation with Marxist, psychoanalytic, and surrealist responses to modernity and capital. For a comprehensive charting of these debates, polemics, and activities see Richardson (ed.), Refusal of the Shadow, 1996. 6 The mission Dakar-​Dijibouti was led by Marcel Griaule. Leiris accompanied the mission, keeping a diary, which was published as L’Afrique fantôme in 1934. The photographs, illustrations, essays, film stills, and manuscripts that span the 15 issues of DOCUMENTS constitute a rich body of work that requires wider exploration than is possible here. Bataille’s ideas regarding ethnographic art and exploration of desire, and the heterogeneity of the journal’s collective approach would later influence Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso americano. 7 Jean Rouch, May 1988, Paris (cited in De Bouzek, 1989). 8 Scholars in the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) in the UK, have theorised ways in which culture (literature specifically) has responded to a singular combined and uneven modernity in a radically uneven world system, building expansively on Jameson’s ideas of the 1980s and onwards. Critically, for this study, is their reformulation of modernity ‘which involves de-​linking it from the idea of the “west” and yoking it to that of the capitalist world-​system’ (WReC 2015, p.15). 9 Rouch was the secretary general of the Comité du Film Ethnographique et Sociologique (CIFES) at the museum. 10 Rouch denounced his first film Au pays des mages noirs (1947), which he found embarrassing in its exoticism.

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11 Deren made three further trips to Porte-​au-​Prince between 1947 and 1954. The film project represents one of several branches of her research in Haiti, which also includes the reflective text Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) and Voices of Haiti, an album released in 1953. 12 This period is Carpentier at his most recalcitrant and anti-​ surrealist, immediately following his trips to Haiti and Venezuela. He recalls how Breton had asked Lam to illustrate his poem Fata Morgana, and started collaborating with Suzanne and Aimé Césaire on the journal Tropiques (see Suzanne Césaire ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’ Tropiques, pp.8–​ 9. In Rosemont (ed.) 1998) but felt that it was already much too late [‘Pero era muy tarde ya’] (quoted in Chao, 1998, p.225). This stance was not to last, however, with his later interviews showing a deep indebtedness to the Parisian group. 13 Pierre Mabille. [1945] ‘The Jungle’ Tropiques No. 12 January 1945. In Richardson (ed.) 1996, pp.200–​12. 14 As well as assisting with the translation of Le miroir du merveilleux while in Paris, Carpentier crossed paths with Mabille in Porte au Prince, Havana, and Mexico City. 15 Laraque recalls the message of hope generated by Breton’s words, and in a wonderful analogy linking ‘the new world’ to discovery through automatic writing, underlines the important lessons of insurrection and refutation of logic that surrealism taught the Haitians who came to listen: ‘What surrealism represented to us above all was the leap into the unknown […] it was no longer a matter of creating or inventing, but of discovering. ‘Paul Laraque, ‘André Breton in Haiti’ [1945]. In Richardson (ed.) 1996, pp.217–​28. 16 André Breton, ‘Interview with René Bélance [Excerpts]’ in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Rosemont (ed.) 1978, p.256. 17 Voudou principles, however, do incorporate aspects of Catholic iconography, such as god Erzuli, who is associated with the figure of the Virgin Mary, as well as the divinity of the dream, and who Deren felt she was possessed by. 18 Further notes from Murnau’s and Flaherty’s journals reveal the fascinating story of the film’s development and the clashing of egos and ideologies along the way. For an overview, visit www.deutsche-​kinemathek.de/​en/​publications/​online/​murnau/​overview 19 Notes from ‘Loose-​ leaf collection’. F.W. Murnau estate, Deutsche Kinemathek, p.16. Quoted in the Deutscher Kinemathek archive, ‘The Making of F.W. Murnau’s TABU: The Outtakes Edition,’ as part of their archival restoration of the many feet of footage not included in the final film. 20 Vertov directed Cine-​Eye (Kinoglaz) an ‘exploration of life caught unawares,’ and it was released in October 1924. Eisenstein criticised Vertov’s style of filmmaking as purely subjective engagement with reality. 21 Eisenstein never actually watched back the images that he shot for this film, and it remained ‘lost’ in New  York’s MoMA archive until the 1970s, when the reels were returned to the Soviet Union. Many have worked on the film: it was cut by Sol Lesser into the Hollywood fragment film Thunder over Mexico, 1933 which the editors of Experimental Film vehemently opposed in their ‘Manifesto on “Que Viva Mexico” in 1934’ (cited in MacKenzie 2014, pp.38–​40); Marie Seton and Paul Burnford’s Time in the Sun in 1939; Jay Leyda used outtakes to make Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study in 1957; and finally Grigori Aleksandrov in 1977, which is the version we can purchase on DVD today. 22 18 June 1931. In Geduld and Gottesman 1970, pp.90–​1). 23 Eisenstein’s film had featured in double-​page feature in DOCUMENTS Issue 4, 1930, with an introduction by Desnos to accompany the series of film stills provided by the director. Eisenstein had met Bataille and many of the DOCUMENTS contributors

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during his visit to Paris of the same year, where he also established friendships with Rivière and Jean Painlevé, with whom he corresponded. See archival research on their letters in Rebecchi 2017. 24 The metaphor of the Mexican serape is deployed to represent the strands of history, noted by Geduld and Gottesman 1970; and Noble, 2008. 25 It highly likely that Carpentier attended Eisenstein’s lecture at the Sorbonne on 17 February 1930, given their walks together with Desnos through the city, as well as his involvement with the contributors to DOCUMENTS, noted in ‘Recuerdo de Eisenstein’ El Mundo, 1960. In Carpentier 2013, pp.375–​7. 26 Recuerdo de Eisenstein’ [Memory of Eisenstein] trans. R.B. In Carpentier 2013, pp. 375–​7. 27 In an analysis of Pushkin’s Poltava, Eisenstein notes how the author ‘magically’ conjures a nocturnal flight in the juxtaposition of ‘three shots’ (applying filmic language to literature) –​a clack of horses’ hooves, Cossack speech, and a woman’s whisper –​which, when united into a single unifying image evoke an intense emotionality (Eisenstein 1957, p.47). 28 Carlos Fuentes, from a letter in the Archivo Buñuel cited in Fuentes 2004, p.103. 29 Paz’s review of the film ‘Buñuel the Poet’ was first distributed at the Cannes International Film Festival on 4 April 1951 and published in Nuevo Ciné (1961). See Paz (1990, pp.152–​6).

4 LO REAL MARAVILLOSO AMERICANO Prismatic reality and the screen

Carpentier’s muse: the emergent cinematic marvellous in Paris Born of Russian-​French heritage,1 Carpentier’s privilege as an affluent intellectual is not straightforward. He spent his early childhood in Havana, and from an early age was offered the luxuries of international travel; additionally, the family’s love of architecture, literature, and music shaped his future interests. His dual identity, as Chanady reminds us, is shaped by miscegenation and cultural syncretism, and results in an oeuvre detailing ‘the intertext of chronicles of discovery’ (1994, p.xxxi). He moves in avant-​garde and industry circles across the world (France, Cuba, Venezuela) ‘with the detached perspective of the inquisitive phenomenologist’, his semi-​peripheral vantage-​point producing nimble and affective engagement with ‘Latin American’ experience (Janney 1981, p.24). His critical sensorium is always resolutely attuned to revolutionary action –​literal and figurative: [Carpentier’s] pages reflect the desire of the new hispanoamerican bourgeoisie to know what is happening in the transatlantic world […] the fashions and new modes of everyday living, and the new economic, political and cultural directions […] maximum frivolity is juxtaposed with the firmest and sharpest Marxist proposals regarding key hispanoamerican concerns. (Portuondo 1974, pp.9–​11)

This chapter reflects upon Carpentier’s contribution to magic-​realist discourse and its legacies, connecting his philosophical real maravilloso americano through his early film criticism, to industry interest in adapting his novels for screen. Crucially, his film reviews of the 1920s offer many clues to his later conceptualisation of lo real maravilloso americano in the prologue to Kingdom; they evidence his enchantment with the silver screen and its representation of the intangible, non-​material, and

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transient aspects of everyday life. In his 1925 article ‘Jean Cocteau y la estética del ambiente’, published in the Venezuelan periodical Social, he likens the marvellous to a kind of poetic essence: Modernism in itself does not exist; there is only in each moment a wealth of virgin emotions, a fluid that only has use for the true poet, and which must originate an art in accordance with our sensibility. […] The true poet must live on the lookout of that continuously flowing and marvellous fluid.2 This continuous flow constitutes Carpentier’s earliest written conception of the marvellous, which like Breton’s definition of le merveilleux, requires an artist that is attuned and ready to harness its often strange and unexpected affect: ‘a mobilization of the absurd. And organised absurdity is a force: the very strength of the marvelous’.3 Carpentier is bewitched by Cocteau’s mise-​en-​scène in Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel, where the ordinary is thrown into a new light: angels, absurd tableaux, strange objects, cruelty and playfulness, though incongruous, collectively form a cultural commentary directly sourced from the poet’s interior flow, resulting in ‘the perfect exteriorisation of his thoughts’ (Carpentier 1975b, p.28). The movement from inner thought to exterior materialisation is later reconfigured specifically with regards to avant-​garde cinema in an essay from 1928, where he writes: The camera has a glass eye with magical virtues. […] The cinema has revealed to us the hidden and mysterious life of the world in which we live, it has made us see with a fullness that the men of yesterday did not know […] The cinema is a great art, a magnificent art. (pp.354–​6)4

When Carpentier stresses the verb ver in the original Spanish –​to see –​he means to apprehend via all the senses, intimating that the ‘fullness’ of existence is something which we are not immediately aware of. He was trained as a musicologist, conducting research on rhythm in afro-​Cuban musical traditions, and these interests align with his fascination for the non-​narrative poetry of avant-​garde film.5 Germaine Dulac described how: ‘We can use the term “avant-​garde” for any film whose technique […] breaks with established traditions to search out, in the strictly visual and auditory realm, new emotional chords’ (1978, p.43). Carpentier’s marvellous is always linked to poetry and in sharp contradistinction to Breton, he considers Cocteau an exemplary poetic muse who creates the most exquisite verse on stage and screen, and on film an alchemical realisation of the metamorphosis of thought. His praise is unwavering: [Cocteau] the man who, it must be recognised, first saw the huge potential of the ‘poetic object’, the word games, the modern myths that would make the fortune of Breton’s movement; the man who came out with a surrealist conception of poetry before the surrealists had begun considering the same ideas.6

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Cocteau argues that his cinematic poetry ‘should not give form to a thought but to thought itself, that unknown force’ (2001, p.169). Similarly, he discusses how the peculiar qualities of his personal taste make it difficult to actually describe, for example, someone’s star quality, which he finds can only be defined as ‘something else’, a mysterious aspect that clings to a person. The ineffable, the indescribable, the ‘ “something else” is the best definition of poetry’ (p.167). Cocteau’s intermedial work flaunts anachronism, pointing to the absurdity of social relations, cues that Carpentier adapts to probe the temporal layers in Afro-​Cuban and criollo histories. In another 1925 article, ‘El ciné, décima musa’, published in the Havana periodical El País, he uses ‘maravilloso’ to describe the artifice of film, and its unexpected affect in Chaplin’s silent, tragi-​comic ‘maravilloso clown’ (2013, p.24). If cinema is the ‘tenth muse’, ‘the apostle of new ideas’, it succeeds the nine muses of classical mythology,7 and represents, following Riccioto Canudo, ‘the synthesis of all the arts and of the profound impulse underlying them’ (Canudo [1923] 1993, p.293). This outline of an early cinematic magic realism, then, is defined by magical technology, artifice, absurdity, tragicomedy, poetry, and play. In 1928, Carpentier fled his home in Havana after serving an eight-​month sentence for his open opposition to General Machado y Morales’s dictatorship (1925–​ 1933) in the left-​wing periodical revista de avance8 (1927–​1930) (Garcia-​Carranza [1979] 2014, p.5). He stood alongside the Grupo Minorista9 who proclaimed their support for the Afro-​Cuban population and Cuban economic independence from the United States. His link to French surrealism begins here, as he boards a ship to Paris using Robert Desnos’s passport after a fortuitous encounter10 –​Desnos was in Havana attending the Seventh Congress of the Latin American Press. He later reminisces in Le Soir: I have never forgotten the poor village close to Havana where Alejo Carpentier […] led me the very night of my arrival. Two deafening orchestras dueled in grand style. Above it all, an immense plaintive wail of trombones passed over a sonic background of strange instruments and the drone of the sea. (Dumas 1980, p.136)11

Desnos remained one of Carpentier’s closest friends throughout his years in Paris, introducing him to the surrealists, and working together on a series of radio programmes. Prior to fleeing Cuba, Araceli García Caranza of the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí in Havana notes that Carpentier’s journalism12 for El País and La Discusión was, from the outset, engaged in the wide-​ranging historical and political events that mark his later novels.13 The journals such as Social and Carteles that he went on to write for while in France were typical of the period, encompassing trends and shifts in avant-​garde practice from his cosmopolitan viewpoint between Havana, Caracas, and Paris. Carpentier experiments with everything he finds in Europe  –​Freudian psychoanalysis, film, abstract painting, ethnography, theory, and even electricity –​all contributing to a world reinvested in the ‘beyond’. He marvels at the ‘objetos mágicos’14 in Man Ray’s short films and the Parisian cinemas

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promoting avant-​garde wonders. As Kristoffer Noheden elucidates for surrealism, film ‘emerges as a potent magical medium through its propensity for an analogical poetics that can ostensibly reveal obscured facets of the world’, mediating between ‘the modern and the arcane’ and providing a ‘vital and experiential’ dimension in the quest for ‘a new sensorium’ (2017, pp.20–​1). This is an important and complex observation. While the overall application of this idea takes a different route in surrealism post-​1945, it nevertheless shares key components with magic realism, particularly the deconcealment of hidden, buried, or deadened matter and its revitalisation through audio-​tactile-​visual experiment. After visiting Man Ray’s studio, Carpentier writes excitedly: ‘The laboratory of the alchemist [Ray] is located in the heart of Montparnasse […] it is full of cameras, lenses, chassis, of artefacts of light similar to surgical instruments, of complicated tripods that mimic insects …’.15 The films themselves repeat the magical alchemy of the studio: ‘The implacable eye of the camera violates all the modesty of inert matter: […] it’s a still life surprised on an oval table, it’s the slow stretching of a starfish, it’s crystal objects spinning simultaneously’.16 This description of a striking oneiric sequence from L’étoile de mer (1928) –​an in-​frame collage of fragments seemingly torn from a dream –​finds ‘a universe’ of ‘magic objects’ unleashed, a poetics demanding a new perspective.17 Carpentier’s hyperbole, an ecstasy of sorts, is immediately comparable to Roh’s astonishment at the dynamism of the moving image in Foto-​Auge. I argue strongly that lo real maravilloso americano cannot be separated from the mechanics of the cinematic marvellous, just as it cannot be separated from Carpentier’s musicality. Baudelaire observes how ‘The life of our city [Paris] is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous; but we do not notice it’ ([1956] 2011, n.p.). Cinematic magic brings about the unseen and escaping aspects of the marvellous (Massumi 1995), encouraging viewers to see differently and feel intensely. The ‘new sensorium’ according to lo real maravilloso americano shares with surrealism the magic of the cinema as well as Novalis’s exteriorisation of ‘spirit’, enacting a transformation in consciousness and, by analogy, the universe.18

Intermediality and ethnographic research Throughout his time in Paris, Carpentier kept a busy schedule of creative involvement in musical and theatrical productions, which contributed to a promotion of afro-​cubanismo and Latin American culture within Parisian intellectual circles. Between 1927 and 1928, he worked simultaneously on the scenario for Amadeo Roldán’s La Rebambaramba ballet (which tells the story of Havana’s lower classes in the early 1800s), and the literary work Cinco poemas afrocubanos. Roldán and Carpentier also researched Abakuá culture for their ballet El Milagro de Anaquillé [The Miracle of Anaquillé, 1927], an anti-​imperialist avant-​garde work that can be considered ‘one of the earliest efforts in the modern ethnography of Afro-​Cuban culture’ (Tomé 2018, p.186).The ballet is set for the most part on a sugar plantation and its characters: the Business Man (a masked film director), the Flapper, and the

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Sailor, The Iyamba, The Diablito, and The Jimaguas19 clearly indicate a determined geopolitical stance on colonial Cuba and ‘ethnographic reflexivity’ (Tomé 2018, p.190). This is signalled in a marked clash between Abakuá deities and an American filmmaker, whom the deities strangle after their altar is desecrated with Christian iconography and advertisements for chewing gum and soda. It is evident that the ballet’s rather simple politics, of the modern tourist-​artist in Latin America, is lifted into a work of ethnographic significance by the musical score and rhythmic movement:  ‘Everything in our environment can be transcribed into gestures, chants, choruses or rhythms […] I  used, with no modification whatsoever, the choreographic ritual of Afro-​Cuban initiation ceremonies’ (Carpentier 2001, p.55). Deren’s work similarly prioritises rhythm and choreography to express particularities of Haitian cultures (the dizzying plurality of approaches to ritual) but also to capture an ‘exaltation of the spirit’ (Carpentier 1995b cited in Zamora and Faris, p.86). In Paris he continues to seek out artists from Latin America, having retreated from the surrealist group quite early on20 (additionally Breton openly displayed indifference towards music). At this time, the group could not fulfil Carpentier’s desire for a hybrid, non-​Eurocentric merveilleux. He values the repetition in patterns and rhythms in the works of Cuban artists Wifredo Lam and Eduardo Abela. Federico Acevedo argues that in Carpentier’s review of Abela’s solo exhibition at Galérie Zak in Paris, lo real y maravilloso first find their sintésis: Abela suggests to us the tangible, using plastic metaphors. His language is, therefore, the language of a poet. […] His conceptions are very Cuban they represent […] the higher reality of things; that marvellous and invisible reality, which is, in the end, the only reality that endures in everything we see.21 Perhaps Abela’s paintings exhibited far away in Paris seem particularly marvellous, with ‘un aspect mágico’ (Acevedo 1994, p.116). The ‘magical aspect’ surfaces in paintings that reproduce the drama, movement, and heat of Cuban life but shift the emphasis, thereby inverting expectations of colour and perspective, and, for the Western viewer at Galérie Zak, bring magical rituals and fetishes into arresting proximity. It is no simple matter to tease out the various passion for and rejection of European avant-​garde culture in Carpentier’s oeuvre. His work embodies the much wider currents of ambivalence and unrest that are set in motion as more is understood about the processes of colonialism, appropriation, and exoticism and their relationship with the international avant-​garde. A clear example of this ambivalence can be found in his journalism, such as this description of the pavilions of the spectacular and marvellous Exposition Coloniale in 1931 as ‘a synthesis of the spirit of the age’:22 At night, the Colonial Exhibition takes on a magical aspect. From the center of Paris, from the Place de la Concorde, you can see the lighthouse of the gigantic column that dominates the main door of the forest of Vincennes.The temples, the palaces, the museums, the pavilions, are closed; but its millenarian

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or exotic architectures, its moldings, its statues, its fetishes, its totems, shine in the light of a thousand invisible reflectors.23 He often shows a lack of criticality around the practices of ethnography and the influence of indigenous art forms on European art. However, while admiring the exhibits and the extravagance, he does reflect on the French influence in the colonies, vehemently opposed to the government’s ‘meddling’ in the lives of those who had never before cared about commodity culture, which brings a ‘ “felicidad” problemática’ (problematic ‘happiness’) in the form of canned goods, railways, and vulgar hymns. A second article on the Exposition Coloniale references a night when the director of the Trocadéro Museum had put on an open-​air concert of African tam-​tam dancing. Carpentier notes the striking juxtaposition of well-​dressed dignitaries and famous guests bewitched by the rhythms and violent intensity of the music (1976, pp.500–​2). These articles express a discomfort at the reification of ‘primitive’ art, yet at the same time illustrate how he recognises the necessary disruption that ‘primitive’ culture brings to Western art and specifically to French bourgeois culture.24 Carpentier’s perspective is not immutable; it reflects the liminal experience of a person in exile. Melanie Nicholson is absolutely correct when she describes Carpentier’s ‘surrealist gaze’ as ‘ambivalent’:  ‘Carpentier’s literary career offers a prime illustration of the vases communicants in which European and Latin American aesthetic values flow in both directions’ (2013, p.41). Engaging with the back and forth motion of Breton’s Vases Communicants [Communicating Vessels, 1932], Nicholson posits that Carpentier enacts an ongoing dialogue with surrealism whereby lo real maravilloso americano signals ‘a kind of synthesis that allowed for a productive adaptation of surrealist thought’ (p.42, author’s emphasis). He revises and expands rather than replaces le merveilleux  –​ whose ‘contemporary magic’ and ‘belief in a higher reality’ he extolled prior to his disenchantment with the Paris Group.25 Despite frequently referring to surrealist painting as manufactured –​‘misterio fabricado’ –​his own love of avant-​garde film is based on a process that also manufactures the marvellous. The fact of lo real maravilloso americano is that it is a subjective process of apprehension that can be, as Nicholson suggests, expanded to encapsulate a given set of conditions. When he uses the term maravilloso to define the poetic fluidity of ideas in Cocteau’s or Ray’s films, Carpentier emphasises the role of the viewer, without whom the marvellous does not materialise: ‘We don’t narrate films, we watch them’.26 The language of film enables the widely opposed realities of colonising and colonised nations to share a space, to circulate while the language is still experimental, fresh, and magical. It is capable of transforming the object –​whether ancient or a spoil of capitalist commodification –​into something altogether revelatory, ‘something else besides’. On 19 March 1938, when Carpentier finally leaves Paris, it is safe to say that he is ready for something new. A disappointing visit to L’Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galérie Beaux-​Arts prior to his departure is symptomatic of a particularly antagonistic view towards surrealism that he holds at this time. He is (re)entering a new zone, where the horrors of colonialism are not exhibits

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in a museum but vivid, and first-​hand. These urgent differences are what spur Carpentier to write his most powerful works.

‘Critical regionalism’: The Kingdom of This World and lo real maravilloso americano A critically aware magic realism questions what lies beyond any approximation of the collective; Carpentier’s asks the reader to consider lo real maravilloso americano as an already complex negotiation (and negation) of global modernity. Critical regionalism ‘is the study of the aporias of identity formation, and thus also of what could dwell beyond identity formation’ (Moreiras 2001, p.75, author’s emphasis); a subalternism that speaks from multiple fissures, individual experiences, and gaps. As well as focusing on Carpentier’s relationship with the medium of film, this chapter argues for the ways in which Carpentier anticipates later ideas in Latin American theory, that while he is not speaking from the subaltern position himself, across his oeuvre he does his utmost to give voice to Black African, Indian, and creollo subjects. His particular vantage point furnishes him with an understanding of ‘the impossibility of thinking heterogeneity beyond the processes of globalization that always already determine it as heterogeneity for consumption’ (Moreiras 2001, p.75). This determines magic-​realist discourse far more clearly than discussion of miracles and alchemy, linking also to Jamesonian theories on world capitalism. In his multiple roles as writer, composer, journalist, cultural diplomat, film producer, Carpentier stages ‘critical regionalism’ in the epic theatre of consumer capital, integrating avant-​garde denarrativisation into historical narrative. Lo real maravilloso americano marks a true divide between years spent in Paris waiting for le merveilleux to materialise, and a succession of epic, lyrical, and experimental novels: Kingdom; The Lost Steps; El acoso [The Chase, 1956]; and El siglo de las luces [Explosion in a Cathedral, A Century of Lights/​Enlightenment, 1962]. The continuation of magic realism as a discourse owes so much to Haitian politics. Prior to his trip to Porte-​au-​Prince, Carpentier’s interest in Haiti had been piqued while working on a North American documentary film as translator and musical director –​ Vudú:Magia Negra (Black Magic, 1933–​4) –​which depicted the U.S. occupation of Haiti under Sergeant Faustin Wirkus.27 Carpentier was invited to present the premier of the film at the Trocadéro’s Museum of Ethnography in June 1934 (Rodríguez 2012, p.15). The Haitian Revolution of 1791 spread like wildfire through the French colony of Saint Domingue and centuries later became an incendiary motif for a liberated Cuba. It is not surprising that it evoked similar emotions for Eisenstein, who, having read John W.Vandercook’s Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti (1928) was determined to make a film inspired by this emblematic figure.28 In their introduction to Aimé Césaire’s play Tragédie du Roi Christophe [The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963], Breslin and Ney argue the need for polysemy in the post-​Revolutionary moment: ‘How is Haiti to de-​ alienate itself, discover its own voice, and enunciate its independence? And how can the play perform this quest for authenticity within French, the language of the

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former colonizer?’ (2015, xiv). These are salient questions with regards to Césaire, as well as Carpentier or Eisenstein, who as non-​Haitians might be seen to ‘aestheticize’ the Revolution (Deckard 2016 p.36). In Carpentier’s case, there are interesting links to be made between marvellous realism and a Haitian discourse for Haitians. In response to hearing Carpentier speak in Haiti in 1943, Jacques Stephen Aléxis writes Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtians: Creating realism means that the Haitian artists were setting about speaking the same language as their people. The Marvellous Realism of the Haitians is thus an integral part of Social Realism. […] The Western genres and organons bequeathed to us must be resolutely transformed in a national sense, and everything in a work of art must stir those feelings which are peculiar to the Haitians, sons of three races and an infinity of culture. ([1956] 1995, p.148)

Aléxis imagines a manifesto of the marvellous real that combines (a) the real social conditions of poverty and struggle; and (b) the reality of Voudou possession, whereby an ancient man can suddenly scale a tree, or another possessed man can lick a red hot poker without getting burned. What bridges (a) and (b) is the symbolism of the gods, who represent ‘aspiration’ and ‘inspiration’ towards ‘betterment in every sphere’, including landownership and autonomy through work (p.147). The figure of Henri Christophe complicates any hypothesis that suffering will ultimately lead to ‘betterment’; his huge leap into a bloody and violent dictatorship in the body of a former African slave of the plantation cracks wide open any notion of ‘progress’ and replaces it with evil power. For a transnational writer like Carpentier, Henri Christophe embodies absurdity: from former chef to the terrifying figure dressed in the Napoleonic Bicorne, he is a character capable of: ‘surrealistic poetic soliloquies’ (Breslin and Ney 2015, p.xiii), completely seduced by the power that transforms him. Partly inspired by Oswald Spengler’s apocalyptic vision of the ‘metaphysically-​exhausted soil of the West’ in Decline of the West: Form and Actuality ([1918] 1926, p.6), the Europe that is refracted in Kingdom is carnivalesque and excessive. The European coloniser is heavily critiqued, yet unlike Spengler’s utopian assertion that so-​called primitive and metaphysical aspects of indigenous cultures outside the West are where newness and hope lie, Carpentier’s novel is far more nuanced, interrogating the insidious rhythms of privilege and power which do not fall easily into binary platitudes. Neither modernization nor multiculturalism is representative of ‘progress’,29 rather each constitutes a history defined by lack and erasure, and Carpentier’s oeuvre is predicated on processes of temporality that produce these identities; spatially imagined, history is cyclical rather than linear. Reimagined through the eyes of African slave Ti Noël, Henri Christophe’s empire, ‘the marvelous world’, is revealed as a betrayal of his fellow Africans who labour (and die) in the ‘bowels’ of his citadel (Kingdom, p.116). The free-​indirect narration attempts, and to a large extent succeeds, to articulate an experience of what

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some have denigrated as a fragmented history (Paravisini-​Gebert 2004), which is at times inaccurate, even deliberately so (Speratti-​Piñero 1980; Shaw 1985; Wakefield 2004). Kingdom covers substantial historical ground –​1758–​1805 –​in its 180 pages, and temporal ellipses are to be expected; this is not an historical novel so much as it is an experiential, marvellous novel. More to the point, the novel produces the polysemy of which Breslin and Ney write, and perhaps could be said to anticipate Aléxis’s ‘infinity of culture’, a multi-​voiced, cyclical history (although not ethnically voiced, see Wakefield 2004, p.49). Towards the end of his reign, King Henri is deserted by his staff, and wanders through the great halls of mirrors in his palace like a ‘big mechanical toy’, seeking ‘the solidarity of the marble’ of his balustrades. As the thunder increases, the citadel at Sans Souci is set ablaze and looted by the people, and amidst the flames he takes his own life. ‘The huge edifice stood empty, taking on, with the vast silence of its rooms, the funereal solemnity of a royal tomb’ (Kingdom, p.149). He is entombed in his own deranged dream, an historical monument to the failure of empire –​the ‘ruin’ of colonial pouvoir fou.The novel is hyper-​ aware of its own architectural structure, allowing for an affective spatio-​temporal polysemy that represents a more free-​flowing potential for radical otherness to clash against dominant cultural patterns. This is partially achieved through magic-​realist figures such as Ti Noël, who acts as an intermediary between the African world and the French colonisers, and African slave Macandal –​after François Mackandal, the African houngan who led the first slave uprising in Haiti, in 1758 –​believed by his followers to have escaped execution by hiding in the form of a mosquito. Emphasising the strength of this faith, Carpentier describes Macandal’s ‘narrative art, when with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men spellbound’ (p.13), evidence for their seemingly supernatural faith in his magical lycanthropic30 power of metamorphosis: ‘Macandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World’ (p.46).When he disappears for four years, they are convinced that he is still with them in animal form: ‘as he had the power to take the shape of hoofed animal, bird, fish, or insect, Macandal continually visited the plantations of the Plaine to watch over his faithful’ (p.35). These beliefs are mediated by Ti Noël, whose seeming insider knowledge of Voudou lends authenticity to the incredible scenes. But having already hinted at Macandal’s acting skills, Carpentier ensures that the reader understands the duality of belief systems when Ti Noël is astonished at a witch who plunges her arms into boiling oil without burning, curious about ‘extraordinary animals that had had human offspring. And of men whom certain spells turned into animals’ (p.19). Ti Noël occupies the roles of insider and outsider; witness and participant; enslaved and free man: ‘[…] We are within ourselves and also like strangers observing ourselves from the outside. There is not just one side of the mirror. Both sides exist at the same time’ (Mabille 1998, p.46). In a letter to the co-​founder of ICAIC, Alfredo Guevara, in 1971 regarding a film adaptation of Kingdom, Carpentier muses that Veracruz in Mexico would make a good location substitute for Haiti, with its ‘significant black population’ and similar architecture. But like Eisenstein’s Henri Christophe epic, the film was never made.31

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Latin American film and lo real maravilloso americano Timothy Brennan argues that Music in Cuba contains the entire Carpenterian oeuvre within its pages, popularizing ‘a story that had until then been imprisoned in ethnography of a technical sort’ with ‘portraits of a political (rather than merely racial) other’ (2001a, p.3). It had a formative effect on his later novels, with the ‘musical formation’ giving him ‘a permanent feeling for structures’.32 These ‘structures’ sometimes follow musical notation –​say a sonata or a Caribbean song –​ or unfold in performed time  –​in The Chase the action matches the equivalent time it takes for a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony to end. Equally, the novels are enthralled to the rhythms and structures of film: ‘with its layering of narrative voices and its reverberating spheres of discontinuous time, The Chase is furiously cinematic’ and its exquisite mise-​en-​scène portrays psychological horror in a murder scene filled with Hitchcockian terror (Brennan 2001b, p.vi). In his famous response to the question of a ‘Latin American Novel’ in the New Left Review (1985) Carpentier states that ‘America’ is a ‘political continent’ in which ‘epic events (terrible and wonderful) are commonplace’ (p.103). The presence of psychological horror is an essential component of Carpenterian fiction, based as it is in slavery, revolution, madness, and death. In addition to his responsibility as a writer, as a founding member of el ICAIC he understood clearly the burden on filmmakers to ensure heterogeneous representation of the Latin American continent. On a visit to Mexico in 1926, he meets artists Diego Rivera33 and José Clement Orozco, and poet Jorge Cuesta (García-​Carranza 1979, p.7), whose work starkly illuminated the ethnographic failures doing the rounds at the cinema. In a 1931 article for Carteles ‘México, segun una película europea’ [Mexico, according to a European film], he takes aim at the French documentary Indios, hermanos míos, [Indians, my brothers,  1931] directed by ‘Tytaina’ (Titayna was the pseudonym of writer and journalist Elisabeth Sauvy-​Tisseyre). The film depicts Mexico’s indigenous Mayan and Aztec civilisations, primarily through the figure of the nude peasant. Carpentier describes how the intertitles seem almost boastful of ‘discovering’ a small population of Seri Indians and the ‘secrets’ of civilisation on the Isle of Tiburón. He notes with obvious displeasure how the film fails to detail the incredible natural diversity of the region: ‘After seeing films like this, I think it painful to have to await the arrival of outsiders, and for them to give an account of their powerful and negative visions of our landscapes and our things’ (1976b, pp.492–​3). He is not critical of the outsider view per se, rather that of an uneducated, un-​poetic, or hasty exoticising account. In contrast he considers the Mexican film Redes [The Wave, released in  1936], conceived by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez and American modernist photographer/​filmmaker Paul Strand, ‘magisterial’, a ‘revelatory’ film ‘which marked the start of Mexican cinema’s global ascent’.34 Redes was made during the turbulent but hopeful recovery following the Mexican Revolution, scripted as ‘[…] a “docu-​fiction” ’, which cast villagers in the roles (Berg 2013). Completed in 1935 by Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, Redes owes much of its style to Soviet montage and Italian neo-​realism, both of which later informed Third

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Cinema movements.35 The expansion of an ethno-​magic-​realist attitude, or orientation, into a substantial discourse does not happen overnight. Many of the themes overlap (already seen in Chapter 3) but it is in the lack of a sufficiently detailed and ‘revelatory’ aesthetic transformation that Carpentier finds failure.

Baroque cinema –​between novel and screen In his lecture at the Caracas Athenaeum, 22 May 1975, entitled ‘Lo barroco y real maravilloso’ Carpentier paraphrases Catalonian art historian Eugenio D’Ors’s distinction that Lo barroco (1944) is: ‘a spirit and not a historical style’; ‘a pulsating art […] that somehow breaks through its own borders’ (cited in Zamora and Faris, Carpentier 1995b, p.93). Perhaps this is another way of saying beyond –​ the something else besides, what in musical terms manifests as a ‘polychromatic iridescence’ (Carpentier 2001, p.96). This creative spirit, untethered and mobile, conjures the possibility of a resistance that is physically apparent, its affect invisible and unpredictable  –​like Voudou spirits, potential radicalism, liberty as yet unrealised. Carpentier puts his faith in this unpredictability, in the potential for art to resist assimilation into the global market, by asserting its inherently strange and incongruous blend. Most of the novelists from the continent’s baroque area (I include Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez and myself) express themselves in baroque language because it corresponds to Latin American sensibility. […] We went from pre-​Conquest baroque to Spanish baroque, worked by Indian artisans who added imaginative colours and a proliferation of form. (1985, p.107)

Carpentier’s baroque is a ‘constant of the human spirit’ (Carpentier 1995b, p.93), a ‘spirit’ that he identifies in writers as diverse as Caldéron, José Martí, Novalis, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lautréamont, Proust, and Byron. Romanticism and surrealism, he insists, also developed in the spirit of the baroque (something that is echoed by Jameson, several decades later), which folds everything into it, producing a new and self-​reflexive hybridity that breaks with the past through the past. Persuasion to emotional reaction is a key element of baroque art: ‘Miracles, wondrous events, supra-​natural phenomena are given an air of verisimilitude; the improbable and unlikely is rendered plausible, indeed convincing’ (Wittkower 1999, p.2). In Deleuze’s The Fold (1993) and Patricia McCormack’s Cinesexuality (2008), the baroque is likened to an unending series of pleats that folds back to its origins. It represents a materialisation of the process of perception as an event, where the symbiotic tie of image to the real is replaced by a potential sensorium of affect: ‘The resonance of any image to reality is irrelevant when arguing an image understood through the baroque. The baroque describes the way in which we are folded with the image, neither why nor what, but how’ (McCormack 2008, p.67). Demonstrating this theory through Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture, The Ecstasy

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of Saint Teresa de Avíla (1645–​1652), she draws attention to the crucial link between material form and viewer: Her [Teresa’s] ecstasy is an invocation of folds of desire present to herself but not to us, present to us but not to her […]. We perceive her as she cannot and she herself as we cannot, and always there is desire present to neither we nor she but present nonetheless. Aspects escape and are created by both. (2008, p.66, author’s emphasis)

In his lecture, Carpentier likens the effect of Bernini’s altarpiece to de Chirico’s ‘caged suns’, in which the framework –​the supporting columns –​insinuates entrapment but cannot contain or limit the energy within. He is excited by the naked surfaces, the ‘horror of the vacuum’36 which lies at the centre amidst the ‘proliferating nuclei’ of elaborate ornamentation. An ostentatious and passionate art form, the baroque drew attention to the wealth and ideology of its patrons, culminating in the Rococo style of the mid-​eighteenth century, and became for Carpentier and many other Latin American artists a symbol of resistance and spirit for a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, [that] has always been baroque […] faced with strange events that await us in that world of the marvelous real … we have forged a language appropriate to the expression of our realities. (Carpentier 1995b, pp.98; 107)

To bring the events of the baroque Latin American continent and its nightmares and dreams to the screen, Carpentier wanted detailed specificity: Only a bad writer would say that a landscape is remarkable. I want to know why it’s remarkable. I  don’t want them to talk about a magical reflection. I  want to know what colour the reflection is, its size, how clear it is. The words magical and remarkable tell me nothing. (in conversation with Chao 1998, p.95)37

Mexican producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce agrees, singling out Carpentier’s talent for bringing evocative detail to the page: His description in La consegración de la primavera of the Mexican pyramids, which I love and visit so often, is unique.We had never really seen them until he described them … it’s another kind of vision, another kind of perspective. (cited in Caymares and Castillo p.61)

The regeneration of the baroque for a maravilloso americano became an important cultural metaphor for prominent Latin American filmmakers such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Littín, and Humberto Solás. Carpentier’s novels situate lo maravilloso in the physical landscape, in syncretic architectural styles, and the

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mixing of races, ethnicities, and cultures. They are philosophical works, writ large, covering expansive episodes in the foundation of ‘modern’ Latin America. His discourse critiques abuses of power, while simultaneously highlighting the violent clashes of culture, class, and style in the history of the continent. Littín and Solás choose to adapt the dramatic narrative arcs of his protagonist-​led epics of power and corruption –​ El Recurso de Método [Reasons of State, 1978, Cuba-​Mexico-​France] and El siglo de las luces (1992, Cuba-​Spain-​France-​Russia) respectively. Each takes revolution and resistance as its central theme, remaining reasonably close to the epic political dimensions of its chosen novel with a style evocative of the period film drama. Carpentier, having cut his teeth writing about European avant-​garde cinema imagines lo real maravilloso americano to be mobile; a travelling camera, he insists, is more musical, and can produce a ‘crescendo’ of affect, where the poetry springs not from the transferred dialogue, but from the alchemical dance of movement, stars, and objects with the counterpoint between silence and the soundtrack.38 Writing in 1934, he recalls setting Alain Saint-​Ogan’s children’s tale of a magic ring to music for a radio programme, in which two children live for a few hours at a time in different time periods through history (Rodriguez 2012, p.29). This link between music, film, and lo real maravilloso americano, is pertinent, as these are factors that Jameson writes about in his theories of affect (on Wagner, the global arthouse film, and modernism). Paul Leduc’s Barroco (1989) convincingly captures the spirit of lo real maravilloso americano on a formal level, playing with the affective counterpoint between baroque proliferation and horror vacui in an adaptation of Carpentier’s novella Concierto barroco (1974).39 He lifts Carpentier’s consciousness off the page into a fluid journey of audio-​tactile-​visual montage that floats through six centuries and two continents. Leduc’s avant-​garde approach employs leitmotifs and syncretises religious and cultural themes to form a non-​linear film-​poem without dialogue, a rumination on the baroque that, to my mind, captures its spirit more affectively than Solás or Littín. The novella features an unnamed Mexican nobleman and his Cuban servant Filomeno, following their chance encounters with baroque composers Antonio Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, and George Friedrich Handel. Inspired by travellers’ tales of the New World, Vivaldi, imagined with typically Carpenterian irony, writes his opera Moctezuma (1733) thus creating a symbolic act of transculturation. From Leduc’s perspective, the story in Concierto barroco is quite slight, and he prefers to concentrate on its particular preoccupation with sound and image, and the encounters between the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds. When asked to comment on its baroque structure, Leduc retorts that his film is ‘mostly like a house of cards, or like listening to music; you do not have to understand, you have to imagine, in the end, only what is imagined remains’ (Rivera 1989, n.p.). In his foreword to the novella, Carlos Fuentes notes that Carpentier’s fascination with Utopian thought reveals that his true historical interest has little to do with facts and much to do with language and music as vehicles of the historical imagination. […] he creates a tonal centre from which the listener can choose and arrange his own composition. (1988: pp.12–​3)

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This illuminates the audio-​ visual journey undertaken in Leduc’s film, where music replaces spoken word, and every image appeals to be listened to. Leduc’s poetic adaptation of Concierto barroco is faithful to the spirit of Carpentier’s baroque imagination, which, channelled through the creative genius of Vivaldi, ‘transforms the bloody and brutal conquest and colonisation of Mexico into a mytho-​aesthetic form’ (Lambert 2004, p.134). Carpentier’s baroque symbolises a freedom of movement in its translation of the multiplicity of Latin American cultures and races. This philosophical liberation, based in the affective juxtapositions and folds of the baroque, suggests an ‘exaltation of spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado límite] (Carpentier 1995a, p.85), a spatial metaphor and type of negative dialectics that we can also claim for cinematic magic realism. We know from his personal correspondence40 that Carpentier greatly valued his friend Bataille’s ideas, especially the dissident surrealist’s concept of an extreme state, a limit point, which is closely linked to the concept of ecstasy –​‘the extreme limit of the “possible” ’ (p.40) detailed in Bataille’s L’expérience intérieure [Inner Experience, 1943]. The Lost Steps, for example, traces a journey to the farthest point that a human can go, drawing not on the unconscious, but the exterior reality: ‘as behind the symbolic mask of the indigenous “other” stands sacred reality that can in a moment of communication transform the subject’s non-​symbolic relationship with society’ (Brough-​Evans 2016, p.79).41 The novel –​ which is a direct response and challenge to Breton’s collection of critical essays, Les pas perdus (1924)42 –​is far more concerned with questions of existence: Carpentier’s own ‘inner experience’ is inspired by his 1947 adventure deep into the interior of the Venezuelan selva (jungle) via the upper Orinoco in Guyana, to the remote Venezuelan villages that Guahibo Indians call home, and which forms the basis of the novel: ‘spending time in Venezuela has allowed me to gain an even richer knowledge and understanding of this America that I love so deeply’ (Chao 1998, p.14743). Carpentier’s marvellous is arguably present in works that invoke simultaneous multiplicity on emotional and affective registers. A pact is drawn up between them and their viewers/​readers, who are rarely on terra firma. Take for example this description of a storm from The Lost Steps –​a common metaphor for the ‘histories of insurrection throughout the Caribbean’ (Deckard 2016, p.43): I recall those drops falling on my skin in pleasurable pinpricks as though they had been the first announcement –​which I did not understand at the time, of the encounter […] The origin of everything would have to be sought in the cloud that burst into rain that afternoon with such unexpected violence that its thunderclaps seemed those of another latitude. (The Lost Steps [TLS], pp.13–​4)

This storm, ironically, bursts over the city, the other latitude signalled, is, of course, that of the jungle which opens, for Carpentier, the realm of the senses: ‘As we emerged from the opalescent fog, which was turning green in the dawn, a phase of discovery began for me’ (p.77).44 The Lost Steps requires a particular sensitivity to

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movement and atmosphere: space is ribboned with mists, vapours, clouds, branches, pellucid light, and spirits: ‘Here the themes of fantastic art were three-​dimensional, they could be felt, lived’ (TLS, p.118). The jungle resists immediate interpretation; if we can feel the space intensely, then Carpentier’s allegorical critique of colonialism and of the Western myth of El Dorado peddled to the natives, becomes more affective. The narrator’s inner turmoil is described through the lithographic (and cinematic) practice of superimposition, his own subjectivity is, like the environment, a process in becoming: Within me another stirred who was also I, and who did not quite fit his own image; he and I were uncomfortably superimposed on one another, like plates handled by an apprentice lithographer in which the yellows and reds do not completely coincide. (TLS, p.234)

The double image corresponds to a magic-​realist dialectics in which nothing is fixed, and all potential is marvellous –​such a dialectics allows Carpentier to make leaps between the K’iche narrative Popul Vuh and Russian Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marcel Proust and Arnold Schoenberg, or de Chirico and Lam: ‘It can be both culmination and premonition’ (Chao 1998, pp.64–​5),45 where ‘newness’ borrows from, and is connected to earlier artworks. D’Ors’ characterisation of the baroque introduces themes of dynamism, secular pantheism, and ‘primitive’ culture, which Carpentier weaves into his own theorisation of the marvellous real. Where critics have opposed Carpentier’s idealisation of the Caribbean, exposing ‘Carpenterian theory’ and its ‘central thesis of America as a magical place’ (Libertella 1980 pp.18–​9),46 I argue that his marvellous is more nuanced and critical. He comprehends fully the difficulties of representing power structures, and ‘magic’ does not refer to something outside the ordinary; it relates to the extreme limit within every form of encounter. Power resides with fallible individuals, but also in the form of animals, objects, and ideas, all of which attest to multiple belief systems, time frames, histories, and races –​‘where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies’ (Carpentier 1995a, p.87). Magic is not one side of a binary, it is syncretic, the spirit of metamorphosis in perception and form: ‘An angel and maracas were not in themselves new. But an angel playing the maracas carved on the tympanum of a burned church was something I had never seen anywhere else’ (TLS, p.119). He suggests that the ‘unruly complexities’ require a new vocabulary, or better ‘a new optic’ to express the reality (Carpentier 1995b, p.104), a new ontological system from which the real can be scrutinised through the lens of the sacred. Carpentier’s ‘new optic’ is a challenge for filmmakers, one which Leduc understood in his poetic metamorphosis of language without dialogue. Carpenterian discourse bears little resemblance to the vernacular stereotype of magic(al) realism. There are flocks of butterflies, miraculous events heightened by extreme weather conditions, and extraordinary instances of metamorphosis. But rather than simply highlighting the permeability of reality, Carpentier gifts them to

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the reader in a transference of affect designed to provoke careful philosophical consideration. This is not a matter of the acceptance of the fantastic, it is a practice in form and revolution –​‘a dialectics of the marvellous’. For this reason, the most convincingly maravilloso of his works –​The Lost Steps –​captured the imagination of so many –​among them Hollywood actors Tyrone Power and Sean Penn, filmmakers Wojciech Has47 and Alea, who worked on a screenplay for a potential film adaptation. Angela Carter cites the novel as an early influence on her work (Haffenden 1984, p.36); and for Littín it becomes a talisman. Catching sight of himself in a shop window, heavily disguised to evade the Chilean authorities while filming there illegally, Littín recounts to Márquez how: At that moment, all I had left of my former identity was a tattered copy of The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpentier’s great novel, which I carried in my luggage on all my trips for the last fifteen years to help ease my fear of flying. (Márquez 1998, p.9)

Adaptations of magic-​realist novels, as I have already discussed, are prone to hackneyed and stereotypical approximates that stand in for the minutiae written into detailed ekphrastic passages –​(it has, for example, been noted that dialogue only makes up five percent of One Hundred Years (Santana-​Acuña 2019)). Márquez thought One Hundred Years unsuitable for adaptation: ‘I don’t want it to become a film, since the film viewer sees a face that he may not have imagined’ ([1981] 2007, p.204). Additionally, if, as Robert Stam suggests ‘The art of film adaptation partially consists in choosing which generic conventions are transposable into the new medium and which need to be discarded, supplemented, transcoded, or replaced’, then this method of approach is a non-​starter for magic realism, which resists genrification. In a 1987 interview for Cine Cubano Barbachano admits to a fear of novel-​to-​film adaptations, perhaps irreparably scarred by his failed attempts to adapt Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. Rulfo’s novel has often been cited as a precursor to Latin American literary magic realism, due in largest part to the realism of its ghosts. After continued efforts to adapt it, Barbachano claims: ‘There is a certain type of literature that can not be converted into an image’ (Caymares and Castillo, p.59); he suggests that this impossibility lies with the precision of detail set out by the author, which he fears will somehow be lost in translation. This view seems at odds with Barbachano’s insistence that Carpentier is a cinematic writer, that he ‘had a permanent infatuation with cinema’ that informed his way of looking at the world (p.60). But the issue lies not with the failure of the cinematic apparatus or cinematographer to capture the detail, but with the excess of affect generated by the original text, which then requires an altogether new way of presenting the information in order for it to heighten the sensory affect and its musicality.The opening chapter of de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life examines the counter practice of walking as a metaphor for the fabrication of a story, hewn from memories, displacements, condensations, and dreams of space.These ‘fragments of scattered semantic places’ –​ via detours through exotic distant places, legends, and relics:

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are composed with the world’s debris. […] Things extra and other […] insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. […] The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-​order. (1988, p.107)

This ‘collage’, produces anti-​ texts within the narrative, allowing for personal readings of the space to be filled by the travelling reader. Freud’s alignment of thought and magic is also pertinent here: Since what lies furthest apart both in time and space can without difficulty be comprehended in a single act of consciousness  –​so too, the world of magic has a telepathic disregard for spatial distance and treats past situations as though they were present. (‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought’ [1919] 2008, p.99)

Freud’s musings on animism and magic align closely with the instantaneous, present tense of the marvellous, its condensed, baroque affect begging to be technologically realised on film. It is interesting to read the brief preliminary treatment  –​‘Resumen de la novela’ –​that Alea made for a film version of The Lost Steps in 1990, three decades after his initial interest in adapting it. Description is kept to a minimum, and the magic flickers from moments of interiority where a gap is created for the reader: A.  tells Mouche about his meeting with the Curator. She is excited, and thinks it’s a good opportunity to do some travelling, and then bring back a fake instrument for the University. A. is outraged by this suggestion, and leaves the apartment. But outside, and alone, he reconsiders Mouche’s idea and goes back. When Mouche sees him returning she says ‘This idea was written on the wall’. The next day he goes to see the Curator again, to begin organising the journey. In the University, while he waits to be received by the Dean, he spends some time in a museum of photography and wax casts destined for History of Art students. ‘Stood before these familiar images I  asked myself if, in ages past, men had yearned for ages past, as I, that summer morning, yearned-​as if I had known them myself-​for ways of life that had been lost forever’. (Alea and Pailler 1997, p. 110)48

The tone is philosophical, enigmatic, but also critical of Mouche. The gap between an idea and its realisation hangs on the page; there is no real indication of how these scenes will look, sound, or feel from the notes. As a comparison, here is a passage from the novel where Carpentier is at pains to show that the discourse of lo real maravilloso americano is not a supplanted form of surrealism ‘oneiric “by

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arrangement” ’ (Carpentier 1995a, p.86). The musicologist-​narrator is sickened by his friend, Mouche ‘who believed in veiled mediums’, and her ‘dogmatic devotion to ideas and attitudes that she had picked up in the cafés of Saint-​Germain-​des-​ Prés’ (TLS, p.25). He sardonically recounts her conversations with artists, the story of the seahorse she picks up by chance and pretentiously links to Rimbaud, and the flimsy, superficial work she makes of avant-​garde practice. She ‘had acquired her intellectual formation in the great Surrealist bargain basement, found pleasure as well as profit in scanning the heavens in the mirror of books, juggling the beautiful names of the constellations. It was her present method of writing poetry: her only other attempt, with words pasted on plaquettes illustrated with photomontages of monsters and statues, had left her disillusioned […] about the originality of her inspiration’. (TLS p.25, author’s emphasis)

The dime store analogy, of surrealism as a cheap, soon-​to-​be-​outmoded fad, is later echoed on the narrator’s return to the city, when he enters the basement of the Venusberg bar: on whose walls were painted scenes of desert wastes, which seemed airless, strewn with skeletons, fallen arches, bicycles without riders, crutches that supported what seemed stone phalluses […] Farther off, a metronome, an hourglass, and a snail, rested on the cornice of a Greek temple whose columns were the legs of a woman wearing black stockings with a red garter as astragal. (TLS, p.253)

This pastiche of well-​known surrealist tropes (an approximation of Dalí, Ray, Tanguy, Duchamp, and others), recalls the surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s that he attended. In contrast to Alea’s notes, this passage carries the dynamism of film, packed with visual detail, and tactile, sensory affect. The histories of unpublished screenplays are fascinating, as Christian Janicot’s Anthology of Invisible Cinema demonstrates.49 There is something magical about their indeterminacy, created for a purpose that eludes them; their dynamism waits to be unleashed by the imaginative reader, or eventual filmmaker. Film scenarios penned by Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Buñuel, Magritte, Ruiz, and Samuel Beckett (among scores of others) never made it to celluloid. Carpentier died with the disappointment of never having seen The Lost Steps as a film, and the experience made him perpetually wary of interest in the rights to his works. In an unpublished letter to Alfredo Guevara in 1971, he tells of the persuasive calls to him made by Carlos Fuentes and Barbachano regarding two films to be based on Kingdom and El camino de Santiago: I’ve reacted with skepticism insofar as I’ve never had any luck when it comes to the cinema. I’ve even received considerable fees for films which were never

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made, as was the case with The Lost Steps, when Tyrone Power died as they began filming with Ava Gardener and Gina Lollobrigida.50 The fate of this never-​realised film seems apt for a novel based on lost steps. The novel’s publishing history with Alfred Knopf, Inc. in America reveals further interesting factors. After its initial release in Mexico in 1953, the English translator Harriet de Onis persuaded editor Herbert Weinstock to publish the then unknown Cuban writer. There are several clues as to why Power might have been seduced by the novel, including Ralph Ellison’s review, which had been elicited by the publishers for marketing purposes: What is the meaning of human society? …What really … is man? … I like it too that the hero … sets out … in search for a primitive funeral instrument –​ only to find himself swept along labyrinthine paths which lead him to a concern with those life-​preserving [sic] motives with which men throughout the ages have asserted their humanity against the crush of destiny. In this lies not only the magic of the narrative art … but at a time when the possibilities of rejuvenation which the art forms of so-​called primitives have offered Western artists appear to have been exhausted, Carpentier suggests that a more empathetic examination of those sources which inspired Picasso and Stravinsky might reveal important secrets for our most needed resuscitation.51 The vocabulary used here is evocative –​labyrinthine, magic, resuscitation, rejuvenation, empathetic, destiny –​with Ellison cutting to the quick of the novel’s philosophy, opening up the question of spatial travel as a means to challenge established, historical order. Ellison breezes through the superficial reading of the novel as exoticist, surmising that to understand the histories of Black and Indian culture in the Caribbean requires an intellectual journey to the source (a key theme of the novel). Carpentier desired above all to preserve the geopolitical heterogeneity of Latin American cultures through his work, and I  believe he saw film contributing to this project; take for example the following critique from an unpublished letter to Power regarding the adaptation of The Lost Steps: When people want to evoke the atmosphere of Latin America on film, there tend to be a few details that bring a sense of inauthenticity to the picture. What happens is that scriptwriters, along with directors and designers, are looking for ‘a touch of colour’, ‘the picturesque’, and end up with a Latin America which no longer corresponds to reality. This shocks our audiences and encourages ironic criticism from the press, which harms the film itself commercially. Equally, nothing makes us laugh more than characters who, speaking in English, use the terms ‘Señor’ and ‘Señorita’ to add a touch of colour, given that ‘Señor’ tends to disappear from the Spanish language in many Latin American countries-​like Cuba-​where it’s very rarely used. I’d get rid of all the ‘Señors’ and ‘Señoritas’ in the text. […]

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I’d also completely change the look of the Latin American city that is arrived at on page 39. What’s tragic about our revolutions is that they erupt in cities with modern architecture, with Picasso paintings and stained glass windows by Ferdinand [sic] Leger. […]52 Carpentier sold the rights to Power in 1955 after their initial meeting in Mexico, and the comments above pertain to Irwin Shaw’s draft treatment, which he must have received late in 1958, after Power’s correspondence from Beverly Hills.Tyrone, back in Los Angeles is eager to access photographs from Carpentier’s Orinoco trip to fully visualise what is unimaginable to him in the setting. Carpentier makes it very clear that the film must be properly informed, and reflect the customs and beliefs across the region, as well as the syncretic barroco americano of the modern cities. Racial mixing; interpenetration of Catholicism, African and indigenous rituals; European architecture jostling with rural huts and religious totems and altars –​require geopolitical work in order to fully appreciate their complexities –​ the inverse of the affectless proliferation of images that Jameson considers postmodern. What is the role of magic or the marvellous here? If ‘In magic, something is like something else in a way that is not inert repetition, but rather it is in repetition precisely that power resides’ (Wilson 2013, pp.8; 14), we might think about the ways in which capitalism accelerates cultural production  –​where use value resides uncannily in the object. But what if, rather than ‘describe the insidious power of capital’ complicit with a reification of culture, magic here sides with ‘the work of the resistance’ instead (p.31)? Lévi-Strauss ponders whether a travel writer can truly ever escape stereotyping their experience.Visiting a ‘featureless suburb’ of Lahore, he laments ‘a lost local colour’ in the busy market stalls filled with Western commodities: From time to time, for a second or two and over the space of a few yards, an image or an echo would seem to surge up from the past, for instance, the clear serene tinkling in the little street where the gold and silver beaters worked, as if some genie with a thousand arms were absent-​mindedly striking a xylophone. (1976, pp.49–​50)

This moment of breaking, of pausing the action (through sound) seems marvellous. The sound repeats, a counter-​rhythm to the movements of the marketplace; it too signals the sign of labour, and yet it draws the mind back to tradition and authenticity, to the source of the labour. Sound, and its absence, is crucial for the musicologist-​ narrator of The Lost Steps: ‘Silence is an important word in my vocabulary.Working with music, I have used it more than men in other professions’ (TLS, p.109). He is acutely attuned to the jungle’s sounds, but when deep in thought sound vanishes from his surroundings: Nothing makes a noise, nothing collides with nothing, nothing moves or vibrates. When a fly in its flight crashed into a spider web, its buzz of horror

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took on a sound of thunder. Then the air grew calm again from horizon to horizon without a sound. (TLS, p.110)

As he sits and watches, images remain within his vision, but sound is removed or amplified according to what is happening simultaneously in his mind. Film can capture this effect by ‘applying’ silence to scenes with obvious movement and sound. It can also suggest the presence of sound through movement, as achieved in silent films  –​for supernatural elements the movement of objects by natural forces are emphasised. Magic realism repeats a synaesthetic experience: The darkness trembled with fears and slithers. […] A grotesque bass set up a laugh in a hidden glade. […] And there were metal combs, saws whining through wood, harmonica reeds, the quavering stridulation of the crickets, which seemed to cover the whole earth. (TLS, p.162)

An orchestral cacophony overwhelms the senses and confounds the narrator’s sense of rhythm (he measures everything by metronome). Image and sound are in counterpoint, the jungle brought to life in its myriad facets through the distorting perception of the onlooker. He aches to capture the marvellous reality first-​hand, like Rouch or Deren, to feel alive. The Lost Steps is dedicated to recording the experience of marvellous counter currents, where encounter after encounter leads the musicologist-​narrator to fundamentally despise his life back in the city, although at no point do the disparate realities of the city-​forest petrify into a tired dichotomy. The novel’s nameless city is a parodic amalgam of Paris or New York, whereas the rarity of the natural environment corresponds to real places: ‘beyond […] Puerto Anunciación, the landscape reproduces the very precise vision of little-​known and rarely, if ever, photographed places’ (Carpentier 2001, p.x) –​places which Carpentier visited and photographed in 1947. He described the Orinoco as: ‘a physical manifestation of the passage of time […] a recurrence in time’ (Chao 1998, p.152), and as he descends towards it for the first time, it seems to materialise the longed for estado limite: […] suddenly, in the clarity of a wide ray of sun, the Orinoco appeared to the east, closing the clear horizon […] Father Orinoco […] seems to have broken the earth with a gigantic plough’s tooth: it seems to have divided it, to have thrown it to both sides of its waters, like something feeble, of a very petty nature.53 A marvellous revelation: ‘For the full experience of wonder […] The object must be unexpectedly, instantaneously seen for the first time’ (Fisher 1998, p.17). This literal eruption readies him for what is to follow, but it is only possible because his vantage point is from an aeroplane –​enabling a manipulation of view that would

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be very much at home in Foto-​Auge –​the Orinoco yields to this gaze, despite its power to dominate the earth. This is the paradox of Carpenterian discourse. In the Fundación Alejo Carpentier archive is a large photo album labelled in gold ‘Escenario De Los Pasos Perdidos De Alejo Carpentier’, which contains 28 black and white photographs of his voyage on the Orinoco River (I have no idea whether Power ever received the negatives he desired). This fascinating object provides a marvellous link between the novel, the physical, and the mental quest into la selva. As one would expect from having read the novel, the photographs detail the force of the natural habitat –​river, mountains, and plateaus –​‘Dos de las Más Singulares Mesetas De La Gran Sabana’  –​the jungle and its tangled trees, and ‘the highest waterfall in the world’ –​La Caída Del Angel –​from ground and aerial perspectives. The habitat sustains people living in stone huts with thatched roofs, alongside the modern façade of a church with a hexagonal domed tower. The Indians appear in a number of the shots, dressed in loincloths, a young boy carrying a dead bird, and a portrait of Carpentier with Fray Diego De Valdearenas (the source for the novel’s Fray Pedro) captioned: ‘El Padre Valdearnas Prefigura Un Personaje De Los Pasos Perdidos’. Bright sunshine renders the tree trunks brilliant white, the high contrast creating striking and oblique juxtapositions within the landscape. The viewer sees Carpentier in a fishing boat on the river, just as we imagine the novel’s narrator looking for signs in the twisted roots of the banks, or Mexican artist Remedios Varo’s (1908–​63) androgynous female explorer in Exploración de las Fuentes del río Orinoco (Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco, 1959), which seems to illustrate the central voyage of Carpentier’s novel. The figure, surrounded by tree trunks, floats in an amphibian boat, which is magically devised from a suit jacket and fishy gills. They stare with melancholy beyond the tree in the foreground, which opens into a small alcove where a three-​legged table holds a small glass goblet fashioned as a fountain. Both Varo and Carpentier had travelled to Venezuela in 1948, a coincidence that has not been overlooked (Sanchez 2006). To consider these two works of art in one breath reveals the significance of the quest, for each was interested in dreams, the alchemical power of nature and the cosmos, and the traditions of oral and metaphysical histories. As with Carpentier’s descriptive prose, Varo seems to paint ‘with her gaze’ capturing the immediate reality before her, forming a ‘rare poetry […] enigmas […] They are not mysterious paintings, they are marvelous’ (Paz cited in Lozano 2000, p.11). The novel is a ‘passage in time’, but also a marvellous counter current. Carpentier interrupts human-​manufactured concepts of temporality through his theory of ‘mimetism-​magic-​rhythm’, a ‘primitive rhythmic expression’ (TLS, p.20) of reality –​specifically the sounds of birds and animals –​reproduced by Native Indian peoples of Brazil and Venezuela. If ‘all of the stages of civilization known to humans throughout history can be witnessed in the present in the American continent’, the voyage down the Orinoco could well inspire an evasion of time, an escape via the medieval rhythms of the Venezuelan jungle; but Carpentier requires his reader to ‘live their epoch’, to suffer, and to question inspired by this affective evasion (Carpentier and Lemus 1985, p.172).The

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all-​at-​once-​ness of a marvellous reality is experiential, poetic, and philosophical, just like Varo’s painting. A triple V marks a secret entrance into the jungle:  ‘I watched for the three V’s one above another, at the height of a man’s breast if he were standing on the water’ (TLS, p.269). This carved sign is enigmatic (made by whom so high above the water?) but could also allude to VVV, the surrealist magazine published in New York between 1942 and 1943, which is not unlikely, given that the novel is a deliberate challenge to Les pas perdus. In the preface, Carpentier insists that the triple incision marking the entrance to the Guacharaca Channel really exists, superimposing his own reality over the narrator’s, who has ‘lost the portal to existence’ (Brennan 2001a, ix). This mark indexes the events that are to unfold, seeming to signal an inevitable desire for an inviolate, unblemished moment in time prior, yet future, to the anguish of modern life. On his return to the city at the end of the novel, the narrator relives this desire through its iterations: I was here tonight as a bird of passage, remembering the future, the vast land of possible Utopias, the possible Icarias. Because my trip had upset my ideas of past, present, future. […] Now I believed only in the present of the intact; in the future of that which was created face to face with the planets of Genesis. (TLS, pp.255–​6)

Carpentier’s narrator, like Eisenstein or Murnau, discovers the possibility of lo real maravilloso americano as a counterpoint to capitalist time, where the future is always already past. The narrator, like a hummingbird, hovers, realising that if there is no singular reality: ‘The paradoxical essence of “lo real maravilloso” is precisely this –​to reproduce or invent the magic-​seeing perspective of the “believers” […] through the refined use of language’ (Janney 1981, p.116). This is an audio-​tactile-​ visual language, indebted to avant-​garde form in theatre, painting, and film. Back in 1925, Carpentier had singled out Ernst as a pioneer of the marvellous, particularly for his textural series Histoire naturelle (c.1925, published 1926) –​‘to look for Max Ernst, is to discover the secret history of the world’,54 and it is fitting that the 1963 Penguin edition of the novel has Ernst’s La grande forêt (1927) printed on the cover. Dominated by a ringed solar eclipse, Ernst’s La grande forêt is mysterious and otherworldly. In an essay for Minotaure in 1934, Mystères de la forêt, Ernst describes the forest as ‘savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow’ (Caws 2004, p.65). Such correspondences augment the indeterminability and magic of the jungle as a ‘discursive space’ is characteristic of magic realism (Faris 2004, p.40). Carpentier refuses to fill in the gaps (narrativising) in order to reproduce ‘the secret history of the world’ and his love of the avant-​ garde provides him with an intermedial language with which to work against the grain of narrative cohesion.

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Explosion in a Cathedral: the Carpenterian epic as Third Cinema? In 1969, Alfredo Guevara writes to Carpentier and his wife that he had tasked Espinosa, en route to the Venice Film Festival, with carrying three Carpentier novels –​ The Lost Steps, Kingdom, and Explosion –​to give to Glauber Rocha, who was interested in filming ‘a Carpentier’ –​most likely The Lost Steps or Kingdom. He writes of his hope that Rocha will pave the way for Solás to be able to film Explosion; if realised, ‘we will have finally thrown down the bridge between the page and the screen, something yet to happen with Alejo’.55 As I already mentioned, Buñuel was interested in adapting The Lost Steps, and there is an undated note in the Carpentier archives from him to ‘Alex’ as he called Carpentier, arranging to meet at his hotel (I would like to imagine that it was to discuss this very matter!). The profound engagement with his work by a number of filmmakers whose art grew with the idea of a radical Latin American Cinema, is more significant to the story of magic-​realist cinema than the actual adaptations. These intersections demonstrate clear affinities between film and lo real maravilloso americano, which leads to the ‘boom’ era of magic(al) realism, and the concerns of Third Cinema. This is definitely due to his political stance, but Carpentier brings a baroque spirit of radical audio-​visual-​tactile language to the discourse of magic(al) realism that is cinematically irresistible. Take for example the epic artistry of Explosion. In the opening paragraphs, the terrifying apparatus that dominated the French Revolution –​the guillotine –​is juxtaposed against the stars of the Milky Way as seen from the perspective of the Caribbean. While this pairing of the cosmos with an instrument of terror marks a real point of convergence in the mise-​en-​scène, the symbolic combination of stars and blood suggests a fundamental clash of cultures and ideology that is magic-​realist. The deeper implications of this juxtaposition are highlighted in the novel’s exploration of world belief systems in the face of colonial violence. Upon his first glimpse of the guillotine, central protagonist Victor Hugues stands as if turned to stone: ‘Together with Liberty, the first guillotine was arriving in the New World’ (Explosion, p.131). Despite the clear historical time stamp, this cinematic image also refers to Carpentier’s twentieth-​century concerns –​modernity, modernisation, and revolution. In Solás’s adaptation similarly: ‘The ghastly, sinister body of the guillotine is an image which looms over the whole film’.56 Across more than two decades (and, by extension, centuries) Carpentier’s epic philosophical novel charts the arrival of the twin arms of Enlightenment and Revolution as they crack open the Caribbean –​Cuba, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Haiti –​with a force equal to the cyclones and earthquakes natural to its climate. It is a story of a historically bloody colonisation of native peoples, enslavement and miscegenation, as much as it is a philosophical treatise on the politics of the twentieth century. Desire for, and abuse of power often emerges with the most unlikely character arcs on all sides (some factual, others fictional), proceeding in a contrapuntal dance of uneven cultural syncretism. On Carpentier’s formal translations of history Neil Larsen notes that ‘what one “experiences” in reading [Explosion] is less the

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phenomenal form of history as such […] than its random epiphenomena’, effects which seem ‘more wedded to the present than to the past’ (2001, pp.116–​7). Larsen sees the epiphenomena and meandering paragraphs as Carpentier’s narrativisation of automatic writing: ‘[which] results from the collision of past and present, not merely of free-​associated images; and the ensuing alteration of consciousness is at the same time an involuntary act of remembering … or of glimpsing the future’ (p.132). Untethered to reason or causation, epiphenomena expand the experience of the reader, running parallel to the events of narrative drama of the novel’s ‘physical’ world and its materialisation of thought. Carpentier presents hundreds of ways to expand and divert our attention: costumes, architectural detail, objects, collected bric-​a-​brac, fragments of poems, songs, historical tracts, plastic arts, and moments of interiority suspended in an atmosphere of unreality. The rapid and migrating chaos of the failed 1789 Revolution, which brings disease, slavery, tyranny, and death to the Caribbean, is presented through characteristic Carpenterian montage and dry humour at a gallop. He plays with the thought of modernity, and the idea of liberation and when the novel is eventually adapted by Solás, these aspects are heightened: ‘the film’s circularity expository favored the crystallization of the philosophical parabola: an emotional and reflective approach to the value and cost of the revolution as process of social and historical change’ (Cabellero 2008, p.52). The English language title Explosion in a Cathedral takes after the seventeenth-​ century painting of the same name that features so prominently in the novel, attributed to Monsù Desiderio.57 The painting is actually titled King Asa of Judah Destroying the Idols, which completely changes the genesis of the depicted explosion, removing the suggestion that it is an occurrence outside of human control. In the novel, Esteban and Sofía are both struck by the ‘silent cataclysm’ and ‘terrible suspense’ of Desiderio’s cathedral frozen at the point of explosion on the canvas (Explosion, pp.18–​9). On its second appearance, in Chapter 5, the painting seems to Esteban to have prefigured many of the events that he witnessed sailing through the Caribbean:  ‘he felt bewildered by the multiplicity of the interpretations to which this prophetic, anti-​plastic, un-​painterly canvas, brought to his house by some mysterious chance, lent itself ’ (p.253). By the end of the novel, after the house has been emptied, ‘Fresh air circulated through the rooms, driving out witchcraft and sorcery’ (p.343). Only the painting remains on the wall, its broken columns barely visible against the blood-​coloured background, which seems to echo the bloodshed brought with each stroke of the guillotine blade. The painting embodies Carpentier’s approach to his epic subject matter, with the columns and their spontaneous moment of ruin referencing a multitude of political and cultural parallels –​the revolution itself, the fragile yet dominating presence of Catholicism, architectural splendour at the expense of enslaved labourers, the conflation of baroque, Byzantine and Romantic passions, and de Chirico’s ‘caged’ vitality. Even Esteban’s realisation that the ‘Promised Land’ is but a myth relies on a third-​hand set of words for expression, citing Ogé reciting the words of his master Martinez de Pasqually: ‘ “A human being can only become enlightened if we awaken the divine faculties within him, kept dormant by the predominance of mater” ’ (p.261). Solás’s

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adaptation Le siècle des lumières explores Carpentier’s idea of a ‘corruption’ of revolution but updates the politics for the ‘failure of socialism’ in 1990s Europe (Solás in Martin and Paddington 2001, p.13), and as a partial reflection on the economic downturn in Cuba. But as Jason Weiss observes: the book was more than a critique of revolutions; rather, what is most significant is conveyed by the irony of its original title. […] At the close of the eighteenth century the looming presence of the guillotine, and the last waves of the Reign of Terror, were the bitter legacy brought over from the land of reason, suggesting that indeed nothing had changed since the Conquest. (2003, p.74)

For Solás, the originator of the Cine pobre festival,58 there was a certain political urgency to re-​writing history for contemporary Cuban audiences. For maximum impact, he re-​uses Carpentier’s baroque marvellous: I believe the Baroque style is one in which there are no orthodox rules. It is a free style that has made the analogy between the present and the past possible. The Baroque curve took me from one period to the next in non-​linear  terms. (Solás in Martin and Paddington 2001, p.162)59

Solás and cinematographer Livio Delgado achieve non-​linearity with fluid 360-​ degree swoops and mobile shots, zooms, and intercutting between domestic scenes and the battlefields. The effect is clash of soft and romantic (the white billowing sleeves of costumes repeat the sails of the fleets) and a spontaneous pandemonium of violence. The original running time spans 4 hours and 7 minutes, across four episodes, the television format allowing for the sense and weight of the subject matter to be delivered intimately, with time for the senses to dwell on the significance of the myriad objects within the frame. Caballero suggests that the film ‘submerges the gaze of the spectator in a strange perspective, incapable of losing its critical, reflexive distance’ (2008, p.54), a self-​conscious foregrounding of the form and language of cinema. This magic-​realist transference is an abstraction of the political, whereby the historical material takes on a strange, quasi-​ fictional affect that then becomes more readily applicable and relevant to the contemporary viewer. Distant revolutions are stripped of epic status in favour of framing their transferable elements for a present moment in time. As Borges once observed: They say that the doctrines of the transmigration of souls and of circular time or the Eternal Return were suggested by paramnesia, by a sudden, disturbing impression of having already lived the present moment. In Buenos Aires, at 6:30 and 10:45p.m., there is not a single movie-​goer […] who does not experience that impression.60

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Solás acknowledged that elitism and pressures of consumerism plagued the post-​ revolution Cuban film industry, and that those involved with the ICAIC, were encouraged to employ avant-​garde and mainstream styles from North America and Europe (Burton 1986, p.144). French new wave and Italian neo-​realism films were influential, although the majority of revolutionary films of the period were documentaries.61 But as Solás explains: ‘these influences alienated us from our indigenous cultural forms and … the explosive dynamism of the Revolution and its goals for artistic culture’ (p.145). European film seemed ‘degrading, useless obsolete. I closed my eyes to all forms of artistic expression that came from the developed world, and this definitely limited me’ (p.146). Aléa meanwhile, who had studied in Italy, found that Italian neo-​realism provided an initial model for his filmmaking, a means of capturing an unstable reality that resonates with Carpentier’s marvellous: ‘All we had to do was set up a camera in the street and we were able to capture a reality that was spectacular in and of itself extremely absorbing, and laden with meaning’ (p.124). Littín’s Reasons of State accents the personal politics of exile within the spiralling, chaotic behaviour of Carpentier’s crazed and decadent dictator: I want to make one think about the dictator’s conduct: there is nothing extraordinary about him, he acts like an ordinary petit bourgeois who dominates his family –​he controls his country in the same way. […] Because the dictator is not an individual phenomenon, he is not his own creation, but is a product of society.62 The source text is much more daring than Carpentier’s other novels, the lampooning of intellectuals and decadents in power is brutal and unrelenting, and hilariously funny, and as Katherine S. Kovacs observes, many of the jokes and barbs reveal ‘the underlying mechanisms of dictatorship’ through the paratextual layers of the props and mise-​en-​scène, and surprising choices in montage (Kovacs 1980, p.25). As with Alea’s adaptation, the scale of the battles is wrought through distanciation, in the counterpoint between spectacle and slowness; far less romantic than the storytelling in Explosion, Reason’s fabular morality feels less like a piece of heritage cinema, and closer to a work of global art cinema: We want a diffusion of light.We want the light to break the characters a little, to destroy the setting where they live so as to reveal these corrupted people who live in a sort of permanent play of mirrors. (Chanan 1976, p.11)

After Littín’s edits to Reasons post-​Cannes Film Festival (where it was nominated for best foreign film), Carpentier wrote to Guevara that he found the new version ‘fast-​moving, light, and clear’ and was bowled over by its favourable reception.63 Although Jameson never mentions screen adaptations of Carpentier’s novels, it is clear that they fall into the category of world cinema that he defines to be magic-​realist, and not simply the ‘boom’ aesthetic of the 1960s  –​of which he

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was acerbically dismissive: ‘There is no such thing as the “boom”, all “boom” is ephemeral, transient and unsound’ (Carpentier quoted in Chao 1998, p.67). His is a diffuse and subtle discourse, politically subversive, formally innovative, and, despite his profound geopolitical allegiances, untethered and roaming. He has the wit and delivery of the journalist he trained to be, but with the musicality and poetry of a philosopher. His understanding of rhythm helps him to express a hybridity that he never (knowingly) intends to stand for a dilution of region, ethnicity, race, or culture. Elena Garro in her reading of Alfonso Arau’s 1992 film of Laura Esquivel’s acclaimed Mexican magic(al)-​realist novel Como agua para chocolate [Like Water for Chocolate, 1989] muses: In demanding and consuming endless reproductions of magic realism, the dominant U.S. Culture condemns a lumpen, undifferentiated pan-​Latin culture to repetition of an aesthetic that, from the point of view of the rational, industrial, and dominant cultures that consume the images, both defines it as Third World and fixes its status there. Magic realism becomes not a challenge to Western rationality and scientific discourse but rather reaffirms their hegemonic position of power. (2007, p.303)

Arau’s film is part of this ‘endless reproduction’, where emphasis is on the sexy, Latinx chemistry at the heart of the adaptation, and the magical spell cast in the making of the chocolate; Mexican specificity has all but vanished into the antithesis of a Carpenterian character –​a blank reification. The film did exceptionally well in the United States further perpetuating a popular (and populist) pastiche of the mode, emptied of any criticality or depth. Garro cites Paul Willemen’s term ‘cultural apartheid’ (Willemen 1994) to define the film’s ‘fossilizing magic realist aesthetic’ and asks whether it is possible to view a asks whether it is possible to view a ‘First Cinema film in a Third Cinema way’ (Garro 2007, pp.207;303). Arau’s film views Esquivel’s novel in a ‘First Cinema’ way. Carpentier, despite his desire for success, was never interested in this kind of vernacular, even in the film criticism of the 1920s. Similarly, Jameson, to whom the baton of magic-​realist discourse now passes, did not align magic-​realist films with the ‘First World’ but with the ‘Third’64 –​taking inspiration from Carpentier, and the Latin American filmmakers of the 1960s, in ‘a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived’ (1986a, p.301), emphasising the role of the participant. In 1986, Jameson also wrote an article for Social Text entitled ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, famously arguing that literature written outside the ‘Western’ canon  –​a ‘looking at ourselves from outside’ can rejuvenate and regain a ‘depth of experience’ that he considers lost or blocked in first world works. He purports that despite employing the traditions and styles of the Western novel, ‘third-​world’ writers manage to produce texts that are ‘alien to us at first approach’ (1986b, p.69), and this ‘alien-​ness’ becomes a point of interruption, pause, or shock. This type of ‘newness’ is not simply the exoticism of unknown geographies and cultures but resides in an overt politicization of texts

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that combine public concerns with deeply subjective states of being. A ‘third-​world’ text, he argues, even those with stream of consciousness narrative segments, typically projects a politically invested view: ‘individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-​world culture and society’ (p.69). ‘Third World Literature’ caused considerable consternation and dispute among academics in postcolonial studies departments after its initial publication (Lazarus 2004).65 Frantz Fanon reminds us that: culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. (2001, p.196)

More urgently:  ‘Recent migratory floods, with their massive uprooting of peoples and cultures, have done a lot to weaken the paradigm of the nation-​state’ (Mosquera 1995, p.12). It is not in dispute that Jameson feels these sentiments acutely, and he makes every effort to indicate the ‘provisional’ status of his examination of ‘neglected’ literatures (Jameson 1986b, p.68) but it simply fails to move as nimbly as Carpentier’s discourse: ‘the only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-​ class rock, women’s literature, gay literature, the roman québécois, the literature of the Third World’ (1992, p.31); and he believes that the production of such collective work can only be possible to the degree to which those cultures have not become fully subject to the capitalist system. His analysis of national allegory functions as a placeholder; one that he knows is insufficient. In 2019, Allegory and Ideology revisits ‘Third World Literature’ with an additional commentary that acknowledges the changes in world systems and industrialisation since the twentieth century, concluding his commentary with a powerful return to the ‘unrepresentability of the collective’ first world, which he still insists can be illuminated and critiqued through ‘a radically different [third] system’ (2019, p.214). As Willemen observes, the manifestoes of ‘Third Cinema’ had ‘fused a number of European, Soviet and Latin American ideas about cultural practice into a new, more powerful […] programme for the political practice of cinema’ (1989, p.5). In Argentina, 1969, documentary filmmakers Solanas and Getino proposed a radical approach to art for and by the people in their influential manifesto ‘Hacia un Tercer Cine’ [Towards a Third Cinema].66 They channelled Fanon’s ‘third’ phase in the evolution of art in colonised nations,67 where the dismantling of rules and boundaries established first by the settlers, and then by their replacement dictator-​style governments, was the ultimate aim.With the ‘perfect’ capitalist, bourgeois Hollywood system as the first phase, and the nihilistic European new wave art cinema of the ‘petit-​bourgeois’68 as the second, ‘Third Cinema’ sought to turn the perception of

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an ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘imperfect’ cinema back onto audiences. The authors argue that revolutionary filmmaking must resist the ‘pseudo-​objectivity’ of first world mass media and mainstream art in order to create films that remind spectators in Latin America, or Africa, or Asia, that they must always challenge the familiar (Solanas and Getino [1969] 2014, p.241). Thus, not only narrative content, but even the idea of an imperfect ‘look’ to the film –​canted framing, degraded film stock, or a deliberate distortion of the aspect ratio or frames per second decreed by Hollywood –​ was employed to define this uncompromising art form. As Julio García Espinosa exclaimed: ‘There can be no “impartial” or “uncommitted” art, there can be no new and genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the “elite” is done away with once and for all’ ([1969] 2014, p.223). This was not just a counter cinema, but also a political mode bent on reinventing the rules for nations evolving at different rates, embodied in Solanas and Getino’s La Hora de los Hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968].69 Jameson’s regard for the filmmakers of Third Cinema is apparent, but it is not their work or their struggle that form the basis of his theory of magic-​realist film, but key examples of marginal (collective) and allegorical art cinema of the late twentieth-​century, which I discuss in Chapter 5.

Notes 1 Carpentier was born to a French father and Russian mother, spending his first seven years in Cuba, before moving to Paris with his parents and studying at the Lycée Jeanson de Sailly. 2 ‘Jean Cocteau y la Estética del Ambiente’. [Jean Cocteau and the Aesthetics of the Environment] Originally published in Social 10:7. 7 July 1925 (Carpentier, 1975a, pp.28–​9). 3 Published as ‘La cinematograría de avanzada’ [Cinematography of the Avant-​Garde] in Carteles, 4 November 1928 (Carpentier 1978b, p.355). 4 ‘La cinematograría de avanzada’ (1978b, pp.352–​7). 5 Carpentier’s intermedial approach to the arts hinges on a central motivation, which is to express world culture, and specifically the cultures of Latin America as a dynamic dialectic, reliant on the mutual rhythms and arrangements of contrapunto, or counterpoint, a term used by Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz to describe the modernisation process that altered Cuban manufacture forever. In counterpoint to the harvesting of tobacco ‘the voluntary gift of nature’ used by the natives, Ortiz pits the feudalist labour and manufacture brought by the coloniser in the form of the sugar plantation. Sugar, he argues can only be produced through labour and machinery (Ortiz 1940). Carpentier employs Ortiz’s term to express dynamism between two distinct concepts, be those in musical composition, painting, film or a sociological definition of ethnic difference. Commonality in avant-​ garde collaboration, for example, is evidence of a form of contrapunto where mutuality and difference inspire a collective work that gestures towards a continual process of change and reaction, rather than one of completion. 6 Originally published in El Nacional. Caracas, 26 May 1953 (Carpentier 2012, pp. 225–​7). Trans. RB. 7 ‘El cine en la nueva Rusia’, Carteles, 7 October 1928 (Carpentier 1978b, pp.345–​51; p.  347). In classical mythology there are nine muses:  Calliope muse of epic song; Clio muse of history; Euterpe muse of lyric song; Melpomene muse of tragedy; Terpsichore muse of dance; Erato muse of erotic poetry; Polyhymia muse of sacred song; Urania muse

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of astrology; and Thalia muse of comedy.There are numerous interpretations of the tenth muse –​Plato refers to Sappho as the tenth muse. 8 The journal reported on culture from Europe and North America, while simultaneously expressing a self-​awareness of the dangers of such an influence. 9 ‘Without aiming to create a movement, minorismo quickly became a spiritual climate. Thanks to its efforts, exhibitions, concerts, and lecture cycles were organised; magazines were published; personal contact with intellectuals in Europe and the Americas were established, which represented “new ways of thinking and seeing” ’ (Carpentier [1946] cited in Brennan 2001, p.26). 10 Desnos lent Carpentier his passport in order to sail for Paris joining him later on the same boat, having claimed to officials to have lost his papers (Carpentier 1985, 77–​8). Accounts of their friendship are recounted in various sources, most notably:  Dumas (1987) and Conley (2003). 11 Robert Desnos, ‘La admirable música cubana’ Le Soir (cited in Chao 1998, p.182). 12 Carpentier’s journalism can be divided into five types: (1) 1922–​1928 articles written in Cuba (he started writing for Social in 1924, the same year he became chief editor of Carteles); (2)  1928–​1939 articles written during his years in Paris for Le Cahier, Bifur, DOCUMENTS, Comoedia; (3) 1939–​1945 articles written from a fresh perspective on his return to Cuba; (4) 1945–​1959 articles written primarily for El Nacional de Caracas in Venezuela; and (5) articles written after 1959 from Cuba, and during his role as Cultural Advisor for the Cuban Embassy in Paris. 13 For details on Carpentier’s journalism and further bibliographical information held at Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, see García-​Carranza  2014. 14 Carpentier,‘Man Ray, Pintor y Cineasta deVanguardia’ Social 13:7. July 1928. (1975a,  p.79). 15 Carpentier, ‘Man Ray: Pintor y Cineasta de Vanguardía’ (1975a, p.81). 16 Carpentier, ‘Man Ray: Pintor y Cineasta de Vanguardía’ (1975a, p.80). 17 Carpentier, ‘Man Ray: Pintor y Cineasta de Vanguardía’ (1975a, p.81) 18 See Michael Löwy ‘ “The speaking flame”: the Romantic connection’ in Fijalkowski and Richardson (eds.), 2016, pp. 81–​91. 19 These are all participants in the ñañigo ceremonies brought by the African slaves to Cuba. Diablitos, are principal dancers in Carpentier’s version, the Iyamba is chieftain of the village; and the Jimaguas, who strangle the businessman, are twin deities of Afro-​ Cuban witchcraft (all explained in Ross’s notes for her translation of The Miracle of Antaquillé 1980). In his notes for the ballet, Carpentier’s instructions for the masked businessman and Jimaguas to seem monstrous and unreal, ‘moving like robots’ and for the dances to be carried out with ‘frenetic rhythm’ in contrast to the ‘perfect synchrony’ of the cane cutter peasants (Carpentier and Ross [1937] 1980, pp.56–​7) is clearly influenced by the European avant-​garde, in particular such subversive collaborations as Cocteau, Picasso, and Satie’s intermedial baller Parade (1917) performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. 20 Carpentier was introduced to Breton in a visit to 42 rue Fontaine in 1928, accompanied by Jorge Cuesta, but he soon pulled away from the centre of the group. In an article in Carteles, of the same year, entitled ‘El Escandalo De Maldoror’ [‘The Scandal of Maldoror’], (which refers to the Paris nightclub ‘Maldoror’, opened by erstwhile surrealist Roger Vitrac and named after Lautréamont’s Les Chants des Maldoror, 1868–​9), the article recounts how Breton (comically likened to Mussolini and Robespierre) objected to this nightclub on the grounds that it defamed the memory of the poet. Carpentier points to this incident as an example of why Breton’s circle was ultimately destined to splinter. Carteles, 20 April 1930. Reprinted in 1975a, pp. 255–​61. Carpentier

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co-​signed Un cadavre, the infamous tract written in response to Breton’s Second manifeste du surréalisme (15 December 1929). The pamphlet was published on 15 January 1930. and his contribution is an essay entitled ‘La valeur subversive de l’oeuvre d’Éluard’ that opposed Breton’s denouncing of Paul Éluard as ‘understanding nothing’. During their meeting, Carpentier had suggested that the spread of surrealism in ‘America’ was due in part to the effect Éluard’s poems had had on Latin American readers (Rincón 2009, p.113). 21 ‘Abela en la Galería Zak’, Social, 1 January 1929 (cited in Acevedo 1994, pp.115–​6). 22 ‘Primer viaje a la Exposición Colonial’, Carteles, 27 September 1931 (1978b. pp.495–​9). 23 ‘Segundo Viaje A La Exposición Colonial’, Carteles, 4 October 1931 (1976, pp. 500–​3). 24 Surprisingly, there is no mention in Carpentier’s accounts of the surrealist counter-​ exhibition organised by Yves Tanguy and the French Communist Party in the same year. Entitled The Truth About the Colonies and inspired by a quotation from Marx: ‘A people which oppresses others cannot be free’ (Richardson 1996, p.4). It aimed to educate the French public on the subject of colonial exploitation, and leaflets were handed out detailing imperial abuses of power. For further details of both exhibitions, see Tythacott 2003, p.63. 25 These phrases are taken from ‘En la extrema avanzada algunas actitudes del “Surrealismo” ’ [In the Extreme Avant-​Garde, Some Attitudes of “Surrealism”] Social, 13:12, December 1928 (1975a, pp.106–​11). 26 See Jorge Timossi’s verbatim account of Carpentier’s speech at the Cuban Embassy in Paris, 12 January 1977, on the occasion of a short festival of Cuban films.The speech was originally published in El Día, 13 January 1977 as ‘El cine cubano es el product auténtico de la Revolución’ (Carpentier 2013, pp.389–​91; 390). 27 See Wirkus’s account in The White King of La Gonâve: The True Story of the Sergeant of Marines Who Was Crowned King on a Voodoo Island ([1931] 2015) for clear parallels with the reign of Henri Christophe. 28 At this early stage, Eisenstein’s main concern was to follow the narrative of Black Majesty, with Paul Robeson in the central role (Forsdick and Høgsbjerg, 2014). 29 For example, ‘From the mid-​1930s to the 1980s, the metaphor of racial mixture served to produce a teleology of progress’, while ‘On the other hand, the mestizo body indexes a physical connection to a repressive colonial history of enslavement, genocide, and exploitation. The mestizo body inherits an untenable dichotomy involving numerous forms of erasure and presence’ (Pérez-​Torres 2006, pp.13; 7). 30 Lycanthropic is the term that Carpentier uses to describe slave leader Mackandal’s transformation from human to insect form in Kingdom. 31 Letter from Carpentier to Alfredo Guevara, 14 January 1971. Unpublished manuscript. Fundación Alejo Carpentier, trans. RB. 32 Interview with Nuestro Tiempo in Havana, March–​April 1958 (cited in Brennan 2001b, p.vii). 33 Rivera met Eisenstein in Moscow in the same year, and the filmmaker was equally struck by the artist’s revolutionary spirit. The meeting contributed to Eisenstein’s final realisation of his Mexican project Qué viva México in 1930. 34 Carpentier,‘Fin Del Exotismo Americano’ [The End of American Exoticism] El Nacional 7 September 1952 (1975b, pp.266–​7). Trans. R.B. 35 Redes is an early example of a silent film transitioning into the sound period, considered by some contemporary scholars to indicate a highly adaptive and heterogeneous first-​ wave cinematic avant-​garde in Latin America (Schroeder Rodríguez, 2008, pp. 33–​58). 36 The horror vacui corresponds to a fear of emptiness, or an anxiety, which is compensated for by filling every possible space or lacuna with decoration, or detail. For Siegfried

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Kracauer horror vacui refers to a modernity in which an alienated populace fears emptiness and puts faith in the cinematic spectacle and mass production (1995, p.132), and which later might be aligned with the proliferation of images in postmodernism. 37 Trans. RB. 38 This is recorded in a handwritten article, discovered by archivist Armando J.  Raggi Rodríguez in the Carpentier archive:  ‘Como se realiza una Buena pelicula?  –​Los secretos de la dirreción cinematografia por Alejo Carpentier’ (Rodríguez 2012).The article reveals the pressure that he was under, from his mother, to find work in Hollywood. He was approached by Ruben Stolek, the husband and business representative of actor Berta Singerman, to write a film script. This is revealed in correspondence with his mother in 1928 published in Cartas a Toutouche 2011, pp.44–​50. 39 Several years earlier, Carpentier’s Concierto barroco also provided the source material for José Montes-​Baquer’s TV film Concierto Barroco (1982, France-​West Germany-​Italy), a comedy that faithfully incorporated the music from the original source text. 40 For transcriptions and commentary on the correspondence and relationship between Carpentier and Bataille, including their meetings with Desnos at the Deux Magots in Paris, see Ubilluz 2006; Rincón 2009. Although Bataille was a clear source of inspiration, I disagree with Ubilluz that Bataille was responsible for Carpentier’s ‘ethnographic gaze’ (2006, p.22). Carpentier was already developing these ideas in childhood, and his articles on Afro-​Cuban music in revista de avance and Social pre-​date his relocation to Paris. 41 See Vivienne Brough-​Evans’s Sacred Surrealism:  Dissidence and International Avant-​Garde (2016) for excellent discussion of Carpentier’s novels in light of Bataillean ecstasy, and the sacred and occult more broadly. 42 A translation of Les pas perdus produces a double meaning ‘the lost steps, or the not lost’ (Brennan 2001a,vi) which in hindsight captures perfectly the ambiguity and ambivalence of Carpentier’s novel.Yet, it must be seen as a direct indictment of Breton’s early writings, further transposed as a critique of Western culture sustained throughout the novel. 43 Translations from Chao, are, unless otherwise noted, by R.B. 44 The colour green denotes this transformative regression, like the green storm that heralds Ti Noël’s ‘transformation’ at the end of Kingdom. 45 Trans. R.B. 46 Trans. R.B. 47 In an unpublished letter from Carpentier to Guevara –​Paris, 14 June 1972, titled ‘Año De La Emulación Socialista’ (he often titled letters to Guevara) –​he notes having been visited in Paris by Film Polski, who wished to make a film of The Lost Steps directed by Has, with the score composed by the most famous Polish composer of the time Krzysztof Penderecki. Unpublished manuscript Fundación Alejo Carpentier. 48 Trans. R.B. 49 This collection is mostly selected from the European and North American avant-​gardes. During preparations to celebrate the centenary of the birth of cinema in France, Alfredo Guevara –​the co-​founder and director of ICAIC, and Cuba’s ambassador to UNESCO –​ was approached by Janicot regarding the inclusion of one of Carpentier’s works in the anthology. In an unpublished letter to Lilia he writes: ‘It would be very much in your interests (and, in this case, in ours too) for an unpublished text by one of our country’s great writers to appear in this Anthology. Do any projects with these characteristics exist among the archives of our great writer?’ Havana. 23 August 1993. Unpublished manuscript. Fundación Alejo Carpentier, trans. RB. 50 Unpublished manuscript letter from Carpentier to Alfredo Guevara, 1 January 1971. Fundación Alejo Carpentier, trans. RB.

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51 For more information on this publishing history drawn from the Alfred Knopf Inc. records held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin Library, see Cohn 2003. 52 Unpublished (typewritten) letter from Carpentier in Caracas, to Tyrone Power, undated, presumed some time in 1957. Fundación Alejo Carpentier.Translated by R.B.The archive houses several handwritten letters from Power to Carpentier between 1957 and 1958. 53 Recounted in the third person, as if the biography of a grand adventurer, Carpentier wrote ‘Ciudad Bolivár, metropolis del Orinoco’ dedicated to Raul Nass, for Carteles, 13 June 1948 (Carpentier 2013, pp.172–​3). Trans. R.B. 54 Carpentier, ‘Un pintor poeta’ El Nacional, 16 October 1956 (1975b, p.275). The articles from this period reflect much more favourably on certain artists and aspects of surrealism yet coincide with the anti-​surrealist diatribe that flows through The Lost Steps published just three years earlier. 55 Alfredo Guevara to Lilia and Alejo Carpentier, dated 15 September 1969. He signs off with:  As you see, I’m thinking of you both, and about our national cinema which, growing more mature by the day, can be permitted certain goals and ambitions. Trans. R.B. Unpublished manuscript, Fundación Alejo Carpentier. 56 Trans. RB. 57 For a discussion of the relation of this painting to Carpentier’s novel, see Wakefield 2004; and Wall  1998. 58 Poor Cinema Manifesto (Cuba, 2004)  addresses the possibilities for state support of national film industries, and of digital formats potentially reducing the costs of film thereby escaping the ‘feeling of helplessness before the globalizing vandalism’ of wealthy conglomerates (Solás 2004, p.319). 59 This is taken from an intervew with Solás on 29 March. 1999, translated by Astrid Bayr (Martin and Paddington 2001). 60 Borges, ‘Two Films’ originally published in Sur, No.103, April 1943 (Cozarinsky 1981, pp. 59–​61). 61 In the first 24 years after the Revolution, the ICAIC produced 112 full-​length feature films, 900 documentary shorts, and more than 1,300 weekly newsreels, illustrating the tendency towards documentary subjects. See Burton 1997, p.126. 62 ‘An Interview with Miguel Littín’ (Chanan 1976, p.11). 63 Letter from Carpentier to Alfredo Guevara, dated 18 September 1978, after having attended Cannes in the spring of that year. In a telegram to Guevara dated 30 August 1976, he remarks that the film script ‘looks excellent’ and will just needs some tweaking to ‘accentuate’ the ‘political aspect’. Unpublished manuscript, Alejo Carpentier Fundación. Trans. R.B. 64 The etymology of the term ‘third world’ originates from an article by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 that defines countries in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America as ‘underdeveloped’ due to poverty, high mortality and birth rates, and a dependency on so-​called ‘advanced’ countries. It stems from the medieval concept of ‘third estate’ in which a class system separates the commoner from the nobility (Jackson 2010, p. 835). 65 For some, such as Aijaz Ahmed, who responded directly to ‘Third World Literature’ (1987), Jameson was a ‘civilizational Other’ who exemplified the language and attitude of the coloniser. 66 Getino and Solanas were the first to use the term third cinema in ‘Hacia un Tercer Cine’ Tricontinental no. 13, October 1969. 67 Fanon notes the following three phases in the development of artistic output in colonised nations: firstly in a period of ‘unqualified assimilation’ the artist mimics the styles of the occupying nation (Symbolism and surrealism were particularly influential). Secondly, the

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artist relies on memories and old legends to reconnect with a culture that he reinterprets through the ‘borrowed aestheticism’ of the coloniser. And thirdly a ‘fighting phase’ that best describes the work of Solanas and Getino and others, where the artist strives to ‘awaken’ the people and drive them towards revolutionary activity and a ‘new reality’ (2001, p.79). 68 See Solanas, ‘The influence of Third Cinema in the world’ [L’influence du troisieme cinéma dans le monde], published in CinémAction, 1979 (cited in Willemen 1989, p.9). 69 Other films made in the late 1960s such as Rocha’s Terra em Transe [Earth Entranced], 1967; or Alea’s 1968 Memorias del Subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment] deal with themes of neo-​colonialism, of revolution, oppression and civil war and were indicative of a Third Cinema movement that sought to emphasise the hunger and suffering of the Latin American masses.

5 MAGIC REALISM The prehensile toe –​Jameson, Magritte, and affect

As I described at length in the introduction, Jameson’s philosophical impasse of the late 1980s regarding the cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism is partially resolved in his writings on magic-​realist film, which reflect on broader debates on the avant-​garde. In the 1960s Adorno, working on Aesthetic Theory, presents an impasse closely related to Jameson’s:  ‘The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated’ (Adorno 1997, pp.54–​ 5). He approaches the question of art’s potential negatively, as being unsuccessful, defined by the ‘unreconcilability’ of this antinomy (p.54). The irrationality of the avant-​garde, for example, can it only truly reveal the rationality of the status quo through a ‘supernatural’ secular approximation of magic, or the faithfully rendered reproduction of its image? This aporia, or impasse manifests across Roh, Carpentier, and Jameson’s writing on magic realism. Because an artwork cannot succeed, says Adorno, its forces may be set free. I would argue, that this is where, for magic-​realist discourse, potential success lies. Magic realism, as Jameson defines it, is both mode and discourse. It has the potential on the one hand to interrogate ‘the status quo’, and on the other to re-​ establish the affective concerns made explicit in modernism in new ways: ‘If fantasy is epistemological, as Deleuze has argued in the Anti-​Oedipus, indeed if narrative is itself a form of cognition, then an obvious next step lies in the systematic harnessing of the energies of those hitherto irrational activities [the heterogeneity implicit to avant-​garde artworks] for cognitive purposes (Jameson 1992, p.188). The gap between knowledge and affect is crucial to magic realism, and magic-​realist works can be said to hold a certain radicality in their meandering, essayistic, and affective form. Focusing on the potential for environment and perspective to produce something genuinely new, Jameson examines the cross-​genre, cross-​disciplinary realm of a non-​mainstream world cinema resplendent with weird, intense, and irrational

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FIGURE 5.1  Postmodernism

or the cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991, p.10

qualities. We can also see plainly in these writings on magic realism, his redirection of surrealism, which plays a distinct role in the ‘breaking down’ of ‘barriers’, to a more explicitly conscious interrogation of ontological realism (because of course surrealists also desired rupture and political change) (p.88). Jameson, like Adorno, is concerned not only with form, but with the acute necessity to interrogate the erratic rhythms and complex facets of global capitalism. Jean-​François Lyotard believed that the return of the modernist avant-​garde carried the future, that postmodernism was not the fall from, but the beginning of a revitalised modernism: ‘that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable’ (1984, p.114).This repetition was not enough for Jameson, who argues that: ‘Lyotard is […] quite unwilling to posit a postmodernist stage radically different from the period of high modernism’ (1984b, p.xv). He fundamentally disagrees with what he believes to be Lyotard’s tendency towards a revival of the revolutionary forms of the avant-​garde and instead, I argue, posits a non-​Eurocentric mode of ontological enquiry –​magic realism –​as a means of recuperating an avant-​garde practice with increased geopolitical awareness. This is not antithetical to Lyotard’s stance but insists upon a transnational broadening of the conception of the avant-​garde for the late twentieth century. Faris hits the nail on the head when she writes: The magical, irreducible elements in magical realism inherit modernism’s search beyond the rational into the unconscious, but they bring more than an individual’s hidden scenarios to the postmodern surface of the text. […] the autonomy of discourse that magical realism implicitly proposes through the irreducible element means that it mediates the modernist organization of the world’s chaos through art and the postmodern occlusion of the world by the text. (2004, p.33)

She concludes that magic-​realist texts ‘slither dizzyingly’ (p.33) destabilising categories the more we focus upon them. Jameson’s discourse on magic-​realist

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film argues that fragmentation and slipperiness enable an increased engagement with History. Where in postmodern culture ‘a particular phenomenological or emotional reaction to the world disappears’ transforming into a cultural logic of depersonalisation and ‘discontinuous’ relations,1 magic realism grabs our senses (1989, p.4). His negative appraisal of mass culture leaves him decentred, and the turn towards magic realism is bound up with highly subjective feelings, mirroring those of early twentieth-​century artists seeking the marvellous. Ultimately for Jameson, whose dictum is ‘always historicize’ (1981, p.9), the Marxist view of History should be transhistorical, capable of ‘cracking open the opacities of the past’, without anchoring the analysis to a particular point in time or space, a view which magic-​realist films promulgate. The concepts of modernism and postmodernism are reflections and refractions of complex geopolitical and socio-​economic patterns which extend back over the span of the longue durée, beginning ‘with the Council of Trent (ending in 1563) –​in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age’ (2016, p.3). This bold assertion aligns the proliferation of Christian religion across the world with market capitalism and culture –​particularly important for Latin American cultures. Modernity is the history of capital; it is ‘a narrative category’ (2002, p.94) in that it involves the contextual (geopolitical) situation as a chronicle. Modernism, on the other hand, is an aesthetic category –​the art object in its present moment2 (chiming with Larsen’s theory of epiphenomena) –​that speaks of newness, and radical disruption, an uneven spatio-​temporality, if you will. What proves to be a sticking point is the extent to which its radical newness can continue against the contextual background of accelerated modes of production. Benjamin observed that generalities can only be assimilated into a thesis where ultimately the anomalies and fissures in this thesis become the most useful. Jameson describes how ‘magic realism sprang from the objective fact of uneven development in the post-​colonial object-​world itself ’ (1992, p.198), and is therefore an essential means of reflecting upon the systems of power from the vantage point of the fissure or lag. Jamesonian cinematic magic realism offers a potential system of audio-​tactile-​ visual representation that responds to the decentred subject in ways that counter depthlessness through ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’ (1991, p.27). These constantly shifting and evolving ‘presents’ generate urgent questions, through an affective ineffability. While not all the films discussed are immediately recognisable as being revolutionary or radical, for Jameson they nevertheless work against the grain of the systems and dictatorships that they portray in a state of ‘arrested contradiction’ (1986a, p.323). In Figure  5.1, a diagrammatic illustration, or combinatoire supported by four pairs of art-​historical boots (published after ‘On magic realism’, in 1991)  frames Jameson’s hypothesis on the waning of affect in the shift from modernism to postmodernism through magic realism. His original conception of the diagramme was published in the New Left Review article of 1984 and illustrated by only two pictorial examples: Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes,3 and a monochrome print from Andy Warhol’s silkscreen series Diamond Dust Shoes (1980). The addition of the two further pairs of feet was in part prompted by the Italian theorist Remo Ceserani’s4 critique of ‘Postmodernism’ in the New Left Review. The revised

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1991 combinatoire is a strikingly overlooked connection between Jameson’s writings on postmodernism and magic realism. Van Gogh’s canvas expresses: ‘the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world’ (Jameson 1984a, p.59), an all-​important historical context to the viewer through the tactility of its brush strokes, the sensory portrayal of labour and toil (1991  p.58). He draws on a lineage of critical responses to the painting: Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic reading in which every object is ascribed an essence –​‘things move us bodily, in the literal meaning of the word’ (2010, p.156); art historian Meyer Shapiro’s argument that the peasant shoes in question are van Gogh’s own (1968); and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of these arguments towards a gendered reading of the painting (1987). Despite its iconic status, and extensive mass reproduction, the image is deemed resistant to becoming an ‘inert object’ or a reified thing, believing the ‘modernist’ work5 to ‘compensate’ for the processes of commodification by presenting a ‘semi-​autonomous space in its own right’, which acts as an alternative reality. Here a Utopian space, filled with pathos and hope, opens up for counter-​narratives set in motion in the viewer’s experience of the ‘vibrating’ (Heidegger) ‘revelation’ (Jameson) of van Gogh’s desolated working environment. In stark contrast,Warhol’s silkscreen series depicts a selection of un-​paired high-​heeled shoes in both colour and monochrome versions, their surfaces encrusted with a pulverised diamanté dust. Gone is any space for a hermeneutic reading: ‘Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer’; in fact: ‘it no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van Gogh’s footgear; […] it does not really speak to us at all’ (1984a, p.59). Diamond Dust Shoes fails to ‘communicate’ because the shoes have become depersonalised; they remind him of the detritus left after a dance-​hall fire or the piles of victims’ shoes in Nazi concentration camps –​bizarre in an argument for their depthlessness: ‘This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings –​which it may be better and more accurate to call “intensities” –​are now free-​floating and impersonal […]’ (1984a, p.64 –​what we might now refer to as cultural amnesia). The biggest flaw in this reading is that it stops short of considering the resistant potential in Diamond Dust Shoes as ‘a glacéd x-​ray’ (1984a, p.60), failing to note its mysterious and unconscious latency or the radical gesture in Warhol ‘summon[ing] up the tackiness of a sidewalk display in the garment district’ (Merck 1996, p.231) and his fantastic aestheticization of mass production. Nor does it consider his slow, affective challenges to the mainstream in films such as Blow Job (1963), Sleep (1964), and the Screen Tests (1964–​1966). He does find inspiration in the shoes’ emblematic ‘surrealism’, but it is a surrealism ‘without its manifesto […] its avant-​garde’, or ‘personal Unconscious’ (1991, p.175, Jameson’s capitalisation). The combinatoire draws a direct correlative between magic realism and surrealism, underlining the latter’s ‘attempt to endow the object world of a damaged and broken industrial society with the mystery and the depth, the “magical” qualities (to speak like […] the Latin American)’ (p.173). Magritte’s phantasmatic painting Le modèle rouge,6 which depicts an uncanny pair of boots seamlessly grafted onto a pair of bare feet, takes up position at the

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apex of the combinatoire, accompanied by the words ‘Magic Realism: the prehensile toe’. Here ‘Magic Realism’ results from the converging forces of modernism (work, transformation) and postmodernism (play, idleness), and is simultaneously attached and opposed to a ‘realism’ illustrated with Walker Evans’ monochrome photograph The Work Boots of Floyd Burroughs (1936). It is labelled: ‘Creases on the face: The realism of old age’ –​a different, yet not antithetical, version of 1930s reality to that of Le modèle rouge (the photograph was subsequently reproduced alongside James Agee’s text in the photobook Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, of which Jameson makes no note). The farmer’s boots are photographed from above, positioned as if the wearer has just levitated out of them. Evans’s and Agee’s book presents their two-​month stay in the American South as ‘a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers’ designed to educate readers about rural poverty and disease (Agee 2001, p.xi). Like the German photobooks of the 1930s, expression is replaced by the realism of objectivity, the role of photography to record, as well as transform. There is something in the subjects of the photographs so ‘curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomly mysterious’ [in] their unwavering sense of responsibility towards their (sometimes enforced) labour’ (p.6). Agee argues that the ‘unimagined existence’ of cotton tenants, the ‘normal predicaments of human divinity’ (p.x), is hiding in plain sight within the object world, unseen. The photograph, then, actually shows how Evans’s documentary ‘realism’ is also an attempt to capture something hidden or unseen, and is therefore magical. Floyd Burroughs’s work boots are closer to Magritte’s boot-​feet than the combinatoire perhaps anticipates; just as Evans documents ‘unimagined existence’ rising up from the fields of labour, Magritte documents the uncanny realism of social habits or prestidigitation. Realism, it must be remembered, is as shimmering and diverse in its imaginative renderings as magic, and the combinatoire facilitates philosophical engagement with Jameson’s thesis of non-​fixity and its vision of twentieth-​century culture’s inherent mutability. That ‘magic realism’ crowns Jameson’s combinatoire signifies the mode’s importance for him at this time, and its centrality as a resistant force and marker of ‘political consciousness-​raising’ (D’Haen 1995, p.202), its magic re-​directing back against dominant culture. Magritte’s boot-​feet offer an alternative reality, playing with the ineffable boundary between animate (human feet) and inanimate (leather) realms. Jameson spends little time evaluating Le modèle rouge, yet the painting becomes an intriguing emblem for magic realism, in spite of its status as a work of European surrealism. Magritte’s intention for Le modèle rouge, described in a letter to Breton, was to: ‘discover the property which belonged indissolubly to an object, but which seemed strange and monstrous when the connection was revealed’ (Sylvester 2009, p.271).7 Magritte links clothing to socially prescribed behaviour –​objectification, commerce, and sex (e.g. the 1947 work La Philosophie dans le boudoir) –​where the garment(s) stands in for the body itself. The painting is a deliberate play on the ‘haunting’ shape of the human body that gradually becomes imprinted on shoes or clothes over time. The boots rise mysteriously (‘rising toward what?’ Derrida asks, 1987, p.314), evoking movement despite the foot’s severance at the ankle (neck).

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Magritte believed that objects ‘had to reveal their vigorous existence’ of their own accord. But, as in Magischer Realismus, the interior figure lies within the prism of perception. In his 1938 lecture ‘La ligne de vie’ [Life Line] he gives an example where, due to his ‘state of mind’ following a period of long meditation in a Brussels café, ‘the door mouldings seemed to be endowed with a mysterious life, and I was in touch with their reality for a long time’ (2016, p.62). He insists that mystery lies within the object revealing something profound, and often disturbing, about the ever-​shifting weirdness that reality entails. We ‘awake’ from our interaction with these works of art with a ‘lasting sense of reality’ (Freud [1918] 1990, p.263). How can we ever grasp something that never stops moving? In assigning magic realism a patron saint  –​Magritte  –​Jameson resurrects the European modernist lineage at the heart of Magischer Realismus  –​but he does not suggest that Magritte is a magic-​realist painter.8 The text ‘Magic realism –​the prehensile toe’ references the potentially gripping toes in Magritte’s strange painting –​‘the carnal reality of the human member itself ’ (1991, p.10) into which Jameson reads the erotic, and libidinous pleasures of sex. Although the toes are flat to the ground, they are brightly and fantastically highlighted, and in coupling them with the worm-​like laces of the boots, Magritte achieves a magical suggestion of movement, of a wriggling into life, a connection; a desire. But the ‘prehensile’ also links to Breton’s lecture ‘Qu’est-​ce que le surréalisme?’ where he describes surrealism as the ‘strongly prehensile tail’ gripping fast to a particular kind of Romanticism  –​the more radical writers of the previous generation such as D.A.F.  de Sade or Baudelaire (Rosemont 1978, p.62). Carter signals something similar when in conversation with Dawn Ades she muses:  ‘I tend to think of surrealism as a Romantic modernism, rather than a classical modernism’ (Carter 1989). Jameson cites Breton’s lecture in a discussion of surrealist imagery in Marxism and Form (1974, p.97), and later acknowledges surrealism’s ‘new Romanticism’ as a renewal of the natural and naive imagination to ‘re-​awaken the deadened external world’ (1981b, pp. 95; 97), splitting open ‘the commodity forms of the objective universe by striking them against each other with immense force’ (1981b, pp.  96–​7). And Magritte makes his anti-​capitalist critique with a different kind of force:  ‘Magritte, unique among the surrealists, survived the sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming in the process something of a postmodern emblem: the uncanny’ (1991, p.10). Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, however, is a quintessentially modern emblem, linking the unconscious, commodity fetishism, the radicality of avant-​garde work, and, for Jameson, magic realism –​an amalgam of force encounters that assemble in Magritte’s oeuvre. Roh viewed weirdness as an ontological disruption in the real, a means of accessing an energy beyond the object. Mark Fisher bifurcates Freud’s uncanny into weird and eerie offshoots to better examine how: The metaphysical scandal of capital brings us to the broader question of the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate: the agency of minerals and landscape […] There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am another, and I always was. (2017, p.7)

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In a reversal of Freudian psychoanalysis, he seeks, like Roh, to reach the interior through the exterior object world, through its eeriness. But as we know, magic realism dances between these centripetal/​centrifugal movements. In aligning Magritte with the postmodern through a ‘cool, hyperreal depiction of objects in vertiginously foreshortened space’ (Finkelstein 2007, p.162.), Jameson seems to reference the detailed coolness of Neue Sachlichkeit. Hyper-​realism (before the term becomes synonymous with Jean Baudrillard) was traced by art historian Maurice Raynal back to early-​era de Chirico, German Expressionism, and the works of Freud, whose aims were, in their own specific ways to follow ‘the inspiration of thought uncontrolled by reason’ and ‘the mystery of the unconscious mind’ by ‘translating the most usual objects […] into forms as bizarre, as disturbing, as melancholy, as tragic and nightmare-​like as possible’ (1934, p.27). It is clear that Raynal’s hyper-​realism is actually a description of surrealism, and as such is useful in forging a potential link between surrealism and the postmodern dissolution of high-​low boundaries, as well as the Jamesonian link with magic realism. Baudrillard also invokes surrealism in his consideration of ‘hyperreality’ in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1973) but here it is eclipsed by postmodern culture: ‘Irreality no longer belongs to the dream or the phantasm, to a beyond or a hidden interiority, but to the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself’ (p.72). Magritte and magic realism enter the equation at this point of indeterminacy, and instead of becoming resemblance and repetition, play knowingly with the hallucinatory social aspects of the real, gripping fast to modernism. Jameson’s crowning of magic realism with Le modèle rouge is miraculously spot on, alighting on the artist’s resistant mode of indeterminacy, critical play, and mystery: Mystery is there because the poetic image has a reality. Because the “inspired thought” imagines an order that unites the figures of the visible, the poetic image has the same genre of reality as that of the universe. […] When one thinks “universe”, it’s the unknown one thinks of –​its reality is unknown … Thus, I make –​with known things –​the unknown. (Magritte cited in Finkelstein 2007, p.160)

Knowledge, and by extension, meaning, is driven by a lack of knowledge, a desire to understand that stretches from the imagination through the world into the universe. These are not separated and apportioned more or less validity/​reality, but are part of the same system, based in inspiration and irrationality (thought) as much as semiotics or rational science (order, knowledge). Magritte works with the ambiguities entailed in the spatio-​temporal movement of thought; he is concerned with the deeply philosophical conundrum of ‘the real’, its illusions and its material objects, and his paintings draw attention to this. Siegfried Gohr believes that in Le modèle rouge, Magritte divorces the boots from their mundane purpose (a direct response to Heidegger’s essay on van Gogh) proving that ‘If the world can be paradoxical, painting stands firm in the face of this finding by unconcernedly retaining the elegant appearance of miracles of thought and perception’ (2009, p.250).This goes some way to addressing Adorno’s and Jameson’s aporias: within the surface, beyond the object,

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are layers of understated weirdness, memories whose subjective/​objective qualities unnerve –​a radical disquiet. André Delvaux, for example, insists that his own magic realism is more concerned with understatement [litote] and ordinariness (Weisgerber 1987, p.264).9 In Magritte’s writings and interviews we can savour some of the key philosophical issues that are also at the heart of an art-​historical magic realism: vision, materialisation of thought, disquiet, reassessment of the ontological aspects of the object, and affective response to unknown and unexpected phenomena. He deliberately disaggregated word and image in Les mots et les images (1929), preventing his paintings from being placed within the ‘reassuring region’ of order or habit (2016, p.65); magic-​realist films share this desire for the mysterious, marvellous or magical aspect of a given reality, throwing rationality or certainty to the wind. Although they may at times be confused, the fundamental difference between magic realism and surrealism lies in the fact that the former is what surrealism is often mistaken for: a form of representation that acts on reality. For surrealism, ‘magic’ realism must be as doubtful as any other type of ‘realism’ […] surrealism rejects realism not as a form, but because of its claim to represent reality. Magic realism, on the other hand, accepts this claim and merely seeks to broaden reality’s frame of reference, giving reality a wider frame of reference. In contrast, surrealism endeavours to shatter the bonds of realism, to discover and investigate another reality. (Richardson 2006, p.149)

Richardson’s definition holds true for a vernacular magic realism in which ‘the wider frame of reference’ is held in suspension of disbelief, where ‘magic’ is certainly ‘real’.This is not true of an art-​historical and avant-​garde mode where reality is prismatic, extraordinary; and artworks play with weirdness and self-​reflexivity in order to think through political and philosophical concerns. Magic-​realist films in the Jamesonian vein,‘shatter’ the ‘bonds of realism’ (albeit in a more understated manner) in their stubborn adherence to mutability and inbetweeness. Magic realism, however, while intense and often surprising, does not make disruption and détournement its goals, with only select events or juxtapositions equalling the quest in surrealist art. Jameson’s combinatoire offers a key to the potential of magic realism; its shoes/​ boot/​feet are phantoms of capital, positioned at varying distances from concepts of ‘authenticity’, ‘origin’, ‘aura’, and ‘magic’. The dialectic becomes prismatic, with greater radical potential. Jameson adopts Lyotard’s ‘libidinal apparatus’ for his own theory of the mechanics of social fantasy as ‘an empty form or structural matrix in which a charge of free-​floating and inchoate fantasy –​both ideological and psychoanalytic –​can suddenly crystallize, and find the articulated figuration essential for its social actuality and psychic effectivity’ (1981b, p.11). This is magic-​realist politics.

Defining magic-​realist film: shared features The films in ‘On magic realism’ are strange, geopolitical allegories that explore the potential of human transformation against political action, each locked into

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a ‘perpetual’ present in time. Ghostly reverberations of ancient beliefs coincide with more recent atrocities, setting characters into conflict with the past. Jameson’s discovery of magic realism was in the context of painting,10 but the subsequent theorisation stems directly from Latin American literature, with the essay dedicated to the Cuban revolution. Paraphrasing Carpentier, he takes up the argument that magic realism (he never uses marvellous  –​ maravilloso) is ‘a poetic transfiguration of the object world itself  –​not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived’ (1986a, 301). Although Carpentier and literary critics attempt to separate the German and Latin American strains of magic realism, the emphasis on ‘objectivity’ and metamorphosis stems from a shared response to enormous world events, albeit from vastly different spatio-​temporal coordinates and with different structures of power. It does not receive significant recognition in Jameson’s theorisation, but Roh’s Magischer Realismus is as crucial as Carpentier’s real maravilloso americano in any consideration of magic-​realist film. Jameson watches two films at the Havana festival –​Francisco Norden’s Condores no entierran todos los días [A Man of Principle, Colombia, 1984], set during the decade known as La Violencia following the assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala in 1948; and Jacobo Penzo’s La Casa de Agua [The House of Water, Venezuela, 1983] in which a young academic jettisons his career to fight the military-​ run government –​both are based in factually accurate historical detail of corrupt political power and violent uprisings. Each film is drafted through the ideology of a male protagonist who seeks to transform his environment. The historico-​political background; a particular manipulation of colour; and the narrative function of violence, seem for Jameson to bring these films into conversation, bringing to mind a third film that he had seen a couple of years previously, and first put him ‘on the track’ of magic realism: Agnieszka Holland’s Goraczka (Dzieje jednego pocisku) [Fever, 1981]. ‘Poland in general, and the Polish revolutionary movements of 1905 in particular […] seemed an unexpected and peculiar enough reference point, until its affinities with certain Latin American films grew clearer to me’ (1986a, p.129). Holland is known for films that depict racial and sexual discrimination, she has also directed episodes for popular television series The Killing (2011–​2012), Treme (2010–​2013), and House of Cards (2015; 2017)  and a feature film inspired by Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, an allegory of Poland’s twenty-​first century populism (2017). Norden, according to John King, was one of a number of Latin American filmmakers who were criticised for making commercials and documentaries for ‘local capitalist enterprises’ that looked nothing like the Cinema Novo (2000, p.208). Condores is now viewed as a classic of Colombian political cinema, one of the first to chart the violence leading to Gaitan’s assassination on 9 April 1948, and the following years in which assassins for hire ruled the streets. Penzo’s La casa represented Venezuela in the category for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 1985 and commences with an intertitle framing it as a fiction film. There is a formal theatricality to its arresting tableaux, but the subject matter is ghastly realism.

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With these three anti-​totalitarian films, Jameson sets out his initial theorisation of cinematic magic realism, arguing for its ambivalence, its antimony, as ‘a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism’ (1986a, p.302). Roh and Hartlaub separately noted the cancellation and reinvention of artistic movements in their respective manifestos for Magischer Realismus and Neue Sachlichkeit:  ‘Every tendency is tied to a generation, fades along with it into the background, and becomes outmoded in order perhaps to reappear later under a new aspect’ (Hartlaub 1994, p.492). Jameson considers how cinema has reflected these tendencies, particularly in the postmodern Hollywood ‘generation’ film, which sells ‘an imaginary style of a real past’ via the ‘indulgent’ ‘cult of the glossy image’ (1979, pp.116–​7). Such films present a nostalgic, superficial, and revised historical past through easily recognisable stereotypes (e.g. the mafiosi in The Godfather parts I  and II  –​Coppola (1972; 1974), or the idealised teen drive-​in culture of George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973)). In contrast, cinematic magic realism  –​ examples of ‘Second’ or ‘Third’ World cinema –​responds to realities that are stuck in the strange and supplanted temporalities of violent political regimes. They burst onto the screen in medias res presupposing a familiarity with the world unfolding before our eyes. Unlike the pseudo-​historical depth of the postmodern ‘genre’, the magic-​realist film does not attempt to recreate a complete picture of a generation but reflects on the changing modes of production in a given region or community, showing how they become ‘locked into’ conflict with the past (and future) –​a history with gaps, a ‘perforated history’ (1986b, p.130). What becomes magical, argues Jameson, is how gaps in information might pass unnoticed while emphasis is placed on ‘objects’ and their transformation, unfolding in ‘a succession of spatial situations seen too intensely for the mind to have the leisure to ask its other questions’ (p.130). Their mystery is preserved, while often subtly exposing the painful conditions under which people suffer. My commentary on Jameson’s reading of these films focuses on the following theoretical concerns: history (politics), colour, affect, and the disruption or condensation of narrative linearity, which unfold along the magic-​realist film’s central axis:  geopolitics x avant-​garde form. These are the coordinates of magic-​realist cinema, spanning the mode’s art-​historical beginnings and its twenty-​ first century legacy.

Jameson’s cinematic magic realism: characteristics The three films each envision an alternative version of events, resisting the gradual social erasure of ‘authentic’ historical traces in ‘official’ History. The allegorical journey of each protagonist represents the struggle of the oppressed against the ruling hegemonic power, with the illogic of violence brought to bear on the human body. Fever uncovers a fundamental ideological problem –​failed socialism –​that erupts during the violent Russian military occupation of Poland between 1905 and 1907, against the bare minimum of background detail.The film suggests to Jameson the formal representation of the unrepresentable in the form of a peculiar object –​a metallic bomb –​that travels with a group of revolutionaries. Its ‘impossible newness’

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seems at odds with the sepia patina of the mise-​en-​scène that denotes rural peasantry. It bewilders us ‘with the unthinkable conjunction between our own present in time and this ancient history: a point at which, unaccountably, large drops of fresh blood fall slowly upon the cylinder’; as if such ‘new technology’ could not really exist in the pre-​revolutionary world of Central Europe (1986a, p.306).11 Fever’s incendiary device forces the viewer to rethink revolution through a poor and clumsily homemade object, which serves both as plot device and ideological symbol. It represents the party members’ twin revolutionary desires: the death of a Czarist official and a Utopian future. Later the revolutionaries’ efforts are met with derision when the Czar’s soldiers detonate the bomb in a nearby river, producing an impotent explosion accompanied by mocking laughter. Each reference to the bomb is invested with unexpected magic, from its initial appearance in extreme close-​up, abstracted as the brilliant drops of blood fall onto its surface, to the comically marvellous rush of water as it is detonated. It appears to conjure events beyond its humble means: What results is not an Image, in the technical sense of derealization, but rather something else, which remains to be described and which diverts a conventional narrative logic of the unfolding story in some new vertical direction, while working through its elements by way of the mediations of the body itself. (1986a, p.307, author’s emphasis)

Hartlaub referring to the left-​wing faction of Neue Sachlichkeit painting observes how:  [it] ‘tears the objective from the world of contemporary facts and projects current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature’ ([1925] cited in Kaes et al. p.491). Film brings the viewer closer to the palpable tension within the magic-​ realist object, and Jameson’s theorisation of the phenomenological shock that Fever generates and its ‘attempt to think a perception’ (p.306) is genuinely exciting for scholarship on magic realism. The ‘something else’ hovers beyond the (horizontal) flow of the narrative, a hidden component unearthed by the viewer, and Jameson’s essay struggles to find the words to represent it. The cylindrical bomb exudes a strangeness similar to that of the uncanny object (vertically):  it is ‘marked from within by an absent cause’ and must be decoded by its ‘sheerest formal properties’ (1986a, p.316). As Peter Hinchcliffe observes of magic realism in painting:  it ‘is magical because it can achieve the intensity which creates the illusion that every object –​no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant can be injected with meaning’ (1986, p.7). This sequence does not straightforwardly document social crisis and its impact on the human psyche; Holland transforms violence into ‘a strange and poetic reality’ (1986a, p.186) recalling simultaneously Dix’s grotesque paintings of war, and the oneiric and absurd social tableaux in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Georg Lukács proposes that a magical object, if reinvested with meaning, can break ties with the commodity value exchange chain and its ‘phantom objectivity’, and thereby break an absolute state of dehumanised life ([1923] 1975) –​there is radical

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potential here. Magic-​realist objects ‘enjoin a visual spell, an enthrallment to the image in its present of time’ (1986a, pp.302–​3). In contradistinction to the stereotypical objects of literary magic(al) realism –​the alchemist’s crucible, an animated and incongruous swarm of butterflies or bees, the circus ring and Fabergé eggs in Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), a magical plant, a box or mirror that facilitates time travel –​the objects in cinematic magic realism are not always immediately recognisable as marvellous. In literary magic(al) realism, the role of the object is often to provide an entry into, or a link to, another time frame or parallel reality. In film, flashbacks, dissolves, associative montage, and flash-​ forwards have become ubiquitous in denoting the passage of time, or to imagine interior thought as a sequence of images. In magic-​realist films, the object serves as a bridge between past and present, and unconscious and conscious thought; it is often a leap, sometimes irrational, or oblique, sometimes easy to miss. The object can also serve as a diversion from the main action, or as a signpost to a tangential aspect beyond the frame. Jameson identifies within cinematic magic realism a ‘structural distance’ from the ‘lived experience’ of the films (1986a, p.306). Sutured into the film’s ontological reality, the viewer is suddenly jolted out of the narrative flow into an alternative: that of interior thought. The objects are not heavily symbolic, they frequently point to ‘something else’ beyond  –​a rupture in the linear and cyclical patterns of ordinarily measured experience –​because they reproduce the limit, the boundary between interior and exterior worlds, and because they occur between temporal and spatial demarcations. Emphasising the limit or the boundary between things, or states of being, draws attention to their marvellous, resistant difference. Magic-​realist repetition of the limit captures the initially unseen or unnoticed qualities of ordinary things, or reified experience. Holland’s depiction of early twentieth-​century Poland is devoid of nostalgia, and its magic derives not from supernatural intervention, but from the transformation of the real through the disruption of the narrative.12 Shot in close-​up, sometimes out of context and therefore not immediately reconcilable to the plot, several unforgettable objects seem to Jameson excessive against the dull and dimly lit scenes in which the revolution is plotted. Against mounting levels of madness and paranoia, the narrative follows the trans-​temporal flux of thought. The version of ‘history’13 that Holland reveals, while unveiled in its critique, is emotional and violent, driven by a tense counterpoint between objects, and desperate victims of the regime. The film enacts the ‘depersonalization of the terrorist vocation, in which private fantasy and cold political strategy are pathologically dissociated and inextricably intertwined all at once’ (1986a, p.208). Yet, Jameson does not go far enough, as this ‘pathology’ is brought to bear on the sole woman revolutionary, Kama (Barbara Grabowska), who, subjected to mental and sexual exploitation, comes to represent the real site of ambivalence within the film. Kama’s spirit infects the other rebels, and they are unable to rid themselves of her image; her subsequent madness symbolises what the main protagonist Leon (Olgierd Lukaszewicz) calls the ‘mighty metamorphosis that has gripped the masses’ and haunts the film’s remaining scenes –​the body and mind polluted by ideas, by

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fever. It could be said that while both bomb and Kama’s insurgent energy have a Utopian magic potential, they are inevitably closed down by the patriarchal illogic of the State. Kama’s body becomes the antithesis of the magic object, signalling the magical wasteland of unrealised potential, and violated dreams, her Munchian scream protesting in contorted silence. Holland’s decision to underline Kama’s experience chimes with Delbaere-​Garant’s assessment of Carter’s ‘destabilisation’ of ‘culturally constructed notions of identity and gender by showing that, like all human constructs, they are, in fact, projections of individual fantasies’ (Zamora and Faris 1995, p.260). Given the context of magic-​realist criticism in the late 1980s, it is significant that Jameson should attribute what was primarily being discussed as a Latin American literary trend to a Polish film, thus anticipating Zamora’s and Faris’s call for a wider geographical consideration of the mode, and presenting a contradictory version of Polish magic realism to Klonowska and Mazierska. The tactile impression of fever translates into a ‘spiritual reflex’, a human suffering and desperate hope, which is then repeated through the figure of the bomb, and the stubborn continuum of history, failure, and desire that it exhibits.‘On magic realism’ echoes Carpentier’s assertion in his prologue that: ‘Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous’ (1995a, p.101). Revolution can be strange and marvellous it is unpredictable, unassailable; a rupturing and spirited force for change. Revolution is marvellous because it throws reality into disorder whilst preserving realism in the moment of radical unreality that it unleashes. Rather than existing in contradistinction, magic and realism are held in the dialectical tension of uncertain and shifting concepts of lived experience (both physical and mental –​as Aldea’s Magic Realism and Deleuze explores).

Magic-​realist  events Film’s role in materialising the slippage between ‘the real’ and the ‘fictitious’ has been debated since its inception. Jameson elucidates how in the magic-​realist film a philosophical process combining psychoanalytic, Marxist, surrealist, Deleuzian, and countless other approaches to lived experience, interrogates, or reflects, the representation of mental activity on screen. Comolli reasoned that: a sensation of ‘truth’ is reinforced by and because of film’s detour through the ‘fictitious’ ([1969] 1980, p.227). In magic-​realist film, the back-​and-​forth movement between fact and fantasy, and the ‘manipulation’ through which any given history ‘detours’, maintains an air of precarious uncertainty that is additionally resistant to narrative fixity. Jameson’s conception of magic realism revolves around the idea of a conterminous temporality, arrested in a perpetual present,14 what Vivian Sobchack might refer to as ‘increasing representational immediacy’ (1996, p.5), where the chronological or temporal logic of dominant discourse is dissolved. This method of simultaneous condensation and expansion is an event. Jameson defines cinematic events as ‘image-​ sequences’ that are inserted ‘vertically’ into the narrative (like the bomb), but do not correspond to a narrative symbolism (1986a, p.305). The event has its own logic, that of irrealising the exterior world, broken into fragments that are often out of

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order or subject to slowing, stretching, pausing, or rapid cuts. Each sentence, shot, painting, or sequence also contains abstracted micro-​stories that express the most intimate parts of subjective reality at a distance, and to an extent uncontrolled and unbound. The sustained thumping of the beating heart in Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, an event imagined visually and aurally, instantly recalls to my mind a random series of events when I have felt mounting pressure. Simultaneously, I draw associative links to Lee Miller’s heartless statue in the film, and the icy cold snow covering the mise-​en-​scène (relating to Cocteau’s obsession with the cruel stone snowball of his childhood evoked in Les Enfants Terribles). This simple example illustrates the potential for layers of micro-​events to exist within an event. This is the magic of cinema, certainly, but it is also a mechanics to which Jameson returns. The event is a working through of crisis and instability, of clashing world views. It reiterates the discontinuities, sensations, and authenticities of ‘genuine human life’ (1981b, p.49) into ‘unimaginable infinitesimality’ (p.31). He contemplates the ways in which Henry James’s ‘experimental’ novels introduce events via minutiae in inconsequential and detailed passages that resist immediate assimilation:  ‘the meta-​physical or ideological charge in such narrative practices comes when the question about the event is tormented to yield a supplementary answer about what living really is … [and] the more general philosophical question about the Event15 itself may rise’ (p.320). The magic-​realist event signals that potential answers to this philosophical question cannot be found only in gods or rhetoric, ‘but in the tiny, microscopic uncertainties that our senses procure’. In Mille Plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus,  1980] Deleuze and Guattari venture that:  ‘A microscopic event upsets the local balance of power’, for an event is a ‘perverse mutation’ of the hegemonic order, a hallucination, an imagined scene, a poignant memory (1987, p.16). The balance of power might be upset by an ‘intensive trait’ that becomes independent of dominant discourse; for example, a hallucinatory or synaesthetic perception may ‘start working for itself ’ (p.16). In cinema a hallucinatory image may startle the viewer, catching her off guard, breaking away from the plot. In a clinical sense, hallucinatory perception is considered a delusion. In magic realism this shift in perception –​the glimpse of ‘something else’ –​transforms reality rather than abandoning it. Deleuze and Guattari propose that perception proceeds out of vagueness and chaos, ‘affective events begin in a powerful indetermination’ (Bertelsen and Murphie 2010, p.139), whereas Jameson is adamant that indeterminability is both effect and affect of specific political and subjective disjunctions. The magical tense –​an ‘absolute present’ (Jameson 2003, p.710), sets the permeable boundaries of an alternative space in which resistance to the limitations of the dominant discourse is played out without leaving reality. It cannot be subsumed by any one dominant ideology, and its function is affective, prompting an uncovering of something hidden within the diegesis. Nothing in cinematic magic realism can be taken for granted, but thanks to shifts in the ‘mode of perception’, everything has the potential to be transformed, to be ‘something else’. In magic-​realist films, these elements are realised formally in micro-​events often signalled by abrupt intercutting, non-​synchronous sound, long takes of objects or landscapes, the application of colour filters, non-​linear sequencing,

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manipulation of the film stock to emphasise imperfection or anomaly. Following Roh and Carpentier, the ‘meta-​physical’ is brought about in the instant, and magic becomes, personal, hybrid, and fleeting, unfolding ‘a path to defamiliarization, and thereby to fresh enlightenment’ (Jameson 1992, p.158). Condores and Casa de Agua suspend their protagonists’ desire for revolution within cycles of corrupt political power and social injustice, which are imagined on screen in intense and contradictory events. What matters to Jameson is how the films’ formal aesthetics generate commentary from a seemingly external position. Conventionally, magic-​realist literature achieves this by creating exterior worlds or time frames from which to re-​view history. Jameson’s theorisation of cinematic magic realism, while thematically joined to its literary counterpart through a postcolonial politics, proposes that experimental and avant-​garde elements in certain films generate the disjuncture, ambiguity, and strangeness to launch a critique. To see thought one must interrupt, or disrupt the viewer’s chain of thought, to draw attention to irrational, absurd or weird, as well as factual or ‘faithful’ aspects in a film’s rendering of the object world. This is often the objective outcome of a magic-​realist film. In Condores the transformation of ‘el condor’ Léon Maria (Frank Ramírez) from petty-​bourgeois liberal into a ‘preternatural force of violence and retribution’ (Jameson 1986a, p.318) constitutes a ‘de-​narrativisation’ via a multiplicity of episodes that are wrought on his already politicised body. Antagonistic political forces –​the ‘eternal rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives’ (p.318) are threaded through a quotidian reality. Léon’s body is fashioned into episodic events that mark a metamorphosis, as follows: his cold indifference to the burning of a young boy is revealed in a close-​up of his expressionless face reflecting the yellow flames; his stiff body strides about town asserting authority, until the twin legacies of his childhood –​asthma and prudishness –​render him ineffectual and weak; in the final scene his corpse is abandoned in an alleyway with all traces of revolutionary fervour and stubborn pride extinguished as the hovering camera pulls away in search of the next event; his body not an interior monologue tells the story. These body-​events demonstrate how a ‘particular tension’ can be achieved through the figuration of a relationship between ‘the ideological theme and the haunting visual images’ (1986b, p.186). In Condores and Casa de Agua, human bodies become spectacles –​the objects of sustained violation –​but Jameson seems to be offering the films as examples of a different kind of spectacle, one that ‘needs to be radically historicized’ (1981, p.11). In Penzo’s Casa de Agua, the central conceit is the inverted metaphor of water as a force of death. The protagonist, Cruz Elías León (Franklin Vírgüez) gives up his place at university in order to fight against the ruling military. The film opens and closes with scenes of Cruz being tortured, his head and torso repeatedly plunged into icy water, juxtaposed with shots of his funeral procession –​a slow, black flow of attendants following the coffin. Penzo emphasises the opposing forces of agua by contrasting scenes of Cruz’s idealised childhood home by the sea in Cumaná, with images of terror connected to the water torture and the watery wheeze of tuberculosis in his congested lungs. The film draws attention to natural elements in order to show how history is being played out upon them.

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The bleached white expanse of the Venezuelan salt flats becomes blank pages onto which the bodies of the dying and the dead fall. Oppositionist traitors are shot or hung up to die on makeshift crucifixes outside the church, their corpses marking a collective historical impression upon the land as clouds of dust encircle the event of their punishment, intercut with newsreel footage of the Roosevelt administration’s desire to gain power over oil in the area. This sequence is chilling and irreal: ‘the ideolgemes of History and Nature are strangely held at a distance from each other by the very narrative which conjoins their nightmarish powers on the body of a common victim’ (1986a, p.152). The corporeal intercedent upon which suffering is played out is a necessary and integral part of Glauber manifesto for Brazilian Cinema Novo ‘An Aesthetics of Hunger’. He refuses the coloniser’s view of revolutionary uprising as an example of ‘primitivism’, pushing forward a cinematic ‘aesthetic of violence’ (1965, n.p.) that reflects the realities of twentieth-​century Latin America. In each of Jameson’s three films the protagonists die a violent death, their bodies unceremoniously dumped and forgotten, recalling the bodies of young delinquents unceremoniously dumped on the rubbish heaps in Buñuel’s Los olvidados. This human detritus signifies the common victim of a violent and unrelenting social modernisation and finds no solace in the oppositional forces. Solanas and Getino speak of living in ‘a world where the unreal rules’ and desire can only result in a fleeting satisfaction (1971–​2, p.6.); the protagonists in these magic-​realist films inhabit the gap between desire and satisfaction. Eruptions of violence mark the point at which the two converge, and their bodies signal both ‘uncontainability’ (Lyotard 1974) and resistance in an intensification of ‘excised’ temporality, an alchemical transmuation that simultaneously tells the ‘tradition of “terrorism” ’ (Jameson 1986a, p.303). These examples of magic-​realist film turn on the fleeting sense of unreality at the heart of a violent capitalist culture, protesting the effacement of the human form. Viewing the films for the first time in quick succession, there was no immediate sense for me as there had been with Spirit of the Beehive or Wings of Desire that these were examples of magic realism. And yet, as I considered the form and content, a commonality with epic Carpenterian narratives became apparent: themes of revolt, slavery, dictatorships, disease, condensation of vast periods of historical time, attention to architectural and emotional form, focalised male perspectives, tell of unfair and uneven lifestyles through the marvels of suffering. Jameson’s cinematic magic realism does offer an explanation for how magic ‘works’: it involves the ‘radicalisation’ of narrative (synthesis of form and plot) and of history (with gaps) mediated through audio-​tactile-​visual montage that foregrounds the mysterious and strange. It signals the ‘beyond-​space’ of human wish-​fulfilment that is nevertheless rooted in the real and hovers at the boundaries of fiction and documentary, not the politicised Third Cinema, but a World cinema (dropping the ‘third’). These films share aesthetic qualities: a desaturated colour palette (with insertions of monochrome or sepia sequences); low-​budget peculiarity; foregrounding of political revolution and/​or totalitarian oppression; slowness and non-​plot-​driven sequences; stark or sudden clashes in scale, texture, mood, and pace. Holland, Penzo,

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and Norden each play with realism in vivid portrayals of political and economic terror. In the absence of a clear theory of cinematic magic realism other than transpositions of key ideas purloined from literary magic(al) realism, Jameson’s essay propels and expands the discourse, adding affective, critical dimensions that I find compelling. It provides a map with which to consider the formal elements of a discourse rooted in art historical, theoretical, and phenomenological conundrums.

Affect –​colour and the chromatic scale Massumi’s statement that ‘affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system’ with the ability to ‘produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself ’ (2002, p.45), resonates with Jameson’s affective analysis of ‘vertical’ shock and diversion in magic-​realist film. As a physical as well as psychological stimulus, affect has social, psychological, and political significance for him, and Deleuze’s ‘affection-​image’16 –​a film image in which the ‘state of things’ in the world, the temporal, spatial, relational coordinates of lived experience converge –​is a key reference point for him, and for this book. His version of magic realism prizes the material consciousness-​raising that results from philosophical and affective consideration of (filmed) reality. He raises similar observations (minus the nostalgia) to those of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981); both he and Barthes feel the eerie unheimlich punctum, and the philosophical potential in photographic images’ indeterminacy. Barthes, wrestling with the ghostly/​ghastly affect he senses in the spontaneous conflation of differing temporalities, is left without sufficient words: ‘What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good system of disturbance’ (Barthes 1981, p.51). He is unable to ‘locate’ for example, where (or why) Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Robert Wilson ‘holds’ him; the effect [affect] ‘is sharp, yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. Odd contradiction: a floating flash’ (pp.151–​3).This sensory and linguistic confusion mirrors the point of contradiction with which magic-​realist films enthrall the viewer. Jameson similarly describes his ‘libidinal’ (pre-​cognitive) response to colour, which ‘intensifies the remnants in the present of what had been surgically excised of its other narrative temporalities’ (1986a, p.325). The intensification, or withdrawal, of colour from an image can have a magical affect if the object or the mise-​en-​scène is derealised sufficiently to cause a visual shock. In Antinomies of Realism (2015), he employs the term Stimmung (echoing Eisner and Rouch), to represent the ‘everyday as outside’ in an Expressionistic understanding of emotion, and its accompanying term affect, which belongs to the ‘existential as the lived or inside’ (2013, p.143). The point, he concludes, is that both quotidian and existential states ‘depend absolutely on the avoidance of genres which would tend to reify and thereby to explain this lived material’ (p.143). He values a lack of explanation as a form of resistance, in accordance with Massumi’s proclamation that ‘affect escapes’ (2002, p.35). Much of the action in Condores occurs at night in the grey asphalt streets; in Casa de Agua, the bleached expanses of the salt plains dazzle; and in Fever the dark

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cramped spaces underscore the claustrophobic urgency of the anarchists’ meetings. Against such backgrounds individual colours stand out vividly:  ‘I remember in particular the moment (in Fever) of the passing detail of an extraordinary violet apron:  a punctual experience of rare intensity comparable only to Baudelaire’s “green so delicious it hurts” ’ (1986a, p.314). Kandinsky believed that a certain quality in yellow:  ‘can be brought to a power and height unbearable to the eye and to the mind. When so intensified, it sounds like a shrill horn, blown constantly louder …’ ([1912] 1977, p.63). In what amounts to less than a second of screen time, Jameson not only sees the screen object but feels it too. In Condores a flash of bright pink candyfloss held aloft by the assassin’s daughter introduces a point of difference in which the contrast between the innocent pleasures of youth and the world of political violence that her father has constructed is intensified. The shock of this interruption is subsequently decoded into the image, where the deconcealment of a hidden, forgotten or unrealised idea: [The] ‘return of the repressed’ makes itself felt by the garish and Technicolor [sic] representation of what is given as an essentially black-​and-​white reality […] objects derealized by the very plenitude of their sensory being, by which the merely perceptual is unmasked as obsession. (1986a, p.315)

The blurring of the line between imagination and reality is activated in the correspondence between the image and the human mind, a visual and perceptual sorcery that is derived from and concludes in the film image. Freud called the subject’s investment of libido besetzung, which can be translated into English as cathexis. The libidinal intensities of magic-​realist film invest fantasy in social history, connecting subjective desire with objective existence:  the libidinal apparatus ‘endows a private fantasy-​structure with a quasi-​material inertness, with all the resistance of an object which can lead a life of its own and has its own inner logic and specific dynamics’ (Jameson 1981b, p.10). The application of colour to particular images creates an affect that Jameson believes to signal the materialisation of thought as repressed or unfulfilled desires; and a sudden application of colour operates on the viewer like ‘punctual beats of energy’ (1986a, p.314). These libidinal intensities mark a process whereby the ‘ontological aspect’ of perception is tested at the limits of human perception, reaching the point where the distance between exterior and interior collapses (Deleuze 2001, p.230). Such juxtapositions can ‘awaken’ reality by momentarily defamiliarising the diegetic world through a sense of wonderment: ‘To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed that stare, animal-​like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours […]’ (Baudelaire 1972, p.398). Jameson’s reaction to the violet apron changes his perception of the diegetic world; the film makes possible ‘the awakening of fresh sight’ (1986a, p.314), enacting perfectly the intentional ‘shocks of colour’ engineered by André Delvaux (Chapter 7) to create a marvellous, off-​kilter mood (Abraté 2012). As Deleuze repeats throughout

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Cinema 2: The Time Image, colour is power, it is capable of replacing an object, as in the hands of Michelangelo Antonioni who films ‘brain-​colour with all its future potentialities’ (1985, p.205). Colour is emotional, sensory, and highly subjective –​ magic-​realist films play with addition and subtraction of colour to reflect the ever-​ shifting boundaries between what we imagine to be certainties, or at least assignable to meaning. Kandinsky argued that in paintings depicting weird and strange worlds, a careful aesthetic balance is necessary to avoid straying completely into the realm of the fantastic: ‘The utter impossibility of a red horse, if placed before us, demands an equally unnatural background. Otherwise, the entire effect can be taken for a freak (superficial and completely inartistic), or as a clumsy fairy-​tale’ (1977, p.83) as transpires in the vernacular. It can also be deployed as codified link to an emotional state, altogether distinct from Baudelaire’s green, Jameson’s violet, or the splicing of a blank red frame in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), designed to signal a mental impasse in the titular protagonist. The colour balance in cinematic magic realism is frequently off kilter, amplified, overly subdued; but nothing seems ‘utterly impossible’ even if the shifting tonal palette refuses conventional realism. This is an affect very distinct from the bright, saturated colours associated with vernacular magic realism (e.g. the rainbow pageantry of Tim Burton’s Big Fish) that constitute the diegetic narrative style. Holland, Penzo, and Norden create worlds through the ‘imperfection’ of colour, suggestive of a low budget ‘realism’. In Cézanne’s paintings, a ‘heightened exaltation’ of bright blues and greens is opposed to ‘the contracting counterforce of ochre, which winds this excitement down and effectively recontains its energies’ (Jameson 2007, p.263). The interplay between brilliant and dull tones is central to Jameson’s theorisation of magic-​realist film, where magic resides in a shifting spectrum; the violet of the apron has no assigned meaning, its colour simply part of a subjective affectual process. Stanley Cavell argued that dramatic monochrome images documented the real world better than Technicolor because ‘the ease with which we accepted film reality came from our having already taken reality dramatically’, while the glaring addition of Technicolor meant that ‘our comprehensibility of personality and event were secured’ (1971, pp.89–​90). Jameson muses on this thesis, concluding that vivid colour corresponds to an uncanny disruption via the viewer’s latent desires. Consequently, a magic-​realist film offers no signifying framework for colour or tone, other than to attribute it to the arrested mobile sensation contained within the crystal moment. As an example, the gaze might be irritated or traumatised as colours fleet before the eyes in jarring and ‘brutal’ succession: ‘the bright-​dark laboratory of the chemist side-​by-​side the gray liquid landscape of the lake in eruption, the moldering green opacity of the stone well side-​by-​side with the blinding whiteness of an expanse of salt’ (1986a, p.305). In literary magic(al) realism detail is enhanced and supplemented by descriptions of the marvellous colours of tropical locations. The bright gold, crimson, blue, and yellow gleam of religious iconography; fantastically hued costume; as well as the ridiculous felts, wools, and leathers of the colonial soldier, and the fancy objects of the colonial home, are frequently highlighted. In Pedro Paramo colours are associated

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with certain memories  –​grey sky with the protagonist’s father’s death  –​and the air magically alters the colour of objects. In Magischer Realismus paintings yellows and whites emphasise light, and a tempera glaze highlights the transparency of the still, reflecting skin of glass objects, such as the lightbulb and window composition in Georg Scholz’s Cacti and Semaphore (1923). Roh expresses the importance of coolness, smoothness, sharp focus and ‘glass-​like’ space in these paintings of the inter-​ war years (Menton 1983, p.17), an ‘airlessness’ (Carrà 1971, p.201) that is ‘weirdly’ mimetic and faithful to the original object but flatter, brighter, and with a reduction in chiaroscuro that lends the objects their hyperreality. In ‘On magic realism’ Jameson reflects on a passage from Cuban novelist Pablo Armando Fernández’s magic(al)-​ realist Los ninos se despiden [The Children Say Goodbye, 1968] where the protagonist, in the process of building a new world, reflects on the correlation between sensory perception and individual experiences of recognition and cognition: People spoke of ‘weak’ gray or ‘dead’ gray, of ‘languid’ or ‘rich gray’, of brilliant red, of brick red, of flesh red, of purple red, of yellowish red, of drab brownish red, of saffron red, fire red, carmine red, crimson red, scarlet red, burnt red, blood red, or sunset red, and distinguished between ‘dappled’ colors and ‘veined’ colors, between ‘speckled’ and ‘marbled’, and to each one of these they attributed specific qualities for certain crops. (Fernández quoted in Jameson 1986a, p.313)

The distinctions between colours seem to awaken multiple senses, creating a heterogeneous reality through embodied response. The distinction between the interior world of the human mind and the exterior world is blurred, with patterns and repetitions emphasised. Jameson’s analysis of this passage also underscores the philosophical act of thinking through that returns to the objects of contemplation after the initial awakening of the senses: ‘something of this new and imperfectly explored multiplicity of perceptual powers now returns back upon the words themselves, to confer on each an unaccustomed magic power, in the incantatory isolation of each distinct act of speech’ (1986a, p.313). Such a conscious awakening of unconscious thoughts at the level of the text also applies to magic-​ realist films in which unexplained combinations of emotion and affect attach to particular objects, lieux, or actions, working on the viewer in a heterogeneous rush of suggestion. Dialectical thinking should engender shock in order to create the possibility for change. Affect leads to a transitional moment of self-​reflective awareness after various layers of meaning have been revealed all-​at-​once in a synaesthetic surge:  ‘There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-​ oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-​ consciousness  –​ something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator’s fall’ (1974, p.308). The shock prevents passivity in the viewing experience; it requires active engagement with ideas. In Chapter 6, I examine how Jameson unpacks the twin DNA strands of magic-​ realist film through his analysis of Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse: (1) the simultaneous

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cancellation and preservation of genre/​mode (the film’s ‘sublated’ science fiction elements (Jameson 1992, p.89)); (2) re-​adapting ‘the paradigm of national allegory’ ‘to allegorical structures of a global and world-​systemic type’ (p.111), which might indeed be akin to Latin American literary magic(al) realism and its ‘objective fact of uneven development in the post-​colonial object-​world itself ’ (p.200).The Hegelian sublation that underpins this muted (yet vitally hybrid) cinematic discourse is antithetical to generic pastiche with a decipherable code, or structure. Sokurov’s magic-​realist drama is an ‘experimental’ work reminiscent of ‘the more extreme and enigmatic literary modernists’ Ezra Pound and Marcel Duchamp (Jameson 2006, p.1).

Notes 1 Which, distinct from the dynamic spark of the marvellous in surrealist collage, is a ‘heightened bricolage’ that ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of pre-​existing texts and art works in ‘pure and random play’ (Jameson 1991, p.120). 2 Jameson’s reading has not convinced everyone; Aldea finds that he over-​emphasises the ‘material conditions’ of the ‘realist part of magic realism’, while neglecting to address the magic, leaving the reader unable to determine how magic ‘works’ (2011, p.109). Yet in his analysis of the films, spatio-​temporal affect removes the binary opposition between realism and magic, instead insisting, like the surrealists, that the ordinary is magic, and that lived experience cannot be separated from instinctual or repeated belief in that which lies beyond the material object, whether of supernatural and divine properties, or in technology, or the mechanisms of the unconscious. 3 Van Gogh painted a series of shoes; Jameson does not differentiate between the various versions. In Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (1991) the reproduction of The Pair of Boots is from the original in The Baltimore Museum of Art.This differs from the version seen in 1930 by Heidegger at the Stedelijk Musuem in Amsterdam. In his analysis, he refers to Heidegger’s descriptions of the ochre fields, which are clearly absent from the blue-​hued version of the painting. 4 The addition of these two artworks is prompted by Ceserani’s critique, where he argues that the van Gogh/​Warhol model needs to reflect the more complex, uneven, and contradictory nature of postmodernity where classicism and other art-​historical traditions are recycled alongside the new. He offers Italian novelist Italo Calvino as an example of a writer who, despite being marketed as ‘postmodern’ in America, is situated firmly in the modernist tradition (Ceserani 1994, p.377). Calvino’s oeuvre has frequently been labelled magic-​realist (Sexson 1983; Spindler 1993) and linked not only to the metatextual elements of postmodern literature, but to folktale, magic, and enchantment. 5 In ‘Beyond the Cave’, Jameson affirms modernism as a wide and varied movement that is fantastic, archaic, and futuristic; modernist artists appropriate allegory, symbolism, metonymy, and abstraction to recode exterior and interior worlds. Modernist literature can range from Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) –​a novel immersed in themes of isolation, the unconscious mind, and the socio-​political conflicts of capitalism, also viewed by some critics as a proto-​magic-​realist (Flores 1955; Durix, 1998; Shroeder, 2004) to a much later work, The Exorcist, a popular American narrative of the paranormal and the role of faith in everyday life (Jameson does not specify as to whether he means William Peter Blatty’s novel, 1971, or its 1973 film adaptation directed by William Friedkin (1975).

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6 There are at least seven versions of this painting made between 1935 and 1948 (critical reports vary; line drawings from 1964 also exist). The painting reproduced in Postmodernism is the version painted at some point between 1947 and 1948, according to the chronology set out by Sylvester (2009, pp.277–​9). Each version has significant differences, with some (Moderna Museet Stockholm, 1935) less ‘life-​like’ in tone and lacking the detail (the protruding veins and flesh tones, the ephemera, clumps of earth and dingy water marks on the wooden background) of later versions (the copy held by Muséé National d’Art Moderne, Paris being the most marvellous in its corporeal representation). 7 In 1937, British poet and patron of surrealist art Edward James commissioned a version of Le modèle rouge for a panel triptych to be hung in his residence in London. As well as augmenting the scale of the painting almost threefold, Magritte added some English pennies, a cigarette butt, matches, and a fragment torn from a French-​language newspaper that illustrates a reversed image of his 1928 painting Les jours gigantesqus (The Titanic Days). The boots, now with a pull added at each heel, are identified with the world of work, or perhaps of military service. James wrote excitedly to Magritte describing the reaction to the triptych hanging in his Ballroom: ‘Your paintings produced a profound sensation at my ball. That evening, Youth Illustrated prompted many conversions to Surrealism among the British youth. But above all, the human boots struck a chord in the young dancing couples in their capitalist heels’ (see in D’Alessandro 2014 in Unland, pp.196–​7). This exchange further underscores the connections between capitalism and human customs that originally inspired Magritte. 8 In personal correspondence with scholar Patricia Allmer on the topic of magic realism, she writes: Magritte seems to me to be much more interested in the illusionism we associate with stage magic […] while for people like Márquez and [Angela] Carter the magical is magical, not prestidigitation (which is very clear about magic being trickery).The magic in magical realism is ‘real’ while Magritte is about debunking illusionisms. While clearly stating Magritte’s interest in illusion and sleight of hand, where not everything magical is real, it also underscores a key fascination with technology and magic that is common to Magischer Realismus, illustrating the proximity of influence, if not the intent and delivery (email correspondence between Allmer and Gee, 20 August 2019). 9 In his persuasive materialist analysis of literary magic realism, Liam Connell argues that in One Hundred Years it is not the fantastical objects of the gypsies which seem the most magical, but the actions of the workers in the banana plant (1998). 10 A branch of magic-​realist painting that flourished in 1950s America ‘created mystery and the marvelous through juxtapositions that are disturbing even when it is difficult to see exactly why’ and translated ‘everyday experience into strangeness’ (Cozzolino 2005, p.12.). A  group of artists  –​Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–​1977), Sylvia Fein (b.1919), Marshall Glasier (1902–​1988), Dudley Huppler (1917–​1988), Karl Priebe (1914–​1976), and John Wilde (1919–​2006) –​‘drew on the visual language of surrealism, read psychology, studied myth, and looked to nature for meaning […] they asserted narrative, the visible body, and tangible objects in order to explore sexuality, identity, history, and the wonder of nature’ (Cozzolino 2005, p.1). Each artist’s work evokes the calm, quietude, and minor key of Magischer Realismus, responding to social terrors with peculiar and personal obsession. In Dorothy Miller and Alfred H.  Barr Jnr’s exhibition catalogue American Realists and Magic Realists (MoMA, 1969) magic realism is described as ‘a widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art’ (p.5) and

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variously noted to correspond to a style of painting where material surfaces (wood grain, paper) are rendered convincingly, and a transparent and mirror-​like quality is common. Subject matter is often fantastic, but rendered realistically, recalling the trompe-​l’oeil effect of eighteenth century Italian painting. 11 Elsewhere Jameson has posited that anachronisms are an inherently ‘magic-​realist’ device. See ‘Transformations of the Visible’, in The Cultural Turn, 1998, p.125. 12 Holland’s 1992 film Olivier, Olivier, also based on ‘real events’, similarly presents a world of violence and a history with gaps, adding supernatural phenomena and marvellous coincidence, such as realised premonitions and telekinesis, which align it more clearly with the mode of magic realism. It illuminates how magic is not necessarily linked to the supernatural, but to everyday events that somehow seem to emulate or capture something of the supernatural, as in Tarkovsky’s films. 13 Due to the coincidence of its release with the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980, it has largely been interpreted as a commentary on (then) contemporary politics. In 1984, while promoting the film in Chicago, Holland commented that ‘the similarity of the film’s subject matter and the Solidarity movement, which at that time was banned by Poland’s communist authorities, rendered her film unwelcome in Poland’ (Gessner 2000). 14 Jameson’s concepts of unevenness and the perpetual present, although distinct, are nevertheless based in Bloch’s concept of ungleichzeitig (nonsynchronous). Mark Ritter, the translator of the 1977 edition of Bloch’s ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’ (Bloch [1932] 1977)  notes that his translation  –​(non)synchronous  –​is an imprecise term to describe the persistence of remnants of the past in the present (now). Jameson uses it to define more specifically the uneven flows of world capital in line with Bloch’s commentary on German peasantry and its unsettled economic past. 15 Jameson uses both lower and upper case for this noun, but here we can see how the upper case ‘E’ apportions intensity to ‘Event’ as a philosophical concept. Magic-​realist films’ odd tensions, and geopolitical contexts often involve a slowness, intercut with sudden incongruities that allow temporal slippages between past and future, creating a folding (Deleuze), Event-​ful present. 16 See ­chapter 6 ‘The affection-​image: face and close-​up’ in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, 2008. Deleuze describes the final scene in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box in which Jack the Ripper’s knife is shown in chilling close up, preparing the viewer for the subsequent mobilisation of affective horror. He argues the knife as pure image, pure object that could stand in for the action itself.

6 ‘SOVIET MAGIC REALISM’ AND WORLD CINEMA

Sokurov made his first feature film Odinokiy golos cheloveka [The Lonely Voice of Man] in 1978, but his work gained wider distribution in Russia after 1986, where it was well received by Perestroika-​era audiences. His films tackle themes of displacement, liminality, stagnation, and economic turmoil caused by Soviet politics: ‘I myself experience history as a Eurasian; Russia occupies a separate place, being neither Europe nor Asia’ (Sokurov cited in Carels 1991, p.73); where ‘due to its vastness, the Russian Empire was still exotic to itself ’ (Soroka 2007, p.335). His subdued politics takes inspiration from literary and painterly influences:  ‘it is imperative to keep it [art] from being stifled by a society in the grips of hatred and disaster’ (cited in Sedofsky 2001, n.p.), creating a conceptually synaesthetic form of cinema that is dependent on a variety of mediums; layered allegory and formal experimentation obfuscate its often bitingly critical perspective. Based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s science fiction novel Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years before the End of the World, aka Definitely Maybe, 1978], Days of Eclipse is set in Soviet-​era Turkmenistan, a world in which paranoia and fear combine with superstition and absurd chance. It is also a politicised depiction of the diaspora, an elegy to the thousands displaced under Soviet rule. Its dusty, barren landscape transforms into something else within the reality as mysterious forces seem to be working on the townsfolk from outside: a beyond which is ‘inaccessible yet constantly makes it presence felt as pressure and as strangeness’ (2006, p.7). The film opens onto a bright orange sky, foreshadowing the intense heat and solar eclipse to come. This static image is accompanied by extra-​diegetic sounds of children’s voices, overlaid with a soundtrack of folk music. It dissolves slowly and is replaced by an aerial tracking shot taken as if from the perspective of an aircraft passenger. The earth, still tinted orange, is scored with lines –​train tracks, roads, borders –​reminiscent of aerial photographs in Roh’s Foto-​Auge. Against these giant sweeping lines, tiny dotted figures are perceptible. The children’s voices become louder as the camera

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swoops downwards and gains speed. Isolated shacks, rubble, a stationary bus, and more figures are now visible.The soundtrack changes to an ominous drum beat and the strings crescendo into discordant noise as the camera begins a dizzying plunge towards this unordered geometry. Finally, the hurtling descent reaches its end, as the viewer crashes with the camera into microscopic particles of dusty, stony ground. Immediately a sepia filter replaces the orange. The opening descent and discordant soundtrack frame the supervening montage of documentary-​style shots of silent townsfolk (played by locals from Krasnovodok). The audio-​tactile-​visual montage creates a confusion of voices that lack bodies, and bodies that lack voices.The voices we can hear belong to ‘beings’ that seem to be watching from above. From the very first scene, the town is defamiliarised, focalised through the perspective of a child (signalled by extra-​diegetic laughter) or an alien (if we believe someone else, an extra-​ terrestrial presence is watching). Days of Eclipse embraces ‘the representation of the unrepresentable’, namely ‘the forces that impinge on our monad from the outside’ (Jameson 2006, p.10); but these forces have no real tangibility except for the affect that is produced. What is particularly striking about this exchange of perspectival positions is that any hierarchy between viewer and object is dismantled.The audio-​ tactile-​visual montage replicates the mental capacity to simultaneously recall visual, textural, olfactory, and aural memories, an ethno-​magic-​realist form of documentary. Sokurov replaces the classical hierarchised gaze of ethnographic documentary with a double gaze, whereby the ‘extraterrestrial’ perspective undermines the viewer–​object relationship, isolating the sensations of lived experience. The gaze becomes uncertain; who is being watched, and why? Despite the camera’s scrutiny of the townsfolk in a montage of close-​ups, the suggestion of an alien ‘other’ undermines its mimetic process. Consequentially, the first close-​up of a bandaged woman dressed in traditional headscarf and staring listlessly ahead is already imbued with mystery. The Strugatsky brothers’ intention was to portray the figure of the creative intellectual under the pressure of totalitarian rule. Sokurov’s film is far removed from the narrative scenes of the original (as the authors have themselves testified1) but retains the thematic concerns of intellectual oppression –​central protagonist Malianov (Aleksei Ananishnov) is pressed to destroy his research, the incessantly ringing telephone in his apartment signalling an inescapable surveillance. The novel is dismissive of folklore and extra-​terrestrial life:  ‘there are no aliens and no ancient wise men’, but the characters sense that there is ‘something else, some force –​and our work is getting in its way’ (1979, p.70, author’s emphasis). Sokurov plays up the mysterious oppression, ruling out neither aliens nor folktales. Jameson turns the film’s sustained atmosphere of paranoia into an ideological utopianism, where idiosyncrasy and supernatural events threaten to undo order; radical challenges to social life are ‘simply the imperative to imagine them’ (2007, p.416). Eisenstein ‘suffered’ from the neurological condition of synaesthesia, and in ‘Towards a theory of montage’ describes how patients suffering from the condition are unable to walk across multi-​coloured carpets without stumbling over ‘the polychrome patterns of the carpet as though they were actually at different depths or heights’ (1991 p.259). In Days of Eclipse the landscape, like Eisenstein’s rug, is

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difficult to navigate. Its indeterminate spaces create optical illusions where shadows, folds, and fissures create the effect of mountains and valleys. Moreover, the dislocation of sound from image throughout creates a constant uncertainty and doubt. Jameson does not discuss the role of sound in magic-​realist film, but it is an integral element of the technical magic. Persistent noise –​typing, ringing telephones, folk music, radio broadcasts, and odd shrieks and bangs –​punctuate the diegesis, sonically mobilising the town’s weirdness, and erasing sensory and geopolitical boundaries and limits. A  young boy mysteriously appears at Malianov’s doorstep, weak and freezing cold. His strange chatter is set against a radio broadcast of an Italian mass from 1987.2 Sound bridges shots long after the image has faded or anticipates an action that occurs seconds later. As a metaphor for ethnic dislocation, paranoia, intellectual threat, and existential malaise, the cinematic synaesthesia that Sokurov creates becomes magical because the dislocation heightens our sense of the real, strongly suggesting an imagined extra-​diegetic space beyond (the extra-​terrestrial ‘other world’) but spiritually tied to what appears on screen. The sensory blending questions what constitutes the ‘real’. Many of the characters appear dazed or shaken, and technical manipulation creates a jarring quasi-​verisimilitude that seems unstable and intransient. Ultimately, the comfortable layers of known experience, of recognisable images and sounds, are replaced with a weird and distorted refraction. We may feel that we are standing on quicksand, or on Eisenstein’s rug, trying to make sense of the unlikely contingencies, and irrational actions of the characters, which seem to rhythmically parallel the tremors and the strange power of the eclipse. A small rural town and its inhabitants are revealed in fragments: a woman walking through ruined stone houses with a dog, men squatting on the dusty floor covered in flies, and endless sheets of washing hanging out to dry, intercut with images of camels shot in close-​up, slowly chewing. The intrusive, voyeuristic close-​ups of the town continue, revealing a man with rotting teeth, a youth rocking back and forth, and children playing in the rubble. Almost everything looks ruined or half-​finished and even the children seem ill and weary. Many of the men and women stare directly back at the camera, some grin, others appear indifferent seemingly waiting (for what?) while repeating the same gestures. Later in the film Malianov admits to not being able to understand a word the locals say: ‘It’s like living in a freaking wildlife reserve’ (Sokurov’s irony); they fear something outside the frame, something working on the environment.3 Soviet totalitarianism is imagined through the bizarre narrative synaesthesia in an encounter with magic realism. Like Hal Foster’s triangulation of Marxism, psychoanalysis and surrealism in Compulsive Beauty (1993), Jameson’s magic realism, while much informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s 1974 text Anti-​ Oedipus and appreciative of their ‘materialist psychiatry’, tends to favour retaining the psychic and psychoanalytical aspects linking desire and capital to the social. Deleuze and Guattari argue for its excision: ‘libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else’ (2004, p.31, original emphasis). Alighting on a fragment from a schizophrenic patient’s diary mentioned in Anti-​Oedipus, Jameson finds a

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new use for the term schizophrenia, which he had previously deployed to stand for a fragmented, de-​centred postmodernism.The diary entry now puts him in mind of the magic-​realist event, where reality and unreality are simultaneously experienced. As the patient walks past a school, she glances at a group of children singing and it triggers a strange shift in perspective: It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks […] At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I  could not see […] The yellow vastness […] filled me with such anxiety.4 The exterior world seems to become larger and larger until it is unrecognisable. She continues: ‘It was the first appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations of unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of natural things’ (Jameson 1991, p.27). These visions could be said to correspond to ‘events’ in which the ‘incompatibility’ of the real and the magical is foregrounded in ‘arrested contradiction’ (1986a, p.323). Jameson quite happily invites the discursive synaesthesia of psychoanalytic, socio-​economic, and literary theories to the philosophical conundrum of magic-​realist discourse. Affect articulates the ‘irreducibility … of sociality’ (original emphasis), whereby when ‘Massumi speaks of matter he is also speaking of the experience of matter’ (Best 2011, p.70). Jameson equates affect with bodily reaction, as well as with unnameable ‘haecceitas or “this-​ness” ’ (2015 p.39), a discursive affect resulting from intersecting disciplines of thought, which, distinct from the views of Deleuze and Guattari, or Eugenie Brinkema,5 favours the singularity of the subject –​psyche and body. In Jamesonian magic-​realist discourse, the intersection of aesthetic, philosophical, psychological, and sociological concerns exist both prior to and concurrent with sensation: a total synaesthesia. Sokurov portrays his childhood home with deeply underscored and deliberate gestations towards its unreality. Unexpected juxtapositions between pre-​modern and modern elements, and the artificiality of the real location –​sound technician Vladamir Persov testifies that filming in Krasnovodsk ‘was like an “artificial” place’ (2011, p.208) –​test the spectator’s belief in what she sees.The diegetic world magically expands in close-​ups of art objects depicting exterior scenes: a ceramic plate with an illustration of a ruined building, old sepia photographs of the town showing rows of Muslim men, or old colonial-​style houses. In addition, Sokurov plays with perspective, foreshortening shots of the distant mountains and stretching others with an anamorphic lens, abstracting and distorting the view (Bird 2007, p.91). Unexpected points of perspective challenge expectations of scale: long shots render human life microscopic; and low-​angle shots create overly large figures or objects that dwarf their surroundings (Roh found the transformation of an object’s scale –​ whether gigantic or miniature  –​to have magic-​realist effect). When the eclipse occurs, the sun and moon loom gigantic against a backdrop of mountainous rock that is made to seem as artificial as Murnau’s quasi-​theatrical sets in Sunrise. In the

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final scene buildings disappear from the screen in a gradual dissolve that leaves an eerily uninhabited space with an ‘altered consciousness’ that Donato Totaro likens to surrealist art which ‘rekindles the object in a new light’ (2000, n.p.). Sokurov cleverly invests realism with trompe l’oeil and chance alignment to create a tension akin to an active nightmare, where ‘something else’ emerges –​the half-​formed idea partially obscured by the dusty fog: a national allegory ‘lifted into something rather different (which I have abusively called magic realism for lack of a better characterization’ (Jameson 1992, p. 90). In attempting to ‘characterize’ Sokurov’s approach to the political situation, Jameson draws on Buñuel’s Las Hurdes for comparison, while also explaining the film’s magic as ‘accidents’, once more aligning the mode with surrealist film practice. Constellations of micro-​events seem influenced by one visible and one invisible (yet keenly felt) macro-​event: the titular solar eclipse and the all-​pervasive threat of totalitarian power. The film was released when Mikhail Gorbachov had been in office for two years and the fate of the former Soviet states was as yet unknown.6 Sergei Selianov describes how the relationship between the former Soviet Union and the ‘first’ world changed completely at the end of the Cold War in 1992: the country opened up and the powerful myth of abroad collapsed […] Living in Russia, it was very important to know that somewhere out there was such a different world. Suddenly it transpired that there is no other world. This is what we have lost. (1999, p.45)

This paradoxical relationship is made materially evident in Sokurov’s film, where the presentient allegory of a deregulated Soviet Union is shown through the mise-​en-​scène to be in process of disappearing. The film plays with erasure and superimposition to suggest the dissolution of both real and imagined borders; and the dominating presence of a half-​formed outside world is tethered to an all-​ encompassing fear of oppression –​whether communist or capitalist. Days of Eclipse is a magic-​realist portrait of Turkmenistan at the fringes of the Soviet Union’s ‘neo-​ colonial’ enclaves in which accelerated entropy –​the disintegration of both human life and the natural world  –​and obsessive paranoia are woven into a ‘fairy tale’ (Jameson 1992, p.101). Here political power and national identity can be addressed, albeit at a distance. Like the literary worlds of Márquez and Carpentier in which the reader is transported to alternative visions of Colombia, Haiti, or Venezuela, the town of Krasnovodsk on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, mirrors the one in which Sokurov grew up, but continually metamorphoses between this known reality and a magical place in which there seem to be no boundaries between the living and the dead. The dialogue combines the languages of its indigenous and exiled people:  Turkmen, Russian, and Azerbaijani. Sokurov builds a mysterious atmosphere that foresees the threat of late capitalism from the vantage point of a region struggling to move forwards. As is often the case in the literature of a colonising nation, the indigenous peoples of Turkmenistan were written off as

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‘backward’ prior to imperial Russia’s seizure of power (completed in 1894 and not fully dissolved until 1991). After the Second World War the Soviet political police NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) exiled and targeted Muslim nationalities throughout the Soviet Union, sending them to rural areas such as Turkmenistan: ‘These brutal forced relocations to desolate areas with poor material conditions resulted in hundreds of deaths from disease and malnutrition’ (Pohl 2000, n.p.). Days of Eclipse makes emphatic reference to its many ethnic groups, giving voice to the Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans by way of geologist Vecherovsky (Eskender Umarov), Malianov’s only true friend. He tells of how his parents, exiled under Stalin, were for many years unable to find permanent residency and never found a sense of ‘home’. The strange nostalgia in the film results from this difficult relationship with Soviet Russia, and the uneven and precarious experience of the diaspora. It speaks also, to migration and the refugee crisis, continuing mass displacement in the twenty-​first century. In the next section I expand the Jamesonian magic-​realist event to consider it as a protracted affective event, the type of event that holds the peculiarity and shock of the all-​at-​once but becomes even more peculiar and resistant as it unfolds over screen time. During the night before the eclipse, Malianov is called to the house of his Russian neighbour, Snegovoy, under the pretext of procuring a sleeping pill for his insomnia. Inside the apartment, the two men are frontally lit, their backs to the open window framed against the black night sky. The lighting eliminates shadow giving an unnaturally flat image with minimal depth, transforming a very ordinary tableau into something quite mysterious. From this angle the moon is excessively low in the sky, hanging stony and out of place, recalling the weird meeting of rock, cloud, and moon in Magritte’s La Bataille de l’Argonne [Battle of the Argonne, 1959]. The high contrast between the pale stucco moon, Malianov’s white shirt and bare chest, and the black night sky is magic-​realist, Magischer Realismus. Moreover, on closer inspection, the buildings and yard in the background, only partially reflecting the light and scored by a black power line, bear a striking resemblance to photonegative prints in which the expected light patterns have been inverted. After a short exchange of dialogue, the camera follows Malianov as he walks out into a clear, ultra-​blue light, made possible by the eclipse of the setting sun. The transition is shocking after the preceding monochromatic scene. The camera zooms outwards and upwards until the houses are once again the size of small toys. Suddenly a sweeping beam of light passes overhead, revealing a mysterious green light emitting from several houses, which could feasibly be linked to the extra-​terrestrial presence in the film’s opening scene. The following shot matches the movement of the sweeping beam as Malianov is revealed back inside his apartment swinging a light bulb, which hangs from the ceiling. We hear his sister ask: ‘Are you afraid’? to which he answers: ‘Yes, I am’. Both exterior and interior scenes are imbued with a peculiar tension; the white light of the beam and the golden yellow light of the bulb, however, cannot be deemed more or less artificial or marvellous than the startling dusk sky and the summer moon. We cannot tell if Malianov is afraid of his new environment, his conversation with Snegovoy,

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or the threat of external forces, but the tension is made palpable through the transformative magic of light. The following morning Snegovoy is discovered dead in his apartment, and the ensuing forensic investigation gradually reveals the objects related to his suicide.The police search lasts for 5 minutes and 6 seconds of screen time, and the body of the dead man, unceremoniously shrouded in a white sheet, is present in the background throughout. Time-​lapse dissolves indicate that this process took much longer, and the number of police swells and dwindles as the futile photographing of the crime scene and Snegovoy’s past is carried out in ‘uneventful’ forensic time (Doane 2002). This slow event builds a strange intensity, with Snegovoy’s room posing an enigma that Jameson admits to watching with ‘rapt fascination’ (1992a, p.103). His reading of the scene can be better understood, with recourse to an earlier article in which he dissects the role of boredom as a symptom of a more deeply buried malaise: ‘boredom […] marks the spot in which something painful is buried, it invites us to reawaken all the anguished hesitation, the struggle of the subject to avert his or her eyes from the thought’ (1975, p.4). The drawn-​out, uneventful police investigation thus becomes a site of excavation, inviting an intense engagement with an event in which nothing is resolved. After its conclusion, a shadow passes across the town in another aerial tracking shot as the eclipse takes place. As well as reversing day and night (mirrored in Malianov’s costume change from a white (day) to a black (night) t-​shirt), the eclipse is of profound religious significance to the town’s Muslim population. It is suggested that the prophet Muhammad may have been born during an eclipse, which signifies his ability to bridge the sleeping and waking worlds, a fitting story for a magic-​realist film. In addition, and this is of principle significance to what happens at the morgue the next day, is the Islamic belief that an eclipse forewarns the Hour of Doom, or the Day of Resurrection. Following the eclipse, Malianov stands at his windowsill, lit with a champagne luminosity that recalls the silvery-​gold patina of early daguerreotypes; momentarily the dusty sepia is replaced, and he seems transformed, like a deity. In one of the film’s most inexplicable moments, he performs a back flip off the sill back into his room before heading straight to the morgue. Snegovoy’s body is spread out on a slab, underneath a bright overhead light. Malianov enters and stands transfixed as the head of the dead man turns slowly towards him. At exactly the same moment, an odd, extra-​diegetic shriek causes him to jump (repeated in the absurd off-​screen yell pronouncing ‘a fly!’ soon after). Looking up at Malianov, the ‘resurrected’ Snegovoy implores him to leave: ‘The living don’t belong here’. At no point is this scene signalled as a figment of Malianov’s imagination, and Sokurov does not invest it with any of the cinematic devices usually employed to denote dreams or fantasies. As his friend Tarkovsky emphasises: ‘All too often film dreams are made into a collection of old-​fashioned filmic tricks, and cease to be a phenomenon of life’ (1986, p.30, original emphasis). Sokurov’s portrayal of the resurrected corpse is eerie, but not fantastical. The corpse continues to speak, warning that once the limit between life and death has been truly understood, nothing can ever be the same: ‘each one of us has an invisible circle around us and we cannot venture beyond it for even

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a single moment. Forgetting this limit, trying to break it with your mind […] you don’t know what guardians you have awakened, you have stepped outside the circle’. In Sokurov’s Elegiya iz Rossi [Elegy from Russia,  1992] a young woman suggests that she and her companion move away from the dead body of their relative as corpses are said to be able to hear two hours after death. Sokurov does not seem to be inviting the spectator to understand Snegevoy’s ‘resurrection’, but there are clear allusions to superstition and religious beliefs, which feel real. He is both ghost and sage, existing in a liminal space between life and death, a fate which his speech to Malianov suggests is also the case for the living. My second example of a protracted affective event is equally disquieting, and likewise, extends to a conflation of philosophical and supernatural ideas. It begins after Malianov burns the notes from his ethnographic research on the townsfolk. The charred papers perform ‘a magical conflagration’ or a ‘kind of supernatural incineration’ (1992a, p.105); in a subjective chain of associations Jameson links Malianov’s act to the keloid scars on Snegovoy’s face, and a hairy, sticky mess on the wall of Vechervosky’s living room. Certainly, the ‘magical’ fire that destroys Malianov’s livelihood seems, alongside the suicide of his neighbour, to have some relation to the disgusting goo on the wall. Sokurov has implied that the ‘meaning’ of Days of Eclipse resides in this key scene inVecherovsky’s flat (Graffy, p.81) but offers no further clues –​ although the link seems to inherently reference the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, as other objects in the apartment have melted. In Malianov’s previous visit to the apartment Vecherovsky explains that he is looking after a dog for some friends. The dog has now vanished, but in its place a stain dominates the living room wall, roughly textured, hairy, oozing, its original canine form retained. In the novel Vecherovsky’s apartment is stained with black soot, and it is suggested that the ‘authorities’ have lit fires there to destroy his work, thus linking ash and soot to the burning of intellectual material. For Jameson what makes the event ‘supernatural’ is not the extra-​terrestrial inflection of the novel, but rather the way in which magic is built up through ‘a kind of action at a distance’ over two separate episodes (1992a, p.105). Jameson’s explanation is compelling, but so also is the earlier visual repetition of animal forms –​the fully preserved lobster in aspic and the un-​skinned rabbit that Malianov receives as gifts; the half-​exposed canine skeleton in the town cemetery, and the dogs and lizards that roam free. These motifs stick to Malianov as the image of the stray dog sticks to Jaibo in the dramatic dissolve concluding Buñuel’s Los olvidados, where the dog is superimposed upon the juvenile’s dying body. There is no doubt that the stain on the wall is the residue of a violent event (whether Vecherovsky’s erupting rage or a nuclear disaster), and the charred remains of an animal ironically enact Malianov’s frustrations in a physical catharsis that simultaneously destroys his ideological ideas. The entire scene recalls an allegory in Robbe-​Grillet’s novel La Jalousie [Jealousy, 1957] where a Scutigera has been violently squashed against the wall of a house ordered in an exquisitely detailed quincunx: The image of the squashed centipede […] appears not as a whole, but composed of fragments distinct enough to leave no doubt. Several pieces

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of body or its appendages are outlined without any blurring, and remain reproduced with the fidelity of an anatomical drawing […] Then come the other part, less precise:  section of legs and the partial form of a body convulsed into a question mark. (Robbe-​Grillet 2017 p.29)

The centipede grips the unnamed woman A., signalling a violent point of disorder that threatens to unravel the calm of the domestic routine. It is an excessive and repeated motif, its excess invoking incremental folds of jealousy and fear, just as the squashed canine enfolds Sokurov’s politics into its seeping wound. Robbe-​ Grillet’s explodes the conventions of the realist novel quietly via his painstaking depiction of an obsessively objectified and minutely detailed reality, leaving gaps, fissures, and looping temporal episodes that slowly fill the space with horror. I felt the most intense shock when, for the first time, the narrative arc is broken by a glitch (she cannot simultaneously be inside the house and outside the window exiting the car!). The reader, like Sokurov’s viewer must do the work. This is a trick of magic realism, a rupture in the real, that remains unchallenged for the duration of a novel, or film. ‘Magical’ ruptures in linear narrativity disrupt straightforward historical documentation; they represent excessive acts that have been taken out of historical chronology and reconfigured as image. The flames and stain in Days of Eclipse are shown in close-​up, ‘multiple transfer’ images that are ‘enigmatic enough to suggest methodological as well as libidinal after-​images’ (1992a, p.105). They open up unlimited possibility for associative remembering, dreaming and fantasy and, as Robbe-​Grillet asserts for the style of his novel: ‘[it] does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation’ (Robbe-​Grillet 1989, p.161). Magic realism and its protracted affective event, then, accept that what is there is what we think we see. The working through does not entail a confirmation of whether something is real or not, it does not fix meaning –​it is not pure allegory –​but encourages engaged viewers and readers to respond to the combination and conflation of images, suggestions, and confusions, with flexible and open minds. Sokurov’s style corresponds to what Christian Metz defined in his analysis of condensation and displacement as ‘the spilling over of the image’ (1983, p.289) –​a careful representation of historical events: the police investigation, ethnographic-​style portraits, a soldier dressed in a panama hat reading The Guardian, a teacher showing old pictures of the town –​in visual parataxis. The political and cultural histories are layered one over the other in mysterious rather than radically ideological or nostalgic fashion. The impact of cinematic magic realism lies with the filmmaker’s ability to invest the object world with a real mystery or wonder, to connect disparate histories through the present continuous ‘event’ of a particular image. In 2015 Jameson returns to the subject of Sokurov (‘the last modernist’), describing him as ‘generationally very belated indeed’ (2015, p.156). Sokurov’s affect, his magic, reaches Jameson via ‘the anti-​aesthetic atmosphere of

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postmodernity under the cover of something of the neo-​ethnic sensibilities of the present age’; it must ‘bear within it some lingering sense of the nation and its destiny’ (p.158). Magic-​realist films adopt an anti-​aesthetic, avant-​garde approach to contemporary culture, maintaining the modernist axiom of individualism and an ontological authenticity of location, history, and objects in diegetic worlds that ‘become magical’ as allegories of ‘the whole unimaginable decentred global network itself ’ (1992b, p.13). Ultimately, Jameson’s cinematic magic realism leaves the reader with further questions, the rhomboid combinatoire spinning in the air with all the ambiguities of late capitalist culture –​a mobile rather than fixed theoretical framework. But his discourse is significant in its heterogeneous re-​imagining of magic realism in world culture, indexing the cultural and historical overlaps, or impasses through which the ‘something else’ spills outwards. His lexicon –​affect, vital event, libidinal intensity, vertical disruption –​privileges reaction. He discovers elements in the films that return him to the debates of the 1920s and 1930s, to a time when film art was first broken down into form, content, and affect. He never fully defines the ‘something else’, it remains as effluence, ‘escaped’ affect, an uncontrolled and unlimited intensity produced in the attraction to and reaction between interior thought and objective reality. He is interested in the ‘indeterminacy’ of meaning left open, assessing the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which, by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your own and […] also transcends your capacity to understand it or to conceptualize –​better still, to represent –​  it. (Jameson 1991, p.88)

Cinematic magic realism re-​presents social reality through the human (and non-​ human) senses and mental faculties, illustrating the transformation of the object world as perceived reality on screen, and in so doing, realises Roh’s dream. Sokurov gets to the crux of a matter that has fascinated cinephiles for over a century –​how to photograph the social and individual psyche, how to capture its fleeting impressions and visceral pains and pleasures and grasp as the ‘cosmic abstraction’ that is philosophy: ‘It’s hard to combine film and philosophy. […] I live in a culture which is not formed, which remains uncompleted, which is out of joint, intertwined with socio-​political processes, transitions of power, with the stupidity of the people, their mistakes and crimes’ (Sokurov and Bauer 2011, n.p.). The magic-​realist film convincingly mirrors the hyper-​abstraction of thought, the messiness of existing and acting in the world. Sokurov weaves metonymic associations into an over-​riding atmosphere of claustrophobia, melancholy, violence, and paranoia. Days of Eclipse is a tactile, sculptural collage that extrapolates objects from their contexts and re-​ frames them within an alternative version of that reality that is both critically and formally challenging, and Jameson brilliantly grasps its poetic and philosophical potential. ‘Only Marxism’, he argues,

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can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective (allegorical) story, only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot. (1981, p.19)

The films he discusses do give an ‘adequate account’, each telling a story of political urgency from a prismatic point of subjective exterioritiy. Magic realism is a form of Utopianism, and these films raise consciousness by diverting History in new amd unexpected critical and philosophical directions. Jameson shifts the field of cinematic magic realism from postcolonial folktale to geo-​critical avant-​garde.

A magic realism with gaps –​‘World’ film: Raúl Ruiz and Sergei Parajanov At the end of the 1960s a new Latin American cinema was developing, and in 1969 at the Viña del Mar Film Festival in Chile, the premiere of four films marked a significant moment for Chilean cinema specifically: Aldo Francia’s Valparaiso mi Amor [Valparaiso my Love], Littín’s El Chacal de Nahueltoro [The Jackal of Nahueltoro], Helvio Soto’s Caliche Sangriento [Bloody Salpêtre], and Raúl Ruiz’s Tres Tristes Tigres [Three Sad Tigers] (Pick 1987, p.67). This climate was only possible under Salvador Allende’s government, and Littín was involved in setting up workshops for aspiring filmmakers at the Cineteca Universitaria, like many of his comrades in Third Cinema in their respective countries. Littín’s black and white classic depicts the ‘jackal’ José (Nelson Villagra) –​based on the true story of a peasant murderer –​ in broad strokes, showing brute force and cold indifference to be the inevitable outcome of relentless rural poverty. Stylistically distinct from his adaptation of Carpentier’s Reasons of State, it nevertheless focuses similarly on political abuses of power. Littín deployed Carpentier’s discourse of lo real maravilloso americano to voice a shared suffering, but also a shared optimism for change. It is a discourse that inevitably becomes entangled, if not in dialogue with, the European avant-​ gardes, whether stylistically or in terms of transnational co-​production. However, his films do not capture the ineffability and ambiguity of lo real maravilloso americano in the way that Ruiz’s earlier films do. Ruiz’s output is prolific, writing close to 100 plays before embarking on a career as a filmmaker, and then making over 100 films, of which three in particular exemplify the avant-​gardist discourse of magic-​realist cinema:  L’hypothèse du tableau volé [The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1978], Les trois couronnes du matelot [Three Crowns of the Sailor, 1982], and Les villes des pirates [City of Pirates, 1983]. These films were made in exile after the coup d’état in 1973 that toppled Allende’s government, and which saw Ruiz banished from Chile. They share the characteristics of a fever dream, experimental in narrative and aesthetic, drafted from half-​formed ideas and profound philosophical conundrums. Michael Goddard notes how in his early films (up until Three Crowns) Ruiz’s approach to filmmaking was based in

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discovering anomalies in the everyday, thereby circumventing classical debates about reality versus the imaginary or realism versus the fantastic or even Surrealism. If anything they partake of what his friend and collaborator Waldo Roja has referred to as ‘Surreachilism’. Ruiz relates this to the Cuban surrealist [sic] writer Alejo Carpentier’s concept of ‘fantastic realism’ [sic] but also to a type of discontinuous or aleatory perception of the world, which he describes as polysemic and polyphonic. (Goddard 2013, p.18)

Magic-​realist film’s particular kind of philosophical essayism sets poetic, avant-​garde form and geopolitical context into dialogue and, at times, conflict. It might seem to spring purely from aleatory perception, but the polysemy is not all chance and whimsy. Goddard’s remark is illustrative of the ways in which Ruiz and his oeuvre have fallen outside of generic markers yet been found to have resonant affinities with both surrealism and magic realism. It seems to be the seamless folding of the heterogeneous and discontinuous into an expanded, heightened sense of reality that prompts such observations. In certain of Ruiz’s films, Richardson finds a disorientation of the senses and a lack of causation reminiscent of surrealist film: ‘Ruiz is also one of the great directors of objects, respecting their integrity as objects and giving them a life force that belongs to them and is not simply a reflection of human desires’ (2006, p.160). These are observations predicated on affective response, and what Timothy Corrigan has identified as an ‘anti-​aesthetic aesthetic’7 brought about by Ruiz’s highly experimental and self-​reflexive art. In a discussion of tableaux vivants as a cultural means of facilitating philosophical discourse, Jameson cites Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting as a vivid modernist example (2015, p.19); this nod to Ruiz corresponds with his description of Sokurov’s modernist ‘anti-​aesthetic’, bringing the two filmmakers into conversation. Hypothesis unfolds from a gap, a painting missing from a series of seven works by the artist Tonnerre. The disappearance is hypothesised in a form of Socratic dialogue between an on-​ screen art collector (Jean Rougeul) and an off-​screen narrator: ‘Today we look and look again at these paintings. There is nothing shocking about them, no common link between them, not even a unity in style’. And yet, in the process of re-​enacting the sequence of paintings through tableaux vivants Ruiz creates a tense mystery, wrought with intrigue and occult mysticism, alluding to the thrill of something potentially shocking. The film generates palimpsests of Pierre Klossowski’s novel The Baphomet (1965), an experimental narrative that imagines the ghosts of Templar Knights –​variously assuming human, animal, and supernatural forms –​gathered in commemoration of their deaths to philosophise the human condition. In the film an intertitle announces the artificiality of this reference in a fake quote attributed to P.K. Baph.VI. 141 (an ‘androgynous demon’): ‘What do you see? What do you feel? Is it pain or is it ecstasy that keeps you afloat in space?’ The tableaux are tightly framed (literally, with picture frames), generating a web of looks and gestures that rely on the tension of the missing painting, and, indeed, the missing answers to each philosophical question posed by the narrators. The viewer is required to decipher

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the spatial magic indicated beyond the frame, in the film’s opaque clues and collective, circuitous prompts, which defy simple explanation. The black and white cinematography shot by Sacha Vierny, who also worked on Resnais and Robbe-​ Grillet’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad, 1961], mobilises sensory uncertainty, where over-​exposed particles of light fall in diffuse swathes across the myriad rooms. At certain points high contrast additionally summons dialectical shocks –​figures loom from the background; faces, mirrors, and solid surfaces metamorphose in starkly juxtaposed angles, but overall a lack of definition is achieved thanks to the smoke. The film is an essay, a trying out of a hypothesis and a materialisation of theory: ‘I am fascinated by the gap between our ideas about things and the things themselves’. But ultimately the conclusion remains elusive:  ‘It is like the horizon: once you reach it, there is still the horizon’ (Ruiz cited in Afterimage 1981, p.124). Film and cinema, says Ruiz, after Benjamin, form a symbiotic (un) conscious(ness): When we live in everyday life, we see a certain number of images and we compose other complementary images along a number of axes. Every film incorporates that teeming vision. Every edited sequence has a multiplicity of possible angles, which are merely suggested, and which usually serve as counterpoint to the sequence we are actually viewing. But in our lives these possible montages are uncontrollable –​because they are necessarily different for every spectator. They form a type of photographic unconscious […] which we could call ‘potential montage’. (2005, p.65)

Poetics of Cinema 1 and 2 are Ruiz’s contribution to film-​philosophy, and directly result from his time teaching at Duke University in 1994 at the invitation of Jameson and Moreiras. These volumes are manifestos of a kind; they certainly open up a critical discourse between his philosophical ideas and the poetry of his films. In his more poetic representations of exilic displacement in Three Crowns and City of Pirates: ‘the elements of fairy-​tale, horror and science fiction are blended as if […Ruiz] wanted to find a cinematographic equivalent to the literary modalities of Latin American “magic realism” ’8 (Pick 1987, p.55). Pick’s analysis argues that Chilean politics are best represented through a kaleidoscope of references and layers that reproduce the uncertainty of exile and diasporic ‘belonging’, and Ruiz believed that in order to challenge a social structure, film must adopt an experimental attitude. Asked whether his ‘European’ films obliquely reference the labyrinthine structures of fellow Latin American, Borges, Ruiz responds that all Latin Americans work with a ‘hyper-​abstraction’ –​in other words, while Europeans work within ‘a specific culture or other, “The Latin American experience is of being outside (or inside) European culture in general” ’ (Christie 1981, p.112).The interviewer, like Jameson, infers a similarity or tendency in Latin American culture that must be seen, as Carpentier’s writing illustrates, from this ‘abstracted’, de-​centred perspective, a position Sokurov also explores.

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Ruiz’s shadowy Three Crowns drifts with the overlapping memories of a sailor (Jean-​Bernard Guillard) who, referencing the storyteller of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1797–​8), sets about recounting his tale to a young student, Tadeusz (Phillipe Deplanche). The sailor witnesses Tadeusz murder his professor and prevents him from fleeing the scene with a promise to procure him a job aboard a large ship preparing for imminent departure. In return he must pay the sailor three Danish crowns and listen to his story in its entirety. The sailor, a native of Valparaiso –​a thriving town used as a stopover by sailors travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans –​is haunted by memories of his childhood home and plagued by the expectations of the family he has left behind. The events from the Sailor’s past are recalled through what Ruiz terms the colours of a ‘siesta nightmare’ in which the sailor believes that he exists in multiple places simultaneously. ‘Real time’ scenes taking place in Russia are shot in monochrome, juxtaposed against the strong blue and red colours of exoticised ‘location’ memories shot on Agfa film stock. The resulting atmosphere is one of oneiric synaesthesia, where the boundaries between the voyage and that of the imagination, or the supernatural, become increasingly indiscernible. Crew members die only to be resurrected, and Ruiz emphasises the exchange value of human identity by constantly underpinning the eternal return of history in which an individual is but flotsam at sea. The characters often repeat the refrain ‘It’s not me. It’s someone else’ when the sailor attempts to grasp their identity, an absurd exchange that confounds him. In Coleridge’s poem, the wedding guest ‘cannot choose but hear’ the ancient seafarer’s ghastly tale, and Ruiz has something compelling to say about the position of the viewer of film, who, as in Jameson’s theory of vital intensities, cannot look away. The sailor invites us ‘on a voyage along a subterranean river’, where the departure point ‘has always been an image-​situation’: ‘The image-​situation is the instrument that permits the evocation or the invocation of the imaged beings. It serves as a bridge, an airport, for the multiple films that will coexist in the film’ (Ruiz 2005, pp.115–​6). He describes how the simultaneity of thought and image, of impression and reaction, encourages the viewer to create their own kaleidoscopic film. Three Crowns commences with a murder, which triggers the story to unfold, but this ‘image-​situation’ fades, only to be replaced with multiple micro-​image-​situations that prove to be contingent, personal, and often unconscious. Buñuel’s adage that: ‘A glass is a glass’, but in the right hands can ‘be a thousand different things, […] and no-​one sees it as it really is but as his desires and his state of mind make him see it’ (1995, p.140) perfectly encapsulates Ruiz’s and Jameson’s respective descriptions of layered cinematic affect. The sailor returns home to a town of ghosts, chasing the dream of a lost dancer he once loved; Ruiz takes an ordinary glass and superimposes the dancer inside it to illustrate how to the sailor: ‘She appeared in every glass I emptied’. Buñuel’s analogy applies to the craft of filmmaking, but his observation is applicable to the viewer, desirous of knowing more about the sailor’s tiny dancer in a glass. Ruiz describes how one day leaving his optician he encounters a model being chased by paparazzi in the street. The flash bulbs present an image-​situation that immediately transports him: ‘Suddenly

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I realize I am traveling […] on rue Beautrellis, to Antarctica, as described by Poe in The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym […] Here the departure point of the scene is an image whose origin is bedazzlement’ (2005, p.115). Poe’s colonial sea-​horror can be traced associatively in this manner in Three Crowns, replicating the magic Borges feels in the tale: ‘A quite different sort of order rules […] one based not on reason but on association and suggestion –​the ancient light of magic’ (‘Narrative Art and Magic’ In Monegal and Reid 1981, p.37). City of Pirates references the coastal shores in ‘Overseas territories’ of Three Crowns, its red, pink, and violet palette seeming to unfurl from the images left behind from the earlier film. But its liminal spatio-​temporality creates a greater magic-​realist affect, for example: the somnambulant Isidore (Anne Alvaro), slow-​ motion dream fragments, the ball reimagined as a sentient planet, the kiss transferred onto a Lieutenant’s body shaped like the Isle of Pirates, and the séance: ‘I am making contact with the bottom of the sea. He is here’. Boundaries are eschewed in favour of simultaneous spontaneous experience. The deliberately faded brightness of the drama corresponds to similar colouration in the films of Terayama, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Parajanov, all of whom privilege the realities of desire above all else, while ensuring that images of war, political violence, exile, and intense human suffering puncture the ontological reality of their films. In Pirates a simple gesture leads to an earthquake in Chile, or a war in Iraq; a dream or premonition reveals the corporeal horrors of life, or of death. Ruiz creates a magic reality analogous to the poetry of travelling (both literal and imagined), where the everyday is seen in a different light: ‘In true travel, what matters are the magical accidents, the discoveries, the inexplicable wonder and the wasted time’ (Ruiz 2005, p.78).

Hierophany and tragedy: ‘The People’s Themes’ –​Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Jameson takes literary magic(al) realism’s ‘anthropological perspective’ deriving from ‘peasant society […] the world of the village, or even tribal myth’ as a driving force within magic-​realist film, where his choice of examples and references indicates the centrality and importance of rural and marginal economic regions of the world system (Jameson 1986a, p.302). Peripheral to his sustained analysis of Days of Eclipse, is Sergei Parajanov’s Tini zabutykh predkiv [Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1964], which he mentions in passing as a further example of the ‘modernist’ tradition of filmmaking in the ‘minor key’9 associated with magic realism (Jameson 1992a, p.100). But Parajanov’s (1924–​1990) link to cinematic magic realism is worthy of more consideration. Set in a remote and ancient village in the old Carpathian region of Western Ukraine during the nineteenth century, Shadows depicts communities of farmers and loggers who live according to seasonal cycles (lambing, harvest), and are guided by the magic of stories and curses underpinning their culture:  ‘A Gutsul land forgotten by God and by people’ (opening intertitle). In Ron Holloway’s documentary Parajanov: A Requiem, Parajanov states

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how he: ‘focused on ethnography, on God, love and tragedy. […] The Ukrainians loved me. But this was not liked in certain circles [the Soviet authorities]’ (1994). The film’s ‘archaic exoticism’ (Egorova 1997, p.194) –​an emphasis on costume, ancient labour rituals, and folklore –​speaks back to Soviet authorities who sought to suppress regional, ethnic identities. The religious mysticism ‘harks back to themes that had long been taboo in Soviet cinema –​the survival of ancient tradition and the continuing power of magic in peasant life’ (Christie 2010), but also reveals the disparity between richer and poorer rural classes, warring religions, and the failure of utopian dreams. The religion of the coloniser –​symbolised in the iconic art of the Orthodox Church –​has a strong presence in the syncretic blend of religious Ukrainian artefacts and is shown to exacerbate the film’s tragic story arc. Hierophany –​the breakthrough of the sacred into the everyday world –​in magic-​realist setting is not presented as ‘other’ but as a lived experience that draws upon diverse histories, belief systems, and myths. As in Days of Eclipse, the landscape is limitless, ordered by invisible forces that materialise in eerie and unexpected ways:  the shining North Star that connects the distanced lovers, chants, theatrical artifice, emissions of smoke, bolts of lighting, funereal rituals, and the ghostly return of dead souls at the window as the nails are hammered into Ivan’s (Ivan Mikolaychuk) coffin. When one religion fails, the villagers resort to another: ‘God hadn’t given them children so Palagna practiced sorcery’; every action has a resonance beyond the everyday, it gestures towards the indefinable hope that desires can be fulfilled. Jameson marvels at how Shadows ‘inflects the color image in another, more properly magical-​realist direction, substituting nationalism and folklore for Greater Russian religious mysticism and inflecting the guilt and sacrifice that obsess Tarkovsky in the direction of a more vulnerable and more human shame and humiliation, the smarting of a well-​nigh sexual inferiority feeling’ (1992a, p.100). This strange critique pertains to the film’s ethnographic aim (and a biased reading of Tarkovsky) –​the deconcealment of ‘polyethnic’ traditions and beliefs (Papazian 2006, p.303), indigenous Hutsul superstition involving sorcery, devil worship, and nature spirits, as well as the implanted Christianity of Russian orthodoxy (the priest steals money from the poor). The colour palette reflects seasonal changes; the pure white of the winter landscape is offset by the vivid reds of peasant costumes, and the coal black smouldering fires of the loggers. The dappled, sunlit greens of summer present a pastoral idyll flecked with golden beams of sun, and at midsummer the night sky is a deep blue. Similar to the film stock and filters that mute the otherwise vivid hyperbolic colours of Ruiz’s Three Crowns and City of Pirates, many Soviet films were made using degraded stock. For Jameson imperfection in colour or clarity in ‘Third World’ films takes on magical properties: ‘technology, or its underdevelopment, is […] explicitly drawn back inside the aesthetic message in order to function henceforth as an intrinsic meaning, rather than an extrinsic accident or causal determinant’ (1986a, p.316). The colour palette seems to him an aesthetic rendering of Ivan’s double failure with women: Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) dies, and his loveless marriage to Palagna (Tatyana Bestayeva) is not consummated,

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which obliquely signifies a national shame; a shame characterised by imperfection (lack of high-​contrast photography, degraded film stock) and intensity (vivid reds, bursts of light). Parajanov’s love of deliberate artifice also fascinates Jameson. Colour gels inject sudden flashes of red onto the screen, for example, when Ivan’s father got struck with an axe and killed by the head of the Gutenyuk family. This shot is immediately intercut with images of red horses galloping against a white background (in some countries the film was titled ‘Wild Horses of Fire’). The montage is magical in its strange, purposely artificial poetry. When the Sorcerer attempts to prevent a storm from hitting the village, rhythmic flashes of primary colours accompany babbling incantations, and the surrounding countryside whirs past repeatedly in a 360-​degree panning shot, producing a kaleidoscopic rush of images.This deliberate disruption of sound and vision resembles the looping, cylindrical motion of the zoetrope, but instead of animating static images, it serves to artificially suspend the ‘real time’ of the scene as the landscape is trapped, spinning in the Sorcerer’s spell. The natural landscape seems alien, and the human marks left upon it are equally mysterious: geometrical patterns left by the loggers’ strips of wood, stumps of felled trees, and smouldering ashes of fires used to keep the workers warm. An intertitle places us in the late 1800s, but the coloured gels, lens flare, shaky handheld camera, canted angles, vertiginous aerial perspective, extra-​ diegetic superimpositions and intercuts, sensory montage, jump cuts, liquid oozing over the camera lens, and leitmotif of traditional Ukrainian ceremonial horns10 each contribute to a defamiliarisation of Parajanov’s ethnographic subject/​s. Such technical interjections are jarring in their modernity, and as such seem anachronistic.11 The artificiality perfectly evinces the complexity of the region’s multi-​layered belief systems:  ‘The dizzying combination of telephoto lens, handheld camera, and characters photographed through bushes fits organically with the theme of a semi-​pagan people whose fates are bound up inextricably with nature’ (Steffen 2013, p.65). Parajanov’s transnational origins proved problematic for the Soviet authorities: ‘I am an Armenian, born in Tiblisi, incarcerated in a Russian prison for being a Ukrainian nationalist’ (Christie 2010, n.p). He was internally exiled in the Ukraine, and served time on alleged accounts of sodomy, rape, anti-​Soviet ‘treasons’, and art trafficking.This is chronologically detailed in Steffen’s The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (2013), with particular emphasis on his multiple arrests in the 1970s, which put a stop to his filmmaking, but not the creation of collages, and object-​boxes that engage directly with surrealism.12 In his fascinating article ‘Parajanov in prison an exercise in transculturalism’, Kirill Razlogov details how the filmmaker’s family would bring materials to prison, which he would turn into assemblages, collages, and illustrations. In such works we witness the mixing of prison culture with popular and avant-​garde references –​dolls, indigenous folk objects, found objects, Duchamp’s La Giaconda (L.H.O.O.Q. c.1919), satirical critique of Christianity, all with a black humour –​an approach that is also evident in his film poems. In his most well-​known film in the West, Tsvet granata (later released as The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969) Kirill notes how: ‘The beauty of each separate image became

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the main criteria for including it in the film, which was assembled like a puzzle or a collage’ (2018, p.54). But, something that would no doubt interest Jameson, had he researched further, is that Parajanov’s surrealist practice stemmed not only from a knowledge and love of the avant-​garde, but from his geopolitical status on the margins of second world culture. Branded a homosexual, a criminal, he was also able ‘to fuse multiple identities and assimilate and transform them in his creative works, thus confirming the ideas of transfiguration of multiculturalism into transculturalism’ (p.55). Shadows has been described by one critic as ‘a wash of peasant grittiness and magical realism’ (Slobin, 2008, p.53), and by another as: verging on a folkloric surrealism, or ‘barnyard surrealism’ (Hoberman, 2003, p.95). Working across traditions, languages, regions, diasporic and marginalised experience, his films herald the poetic and hybrid specificity of becoming that Carpentier and Jameson alight upon in their writing on magic realism. While acknowledging the breadth of Parajanov’s hybrid folktale, Jameson does not fully unpack its magic-​realist potential, letting it slip through the net when it surely contributes so much to his theories on capital and modernity. Here too, are missteps regarding Sokurov’s friend Tarkovsky, who Jameson rejects as elitist and sentimental, questioning whether he is not just subscribing to the old bourgeois ideology of art as doctrine where ‘religion is to be grasped as a stand-​in for the religion of art’ (2006, p.11).13 For example, in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Mirror (1975), and Nostalgia (1983), there are manifold instances of indeterminacy, morbidity, and vitality that magically inflect the poetry of the films, while also signalling the dangers of Soviet rule; additionally, Tarkovsky’s philosophy of sculptural time is legendary (1986). Scenes in which something else, (perhaps scientific, perhaps psychological, perhaps related to pollution) causes changes to occur in the diegetic reality. Human levitation and impossible temporality in Mirror; anachronistic, oily, submerged objects in ‘the zone’, and Monkey’s telekinesis in Stalker; or the magical juxtaposition of a Russian dacha, which appears inside a Roman ruin in the final scene of Nostalgia, align with my theory of magic-​realist cinema. Disparate locations and non-​logical cause and effect seem drawn together by unknown, magical powers. These worlds correspond to questions, not narrative coherence or ‘religious mysticism’. Jameson, however, prefers Sokurov’s self-​reflexive artifice and hybridity, his ‘multi-​worldness’ (Yampolsky 1994, p.114) sensing the earlier influence from French avant-​garde cinema and surrealism that Parajanov embraces.The blend of socio-​realist, folkloric, ethnographic, surrealist, supernatural, metaphysical, and philosophical tenets in Shadows comes close to exemplifying every facet of Jameson’s cinematic mode. It is astonishingly original in the way it represents time and space, seeming to ‘destabilize the viewer perceptually and therefore psychologically’ through its dizzying free verse poetics (Cook 1984, p.22). This destabilisation, of course, is precisely what Jameson requires of late twentieth-​century modernist art as a means of reinvesting affect back into culture –​immanent and resonant. I consider it a magic-​realist film in its non-​sentimental and challenging portrait of the Carpathian region. Parajanov experiments with a new hybrid form of collage that incorporates his interests in surrealism with the richness of tradition,

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and the idiosyncrasy of experimental filmmaking.This visual explosion is crowned by marvellous tableaux vivants, a practice he incorporates into all his subsequent films and masters in The Colour of Pomegranates to mesmeric effect. As we have seen in the work of Ruiz, (a practice also beloved of Walerian Borowczyk, Juan López Moctezuma, and Peter Greenaway), tableaux vivants are striking, and often uncanny, assemblages spanning the inert and vital, inanimate and animate. They revivify historical figures and events, exposing the ideas contained within them to a process of change and transformation. They constitute, on celluloid, a new repository that magically brings the past to life. It is likely that the tableau vivant in the hands of avant-​garde artists such as Ray, Cocteau, Magritte, and later Pier Paolo Passolini (in La Ricotta, 1962) inspired Parajanov greatly (he adored Passolini’s work); their revolutionary spirit infusing still objects with new counter currents. But what sets Parajanov apart is the way in which, like in Ukrainian painting of the Soviet era, ‘folk ornament shines through’ (Maniichuk 1998, p.65). The films reflect an iridescent, transcultural, multi-​world folk culture through his singular experience, where the peasant class is stuck in a fable of contradictions. Shadows is achingly sad, historically rich, sumptuously tactile, playful, and non-​conventional. Christie comments that Parajanov ‘made art prodigiously, naively, magically’, drawing a comparison with primitive painter Niko Pirosmani (a Georgian Henri Rousseau, and the subject of Parajanov’s short film Arabeski na temu Pirosmani [Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme,  1985]). The desaturated palette is enlivened by the foregrounding of key colours –​purple, red, gold –​that seem stuck on, heightened and incongruous, with figures mid-​metamorphosis. Contextually ambiguous, such shots and sequences yield peculiarly affective resonances, distancing the viewer from direct emotional intimacy. Cinematographer Yuri Illienko aimed to film everyday life in its philosophical dimensionality: ‘I began to experiment with a hand-​held camera striving in some way to imitate a world which draws everything into it’ (cited in Nebesio 1994, p.47). Shadows presents the tough tensions of rural life through a magic-​realist attitude, where the real becomes a whirlpool of contradictory thoughts at the mercy of the warring forces of socialism and capitalist expansion, never settling into a singular identity.

Notes 1 Boris Strugatsky describes how the main idea of the literary source  –​the idea of how hard it is for a creative person to live in the world of totalitarian mentality, in the world of unbearable pressure of the authorities –​this idea has been picked up by the director and transferred to an absolutely new situation. However, in the film this idea sounds very convincing and makes an even more terrifying impression. (cited in Tuchinskyaya 2002 n.p.) 2 Julian Grafy, (in Beumers 2011, p.79) describes how in this broadcast, the priest makes reference to the beatification of the nun Edith Stein in 1987, who died in a Nazi concentration camp.

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3 Sokurov cites Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Eisenstein’s Strike as inspiration, the former for its portrayal of ritual using non-​actors, and the latter for its ‘Russian energy [and a …] senseless, wild, almost animalistic quality’ (Carels 1999, p.73). In Days of Eclipse, the political status of post-​Soviet Turkmenistan, and the conflation of animal and human realms contribute to an atmosphere of confusion and displacement. Associative juxtapositions are kept within the frame rather than between frames. The film favours a rhythmic exchange between long panoramic shots and long static takes, creating contemplative time for the viewer. 4 The original diary entry is quoted as Maguerite Séchehaye’s Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, from 1968 (Jameson 1991, p.27). 5 Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects (2014) treats affect as ‘a problematic of structure, form, and aesthetics’ (p.xvi). Her analysis redresses the balance in favour of form over the mystery of subjective reaction, usefully seeking meaning in the text itself, and its structural resonances. 6 The Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, U.S.S.R.) was formed following the 1917 Revolution, and consisted of four socialist republics (the Russian and Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republics and the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics) until 1922, when additional Republics were added. These Republics fell under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Soviet body in Moscow, and the number of distinct nationalities living within its geographical and political borders numbered in excess of 100. 7 My paper ‘Reflexivity and the ‘Anti-​Aesthetic Aesthetic’ –​A Surrealist Approach to the Essay Film’ given in two different versions at University of Reading (2015) and Jadavpur University, Calcutta (2019) takes Timothy Corrigan’s concept of refractive essay films and explores the anti-​aesthetic practice of Cocteau and Ruiz: refractive essay films concentrate the representational regime of the essayistic on the cinematic itself in order to distil and intensify the essayistic by directing it not, for instance, at portraits of human subjectivity or the spaces of public life but at the aesthetics, or more exactly, the anti-​aesthetics of representation that always hover about essay films as a filmic thinking of the world. (Corrigan 2011, p.191) There is a strong commonality in these filmmakers’ approaches to reality that fits my definition of a philosophical magic-​realist film. 8 Ruiz did not identify as a magic realist, the French art cinema was too important an influence upon him; but his evident understanding of the mode seems to come via the ‘boom’ rather than its historical avant-​garde roots (Ruiz, 2005). 9 It seems more than coincidental that he should use a phrase that Roh applied specifically to Magischer Realismus, and the twilight visions of Rousseau, Ernst, and Radziwill. 10 The Ukrainian alpine horn  –​trembita  –​was traditionally used to announce deaths, funerals, and weddings (all of which feature in the film). 11 Jameson asserts that anachronisms are an inherently ‘magic realist’ device (1998, p.125). 12 To access digital images of Parajanov’s work see http://​parajanovmuseum.am/​en/​ (accessed 03 November 2010). Louis Aragon played an instrumental part in Parajanov’s release in December 1977. His wife, Elsa Triolet, was a friend of Lilya Brik a close friend of Parajanov, and when Aragon travelled to Moscow to accept the ‘Order of the Friendship of Peoples by Brezhnev’, he persuaded the president of the USSR to release him (Steffen 2013, p.197). This link to the French surrealist group emphasises the

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widespread networks of the French avant-​garde, and their influence on Parajanov’s attitude to art and filmmaking. 13 Jameson pits Days of the Eclipse against Stalker (which was also adapted from a Strugatsky Brothers’ novel –​ Piknik na obochine [Roadside Picnic, 1971]. He argues that Tarkovsky turns the supernatural elements in Stalker into a ‘religious fable’, whereas Sokurov invents a genre that retains elements of earlier modernisms and yet attempts to represent the unrepresentable hybridity characteristic of postmodern art (2006).

7 HYPERREALITY, UNDERSTATEMENT, ATMOSPHERE, AND AMBIVALENCE

Magic-​realist discourse is a linguistic attempt to grasp a syncretic, uneven cultural situation that raises political and philosophical questions for the future. The previous two chapters examined affect as a principle mechanism in the magic-​realist film, where aesthetic and critical mobilisation of inbetweeness creates ontological fissures that challenge the status quo, and the immobility of official History. Magic-​ realist films of the kind of geopolitical art cinema that Jameson discusses unfold in the intersection of a phenomenologically philosophical politics with aesthetic form.This chapter looks more closely at twenty-​first century examples of cinematic magic-​realism, linking a critical formality to magical affect in a range of films and texts that exemplify the mode’s avant-​garde vernacular. The viewer’s collaboration is essential to this process: The world is not magical. We make it magical all of a sudden inside us (Ocampo 2015, xv).

The ‘cinesthetic subject’ I begin, however, still in the twentieth century, with magic realism’s unresolved antinomy; a fuzziness in categorisation; and the modernist fantastic, which, in its preoccupations, is the most faithful to Roh’s, Carpentier’s, and Jameson’s respective discourses on becoming in the world. The preface to La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel,1940] by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–​1999), is written by Bioy Casares’s best friend, Borges, with whom he collaborated on the literary anthologies Antología de la literatura fantástica (1965, with Silvina Ocampo). Borges considers Morel to be exemplary of the mode of fantastic literature, but subsequent scholarship and attempts to adapt it for the screen have often aligned it with the mode of magic(al) realism (the possibility that Bioy Casares’s text inspired Resnais’s and Robbe-​Grillet’s LastYear at Marienbad (1960): Updike 1986; Beltzer 2000; Neifert 2003; Levine 2003;

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and the Brothers Quay film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005),1 for example).The differences are semantic but, should not be taken as categorical: magical realism, as opposed to the fantastic, can be defined as a confrontation with reality on the part of the characters. Reality, for them, is magical, and therefore it is necessary to interpret its significance, to go beyond its surface appearance and look for a deeper meaning. However, the world in which these characters move is the empirical world, not an invented world like those found in fantastic literature or science fiction. (Leal 1983, p.45)

Morel illuminates a path towards lo real maravilloso americano via forking Argentine traditions of fantastic literature. It follows a criminal fugitive to a ‘diseased’ island previously inhabited by the inventor Morel, where ‘the inmates of an abandoned insane asylum’ cavort leisurely around him. We later learn that they are projected onto the landscape by Morel’s machines, and do not actually exist. The machines are driven by motive energy surges in the tides, and solar orbits (magic/​divine energy) and in Morel’s notes, he writes:  ‘If we grant consciousness, and all that distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by my machinery’ (Morel [1940] 2003, p.71). Narrated through the delirium of a first-​person stream-​of-​consciousness, Morel brings together conquest myth (the takeover of an island) with the magical powers of holographic recording devices, thereby realising Friedrich A.  Kittler’s assertion that ‘Technological media turn magic into a daily routine’ (1999, pp.35–​6). The text slips between various kinds of reality –​actual, voyeuristically perceived, artificially reproduced, hallucinated, dreamed, mistakenly understood, and erotically desired.The reader is not led to believe in one plane of reality above another, but on occasion the narrator enters into an explanatory mode that reflexively interrogates what he is seeing or sensing. It is clear from Morel’s notes that he has achieved a full synchronization of the senses in his recordings: ‘the sounds, tactile sensations, flavors, odors, temperatures’ that is not possible in cinema (p.70). The narrator’s confusion when encountering the simulated and recorded figures, even when he knows about the machines, plays with the dissonance between habit, trust, and affect. This dissonance tests human faith in existence, in the matter of life itself.Vivian Sobchack’s conceptualisation of the cinesthetic subject proves useful here: ‘All the bodies in the film experience –​those on-​screen and off-​screen (and possibly that of the screen itself) –​are potentially subversive bodies’ by virtue of their ambiguity (2004, p.67). While materially located in a network of relational structures operating within and without, film bodies are diffuse and ‘extensional’, but they are also ‘intensional’: ‘commingling flesh and consciousness, the human and technological sensorium, so that meaning and where it is made does not have a discrete origin in either bodies or representation but emerges from both’ (p.67). Within the cinesthetic subject the specific condition of cinematic exhibition is combined with the neurological, and

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cultural, conditions of synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. The prismatic forms created by the layers of represented matter (physical and emotional) in Morel (sensory stimuli are superimposed –​the virtual over the actual) create a dynamic tension through this subversive show of bodies. It is unsurprising that, like The Lost Steps or Pedro Páramo, this text has inspired filmmakers, eager to realise its photographic magic. Borges thought that Bioy Casares had invented a new Latin American fantastic, but in aligning technological magic with the fantastic, rather than the magical or marvellous, he misses the greater slippages and uncertainties that the narrator’s thought processes allow, as well as the aforementioned relationship to the real. The technological twist is conjoined with mental activity, a cinesthesia that cannot purely be fantastic –​Morel’s notes, the narrator’s interiority –​as it includes mundane motor responses, and recollections, as well as the more marvellous leaps in mad love and projective fantasy. The titular piano tuner of the Quays’ ode to Morel, as if speaking from the world of Márquez’s Macondo, boasts ‘I can hear anything between a sneeze and infinity’. The reality of the ‘human and technological sensorium’ is not Borges’ fantastic, but to the twenty-​first century reader a tangible fact, the human senses amplified through technology, magical though the ‘commingling’ may seem. Robbe-​Grillet’s screenplay for Marienbad shares with Morel an interest in human consciousness and the spatio-​temporal architecture that the brain builds; ‘Unlike conventional realists, Robbe-​Grillet requires that his reader share in creating the work’ (Smith 2006, p.2), a requirement demanded by all magic-​realist works. ‘Why exactly do we manipulate forms?’ he asks; ‘Because certain things escape conceptualization’ (Smith 2006, p.147), hence the repeated gestures to ‘thresholds’ in both the screenplay and Resnais’s film. Arguably, these complex resonances, united in their audio-​tactile-​visual realisation of the functioning of thought, are responsible for the almost instinctive labelling of twenty-​first century works as magic-​realist –​a shared atmosphere, or stimmung, the thrill of Jamesonian chromatic affects, which only later acquire profound meaning.

Tarsem Singh’s ‘The Fall’ –​from Magischer Realismus to the vernacular Indian American filmmaker, Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar (1961  –​known as Tarsem Singh) began his career in music videos, and his oeuvre is characterised by a crisp clarity in the materialisation of hyperreal mindscapes. In The Cell (2000) psychotherapist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) uses a radical technology to enter the psyche of a serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D’ Onofrio). Stargher’s mind is portrayed as a landscape, into which Dean enters, encountering the memories of his childhood as figural and objective motifs. These landscapes  –​deserts, cherry groves, classical halls, and pavilions  –​draw from world cultures in costume and iconography while also nodding to the spatio-​temporal-​fantastic manipulations of science-​fiction films. To encounter a serial killer film in which stillness, sublimity, and tenderness are dominant, is truly arresting. Carpentier always specified that lo real maravilloso americano applied to positive and negative attributes, adamant that the

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common denominator should involve revelation and amplification in the perceived reality, akin to a miracle. Singh’s film offers a pastiche of secular and religious belief systems, where science, magic, psychology, and human suffering take on marvellous proportions at the estado limite of the mind. Singh’s next film The Fall (2006) was deemed ‘almost impossible to describe’ by Roger Ebert:  ‘You can say what happens, but you can’t convey the astonishment of how it happens’ (2008, n.p.). On the surface The Fall seems to exemplify a vernacular cinematic magic realism in its bright colours, mythic tropes, and oral storytelling. However, despite its well-​ crafted narrative, images of colonial and personal trauma resist assimilation into the plot, creating radial points of intensity. The film delivers a mesmerising story woven from the imagination of the two central protagonists, each convalescing after a fall –​movie stuntman Roy (Lee Pace) and a child refugee from Romania, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru). Set in Los Angeles in 1915, home of Hollywood and oranges (the cause of the characters’ respective falls), the city fails to deliver on its promise of dreams, forcing the characters to create their own. On the cover of the Momentum Pictures DVD edition of the film, a pair of bright blue eyes stares out from behind a red, rectangular eye mask suspended mid-​air. A small blue butterfly is fixed where the nose should be, above a pair of red lips. This mirage of an incomplete face floats against a desert backdrop, which becomes its ‘skin’ glimmering between the facial features. It is a disconcerting and strange image that immediately recalls Magritte’s painting series Shéhérazade. Across a number of variations, the paintings depict the marvellous storyteller of The One Thousand and One Nights, her ornate, floating face, sans flesh, constructed from a string of pearls in flourishes surrounding blue eyes, and a pair of red lips. Magritte read One Thousand and One Nights over the summer of 1946 (Draguet 2018, p.33), and the following year 15 small-​format gouaches were displayed at Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels, all depicting Scheherazade: ‘Oscillating between realism and Impressionism, Magritte’s gesture loosens and sparkles, the new motif confirming his taste for the enchanted’ (p.33). Curtains, sea, bells, sand, a stone turret with birds circling, all feature in the magical tableaux of the Shéhérazade paintings, combinations also found in Singh’s mise-​en-​ scène. Scheherazade, of course, thanks to her intelligence and persistence, overcomes fate of death by drawing the King Shahrya into her intricate folk tales, which told over the period of 1001 nights, act as a framing device for this disparate collection. The tales span centuries (most likely from the 8th to the 14th), and amalgamate Persian, Indian, Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and other regional folkloric stories.2 Scheherazade is not an embedded character in the stories, appearing in the text only as the storyteller and collator of tales. In The Fall a double narrative is woven from the minds of two storytellers, who also become meta-​diegetic characters in the story itself. In so doing, Singh illustrates the extraordinary feat of the dream or daydream, whereby we are able to enter our own fantasies; the film literalises this concept. Alexandria listens to Roy tell of five intrepid men, an ex-​slave, an ‘Indian’,3 Luigi, an explosives expert, Charles Darwin, and the masked bandit (Roy). It is the quest narrative of sworn revenge on Emperor Odious (representing the movie star

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who steals Roy’s fiancée in real life). Alexandria becomes increasingly emotionally invested in this tale of betrayal, camaraderie, outlandish stunts, and genuine heartbreak. Roy seems to achieve a bitter catharsis in the story’s invention, based as the events are in real life, and yet his will to go on living becomes weaker. He lures Alexandria into stealing morphine pills from the hospital store, in order to commit suicide. Scheherazade’s stories prolong her life, saving her from the fate of her predecessors; Roy’s story similarly extends his, proving the emotional magic of the stories to unite in suffering. Singh’s pairing of Alexandria and Roy is miraculous. Their on-​screen chemistry is rooted in realities of pain and suffering: Alex’s house in Romania was burned, forcing her family to flee to America, where, at the age of four she is forced to pick oranges, falling and breaking her arm; Roy falls from a horse in a misjudged stunt, loses his girl to a richer, more glamorous Hollywood actor, and has joy extinguished from his life. The film opens with this accident. An aerial shot of water, monochrome, disturbed by concentric ripples, draws in the eye. In slow motion, a head emerges from the centre. The following sequence is bifurcated by a bridge, over which a train is travelling, expelling sunlit clouds of steam. We have seemingly been plunged into the ‘Wild West’ in the age of the railroad. It is in fact America in the 1920s, and the crystal-​clear black and white cinematography immediately evokes the New Photography of that era, with a dynamic fascination in the scale, angle, and lighting of objects. Further aerial shots of the water reveal that a passenger and his horse have fallen from the bridge during the shooting of a stunt for a Hollywood movie. Shadows of the bridge develop on the surface of the water; surfaces glisten; and atop the bridge, tiny figures construct a pulley to lift the horse from the water. When Roh extoled the revitalisation of vision that he believed to constitute the ‘fantastic’ and new in photography and in film, he emphasised the isolation of details, which ‘allow us to experience the inner form of a thing, by removing the usual, and distracting context that connects one thing to the “whole” or to other, adjoining things’ (Philips [1930] 1989, p.161). The opening scene achieves this state of ‘things’ in its initial confusion of perspective and scale. Additional factors –​movement, editing, and slow-​motion playback –​heighten the alienation, but encourage the viewer to contemplate the ‘inner form’ of the mise-​en-​scène. The next cut, a jarring shift to full colour with the intertitle ‘Los Angeles’; ‘the story’, continues the foregrounding of technical and formal experimentation. The hospital where Roy’s framing story is housed comes alive through the interplay of light and shadow, which transforms the fantasies of the protagonists into real images. The spectre of technology is never far away, revealed at its most magically real in the ominously dressed X-​ray technicians, knight-​like masked figures who re-​ appear in Roy’s bandit narrative. There are also numerous allusions to filmmaking as device. In an early scene, Alex is transfixed by a passing horse: the figure is captured by light passing through a keyhole which acts as a pinhole camera, projecting the horse upside-​down onto the wall as a moving shadow image. In another scene the camera mimics the human movement of Alex closing one eye and then another, registering the jolt from left to right, showing us this commonly experienced,

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playful distortion of the viewing field. Singh was convinced that Alex should not have seen a film prior to hospitalisation; this narrative aspect was only feasible if the film were set in the early twentieth century. Her lack of exposure to the moving image increases the magic when she finally watches the silent reels of ‘cowboys and Indians’ projected in the ward at the end of the film. It is also important that her imagination is shown in vivid colour images, woven together within Roy’s trauma-​ revenge-​fantasy, because Singh is making the point that trauma is both replicated and exorcised through cinema. In The Fall this is understood as a belated reality, repeated and revisited in the elements of the story: ‘What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet fully been known’ (Caruth 1996, p.6). This structural deferring provides an illuminating perspective on the narrative unfolding of magic-​realist films (or texts) taking into account Jameson’s idea of ‘the perpetual present’ and Carpentier’s narrativising of revolution and revolt through suffering. The Fall demonstrates the embeddedness of trauma in the visual imagination, repeatedly bringing to life the persistent phantoms of the original event. The shock and pain Jameson experiences while watching the films he categorises as magic-​realist result from the recognition and recollection of vital, or violent, historical events, whether personal or collective, near or far. The magical elements in these films, tied to perception and wish-​fulfilment, are not simply an escape or diversion (although this is possible) but a manifestation of belief in the future through the lens of a belated, sometimes anachronistic past. Enchantment at the level of the story for Alex opens up a future beyond the trauma of her family’s flight from Romania, beyond her accident, beyond witnessing a child die in the hospital, and beyond the possibility that Roy may commit suicide. For Roy the storytelling is an angry, painful process. The construction of the bandit fairy tale is not simply an allegory for American society, nor of courtly love; it is a collaborative practice: this new oral history is a discourse not yet developed sufficiently with the words to sustain it (Alex cannot yet master English and Roy is in thrall to morphine hallucinations). Magic realism does not replace or substitute real physical, ideological, or phenomenological experience with lightweight fantasy. Magic realism as I have argued throughout, is a serious business. It is driven by a desire to challenge the dominant position of history as tradition, of a logical cause and effect, and of fixity.This process of rebuke requires a state of readiness to change the present, to open the ordinary to the facets of Deleuze’s crystalline image of time in Cinema 2, where the mind seeks to understand the links, gaps, and jumps that make a given reality extraordinary. But neither the goal nor the outcome is to find answers, the process of thinking through magic realism leads to increased awareness, which in turn leads to a shift, which may or may not be a return (after Carpentier). It is a reductive reading to categorise The Fall’s vivid hallucinations, miraculous coincidence, indigenous seers, flocks of rare butterflies, nods to 1001 Nights, and One Hundred Years (‘that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’, Márquez 1970, p.1) as pure hyperrealist vernacular. The film is a critique of America’s mistreatment of immigrants, of the Hollywood star system, of heterosexual love, of science, and of slavery. But it also

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philosophises on the manner in which images and ideas are created and deployed in the modern world, its own formal structure resisting simple assimilation into the category of ‘mainstream film’.

André Delvaux’s enigmatic philosophy –​surrealism and magic realism ‘à pas de deux’ Jameson finds violent realisation and slow contemplation equally indicative of magic-​realist film. Delvaux, like fellow Belgian Magritte, ensures sufficient time for things to emerge and reveal their own agency: ‘The bark of a tree, the green in leaves, facades, bricks. When you approach a substance, it comes alive, acquires a life of its own. And there’s a way in which all that organises itself in a world’ (cited in Abraté, Delvaux 2012). His films, often literary adaptations, are less concerned with plot than in the incremental details that form the worlds around the story. Characters and objects frequently act as conduits, registering weird or horrifi events –​the tinkling glass that stands in for the sound of warfare in Rendez-​vous à Bray [Appointment in Bray,  1971] or the personification of paranoiac desire in The Man Who, which lead to ‘another reality’. Delvaux’s films tend towards slowness, sparsity, and deliberate avoidance of conventional cinematic verisimilitude, eschewing overt motifs in favour of understatement [litote]. Crucial lines of enquiry can be easy to miss when details are layered through the small and ephemeral. Understatement is key to my theorisation of magic realism: minutiae of the gesture, invisible breezes of disquiet, micro-​narrative arcs in which nothing much happens, subdued atmosphere.The second part of this chapter explores how understatement, combined with metatextual layering and hyperreal vitality set in quietly unsettling worlds, can result in deeply nuanced philosophical films. I focus on Johan Daisne and Flemish réalisme magique, Delvaux’s The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, and two more recent films  –​Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Évolution (2015) and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Dao khanong [By The Time it Gets Dark, 2016]. Réalisme magique is an art historical term used to describe a very small, and short-​ lived, movement in painting in early twentieth-​ century Holland. Carel Willink, Raoul Hynckes, Wim Shumacher, and Dick Kent, were all associated with the movement, but Pyke Koch was the only artist among this loose grouping who referred to his own work as réalisme magique. He was inspired by painters such as Rousseau, Grosz, and Schad; and his enigmatic, ‘realistic’ painting came to be associated with magic realism via the 1929 Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Koch’s meticulously detailed paintings of expressive subjects reference the new German painting as well as cinema and its projection of fantasy.They penetrate ordinary life with an acute anguish, combining sensations drawn from the tumult of the Second World War with fantastic subjects, such as in Nocturne (1930), and La Femme à l’oiseau mort II (1974): ‘Surrealists have created situations that are materially impossible; Magic Realism, on the other hand, confronts us with possible situations, even ordinary ones, but which contain an element that makes them improbable’ (Koch cited in Zutter 1995, p.71). Koch’s

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magic-​realist paintings are socially critical, mysterious, and realistically depicted. The ‘improbability’ in his paintings lies within a strange atmosphere, accented by elements of surprise in juxtaposition. Born in Ghent, Daisne (née Herman Thiery) was the leading pioneer of réalisme magique in Flemish literature. His novel The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (1951), was the inspiration for Delvaux’s film, and, like Koch’s paintings, presents a convincingly tangible world, detailed, cool, and shot through with the most eerie, unlikely, and at times, fantastic psychological elements. Adolphe Nysenholc describes Delvaux’s films as inhabiting territory between the métaphysique intériorisé of de Chirico’s paintings and Kafka’s storytelling, without ever leaving the realm of the real (2006, p.188). This is a well-​judged description, fully realising the powerful sense of enigma and cerebral play in his films. Additionally, Delvaux cites Magritte as a primary influence on mood and atmosphere: ‘Le réalisme magique existe chez Magritte’ (cited in Nysenholc 1985, p.106). In preparation for filming The Man Who, Delvaux read Daisne’s essays on magic realism, which split his ideas into romantic and classical veins:  ‘réalisme magique romantique’ and ‘réalisme magique classique’. The latter applies to Daisne’s novel in its calm questioning of ordinary objects and their strange purchase, whereas the ‘romantic’ vein ‘immediately betrays the place reserved for the imaginary and dreamlike’ thereby highlighting a dramatic gap, which then entails ‘a return all the more laborious to the latter’ (Erickson 2005, p.94) –​he could well be describing vernacular magic-​realist films, where this ‘romantic’ application actively destroys any magic.The classicist inflection running through The Man Who: ‘implies the absence of any intensification, and the moderation, or even total disappearance of fantastic ingredients’ […] the magical sparks weaken and separate, and the action has almost no event that cannot be accepted by the senses and reason’ (p.94). In short, réalisme magique classique relegates the fantastic to its virtual form, where everything that is fantastic stems from the protagonists’ minds, and the viewer/​reader can only be led by how much the filmmaker/​writer wishes to reveal about the source of the image/​ sound. The resulting sparks are understated rather than dramatic but marked by a peculiar magic. In their respectively frustrating endings Daisne and Delvaux refuse to reveal or explain the gap between what protagonist Govert (Senne Rouffaer) fantasises and what he really sees and does. All is plausible, but it escapes finite proof, a condition perfectly denoted by Govert’s surname Miereveldt, which means ‘field of ants’, conjuring Buñuel’s and Dalí’s swarming insects. Delvaux mobilises the affective twists of Govert’s obsessional mind, creating an elliptical structure of magically real transferrals: ‘Mental or psychological displacement through imagination or fantasy, or through unfamiliar perception, engenders spatial displacement (nomadism, errancy, magical realism), and vice-​versa’ (Erickson 2005, p.25). Delvaux’s film captures the spatio-​temporal slippage of interiority effortlessly. Daisne’s novel commences with a first-​person stream-​of-​conscious narrative without paragraph breaks: Yes, everything considered, there has always been ‘something.’ […] I  can define this something only with great difficulty, but no matter how long

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I think about it, so long as I can remember it has always existed, although it has altered its appearance. (Daisne 1975, p.21)

The enigma ensures an instability and tension in his environment, yet his apparent frankness assures its fidelity. Govert, a common lawyer, replaces the retired Judge Brantnink as a teacher at the local girls’ school. Shot in black and white, the film opens with a close-​up shot of Govert in reverie; his lips move, repeating the name ‘Fran’ as he gently stirs. An inner monologue juxtaposed with the sound of ringing bells informs us that: ‘Today Fran is leaving school. For good. I have to tell her’. From what seems a straightforward reminder, the action plunges into series of sinister events with Govert at their centre. Delvaux leaves visual and sonic clues throughout –​the rotten bowl of fruit in front of the mirror, the deserted streets, Govert’s compulsion for cleanliness, the lingering smell of an autopsy, a score that swings between Fran’s (Beata Tyszkieswica) romantic leitmotif and the nervy piano drama whenever Govert’s agitation mounts. The viewer learns quickly that she is in the company of an obsessive and unstable mind, where it is almost impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is a figment of Miereveld’s fevered imagination. In an interview for Image et Son (1973) Delvaux repeatedly uses the term réalisme magique to describe the effect he desires for the film, how mystery should materialise from discrepancies and ruptures in a logical storyline, or from contradictions within the concrete reality and not from any supernatural cause: ‘We are not talking about fantasy, but about working on reality in order to bring out meaning where possible’ (Nysenholc 1985, p.106). To add to the confusion, Delvaux contradicts himself here, because earlier in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma (July 1966, No.180) with Comolli, Jean Narboni, and Adriano Aprà, he refers specifically to the surnatural or fantastic (Nysenholc 1985).This is not to say that earlier stylistic and thematic concerns vanished from his later films, on the contrary they reoccur frequently. Laure Borgomano finds four principal means of conveying magic in his films: (1) first person narration; (2) action proceeding from a point of conflict that manifests in the real, from which a doubling between the real and the imaginary then develops; (3) the recurrence of symbolic objects –​often with double meanings –​ that Delvaux explains as markers for the viewer to navigate seamlessly from real to imaginary without suspending disbelief; (4) the score, which echoes themes in the main plot, and subliminally influences the viewer’s interpretation of the real (1988, p.34). Delvaux’s explanation of the function of the object is significant. Rather than acting as a metaphor, or substitute for latent psychological material, or to indicate a magical departure from reality, Delvaux insists that in The Man Who certain objects –​ a book, a portmanteau, a gun, a hand –​serve to guarantee reality to the spectator. Their ordinariness is made strange due to the narrator’s perception of them, but at the end of the story, the gun, for example, is a fact, a piece of evidence, whereas the narrator’s recollection of the murder of his student cannot be relied upon. Magic realism is often associated with hyperbolic fantasy, but Delvaux insists that his own magic realism is more concerned with understatement [litote] and ordinariness

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(cited in Weisgerber 1987, p.264), resonant with German photorealism’s transformation of the object. Govert’s slow pauses, as he fingers the bark of a tree, focuses on a first-​aid dummy in the classroom, or gazes into the camera, for example, make strange an otherwise ordinary scene. Regarding Man Ray’s manipulation of the real, Kim Knowles observes that he ‘does not aim to shock the viewer with outright incongruity, but instead attempts to create an atmosphere in which reality is only slightly out of synch with the way it is traditionally presented in the cinema’ (2009, p.161). Although Ray’s experimental films of the 1920s and 1930s present sexual fantasy and obsession through more clearly signalled methods (a Vaseline-​ blurred camera lens, irrational match-​cuts, anthropomorphised objects) and a surrealist engagement with reality, his work, especially given Carpentier’s interest in it, is a relevant precedent here. Being ‘slightly out of synch’ certainly applies to the strange 180-​degree reversals, diagonal tracking shots, and traversals of vertical space (the movement from the ground floor of the stage to the viewing platform and classrooms during Fran’s performance, for example) that Delvaux employs. The transformation of the ordinary by ‘working’ on the real, as he puts it, reminds me once again of Robbe-​Grillet’s détournement of reality through the real.The obsessive details in Jealousy, or the visual echoes of mirrored space in Marienbad, take on an abstracted and sinister appearance that is exacerbated in the slow and careful movements of the protagonists, understated intensity par excellence. Long takes chart Govert’s movement through the ordinary, slow capture of his outwardly profound encounters with locations outside his routine (the graveyard, the hotel town), drawn to ‘the state of bemusement and incipient illumination which arises within certain settings […] lieux électifs –​elective places, or sites conducive to the marvelous’ (Cardinal 2009, p.36).The real metamorphoses into something rare and irrational, and the airless lieux –​the odd streets and deserted public squares where Govert lingers  –​have an enigmatic quality:  ‘The characters and their surrounding are in collusion’ (Delvaux [1965] 2012). The action unspools with restrained understatement, illuminating Govert’s unease through a series of subtle visual motifs and slowly deliberate shots of his peculiar gestures, rather than through direct dialogue. Georgiana M. Colville struggles to locate Delvaux’s oeuvre: ‘Delvaux’s surrealism emerges from the level of the signified or content and could be perceived as the unconscious of his work, while his carefully elaborated magic-​realist structures constitute its signifier and conscious’ (2006, p.120). She suggests that surrealism pertains to latent meaning, while magic realism is aligned with realism, surface appearance and ascribing meaning. In Delvaux’s film, while everything stems from the delusions of a perturbed mind, the exterior world generates a mysterious magical philosophy of its own. Take the issue of ‘matter’ as expressed by Professor Mato (Hector Camerlynk) following the graveside autopsy. The viewer understands the body of the deceased only through the exertion shown in the raised veins on the Professor’s wrist and jaw as he, we imagine, severs the spinal cord. The understatedness in the detailed close-​up of the Professor is then contrasted with the clumsiness of the onlookers. Govert asks: ‘Is anything else to be found behind that changing of matter?’ to which Mato responds: ‘Maybe the

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constant changing of matter is the soul, and it can exist by itself and give meaning to that changing’. This dialectical psychomany, or conflict between the body and soul, is in fact a magic-​realist metamorphosis of matter into metaphysics, which exceeds the simpler reading of Govert’s latent desires (Fran, bodily cleanliness). Colville might distinguish that the metamorphosis of matter in and of itself seems surrealist, whereas the ascription of meaning to it seems magic-​realist. Delvaux, however, states that the scene was designed to ‘intensify the fear’ to avoid answers, and not to confront the autopsy at all, but to ‘be a little sadistic’ by withholding information, and instead asking the viewer to take in the sound of seagulls, the damp earth, the river Scheldt, and the gloom of the graveyard –​the sensory-​scape of death (Delvaux [1965] 2012). Openness to possibility is a characteristic of both surreal and magic-​ realist practice, and while there is a tendency to align a greater (and sometimes more obvious) absurdity with surrealism, and a more miraculous aspect to magic realism, these are not reliable coordinates. The film experiments with fragility, with beauty and its base opposites, and the desire for understanding and knowledge (Govert feels seen when he is ‘understood’). It is philosophical, poetic, chilling, and filled with surprising moments of humour. Ultimately, Colville concludes that ‘surrealism and magic realism dance a pas de deux with the danse macabre as a negative mirror, traversed by an Orphean quest for love. Magic-​realist doubles and surrealist antinomies prove to be closely related’ (2006, p.128). Films, such as Blood of a Poet, Marienbad, and Céline and Julie, share a visual and atmospheric complexity with The Man Who. They create worlds of theatrical, yet in many respects, ordinary, dimensions, where, to differing degrees, what it means to love, think, and feel outside of time is played out. The house, artist’s studio, stage, garden, become nodal points around which the protagonists circle, in search of something else besides. Cocteau’s artist leaps through the mirror, and a lethal game of roulette unfolds at a table in the snow, the hotel in Marienbad sees X, A, and M loop endlessly in a separate, distant world that reflects back upon itself; Rivette’s suburban Paris connected by a chance encounter searches for a break in the continuum; and Delvaux presents his exterior lieux électifs  –​the streetcar track, the cemetery, the harbour, the asylum garden –​as links in a puzzle, for the viewer to connect. Traces are always left in the contact between subjects, objects, and their immediate environment, but presence is not always materially visible. Take for example the following statement: ‘The memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place. In this place that is a palimpsest, subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence and makes it “be there” ’ (de Certeau 1984, p.109). The Freudian child feels an acute lack in their separation from the parent(s) that is arguably repeated throughout life in the disappearance of beloved objects and experiences that have passed. The atmosphere that builds in cinematic magic realism relies on precisely this mystery of lost things.The something else besides might well stem from a mysterious tension that cannot be pinpointed, residing in an amalgam of feeling and affect. We literally cannot put our finger on the reasons for the unease; magic-​realist films recreate the sensation of imbalance in a magically understated manner. In Daisne’s novel, Govert describes the something else besides as an alternating golden and then ashen haze, or fog:

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When I left the barber and walked out of the fresh, sombre station, ‘it’ hung over the great round plaza, where the streetcars, coming from all directions, describe a wide, graceful circle, before going out in those various directions again. It hung there like a blinding reflection of the sun. (1975, p.28)

In Delvaux’s translation he depicts Govert’s all-​encompassing virtual fog not in sfumato but in its inverse –​crisp, clear, with light bouncing from reflective surfaces. It creates a glassy approximation of a border between self and environment, that is, the expansive stillness and doubling of thought-​space. Doubling the synaesthetic affect, generated in the autopsy scene, is a most peculiar sequence that remains brilliantly emblazoned upon my memory. Govert leaves the hotel after bumping into Fran and enters the deserted street.We watch him scuttle past a series of shop windows, set in the darkened cobbles of an otherwise abandoned part of town.The setting seems to combine Atget’s glassy arcades and Raoul Ubac’s ghostly photomontage Hommage à de Chirico [The Street Behind the Train Station, 1936] –​‘a “site” with all the uneasy desolation of the Parisian banlieue’ where ‘the classical statuary seems woefully ill at ease’ (Walker 2002, p.38). Govert, awkward to a fault, rings the bell of the shoe shop, which is clearly closed, but is shown inside. The shoes in the windows are ladies’ pumps, and when he exists the shop swinging a box wrapped and bound with twine, it is a fair assumption that he has bought a pair for Fran. However, as he makes his way back down the dreamlike street, he pauses to throw the box into the river. He has been scraping the sole of his shoe since the autopsy, where the policemen notes something clinging to it, and the viewer now makes an adjustment, deducing that he has in fact bought a new pair for himself, and was carrying the old pair (which is described in the novel). The entire sequence hinges upon a threshold where paranoia and organised practicality meet, realised in the meeting of photorealistic shop windows with the photomontage effect of the street reflected in them, animated in the interplay of light and shadow.The film is economical in what it reveals, but the suggestion of outrageous acts takes on a magnitude that concludes in Govert’s eventual incarceration. Every object is a clue, liable to steer us off track, magically folding outwards like the waves in Govert’s brain. Unlike the murderers of German Expressionist films, where sensation is key to the dramatisation of evil, Delvaux leads the viewer to believe everything is potentially frightening, thereby downplaying the marvellous actions and investing the very ordinary spaces of the school, hotel, street, or barber’s with suggestion, mystery, and disquiet. This is magic realism at its most subtle and airless.

‘Fabulous syncretisms’ –​queer metamorphoses and marine magic Moroccan-​ born, French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović’s first feature film Innocence (2004) emerges from a stream of oneiric images tinged with the familiar tincture of a fairy tale. Set in a boarding school deep within a forest, betrayed by its manicured parklands, female students are held in an environment where the strict

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parameters of their formal education nevertheless reveal an intimate world. The stages of girlhood –​seniority is signalled by the colour of a girl’s hair ribbon –​are presented in a weirdly ordered series of pairings. The verdant twilight, exquisitely shot by Benoît Debie, sets the visual tone; there is no inkling of nostalgia, this is Magischer Realismus, the tense interiority palpitating within the lyrical yet sober, mise-​en-​scène. In Hadžihalilović’s films, like Delvaux’s, there tends to be a limit whereby growth and metamorphosis can be contained, measured, and potentially transgressed –​ in Innocence a wall and the outskirts of the woods –​and in her next feature Évolution, the vast expanse of sea. However, the limit, whether physically or psychologically realised, is never a boundary between a real and an unreal world –​ they co-​exist. Cut off from the outside, the boarding school is sensorially gothic but rendered in an altogether contrary luminescent photo-​realism –​a réalisme magique classique. The stillness and hyperreality of the airless forest, where huge lamps are ringed with yellow light, reinterpret a version of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil, 1857], where the tenebrous, synaesthetic forest of symbols enchants those who enter, diverting from the dreadfully sinister potential within (Baudelaire [1857; 1861] 1999). In Hadžihalilovićs’ forest, danger and gloom lurk on the other side of the mirror, tainting the luscious images of the girls’ seeming wholesomeness, blooming like giant insects drawn to the unnaturally bright lamps. The newest girl, Iris, arrives in a coffin, and one of the eldest girls will soon be chosen to leave with the erstwhile absent headmistress to dance in front of a room filled with leering male voyeurs. What is particularly perplexing about Hadžihalilović’s film is its believability –​mostly achieved through close framing of the girls’ bodies and movement, of their gestures and textures. It never calls into question the dichotomy between an inside and beyond because the threat is everywhere, in an atmosphere loaded with predatory desires and charged with the pleasures of looking.The stilted and repressed conditions infer much more sinister realities based in the commercial exchange of patriarchal power and female corporeality. Amniotic fluid, tears, drowning, desire, escape, melting ice caps; water reveals and conceals, gives and takes life; and in Hadžihalilović’s Évolution water is a prerequisite for experimental metamorphosis. Filmed on the volcanic island of Lanzarote, a tiny hamlet community struggles to evolve within a system where (failed) science and human and marine life intersect. The opening shot is a low-​angled view of the sun from under the sea; it undulates with the movement of the water for a while until the silhouette of a boy floats into view, his limbs suspended like a sea creature. His red-​ orange shorts stand out like Little Red Riding Hood’s cape, the colour repeated in the bright form of the starfish that Nicholas (the boy, Max Brebant) plucks from the seabed –​for which he develops a grotesque fascination. In a dramatic 180-​degree reversal, the shot is suddenly cut to reveal Nicholas running for his life towards the houses on the shore. Captured from behind, his body seems to dwarf the tiny habitations. Emanating from this all-​at-​onceness is the sense of horror evident on his face, of sensations seemingly created from the sea, where he has conflated the starfish stuck to his chest, with an image that ‘possesses’ him (his belief that a dead boy is at the bottom of the sea.4 As events unfold a connection between creature

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and human is revealed.The boys on the island (there are no girls), are incubators for foetuses, their bodies used to ‘birth’ children. Their mothers, meanwhile, (there are no fathers) have large suckers tracing their spines, and at night they writhe in the shallow seawater with an octopus. Expository scenes outline the adolescent transformation of lizards, crabs, boys, and their fragility, emphasising a morbid fascination with biological metamorphosis. Each boy is prepared for his transformation with a dosage of medicine, a dark liquid suspiciously like squid ink. There are many instances of this overlapping, or conflation, between aquatic and human forms, not least the mirroring of Nicholas’s nosebleed and the blood from the crushed starfish tentacle. The boys’ metamorphoses are not designated by the human trajectory of adolescence, but by a totally pre-​pubescent and alternative rhythm. Hadžihalilović stresses the ambivalence of the gender or sex of the pre-​pubescent carrier:  ‘I thought it was more interesting and striking with the boy because it was more abnormal. It was less a cliché than to have a girl afraid of having something put in her belly’ (Hadžihalilović 2016a). In the aquatic films of pioneering documentarian Jean Painlevé, he is enraptured by the maternal behaviour of male seahorses, who carry the female’s eggs in their stomach until they give birth: ‘The male undergoes a real and apparently extremely painful delivery five weeks after the wedding’ (‘The Seahorse’ Bellows and McDougall 2000, p.  xiii). The ‘queer sexuality’ of these, and other sea creatures, ‘is enough to make a pure mockery of any Christian eulogy of “nature”: bisexuality, same-​sex sex, hermaphroditism, incest and all other kinds of unnatural sexual practices are part of the animal kingdom’ (Braidotti 2002, pp.158–​9). Rather than an allegory of motherhood, or queer parenting, the genesis of Hadžihalilović’s film actually stems from a shocking recollection-​image, that of having her appendix removed as a child, and the feelings and sensations she associated with that hospital space. Her human figures become strange specimens in an aquatic hospital lab, where they must float, like the seahorse, to give birth in water. The milky limpidity of human skin, inky black fluid, orange starfish blood, the opaque depths of the sea, and the pellucid tanks where the boys are suspended, combine to create a marvellous, watery, queer environment. Hadžihalilović claims Magritte as an important figure of inspiration for her filmmaking (Wood 2005, n.p.). He described ‘l’art fantastique et magique’ in terms of: ‘the mystery of the familiar world where we live, and of its painting which, whether fantastic or not, is only a matter of a detail like any other detail’ (Magritte 2009, p.489). In Évolution, Hadžihalilović details an ontological world where atmosphere and mood constitute the governing forces; all action stems from the mysterious portrayal of the island’s inhabitants, seamless in its dream of alchemical reproduction, like Magritte’s anti-​siren, the fish-​woman in his painting ‘The collective invention’ (1934). Évolution confronts a pervasive fear of medical science through the fantastic fascination of the sea, drawing them together in a singular, taut breath of glassy realism –​what is really possible? The tension is palpable. In the imaginative, creative act, as Magritte explains, separation of realms is an irrelevance, only the infinite possibility of reproduction and representation remains –​in acts of magic.The marvellous is everywhere, but it is felt through subjective affective experience. Neurological

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and phenomenological connections form part of a complex and personal psychic cartography. Évolution’s interior spaces such as the hospital wards, or the kitchen, are dimly lit; objects are picked out by spot lighting and cast as shadows or silhouettes, evoking the mysterious rock pools close to the shore. The atmosphere is oneiric; images and sounds are dislocated, obfuscating actions and movements, and mimicking the sensory distortion of being underwater. Manipulation of reflective light mirrors the operating lamps back onto Nicholas’s pupils, shrinking them in the process, and turning them into two tiny stars, connecting the boy once again to the sea creatures. The film presents a certain fragility in its emotional register upon which everything else relies. Shot digitally, the camera achieves a sense of extreme closeness, even with images shot underwater. Match shots of starfish tentacles and Nicholas’s eyelashes highlight their formal similarities, while the scary mouth of the starfish (which Nicholas fears above all) recalls the stomach wounds where the foetuses have been inserted into the boys’ bodies. When pushed to assign the film a genre, Hadžihalilović cites horror, particularly with its treatment of female bodies, yet the reactions of the principle lead, and of his mother (Julie-​Marie Parmentier) resist cliché or hyperbole. The mother’s sincerity is evident when palpable relief spills over in the sonogram sequence. Nicholas’s expressive eyes, his fear, and his stubborn resistance, register across a nuanced spectrum of emotions and affects. Hadžihalilović explains: I wanted the soundtrack to reflect the mood of a child and not reality. […] I wanted to reflect the emotion more than the location. I couldn’t use real recordings. […] We were working under some kind of minimalism, because I thought it was scarier to have a kind of silence, not to fill the image with realistic sounds. It was the opposite, to take out. (Hadžihalilović 2016b)

With a more understated soundscape, the mood swells in watery echoes and vibrations that are neither abstractly nor linearly conceived. This is what lends the film a closeness and intimacy that is both creepy and authentically felt. This is also, I believe, how the lives of sea creatures are seamlessly and un-​problematically woven into the film, not in a Lovecraftian feat of engineering, but through an empathetic sharing of affective space through water. Painlevé asks ‘Does the complete understanding of a natural phenomenon strip away its miraculous qualities? It is certainly a risk. But it should at least maintain all of its poetry, for poetry subverts reason and is never dulled by repetition’.5 Analysing reality from a similar position to Roh, through the apparatus, Painlevé is similarly struck by the inner mystery of nature. Both obsess over form, microscopic detail, and marvel at being able to apprehend both near and far simultaneously, without completely abstracting the object. Painlevé’s films of marine life such as L’Hippocampe [The Seahorse,  1934] or Les Oursines [Sea Urchins,  1958], and his experiments capturing the movements of liquid crystals, Transition de Phase dans les Cristaux Liquides [Phase Transition in Liquid Crystals,  1978] find poetry

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in transformation and motion. In the same way that Nicholas’s eyelashes might resemble the spines on a seahorse, or starfish tentacles, Painlevé’s sea urchins becomes forests: ‘Magnification allows us to venture deeper into the forest. Around the spines, which now look like Doric columns, we discover another smaller forest of shrubs’ (2017, p.9). Roh, Painlevé, Ray, and others of their generation were fascinated by the ways in which a camera could help us to see the world anew, to admire the ‘spectacle of choreographed movement’ and balletic form offered to us in the mysteries of the Atlantic Ocean (Jager 2017, p.30). Magic-​realist animal-​ plant-​mineral-​human hybrids arise from the real  –​whether something not seen clearly that appears other (the tree root that is mistaken for a hand); a transmutation of form that is unquestioned; levitation and wings that support a belief system (Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes; Days of Eclipse, Wings of Desire); and here in Évolution, women who manifest tentacle suckers and fish eyes. Whether actual or allegorical phantoms, the hybrid creatures of cinematic magic realism, are, like Carrington’s talking hyena and her characters made from wax, animal skins, dust, or cinnamon, as real as anything else presented alongside them. Hadžihalilović’s Évolution is particularly adept at blurring creation and evolution myths, allowing imagination the upper hand. It plays with stock symbolism such as the sickly, moist green rooms inhabited by waxy in-​patients, the rust of iodine and murky jars of formaldehyde, and the monstrous unfurling of the octopus. Into this well-​worn sampler of colour and texture, ellipses and unexpected events are inserted. Much of this is carried in Brebant’s performance. The child’s-​eye view immediately realises the naivety and spontaneity that Breton desired to retrieve through automatism: as a result, the marvellous seems more shocking and signals an alternative route outside of order and regulation. In 1928 Carpentier comments that Ray’s ‘L’étoile de mer has an inexhaustible dynamism. The magic of the film’s ‘contingent elements’, of images that oscillate between dream and reality perplexes him.6 He describes a camera-​eye that violates any inert material object, an apparatus that captures every slow movement, even the slow stretch of a starfish. The result is ‘a counterpoint of crystal objects that spin simultaneously’, teaching the viewer to see reality anew (1976, p.80). In this particular sequence (referenced in Chapter  4), an in-​frame montage of moving objects is set against a dark background: the horizontal drawing of a blade, rotating starfish suspended in specimen jars, fast-​revolving casino wheels and other glass objects spin and catch the light.The preceding intertitle reads: ‘Si les fleurs etaient en verre’ [If the flowers were made of glass], signalling a transmutation of form via the imagination or by way of dream. Ray’s short film is resplendent with poetic condensation (inspired and in dialogue with Desnos’s poem), its meaning slipping between gaps encouraged by glimmering superimpositions, faux intertitles, and blurred vision. The film has enjoyed its share of Freudian readings of sexual desire, and castration anxiety (Fotiade 2006, p.281), but more relevant to my analysis of Évolution is its poetic montage, inter-​species transformations, and inter-​material symbiosis. The sensations that Étoile de mer generates are intimately drawn, with an emphasis on tactile and erotic pleasure that borders dangerous and unknown fears latent within everyday life; a new reality springs from Ray’s weird alchemy.

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Hadžihalilović’s cephalopoda-​women invite a point of comparison with the magic-​realist creatures of the Caribbean in Carpentier’s detailed descriptions of the jungle. The musicologist is struck by the profound wonder of the reality unfolding around him: The aquatic plants formed a thick carpet, hiding the water that flowed below, mimicking the vegetation of the solid earth […] The jungle is the world of deceit, subterfuge, duplicity; everything there is disguise, stratagem, artifice, metamorphosis. The world of the lizard-​cucumber, the chestnut-​hedgehog, the cocoon-​centipede, the carrot-​lava. (TLS, p.165)

Similarly, in Explosion in a Cathedral, Esteban marvels at the ‘formal ambiguity’ of the islands he travels through, where ‘many marine creatures had received names which established verbal equivocations in order to describe them accurately […] a fantastic bestiary had arisen of dog-​fish, oxen-​fish, tiger-​fish, snorers, blowers, flying fish’ (pp.177–​8). The shifting nature of their evolutionary process is ‘characteristic of the Caribbean’; ‘the shape of these fish, of these creatures, is not given by the second term in the hyphenated word, but by the very process of changing one into another, by the hyphen itself ’ (Echevarría 1983, p.557). These composite objects/​ forms encapsulate what it means to see the world through a magic-​realist lens –​a constant becoming, which flouts any semblance of a binary. Carpentier’s love of Caribbean baroque and its syncretic distillation of multiple, heterogeneous elements results in descriptive passages that are profoundly cinematic. The musicologist is drawn to the jungle, and its dynamic, at times impenetrable, tactile qualities: ‘Under the water great riddled leaves waved like dominoes of ocher velvet, lures and traps. […] A kind of thick, opalescent gauze hung over the opening of a rock teeming with hidden life. […] I was dazed, frightened, feverish’ (TLS pp.160–​2). The jungle, as if shot in close-​up, throws up a montage of objects and light patterns; the narrator moved by the ‘inexhaustible mimetism of virgin nature’ (p.165) experiences a full spectrum of affects. But nature is also deceptive, concealing beneath its proliferating layers. Steve Wakefield likens this ‘conflict’ between appearance and reality to a quality in the baroque, engaño, or deceit (2004, p.80), emphasising the mutual instability that exists between sense reactions and things. Évolution’s world is one of engaño, where the mothers and nurses are not honest with the boys. Seen from Nicholas’s perspective, meaning is unfixed; the dead lobster, the wounded starfish, his mother, the nurse’s suckers, and the midnight rituals that he witnesses from a place of hiding, offer only ambivalence. He is told that he is mistaken when he finds the boy’s corpse at the bottom of the sea and finds no answers for why he has been operated on. Fascinated and repulsed by the eco-​system that he inhabits, he decides to revolt, to escape the creepy, engineered fate that awaits him.Yet, perhaps the industrial mainland shoreline, towards which he sails in the closing sequence, is no less ambivalent, no less strange with its towers, and mechanised cranes. In her treatise on cultural metamorphosis Braidotti writes:

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The starting-​point for my work is a question that I would set at the top of the agenda for the new millennium: the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations, rather than Being in its classical modes. (2002, p.2)

Magic-​realist films offer the potential to explore the philosophical question of moving beyond the binary, beyond the solid and fixed.

Magic mushrooms and modern labour Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By The Time it Gets Dark is a counter-​cultural work of magic realism that explores modern life through a collage of representational methods:  documentary, digital video, music video, intercut archive film footage, television show rushes, interviews, staged performance art, and simulated activism. In the final sequence the film literally threatens to disintegrate in a deliberate  –​ and magical  –​glitch in the pixilation transfer, a sequence that resonates marvellously with footage intercut earlier in the film of Méliès’s Voyage dans la lune (1902). The film opens in present-​day Thailand, but it is also a mythical Thailand, and the two versions are connected by leaps in consciousness worthy of Lewis Carroll, visualised in telekinetic parallels, oneiric diversions, and chance encounters. Suwichakornpong’s textural portrait of Thailand is woven around a main geopolitical strand: the events of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre; and the patterns created in the movements of four key protagonists: a documentary filmmaker Ann, (Visra Vichit-​Vadakan), a teen idol, Peter (Arak Amornsupasiri), an activist, Taew (Rassami Paouengtong), and a woman, Nong, who appears in different spatio-​ temporal locations as a waitress in a rural café, a waitress and cleaner in the city, and a Buddhist monk (Atchara Suwan). With very little in the way of exposition or chronology, save for when Taew talks to Ann about the massacre on camera, all the events seem linked. This effect is amplified in the various instances of visual doubling throughout. Taew exists as a young activist in the scenes connected to the time period of the massacre, but also in a ‘real’ and ‘dream’ version of herself in the scenes at the rural lodging. Ann, having eaten one of the local area’s famed mushrooms (doubled in the sequence featuring Méliès’s magically growing moon mushrooms), walks through a wood when she sees across from her, a child dressed in a monkey suit. After a series of shot-​reverse-​shots, the monkey-​child is replaced by Ann’s identical double, with whom she tries to catch up. At first, this seems to be an elliptical edit, or mistake, something imagined, and yet the image of the second Ann persists. Suwichakornpong leaves open the possibility that either the mushrooms might have caused a hallucination, or they signal a magical realm in which everything imagined is real; Jonathan Romney finds this scene ‘bewildering’, surmising that it ‘might be a dream, or a detour into magic realism’ (2017). Atchara Suwan’s multiple appearances create a cyclical sense of inevitability, a materialisation of the belief in reincarnation, perhaps, or a recycling of the material labour needed

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to sustain a gig economy, where all subjects are replaceable and expendable. Peter also inhabits several incarnations –​performing as a star in a music video, posing for selfies with fans, in bed, and at lunch with his partner, reflected in the windows of cars and high-​r ise buildings, and, most chillingly, in the playback from an ‘indie’ film which rolls as the news of his (real) death in a car accident reaches the director.The film deliberately places the star in the same spatio-​temporality as tobacco factory workers, grifters, and adoring fans, making plain the gulf between exploitation, world trade, and the vacuity of celebrity. Synaesthetic transitions between shots  –​oneiric, simulated, and reconstituted images, as well as the film-​within-​a-​film  –​have a sensory immediacy with little time for the viewer to fight first impressions and instincts. In the longer, slower sequences, Suwichakornpong injects intensity as the seeds of spiritual and socio-​ political ideas proliferate centrifugally. While Peter waits at the traffic lights, a man selling bubble blowers walks through the stationary cars, a cascade of rainbow bubbles glimmering in the light. The scene is magical, the bubbles transforming a completely mundane event; but it is also deeply engaged with the politics of poverty, and casual or improvised labour. Nong’s multiple jobs are another means of illustrating working class experience  –​‘She represents the majority of people in Thailand’ –​and of highlighting the detachedness of people from their history. By The Time examines the possibility of re-​visiting and returning to truths that are inaccessible. Suwichakornpong feels an ambivalence to the history of the past yet is strangely drawn to it: I myself was born in 1976, so I kinda feel a connection with the situation even though I’ve never been involved directly. Over time, I’ve wondered if I really have a connection with the event. Or if I don’t. Or if I do, but I have not realized it yet. (Suwichakornpong 2017)

The film’s engagement at a distance, or through the self-​reflexive layers of cultural art objects, deliberately plays with the viewer’s understanding of time and memory. The cycle has the ominous inevitability of repetition and unlearned lessons: the very same university was at the heart of eerily similar protests between students and police in 2018 over demands for an election. Similarly, Thai spirituality and military brutality are condensed in the film’s first two sequences. As the cicadas sing, a pair of hands opens white, slatted shutters to reveal the dappled but brilliant sunlight outside. The camera pans gently to the left to reveal a woman taking a photograph of the trees. The next shots contemplate dirt and leaves on the floor, the wind blowing in the trees, and a medium-​shot of a six-​paned window. Only one of the panes is sufficiently transparent to see through. This deliberate collection of images seems to be communicating something, a code. The following shot witnesses a family standing outside the house, burning incense, in what seems to be a purification ceremony. The woman takes another picture. It is the next cut that jolts the viewer into a convulsive state of tension, breath, and

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focus held fast in the moment. Bodies with their hands tied lay face downwards on a concrete floor. Soldiers walk through, yelling for them to keep their eyes on the floor. A female voice shouts through a megaphone for the soldiers to kick the bodies if they want. The sequence is punctuated with a series of photographic stills documenting various angles of the brutality. At this point we realise that the violence is staged, and that this is a large-​scale performance piece. Later, it becomes clear, if one does not already recognise the reference, that this is a historical re-​ enactment, a performance piece, which refers to the massacre of university students over four decades prior to the film’s ‘perpetual present’. We learn subsequently that Taew, in the ‘flashback’ sequences of 1976, is one of the instrumental activists behind the student resistance. Another jarring juxtaposition occurs in a cut between the black and white footage of Taew and her friends hanging a banner at the university, to Taew and Ann shopping in an over-​lit supermarket for provisions. What is real life? In the final scene, during the Buddhist holiday celebrations of Makha Bucha, the film image is subject to a disintegrating pixilation following a scene of euphoria in a dance club. The confluence of contemporary life, spiritual ritual, and technology generates a baroque swelling, which exceeds the film’s reality. What lies at the centre of Thai culture, bang in the middle of all this energy and magic? An artificially bright pink and yellow-​hued landscape fades to naturalistic tones in the closing moments of the film, reminiscent of ‘the zone’ in Chris Marker’s documentary Sans Soleil [Sunless, 1983]. Excessive manipulation of the image represents a moment of philosophical abstraction –​what is the zone; what is its relation to Tarkovsky’s Stalker; why does Suwichakornpong blur the landscape in a rush of artificial imperfection? These deliberate interventions magically propel the film in a vertical direction, gesturing beyond the film itself, and to wider questions of existence. Jameson’s discussion of Kidlat Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare (1977) notes the danger of the ‘ethnic’ film (here Filipino) becoming a travelogue for a western audience (remember the perils of the chronicle). He argues that ‘a gap must be kept open between the contents and what displays them’ (1992, p.203), in other words avant-​garde form prevents a magic-​realist film from tipping over into a visual exoticisation or depthless vernacular. There is an all-​at-​onceness to By the Time, which enacts the elliptical History of Jameson’s cinematic magic realism, whilst spinning the poetic-​philosophical form that I  have outlined in my own variation of the discourse. It leaves us in no doubt that reality corresponds to a set of ideas and not a linguistic order –​a set of forms and their virtual counterparts, imagined or half-​remembered, hyphenated like Carpentier’s worlds-​in-​becoming. The film pushes back against the myths of capitalist expansion, where the processes of looking, of taking roles, of self-​reflection, and Ann’s documentary project, interrogate the interior figure of the exterior world. In By the Time, aspects of folkloric and Buddhist beliefs underpin philosophical ideas about labour and the individual. The specificity of rural Thailand, the spaces of the forests, fields, and rivers involve scenes overlaid with the concepts of ‘popular’ or ‘magic’ Buddhism.The forest, and its mushroom harvest, is as important as the tobacco factory and those bastions of soft power –​the all-​round media star,

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and cosplay (the monkey suit). Jameson would relish the juxtaposition of capitalist commodities with ancient tradition, but there is more at stake here if we are to class the film as magic-​realist. Suwichakornpong’s film plays with technical reproduction and flashbacks to represent passages of reincarnation or duality; it seems to have many points of correspondence with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s eight-​ screen video installation Primitive, its ancient ghosts and returning humans in animal form: ‘a reincarnation of presence (and absence). It’s also a reincarnation of cinema as a means of transportation as it was in the time of the early cinema innovator Georges Méliès:  the “motion picture” carries us from our own world. Primitive is a meditation on those voyages in fabulous vehicles that bring about the transformation of people and of light’ (unpublished artist’s statement, cited in Comer 2010).Weerasethakul and Suwichakornpong imagine their homeland, and its belief systems, in a charged form of ancient-​contemporary synthesis across a range of visual mediums. Experimentation with form is mirrored in the ‘syncretic and complex entity’ of Thai religion since the Second World War. Pattana Kitiarsa explains how the dominant Theravada Buddhist tradition –​‘folk Brahmanism, animism, and supernaturalism’ blends with ‘living popular traditions’ and local belief systems, with State and ancient beliefs forming a more syncretic Buddhism.These regionally specific models, intertwined with superstition and magic, are the belief systems that sustain contemporary life (Kitiarsa 2005, pp.462–​6). Magic-​realist cinema involves an uneven interpenetration of belief systems from the supernatural to the libidinal, the generational to the anachronistic: ‘Urban Thai religious change in the 1980s involved the invocation of magico-​religious protection through the use of amulets, fortune-​telling, magical and traditional healing’ (p.471). Kitiarsa argues that these beliefs in the supernatural have proliferated specifically because of rapid urbanisation, and a sustained respect for the monarchy. In Weerasethakul’s Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat [Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), the princess who appears to have sex with a catfish under a waterfall, is dressed in sumptuous royal costume with which Weerasethakul references not the Thai monarchy, but its reproduction in the popular prime-​time television dramas watched by thousands in Thailand (cited in Selavy 2010). Fantastic sequences in which creature and human form close bonds, force the viewer to question why these myths, fantasies, and boundaries exist in our everyday reality. The examples in this chapter propose that real magic is served by water, islands, and forests, where transgressions and transmutations are only partially revealed, as if in a dream. Juxtaposed with divine or technological elements in each film’s worldview (Buddha, god, the cosmos, recording equipment, biological science) hybrid and reincarnated creatures seem to bridge ancient and contemporary thought. This strange alignment is what creates the marvellous and magical elements but in understated rather than overt symbolism. The knowledge that superstition and magic is still so prevalent in many world cultures ensures that these films are not mere fantasy or science fiction, but thought through the body, through the individual, perfectly capturing the flux of being and metamorphosis as Braidotti describes it. In worlds in which day and night can be reversed or tactile surfaces such as skin and bark mutually exchanged, it seems little wonder that rock

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becomes weightless or lifelike, documentary testimony, art installation and popular culture merge into one another, or that scale, shape, and semiotic substitutions confuse any conventional order of things. The references to the real –​history, politics, state violence –​are not a static background from which action emerges, but a mobile cosmos of citations, hooking into the viewer, prompting deeper contemplation as to why and how. By The Time and Évolution survive Jameson’s ‘sea-​change’. We never doubt their sincerity, nor are we deceived by the engaño of gorgeous proliferation in their multi-​medium worlds; all-​at-​once, like an effective poem, they release magic-​realist affect. Subsequent to the visceral, affective jolt of a perceptual experience, language forms around the residual aftershocks in attempts to articulate it; magic-​realist films express this process in many different ways:  Nicholas’s drawings; Govert’s obsessional mantras and attention to tiny details; Ann’s attempts to reincarnate the massacre; Suwichakornpong’s magic montage, which pursues an equivalence between fantasy and political fact, and between the perfection and imperfection of audio-​ tactile-​visual images. To reveal a gap, or a glitch, paranoia, a mysterious creature, an anomalous object, is to open up the possibility for thought. The emphasis has shifted from early twentieth-​century theories on how to ‘photograph thought’, onto the practice of thought, what Adorno names the ‘transaesthetic subject’ (1997, p.269). A viewer’s interaction with a thing, or a work of art, is mediated through various positions: a cognitive posture, feelings, ideas originating in the ‘empirical layers of life’ (p.269), the idea of Truth, and its critique. Feelings provoked by an artwork, says Adorno, are real, but are different from what is being seen: ‘In no artwork is the element of spirit something that exists; rather it is something in a process of development and formation’ (p.91).This web of nodal points, positions the viewing subject as a blur, caught between co-​existing registers of experiential life like Neo in The Matrix (Wachowskis 1999). Irrationality is encouraged but does not usurp reason; empirical fact does not find more truth than fantasy; and the thing –​here the artwork –​is neither a mirror nor a thing, but a prismatic catalyst. Adorno has freed the object from its gegenständlichkeit; and like Magritte’s boots, or Jameson’s violet apron, artworks can escape reification, instead becoming ‘sedimentations’ or reproductions of the dialectic without mimicking it: not ‘a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential’ (Adorno 1997, p.33). Furthermore, he adds: Although the nonexisting emerges suddenly in artworks, they do not lay hold of it bodily as with the pass of a magic wand. The nonexisting is mediated to them through fragments of the existing, which they assemble into an apparition. (p.83, original emphasis)

I hold up Adorno’s cipher, his apparition  –​in which a ‘prehistory’ emerges like a ‘spell’  –​in contrast to the notion of a phantasmatic commodity fetishism (Lukács, Jameson et al.). His philosophical consideration of the role of the object in subjective sensory and affective experience fits my theory of cinematic magic

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realism closely. The apparition transfers mystery to the processes, rather than the things involved, requiring the viewer to engage transaesthetically. By The Time in particular demonstrates how this functions by immersing the viewer in a world assembled out of fragments –​‘footage’ of past suffering; swatches of early cinema; close-​up tears and shocked faces; images of nature; jump-​tracking shots; magical encounters and reincarnations. It is Thailand, it might be my Thailand, or it might be Suwichakornpongs’, or Alice’s Thailand, but it is also a kaleidoscopic piece of transaesthetic magic realism.

Notes 1 The Quays asked Bioy directly for the rights to the screenplay, but it had already been bought; nevertheless, they, with co-​writer Alan Passes, kept the novella at the centre of the film (Sélavy 2007). 2 I do not argue as Faris does, that 1001 Nights is a magic(al) realist work of metafiction, where ‘the texts provide commentaries on themselves, often complete with occasional mises-​en-​abyme –​those miniature emblematic textual self-​portraits’ (2004, p.175) because this reading does not account for cultural specificity sufficiently, taking form as style, rather than critique. Singh’s film and its paratexts work with the cathexis of storytelling in relation to trauma and socio-​economic class. 3 Alexandria associates the ‘Indian’ with someone from India who she recalls having met in real life, rather than understanding the word as a description of a Native American Indian. This distinction cleverly signals that perspective is socially determined, and when privy to a child’s imagination, the viewer is more likely to be surprised by associations and remarks that are not yet fixed to a definitive meaning. 4 Cathy Caruth states that ‘to be Traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event’ (capitalisation in original) (1995, p.405). 5 Jean Painlevé, ‘Mystères et Miracles de la Nature’ originally published in VU, 29 March 1931. Archives Jean Painlevé, 2018. 6 Carpentier, ‘Man Ray: Pintor y Cineasta de Vanguardia’ (1976b, p.80).

CODA ‘There are so many different Magics’

This book explores magic-​realist discourse in light of its historical rootedness in the European avant-​gardes; a baroque-​marvellous storytelling combining geopolitics with cultural specificity; an aesthetic and philosophical challenge to the waning of modernist affect. It has been my intention to reclaim the depth and breadth of artistic and critical engagement with this discourse to better grasp the ‘slipperiness’ and ‘seductive’ power of its ‘unresolved antinomy’. What results is a cinema that represents the layered and proliferating metamorphosis of thought. As Carrington concludes, ‘there are so many different magics’ (1998, p.274); gossamer threads form a web of resonances, tendencies, and commonalities, creating an atmosphere or mood that instils a work with magic realism. Magic-​realist films take the perpetual struggles between interior and exterior, surface and depth, mind and body, powerful and powerless, past and future, as their galvanising force to explore beyond the frame from within the frame. Colour in magic-​realist films can be anything from the de-​saturated yellows of Days of Eclipse to the opulent jewel tones of Parajanov’s film-​poems, and the aqua-​luminous moods of Hadžihalilović. I have travelled with magic realism’s major philosophers, who eschew tropes or categorisation in favour of ambiguity and deconcealment of the marvellous. To study magic realism is to accept that in following its development from the 1920s onwards there are no fixed answers; what persists are feelings, moods, indiscernibility, newness, critical and philosophical engagement with ontological reality and its geopolitical veins. Faris posits that ‘The reader may hesitate […] between two contradictory understandings of events –​and hence experience some unsettling doubts’ (1995a, p.175). The reader’s initial disbelief or surprise most usually abates when the allegorical or metaphorical connection to cause and effect is made, or a contradiction is explained as miraculous, and a scientific, metaphysical, logical, or psychological reasoning is put in place. My own definition of cinematic magic realism requires hesitation and surprise as affective responses, which (a) trigger philosophical enquiry, and/​or (b) establish thought as

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poetry that does not need to be ‘explained’ or ‘resolved’ even though it may be explored through the ‘reasonings’ cited by Faris. Perspective is encouraged to be multivalent and non-​fixed, often non-​human, and magic realism does not split into a questioning of ‘real’ and ‘magical’, document, fact, or allegory. The ‘unsettling doubts’ penetrate the very practice of reception, to the point at which uncertainty replaces certainty, and confusion replaces conclusion. While magic realism often indexes a particular historical event, or material object, its magical aspect is a celebration of human, as well as non-​human, creative power and imagination. Jameson is exacting when he writes: ‘Magic […] may be read, not as some facile plot device […] but rather as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualization of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present’ (2005, p.66). Seen from this perspective it is clear that magic and realism are in no way opposed; neither are they equivalent, but, as Aldea suggests, magic ‘rather complements it [realism] by allowing us to think the virtual’ (2010, p.148).

FIGURE 8.1  Response

to Jameson’s combinatoire –​the affective cycle of magic realism within the avant-​garde

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In dialogue with Jameson’s combinatoire, I have designed a dynamic map of cinematic magic realism that focuses on continuous flux and movement (Figure 8.1). The labels Affect and Avant-​Garde signify the key modes of expression that are perennial and touch each nodal point and chromatic in between.The transaesthetic subject, object, poetry, and philosophy are non-​hierarchised and interchangeable –​ they work together, sometimes one is more prominent or critically central than another. An object can be present, or intangible; it can contribute to a philosophical or affective awakening or might simply emerge as poetry through the subjective unconscious. The transaesthetic subject, in its positive dialectics, travels through the art object by way of a sensory-​philosophic magic realism, thereby reinjecting specificity and potential for critique into multiplicity and fragmentation. Le merveilleux, lo real maravilloso americano, Magischer Realismus, photorealism, réalisme magique … these are all historically and ideologically distinct. However, they are interrelated, as I  have argued throughout (the surrealist and magic-​realist marvellous can be interchangeable in Carpentier’s oeuvre, dependent on the time period). Cinematic magic realism is not a style, it is an active discourse –​it encapsulates the essayistic, irrational, mysterious, anti-​colonial, the flows of uneven development and labour, the eruption of new technologies. It is a phenomenological and radical discourse. It does not stay still, but exists to help us articulate shifts, weirdness, newness, and so on. It is a world discourse, relevant and visible across regional borders, races, ethnicities, class, genders, and sexes. Regardless of the impossibility of a magic-​realist ‘style’, this book has sought to chart stylistic influences (de Chirico, Magritte, Murnau, Buñuel, Ernst, Deren, Delvaux, Carpentier, Márquez) on films of the late twentieth, and twenty-​first centuries.The weird juxtapositions, strange moods, and meteorological shifts in Sokurov and Parajanov’s work, for example, combine surrealist investigation into the object, with philosophical enquiry. In the works of Hadžihalilović, Ruiz, or Suwichakornpong, likewise, a collage of magical events elevates themes centred around revolution and protest, interiority, dystopian visions of capitalist excess, exile, and loss. Sometimes Gothic and Romantic inflections, Expressionistic acting, hyperrealistic detail, and fairy-​tale tropes add to these proliferating layers. The viewer, when confronted with this modern equivalent of baroque excess, experiences the disorientating frisson of vertigo or the Freudian uncanny, and must find their own centre of gravity. If magic is indeed air-​born, invisible yet palpitating nearby, these films insist on its significance for unmasking the true complexity of existing in the world. Somewhere between material reality, action, metaphysics, and fantasy, is the realm of magic realism. This circular diagramme is a departure, a new starting point from which to develop a mode of cinematic magic realism, with roots firmly in the past. It is mindful of the baroque eon (Lambert 2004), the eternal return, and the recycling of past artistic movements, but it intends to move forwards, hoping to formulate a new theory of magic realism that intersects current philosophical ideas in affect theory and film studies, adding new stars to Roh’s cosmos. Jameson’s cinematic magic realism philosophises a sense of past and future all at once, where the obsolete and the anachronistic pertain to what Fisher might have termed a ‘lost future’ (also touching on Jameson’s analysis of the nostalgia film):

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What haunts the digital cul-​de-​sacs of the twenty-​first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. […] Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time. (Fisher 2012, pp.16; 19)

Each of the films discussed in this book approaches the idea that a place, a person, or a time, can be ‘stained’ both physically (materially, corporeally) and mentally (virtually) by the past at the moment of the present.This has covered colonial and postcolonial histories, revolution and image making, childhood trauma, the projection of sexual desires and wish-​fulfilments (which includes collective utopian dreaming), and recourse to the divine and supernatural. A stain, as opposed to a phantom, is present, visible, and suggestive of scarring or indelible marking. We might think of the staining of the bricks used to build King Henri Christophe’s citadel, the stains on the apartment wall and on Snegovoy’s face in Days of Eclipse, the lips transferred onto the hand in Blood of a Poet, the scars on the children’s abdomens in Évolution, and the stains and fissures of early photographic experiments. But the apparition is also a part of magic-​realist film –​the recorded voice, the escaping affect, the fogs and mists, the emptied streets, the disrupted psyche. Jameson, in defining magic realism in film, indicates that something (a history, a style) is cancelled, or sublated, while also simultaneously preserved in palimpsestic traces and formal, affective elements (1992, p.90). This is the film image as event: ‘which comes before us with the lively energy of radical difference, rather than with the melancholy of mortality’ (1986, p.265). As Ruiz remarks of Cocteau: I have always found it difficult to accept Cocteau’s famous phrase: ‘Cinema is death at work’.Yet there is some truth to it. In shooting one always transacts with the beyond: an invocation, the convocation of spectres, the manipulation of magical objects, an altar, a sacrifice, the mystery. (2007, p.82)

In 2015, upon the release of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie, having said many contradictory things on the topic of magic realism over the years, reportedly says in 2015: Magic realism isn’t a fad […] it has been around as long as art has been. Kafka, Gogol, Bulgakov, Magritte, Buñuel: all magic realists in their way. The fable, the surreal story, is just another way of getting at the truth, and if it has good, deep roots in the real […] the ‘realism’ part of magic realism –​then it can intensify a reader’s experience of truth, crystallize it in to words and images that stay with one. That’s the appeal. (Fallon 2015, n.p.)

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He intimates that to separate fantasy from reality, or the rational from the irrational, creates the monstrous. His answer to the horrors of twenty-​first century world affairs is to imagine a future, approaching its complexities through allegory and humour, an approach echoed in Jameson’s critical writing of the 1980s and 1990s. Jameson’s extended theorisation of the intangible and complex relationality of counter-​capitalist sentiments finds possibility in the nonsynchronous, weird, affect of Le modèle rouge, as well as the revolutionary philosophy of surrealism. In June 2017, he revisits the topic of magic realism to write an opinion piece for the London Review of Books marking the 50th anniversary of the ‘literary earthquake’ brought by Márquez’s One Hundred Years. Central to his philosophy of radical participation is the idea that magic-​realist novels generate both affect (unnameable sensations and reactions) and non-​reflexive consciousness: ‘which is itself shaped and tensed by a contradictory ontology in which everything has happened already at the same time that it is happening afresh in a present in which death scarcely exists, although time and aging do’ (2017, p.30). This reaches far beyond simply a suspension of disbelief in so-​called ‘magical’ plot devices and events; instead the ‘past and present all at once’ (p.30) of global world cultures is unveiled to be unstable, unfixed, mobile, and syncretic. From within the unequal structures of world power, cinematic magic realism pushes further, its audio-​tactile-​visual mobility better able to express the ineffability and flux of modern life, its violence and marvels. Its aesthetics is based in infinite permutations of neural and sensorial vibrations that precede conscious thought. The knot of data sensations is then worked out through essayistic and philosophical means, dependent on the issue at hand. Jameson furthers magic-​realist discourse in many ways, but not least by encouraging a deeper reflection on how it attributes agency to objective facts within a highly sensory, confessional experience. Magic realism is due a comeback. In troubling times of rising dictatorships, unrest, displacement, and disenfranchisement globally, the magic-​realist film asks for an active viewer, an adventurer, to see anew those weird and marvellous intangibilities that resist assimilation. It asks that we de-​centre our perspective, look for ‘life elsewhere’ beyond Carpentier’s estado límite. If Magritte is Jameson’s patron saint of magic realism, mine is Adorno, whose words close this book: Art is motivated by a conflict: its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world, yet without its ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element. ([1970] 2013, p.79)

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INDEX

Abela, Eduardo 95 Adorno, Theodor ixn1, 126–​7, 191, 197 affect 20–​2, 28n24, 103, 126, 128, 142–​45, 152, 193–​5; protracted affective event 154–​7 Agee, James 130 Aldea, Eva 138, 146n2 Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez 102, 106, 107–​8, 125n69 Aleksandrov, Grigori 77, 81, 89n21 Aléxis, Jacques Stephen 98, 99 anti-​capitalism see capitalism: magic realism’s resistance to anti-​colonialism: of Carpentier 65, 96–​9, 104–​5, 114–​15; Haitian Revolution 9–​10, 28n21, 97–​9; of magic realism 195; of surrealism 66, 69–​70, 73, 88n5, 122n24; see also colonialism Antonioni, Michelangelo 144 Apollinaire, Guillaume 2, 38, 40, 57n6 Aragon, Louis 38, 168n12 Arau, Alfonso 118 Arp, Hans 36, 57n10, 58n18 Artaud, Antonin 2 Atget, Eugène 46–​7, 58nn28&29, 181 avant-​garde 6–​7, 14–​18; ethnography 2, 31, 60, 64; influence on Carpentier 10, 91–​7, 103, 113, 121n19, 159; international 6–​7, 64–​5, 95; Jameson on 11, 126–​7, 135, 194; qualities of magic realism viii, 1, 13, 84, 158, 170, 193–​5; see also Dada; Expressionism; modernism; Nach-​Expressionismus; Neue Sachlichkeit; surrealism

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (Birri) 15, 185 Barbachano Ponce, Manuel 102, 106, 108 baroque 10, 35, 101–​5, 116, 186, 195 Barroco (Leduc) 103–​4 Barthes, Roland 142 Bataille, Georges 88n6, 89n23, 104, 123n40 Baudelaire, Charles 94, 131, 143, 182 Baudrillard, Jean 132 Bauhaus 45, 46 Bennett, Jane 23–​5 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 35, 101–​2 Bioy Casares, Adolfo 170–​2, 192n1 Birri, Fernando 15, 17, 29n31, 185 Blood of a Poet (Cocteau) 139, 180, 196 Blue Lobster, The (Samudio and Márquez) 15–​16 boom novel vi, 10, 63, 114, 117–​18, 168n8; see also magic(al) realism (literary) Borges, Jorge Luis 27n15, 65, 116, 161, 163, 170, 172 Bowers, Maggie Ann xn4, 2 Braidotti, Rosi 186–​7 Breton, André: Carpentier and 92, 96, 104, 121n20, 123n42; cinema-​going as magical 2; eidetic image 81; on Ernst 42, 43, 45; in Haiti 72–​3, 89n15; magic art 29n34; on le merveilleux 20, 27nn13&15, 92; on Mexico 58n29, 80; Valori Plastici 38; writings on surrealism xn3, 8, 27n13, 32, 131 Brinkema, Eugenie 22, 152, 168n5 Buñuel, Luis: adaptation of The Lost Steps 108, 114; Un chien andalou 54;

Index  225

ethnographic documentary 82–​5; The Exterminating Angel 82, 136; on film-​ making 162; Las Hurdes 61–​2, 66, 67–​8, 82–​4, 153; Los olvidados 82–​4, 141, 156 By The Time it Gets Dark (Suwichakornpong) 187–​92 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Wiene) 54, 55 Camayd-​Freixas, Erik 15, 63, 84 capitalism: and cultural production 110, 119; Jameson on 11, 28n26, 88n8, 97, 118–​19, 127–​8, 148n14, 166, 197; magic realism’s resistance to viii, 11, 63, 97, 113, 141, 189–​90; surrealist response to 73, 88n5, 131, 147n7; time 69, 87, 113 Cardinal, Roger 37 Carpentier, Alejo: anti-​colonialism 65, 96–​9, 104–​5, 114–​15; association with Eisenstein 80, 90n25; avant-​garde and surrealist influences on 8, 10, 89nn12&14, 91–​7, 103–​4, 107–​8, 113, 121n19, 159; becoming in the world 166, 170, 189; ‘El cine, décima musa’ 93; The Chase 97, 100; Concierto barroco 103–​4, 123n39; cultural syncretism 10, 61, 65, 91, 102–​4, 110, 114; estado límite 104, 111, 173, 197; ethnography 94–​7, 123n40; Explosion in a Cathedral 35, 97, 114–​17, 186; film adaptations 14, 103–​4, 107–​10, 114–​18, 159; Haiti 9–​10, 28n21, 72, 97–​9, 153; influence on Márquez 15; interest in film 10–​11, 60–​1, 64, 91–​2, 179, 185; The Kingdom of This World 97, 98–​9, 108, 114, 122n30, 123n44; The Lost Steps 97, 104–​14, 123nn42&47, 124n54; El Milagro de Anaquillé 94–​5; Music in Cuba 61, 100; politics 14, 23, 63, 65, 91, 93, 114–​18, 175; prologue to The Kingdom of This World vi, 9, 28n20, 72, 91, 138; Reasons of State 159; see also lo real maravilloso americano Carrington, Leonora 83, 185, 193 Carter, Angela 2, 106, 131, 137, 138, 147n8 Casa de Agua, La (Penzo) 134, 140, 142–​3 Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Rivette) 2, 180 Cell, The (Singh) 172–​3 Certeau, Michel de 106, 180 Césaire, Aimé 68, 87, 88n5, 89n12, 97–​8 Cézanne, Paul 72, 144 Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice 5, 15, 91 Chirico, Giorgio de: affinities with magic realism 8–​9, 26n5, 44, 49, 132, 177; Carpentier on 102, 105, 115; influence on Roh 35, 37, 53; influence on Rouch 66, 68; metaphysical art 38–​40 cinesthetic subject 170–​2

City of Pirates (Ruiz) 159, 161, 163, 164 Clifford, James 60, 65, 66–​7, 85–​7 Cocteau, Jean: Blood of a Poet 139, 180, 196; Les Enfants Terribles 55–​6, 139; influence on Carpentier 92–​3, 96, 121n19; magic-​ realist film 55–​6, 168n7, 196; tableaux vivants 167; in Valori Plastici 38 collage: cinematic 17, 76, 94, 158, 187, 195; Dadaist 41, 59n31; literary 16, 106–​7; surrealist 40–​5, 58n19, 59n31, 146n1, 165–​7; see also montage; photography: photomontage colonialism: Africa 62, 68–​70; ethnography 64, 84, 95–​6; Latin America 5, 6, 10, 61–​3, 79, 85, 114; legacy of 10, 61, 75–​6, 85; see also anti-​colonialism colour, use in film 12, 134, 142–​5, 164–​5, 167, 182, 193 Colour of Pomegranates, The (Parajanov) 165–​6, 167 Colville, Georgiana M. 179–​80 Comolli, Jean-​Louis 67, 138, 178 Concierto barroco (Carpentier) 103–​4, 123n39 Condores no entierran todos los días (Norden) 134, 140, 142–​3 Cooper, Sarah 69, 70 Corrigan, Timothy 160, 168n7 Cortázar, Julio 82, 87, 88n4 Cortés, Hernán 3, 78 Dada 36, 38, 46, 50, 57nn9&10, 58n18; see also avant-​garde; surrealism Daisne, Johan vi, 177–​81 Dalí, Salvador 28n17, 34, 45, 54, 66, 68, 108 Days of Eclipse (Sokurov) 12, 149–​58, 185, 193, 196 Deleuze, Gilles: affect 21, 101, 139, 142, 143–​4, 148n16; Anti-​Oedipus 126, 151–​2; Cinema 2 143–​4, 175; and magic realism 6, 138 Delvaux, André vi, 14, 22–​3, 133, 143, 176–​82 Depestre, René 73, 87 Deren, Maya 61–​2, 65, 66, 70–​4, 84, 89nn11&17, 95 Derrida, Jacques 88n2, 129, 130 Desnos, Robert 48, 80, 89n23, 93, 121n10, 185 Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (Deren) 61, 66, 71–​4, 89n11 Dix, Otto 40, 56n2, 136 documentary film 54, 67, 117, 124n61, 183, 187, 191; see also ethnography: ethnographic film; ethnography: ethno-​ magic-​realist documentary D’Ors, Eugenio 101, 105

226 Index

Ducasse, Isidore-​Lucien see Lautréamont, Comte de Duchamp, Marcel 80, 108, 146, 165 Dulac, Germaine 54, 92 Einstein, Carl 73 Eisenstein, Sergei: association with Carpentier 80, 90n25; Haiti 84, 97–​8, 122n28; ¡Que viva México! 61–​2, 66, 67, 76–​82, 89nn21&23, 122n33; Strike 168n3; synaesthesia 150 Ellison, Ralph 109 Éluard, Paul 41, 121n20 Embrace of the Serpent (Guerra) 60, 85–​7 enchantment 23–​5, 49, 60, 175, 197 Eréndira (Guerra) 15, 17 Erice,Victor 17–​18, 141 Ernst, Max: Dada 58n18, 59n31; influence on Carpentier 113; influence on Roh 31, 35, 40–​5, 50–​1, 53, 58nn19&23; influence on Rouch 66 Espinosa, Julio García 10, 114, 120 Esquivel, Laura 6, 118 essayistic discourse 22–​3, 66, 126, 160–​1, 195, 197 ethnography: avant-​garde 2, 31, 60, 64, 66–​7, 68, 86, 88n2; Carpentier 94–​7, 123n40; Clifford 60, 65, 66, 85–​7; colonialism 63–​6; ethnographic film 60, 63–​5, 84, 100, 150; ethno-​magic-​realist documentary 60–​90, 101, 150; Parajanov 163–​6; synergies with magic realism 2, 13, 60–​1, 67, 71, 86 Evans, Walker  130 Évolution (Hadžihalilović) 182–​6, 191, 196 Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier) 35, 97, 114–​17, 186 Explosion in a Cathedral (Solás) 114–​17 Expressionism: film 52, 54–​5, 57n12, 181; relationship to Magischer Realismus 8, 31, 33, 36–​7; representation of emotion 36–​7, 142 Fall, The (Singh) 172–​6 Fanon, Frantz 119, 124n67 fantastic, the 20, 31–​6, 57n9, 170–​2, 174, 177–​8 Farewell to the Ark (Terayama) 15, 16–​17 Faris, Wendy 26n1, 127, 138, 193–​4 Fever (Holland) 134–​8, 141–​4, 148n13 film adaptations 14–​16, 65, 103–​4, 106–​10, 114–​18, 159, 176 Film und Foto exhibition 31, 45, 56n1, 60

Fisher, Mark 88n2, 131–​2, 195–​6 Flaherty, Robert 64, 67, 74–​5, 79, 89n18, 168n3 folklore 6, 13, 17, 164–​7, 173, 189–​90; see also myth Foto-​Auge 31, 40, 44–​7, 49, 51, 52 Freud, Sigmund: libido 143; magic 107; separation 180; Totem and Taboo 2; the uncanny 21, 37, 131–​2, 195 Fuentes, Carlos 79, 82, 103, 108 Getino, Octavio 119–​20, 124nn66&67, 141 Glissant, Édouard 65, 85 Goddard, Michael 159–​60 Griaule, Marcel 66, 68, 88n6 Grosz, George: influence on Koch 176; photomontage 50, 58n26, 59n31; as political artist 36, 40, 56n2 Guattari, Félix 21, 139, 151–​2 Guenther, Irene 18, 32, 37–​8 Guerra, Ciro 60, 85–​7 Guerra, Ruy 15, 17 Guevara, Alfredo 99, 108, 114, 117, 123n49, 124n55 Hadžihalilović, Lucile 44, 181–​6, 191, 193, 195, 196 Hansen, Miriam ixn2, 58n25 Hart, Stephen M. 4, 5, 6 Hartlaub, Gustav 32, 56n2, 135, 136 Hauka 61, 69–​71, 73, 87 Hausmann, Raoul 38, 50, 58n26, 59n31 Heartfield, John 36, 50, 58n26 Heidegger, Martin 129, 132, 146n3 Herzfelde, Wieland  50 Herzog, Werner  67, 73 Höch, Hannah 36, 58n26 Holland, Agnieszka 134–​8, 141–​4, 148nn12&13 Huelsenbeck, Richard 36 Hurdes, Las (Buñuel) 61–​2, 66, 67–​8, 82–​4, 153 hybrid culture see syncretism hyperreality 132, 145, 172, 175, 182, 195 Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, The (Ruiz) 159, 160–​1 Imbert, Enrique Anderson 55–​6 Innocence (Hadžihalilović) 181–​2 Instituto Cuban del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) 10, 28n22, 99, 100, 117, 124n61 Invention of Morel, The (Bioy Casares) 170–​2

Index  227

Jameson, Fredric: affect 21–​2, 28n24, 103, 126, 128, 142–​46, 152, 158, 194, 195; capitalism 11, 28n26, 88n8, 97, 118–​19, 127–​8, 148n14, 166, 197; combined unevenness xn6, 28n26, 29n28, 67, 88n8, 128 148n14; criticism of 6, 124n65, 146n2; event 138–​42, 148n15, 152–​8; magic realism as multi-​generic 1; magic realism as resistance 130; magic-​realist film 8, 10–​13, 21–​2, 49, 67, 120, 126–​8, 133–​42, 150–​9, 163–​6, 175–​6, 189, 194–​7; modernism 11–​12, 22, 103, 126–​33, 146n5, 166; perpetual present 49, 134, 138, 148n14, 175; postmodernism 11, 110, 126–​33; ‘Third World’ film and literature 6, 11, 118–​19, 164 Jolas, Eugene 16 Kafka, Franz 67, 146n5, 177, 196 Kahlo, Frida 79 Kandinsky, Wassily 37, 57n14, 143, 144 Kingdom of This World, The (Carpentier) 97, 98–​9, 108, 114, 122n30, 123n44; prologue to vi, 9, 28n20, 72, 91, 138 Koch, Pyke 176–​7 Kyrou, Ado 2 Lam, Wifredo 72, 89n12, 95, 105 Laraque, Paul 73, 89n15 Larsen, Neil 114–​15, 128 Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais) 161, 170, 172, 179, 180 Lautréamont, Comte de 38, 101, 121n20 Leduc, Paul 103–​4, 105 Lee, Ang 14–​15 Leiris, Michel 64, 68, 88n6 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 64, 110 Life of Pi (Lee) 14–​15 Like Water for Chocolate (Arau) 118 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel) 6, 118 Lissitzky, El 45–​6 litote see understatement Littín, Miguel 14, 102–​3, 106, 117, 159 lo real maravilloso americano: baroque 101–​5; Carpentier’s definition vi, 9, 28nn19&20, 72, 91, 138; critical regionalism 97–​9; ethnography 61, 65, 88n6, 94–​7; film 93, 94, 96, 100–​20, 171; Haitian politics 97–​9; literary tradition 63; modernity 10, 97; relationship with Magischer Realismus 34; relationship with surrealism 8, 65, 88n6, 94–​7; Ruiz 159–​60; suffering 141, 159, 172–​3

Lost Steps, The (Carpentier) 97, 104–​14, 123nn42&47, 124n54 Lukács, Georg 136–​7, 191 Lyotard, Jean-​François 127, 133 Mabille, Pierre 20, 27n15, 72–​3, 84, 89n14 magic realism, definition of vi, viii–​x; see also magic(al) realism (literary); Magischer Realismus; merveilleux; lo real maravilloso americano; réalisme magique magic(al) realism (literary) vi, 3–​6, 50, 63, 137, 144–​6, 196–​7; see also boom novel magischer Idealismus 16, 18–​20, 33 Magischer Realismus: de Chirico’s influence 37–​40; definition vi, 7–​9, 32–​3; Ernst 40–​5; film 55–​6, 82, 134, 172–​6, 182; Magritte 43, 131, 133, 147n8; Novalis’s influence 18–​20; photography 45–​54; relationship to Expressionism 8, 31, 33, 36–​8; relationship to Neue Sachlichkeit and surrealism 32, 35–​6, 46–​7; relationship to lo real maravilloso americano 34; Rousseau 34–​5; use of colour and light 145, 154 Magritte, René: film scenarios 108; influence on filmmakers 68, 76, 154, 167, 173, 177, 183; Magischer Realismus 43, 131, 133, 147n8; Le modèle rouge 129–​32, 147n7, 197; Shéhérazade 173 maîtres fous, Les (Rouch) 61–​2, 66, 69–​70, 87 Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, The (Delvaux) 177–​81 Mandel, Ernest 28n26 Márquez, Gabriel Garcia: film adaptations 14, 15–​16, 106; influence 12, 15, 175, 197; Latin American identity 87, 101; magic realism 4–​5, 15, 29n27, 147n8; myth 5, 65; One Hundred Years of Solitude 4–​5, 12, 15, 16, 106, 147n9, 172, 175, 197 Masson, André 72, 73 Massumi, Brian 22, 142, 152 Mauss, Marcel 2, 64 Meidner, Ludwig 36, 37 Méliès, Georges 187, 190 Ménil, René 7, 88n5 merveilleux vi, 8, 27nn13&15, 50, 95–​7, 195; see also surrealism metamorphosis 2, 20–​1, 41–​3, 50–​1, 105, 134, 180, 181–​7 metaphysical art see pittura metafisica Mirror (Tarkovsky) 166 modèle rouge, Le (Magritte) 129–​32, 147n7, 197

228 Index

modernism: film 160, 163, 170; Jameson on 11–​12, 22, 103, 126–​33, 146n5, 166; magic realism and 30n36, 32, 84, 157; non-​Western cultural forms 7, 72, 88n2; shift to postmodernism viii, 8, 28n26, 126 modernity 7, 13, 24, 88nn5&8, 97, 128, 166 Modotti, Tina  79 Moholy-​Nagy, László 45, 47, 49, 50, 57n14; influence on Roh 31, 46, 51, 58n27, 59n32 montage: in film 15, 67, 73, 76–​82, 100, 103, 137, 141, 150, 165, 185, 191; in literature 115, 117; see also collage; photography: photomontage Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu 55, 75, 84; Sunrise 152; Tabu 61–​2, 66, 74–​6, 77 Music in Cuba (Carpentier) 61, 100 myth 24–​5, 65–​6, 164, 173; see also folklore Nach-​Expressionismus (Roh) 8–​9, 28n17, 32–​7, 40–​1, 54 Nanook of the North (Flaherty) 64, 68, 168n3 neo-​realism (Italian) 100, 117 Neue Sachlichkeit 31–​2, 38, 54, 132, 135, 136; exhibition 32, 56n2, 176; relationship to Magischer Realismus 32, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich 38, 39, 68 Nolde, Emil 36–​7 Norden, Francisco 134, 140, 142–​4 Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (Murnau) 55, 75, 84 Nostalgia (Tarkovsky) 166 Novalis: influence on magic realism 38, 80, 87, 94, 101; influence on surrealism 29n34, 68; magischer Idealismus 16, 18–​20, 33 olvidados, Los (Buñuel) 82–​4, 141, 156 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) 4–​5, 12, 106, 147n9, 197; influence on film 15, 16, 172, 175 One Thousand and One Nights, The 173, 174, 175, 192n2 Orlan, Pierre Mac 31 Orozco, José Clemente 79, 100 Ortiz, Fernando 26n6, 120n5 Ouyang, Wen-​chin  5, 6 Painlevé, Jean 89n23, 183, 184–​5 Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro)  17–​18 Parajanov, Sergei 14, 163–​7, 168n12, 193, 195 Paz, Octavio 82, 83 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo) 82, 106, 144–​5, 172

Penzo, Jacobo 134, 140–​4 phenomenology 20–​2, 36, 37, 39–​40, 170, 195 photography: Atget 46–​7, 58nn28&29, 181; Carpentier 111–​12; objectivity 130; photogram 20, 46–​50; photomontage 20, 40–​1, 44, 45–​7, 50–​4, 58n26, 181; Roh 31, 44–​53; technological magic 20, 39 photorealism 15, 20, 179, 181–​2, 195 Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, The (Quay Brothers) 171, 172 pittura metafisica 8, 26n5, 34, 38–​40 Plato 3 postcolonial criticism 6, 28n26, 62, 119 postmodernism 8, 11, 110, 126–​32, 135, 146n4 Power, Tyrone 106, 109, 110, 112 Quay Brothers 171, 172, 192n1 ¡Que viva México! (Eisenstein) 61–​2, 66, 67, 76–​82, 89nn21&23, 122n33 Radziwill, Franz 35, 168n9 Ray, Man: explosante-​fixe 27n9; films 54, 93, 94, 96, 179, 185; indigenous objects 2; influence on Carpentier 94, 96; influence on Parajanov 167; influence on Roh 51; photograms 48, 49 realism 18, 27n15, 37–​8, 85–​6, 130, 194; see also hyperreality; neo-​realism (Italian); surrealism;Verism réalisme magique vi, 176–​8, 182, 195 Reasons of State (Littín) 103, 117, 159 Redes (Zinnemann and Gómez Muriel) 100–​1, 122n35 Resnais, Alain 161, 170, 172, 179, 180 Richardson, Michael 65, 133, 160 Richter, Hans 36, 45, 51, 56n1, 57n10 Rivera, Diego 77, 79, 80, 100, 122n33 Rivette, Jacques 2, 180 Robbe-​Grillet, Alain 156–​7, 161, 170, 172, 179 Rocha, Glauber 114, 125n69 Roh, Franz: definition of Magischer Realismus vi, 7–​8, 32–​3; Foto-​Auge 31, 40, 44–​7, 49, 51, 52; influences on 31, 35, 40–​5, 50–​1, 53, 58nn19&23; Nach-​ Expressionismus 8–​9, 28n17, 32–​7, 40–​1, 54; photography 31, 45–​54, 174, 185; the strange 55–​6, 86, 131–​2; see also Magischer Realismus Romanticism 18–​20, 68, 101, 131, 195 Rouch, Jean 60–​2, 66–​70, 81, 87, 88nn9&10, 142

Index  229

Rousseau, Henri 34–​5, 57n6, 79, 167, 168n9, 176 Ruiz, Raúl 14, 82, 159–​63, 164, 168nn7&8, 195 Rulfo, Juan 82, 106, 144–​5, 172 Rushdie, Salman 29n27, 88n4, 196 Schad, Christian 48, 176 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov) 163–​7 Sinclair, Upton 77 Singh, Tarsem 44, 172–​6, 192n2 Skrodzka, Aga ixn2, 12–​13, 17 Sobchack,Vivian 138, 171 Sokurov, Alexander: Days of Eclipse 12, 149–​58, 185, 193, 196; influences 195; Jameson on 12, 145–​6, 150, 160, 166 Solanas, Fernando 119–​20, 124nn66&67, 141 Solás, Humberto 102–​3, 114–​17 Spinoza, Baruch 21, 37 Spirit of the Beehive, The (Erice) 17–​18, 141 Stalker (Tarkovsky) 166, 169n13, 189 stimmung 41, 55, 66–​7, 142, 172 Strindberg, August 47–​8 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris 149–​50, 169n13 surrealism: anti-​colonialism 66, 69–​70, 73, 88n5, 122n24; Breton’s writings on xn3, 8, 27n13, 32, 131; Carpentier and 8, 89n12, 92–​6, 107–​8; collage 40–​5, 58n19, 59n31, 146n1, 165–​7; ethnography 60, 65, 66–​7, 86; film 54, 82–​3, 86, 153, 160, 165–​7; influence on Rouch 66, 68; relationship to magic realism 32, 35–​6, 46–​7, 127, 129–​33, 176–81, 195; see also avant-​garde; Dada; merveilleux Suwichakornpong, Anocha 187–​92, 195 synaesthetic experience 77–​8, 111, 139, 145, 150–​2, 170–​2 syncretism 6–​7, 10, 26n6, 61, 65, 72, 87, 91, 110, 114, 197

tableaux vivants 160, 167 Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau) 61–​2, 66, 74–​6, 77 Tarkovsky, Andrei 148n12, 155, 164, 166, 169n13, 189 Taussig, Michael 65 Terayama, Shūji 15, 16–​17, 163 Third Cinema 10, 65, 82, 114, 118–​20, 125n69 Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz) 159, 161–​3, 164 Todorov, Tzvetan  20 Toro, Guillermo del 17 transaesthetic subject 191–​2, 195 Tschichold, Jan 31, 45, 49, 52; see also Foto-​Auge uncanny ix, 21, 37, 46–​7, 131, 142, 195 understatement 38, 133, 176–​81, 190 Valori Plastici 8, 34, 38, 40, 57n13 van Gogh,Vincent 128–​9, 132, 146n3 Varo, Remedios 112–​13 Verism 54, 56n2 vernacular: definition vi, ixn2; magic-​realist film ixn2, 3, 14–​18, 63, 133, 144, 170, 172–​6, 177; resistance to viii, 7, 14, 16, 105, 118 Vertov, Dziga 52, 67, 76, 89n20 Voudou 25, 61, 71, 73–​4, 89n17, 98 Warhol, Andy 128–​9 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) xn6, 29n28, 67, 88n8 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 190 Weimar period 8, 52, 54, 59n35 Weisgerber, Jean 22–​3 Wenders, Wim 2, 24, 29n31, 30n38, 141, 185 Wiene, Robert 54, 55, 64 Willemen, Paul 118, 119 Wings of Desire (Wenders) 2, 24, 29n31, 30n38, 141, 185 Wölfflin, Heinrich 8, 31, 33 wonder 3–​4, 21, 62–​4, 80, 86