According
to many ethnologists, traditional myths are effective because
they imply absent and unspoken, if not unspeakable, realities.
Always there are references to distant moments of origin and
absent processes of cosmogony. In the Tshimshin myth of Asdiwal,
analyzed by Claude Levi-Straus, the social tension experienced
by the practice of patrilocal residence with matrilineal kinship
remains the primary source of social tension, but in Asdiwal,
that tension is always is implied, never stated. It is alluded
to, but never explicated. Such allusion in myths serve to enhance
the impact of their performance. The psychological and social
punch of a myth is sharpened when the crucial elements are occluded
or when critical issues are left unspoken. In short, myths work
best when their point of focus is hidden.
Absences
are significant beyond the realm of the myth described by ethnologists.
Here we will consider two examples of significant absences
in modern life. The first example, a monetary one, will
show that modernity renders absences natural so much so that
we moderns learn to handle them unreflectively. The second
example has to do with artistic perspective and is meant
to highlight an important feature of absences in modern life,
namely, that they often provide an opportunity for inserting
the self into the socially constructed system of signs.
Money
Prior to the 17th century, the gold or silver coin operated
both as a metonym for wealth, that is as itself an instance
of wealth, and as a medium of exchange. As metonyms of wealth,
coins could be expected to lose value through time. This happens
when they are worn away or are pared away intentionally - which,
by the way, is the reason why so many modern coins have edges
that are embossed in one manner or another. Paper money or the
promissory note, introduced in England at the end of the 17th
century, was advantageous because it was dislocated from the
valued goods it mediated. Unlike a coin, a bill is, after all,
not a metonym. It is not an instance of wealth, but only the
representation of such an instance. Being held by an unnamed
bearer, it is detached as well from all specific social relations
of exchange. Thus, the invention of paper money marked the beginning
of a new order of economic signs, one cut free of labor, product,
and social circumstance. Being promissory, the value of paper
money - popularized in the U.S. in the 19th century - was, and
is, only potential. Accordingly, many doubters and skeptics
criticized this new form, claiming it introduced unreal shadow
values into the economy. Such criticism was fulfilled, one might
say, when, in 1973, the U.S. government cancelled its self-imposed
obligation to deliver on the promise of its paper notes, with
the result that the value of a dollar is now what the dollar
is worth on a day-to-day basis to those who hold it.
I
offer this brief account of monetary history, only to illustrate
the notion of absent value in a no-nonsense arena of human activity.
My hope is that it will prepare you to take seriously the notion
of absences that we will now talk about in the arenas of art,
photography, and finally film.
Perspective
In 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti, introduced and explained the
new artistic technique that we now call perspective. A central
feature of this technique was vanishing point, the point of
convergence of visual rays, which creates a sense of depth in
a work of art. Curiously, the cone or pyramid formed by those
converging rays, can be paired with a congruent pyramid extending
from the eye of the painter to the ends of the transverse at
the very base of the work. Given this congruence, the vanishing
point stands in for the eye of the painter, and the viewer of
the work, with eyes drawn to that vanishing point, effectively
stands in the shoes of the painter, and thus identifying with
the painter. In this way, any work wrought in perspective includes
the viewer as a significant absence. Like the mythological and
monetary absences discussed above, the absent presence of the
viewer in the work of art is significant insofar as it transforms
every work of perspectival art into a work about the viewer.
De Vries's
drawing may seem to depict a man with a child looking down
a street, but it is really about you as you consider that man.
Camera
Let us now consider a second major optical development in Western
history that involves a significant absence. The camera obscura
(the darkened room) became a source of popular delight in the
18th century. It was a small chamber fitted out with a seat on
one side and a pinhole to a natural light source on the other.
Once having entered this box, the subject closed the door and
sealed the chamber into complete darkness, save for the light
cast through the pinhole onto a screen. There, from inside this
darkened chamber, well isolated from the bright bustling world,
the subject introspected by viewing images of the world from the
inside. The delight of the experience was that seeing the world
from inside this dark box reminded people of the inaccessible
(absent) experience of their mind's eye viewing the world from
within the dark box of one's skull. In the camera, one operated
like a homunculus of the self, gifted with privileged access to
the world from inside out.
The
popularity of this camera obscura increased with the passing
years of the 18th century. Its attraction was all tied up with
the paradoxical experiences of isolation and privileged observation.
On the one hand, the camera obscura provided an occasion to
flee the world, to separate oneself from others, and to restrict
interaction. On the other hand, the camera obscura provided
the circumstance for observation of unparalleled focus and concentration.
We know that similarly paradoxical attractions lured the masses
in other domains of social life. Among these experiences, one
must count the coffee house, an
institution that, beginning in 1700, gained great popularity
as both an opportunity to escape the riff-raff who met in bars
and taverns, and to launch deep explorations into, deeply into,
serious topics such as literature and science. Social isolation
and penetrating inquiry were happily coupled in the coffee house.
Somewhat later, in the mid 19th-century, the design of living
spaces (withdrawing rooms) and traveling spaces (railway compartments)
facilitated similar movements of isolation and penetrating introspection.
At
all events, the coupling of the popular camera obscura with
developments in optics and chemistry in the 19th century led
first to photography and then to cinematography. From the very
beginning, in both media, the attractions were bifurcated. Along
one line of development, photography and cinematography were
attractive as media of realistic representation of experience.
That attraction was certainly uppermost in the minds of a number
of early 20th century cinematographers, such as John Grierson,
Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov who were intent on using film
to capture and document experience on film. The camera in their
hands was a device for producing realistic representations in
contemporary life, even as the telescope was the instrument
of choice in 1600. Both devices enabled the representer to operate
from a distance, detached and isolated. Isolated in this way,
the representer reads and records, not the distant experience
itself, but the image provided by the mediating instrument,
that is by the telescope and by the camera. The filmic image
actually stands in for absent experience, even as the telescopic
image becomes the raw material that supplants the reality of
distant and otherwise inaccesibe stars in astronomical science.
The challenge and the frustration faced by documentarians working
within this tradition is to overcome the medium by somehow suturing
viewer directly to the experience, there recovering the real.
This challenge has come to be referred to as the problematic
of representation.
A second branch of the cinematographic tradition is one that worries
less about the challenges of reclaiming the real, and faced instead
the culturally significant implications of the cinematographic technique.
This tradition approached film as an opportunity for introspection
instead of "extra-spection." It asked, what does it mean that film
is popular in modern life? And how does one construct a film that
will serve the commonweal? This second tradition of filmmaking and
film analysis persistently raised question about films as cultural
realities and about how one should use them to enhance cultural
life.
Clues
about the cultural impact of film must start with the realization
that film is not a thing but an experience, as suggested by
the problematic of representation. One views a film from within
a camera obscura, a darkened room where the sounds of everyday
life are muffled, where viewers become homunculi
with privileged, albeit dreamy, access to their own bodily experiences.
This privileged position of viewers, however, is always compromised
by the recognition that every moment on the screen attests to
absent realities that viewers long to see, but cannot. Thus
tantalized by experience that promised but then withdraw, viewers
embrace the image on the screen as fetishes.
Popular
Culture, Ideology and Movies The preceding discussions
have prepared us to understand modern movies in terms of absences.
Now we will turn to the task of fingering the particular kinds
of absences that are implicated in our movie experiences. We
will examine, in broad strokes, the method associated with structuralism
which suggests that the significant absence behind movies, or
any other well organized and socially shared expressive system,
is our computational nature itself, the human rational faculty.
Then we will consider some poststructuralist approaches that
open up a wider field for understanding the implications of
modern movies.
Structuralism
is the conceptual method for analyzing social systems of signs
that dominated 20th-century thought. According to structuralists,
all signs are reciprocally defined within a well-bounded synchronic
space. Such an approach when applied to Hollywood Westerns suggests
that a theme such as "the good" is defined as the negation of
"the bad," though, reciprocally, "the bad" is defined in opposition
to "the good." Similarly, "the strong" and "the weak," "the wild"
and "the civilized," "inside society" and "outside society" are
all reciprocally defined. Taken together, such reciprocally defined
themes form an ensemble, an elegant one in well-crafted movies
like Star Wars and ET, comparable to the myths analyzed
by Claude Levi-Strauss. What is implied by such an elegant ensemble
is always, in the structuralist's view, the absent reality of
"mind", the opposition-creating, distinction-making, boundary-maintaining
human rational faculty. In the structuralist view, primitive myths
and modern films both celebrate that all-powerful but wholly hidden
force - not now God - but "mind".
Poststructuralists
agree with structuralists regarding the power of signs to constitute
our thoughts and our very selves, only they contend that signs
are rarely simple and neat in their oppositions. They aren't
neat because they are rarely if ever well-defined, and they
are not well-defined because they rarely exist in a purely synchronic
system of signs. Always signs involve more than just their
opposition to other signs. Always signification drags in
something from outside the system - Bakhtin argued that
every one of our words is half someone else's - something from
the past.
Let
me suggest a film whose content focuses on just this issue of
the porosity and ill-definedness of semiotic systems, Rosencrantz
and Guldenstern are Dead (The screen play for this film
comes from Tom Stoppard who also wrote Shakespeare in Love.).
From the very beginning coin-toss scene, we discover that we
are in a world that has somehow taken leave of the mathematical
rules of probability, and then throughout the film we witness
scientific experiments that fail, not because of bad science,
but because the pristine and well-defined conditions of scientific
experimentation are muddled by human action.These scenes raise
questions about the boundaries of knowledge systems and of human
symbolic systems in general. The answers that are then provided
suggest that such systems may have no boundaries at all.
This
same conclusion can be drawn from almost any scene in Topsy
Turvy, which, while celebrating the geniuses behind the
tightly woven, neatly integrated, flawlessly presented Mikado,
demonstrates with poignant detail, that the flawlessness is
a phantasm. Scratch the surface and you find a toothache, food-poisoning,
and drug-heads. Human circumstances always well up and swamp
out the neat and rigid categories propounded by structuralists.
Again,
along these same lines, at the end of volume xi in his celebrated
--even if unreadable -- Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1959-67), Laurence Sterne wanders his characters into circles.
They succeed in meandering through one incident after another,
at which point Sterne the author intervenes, scolds himself,
and promises henceforth to continue his account in a more straightforward
way. He shows us what he will do by presenting a straight line
drawn across the page, as if a life could be so represented:
Perhaps
Sterne --insincere though he is in his vow-- has formulated
the ideal toward which we all strive in both our lives and in
our effort to represent human lives. But --and this is the genius
of his work-- as quickly as he formulates this ideal, he lapses
back into his rhetorical meander. So, it seems, his work is
actually suggesting that the ideal of the straight line, while
heartily embraced, can never be sustained in human experience.
Instead, we all constitute ourselves--and others--somewhat haphazardly
out of the welter of our experiences, out of the gallimaufry
of daily living. And, if any of one's deepest self-reflections
pauses even for a moment over the method of reflection, then
it cannot help but raise the question of whether the neat conclusions
one draws--about an inner essence of an atomistic self encapsulating
a life as if on a single thread running through time-- is a
bit unrealistic.
Consider
again the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It
aims to supplement Shakespeare's story of Hamlet, filling in the
details that the bard just happened to leave out, as he goes about
structuring his drama like a symphony of human interaction, tightly
woven, with tensions mounting and finally culminating in a final
furry of resolution. The movie-as-supplement focuses attention
on two colorless walk-ons, little more than grace notes in the
original dramatic text, who suddenly appear and then just as suddenly
leave on a perilous mission whose end can only be imagined. These
are Messers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The presentation of
their misadventures is meant to do more than just fill in the
gaps left by Shakespeare. It is meant to encourage some critical
reflection on the virtually unlimited circles of tensions that
are set into motion by human actors, and on the manifold ways
in which these circles can intersect. What gradually emerges is
a sense that the tight dramatic circle developed in Hamlet is
a fiction when viewed from its underside. All human efforts, whether
moralistic or scientific, to find or create a stable order of
signs that might serve as the foundation for human life are futile.
The human sphere is a chaos of manifold forces operating in unpredictable
ways. In the end, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead testifies
to the porosity of human systems and human symbols in two ways.
First, it dwells on ill-defined signs, showing that characters
and actions mean much more than any static system of oppositions
can admit. Second, it demonstrates that manifold meanings arise
from the clash of forces unleashed from outside the semiotic frame
itself.
The
film Carmen by Carlos Saura accomplishes a similar objective.
Using the very device favored in Hamlet of a play-within-a-play,
Saura places the action of the opera Carmen within a rehearsal
of a choreographed adaptation of that opera. It quickly becomes
apparent that this film plays on multiple absences of experiences
alluded to but unseen. First, viewers witness a non-performance,
something that is, a best, only a rehearsal for a performance.
But it is always couched in a muddling chatter that suggests
the unstructuredness of this rehearsal event. Second, viewers
confront a non-opera. The opera Carmen gets barely more than
a mention and a few seconds of audio replay. Third and by implication,
the audience significantly does not see the society in which
this non-performance and this non-opera take place. How doe
these absences bear on the murder of Carmen? The film operates,
I think, with great stealth to lure the viewer into implicating
the long chain of absent realities in this crime. The tragedy
on the screen is due as much to the absent society, as to the
absent performance, and the absent opera. With everything soured
by absent realities, why should the society be spared blame?
Carmen
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are unusual
postmodern films because they operate with and simultaneously
focus on the problem of semiotic openness, the ill-definedness
of semiotic systems. A host of other recent films push viewers
in a similar fashion to "open" up signifiers, notably The
Unforgiven, Lone Star, Orlando, The Road
to Perdition, and a number of Woody Allen's films (see
the movie reviews posted here), but few have taken on the
conjoined task of focusing attention on the problem of openness
at the very same time that they exploit it.
Interestingly,
both films are also filled with traces - let us now use this
word "trace" to refer to significant absence - of the struggle
between highbrow culture and lowbrow culture (see Lawrence Levine's
book). Not that they explicitly address these issues. Rather,
their manner of managing signs leaves viewers with the impression
that the random, ill-defined, extra-contextual forces that are
responsible for the focal highbrow events are something general
out of lowbrow interests, lowbrow idiocy on the part of Rosencrantz
and low passion on the part of Antonio. While viewers are initially
attracted to the brute and raw character of this lowbrow experience,
they are just as quickly steered off into reflections on the
constructedness of the lowbrow. Prince Hamlet is not the only
fiction the screen. So too is Rosencrantz. And while Carmen's
dance in the tobacco factory might be an elegant artifice, her
murder is also artificial as well (see Evlyn Gould's The
Fate of Carmen). In the end, one is left empty-handed in
the search for the roots of behavior.
Movies
like Rosencrantz... and Carmen do more than express.
They also alter and reengineer the sign system that they imply.
For another good example of such filmic re-invention, one might
consider The Godfather, a film that operates as both a
reflector and innovator. Prior to the appearance of this landmark
film, Italian-American identity was caught somewhere between the
image of the immigrant and the image of the mafioso. But, in the
aftermath of The Godfather, that identity was revised to
include a third element, namely family. Following this innovation,
the phrase "taking care of family business" took on new and positive
meanings to counterbalance its negative associations with organized
crime. In this way, the film contributed to, at the same time
that it drew from and reflected on, the absent cultural sign system.
Traces,
i.e. significant absences, in modern popular film suggest
the chaotic nature of modern experience. The world is not such
much of vacuum of signification but just the opposite. Everything
means too much. Everything means everything. Reality is everywhere
moreso than nowhere. Experience is holographic. Like a television
picture, it is rooted in invisible waves that swirl all around
us in such a way that everything is always everywhere. The increasing
impact of this everything-always-everywhereness is indirectly
manifested in the increasing popularity of the genre of conspiracy
films where we, the viewers, find ourselves swept up in a plot
of intractable complexity and of indecipherable origin. The message
of conspiracy films such as The Parallax View is that there
is, out there, absent from view, lurking as it were at the root
of all our activity, a conspiracy of forces that not only elude
our control, but which actually work to do us in. Moreover, as
All the President's Men and In the Line of Fire
suggest, that conspiracy is actually complicit with the very powers
on which we conventionally rely for our security. In these films,
the traces that tantalize viewers are not extra-terrestrial agendas
or Minds-at-large force (as suggested in the Celestine Prophecy).
Rather we moderns are finally coming around to facing up to the
realities which Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud outlined: far from
being the center and pivot of the cosmos, humans and human societies,
are spin-offs of forces that can never be known, specks of cosmic
dust in an unfathomably large supernova.
House
of Games and The Usual Suspects take this theme even
one step further by suggesting that all that we think that we
know about our situation has been trumped up as a huge cosmic
lie, a verbal conspiracy, not merely a game of words that leads
who-knows-where, but a deception that leads to oblivion.
One
other dimension of significant absence should be mentioned here,
though only mentioned because it will be explored more fully
in the next section on music. I refer to the elision of the
feminine in popular film. Laura Mulvey argued that popular feature
film, by its nature, presupposes the viewer to be a dominant
male voyeur, and Kaja Silverman contended that the female voice,
metonym for the female presence, is consistently elided in modern
popular film, thereby provoking unslakeable thirst for the feminine,
and ultimately a fetishistic obsession. This sort of argument
returns us to the 19th century and to its passionate quest to
recover the interior and to expose the soul. This quest almost
always ends up being translated as a challenge for men to experience
femininity. Ultimate, however, such femininity is beyond reach.
It is an elusive quality, an absent dimension. In some films,
this absence is handled trhough images of fetishized body parts.
In other films, it is handled more directly by the romantic
longings words of men (Il Postino), by their emotion-filled
attachments to people close to home and far away (Field
of Dreams and Dances with Wolves), and, above
all, by the tears that men shed (Cinema Paradiso).
To
this point, our analysis of popular film has revealed multiple
absences through which film articulates with, and contributes
to, modern systems of signs that construct both the world and
ourselves: conspiracies, the feminine, and the emptiness of
signs themselves. One more addition to this list of absences
will round out our discussion of feature film and, in addition,
draw documentary film into the net of our analysis. Here, I
will refer to this final absence as "the omniscient eye."
Recall
that Albertian perspective in pictorial art implies, as a significant
absence, the eye of the beholder. As viewers' gazes follow a
painting's lines of perspective right to the very vanishing
point, there to discover that their eyes match the artist's.
Through that match, viewers vicariously experience the thrill
of artistic production in the moment of viewing (consuming)
the work of art. Something analogous occurs in films for which
viewers experience the thrill of identifying with panoptic gaze
of the camera. Panoptic vision, according to Michel Foucault,
is, literally, all-seeing. In whatever medium it might be exercised,
it always bespeaks the power of surveillance, as in Jeremy Bentham's
eighteenth-century design for an efficient prison, the "panopticon."
Films, in particular, exercise such disciplinary power when
they carry viewers into the past (The Age of Innocence,
Sense and Sensibility) subtley imposing the values
of the present on people far removed in time and place -- or
not so subtlely as in Blue Velvet. Jameson refers to such films
as nostalgia films. Similarly, adventure films (Raiders
of the Lost Ark) carry viewers to the very boundaries of
familiar experience from which point they are treated to intense
experiences of the exotic. Curiously, again, those experiences
of the exotic on the margins are reorganized and represented
according to the prevailing values of the familiar mainstream
in the center. Hence, Indiana Jones, the hometown hero, plays
the role of a brave and protective civilizing force, whereas
the Nazis (and the Indian cultists in the Temple of Doom)
are consistently brutal and avaricious. Filmic sojourns beyond
both the center and the margins, beyond the familiar and the
exotic, and on into the realm of the imaginary (in Star
Wars) provide a similarly reassuring picture of a cosmos
in which the values at a familiar center are reaffirmed and
extended, now, without limit. Star Wars plays out not the empowerment
of our vision, but also the imposition of that powerful vision
on all the other beings we encounter.
The
power of panopticism is evident in feature films such as Star
Wars, but is also operative in documentary film. Generally,
documentary film, whether it be a brief patch of news footage
backed by commentary from a newscaster or the whole cloth of
an ethnographic film, aims at representational faithfulness.
One can discern two varieties of documentary film, the persuasive
film and the representational film. The former gathers evidence
so as to persuade, the latter subordinates persuasion to "reality,"
for example, by using lengthy footage of integrated events shot
on location and screened with minimal editing, and by acknowledging,
rather than hiding, the presence of the documentarians through
a sparing use of voice-over narration and maximal use of an
on-screen interviewers. The objective of a persuasive film is
to justify, legitimate, exhonerate or otherwise brighten the
image of the actions or persons presented. The films The Good
Fight and The Civil War assemble, facts, photos, and narrative
testimony to so brighten first, the events of the Lincoln Brigade
fighting against the forces of Franco, and, second, the people
who fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil war.
The
objective of a "representational film" is to supply facts which
viewers can plug into arguments of their own making while avoiding
as much as possible the temptation to hit viewers over head
with pre-assembled arguments. The problem with "representational
film" is that persuasion always sneaks in the back door, being
hidden in the very act of exhibiting others and integrating
such exhibitions in the logical structure generated by the filmmaker.
Just so...the viewers' gaze enframes "the other as spectacle
or picture," writes Kenneth Little. Such an "enframing" cannot
be a neutral act, no matter how realistically presented the
enframed material might be. Rather the framing gaze objectifies
its object, subordinating it to the needs of the one who gazes.
In Bakhtin's words, "the author's own real homeland serves as
an organization center for point of view."
The
appeal of gazing and objectifying is the experience of authenticity.
"Modern man (sic) has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere,
for his authenticity, to see if he can catch a glimpse of it
reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity or purity of
others," writes Dean MacCannell. This term "authenticity" refers
to an essential integrity which is assumed to undergird the
fragmentations of quotidian existence and give them meaning.
An authentic experience is one that puts individuals in touch
both with a 'real' world and with their 'real' selves. The "real,"
like a Platonic essence, is supposed to make sense of all life's
"accidents." It is a hierophany of the Wholly Other that is
used to refer, in Thomas Luckmann's words, to the world of everyday
life and point, (and also) to a world that is experienced as
transcending everyday life." Thus, when we as students view
The Hunters or The Feast or Dead Birds, we subtley
place ourselves in the picture, affirming ourselves by representing
lives and objectifying others.
