INTRODUCTION: CINEMA AS DIGITAL DREAM MACHINE
1. Some pioneering efforts to think through this problematic include Chun and Keenan, New Media, Old Media; Gitelman, Always Already New; Gitelman and Pingree, New Media, 1740–1915; Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media; Manovich, The Language of New Media; and Thorburn and Jenkins, Rethinking Media Change. All claims stated in this introduction will be supported further, in terms of both argument and bibliographic reference, in the chapters to follow.
2. Of course, this formulation echoes André Bazin’s landmark What Is Cinema? I will take up Bazin’s work in chapters 1 and 4. For a fascinating Bazinian exploration of the idea of cinema see Andrew, What Cinema Is!
3. Here and throughout this book I have chosen not to capitalize surrealism or surrealists in order to indicate my investments in figures either excluded from or at the fringes of the official Surrealist Group.
4. See, e.g., Mulvey, Death 24x a Second; and Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. For an important counterargument see Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index.”
5. For an influential version of this narrative see Jenkins, Convergence Culture. For a counterargument see Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation.
6. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 190. See also Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 18–27.
7. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 14.
8. For useful overviews of the varied theoretical approaches to cinematic spectatorship see, e.g., Aaron, Spectatorship; Brooker and Jermyn, The Audience Studies Reader; Plantinga and Smith, Passionate Views; Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; Thornham, Feminist Film Theory; and Williams, Viewing Positions.
9. For an excellent study of cinema’s movement out of the theater and into the home see Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex.
10. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 20.
11. I am borrowing these terms from Thussu, “Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow.”
12. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.
1. ENLARGED SPECTATORSHIP
1. Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” 21.
2. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 65. Subsequent citations of this source will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper by the abbreviation TM, followed by the appropriate page number(s).
3. I have chosen the term intermediated over the more common term convergent to preserve a sense of tension between media layers, as well as between spectators and technologies, that I believe is minimized in accounts like Henry Jenkins’s influential description of digital media culture as a “convergence culture.” For Jenkins convergence culture is characterized by “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want.” So far, so good. But I ultimately disagree with how Jenkins boils down this definition of convergence culture to a “participatory culture” where “older notions of passive media spectatorship” are replaced by “the work—and play—spectators perform in the new media system.” Although Jenkins attends carefully to the complex interchanges between media producers and media consumers, his narrative of the digital age tends to favor depictions of new media that empower the consumer as a producer. For example, he describes the participatory culture of the twenty-first-century digital era as a return to practices closer to nineteenth-century folk culture than twentieth-century mass culture: “The story of American arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” See Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2, 3, 140.
4. Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” 30. In the context of the present discussion it is worth noting that “Death Every Afternoon” is a meditation on Pierre Braunberger’s The Bullfight (La course de taureaux, 1949), a documentary that features voice-over commentary written by the surrealist Michel Leiris.
5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. Subsequent citations of this source will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper by the abbreviation CL, followed by the appropriate page number(s).
6. MacCabe, “Barthes and Bazin,” 74, 75.
7. Andrew, “Ontology of a Fetish”; see also Andrew, André Bazin, 70.
8. Sartre, The Imaginary, 10. Subsequent citations of this source will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper by the abbreviation TI, followed by the appropriate page number(s). Sartre’s fascinating and frustrating book is overdue for serious consideration by film scholars, not only for its influence on Bazin and Barthes but for its relation to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson. Although Sartre tends to refute Bergson as thoroughly as Gilles Deleuze embraces him later on, particularly in Deleuze’s books on cinema, this intellectual genealogy (which also includes Bazin’s notable influence on Deleuze) warrants further exploration for film studies. See Deleuze, Cinema 1; and Deleuze, Cinema 2.
9. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15. Subsequent citations of this source will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper by the abbreviation OP, followed by the appropriate page number(s).
10. For a discussion of how subjectivity and objectivity are intertwined in Bazin’s thought, see Rosen, “History of Image, Image of History.”
11. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 14.
12. The subject of surrealist politics is vast, and I will address it more substantially later, especially in my discussions of Georges Bataille in this chapter and others. For an introduction to the terrain of surrealist politics see Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism. For an example of surrealist politics applied to a cinematic context see Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 17–53.
13. Sartre refers to “the structure of the image” as “irrational” (TI 24). Formulations such as this one, along with Sartre’s thoughtful attention to dreams and various hypnagogic states, give The Imaginary a certain proximity to surrealism that Sartre’s later work will not share. See, for example, Sartre’s searing critique of surrealism in “What Is Literature?” (1948), included in Sartre, “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, esp. 152–58. For a study of Sartre’s relation to surrealism see Plank, Sartre and Surrealism. On the subject of surrealism, as well as Sartre’s importance for Bazin and Barthes, it is worth noting that Sartre comes closest to making an exception to his divisions between perception and imagination when he admits that certain “image-portraits,” such as paintings or photographs of actual persons, sometimes seem to offer an “irrational synthesis” of presence and absence for the viewer. See The Imaginary, 23; and compare Barthes’s related quotation of Sartre in Camera Lucida (CL 19–20; quoting TI 24–25).
15. Note how Bazin’s formulation here again evokes Sartre in order to challenge him, this time recalling Sartre’s refutation of Hippolyte Taine’s assertion that “perception is already ‘a true hallucination’” (TI 148).
16. Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 29.
17. Andrew, André Bazin, 58. Andrew dates Bazin’s most intensive involvement with surrealist concepts to the early 1940s, the very same era that Bazin was at work on the ideas that would structure “Ontology of the Photographic Image.”
18. Recent developments in film studies suggest, however, an increasing willingness to challenge this conventional reading of Bazin. For illuminating examples of this trend see Andrew, with Joubert-Laurencin, Opening Bazin; Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin”; and Keathley, Cinephilia and History, 54–81.
19. Bazin, “Subida al cielo,” 63.
20. Bazin, “Cruelty and Love,” 57.
21. Bazin, “Cabiria,” 88, 89.
22. Bazin, “Science Film,” 146–47.
23. See Ungar, “Persistence of the Image,” 238–39. For another stimulating critical account of Barthes’s work in relation to cinema see Watts, “Roland Barthes’s Cold-War Cinema.”
24. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17.
25. What has been lost, however, in Barthes’s transition from “The Photographic Message” to Camera Lucida is a willingness to analyze the photograph as a social text. Camera Lucida brackets the social in favor of the personal, as explained more fully below in Barthes’s distinctions between the studium and the punctum.
26. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 21.
27. For a valuable account of the influence of Barthes’s distinction, particularly in terms of its wide-ranging implications for art history, see Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum.”
28. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26, 37, 36.
29. Ferry, “Concerning King Kong,” 161.
31. I will elaborate on surrealist cinematic enlargement below, but for some useful landmarks in the wider critical literature on surrealism and cinema that aid in contextualizing enlargement, see Abel, French Film Theory; Caughie and Fotiade, “Surrealism and Cinema”; Harper and Stone, The Unsilvered Screen; Kovács, From Enchantment to Rage; Kuenzli, Dada and Surrealist Film; Kyrou, Le surréalisme au cinéma; Matthews, Surrealism and Film; Moine, “Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism”; Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost; Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema; and Williams, Figures of Desire.
32. Surrealist Group, “Toward the Irrational Enlargement,” 121.
33. See “Recherches expérimentales.” A partial translation can be found in Jean, The Autobiography of Surrealism, 298–301.
34. Surrealist Group, “Toward the Irrational Enlargement,” 122–27.
37. Breton, “As in a Wood,” 73.
39. Ibid., 73. It is worth noting, if only in passing, how Breton’s account of surrealist spectatorship anticipates certain aspects of the “resistant” or “oppositional” spectator constructed by cultural studies discourse; for a particularly influential example of cultural studies spectatorship see Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” One major difference that distinguishes the two spectatorship models is that where surrealism favors the shared fantasies forged between spectator and text, cultural studies tends to favor clearly delineated distinctions that separate the text’s ideological “encoding” from the spectator’s “decoding” of the text’s messages.
40. See also Barthes’s brief references to Godard, Antonioni, and especially Fellini (CL 70, 85, 115–16); these moments underline the extent to which cinema, however marginalized in Camera Lucida, is never forgotten.
41. Although the analysis that follows focuses solely on “The Third Meaning,” it is also informed by two related essays on cinema written by Barthes during the same period. See Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” (1973); and Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975).
42. Unfortunately, Barthes makes no clear distinction between publicity stills and frame enlargements when discussing the “photogram”; distinguishing these two forms may well have altered Barthes’s account of “the filmic.” I am indebted to John Belton for calling this issue to my attention.
43. Compare Bazin on Ivan the Terrible, where he notes the film’s “rather static” style but asserts that “it would be wrong to say that the film is nothing more than an album of artistic photographs.” Perhaps an inspiration for Barthes’s sense of “the filmic”? See Bazin, “Battle of the Rails,” 201.
44. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26.
45. For a more detailed account of this split within the surrealist movement see Richardson, introduction to The Absence of Myth, esp. 1–11.
46. Alexandrian, Le surréalisme et le rêve, 456; quoted in Richardson, introduction to The Absence of Myth, 6.
47. See, e.g., Bataille, The Absence of Myth; and Barthes, “The Surrealists Overlooked the Body,” 243–45. It is also worth noting that Barthes, at least intermittently, shared with Bazin a particular admiration for the films of surrealism’s most significant director, Luis Buñuel. See Barthes, “On Film,” esp. 21–23; and Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty, 51–99.
48. Bataille, “The Big Toe,” 20.
50. For further examples of Barthes reading Bataille see Barthes, “Outcomes of the Text”; and Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye.” The former essay examines “The Big Toe,” while the latter analyzes Bataille’s novel Story of the Eye (1928).
51. See Bataille, “Le gros orteil.” For a brilliant reading of Bataille’s intellectual project that has influenced my own account, see Lastra, “Why Is This Absurd Picture Here?” All fifteen issues of Documents (1929–30) have been reprinted in two volumes; see Bataille, Documents. For additional contextualization of Documents see Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Translations of select material from Documents can be found in October 36 (Spring 1986); October 60 (Spring 1992); and Brotchie, Encyclopaedia Acephalica.
52. Bataille, “The Big Toe,” 23.
53. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 287, 289. For other noteworthy accounts of cinema in the age of new media that share Manovich’s sensitivity in analyzing the continuities between “old” and “new” media, see Belton, “Digital Cinema”; Everett, “Digitextuality and Click Theory”; and Rosen, Change Mummified, 301–49.
54. For useful overviews of Egoyan’s films see Romney, Atom Egoyan; and Wilson, Atom Egoyan.
55. For a study of DVD special features see Brereton, Smart Cinema.
56. Bazin, “Adaptation,” 26.
57. Naremore, “Introduction,” 1. See also Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate; Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents; MacCabe, Murray, and Warner, True to the Spirit; and Stam, Literature Through Film.
58. Banks, The Sweet Hereafter, 1, 34.
59. This sequence can be found on The Sweet Hereafter DVD as chapter 11, “That Morning.”
60. Banks, The Sweet Hereafter, 37.
63. Bataille, quoted in Barthes, S/Z, 267; see also 16.
64. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 144. For additional discussion of the surrealist experiments in collaborative writing see Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 193–96.
65. See The Sweet Hereafter DVD, chap. 20, “The Sweet Hereafter.”
66. Atom Egoyan, in Banks and Egoyan, “The Sweet Hereafter,” 35.
68. Breton, “As in a Wood,” 73 (Breton’s emphasis).
2. INTERACTIVE SPECTATORSHIP
1. Belton, “Digital Cinema,” 104–5; Lunenfeld, “Myths of Interactive Cinema,” 154; Kinder, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative,” 4, 6.
2. I am responding here to a frequent tendency in scholarship on gaming in new media contexts to turn toward narrative as primary. See, e.g., Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck; and Kinder, “Narrative Equivocations.” Again, I do not wish to discount the importance of narrative to gaming in new media but to seek alternate approaches to this phenomenon that do not necessarily begin or end with narrative.
3. See Bordwell, “The Art Cinema”; and Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 205–33. Although Bordwell is not silent on the historical, economic, and cultural aspects of art cinema, these elements have been pursued in more detail by other scholars. See, e.g., Betz, Beyond the Subtitle; Galt and Schoonover, Global Art Cinema; Kovács, Screening Modernism; Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution”; Wasson, Museum Movies; and Wilinsky, Sure Seaters. The primacy of narrative in Bordwell’s account, however, coupled with the influential impact of his claims, means that art cinema’s place in film studies has tended to be fixed in a particular way for many years.
4. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 231.
5. Elsaesser, European Cinema, esp. 485–513; and Galt, The New European Cinema.
6. Bordwell includes Buñuel in his lists of art cinema auteurs (see “The Art Cinema,” 778; and Narration in the Fiction Film, 232). For a consideration of Cronenberg’s relation to art cinema and Canadian national cinema see Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 145–75.
7. I have placed Galloway’s work at the center of this chapter’s discussions of video games because his arguments, to my mind, address my particular concerns with unusual sensitivity. This is not to say, however, that Galloway’s is the first, last, or only word in video game studies, a field that continues to grow at an impressive pace. See, e.g., Aarseth, Cybertext; Bogost, How to Do Things; King and Krzywinska, ScreenPlay; Perron and Wolf, Video Game Theory Reader; and the journal Game Studies.
8. Galloway, Gaming, 2. I follow Galloway in his use of “video game” as an “umbrella term for all sorts of … electronic games” (127n1).
10. Although Buñuel had not yet joined the Surrealist Group when he and Dalí made Un chien andalou, he often pointed out the film’s fundamental debts to surrealism: “Un chien andalou would not have existed if the movement called surrealist had not existed” (Buñuel, “Notes,” 151–52); “Even the poems I published in Spain before I’d heard of the surrealist movement were responses to that call which eventually brought all of us together in Paris. While Dalí and I were making Un chien andalou we used a kind of automatic writing. There was indeed something in the air, and my connection with the surrealists in many ways determined the course of my life” (Buñuel, My Last Breath, 105). Buñuel joined the Surrealist Group officially in 1929 and broke with them in 1932. His films and writings, however, right up until his death in 1983, testify to a powerfully sustained investment in surrealism.
11. Buñuel, “Notes,” 153. The criticism pertaining to Un chien andalou is extensive. For some recent illuminating accounts, in addition to those cited later in this chapter, see Adamowicz, Un chien andalou; Short, The Age of Gold, 51–101; and Turvey, The Filming of Modern Life, 105–34.
12. See Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 15–16.
13. For an overview of surrealist games see Brotchie and Gooding, Book of Surrealist Games.
14. Simone Kahn, an associate of the Surrealist Group (and André Breton’s first wife), recalls the original exquisite corpse games as insular, with the surrealists putting on “a fantastic drama for ourselves.” Even when the first selections of results from the games were published in a 1927 issue of La révolution surréaliste, they appeared anonymously. Later examples of the game were signed by the players. See Caws, Surrealism, 200, 62.
15. Buñuel, “Notes,” 151, 153.
16. See Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?” 26.
17. In this way Un chien andalou speaks to Buñuel’s sense of surrealism as a movement whose aim “was not to establish a glorious place … in the annals of art and literature, but to change the world, to transform life itself.” Buñuel concludes that surrealism was thus “successful in its details and a failure in its essentials,” even though the movement clearly changed his own life. See Buñuel, My Last Breath, 123.
18. Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 779.
19. At the same time it is important not to minimize Dalí’s considerable contributions to Un chien andalou. According to Buñuel it was Dalí who convinced him to use the title Un chien andalou for the film. See Buñuel, “Pessimism,” 258. For an extended discussion of Dalí’s part in Un chien andalou see Finkelstein, “Dalí and Un chien andalou.”
20. For a fascinating inventory of verbal and visual exchange in Un chien andalou see Liebman, “Un chien andalou.” In the present context Liebman’s account is usefully paired with surrealist games that utilize the spoken word in a way that games such as the exquisite corpse focus on written words or visual images—for example, the “game of variants,” where one player whispers a sentence in the ear of another and so on until the first and last versions of the sentence are compared. See Brotchie and Gooding, Book of Surrealist Games, 32.
21. Galloway, Gaming, 11–12.
22. For an excellent introduction to Caillois’s career see Frank, introduction to The Edge of Surrealism.
23. On the College of Sociology see Hollier, The College of Sociology (1937–39).
24. Caillois, “Surrealism as a World,” 334.
25. Caillois, “Testimony (Paul Éluard),” 62.
27. Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” 85.
28. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 99–100.
29. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 177n5, 12, 19, 21, 54.
31. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 162.
32. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 141; see also 55.
34. Frank, introduction to The Edge of Surrealism, 33.
35. See Richman, Sacred Revolutions, esp. 110–54; and Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.”
36. See Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.” Bataille develops these arguments further in The Accursed Share.
37. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 5–6, 10.
38. Ibid., 196n60, 126. For more of Caillois’s views on film see his L’homme et le sacré.
39. Another is the issue of community in relation to the masses. For an account of Caillois’s oscillations between fearful and hopeful stances toward democracy during the World War II era see Frank, introduction to The Edge of Surrealism, 22–37.
40. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 75.
42. See Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction.”
43. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 122. Caillois cites Rudolf Valentino and James Dean specifically (see 194–95n57). On Valentino in a related context see Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 245–94.
44. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 100.
45. For significant examples of this psychoanalytic film theory see the essays by Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. For an argument about how Lacan’s work is misinterpreted in much of this film theory, see Copjec, Read My Desire, 15–38.
46. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 3–4.
48. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 102.
49. Ibid., 97–98, 103n40.
50. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 37.
51. See Caillois, “The Image.”
52. Caillois does not refer specifically to Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game in “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” but to his series of paintings that includes Invisible Lion, Horse, Sleeping Woman (1930). Mary Ann Caws has noted how this series demonstrates “Dalí’s closeness to cinema … in which experiments with multiple images establish links between cinematic techniques, such as dissolves and multiple exposures, and his theory of paranoiac imagery” (Caws, Surrealism, 152). For more on Dalí’s myriad (but usually unrealized) film projects see King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema. For Bataille’s commentary on The Lugubrious Game (which includes references in its footnotes to Un chien andalou) see his “The ‘Lugubrious Game.’”
53. The fact that Geller later interprets Pikul’s actions here as a true desire to assassinate her rather than a simulated one only deepens the problem of agency I have been describing in relation to this scene. The assassination scenario is played out during the film a number of times in a number of different ways, constantly foregrounding questions of who or what is in control of the action (or, to put it in Caillois’s terms, what counts as self-abandonment and what counts as self-preservation). When Geller accuses Pikul of being her true assassin near the end of the film, she then kills him and declares triumphantly, “Death to the demon, Ted Pikul!” Afterward, she asks, “Have I won the game?” Of course, there is no answer.
54. Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 778.
55. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 106.
56. Buñuel, “Un chien andalou,” 162.
57. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125.
58. Cronenberg, quoted in Scoffield, “An Interview with David Cronenberg,” 93.
59. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 106.
60. Buñuel’s published screenplay, which the film does not always follow faithfully, describes this final couple as “the main character and the young woman,” or whom I have been referring to as the dark-suited man and Simone Mareuil. Buñuel adds that they are “blind, their clothes in tatters, devoured by the rays of the sun and by a swarm of insects.” See Buñuel, “Un chien andalou,” 169. As Linda Williams notes, the nature of the extant prints of Un chien andalou make these details hard to decipher at best. See her Figures of Desire, 99n45.
61. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 99, 100.
62. Barthes, “Metaphor of the Eye,” 239, 241.
63. There are a number of remarkable overlaps in theme and content between Story of the Eye and Un chien andalou. Consider, for example, this passage from Story of the Eye: “Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. And egg? A calf’s eye, because of the color of the head (a calf’s head) and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball” (Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, 38). The resemblances here to Un chien andalou are striking, especially when framed with Bunuel’s claim that a calf’s eye was used during the filming of Un chien andalou’s opening scene and the fact that Story of the Eye’s action concludes in Andalusia. See Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 16; and Bataille, Story of the Eye, 85. Since Story of the Eye was published in 1928, the same year Buñuel and Dalí commenced work on Un chien andalou, paired with the fact that Buñuel had already begun living in Paris (off and on) in 1925, there is certainly the possibility of direct influence. For Buñuel on Bataille see Buñuel, My Last Breath, 122. For Bataille on Buñuel see Bataille, “Eye.” I will return to a more detailed analysis of Story of the Eye in chapter 4.
64. Of course, James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar (2009) also exploits the cinema/video game intersection.
65. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 102. Paul Young adds an intriguing dimension to the game pod’s combination of animate and inanimate matter by reading the pod “as a figure for the contested fetus in an era flush with religious fundamentalism” (Young, The Cinema Dreams, 243).
66. My use here of the terms assaultive and reactive proceeds from Carol J. Clover’s important recasting of sadistic and masochistic spectatorship as “the assaultive gaze” and “the reactive gaze.” See Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, esp. 166–230.
68. Galloway’s use of Caillois on matters of play and games reveals similar limitations: Caillois’s relevance for video games is considered “confine[d],” and he is described flatly as “a leftist and friends with the likes of Georges Bataille.” See Galloway, Gaming, 21, 19–20. What this rather broad and vague characterization of Caillois minimizes is the specific importance of surrealism and mimicry to his intellectual projects.
69. Of course, this temporal discontinuity can also be read as a spatial discontinuity, where the man performing the slashing of the eye is not Buñuel at all. But the persistence of the razor and the vertically striped shirt from previous shots, in addition to the graphic matching between shots, creates a strong impression of spatial continuity despite the missing watch and new tie.
70. The significance of the watch as an object for Buñuel can be seen in his amusing piece “Why I Don’t Wear a Watch.”
71. Bordwell refers to what Norman Holland calls “puzzling movies” as examples of how “art cinema foregrounds the narrational act by posing enigmas.” For Bordwell classical cinema narratives pose questions at the level of story (“who did it?”), while art cinema narratives foreground enigmas at the level of plot (“who is telling this story?”). See Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 778–79. Where the new “puzzle films” fall with regard to these categorizations is a matter for further debate, but it seems to me that we might begin thinking about them as incorporating enigmas at both story and plot levels. For additional discussion see Buckland, Puzzle Films.
72. In fact, the way a film like Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) sets out to conjoin the puzzle film with art cinema’s trappings of national “authenticity” seems anticipated (and satirized) by the deployment of ostentatiously “diverse” names and accents for many of the characters in eXistenZ. In Cronenberg’s work performances of national “authenticity” are often distrusted as deceptive rather than embraced as genuine identities. Babel displays little to none of this skepticism.
73. See, e.g., Shaw and Weibel, Future Cinema.
74. For related discussions of Cronenberg’s oeuvre see Lowenstein, “A Dangerous Method”; and Lowenstein, “Transforming Horror.”
75. For the exhibition catalog see Fogle, Andy Warhol/Supernova.
76. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 103. For more on Buñuel as a film curator see his “A Night at the Studio des Ursulines.”
77. For the exhibition catalog see Stauffacher, Art in Cinema.
78. Buñuel, “Notes,” 151, 153.
79. For tantalizing hints in this direction consider Buñuel’s interactive art project A Giraffe, constructed with the collaboration of Alberto Giacometti sometime in the early 1930s but now lost. For Buñuel’s descriptions of the project see Buñuel, My Last Breath, 118–19; and Buñuel, “A Giraffe.” Marsha Kinder quite rightly points to A Giraffe as an important context for discussing Buñuel’s legacy for new media. See Kinder, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative,” 3–4.
80. See Drew, David Cronenberg, 57.
3. GLOBALIZED SPECTATORSHIP
1. Translations of Murakami’s concept of “superflat” sometimes opt for “super flat”; for consistency I have made the former spelling uniform. I have rendered all Japanese names by placing the family name first, with the exception of English-language sources.
2. For valuable reflections on these terms in a cinematic context see Ďurovičová and Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives.
3. See Andrew, “Atlas of World Cinema”; and Rosenbaum and Martin, Movie Mutations.
4. Thussu, “Mapping Global Media Flow,” 11.
5. Iwabuchi, “Contra-Flows,” 78; see also Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization.
6. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 27, 29.
8. Nakata’s film is often referred to as Ringu, but this is an artificial (and misleading) “Japanizing” of the film’s original title, the English word Ring. Therefore, I will refer to Nakata’s film as Ring in this chapter. For an explanation of this usage, as well as a useful introduction to the entire J-Horror phenomenon, see Kalat, J-Horror, 25. For more on J-Horror see McRoy, Nightmare Japan.
9. See Holden, “‘Sportsports.’”
10. For a related discussion of the technological uncanny see Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies.”
11. For a fascinating study of film’s relation to its photographic substrate that suggests a number of additional implications for this scene (although not referred to explicitly), see Stewart, Between Film and Screen.
12. For further discussion see Young, The Cinema Dreams.
13. For context on Japanese cultural traditions relevant to these films see Hand, “Aesthetics of Cruelty.” For analyses of Onibaba in particular on this score see Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 83–109; and McDonald, Reading a Japanese Film, 108–21.
14. This list is not meant to be exhaustive; Ring is indebted to a number of other American horror films as well. On the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) see Goldberg, “Demons in the Family.” Suzuki Koji’s novel Ring mentions a number of American horror films, perhaps as nods of acknowledgment: The Exorcist, The Legend of Hell House (John Hough, 1973), The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), and Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980). See Suzuki, Ring, 71–72. David Cronenberg’s presence on this list as a Canadian director rather than an American one is important to note, especially since Videodrome is saturated with implicit references to fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan—one character in the film is a McLuhanesque media prophet named “Brian O’Blivion.” Cronenberg’s films have been remarkably influential for Japanese horror and science fiction cinema, as is apparent in the work of (for example) Tsukamoto Shinya and Miike Takashi. For more on Cronenberg see chapter 2.
15. Nakata Hideo, interview with the author, June 27, 2008, Tokyo; Takahashi Hiroshi, interview with the author, June 19, 2008, Tokyo (trans. Sakano Yuka).
16. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 30.
17. Murakami, “Superflat Trilogy,” 152.
18. Murakami, “Little Boy,” 2–3.
19. Okada, Morikawa, and Murakami, “Otaku Talk.” See also LaMarre, “Otaku Movement.”
20. Okada, Morikawa, and Murakami, “Otaku Talk,” 170.
21. McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” quoted in Môri, “Subcultural Unconsciousness in Japan,” 188.
22. Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” 17.
23. Harootunian and Yoda, introduction to Japan After Japan, 1.
24. Murakami, “Superflat Manifesto,” 152, 5.
25. Koschmann, “National Subjectivity,” 122.
26. Harootunian and Yoda, introduction to Japan After Japan, 11–12.
27. Ivy, “Revenge and Recapitation,” 197–98.
28. Murakami, “Superflat Trilogy,” 161.
29. Murakami, “Little Boy,” 4.
30. See Schimmel, ©Murakami.
31. Takahashi, interview with the author.
32. For critical reflections on this sort of “electronic presence” see Sconce, Haunted Media; and Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen.”
33. Hornyak, “Murder in Lotus Land.” Hornyak also discusses a more recent otaku murderer, Kato Tomohiro, who in 2008 killed seven people in Akihabara, Tokyo’s center for otaku culture. Miyazaki was executed in 2008.
34. Nakata, interview with the author.
35. Takahashi, interview with the author.
37. For more on the significance of Aum in this context see Ivy, “Revenge and Recapitation.” As Ivy notes, Aum’s infamous use of faked photographs to document “miracles,” such as Aum leader Asahara Shōkō “levitating while in the full lotus position” (201), have been connected to the craze for spirit photography in Japan. Nakata reveals that such spirit photographs inspired some of Ring’s most striking visuals: the distorted faces in photographs of those who have been marked by Sadako’s curse, as well as the Miyazaki-like hooded figure on Sadako’s videotape. I will return to the subject of spirit photography later in this chapter.
38. Nakata was hit particularly hard by the collapse of Nikkatsu, the studio where he entered the film industry in the mid-1980s. See Mes and Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide, 251–55.
39. Nakata, interview with the author.
40. Sawaragi, “On the Battlefield,” 204–5. For an account that argues Sawaragi devotes too little attention to this vacillation, see Môri, “Subcultural Unconsciousness in Japan.”
41. It is to the credit of the National Museum of Modern Art that it has been willing to display some of the most violent and disturbing war paintings from its collection. For example, when I visited on June 21, 2008, one of the three war paintings in the gallery was Fujita Tsuguharu’s Fierce Fighting of Kaoru Paratroops After Landing on the Enemy’s Position (1945), which depicts Japanese soldiers beheading the enemy during combat. I was also permitted to study color reproductions of all 153 war paintings in the museum’s art library, which is open to the public. I am grateful to Miwa Kenjin and the library staff for their assistance.
42. Sawaragi, “On the Battlefield,” 199.
43. Kaido, “Reconstruction,” 11. The arrests of Fukuzawa and Takiguchi grew out of long-standing government surveillance of surrealist activities, dating back at least to 1936. See Clark, “Artistic Subjectivity,” 48. For additional context on Takiguchi see Sas, Fault Lines.
44. Clark, “Artistic Subjectivity,” 50.
45. Kaido, “Reconstruction,” 11. There is only one war painting by Fukuzawa in the collection at the National Museum of Modern Art: Shipborne Special Unit Leaves the Base (1945).
46. Kaido, “Reconstruction,” 11. On Fujita’s career, including his brief flirtation with surrealism while living in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and associating with Robert Desnos, see Birnbaum, Glory in a Line, 150–59. There are fourteen war paintings by Fujita in the collection at the National Museum of Modern Art, more than any other artist.
48. Eric Cazdyn refers to an event occurring on Japanese television in the late 1980s that may have inspired Ring, particularly the novel’s (and film’s) investments in the past: “At about three or four in the morning, signals would be recircuited and images and audio would appear, flickering like television broadcasts of a bygone era. … There were family photographs, old documentary footage of World War II war criminals, and Zengakuren demonstrations … but then, before the event could become something, before it could become History, the images … stopped” (Cazdyn, “Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism,” 295–96).
49. Takahashi, interview with the author. On the Japanese human experimentation program see Harris, Factories of Death.
51. Nakata, interview with the author.
52. Takahashi, e-mail communication with the author, June 26, 2008.
53. Nakata, interview with the author.
54. Takahashi, interview with the author.
55. Buñuel, “Notes,” 153.
56. See Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi, 24, 100.
57. Klein, Ankoku butō, 26; see also Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi, 84; and Sas, Fault Lines, 161–64.
58. Hijikata’s unforgettable presence in the cult horror film Kyofu kikei ningen (Horrors of Malformed Men, Ishii Teruo, 1969) anticipates Sadako in a number of striking ways: the outcast’s thirst for revenge, the spastic movements, the white robe, the long black hair. The fact that Hijikata “began letting his hair grow long in the 1960s in the belief that this act would help his sister [sold into prostitution during Hijikata’s impoverished youth] to live on within him” also suggests parallels with Suzuki’s Sadako, who is described as androgynous and hermaphroditic. See Klein, Ankoku butō, 6. On Hijikata’s participation in the avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, including the experimental films Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb, Hosoe Eikō, 1960) and Sacrifice (Donald Richie, 1959), see London, “X,” 286–89. It is worth noting that Hijikata is just one example among several others that point toward rich intersections between Japanese avant-garde film traditions and Japanese horror film traditions. Consider, for example, the careers of Teshigahara Hiroshi, Wakamatsu Kōji, Tsukamoto Shinya, Sato Hisayasu, and Miike Takashi. See Hunter, Eros in Hell; and Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest.
59. This globalized network also includes the Korean remake of Ring, entitled The Ring Virus (Kim Dong-bin, 1999). Space does not permit an analysis of this film here, but its historic status as a Korean-Japanese coproduction is a fascinating instance of global contra-flow and of Japan’s recent cultural influence in Asia. For more on these cultural contexts (although neither Ring nor The Ring Virus is discussed specifically) see Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization.
60. The Ring, released not long after the events of September 11, 2001, may well have evoked another Japanese/American historical association commonly mentioned in the American media at that time: the perceived similarity between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. For more on this connection see Landy, “‘America Under Attack’”; and Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 177–84.
61. Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), 4. See also Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema.
62. I am not suggesting that Lippit is uninterested in national contexts beyond Japan, as he includes, for example, illuminating analyses of The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963). But The Ring is not mentioned at all and Ring only in a footnote (Lippit, Atomic Light, 193n10). In short, I believe my own chapter can be read usefully alongside Lippit’s fine research.
63. See, e.g., Hein and Selden, Living with the Bomb.
64. See Tsutsui and Ito, In Godzilla’s Footsteps.
66. Of course, this is not meant to suggest that Curse of the Ring serves only to open up analytic possibilities for viewers; it is also capable of closing them off. For an illuminating analysis of the conservative aspects of online Ring fandom see Hills, “Ringing the Changes.”
69. Fukurai, Clairvoyance and Thoughtography, 7.
74. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 128.
76. See, e.g., L’Ecotais, “Man Ray”; and Livingston, “Man Ray and Surrealist Photography.”
77. Krauss, “Photography,” 24. Krauss also reminds us that Man Ray’s photography, along with surrealist photography in general, encompasses many more styles and techniques than just rayography: “solarization, negative printing, cliché verre, multiple exposure, photomontage, and photocollage” (25). But for the purposes of this chapter my focus will be on rayography.
78. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 278.
80. Man Ray, “Cinemage,” 133.
82. See Heiting, Man Ray, 1890–1976, 187.
83. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 116.
84. Man Ray, quoted in Krauss, “Photography,” 24; see also Man Ray, Exhibition Rayographs, 1921–1928.
85. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 128.
87. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 32.
88. For more on Breton’s relation to photography see Krauss, “Photography,” 15; and Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” 161.
89. Breton, quoted in L’Ecotais, “Man Ray,” 156.
90. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 70.
91. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 16, 15.
93. Nakata, interview with the author.
94. Gunning, “Phantom Images,” 42–43.
95. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 30, 32.
97. Murakami, “Superflat Trilogy,” 161.
4. POSTHUMAN SPECTATORSHIP
1. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3–5.
2. This is not to say that this sort of scholarly investigation would be fruitless; far from it. See, e.g., Badmington, Alien Chic; Bukatman, Terminal Identity; and Stacey, Cinematic Life of the Gene.
3. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xviii–xix.
4. For histories and analyses of YouTube see, e.g., Burgess and Green, YouTube; and Snickars and Vonderau, The YouTube Reader.
6. See Bourke and Rendall, A Lion Called Christian.
7. Daston, “Intelligences,” 54.
8. See Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” For an overview of animal studies see Kalof and Fitzgerald, The Animals Reader. For valuable contributions to animal studies that are particularly sensitive to cinema, see Burt, Animals in Film; and Lippit, Electric Animal.
9. Haraway, When Species Meet, 31–32, 17.
12. Haraway, When Species Meet, 32.
14. Buñuel, quoted in Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 6.
16. On Buñuel’s Mexican films see Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico; and Strayer, “Ruins and Riots.”
17. Bazin, “Cruelty and Love,” 52.
18. See Polizzotti, Los olvidados, 31–32.
20. See Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 61.
21. See Polizzotti, Los olvidados, 72. For Paz’s writings on Buñuel see Paz, On Poets and Others, 152–65.
22. See Polizzotti, Los olvidados, 75–76.
23. Buñuel, quoted in Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 59.
24. Lastra, “Why Is This Absurd Picture Here?” 209.
25. See Polizzotti, Los olvidados, 33; Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 60; and Buñuel, My Last Breath, 199.
26. Indeed, the shot of the chicken could be a remnant of a deeper surrealist strategy Buñuel originally wished to pursue in the film but ultimately abandoned: the insertion of “a priori unjustified elements, irrational sparks, quick shots” that functioned as “an attempt not to follow the story line to the letter, to achieve a ‘photographic’ reality” (Buñuel, quoted in Colina and Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, 63).
28. Haraway, When Species Meet, 251, 255, 257.
30. Ibid., 23, 27. See also Derrida, The Animal; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
31. See, e.g., Singer, “Animal Liberation”; and Regan, “The Rights of Humans.”
32. Haraway, When Species Meet, 36.
33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 240.
35. Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” 29.
36. Bataille, Story of the Eye, 56–57.
37. Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” 30.
40. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15–16.
41. Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” 30.
43. See Daney, “The Screen of Fantasy,” esp. 37. For additional commentary on Bazin and animals see Fay, “Seeing/Loving Animals”; and Jeong and Andrew, “Grizzly Ghost.”
44. Bazin, “Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” 49n.
47. Bazin “Cruelty and Love,” 51, 52, 57.
49. See Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 34–46. Subsequent citations of this source will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper by the abbreviation AM, followed by the appropriate page number(s).
50. Bataille’s refusal to insist here on the actual killing of animals as the means to reach a poetic awakening in the reader should not be construed as evidence that his thinking can be easily assimilated to an animal rights or animal liberation agenda. There are many instances in Bataille’s work where animals, however fascinating or even enviable for “being neither a thing nor a man,” prove incapable of reaching the privileged sorts of experience (especially radical negativity) he values as human potentialities. See, e.g., Bataille, Theory of Religion, 21; and Bataille, The Accursed Share, 27–29. For a relevant commentary on Bataille’s resistance to notions of animality advanced by his teacher Alexandre Kojève in his famed lectures on Hegel, see Agamben, The Open, 5–12.
51. For a consideration of Prévert’s film work in relation to surrealism see Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, 45–59.
52. Bataille, “Eye,” 19n1.
53. Breton,’As in a Wood,” 73.
54. Ibid., 73–74. It is important to note, however, that Breton does not believe that cinema has lived up to its surrealist potential in its mainstream, commercialized, “controlled” form. The surrealist potential clearly resides primarily with what spectators can do with such films rather than with the films themselves. See ibid., 76–77.
55. Bataille, “Eye,” 19m.
5. COLLABORATIVE SPECTATORSHIP
1. One measure of Cornell’s stature is the explosion of art historical scholarship that has been devoted to him in recent years. In addition to the volumes I will refer to later in this chapter see, for example, Caws, Joseph Cornell’s Theater; Hartigan, Joseph Cornell; Hartigan, et al., Joseph Cornell; and Waldman, Joseph Cornell. The Joseph Cornell Study Center, an important archival resource, was established at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1978.
2. For a fascinating record of the Levy Gallery’s approach to surrealism (and Cornell’s centrality to it) see Levy, Surrealism.
3. The story of Rose Hobart’s first screening has been recounted numerous times with slight variations in detail, but Dalí’s viciousness and Cornell’s shock are emphasized in all of the accounts. Another recurring theme is how remarkably long-lasting the traumatic effect of this incident remained with Cornell. See, e.g., Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery, 229–31; Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 77; and Solomon, Utopia Parkway, 87–89.
4. A number of Dalí’s artworks that predate Rose Hobart actually do suggest certain general points of resemblance with some aspects of Cornell’s film. See, e.g., his collages The Marriage of Buster Keaton (1925) and L’phénomène de l’extase (1933). The former indicates how Keaton, whom Dalí called “Pure Poetry,” may have occupied a similar place in Dalí’s imagination as Hobart did in Cornell’s. See Gale, “In Darkened Rooms,” 53; and Lastra, “Buñuel, Bataille, and Buster.” L’phénomène de l’extase is discussed in relation to Rose Hobart in Hauptman, Joseph Cornell, 95–97. There is no doubt that Dalí was an influential figure for Cornell, who apparently even bought a Dalí painting or drawing from the Levy Gallery in 1932. See Solomon, Utopia Parkway, 70–71. It is also likely that Cornell attended screenings of Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or in New York in 1933. See Ades, “The Transcendental Surrealism,” 40n15.
5. Cornell, quoted in Hartigan, “Joseph Cornell: A Biography,” 103.
6. For an exploration of Cornell’s art that focuses on his connection to Christian Science, see Starr, Joseph Cornell.
7. Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, 11, 69–70. Another recent example of this disparaging attitude toward Cornell’s importance for surrealism can be found in the new introduction to the reprinted edition of Levy’s Surrealism, where Mark Polizzotti writes that Cornell “is amply—one might say too amply—represented here” (Polizzotti, introduction to Surrealism, vii).
8. Sitney, Visionary Film, 350.
9. Hoving, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy, 61.
10. Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 76, 77.
12. Indeed, late in his life Cornell would refer to memories from the 1930s as “the ‘Chien Andalou’ days” (quoted in Hoving, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy, 20).
13. Tashjian, Joseph Cornell, 17, 18.
14. For fascinating testimony to this process (which is not without its moments of disagreement) see Cornell’s letters to Stan Brakhage in the Joseph Cornell Papers at Anthology Film Archives, New York. Incidentally, when Cornell writes to Brakhage about his appreciation of Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) and La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954), another pathway opens toward recognizing the surrealism in cinematic realism (as covered in my discussions of Bazin in chapters 1 and 4). See Cornell’s letters of Nov. 27, 1955, and October 1956, respectively. I am grateful to Anthology’s director of library collections, Robert A. Haller, for pointing me toward Cornell’s correspondence with Brakhage. For more recent, posthumous instances of artistic collaboration with Cornell see Foer, A Convergence of Birds; and Roche, “Performing Memory.”
15. For a touching personal account of Cornell’s gift-giving see Michelson, “Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot,” 47–48. For a less charitable take on Cornell’s gifts (he calls Cornell “weird” and “creepy,” although not without some admiration) see Gopnik, “Sparkings,” 184, 187.
16. It appears that Hobart, who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-four, only learned of Cornell’s film in 1982. It was too late for her to meet the filmmaker, but she did watch the film. See Keller, “I Met Rose Hobart”; and Haller, “Joseph Cornell.” Both of these publications can be found in the Joseph Cornell Papers at Anthology Film Archives.
17. On these projects see Tashjian, Joseph Cornell; and Hauptman, Joseph Cornell.
18. Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 75.
19. Michelson, “Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot,” 56.
20. See Hauptman, Joseph Cornell, 219n51.
21. See Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 77.
22. See Hartigan, “Joseph Cornell,” 112. Hartigan also notes that Cornell met Sontag in January 1966 and made “at least one collage, The Ellipsian [1966], in her honor” (112).
23. Sontag, “Apocalypse in a Paint Box,” 27. Sontag’s review includes a wide-ranging genealogy of surrealism that includes the artist Jasper Johns, whom she sees as an “heir to Duchamp and Joseph Cornell” (26).
24. The most extensive account of these relationships can be found in Solomon, Utopia Parkway.
25. See Tashjian, Joseph Cornell, 42–61. Since Lee Miller appears in Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), it seems worth mentioning that a common antipathy toward Cocteau from within the precincts of surrealism may well include a homophobic dimension, however indirectly expressed. For a stimulating study of how the films of Cocteau and Cornell share certain thematic qualities, see Keller, The Untutored Eye.
26. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” 17–18. For ambitious attempts to expand the surrealist canon so that women might occupy a more central role, see Rosemont, Surrealist Women; and Chadwick, Women Artists.
27. Hauptman, Joseph Cornell, 97.
28. Solomon, Utopia Parkway, 87, 70. On Duchamp and Cornell’s relationship see also Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, 239–42; Tomkins, Duchamp, 331; and Davidson and Temkin, Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp.
29. Tashjian, “‘Vous pour moi?’” 37, 38.
30. Among Duchamp’s notable contributions to surrealism was his famous design for the web of string that covered the “First Papers of Surrealism” gallery show in New York in 1942; Duchamp’s installation came at the invitation of André Breton. See Tomkins, Duchamp, 332. See also Breton’s glowing appreciation of Duchamp in his Surrealism and Painting, 85–99.
31. Tashjian, “‘Vous pour moi?’” 44, 45.
32. Enchanted Wanderer was originally published in View, an American arts journal sympathetic to surrealism. For further analysis see Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 73–74; and Hauptman, Joseph Cornell, 1–10.
33. Cornell, “‘Enchanted Wanderer,’” 206, 208. This reprint does not include Cornell’s collage illustration of Lamarr featured in the original publication. For a reproduction of the original see fig. 5.5.
34. Cornell, “‘Enchanted Wanderer,’” 208. The importance of music to Cornell’s art can scarcely be overestimated. See, e.g., Hussey, “Music in the World.”
36. For useful critical overviews of Hudson’s career see Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning, 97–131; Cohan, Masked Men, 264–303; and Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body.” For Hudson’s autobiography see Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson.
37. For an important contextualization of the cultural and political landscape of AIDS within which Hudson’s image circulated, see Crimp, AIDS.
39. For a revealing account of this film’s genesis see Rappaport, “Mark Rappaport’s Notes.”
40. See Pratley, Cinema of John Frankenheimer, 131–48.
41. Frankenheimer’s commentary on this scene is somewhat at odds with the account given of it in Oppenheimer and Vitek, Idol, 87–88. Oppenheimer and Vitek assert that the scene had to be shot twice; the first, with Hudson actually drunk, led to Hudson’s emotional breakdown on the set, while the second, with Hudson sober, was actually used in the film. Of course, it is possible that footage from both shoots wound up in the final cut. Hudson’s costar, Salome Jens, believes that at the time, Hudson was a high-functioning alcoholic. See Oppenheimer and Vitek, Idol, 88.
42. See Oppenheimer and Vitek, Idol, 80–92; and Blinder, “Seconds,” 212–17.
43. Dyer, too, is alert to the exceptional nature of Seconds for Hudson, especially the “queer resonances” of the film’s story that “may suggest the idea of the gay Rock making a bid to escape the confines of his straight image” (Dyer, “Rock,” 170).
45. For a brilliant discussion of how such mechanisms of fantasy operate in the public sphere, see Warner, “The Mass Public.”
46. See Sitney, “Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” 77.
47. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 277. For more recent investigations of camp that focus particularly on film and visual media, see, for example, Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer; Robertson, Guilty Pleasures; and Tinkcom, Working like a Homosexual.
48. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 14.
49. Rappaport, “Mark Rappaport’s Notes,” 16–17.
50. On the Seconds DVD Frankenheimer reports that shooting this scene required multiple replacements of the gurney’s leather straps because Hudson kept snapping them; in addition, two professional football players were needed to hold him down while he performed.
51. Frankenheimer, quoted in Oppenheimer and Vitek, Idol, 91. On the cult reputation of Seconds see also Blinder, “Seconds,” 212. For a more expansive consideration of Frankenheimer’s career see Pomerance and Palmer, A Little Solitaire.
52. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 16. See also Brunius, “Crossing the Bridge,” 99–102. Although this excerpt from Brunius’s En marge du cinéma français (1954) was given its title by Hammond (in an allusion to Breton, presumably), its concerns dovetail with Breton’s concept.
53. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 16.
AFTERWORD: MAKING CINEMATIC TIME
1. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262, 255; see also Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 12–16. My understanding of Benjamin has always been, and continues to be, shaped by the scholarship of Miriam Bratu Hansen; see, e.g., her Cinema and Experience.
2. See Zalewski, “The Hours.”
3. Nor is it a Deleuzian film, for that matter, despite the understandable temptation to assimilate The Clock into Deleuze’s notion of a time-image. But this would ultimately be a misleading literalization of Deleuze, not an illustration of his concept. See Deleuze, Cinema 2.
4. See Hammond, “Lost and Found.” For a fascinating document that attests to the Surrealist Group’s investment in L’âge d’or, see their “Manifesto of the Surrealists.”
5. See Hammond, L’âge d’or, 8.