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Title:The pathos of the unconscious: Charlie Chaplin & dreams
Author(s):David J. Lemaster
Source:Journal of Popular Film and Television. 25.3 (Fall 1997): p110. From General OneFile.
Document Type:Critical essay
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956059709602757
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=browsepublicationsresults,30,48; Full Text:
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The recent reemergence of Charlie Chaplin into the popular culture gives scholars an opportunity (and excuse) to reexamine the work of Chaplin the writer/director and his use of thematic devices as a tool for creating the "mask" we know as Charlie Chaplin the Tramp. Although volumes exist analyzing Chaplin 's work as an actor and detailing the themes of his films. Chaplin the director 's creation of pathos challenges scholars (and directors) to dig even more deeply into his method for a better understanding of his achievement. Chaplin 's use of subtlety helped him create a sense of pathos and charm that allowed Charlie the Tramp to become an Everyman.
In his lengthy discussion of Chaplin 's body of film, critic Gerald Mast briefly identifies one seldom discussed aspect of Chaplin 's work: the use of dreams and dream imagery. (1) In identifying a few dream sequences, Mast uncovers one of Chaplin 's essential tools as a director. In this discussion, I will expand Mast 's listing of dreams and examine Chaplin 's body of work by studying in depth the dreams themselves and their importance in the development of the character mask.
It is my contention that the dream sequences were essential to Chaplin the director in his development of a sense of pathos in the relationship between Charlie the Tramp and the film audience. By establishing and cultivating this tender relationship, Chaplin created an archetypal embodiment of the "American Dream": a character representing at once an exaggeration of our wildest hopes for success and our deepest fear of failure.
In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung identifies dreams as "involuntary, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche ... not falsified by any conscious purpose" (48). Using this definition, we may identify Chaplin 's dream sequences as moments of unconscious revelation for Charlie the Tramp that provide an opportunity for Chaplin the director to flesh out his creation. Freud himself set the stage for the application of dream analysis to film and art when he applied his psychoanalytical theories to both the living artist (2) and historical figures; (3) Carl Jung 's theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious gives English scholars an excuse to analyze both character and dream imagery in literature. (4)
By employing Jung 's definition, it may be concluded that the most effective manner of analyzing character in film is by a full examination of the character 's dreams. Such examinations give the researcher a better understanding of the character 's motivation for action. Because Chaplin built upon his "character mask" from one film to another, it becomes important to consider the dreams in his collective body of films to analyze the psychological makeup of his character Charlie the Tramp. There are two types of dream sequences in Chaplin 's films. The first category, full-scale dreams, includes detailed fantasies in which long-range goals reveal the elements of Charlie 's self-image--his desires and fears. In films such as The Gold Rush and The Kid, dreams disrupt the film just long enough to explore an alternative reality. In films such as His Prehistoric Past and Shoulder Arms, dreams serve as the major source of action. The second category, daydreams, includes short fantasies in which Charlie steps out of reality for a moment and redefines himself as an escape from his present situation. The daydreams interrupt the action just long enough to give the audience a peek into Charlie 's mind. Both dreams and daydreams employ stylized and exaggerated movement and inhuman acts of strength. The dream motif represents Charlie 's struggle to define himself in a cruel, punishing world.
Critics often dismiss Chaplin 's dream sequences as superfluous; for example, the major criticism of The Kid takes aim at an extravagant dream sequence that Bardeche and Brasillach claim adds little to the plot (215), and that Sir James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, calls a whimsical mistake (Robinson, His Life 63). McCabe in Charlie Chaplin identifies Chaplin 's tendency to use an occasional dream motif in which Charlie "reaches bliss" and then is "shocked" back into reality. Robinson traces Chaplin 's use of dream sequences back to a favorite act with the Fred Karno troupe. Gerald Mast identifies the dream sequences as a "prominent" tool during Chaplin 's years at Essanay and First National (chs. 6-8). But the majority of critics fall to recognize the importance of dreams for establishing a sympathetic pity between Charlie and the audience. The motif is actually one of Chaplin 's favorites for further defining Charlie the Tramp 's mask.
Dreams
The first instance of dreaming in a Chaplin film occurs in His Prehistoric Past (1914), his final work at Keystone. In the film, Chaplin plays a variation of the "Charlie" character, a prehistoric tramp named Weakchin, who wears a bearskin with his derby hat. After a brief competition with the caveman ruler (Mack Swain) for a woman 's affection, Weakchin throws his superior over a cliff and assumes leadership of the tribe. Swain 's character survives the fall and returns to club Weakchin over the head, awakening Charlie and the audience to the real world, where the Tramp dreamed the sequence while asleep on a park bench. If viewed without reference to other Chaplin films, His Prehistoric Past would be an effective exploration of the underdog versus the bully. Seen as a part of Chaplin 's collective whole, the film and Charlie 's dream/desire to conquer a figure much larger and more powerful than he add to the definition of the Little Tramp, allowing us a glimpse into his inner mind. The dream sequences identify a goal for Charlie and reveal his desire to meet that goal. From His Prehistoric Past we learn that the Tramp dreams of being strong enough to fight for and win over a woman.
Fantasizing becomes an essential theme in The Bank (1916), a touching film that hints at the complexities of Chaplin 's fully developed tramp. We first see Charlie on the streets, an apparent gentleman, strolling leisurely to his place of business. Once inside an office building, however, Charlie strips off his street clothing and assumes the role of a janitor, thus ending a brief fantasy and foreshadowing the dream ahead. His actions define the character, preparing us to step inside Charlie 's mind and better understand his dream.
The film then establishes Charlie 's unrequited love for a fellow employee played by Edna Purviance. Because we were convinced in the opening scene of Charlie 's gentlemanly status, we the audience become caught in the complex dreams inside Charlie 's mind. The use of this trickery by Chaplin establishes audience sympathy with Charlie because we understand the vast difference between who the character is and who he wants to be. His love interest ignores Charlie 's advances, and the Little Tramp, clutching a mop to his side, fails asleep in a back room. The ensuing dream involves a bank robbery in which Charlie, using superhuman intelligence and strength, rescues Purviance 's character and saves the day. He awakens kissing his mop.
McDonald, Conway, and Ricci call The Bank a beautiful blend of comedy and pathos. More important, however, the film demonstrates Chaplin 's thought process as a director; it marks his initial use of dream sequences to gain audience sympathy and further develop Charlie 's character. Additionally, The Bank remains unique among Chaplin 's early films because it does not have a happy ending. Donald McCaffrey gives an excellent chronological analysis of the films with forced happy endings before City Lights in an essay. McCaffrey believes that Chaplin wrestled with becoming a tragicomic figure, thus creating a flaw in such works as The Vagabond and The Gold Rush. He argues that dreams give the Tramp an easy way out of his situations. In his analysis, however, McCaffrey overlooks The Bank, where the dreaming Charlie awakens to loneliness. It may be seen as an early experiment by Chaplin concerning fantasy and reality as they relate to tragic and comic endings.
Chaplin 's next dream film, Shoulder Arms (1918), places the Tramp in World War I. The opening sequences establish him as a bumbling klutz, the worst soldier in a pathetic, though highly patriotic, unit. After a day of drills Charlie falls asleep and we dream with him about bravery and heroism. This time the dream details Charlie enduring the drudgeries of trench warfare on the front: Shells bombard the soldiers; rain pours from the sky and floods their bunks; Charlie uses a gramophone as a snorkel to take a nap in the flooded barracks. The extreme details establish Charlie as an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.
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Like the dream character in His Prehistoric Past, in Shoulder Arms Charlie uses inhuman strength, unquestionable bravery, and unprecedented luck to win victory. Charlie dresses as a tree and wanders through the forest to spy on the German army. When discovered, he hides among the real trees and simply knocks Germans on the head with his branches as they walk by. In another scene, after defeating an entire platoon of Germans, Charlie discovers a dwarfish German leader and promptly throws the fellow over his knee and spanks him. He single-handedly turns a machine gun on three ferocious Germans. Finally, using both strength and brains, he manages to outwit Kaiser Wilhelm, Prince William, and Field Marshall Von Hindenberg, capturing the three Germans while saving both a beautiful woman and a fellow soldier.
The most interesting segment of the dream attains a surrealistic quality far beyond the rest of the film. Wounded, Charlie seeks shelter and is nursed by a peasant, played by Edna Purviance, in a bombed-out house missing a wall. Charlie acts as if it were a normal home; he knocks at the door, locks it behind him, opens the window to look outside, and then pulls the window shade down before going to bed. This surreal set has perhaps the most dreamlike quality in the film; however, because of the devastation of the war, it is also one of the film 's most realistic touches.
At the end of the film, of course, Charlie the troop-in-training awakens from his dream to realize that he has not been to the front at all. Like the rest of us, Charlie can only dream about single-handedly defeating the German army. Instead, he must join his fellow troops and fight a real war. Critics fail to identify Chaplin 's use of exaggerated movement within the dream, thus failing to see that the entire film was intended to be a dream. After all, even on the best of days the Charlie character can hardly muster the strength to defeat a German machine gun nest or the leader of Germany him self. McCaffrey considers Shoulder Arms to be flawed, commenting that "especially disappointing is the cliche dream ending" (83), somehow attributing Chaplin 's use of the dream to his failure to think of another way to end the film. He fails to consider Shoulder Arms as part of Chaplin 's exploration of the use of dreams as a cinematic technique.
The fourth major dream is in Chaplin 's first full-length film, The Kid (1921). In one of the film 's most moving sequences, Charlie fails asleep and dreams that he and the kid (Jackie Coogan) go to Heaven, but the newly angelic Charlie falls to temptation. Despite having wings and an angel 's robe, he cannot flee the law, and a policeman shoots him down.
The dream in The Kid contradicts the themes of Chaplin 's earlier dream sequences; this time, Charlie escapes nothing. His dream becomes enveloped in real-life problems; so he struggles against the universe, even in his dream-heaven, which becomes an extension of reality and demonstrates Charlie 's inner conflict.
As I mentioned previously, the dream sequence in The Kid is one of the most criticized moments in Chaplin 's films. When seen in context with the previous dream sequences, however, it becomes a logical step in the development of Charlie 's character. The audience sees inside Charlie 's mind and understands both his fears and his shortcomings, realizing that Charlie and the kid cannot coexist. At the end of the film, when Charlie and the kid are reunited in real life, Chaplin chooses to leave the audience with questions: Will it be a happy ending? Has Charlie the Tramp been invited to leave the streets and live with the kid in his newfound wealth? Chaplin provides no answers.
Chaplin 's most famous dream sequence is in The Gold Rush (1925). Waiting for his new love and her friends to arrive at his cabin, Charlie begins fantasizing: He entertains the ladies with the dance of the oceana rolls, in which he uses inanimate objects (silverware and dinner rolls) in combination with his own face to form a character. This dream sequence identifies Charlie 's inner desires and also establishes audience sympathy because it is evident that no one is coming to the party. The audience experiences a sense of guilt while laughing at the Tramp, because they know his dreams are futile.
The final two dreams I will discuss are a part of Chaplin 's transition from comedy to tragicomedy, as demonstrated in the original opening sequence of City Lights (1931) and the recurrent dreams in Limelight (1952). In the final version of City Lights, the audience first meets Charlie during a grand ceremony in which a new statue is dedicated. A city official unveils the new statue and reveals a sleeping Charlie who, as he climbs down, places his body on various parts of the statue to gesture obscenely at the audience. The original opening of City Lights is an actual dream sequence; the opening image was to have shown Charlie winning kisses from a princess, but in waking, he was to have found that the kisses were actually from stray dogs (Robinson, His Life 397). This opening would have foreshadowed the story of City Lights, in which Charlie the Tramp attempts to gain the love of a blind flower girl, who believes him to be a wealthy man. The original opening was cut from the final production.
Having abandoned Charlie the Tramp after Modern Times (1936), Chaplin created new masks in his later films. Dreams are used to establish his new character Calvero 's past in Limelight. Chaplin plays a former music hall performer who dreams of being back on stage. Calvero 's first dream stops when he realizes that he plays to an empty audience. He performs his act again in a second dream, this time accompanied by a new partner, neighbor, and love interest, played by Claire Bloom. The dreams in Limelight achieve a bond between Calvero and the film viewer. By first showing Calvero on stage alone, Chaplin reveals the old man 's longing for the past. The audience also gains knowledge of his most intimate feelings when Bloom enters his memories.
Daydreams
In addition to dreams, Chaplin also uses brief daydreams in which Charlie fantasizes about overcoming immediate obstacles instead of long-range ones. The daydreams reveal Charlie 's inner thoughts without disrupting the flow of the film, and give the character a brief escape from what is happening to him. In addition, they provide an excellent arena for stylized movement and dance.
The first major daydream sequence occurs in Sunnyside (1919). After being hit on the head and knocked unconscious, Charlie rises and dances wildly through the forest, followed by a group of scantily clad wood nymphs. Unlike the previously mentioned dream sequences, this daydream has nothing to do with the rest of the plot and is a curious mix of fantasy and reality. Constance Kuriyama suggests that the dream world is partially real; at one point Charlie sits on a cactus and has to deal with very real pain in a and has to deal with very real pain in a ballet of exaggeration.
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A daydream added to the depth of the Tramp 's character in The Idle Class (1921). Charlie the Tramp watches a beautiful, wealthy woman ride by on a horse, and he immediately daydreams an incident in which the horse goes out of control, and he must rush to the rescue. The dream foreshadows the action of the film; the Tramp stumbles into a masquerade party, and the woman mistakes him for her alcoholic husband. In the daydream, Charlie the Tramp is a hero, but in the real world, he gets kicked out of the house. It is interesting to note the foreshadowing in the daydream; although Charlie is a hero in the fantasy, he must ride a burro to the rescue. This subtle image reminds the audience that Charlie will never reach the grand state of the woman he chases.
The brief daydream in The Circus (1928) establishes Charlie 's inner conflict. The sequence occurs when Charlie 's love interest (Merna Kennedy) falls for the show 's newest performer, a tight-rope walker. Chaplin the director uses superimposition to achieve the effect of the daydream, and the Little Tramp steps out of his own body and physically beats the tight-rope walker to win Kennedy. The daydream contradicts the actual outcome of the film when Charlie, going against what the audience knows are his real feelings, pairs the couple and helps them get married.
Charlie also daydreams of a perfect future with a character played by Paulette Goddard in Modern Times. Both homeless, they watch a couple kiss in a doorway as the man goes off to work. As a result, Charlie begins daydreaming, seeing Goddard and himself as a perfect couple in a perfect home. The daydream is contrasted with the future reality when Goddard finds them a dream house--a crumbling wooden structure that falls apart with the happy couple inside.
The dance with the globe scene in The Great Dictator (1940) is also, debatably, an instance of daydreaming. The daydreams in the previously mentioned films are well distinguished from reality. Chaplin uses either film technique (such as the superimposition in The Circus) or a physical state of waking/sleeping (Sunnyside) to separate those segments from the rest of the film. In The Great Dictator Chaplin 's evil character, Hynkel, pauses in mid-conversation as the daydream begins, and he even has the presence of mind to dismiss his assistant--"Leave me, I want to be alone"--before losing touch with reality. Before his assistant can leave, however, Hynkel manages to scamper up a curtain and then float effortlessly to the ground. The rest of the daydream comes in the form of a balletic dance reminiscent of the nymph dance in Sunnyside. Hynkel caresses, bounces, then waltzes with a balloon-globe of the world. He also has superhuman ability; leaping onto his desk without effort, he holds the entire world in his hands, bouncing it on his buttocks, then posing over it like a vulture and swooping down to snatch it into his arms. Although there is no definitive beginning to the daydream state, there certainly is an ending: Hynkel squeezes the globe too hard, and it explodes. This time the daydream is not used to achieve pathos, but it does reveal the innermost desires of Hynkel 's character and actually makes a prophetic statement about the dangers facing Chaplin and the audience in real life.
Finally, in addition to the prolonged dream sequence in The Gold Rush, Chaplin also uses a daydream to set the tone. For the first (and only) time in a Chaplin film, a supporting character daydreams. In a hallucinatory state, Charlie 's starving companion, played by Mack Swain, suddenly envisions Charlie as a chicken. In the daydream Chaplin exaggerates his movements in such a manner that he imitates an animal, kicking his legs and flapping his arms, inducing Swain to try to eat him.
One possible origin for Chaplin 's fascination with dreams may be identified. Comedian Stan Laurel (who worked with Chaplin when he was with the Karno Company, and who began his career as a Chaplin impersonator) writes that he and Chaplin both played in a Karno sketch called Jimmy the Fearless. The title character was a dreamer, and the sketch involved a series of dreams and fantasies in which Jimmy escaped reality and became a hero. Laurel originated the role, but he admitted that it was a perfect one for Chaplin and did not complain when Chaplin replaced him. Laurel believes that Jimmy the Fearless influenced the rest of Chaplin 's career:
You can see Jimmy the Fearless all over some of his pictures--dream sequences for instance. He was fond of them, especially in his early pictures. And when it comes down to it, I 've always thought that poor, brave, dreamy Jimmy one day grew up to be Charlie the Tramp. (qtd. in McCabe 36)
Conclusion
Chaplin 's dream sequences have been overlooked by critics, and in our reopening of the Chaplin canon, more attention should be paid to this technique of slowly revealing character nuances through dreams. Chaplin used the dreams to synthesize Charlie the Tramp with his audience, creating a character whom audiences can look down on while observing their own faults. Like all of us, Charlie struggles against the day-to-day pressures of life, yet somehow he remains contented, even when eating shoes, kissing mops, sleeping on park benches, or training to fight in the trenches. Chaplin 's Little Tramp emerges from the screen and impresses himself on our collective unconscious because although he fails to live up to our socioeconomic level, he dares to dream our dreams. Because of his dreaming, we understand what he desires and how badly he craves it. Because the dreams themselves are universal (about love and desire, superhuman strength, and glory) we the audience are drawn into a relationship with the character that Chaplin the director worked to create. It is for this reason that Chaplin 's dream sequences must not be dismissed as cliche. Rather they should be praised as essential in developing his character mask and completing the relationship among director, character, and audience.
DOI: 10.1080/01956059709602757
WORKS CITED
Bardeche, Maurice, and Robert Brasillach. The History of Motion Pictures. Trans. Iris Barry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1938.
Brill, A. A., ed. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. New York: The Modern Library, 1938.
Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. E C. Hull. New York: Pantheon, 1959.
Kuriyama, Constance. "Chaplin 's Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival? ' Film Quarterly spring 1992: n.p.
Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
McCabe, John. Charlie Chaplin. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1978.
--. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1978.
McCaffrey, Donald. "An Evaluation of Chaplin 's Silent Comedy Films, 1916-1936." In Focus on Chaplin. Ed. Donald McCaffrey. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1971.
McDonald, Gerald, Michael Conway, and Mark Ricci. The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin. New York: Citidal Press, 1990.
Robinson, David. Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
WORKS CONSULTED
Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
Gehring, Wes. Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Jung, Carl. Dreams. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1974.
Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: De Capo Press, 1975.
Lyons, Timothy. "An Introduction to the Literature on Chaplin." Journal of the University Film Association winter 1979: 3-10.
Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: De Capo Press, 1985.
NOTES
(1.) Mast only mentions the dreams in passing; the majority of his work defends the thesis that Chaplin should be revered as a great artist, and that his ability to physically "transform" inanimate objects into living/moving creatures is the strength of his art. Among Mast 's more interesting observations is that the ending of Easy Street is a dream, in which Chaplin defeats the bullying Erie Campbell, saves Edna, helps restore peace and prosperity to the streets, and celebrates. Mast explains, "[T]he dreamer does not awake; he passes the dream off to us as reality, all the while letting us know that the solution is less believable than any dream" (83). For the sake of this article, the ending of Easy Street is not a dream sequence, although Charlie 's ability to defeat his enemies and restore peace to his world is certainly consistent with other dream images.
(2.) See Sigmund Freud, "Creative Writing and Daydreams" [1908], in Brill 's Basic Writings. vol. 9, pp. 141-53.
(3.) See Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality," in Brill 's Basic Writings, vol. i 1, pp. 59-138, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955).
(4.) Psychoanalytical film study began with the work of Hugo Munsterburg in 1909 and developed across the century. Recently, the work of Christian Metz and Jean Louis Baudry explores the relationship of the viewer to the film and the film to the viewer. For an excellent discussion of psychoanalytical film theory and its place in the history of film criticism, see Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), ch. 8, and Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982).
DAVID J. LEMASTER is an instructor of theater at San Jacinto College, Pasadena, Texas, and a published playwright.
Lemaster, David J.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Lemaster, David J. "The pathos of the unconscious: Charlie Chaplin & dreams." Journal of Popular Film and Television 25.3 (1997): 110+. General OneFile. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
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Title:Charlie Chaplin in the age of Mechanical Reproduction: reflexive ambiguity in Modern Times
Author(s):Lawrence Howe
Source:College Literature. 40.1 (Spring 2013): p45. From General OneFile.
Document Type:Article
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2013 West Chester University http://www.wcupa.edu/ Full Text:
Charlie Chaplin produced Modern Times in the midst of social upheaval and professional peril: the Great Depression called into question the optimism that had surrounded the 'Machine Age, ' and the success of talking motion pictures threatened Chaplin 's cinematic career as a silent filmmaker and star. These factors have influenced a critical consensus that views Modern Times as resorting to exhausted Chaplin formulas and shying away from social criticism. In light of a careful reading of the reflexive gestures in Chaplin 's film and of primary documents of the period, Howe questions this consensus. Instead, his analysis interprets the reflexivity in Chaplin 's film as representations of production and consumption that emphasize the dynamism that these two economic forces exerted on society as a whole and on Hollywood in particular. The film 's double reflexivity, Howe concludes, establishes a parallel between Chaplin 's dilemma as a filmmaker and the equivocal cultural attitudes toward the influence of industrial technology on economics, politics, and aesthetics because both derive from the tension between technological change in society and the technological basis of art in the early twentieth century. In that intersection of forces, Modern Times reflects not only Chaplin 's own political and aesthetic concerns, but also the complex meanings that technology had acquired in both the production of culture and the culture of production.
Modern Times (1936) signals a notable shift in the career of Charlie Chaplin. To be sure, the film remains loyal to the practices of silent cinema on which he built his success, and it relies, albeit for the last time, on the popularity of Chaplin 's screen persona, the "Tramp," a loveable outcast victimized by institutional authorities, his own frailties, and plain old dumb luck. But the backstory of Chaplin 's career and of the production of this Depression-era film complicate its interpretation, as well as its meaning to American cinema in this crucial period of social and economic turmoil. Much of the difficulty surrounding Modern Times stems from the diverse conditions of Chaplin 's life and their influence on his art. His Tramp persona, informed by his own impoverished upbringing, represented class disadvantage to elicit the sympathy of audiences. And yet sympathetic identification with the Tramp was possible only if audiences disregarded the fact that off-screen Chaplin was one of the wealthiest screen celebrities of his day. ' Indeed, as a filmmaker Chaplin was the antithesis of the befuddled incompetent Tramp. By 1936 he was unique in his total control over his productions, as actor, screenwriter, director, producer, composer, and finally corporate entity. But with each passing year after the release of The jazz Singer (1929), Chaplin was increasingly aware that the growing demand for talking pictures in the marketplace threatened to make a silent-film star like him obsolete.
In the midst of social upheaval and professional peril. Chaplin attempted in Modern Times to reassert his relevance by representing 'machine-age ' culture as a profoundly destabilizing condition of contemporary society. His turn toward social critique coincides with the emerging maturity of film as an art form and the growing expectations that film could achieve much more than it had as a medium of light entertainment. No less a notable public intellectual than Lewis Mumford recognized the potential of film. For him, it was "a major art" of what he called "the neotechnic phase" of civilization, the next great development in the history of humankind (Mumford 1934, 343). He saw the technological evolution of society and the arrival of film as an optimal process of cultural convergence. Film has the power to advance the neotechnic phase, he reasoned, because it epitomizes the cultural role of the machine and thus "symbolizes and expresses, better than do any of the traditional arts, our modern world picture and the essential conceptions of time and space which are already part of the unformulated experience of millions of people to whom Einstein or Bohr or Bergson ... are scarcely even names" (Mumford 1934, 342). But the progress portended in Mumford 's theory of cultural history was no frit accompli. For all its wonder, the power of the 'Machine Age ' threatened to overwhelm society. But if by harnessing the machine, Mumford argued, cinema could integrate "the arts themselves with the totality of our life-experience," then society would self-consciously check the "omnipotence" of technology (344). (2)
Radical critics who inclined toward Marxism similarly stressed the social significance of film rather than its entertainment value, and two among them singled out Chaplin for criticism. Harry Alan Potamkin complained that Chaplin indulged in "maudlin pathos," and Lorenzo Rozas attacked him as "an accomplice to capitalism" in his pre-Modern Times films (Maland 1989, 138, 139). This criticism goaded Chaplin into thinking about modern society and the opportunities for film to address issues of importance. During his world tour in 1931-32 to promote the release of City Lights, the flattering attention he received from political and intellectual dignitaries, with whom he readily shared his views on politics and economics, burnished his standing not simply as a celebrity but as a man of consequence and bolstered his confidence in commenting upon serious matters. For example, with Albert Einstein he discussed the need to relieve workers of excessive hours, which occasioned the physicist famously to remark. "You 're not a comedian, you 're an economist." With Gandhi, Chaplin disagreed about the negative influence of machine technology, defending it as a labor-saving advancement (Maland 1989,130). His alternating sympathy for workers and his defense of technology in these high-profile exchanges provide a glimpse into the ambiguity that infuses Modern Times.
On the same tour, Chaplin also came into contact with popular audiences, and he readily associated the outpouring of public admiration from crowds of adoring fans with the suffering of the masses. (3) Although flattering, this fan adulation also imposed an emotional burden about which he wrote to Thomas Burke: "When those crowds come round me like that--sweet as it is to me personally--it makes me sick spiritually, because I know what 's behind it. Such drabness, such ugliness, such utter misery, that simply because someone makes 'em laugh and helps 'em to forget, they ask God to bless him" (Robinson 1985,456). Although he did not associate the misery he inferred from the crowds with industrial technology, an early experience working as a printer 's devil helped to make the connection between technology and the plight of workers that becomes central to Modern Times. He recalled being horrified by the enormous printing machine, instilling in him a kind of awe and fear of being devoured by it (McCabe 1978, 182). This personal experience made an account of Ford 's assembly line system, recollected in Chaplin 's autobiography, all the more compelling to him. In his own words, it was "a harrowing story of big industry luring healthy young men off the farms who, after four or five years at the belt system, became nervous wrecks" (Chaplin 1964, 383). In this recollection we can detect a direct influence on the Tramp 's factory experience in Modern Times.
Still, despite this jaundiced view of technology, Chaplin 's own success was achieved in an art form defined by technology. As he began work on Modern Times, more inclined than ever before to charge his art with a social critique targeting the industrial ideology that informed twentieth-century life, the film 's political thesis became somewhat tangled in ambiguity, equivocating between the terms of its own technological production and its production of a critique of technology. Noting Chaplin 's ambivalence is, of course, not a new idea, but heretofore Chaplin 's conflicted feelings have been attributed primarily to his struggle to combine entertainment and didacticism. 4 However, the ambivalence in Modern Times, I will argue, is specifically conditioned by Chaplin 's conflicted relationship with technology both in society and in art. The film 's dramatization of this tension shows how Chaplin 's political critique of technology confronts his artistic investment in technology in ways that also affect the politics of film reception. The collision between his evolving interest in social themes and his own exercise of power as the impresario of cinematic production produce a complexity and an unevenness that suggest both Chaplin 's lack of control over the narrative 's multiple meanings and his inability to fully comprehend them. Ironically, these cinematic difficulties mark the film as a gauge of its era. Chaplin 's struggle with the film and the Tramp 's continued failures within the narrative reflect the ways in which the intractability of the Great Depression perplexed the economists, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens who grappled with the vicissitudes of capitalism.
In this essay. I will examine the film 's own ambiguous stance toward its social critique, and show how the film 's unusual double reflexivity generates this ambiguity. Cutting both ways, the reflexivity in Modern Times suggests allegories of film production on the one hand and allegories of spectatorship on the other. ' Going beyond purely cinematic terms, I will argue that this double reflexivity derives from the tension in Chaplin 's attitudes about technological change in society and the technological basis of art, and highlights parallels between his dilemma and the equivocal cultural attitudes toward the influence of industrial technology on economics, politics, and aesthetics.
The film 's reflexive allegories of production register both Chaplin 's fascination with film technology and his antagonism toward institutional authorities typically identified with the control of technology. This antagonism led him to conflate the oppressive control of the Hollywood corporate structure with hierarchical control of Fordist industrialism. Conversely, the film 's reflexive allegories of consumption signal Chaplin 's anxieties about his ability to continue to satisfy the demands of his audience, but they also tap into widespread anxiety about the collapse of industrial society and its inability to satisfy the needs of its consumers.^ By acknowledging production and consumption as dynamic processes, the film 's reciprocal reflexivity enriches its representation of class and technological anxiety, and thus reflects the conflicts of the culture. In other words, because the film 's reflexivity operates in two directions, it comments on the dynamic social relationship between production and consumption--of supply and demand--that was central to both the experience of and the attempts to understand the Great Depression. Equally the film 's social critique turns inward on itself: as a Hollywood commercial film, Modern Times epitomizes the complementary relationship between production and consumption both as a critique of technological culture and a commodity produced by it.
THE TRAMP IN THE MACHINE
Modern Times signals its conflicts from the outset. Its optimistic self-description ("A story of industry, of individual enterprise--humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness") clashes with a jarringly ominous fanfare of discordant horns. The opening montage that follows carries the disquieting mood forward in the opening images: a large clock, dissolving first to a herd of sheep and then to a throng of people as they emerge from the subway on their way to work in a large urban factory, all punctuated with the rhythmically tense, minor-key soundtrack, periodically shifting to ascending modulations that increase the intensity. This opening montage reflects a kinship in technique and content with Fritz Lang 's Metropolis (1927), which framed the oppressive conditions of industrial labor similarly, as well as with the projection of daily routines in Dziga Vertov 's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), although with none of the celebratory playfulness of Vertov 's film. Inside the factory, Chaplin 's set also recalls Henry Adams 's awestruck description of the great hall of dynamos at the Paris Exposition in 1900. The large humming turbines, oversized switches, valves, and gauges convey the importance of American industrial power, just as for Adams "the dynamo became a symbol of infinity." However, rather than evoking Adams 's sublime perception of the "forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross" (Adams 1918, 380) or the menacing power conveyed by Lang 's Heart Machine in Metropolis, Chaplin 's gleaming factory is rather quickly converted into the arena of comedy. When the film focuses on the Tramp tightening a never-ending series of bolts on an assembly line, the viewer instantly recognizes the iconic figure as an agent of humor. Still, as the awkwardly vulnerable Tramp struggles to keep up with the pace of the assembly line and exhibits the stress imposed by a repetitive and accelerating work routine, Chaplin makes clear that he has enlisted the Tramp in order to engage with the pitched debates of the era.
Even before the Depression, industrial workers had grown increasingly anxious, justifiably fearing that they would lose either their jobs to automation or, if fortunate enough to remain employed, their identities as an impersonal, corporate bureaucracy threatened to turn men into automata. In taking up these contemporary concerns from the outset, Modern Times offers a perspective missing from the more unilateral cultural history of industrialization offered by Cecilia Ticchi in Shifting Gears (1987). Ticchi points to the increasing frequency of mechanized imagery and the prevalence of the American engineer as hero in the art and literature of this period as an expression of confidence in technology, and in the ability of the engineer to reshape the world in positive ways. The T92.8 presidential election of Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, shows the degree to which the culture had come to identify the profession with expert management. But the Wall Street Crash only eight months after Hoover 's inauguration and the economic decline that he oversaw throughout his single term in the White House shook the culture 's faith in the engineer 's competence.
The notion that unbridled technology was the solution to modern problems retained some currency even in the midst of the Depression, as summed up in the industrial boosterism of the motto of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago: "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms" (Official Guidebook 1933, TO. Howard Scott, the founder of the Technocracy movement, expressed still greater utopian confidence in his article "A Rendezvous With Destiny," published in a 1936 issue of American Engineer. Articulating the messianic vision of the movement, Scott zealously preached about the promise of technology in leading civilization out of the Depression. Technologically updating the nineteenth-century theme of Manifest Destiny, he declared, "God is good and God is kind. God provided this Continent with the greatest natural resources" (Scott 1936, Jo). Further, he warned that governments that interfered with the march of technology and the economics of abundance were obstacles that must be remedied radically. They "will be compelled in spite of their reluctance to meet this epochal issue in the march of civilization--an issue that has but one possible ending, the defeat and abolition of every political government on the Continent of North America" (Scott 1936, 9): But boosterism for technological progress omits half of the story. Chaplin 's portraits of the Electro Steel president (Allan Garcia), the impractical inventor of the Billows feeding machine (Murdock MacQuarrie), and the engineer trapped in the idle machinery of a decommissioned factory (Oscar Conklin), reflect a countervailing pessimistic attitude toward technology and its masters.
Unsettling signs that technology was not yielding ever-increasing prosperity were legible even before the Crash. Confidence in technology peaked in the mid-1920s, and then waned just as quickly before bottoming out by the early 19305, when "technological unemployment" was generally seen as a consequence of unchecked optimism. Writing in 1932, one commentator in Fortune magazine traced the crisis to an even earlier point, citing 1919 as the year when technological innovation began to increase productivity sharply, leading to a spike in technological employment by 1927. Even if one were fortunate enough to be employed, industrial practices, as the anonymous writer notes, had "replaced man permanently as a source of energy and ... installed him in a new and limitable function as a tender of machines" ("Obsolete Men" 1932, 91). In other words, industrialization was rendering workers into what the title of the article calls "Obsolete Men."
Surprisingly, Ticchi 's historical account also omits the influence of film. Writers and painters may have adapted engineering concepts as metaphors of their practices, as Ticchi notes, or become enthralled with images of industrial machinery or engineering marvels like the Brooklyn Bridge as a kind of homage to the technological direction of the culture, but filmmakers were the artists whose craft most directly participated in the 'machine-age ' ethos. Cinema, an art form utilizing numerous technologies, transformed conceptions of art and the role of the artist in ways that eluded traditional forms of representation. (9) The exponentially expanding cultural influence of cinema in this era made film a medium uniquely poised to address the issues in this public debate. Thomas Edison, the pioneer of cinema in the United States who personified the promise of engineering, recognized this emerging importance of film. He asserted his fervent confidence in its potential for education because the immediacy of images to stimulate cognition, he believed, outstripped the ability of text to impart information and provide instruction. Although his company produced many attractions for the Kinetoscope and the Vitascope, he considered film 's use for entertainment as a very low purpose, far short of its potential.
Virtually in tandem with the emerging prestige of Edison, Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the philosophy of American industrial efficiency through his extremely influential The Prinaples of Scientific Management (1910. Ticchi acknowledges the role of Taylor, who has been widely recognized by cultural critics and historians for his impact on a broad range of early twentieth-century practices. But what has been ignored with respect to film is that Taylor 's immediate successors in the field applied his principles via motion picture technology. Instead of simply observing the movements of workers when performing occupational tasks, the second generation of Taylorites filmed workers in order to analyze more carefully the steps of labor and devise more efficient solutions. As early as 1927, a textbook for scientific analysis of industrial processes, Time and Motion Study, included a chapter on "Taking Motion Pictures for Motion Study," in which equipment, lighting schemes, and camera techniques are detailed (Lowry, Maynard, and Stegemerten 1927). A subsequent chapter on "Film Analysis Procedures" methodically explains how the analyst should efficiently use their own film-study workstation to maximize the effectiveness of the analysis of a factory workstation. Thus, film technology itself was reaching into other arenas, lending credence to Edison 's expectations.
Yet despite Edison 's disdain for film as entertainment and the Taylorites ' use of film for extending practical efficiencies in the arena of labor, it was Chaplin 's Tramp, the polar opposite of the competent technician, who personified the early success of American cinema. And in Modern Times the Tramp combines the medium 's ability to entertain with its ability to challenge audiences to think. Although we cannot be sure that Chaplin was targeting Taylorism in the iconic factory sequence in Modern Times, the Tramp 's shortcomings in that work environment correspond strikingly to the deficiencies of the "poor" worker described in Time and Motion Study: Where the skill of an operator is considered to be poor after he has had sufficient time to learn the job, it will generally be found that he is a misfit--the so-called square pegin the round bole. He knows what to do but does not seem able to do it with ease. His movements are clumsy and awkward. His mind and his bands do not seem to coordinate. (Lowry, Maynard, and Stegemerten 1927, 209, emphasis added)
In contrast to Taylorism 's myopic emphasis on competent efficiency, Chaplin 's film--built around a "misfit" persona, outmatched by the demands of modern society--evoked humor, sentiment, and romance in order to entertain and to question the expert wisdom about the technological direction of society.
The three distinct segments in the factory episode displace the emphasis on output and, instead, stress the connection between the detrimental effects of machine technology on workers and the class hierarchy that separates capital from labor. At the head of Electro Steel Corp., the president sits idly in his quiet, spacious office, occasionally interrupting his contemplation of a jigsaw puzzle or his reading of newspaper comics to supervise his facility on a large screen. On the factory floor, we find the boss 's laboring counterpart, the Tramp, increasingly harassed by the repetitive motion of his task, the periodic acceleration of the assembly line ordered by the boss, and the hostile criticism from his foreman and co-workers further down the line. Seeking refuge from the hectic pace, the Tramp takes an unauthorized cigarette break in the workers ' bathroom, where the frenetically percussive score in the assembly-line scene gives way to a soothing soundtrack of lush legato strings. But the comfort of his languorous solitude is abruptly punctured when the video surveillance of the factory boss intrudes. Despite the comic surprise of the enlarged close-up of the well-dressed, glowering talking head--maximized by the sound of his voice in synch with his image ordering the Tramp to "Quit stalling; get back to work!"--and the startled defensive reaction of the comparatively diminutive Tramp at being discovered, this brief confrontation comments on the regimented duress of factory labor. The boss 's distrust of the worker echoes Taylor 's condemnation of "soldiering," the deliberate slowing down of work output, which, according to Taylor, "constitutes the greatest evil with which the working-people ... are now afflicted" (Taylor 1911, 14). Indeed, the boss 's supervision of all aspects of his company is not so much a version of Taylorism as a modernization of Bentham 's panopticon, blurring the difference between factory and prison, as well as anticipating the scrutiny that distinguishes Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (10) In the Tramp 's unauthorized smoke break, Chaplin maximizes the political and cinematic effects. The factory owner not only oversees his workers through technological surveillance but also appears magnified as an omnipresent power through his image on the screen.

Lunch break at the factory provides the Tramp his only sanctioned opportunity for relief, even if the residual effects of repetitive machine labor linger during his hiatus from the stressful routine. The Tramp 's respite is short-lived, however, once he is chosen as the guinea pig on whom to test the wonders of the Billows feeding machine, a contraption that abuses him no less than the assembly line 's unrelenting pace. The absurdity of utilizing a machine to perform one of the most fundamental of organic functions passes without comment. The ostensible benefit of this invention is that it allows the worker to be fed without interrupting his labor. But the utter failure of the machine to perform as advertised and the need to have at least one operator, if not more, denies any benefit at all, even if the contraption weren 't plagued by malfunction. The absurdity of the feeding machine implicitly questions the obsession with efficiency in Taylor 's system of scientific management. (11) But in light of the boss 's failure to note the absurdity of the phonographic salesman delivering the pitch when the inventor first introduces the feeding machine, we should also note how the inability of the feeding machine 's turntable to function efficiently suggests a comment on the early technology of sound film, which was often plagued by synchronization difficulties between the phonographic sound and the cinematic image. The factory boss 's rejection of the feeding machine as "not practical" echoes the complaints of studio executives who resisted adopting sound technology. Although Chaplin resisted sound technology for different reasons, the parallel that is subtly suggested between the Electro Steel president and the president of Charles Chaplin Films, Inc. will emerge more directly in the next segment of the sequence.
More broadly, however, the feeding machine scene critiques the fascination with the mechanical over the human. 'This conflict of man and machine emerges starkly in the third segment of the first factory sequence, the film 's most frequently referenced scene. As the boss continues to order an increase in the factory belt 's speed, the Tramp continues to struggle with the accelerating pace. Finally, driven by the compulsion to perform his task, he pursues his piecework into the machinery. Becoming one with the assembly line itself, the Tramp is drawn through the gears of the gigantic mechanism (see fig. 1). With a cymbal crash, the soundtrack transitions abruptly from the frantic pace that punctuated the images of the factory 's intensifying speed to a rubato lullaby with the delicate timbres of the celesta and piccolo. Once extricated from the belly of the industrial beast, the Tramp emerges transformed by his machine-induced trauma. His pestering antics toward his co-workers provoke them to chase him with the hope of subduing him, but this simply prolongs his interference with what was known during the period as the factory 's "continuous flow production" (Chase 1931, 41). Gaining the upper hand, the Tramp discovers that he can easily distract his pursuers by re-activating the assembly line, which causes them to return to their stations in a Pavlovian response. Their robotic attention to the machinery recalls the image that Stuart Chase invoked in Waste and the Machine Age, his critique of how industrial technology was wasting not just raw materials or money, but also human potential:
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED] There is a room filled with punching machines. In front of each machine stands a worker, feeding it pieces of steel by hand. A lever is geared to the mechanism, and to this lever the man is chained by a handcuff locked to his wrist. To look down the long room is to see machines, levers, and men in unison feed, punch, jerk back; feed, punch, jerk back. ... I have heard no other single task today which so closely approximates the gloomy prophets ' picture of the robot. (Chase 1931, 42)
Granted, Chase proceeds to a more sanguine view of the potential for technology to improve modern life than this excerpt might suggest. Likewise. Chaplin 's send-up of the automated factory mitigates the dire gloom of the most radical critics of the Machine Age. Wreaking havoc throughout the factory in a parody of the swashbuckling action that Chaplin 's friend Douglas Fairbanks made famous, the Tramp unleashes a carnivalesque chaos that delivers a rich comic payout. Simultaneously, it confirms his status as "misfit," for which society prescribes a stint in a sanitarium as the only remedy.
Chaplin 's humorous critique of technology is not limited to the regimentation of automated factories. The cross-section view of the Tramp being drawn through the gears and sprockets in the factory 's internal mechanism also projects the Tramp figuratively as film stock being drawn through the mechanisms of the camera and the projector. ': Thus, reflexively, Chaplin 's imagery conflates the political object of representation--industrial technology--with the means of representation--cinematic technology. Indeed, this image supports Walter Benjamin 's point about the difference between theatrical and cinematic performance: "The artistic performance of the stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera. ... Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance" (Benjamin 1969, 228). The Tramp 's sinuous route through the bowels of the factory mechanism reminds us that he is an image produced through the analogous machinery of cinematic technology, and registers Chaplin 's own equivocal fascination with technology: as both a yoke that burdens 'machine-age ' workers and a tool of artistic expression that propels his own professional success.
The similarities between how Chaplin recalled his attempt to renegotiate his contract with First National and this representation of the Tramp 's isolation multiply the meaning of this famous scene. Despite having eloquently explained that the extra costs entailed in making Shoulder Arms (1918) warranted First National to revise his contract, Chaplin surmised that he "might as well have been a lone factory worker asking General Motors for a raise" (Chaplin 1964, 221-22). Thus, the stress of his artistic life is reflected in the Tramp 's stressful alienation in the factory scene. Chaplin 's experience with the studio pointed a new direction in his career; in the following year, he formed United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, and DAV. Griffith, joined later by David 0. Selznick. Forming this collective was as much a political and artistic statement as it was a business strategy. For, as its founders told reporters, United Artists was a "declaration of independence from producers and exhibitors of 'machine-made ' films" (Maland 1989, 70). Just as these artist-rebels echoed America 's founding political rhetoric in their rejection of the tyranny of the Hollywood studios, Chaplin frames the Tramp 's factory experience to articulate his objection to both industrial oppression and Hollywood 's production demands.
Nor do the multiple meanings end there. In addition to the scene 's obvious appeal to a working-class audience likely to identify with the Tramp 's ordeal, it raises at least one other competing interpretation that signals Chaplin 's ambivalence about the power of technology in society and within the industry that afforded him considerable authority. The negative images of corporate power exploit popular anxiety about capital 's indifference to labor, but they project as well his resentment at corporate studio heads like those at First National. Yet the irony of these images is redoubled in light of Chaplin 's own total authority over his work and those who worked for him. From this perspective, the factory boss is an equivocal characterization that represents both the studio bosses Chaplin resented and Chaplin the filmmaker himself. The correlation extends beyond the comparable positions of authority held by the factory boss and Chaplin himself, and is reinforced in the ways that they wield their power. For example, the boss 's demands for "more speed" parallel Chaplin 's orders to his cameraman, Rudolph Totheroh. Much of Chaplin 's physical humor was derived from the Tramp 's sped-up, jerky movements, an effect achieved by slowing the speed of the hand-cranked camera from the standard speed of sixteen frames per second to fourteen or sometimes twelve frames per second, which standard projection speed would screen as the Tramp 's hyper-animated style of physical humor. So just as the president of Electro Steel Corp. calls for acceleration of the Tramp 's assembly line, Chaplin repeatedly harangued Totheroh to slow down his hand-cranking of the camera in these important comic moments to yield the sped-up action (McCabe 1978, 71).
Chaplin was a notoriously demanding director, and his cameraman was not the only one subject to his authoritarian will and single-minded dedication to the effect he was attempting to achieve. As Charles Chaplin Jr. recalled: Musicians ... endured purc torture. Dad wore them all out. Edward Powell concentrated so hard writing the music clown that he almost lost his eyesight and had to go to a specialist to save it. David Raksin, working an average of twenty hours a day, lost twenty-five pounds and sometimes was so exhausted that he couldn 't find strength to go home but would sleep on the studio floor. (Robinson 1985, 471-72)
The oppression described here fits uncomfortably with the film 's political rhetoric. Chaplin 's demanding treatment of his musicians, as well as the other artists and technicians whom he directed, recreates the oppression that he had objected to in forming United Artists and that the narrative of Modern Times criticizes. Thus, the film 's reflexivity articulates Chaplin 's own conflicts with respect to power and the technology associated with power, and these conflicts complicate the rhetoric of the film 's social critique.
THE DYNAMO AND THE GAMIN
If the film 's images of capitalist and laborer suggest a polarity between Chaplin 's role behind the camera and his representation on screen as the Tramp, then the audience 's identification is similarly manipulated in opposite directions. Just as the film promotes sympathy between the spectator and the Tramp, the factory boss and the spectator are allied as observing subjects who gaze upon the Tramp as observed object. Like the boss, the spectator watches the Tramp and demands a satisfactory performance from him. And when, for example, the Tramp is struck in the head by a falling beam in the shanty where he and the gamin (Paulette Goddard) hope to find domestic bliss, or he dives head first into knee-deep water, the spectator 's laughter helps to establish the audience 's distance from him, even as they generally sympathize with him as a victimized laborer.
Conversely, notwithstanding the delight the spectator may take in watching the Tramp 's subversive play, one cannot escape the control that the film exerts over this very act of watching. The slapstick tempo inhibits a viewer 's critical engagement with the film because the images and the narrative they construct proceed in an order and at a pace determined by the director. The film tropes its control over the spectator not only in the factory boss 's control over the assembly line but also, and to a greater degree, in the image of the Billows feeding machine. David James suggests that "a film 's images and sounds never fail to tell the story of how and why they were produced--the story of their mode of production" (1988, 5); in Modern Times, the same holds true of the story those images tell about how they are to be received, the story of their mode of consumption. Thus, if Chaplin uses the assembly line as a metaphor for how film and its visual effects are mechanically produced, then he deploys the feeding machine as a metaphor for how those effects operate on the film 's spectator.
During the demonstration of the Billows feeder, when the camera shifts its focus to the ear of corn on the rotisserie fixture of the feeding machine 's turntable, the spectator 's gaze is directed away from the Tramp to the mechanized food that he sees. This subtle, isolated focus explicitly signals how our identification with the Tramp in this sequence is to work. As the spectator gazes on the same rotating ear of corn which the Tramp is about to consume, one 's experience of watching the film analogizes that of the Tramp being mechanically force-fed, although without the assault that he endures for our entertainment. The framing and camera angle stress this analogy between the film and the motorized food, and thus acknowledge how the camera controls the audience 's gaze. For unlike a printed text, which a reader takes in at her own pace, pausing to question or to reread if so inclined, the film 's scale of images and editing pace (not to mention the emotional evocations of the soundtrack) control the spectator 's responses by determining what she sees, how, when, and for how long she sees it. Georges Duhamel expressed his distrust of film for precisely this reason: its motion, he contended, replaced the motion of one 's own thought. (13)
The film 's clearest statements about consumption emerge when the Tramp begins his relationship with the gamin. Immediately after having escaped the long arm of the law together, they observe a suburban homemaker waving her breadwinner off to work. Although the Tramp initially mocks this scene of domestic conventionality, his jest gives way to a daydream in which the gamin and he share a perfect middle-class bungalow. His fantasy of their attaining a piece of the American dream, a term whose coinage is attributed to James Trus-low Adams only a few years earlier in 1931, galvanizes them both (see Adams 1931. 414). In this narrative development, Chaplin projects the ideas of Horace Kallen, one of the most enthusiastic theorists of the consumer cooperation movement in the United States of this period and whose seminal volume Decline and Rise of the Consumer was published the same year that Modern Times was released. "In America," Kallen writes, "the primacy of the consumer is a postulate of the foundations. ' The American Dream ' is a vision of men as consumers, and the American story is the story of an inveterate struggle to embody this dream in the institutions of American life" (Kallen 1936, 198).
However, the Tramp 's version of the American Dream includes several distinctive updates. First, all of the same principles of efficiency that organized the modern factory are present in the home he imagines, including a cow who appears at the kitchen door as if on a conveyor belt to provide milk automatically on cue, without the labor of milking it. This reflects the inroads that Taylorism was making into American culture beyond the industrial sector. After World War II, the emphasis on home efficiency and domestic labor-saving machinery would accelerate further. Second, the Tramp 's fantasy reflects Thorstein Veblen 's concept of "pecuniary emulation," the propensity to indulge in escalating "conspicuous expenditure" out of a desire to conform materially, supporting a sense of social belonging (Veblen 1902, 1O, II). Accordingly, the Tramp 's fantasy and the gamin 's mutual embrace of it show how they have internalized the desires sponsored by the mass production and consumption of the 'machine age. ' Finally, the utter incongruousness of the Tramp 's daydream to his life here or elsewhere in Chaplin 's representation of him is noteworthy. The Tramp had not heretofore expressed anything close to this acceptance of conventionality. Indeed, a large measure of his appeal is no doubt a by-product of his indifference to the pressures to conform. What makes the Tramp 's experience different in Modern Times is the motivation that the gamin inspires in him. No sooner do they bond than he begins to imagine a life together, which prompts him to proclaim his willingness to work, to redouble his efforts as a producer, in order that she may enjoy the benefits of being a consumer.
The Tramp 's daydream conveys this quite clearly in the comfortable furnishings and conventional aesthetics of the fantasy bungalow, and especially in the gamin 's middle-class makeover. Gone is her waifish Peter Pan costume, tangled hair, and soiled face; instead, the Tramp imagines her in a stylish dress and an apron, a fashionable coiffure, and makeup, embodying contemporary standards of feminine beauty. If we compare our first glimpse of the gamin on the docks--stealing bananas and distributing them to hungry children while striking a pirate 's pose as she clenches a knife between her teeth--to her stylish domestic image in the Tramp 's daydream, we can track the source of the Tramp 's awakened motivation to work. The fantasy itself registers the allure of the prevailing tenets of material consumerism.
The consumerist ideal reaches its climax, appropriately, in the department store sequence. This important choice of mise-en-scene, the space that defined modern American consumerism, gives visual presence to the opulence of commercial goods provided by mass production. The department store scenes, moreover, emphasize the role of women as consumers. Like the Tramp 's daydream of home ownership, this episode reflects his eagerness to satisfy the gamin 's needs and wants. Department stores had long recognized that women exercised considerable economic power in their role as the purchasers of domestic goods. Marshall Field, the successful Chicago retailer hailed as a "mercantile genius" (Dennis 1906, 291), had drawn the lesson from his mentor, Potter Palmer, that women customers should be treated with utmost respect. Though Field recognized women 's power to a degree considerably short of Henry Adams 's reverence for Venus and the Virgin, he acknowledged his appreciation for women as consumers in a motto later adopted as the title of his biography, Give the Lady What She Wants! (1954). Thus, the department store became an extension of the home as woman 's sphere, a gendered space catering to women responsible for materially outfitting their homes and families in the image of respectability. '4 Reflecting the importance of this commercial institution, the department store in Modern Times thrills the gamin with its abundance, both creating and satisfying every consumer desire. In the cafe, she enjoys the only complete meal that she 's ever shown eating, and from the gusto with which she devours it, we might infer that it 's the first she 's had in a very long time. In the toy department she delights in the carefree experiences of childhood denied to one of her marginal existence. In the haute couture department, she swaddles herself in the luxury of a fur coat, obscuring her worn and filthy rag of a dress. And finally, in the furniture department, she sleeps in an actual bed furnished with fine linens, beneath a plush comforter that embraces her in its warmth, and surrounded by an excess of pillows. If the shanty she had found for them disappoints the expectations of the Tramp 's fantasy, the department store provides a glut of consumer goods that over-satisfies them, at least for one night.
Still, for all of its appeal to domestic satisfaction and its strategies of piquing women 's desires and facilitating their power as consumers, the department store is an institution in sync with mechanized culture. This large mercantile organization not only bureaucratizes commerce into different retail units, but also mechanizes the consumer 's exposure to its wares by using elevators and especially escalators to shuttle the shopper from department to department. The escalator provides Chaplin with an effective sight gag when he fails to escape the midnight burglars by attempting to roller-skate up the down escalator. But that gag doesn 't begin to measure up to the significance of the escalator as a corollary to the factory assembly line. Where modern industrialism achieves the mass production of goods on a mechanical assembly line, the mechanized retail operation uses the escalator analogously to assemble consumers, constructing their desire for commercial products by the tasteful arrangement of abundance and eye-catching novelty in each department. (15)
Of course, the Tramp and the gamin are not actual consumers in the retail sense; they have no real purchasing power, which in the circular logic of the Depression makes them both complicit in the cause of the economic stagnation and victims of it. Indeed, in Successful Living in the Machine Age (1932), department store magnate and sometime philosopher Edward Filene offered an unorthodox analysis of the prevailing social dilemma that the Tramp and gamin 's life together represents. Emphasizing the importance of consumption, not production, as a driver of the economy, Filene advanced the notion that the ability of the industrial age to satisfy human need depended on keeping wages sufficiently high and prices sufficiently low, and on workers having ample leisure without which "they will not become consumers on a sufficiently large scale" (Filene 1932, 12). (16) In other words, without the means to consume, workers like the Tramp cannot provide the demand that production seeks to satisfy. It 's perhaps not surprising that a philosophical department store owner would recognize that a favorable wage-to-price ratio is necessary to maximize consumption. But Filene appears to have uttered heterodoxy if we consider Chase and Schlink 's influential analysis of the misplaced emphasis on production during this period. They referenced the department store to underscore how a nearly universal fixation on "gross sales--the sacred cow of the retailer" fed into the '"make work ' theory--that production is good in itself regardless of its value to consumers" (Chase and Schlink 1935, 248). (17) Chaplin, too, would have been similarly sensitive to these conditions for consumption. As a filmmaker, he would have recognized that his own profit depended upon people having leisure time to fill and sufficient expendable income to continue to be part of a ticket-buying audience.
In this regard, the film 's reflexivity with regard to consumption represents Chaplin 's ongoing concern as a filmmaker. Modern Times, like all Hollywood films, is a product of mass consumption. As a producer of such products, a filmmaker must be concerned with the likelihood of return on the investment in production. But unlike other saleable merchandise, in which price is calculated largely from cost, the return on a Hollywood film is determined not by a cost price ratio but by volume of ticket sales. (18) Thus if a film 's production costs escalate, return on that investment depends on increased consumption--that is, on demand. Satisfying that demand with any given film is a function of novelty. (19) Chaplin, a remarkable innovator first in pantomime and later in developing his pantomimic talent to construct sustained narratives, had an impressive record of satisfying audience demand. But by 1936 his screen persona was no longer very novel. And as Benjamin notes, the screen actor 's relationship to the camera never enables him to forget the audience: "While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market" (Benjamin 1969, 230. Although Chaplin continued to rely on the Tramp 's silent pantomime, the market had been transformed by Hollywood 's leap into talking pictures.
Chaplin 's persistence as a silent actor long after the talkie had become the industry standard gave rise to a perception that he was resistant to innovation, clinging to an outmoded form of cinema. But Modern Times is a silent film in only the strictest sense; Chaplin adopted sound technology in a number of inventive ways. The effects of his strategic use of sound undermine the charge that he was timid, regressive, or anti-technology in his cinematic approach. Indeed, Modern Times includes a number of instances in which the sound of the human voice is heard, but the speech represented on screen is almost exclusively mechanically reproduced--by phonograph, radio, or most strikingly in the mediated image of the factory boss 's talking head. (20) And this crafty use of the new cinematic technology thematically matches the narrative by implicitly criticizing the imbalance of power between a capital class that controls the technology through which it articulates its demands, and a laboring class silently subjected to capital. Without the ability to talk, working-class individuals like the Tramp are reduced to a figurative state of infancy--in the etymological sense, from the Latin infilms, meaning "not able to speak"--a state that he overcomes in his swansong cabaret performance, albeit imperfectly. For while the Tramp finally raises his voice, he sings nonsense lyrics in place of those he has failed to memorize. The story in the song is performed more effectively, as Chaplin insisted of the best acting, in pantomime rather than in words. The Tramp is a hit, and his success yields the elusive promise of steady work. In other words, to maximize the irony, the Tramp--Chaplin 's silent persona--finally succeeds in the one job that requires him to use his voice. Although Chaplin may appear to have been stuck in practices upon which he had relied throughout his career, he instead employed the new sound technology judiciously to arrive at an innovative critique of both class and the dubious merits of much sound cinema.
Of course, there was no turning back to the silent mode once the Tramp 's long-awaited voice had been heard, even if he uttered only gibberish. But within Modern Times, Chaplin found himself precariously balanced between criticism of a society that had mechanized itself into an intractable economic depression, and artistic expression that relied on analogous methods of technological production. Through the medium of film, Chaplin deploys representations of technology that offer self-referential analogies: to his control over cinema, and to cinema 's control over the imagination of the spectators whose attention is dominated by the images that the film parades before them. In this complex of tropes, he synchs up Modern Times with the uncertainties of its moment.
Chaplin 's balancing act, appropriate for a physical comedian who often teeters on the brink of danger, enables us to see Modern Times as a successful film in its own right. But it also realigns the either/or contentions within the culture-industry debate as both/and propositions. Granted, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have reason to criticize the "Culture Industry" as a powerful institution serving the capital interests of the status quo against the individual. But Chaplin 's film challenges their sweeping generalization that the culture industry "perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises ... the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1997, 139). To the contrary, the reflexivity of production and consumption that Modern Times employs asks the audience to recognize its critical engagement with mechanized society, rather than simply offering "[a] commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape" (139). Having challenged the vertical organization of the studio system, Chaplin based his practices on artisans ' principles, not on the industrial hegemony that characterizes Horkheimer and Adorno 's view of modern culture gone awry. This is not to tip the balance in the direction of Benjamin, whose astute analysis in "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" includes the overly confident claim that, within a popular art form like film, "the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide" (Benjamin 1969, 234). To the contrary, because Modern Times is a technological product that taps into popular anxiety about technology to evoke the audience 's sympathy for the Tramp as a technological victim, the film allegorizes cinema 's authority over its audience while obscuring the actual power of its maker through his role as a beleaguered character who wins the audience 's sympathy. In other words, contra Benjamin, the film effectively short-circuits the merger of popular and critical reception. By projecting the dilemma in his own technologically invested critique of technological society, Chaplin occupies a complex position not reducible to either of these critical poles.
Observing this dynamic reflexivity in Modern Times is not to argue that all films operate in this way, but the presence of this reciprocal tension in Chaplin 's film offers an irreducible resistance to polemics while merging his two objectives: entertainment and critique. As the product of a particular historical moment of transition in cultural attitudes about technology and about cinema, Modern Times marks an intersection of the technological production of material goods and art. Grave doubts had arisen about the promise of industrial technology to meet social and economic needs, and silent film had given way to sound film. In that intersection, Modern Times reflects not only Chaplin 's own political and aesthetic concerns, but also the complex meanings that technology had acquired in both the production of culture and the culture of production.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Henry. 1973. The Education of Heniy Adams. Edited by Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton MifRin.
Adams, James Truslow. 1931. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Anderson, Sherwood. 1970. Perhaps Women. Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Bix, Amy Sue. 2001. Inventing Ourselves Out of fobs?: America 's Debate Over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chaplin, Charles. 1964. My Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Chase, Stuart. 1931. Waste in the Machine Age. New York: League for Industrial Democracy. Chase, Stuart and F. J. Schlink. 1935. Your Money 's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer 's Dollar. New York: Macmillan.
City Lights. 1931. Directed by Charles Chaplin. DVD. Chatsworth: Image Entertainment, 2000.
Dennis, John Jr. 1906. "Marshall Field, A Great Mercantile Genius." Everybody 's Magazine 14 (March): 291-302.
Epstein, Edward Jay. 2010. The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. Brooklyn: Melville House.
Filene, Edward A. 1932. Successfid Livingin the Machine Age. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
Hite, Christian. 2002. "Eating/Machine: Discipline, Digestion, and Depression-era Gesticulation in Chaplin 's Modern Times." Spectator, 21.2 (Spring): 40-55.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1997. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." In Dialectic ofEnlightenment, translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum.
James, David. 1988. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kallen, Horace. 1936. The Decline and Rise of the Consumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Cooperation. New York: Appleton-Century.
Kamin, Dan. 1984. Charlie Chaplin 's One-Man Show. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Lancaster, Bill. 1995. The Department Store: A Social History. London: Leicester University Press.
Lowry, Stewart M., Harold B. Maynard, and G. J. Stegemerten. 1927. Time and Motion-Study, and Formulas. for Wage Incentives. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Lynn, Kenneth S. 1997. Charlie Chaplin and His Times. New York: Simon & Schuster. Maland, Charles J. 1989. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McCabe, John. 1978. Charlie Chaplin. New York: Doubleday.
Man with a Movie Camera. 1929. Directed by Dziga Vertoz. DVD. Chatsworth: Image Entertainment, 2002.
Metropolis. 1927. Directed by Fritz Lang. DVD. Hollywood: Paramount, 2003.
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Robinson, David. 1984. Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Scott, Howard. 1936. "A Rendezvous With Destiny." The American Engineer, 6: 8-10, 24.
Smith, Julian. 1984. Chaplin. Boston: Twayne.
Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From "Don gixote" to jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press.
Taylor, Frederick Winslow. 1911. Principks of Scientific Management. New York: Harper Brothers.
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NOTES
I am grateful to the astute suggestions that my colleagues Mike Bryson, Regina Buccola, Kim Ruffin, and Janet Wondra provided on an early draft; to the responses to different parts of my interpretation from my Roosevelt students; and to the constructive comments of the two anonymous readers of the journal. Special thanks to Graham MacPhee and Elizabeth Lukens at College Literature, and to Arnold Lozano at Roy Export S.A.S.
(1.) I am not suggesting that the public was ignorant of his celebrity status. As Charles Maland notes, Chaplin made every effort to flaunt his celebrity in his serialized memoir of his 1931 world tour, A Comedian Sees the World. And in a 1932 New York Times article, "Ten Men Who Stand as Symbols," which grouped Chaplin with the Prince of Wales, Mussolini, Stalin, the Pope, Ford, Gandhi, Lindbergh, Einstein, and Shaw, Chaplin was presented as being able to personify oppositions: he was "the highbrow who happens to be a hobo, the duke who was only horn a dustman, the utterly genteel who is utterly shabby" (Maland 1989, 132). However, the propensity of audiences to identify sympathetically with the Tramp within the sentimental comic narratives of his invention induces a suspension of awareness of his off-screen identity.
(2.) Despite his enthusiasm for film as means of achieving the "neotechnic phase," Mumford criticized nearly all American filmmakers for squandering film 's potential by indulging "scarcely adolescent fantasies, created and projected with the aid of the machine," thereby making "the machine-ritual tolerable to the vast urban or urbanized populations of the world" (Mumford 1934, 319).
(3.) Indeed, the original title for Modern Times was "The Masses." It was abandoned because of its echo of the title of the radical socialist journal.
(4.) See Maland, who describes Modern-limes as a "case study of ambivalence about the relationship between aesthetics and ideology" (1989, 143).
(5.) In considering the reciprocal reflexivity in Modern 7 Ymes, I am indebted to Robert Stam 's remarks on allegories of production and spectatorship (chapters 1 and 2). Modern Times appears to stand alone in combining the two. To be sure, Keaton deployed the one in The Cameraman (1928) and the other in Sherlock Jr. (1924), but I can think of no other example contemporaneous with Chaplin or later that deploys both in one film.
(6.) These interdependent forms of reflexivity position the film between the two poles that David James ascribes to a much later distinction in the historical development of the medium, between industrial cinema, which emphasizes film as commodity, and alternative cinema, which reimagines and restructures the relationships among those engaged in the process from production to consumption. See especially the first section of "Considering the Alternatives" (James 1988, 3-12).
(7.) Scott weds laissez-faire economics and Calvinism to his technological vision when he declares that: Floods and droughts are the warning of Providence that we citizens of this Continent had better mend our sinful ways. Agro-technology is on the march with its Faraday Fluid Feeding Process or tank farms. Droughts will force the further economic liquidation of farmers in the United States and Canada. This forcing is seen as a providential blessing for it simultaneously compels the introduction on a commercial scale of agro-technology, by which man for the first time in his history will no longer be dependent upon the fertility of soil and the vagaries of the weather. Technocracy wishes to express its thanks to this providential aid. (Scott 1936, 10, 24)
Although the title of his article quotes Roosevelt 's famous phrase, his antagonism toward New Deal policies could not have been more pointed. He singled out only these few words from the presidential speech as "significant" and dismissed the rest as "irrelevant" (Scott 1936, 24).
(8.) See Bix 2001, especially her first chapter.
(9.) See Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tahjian (1986) for an account of the esthetic fascination with machines and machine design in the work of a wide array of visual artists. Indeed, Chaplin himself served as a readily identifiable figure for artists who tapped into the ethos of the 'machine age, ' as can be seen in Hart Crane 's explicitly attributed poem "Chaplinesque" (1933) and in Ferdinand Leger 's painting "Chariot Cubiste" (1924). The latter inspired Leger to collaborate with George Antheil on an animated film, Ballet Micanique (1924), in which the Tramp interacts with a variety of traditional art objects such as the "Mona Lisa." Sherwood Anderson 's Perhaps Women, a meditation on the 'machine age ' as an assault on masculinity, includes an account of his visiting a factory at night where he witnesses the ghostly image of the late-shift workers. Frightened by the imposing presence of a road-building machine, he identifies with Chaplin to express his sense of vulnerable impotence: I became a Charlie Chaplin that night by the mill gate. I was, to myself at least and for the time there in the half darkness, just the grotesque little figure Chaplin brings upon our screen. He, Chaplin, ... the little figure with the cane, putting the hat back correctly on his head, pulling at the lapels of his worn coat, walking grotesquely, standing blinking thus before a world he does not comprehend, can not comprehend-- Brushing his clothes, as I was doing with a soiled pocket handkerchief--"he would have been" I thought, "just the one to run as I had done from an idle road-making machine, thinking it a man, his quick rather fragile mind and feeling upset--his eyes distorting things as I so often do." (Anderson 1970, 95-6)
(10.) See Foucault for an analysis of the panopticon 's oppressive scrutiny (1979, 195-228). He also stresses the importance of "disciplinary power. ... exercised through invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility" (187). The correspondence of this power of vision is central to film. In Chaplin 's narrative, the prison is ironically the one place the Tramp comes to prefer.
(11.) See Hite (2002), who develops a complex argument about the importance of eating and the deprivation of the Great Depression that draws on post-structural analysis of historical influences such as the efficiency obsession in industrial America in this period.
(12.) Dan Kam in also observes this allusion in a caption under a photograph of this image, but he sees this as merely reinforcing "Chaplin 's confrontation with sound movies" in this film (1984, 114). Julian Smith more pointedly reads this scene as "a playful commentary on the internal and external pressures upon Chaplin to keep up his level of productivity, to keep the films moving on his own assembly line" (Smith 1984, 99). However, although Chaplin did announce rather ambitious plans for his output, he had settled into a much more deliberate pace which slowed his output considerably in this period of his career. So he seems not to have responded to those particular pressures. In fact, it seems hard to imagine that Chaplin would have considered his own process under United Artists to be an assembly line. To the contrary, the company was formed by film artists who resented being treated as interchangeable parts in the Hollywood machinery, for the express purpose of reclaiming control of their art.
We might also note that this glimpse into the inner workings of the factory-belt machine replicates the emphasis of the early advertisements for Edison 's Kinetoscope and Vitascopc in the United States and for Lumiere 's Cinematographe in France, thus subordinating the content or effect of film "to the performance of the apparatus and the display of its magic" (James 1988, 7).
(13.) The Billows feeding machine sequence is complemented by the later factory scene in which the Tramp assists a supervising mechanic (Chester Conklin) in preparing a decommissioned plant to resume production. Reversing the terms and conditions of the visual rhetoric, the Tramp 's incompetence in the later episode leads to the mechanic being devoured into the machine, not the Tramp. The reversal is extended when the lunch whistle blows, for it is not the Tramp who is fed, as in the demonstration of the Billows machine, but rather he who feeds the supervisor trapped in the machine. The Tramp 's role reversal from eater to feeder corresponds to the split between Chaplin 's positions as both character in and creator of the narrative.
Walter Benjamin references Duhamel 's distrust of film as manipulating the spectator 's thought process, although it is a notion that Benjamin rejects. He argues instead that the interruption to the spectator 's typical "process of association ... constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind" (Benjamin 1969, 238).
(14.) Veblen makes a comparable point, noting that "vicarious consumption" and "vicarious leisure" are functions performed chiefly by the wife in bourgeois families (Veblen 1902, 79 '85).
(15.)Of course, the stimulation of desire begins even before a shopper enters the store with advertisements and the spectacle of window displays. The analogy of windows to movie screens is particularly apt with department store displays. Sec Lancaster who attributes the showmanship of retail displays to L. Frank Baum, who adapted his early work managing his family 's theaters to his involvement in Chicago retail (Lancaster 1995, 64).
(16.) In addition to making this plain in his introductory chapter, Filene focuses in chapter 2 on the importance of buying power to a sound economic system.
(17.) Rejecting this theory, Chase and Schlink bluntly asserted that "Man does not live to keep money in circulation; money circulates to help him live. If it does not, the whole economic system had best be scrapped as the last word in topsy-turvy nonsense" (Chase and Schlink 1935, 248).
(18.) Epstein 's recent analysis of Hollywood finances reveals a much more complex arrangement of licensing agreements in the contemporary era.
(19.) The demand for novelty is not exclusive to film. Veblen 's analysis of taste and fashion emphasizes the transitory qualities of novelty that generate shifts under a "canon of reputability" under which "anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears off" (Veblen 1902, 177).
(20.) In the opening scene of City Lights (1931), Chaplin mocks the importance of speech by distorting the orations of civic dignitaries at the dedication of a statue into a cacophony of squawks, subtly ridiculing the enthusiasm for the cinematic innovation of talking pictures. However, this opening satire of talkies in City Lights is undercut by the end of the story. This film explicitly emphasizes the relevance of vision by enabling the Tramp to be mistaken by a blind woman (Virginia Cherrill) as a man of considerably higher means. Structured around the disparity between what she imagines and what the audience can see, City Lights conveys the pathos of the Tramp 's sacrifice in fulfilling his beloved 's dreams by giving her the money to restore her sight, and thus the means both to see and to elevate her status from street vendor to the proprietress of a legitimate flower shop. However, the full irony of the ending turns on the ability of the now-sighted woman to recognize the Tramp 's voice--a voice that we cannot hear--coming from the disheveled Tramp she now sees before her. In this epiphany, she realizes the true class identity of the man who rescued her. Thus, while the power of the spectator 's vision as opposed to the beloved 's visual deficit generates the conflict, the story 's reliance on her ability to hear what we cannot exposes the approaching limit of Chaplin 's engagement with the silent film.
LAWRENCE HOWE is Professor of English at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the author of Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority (Cambridge, 1998). His scholarship covers a wide range of topics from the NAMES Project 's AIDS Memorial Quilt to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Howe, Lawrence
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Howe, Lawrence. "Charlie Chaplin in the age of Mechanical Reproduction: reflexive ambiguity in Modern Times." College Literature40.1 (2013): 45+. General OneFile. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
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Title:The lost transcendence of Woody Allen: from "Divine Comedy" to Celebrity
Author(s):Sam B. Girgus
Source:Post Script. 31.2 (Winter-Spring 2012): p43. From General OneFile.
Document Type:Essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2012 Post Script, Inc. http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/litlang/PostScript.htm Full Text:
For more than a decade, Woody Allen achieved a special realm of comedic genius and greatness in film that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes as "Divine Comedy." At least in American literature, humor, and film, few have gained such status over an extended period of time. Mark Twain 's writings and Charlie Chaplin 's great American film comedies immediately come to mind for comparison to Allen 's work in our own time. So perhaps it should be enough for Allen 's ultimate critical reputation in cinematic and comedic history that several of his films over a dozen years from Annie Hall (1977) to Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) qualify for this special category of achievement and success. However, in Allen 's case, a comparison in terms of Levinas 's idea of "Divine Comedy" of his classic films to his films made after 1990 offers important insight not only into his work in particular but film comedy in general, especially the comedy that either aspires to or disclaims a form of transcendence.
Levinas 's notion of divine comedy appears in one of his most widely published essays, "God and Philosophy." The term constitutes another elucidation of his "first philosophy" of ethical metaphysics that established him as a key player in an expanding circle of thinkers that began in his youth as a student with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, went on to Jean-Paul Sartre during the post-war years of his development in Paris, and continued through the maturity of his discourse with Jacques Derrida. In his engagement with all of these thinkers, Levinas diverged from dominant intellectual trends and movements to carve out his own understanding of the relationship of ethical experience to modernism. He proposed to place a priority upon ethics over ontology, pluralism over totality, transcendence over empirical conceptualization. While Sartre expounded a philosophy of freedom based on the idea that existence precedes essence, Levinas proclaimed responsibility to the other takes precedence over one 's self.
The divine comedy constitutes another articulation of this ethical philosophy. For Levinas, divine comedy suggests the paradox of the impossibility of the inescapable moral demand that responsibility and the other places upon the individual. This understanding dramatizes the incomprehensible gap between the finitude of human understanding and emotion and infinite moral demand and responsibility. Levinas maintains that "divine comedy--hollows out a desire which cannot be filled, nourishes itself with its very augmentation, and is exalted as a desire, withdraws from its satisfaction in the measure that it approaches the desirable" (139). For Levinas, the desire of divine comedy inherently connects to the infinitude of his ethical metaphysics. He asserts this relationship when he argues for the need for the return of the word "transcendence" which "has to be put back into the significance of the whole plot of the ethical or back into the divine comedy without which it could not have arisen" (141). Thus, the desire of divine comedy, as Levinas describes it, makes transcendence possible. As Derrida writes of desire in Levinas, "Desire is equal only to excess. No totality will ever encompass it. Thus, the metaphysics of desire is a metaphysics of infinite separation" (93).
Divine comedy helps to realize for Levinas an intimate expression of the difficult concept of the unfathomable infinite. It humanizes and personalizes this complex notion, putting it in tangible experience and making it accessible in ways that escape other forms of expression. Levinas writes, "That comedy is enacted equivocally between temple and theater, but in it the laughter sticks to one 's throat when the neighbor approaches--that is, when his face, or his forsakenness, draws near" (141). The contrast and tension between the sanctity of the temple and the entertainment of the theater encapsulates the value of divine comedy to Levinas 's philosophy. Divine comedy establishes a bridge between the freedom and license of dramatic expression and the search for transcendent signification in the temple; or, put another way, it dramatizes the connection of the mundane and profane to the moral and spiritual. It, therefore, also structures the interaction between these conflicting forces of the theater and temple. Theater and temple function in mutual dependence. The communication of the theater and the solitude of the temple work on and transform each other, so that the spiritual becomes a form of performance while drama stimulates and articulates the deepest and most profound depths of belief and hope.
Accordingly, divine comedy incorporates the tension and connection between the narcissism of the theater and the devotion of the temple into the psychology of social interaction. Divine comedy articulates the daily drama of social behavior and personal crisis. Levinas recalls how "Plato forces out of Aristophanes an admission which, coming from the lips of the master of comedy, is striking indeed: "These are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another '" (139-40). As opposed to suggesting the frivolous and the superficial, divine comedy actually constitutes powerful social criticism and action.
To Levinas, the source and the means for countering the alienation Aristophanes speaks and describes comes from his conception of the face. The face, as Levinas says, "draws near," introducing the unavoidable difference, humanity, and priority of the other.
Levinas insists upon "the summons which comes to me from the face of a neighbor" (145). Divine comedy makes the face-to-face relationship possible, tangible, and inevitable. The face-to-face turns all human connection into an "ethical moment" (148) of total responsibility for the other. As Derrida states, "Beneath solidarity, beneath companionship, before Mitsein, which would be only a derivative and modified form of the originary relation with the other, Levinas already aims for the face-to-face, the encounter with the face." Derrida further explains, "Without intermediary and without communion, neither mediate nor immediate, such is the truth of our relation to the other, the truth to which the traditional logos is forever inhospitable" (90).
At once thoroughly contrived and artificial, perfectly human, and powerfully suggestive, Charlie Chaplin 's "Tramp" invariably conveys the sense of the face in Levinas 's philosophy. In such Chaplin classics as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and Modern Times (1936), the face of the Tramp compels attention, not only for its surface eruption of sentiment and pathos but also for its suggestion of the recognition of a moral demand that exceeds mere physical appearance. The drama of the face tops off the physical action of the body in its defiance of opposition of all kinds. The impossibility of the body 's achievements on rooftops in pursuit of the van taking abandoned Jackie Coogan away, on icy slopes and in a teeter tottering gold rush shack and on skates by a large, gaping hole in a modem department store 's upper floor all confirm some kind of invisible force of spirit and will that sustains Charlie Chaplin. The acrobatics and gestures of Chaplin 's Tramp regularly make the extraordinary the ordinary.
As the body of the Tramp invariably achieves the impossible and triumphs over overwhelming physical and human obstacles, the face takes the action to another realm. The physical and emotional turmoil of the Tramp as he plays a little David against armies of material and human enemies becomes a springboard for the drama of the face that insists upon imposing a moral and ethical dimension upon events and activity. The face in conjunction with the body turns Chaplin 's adventures into a divine comedy. The overwhelming gap between the Tramp 's intention and the object of his action anticipates the search in his personal drama for a meaning to experience that challenges final and total understanding. Thus, the desire enacted on the Tramp 's face also informs each scene with the quality and intensity of the spiritual desire that Levinas characterizes as crucial to the divine comedy. Leaving aside the biographical facts of Chaplin 's actual off-screen love life, the desire on screen of the Tramp and the abandoned child in The Kid, the blind flower girl in City Lights, and the lovely waif in Modern Times expresses the desire of the ineffable and inconceivable. (1)
The genius of Mark Twain 's verbal and literary humor in suggesting divine comedy compares to the visual and performing achievement of Chaplin in film. Twain, of course, in "How to Tell a Story" (1897) articulated a provocative, persuasive, and highly intelligent theory of humor based on incongruities, absurdities, and exquisite timing. However, as Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill have shown repeatedly, Twain in practice exceeded even the brilliance of his verbal gymnastics in his greatest works, including what Blair characterizes as "Mark Twain 's Other Masterpiece" (333), a short story entitled "Jim Baker 's Blue-Jay Yarn" that appeared in A Tramp Aboard (1880). (2) Twain manages in this story to humanize and personalize a hermit and crazy bird into a community of souls who gain a special moment of contact and communication.
The classic films of Woody Allen also aspire to such excellence. Many writers and critics in the past have compared Allen with both Chaplin and Twain. Similarly, innumerable critics and reviewers have noted the mixture of tragedy and comedy in Allen 's greatest work. In retrospect, such films as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1983), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) grow in stature. The drama for most of these films--at least the best of them goes beyond the boundaries of the two rivers on the edges of Manhattan to a mise-en-scene of what I have been discussing as Levinas 's divine comedy. Just as these films often exceed the repertoire of sight gags, jokes, and absurdities of classic Allen comedy to dramatize the development of character and relationships, they also engage serious questions of ethics and morality. The tension and interaction between theater and temple in such films open the stage of dramatic action to issues that challenge representation. To provide some examples from among these films, the desire at the center of Annie Hall vibrates with an awareness of the ethical meaning of time; Manhattan echoes the moral outrage of the jeremiad as Isaac points to a skeleton as a sign of our common destiny and our common moral responsibility; Hannah and Her Sisters shatters illusions of moral and existential certainty; Crimes and Misdemeanors remains a triumph in cinema of Allen 's synthesis of both comic and tragic forms to express the perennial search for insight into an ethics of values and beliefs beyond ordinary, daily experience. The humor and drama in each of these films, and perhaps other Allen films of this time as well, achieve their special success by placing their characters on a stage that insists upon the drama of ideas and relationships.
In these films, Allen relies on the importance and the relevance of the implications of divine comedy. In his best works, the characters engage issues greater than themselves. The humor derives at least in part on the gap between their own lives and the moral and existential issues they confront. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs (Allen) contends with more than impotence and possible cancer but literally with the meaning of his life and the value of his personal relationships. The distance between the triviality and finitude of individual lives and the enormity of their quest for significance defines the humor of the film. Moreover, in these Allen classics, aspects of film construction and art tend to sustain the narrative and psychological drama of the moral and ethical battle. Time, memory, space, fantasy, reality all operate to question ontological certainty. The most stable and confident of characters prove themselves to be divided entities who function in the midst of complete moral confusion and psychological insecurity. Through it all, the skeleton of Manhattan haunts the present with the promise of future moral reckoning, while "the eyes of God" in Crimes and Misdemeanors look in judgment upon everyone 's insouciance over their individual and collective wrongs, failings, and limitations.
Even a relatively neglected, somewhat minor film of this classic Allen period, Broadway Danny Rose, ultimately derives its meaning from an assumption of a living ethical discourse from which all Allen characters generally work in these films. A rather light-hearted romp between Allen as Danny, a nebbishy, nerdy loser of an agent and Mia Farrow as Tina, a bleached-blonde Italian woman with a New Jersey accent that grates and a philosophy to match. She says to Danny, "You know what my philosophy of life is?" and then tells him: "It 's over quick so have a good time.... You see what you want, go for it.... Don 't pay any attention to anybody else. And do it to the other guy first, 'cause if you don 't, he 'll do it to you." Stupefied, Danny responds with characteristic wit and sarcasm. He says, "This is a philosophy of life? This s-this-s-this sounds like the, the screenplay to Murder Incorporated." (Broadway 254). Danny answers her with the philosophy he learned from his uncle Sidney, "Acceptance, forgiveness, and love" (254), and from his "father, may he rest in peace, the man would say maturity ... a little tolerance, a willingness to give that 's all" (189).
When Danny first appears in the film, he wears a "checkered sports jacket, clashing shirt, and Jewish chai dangling on his neck" (151). The crassness of the clothes and the ostentatious religious jewelry all identify Danny 's class, role, and place in life with a sweep of good-humored mockery. At the same time, the chai signifies the pervasive religious theme in the movie. According to Sandy Baron, the Jewish comic and the story 's outside narrator, Danny "has faith" (166) in his clients and by implication in life and people in general as well. Danny repeatedly calls to God to make a point, saying to one client, "After Sunday night, my hand to God, you have me, I 'll be yours exclusively" (182). To gangsters who think he is dating Tina, he says, "My hand to God, I 'm just the beard" (261), after he similarly had indicated the same thing to Tina, saying, "That 's it, it 's the emess.... My hand to God" (213). He fails to resist using God 's name to refer to people he meets such as the tropical fish lady. He says, "God bless you, sweetheart. God bless you" (196).
References to Jews and Jewishness abound in the film. When Tina mentions that a neighborhood fortune teller predicted she would marry a Jew, Danny nervously asks, "Did she, did she happen to say which Jew?" (214). Caught "in the middle of nowhere" with Tina, he speaks Jesus 's name and says= "Oh, God, I never saw so many reeds in my life. I feel like Moses" (234). Afraid of one possible escape route by boat, he proclaims, "f don 't travel by water. It 's against my religion.... I 'm a landlocked Hebrew. I don 't go by water" (237). He summarizes his understanding of dealing with suffering as a kind of ghettoized notion of the need for guilt, pain, responsibility, and learning. He tells Tina, "You know. It 's very important to be guilty. I-I 'm guilty all the time and I-I never did anything.... You know? My, my, my rabbi, Rabbi Perlstein, used to say we 're all guilty in the eyes of God" (224). Admitting that he actually does not believe in God, he finds solace in feeling "guilty over it" (224). Later, he repeats to Tina, "You know, you know what my philosophy of life is? That it 's important to have some laughs, no question about it, but you got to suffer a little, too. Because otherwise, you miss the whole point of life. And that 's how I feel" (254).
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Broadway Danny Rose perhaps lacks the ethical extremes, emotional depth, and cultural range of Allen 's best films of the period. However, the self-deprecating humor in fact nourishes the ethical credibility and power of Danny. It gives a Jewish face and urban vernacular to a religious position in the world. Without promoting or preaching a religious creed or moral doctrine, the film 's humor engages these religious issues, thereby strengthening them through dialogue and exchange. Danny 's belief ultimately triumphs in a convincing way over Tina 's cynicism, negativity, and hostility. Too light for divine comedy, Broadway Danny Rose works as a kind of introduction to the tensions of belief and ethics that his other films dramatize. The film still makes an ethical statement about how to treat and regard others, and it justifies a moral stance m a corrupt environment.
Also, even in this rather whimsical tour-de-force for Allen and Farrow, Allen 's artistic form sustains the film 's ethical significance. Broadway Danny Rose works like a classic Twain frame story with real Jewish comics at Carnegie Delicatessen in New York City relating and framing Danny 's story in their own time, story, and setting. As noted above, Sandy Baron introduces and tells the story and moderates the commentary of the other pastrami-and-corned-beef-loving comics. In effect, this puts Danny and Tina in their own time zone, different from the time of the outside storyteller and narrator. It creates a special ethical dimension for them, one that effectively mythologizes Danny, an idea validated by the story 's conclusion when Sandy announces that the Carnegie has "named a sandwich after him. The Danny Rose special" (309), thereby installing him in a legendary pantheon of Broadway figures and characters. Like one of Twain 's amazing stories or articles, the film becomes yet another if a minor masterpiece of Allen 's art and imagination as a comedic filmmaker.
By not taking Danny and his crises and misadventures too seriously, Allen makes him believable. He takes him seriously enough, however, to engage his character and ideas and feelings. In spite of Danny 's schlemiel-loser quality, Allen 's story and dialogue develop a meaningful exchange of values and conflicts with him. The difference between his naivete and the corruption of others provokes the film 's humor. The structure of this difference provides cohesion but also establishes a lower order of tension than occurs in Allen 's other films that emphasize the gap between the search for moral clarity and the reality of psychological need and devastation. Nevertheless, Danny 's moral stance in the film and within the body of Allen 's work at this time makes his story significant as part of the pattern in the films of the late 1970s and 1980s of articulating and dramatizing the world of divine comedy.
Allen 's overall failure in the films since 1990 to create credible and workable moral drama has radically diminished the style and success of his art. The classic films depend to a degree on a version of Broadway Danny Rose 's gamble on the importance of the moral challenge to meaningful existence. Elsewhere I endeavored to discuss this transformation in Allen 's work after 1990 as being at least in part a result of the scandal that surrounded him during this time. (3) The so-called aura Allen had created about himself as a director, actor, and public figure made it impossible to separate his public and private identities. Crippled by the damaged public image, it became impossible for him to sustain his typical role in film as the eccentric, endearing, brainy, and neurotic New York artist his public adored and admired.
However, as important as the change in his own role and situation in his films, the end of the moral gamble as a living option in his films weakens the structure and tension of his effort. In effect, after 1990 the scene shifts in Allen 's movies from divine comedy and moral drama to settings of despair and loss that foreclose on the option of transcendence. Instead of comedies about the drama of ultimate moral forces of desire, love, and renewal, Allen replays stories and situations for the purpose of simply continuing. He lives his worst nightmare in Hannah and Her Sisters of "Nietzsche with his, with his Theory of Eternal Recurrence. He said that the life we live, we 're gonna live over and over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I, uh, I 'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again" (Hannah 109). Only as it turns out, in his films of the past twenty years, he primarily revisits himself and sits through his own inferior revisions of earlier successes.
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The absence of the impulse toward transcendence, the lack of an articulated consideration of an ethical dimension beyond everyday empirical and mechanical needs force his work into a closed and self-serving circle of limitation. A reconsideration of one of Allen 's major films of this period, Celebrity (1998) with a classic from another era, Federico Fellini 's La Dolce Vita (1960) should help dramatize the artistic and ethical dilemma of Allen 's current phase of work and career.
Several influential critics and commentators have noted the remarkable parallels that connect Allen 's Celebrity to La Dolce Vita to the point of seeing Allen as imitating Fellini as he often acknowledged studying and emulating Ingmar Bergman. (4) In a review that was later rerun in excerpts under the headline "Eying the Glitter-Crazed In Manhattan 's Dolce Vita," Janet Maslin noted the "string of neo-Felliniesque encounters" that occupy the time and attention of the film 's main character, Lee Simon, as played by Kenneth Branagh. She says Branagh "assumes the corduroy mantle of Mr. Allen and takes on the full panoply of self-effacing nervous mannerisms ( 'Really? Great, great, 'cause I don 't wanna be, uh ... ') as assiduously as if he were tackling Richard III" (B1). Describing Branagh 's work as a surrogate for Allen in the film as "an exceptional feat of mimicry," she calls "this character a dolce vita hanger on lacking anything like the Mastroianni magnetism," an appropriate reference to the acting skills and personal charm of Marcello Mastroianni, the popular Italian star of Fellini 's qualified masterpiece (B1, B16).
In London the headline of the review of Celebrity in The Independent sounded a similar connection: "Fellini did it rather better." In the review, Gilbert Adair emphasizes what he considers to be the film 's blatant homage to Fellini. He writes," A Woody Allen film is a palimpsest. Hack away at the surface and you 'll always find, just under it, another film, its referential model." He goes on to assert, "Now, with his latest film, the model is flaunted once more. Celebrity is Woody Allen 's La Dolce Vita." Adair details some of the most salient examples of crucial similarities between the films. He writes, Both films, Fellini 's and Allen 's--set, respectively, in the Rome of the 1950s and the Manhattan of the 1990s--are satires on the voracious cult and industry of fame. Both are episodically structured. In both we 're guided through a squalid, glitzy netherworld of models, starlets, journalists, movie stars, and perennial hangers-on by a sympathetic anti-hero, a failed writer reduced to moonlighting as a gossip columnist: Marcello Mastroianni unforgettably in La Dolce Vita; Kenneth Branagh just as unforgettably (alas) in Celebrity. In both there 's an extended set-piece featuring a statuesque stunner of eyeball-distending sex appeal, Anita Ekberg chez Fellini and the mannequin Charlize Theron chez Allen. In both, too, our anti-hero 's unattainable ideal of purity and integrity is personified by a dark, doe-eyed beauty (in Allen 's film, it 's Winona Ryder). And both, finally, are in black and white. (3)
With all of these similarities between Celebrity and La Dolce Vita, both reviewers for The New York Times and The Independent agree on the stark differences concerning the quality and degree of success of each film, Adair quipping that "Fellini 's film is a near-masterpiece; Allen 's isn 't even what could be called a near-missterpiece" (3). While both writers clearly tend to agree on Allen 's misstep in the film, neither has the time nor space in these reviews to analyze the causes behind the failure. They both also seem somewhat bemused and befuddled by the irony of the failure to amuse and entertain in a film so packed with celebrities who theoretically should be entertaining and amusing just by virtue of being themselves, stars and celebrities. Maslin writes, "Though Celebrity is filled with beautiful and famous faces, it has plenty of opportunity to bog down between star turns, and some of the episodes about the Simons are astonishingly flat" (B16). Adair tentatively suggests at the end of his review that the problem with the film may rest in the nature of its use of satire. He writes, Now Allen patently believes that the characters in Celebrity are worthy of his satire; he believes, in other words, they they 're relevant; even that they 're important. And that 's what renders the film totally inoffensive: one 's conviction that, for all his raillery, he 's actually in love with this neurotically posturing rift-raff. He is, and he knows he is, one of them. Celebrity, ultimately plays like a celebration. (3)
To a certain extent, Adair seems correct, but only to a degree. Allen 's inability to separate himself from the characters in the film becomes obvious with Branagh 's failure in short time to sustain the illusion of being Allen. In fact, the ultimate collapse of Branagh as the Allen character proves the point of Allen 's inexorable immersion in and connection to the film. His presence in the film becomes even stronger in his absence. (5) The problem, therefore, involves Allen 's own crisis of identification. Allen requires but does not acquire a means for establishing distance from his characters. In spite of his off-screen place as director and observer, he lacks a distinct position from which to judge and evaluate this self-indulgent, self-obsessed tribe of attention seekers. Loathing them rather than loving them, as Adair suggests, becomes his problem, an issue made worse by his place as one of them.
This issue of identification and immersion exacerbates another difficulty. The film fails the Broadway Danny Rose test. With his situation of being both in and outside of the film, Allen does not gamble on a moral dimension for the film. He simply presents the characters as wallowing in their own emotional greediness and writhing in their accumulating anxieties, insecurities, and aggressions. He cannot presume to uphold a personal Danny Rose challenge to them of moral exigency because that would impose upon them a language they do not speak or recognize. An appeal in the vernacular of Danny Rose would be as meaningless to the characters in this film as a suggestion to avoid the limelight or an appearance on The Larry King Show or an evening with Geraldo Riviera. They live in a different world, with different concerns and values, and different codes--a world created of course by Allen himself.
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Put another way, Celebrity fails not only because the celebrities themselves frequently fail to ignite enthusiasm or because Allen fatigues and his imagination and energy falter. It fails ultimately because it operates on a limited stage of experience and belief. The challenge of transcendence and the opportunity for "divine comedy" become sedulously avoided, hidden, and repressed, only to return yet again in the steady flow of films that continue to follow it.
Comparisons, similarities, and differences of Celebrity with La Dolce Vita also help explain Allen 's dilemma of recent years that Celebrity represents and advertises. The relationship between the two films illustrates the nature of the transformation of Allen 's work from its earlier articulation of divine comedy. The opening scenes of both films suggest in dramatic ways how Allen 's crisis of moral imagination impedes and obstructs the acuity of his artistic creativity. Celebrity begins with what has become something of a convention now of the making of a film within a film. Lee (Branagh) attends and observes the opening scene of the film within the film to write about the movie and its star Nicole Oliver (Melanie Griffith). As part of this interior film, enormous underlined letters are being skywritten by an airplane above spelling out the word "HELP." The camera in Allen 's film, however, also tilts up to the word in the sky as do ordinary people on Allen 's larger New York City scene who look up from the street, from offices, from a sightseeing bus, and from a construction job with men jack-hammering into the city 's pavement. The symbolism of the word gets even more obvious when the frenetic director of the interior film exclaims "Let 's go people, the letters are fading" and explains to Griffith that in her walk from a car and across the sidewalk she should "project like you know despair" and make him "feel the whole human condition."
Even before the many other parallels between the films become obvious, this opening scene in Celebrity immediately calls to mind the famous beginning of Fellini 's La Dolce Vita. The skywriting, the cameras, the chaotic atmosphere recall how Fellini begins his film with all of Rome looking up to the sky as a helicopter transports a statue of Jesus across the city. A chopper with Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni ) follows to record the event for posterity. However, a reexamination of both films suggests how from these opening scenes they also radically differ from each other in important ways.
The anomaly of the sight of the Jesus statue in transport over Rome and the curious reaction of people to this vision seem to suggest disrespect and mockery of the worst sort. At the same time, the vision also conveys a contradictory and counter notion. In spite of the unseemly and awkward circumstance of the scene, an exalted Jesus in the sky above Rome constitutes a sign of moral awareness and consciousness. The image of an overarching religious sensibility watching over Rome persists throughout the film. It establishes a mood and tone of a moral imperative that grows increasingly strident and severe. In fact, the symbolism of the flying Jesus immediately introduces a serious division in the film that separates the film from itself. Celebrated and condemned at the time for its exposure of the wild nightlife and lifestyle of a segment of Roman, Italian, and international culture, the very title of the film has come to suggest decadence and depravity. Throughout the film, Fellini shamelessly sensationalizes and exploits the sexuality, promiscuity, homosexuality, race mixing, degradation, and wantonness of the characters while at the same vituperating them. Mastroianni 's moral impotence actually serves his role as the film 's moral observer and prism. His usual inaction feeds his self-hatred as a weakling but frees him to merely record and judge others. Indeed, in retrospect, much of Fellini 's moral positioning in the film seems truly harsh, hypocritical, and prejudiced, especially against people of color or with a different sexual orientation.
Some of the conflicts and contradictions of La Dolce Vita are reflected in critical discussion of the film. Thus, Peter Bondanella writes, " 'Dolce vita ' became synonymous even in English with the hedonistic and superficial pursuit of pleasure in reconstructed Europe, thereby acquiring a specifically negative or moralistic connotation that Fellini never intended" (136). Nevertheless, in spite of such putative misunderstanding about Fellini 's moralistic intentions, Bondanella also notes that "Fellini 's concern with spiritual poverty lay at the heart of his trilogy of grace or salvation. [La strada, Il bidone, Le notti di Cabria] La Dolce Vita therefore continues a theme that was already familiar in Fellini 's films" (146). (6)
Accordingly, organized institutional religion, religious and sacred doctrine or creed, and even religious ritual fail in the film. As Bondanella says, "Religion, once offered to Fellini 's characters as a possible means of escaping the meaninglessness of their anguished lives, is now represented by a series of empty images and activities and provides no solutions" (147). Bondanella immediately includes the statue of Christ at the beginning of the film as one such empty image. However, it also can be argued that in spite of the expressed failures of religion in the film as a panacea for existential anguish, anxiety, and despair, the religious sensibility in Levinasian terms of the desire for the infinite persists and even pervades the consciousness of La Dolce Vita. Such desire consumes Marcello 's psychology, behavior, and frustration. It saturates the screen with the point of view of moral condemnation and judgment even without supplying easy answers to human unhappiness. Perhaps such desire also helps explain one example of the inexplicable in the film with the family suicide-murder by the sensitive intellectual, Steiner (Alain Cuny). Steiner chooses death for himself and his beautiful children in part out of fear seeing them grow up in a world without love based on true human and spiritual values and relationships.
Of course, the film 's strongest suggestion of such religious desire centers around the image of virginal purity and innocence of the young girl, Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), whom Marcello meets by the ocean and beckons to in a famous long take at the end of the film. As Bondanella says, Paola, the naive and innocent Umbrian angel Marcello meets at the beach, never represents a possible means of escape from Marcello 's meaningless existence but serves, instead, as an image of his own lost innocence. The film does conclude with a long close-up of Paola, underlining Fellini 's belief that such innocence is a state of grace well worth seeking, but Marcello 's decline by the end of the film makes it impossible for him to believe in any possibility of spiritual renewal for himself. As Paola 's words to him are drowned out by the noise of the ocean 's waves, Marcello is clearly set apart from the protagonists of the trilogy of grace or salvation. (147-48)
Bondanella 's discussion of Paola and Marcello highlights the film 's problematic notions about the relationship between salvation and grace and the conditions of society and culture. Thus, La Dolce Vita literally undermines the very desire and transcendence that Marcello seeks. Marcello becomes both a reflection and extension of the corrupt world he inhabits. Similarly, in Celebrity, Lee also cannot achieve distance and separation from his society. They both, therefore, only can wallow in self-pity. Yet in contrast to La Dolce Vita, Celebrity fails even to consider or convey a moral dimension or position that can propose an alternative point of view. Adair 's equation of Paola in La Dolce Vita to the Winona Ryder character, Nola, in Celebrity, therefore, falls short. Adair forgets that Ryder ends up in the film as simply another neurotic projection of rootless, narcissistic self-centeredness.
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At the end of Celebrity, Lee sits in a theater for a movie premier and once again sees the film that began his story. The call for "Help" reappears on the movie screen and clearly speaks for his own mental state of desperation. Like Marcello, Lee thinks that help can be offered or given by someone or something. They both forget that the help they seek not only cannot be given. It cannot be found when offered. The transcendence of the divine comedy that Marcello seeks occurs only in the relationship with the other. It depends on the irony of a form of desire that must fail in order to be felt and continue. An awareness of this paradox emboldens and invigorates Allen 's films of divine comedy. However, La Dolce Vita reduces such transcendence to the need for social reform while it disappears completely in Celebrity. In both films, difference degenerates into stereotypes. Felt experience deteriorates into cliches and platitudes.
The transmogrification of Allen 's humor from the classic comedies that strive for transcendence to the repetition of his own and others conventions represents more than just a mere change in popular and aesthetic comedic styles. It also involves a change in ways of thinking and believing. For whatever reasons, starting at about the time of his personal and family problems in 1990, Allen 's work moved from a deeply-felt commitment to experimentation and innovation to utter predictability based on barely disguised repetition of his earlier themes, story lines, and characterizations. Jokes and gags that depend for their success and effect upon surprise and originality turned into deflated exercises in humor that had been heard before in similar situations. What at first seemed like serious variations in his usual style and formula in such films as Mighty Aphrodite (1995) or Everyone Says I Love You (1996) turned out to be incomplete attempts to convince his public, and perhaps himself, that something new was underway. For many reviewers, critics, and observers, the problem seemed to rest on basic exhaustion and overuse. The material had gone stale so that not only the comedy seemed second hand, but the force behind it seemed to be running on automatic.
A reconsideration of Allen 's work over the years, and through the several phases of his artistic and personal development, suggests a compulsion on his part during the past twenty years to restrict the boundaries of conceptualization and execution. What could be termed the potential for creativity and innovation in thought and practice encounters new restriction and limitation. In such films as Celebrity and Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen appeared ready to include and exploit language and sexuality that reflect current popular taste and standards. However, he also seemed to construct new boundaries to ideas that previously had generated exciting artistic and intellectual engagement. The stultification of a yearning to explore and express the transcendent and to dramatize moral potential through extreme situations produced work after work that focused on the immediate and the obvious. As a shift in thinking and practice from moral sensibility and consciousness to sensuality and immediate experience, the change in Allen and his work raises questions about how his failures and successes over time constitute possible reflections and manifestations of his audience and culture in a new time and place.
WORKS CITED
Adair, Gilbert. "Fellini Did It Rather Better." Independent on Sunday (20 June 1999): 3. Print.
Allen, Woody. Broadway Danny Rose. Three Films of Woody Allen. New York: Vintage, 1987: 145-316. Print.
--, dir. Celebrity. Woody Allen. Mirimax. 1998. Film.
--. Hannah and Her Sisters. New York: Vintage, 1987. Print.
Blair, Walter. "Mark Twain and the Mind 's Ear." The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Sam B. Girgus. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1981. 231-39. Print.
Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America 's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153. Print.
Girgus, Sam B. America on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
--. The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. "God and Philosophy." Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriann T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. 129-48. Print.
Maslin, Janet. "Jostling and Stumbling Toward a Fateful 15 Minutes." New York Times (25 Sept. 1998): B1+. Print.
Twain, Mark. "How to Tell a Story." (1897). Great Short Works of Mark Twain. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. 182-87. Print.
Notes
(1) For my summary of biographical sources about this aspect of Chaplin 's life, see my "Documenting the Body in Modern Time" in my America on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America (155-73).
(2) See Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill (333-48) as well as Blair 's "Mark Twain and the Mind 's Ear."
(3) See my "Introduction" and "Conclusion" in The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd ed.
(1-19, 148-173).
(4) For Allen 's regard for Bergman see, The Films of Woody Allen (132-35).
(5) See The Films of Woody Allen (14).
(6) Bondanella discusses Fellini 's trilogy: "Following the trilogy of character, Fellini 's subsequent trilogy of salvation or grace--La strada, Il bidone, Le notti di Cabria--marks an even sharper break with his neorealist heritage" (100-01).
Girgus, Sam B.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Girgus, Sam B. "The lost transcendence of Woody Allen: from 'Divine Comedy ' to Celebrity." Post Script Winter-Spring 2012: 43+.General OneFile. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA296160245&v=2.1&u=usaf_portal&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w Gale Document Number: GALE|A296160245

Title:"Cinematic" music: analogies, fallacies, and the case of debussy
Author(s):Scott D. Paulin
Source:Music and the Moving Image. 3.1 (Spring 2010): From Academic OneFile.
Document Type:Essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 University of Illinois Press http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/mmi.html Full Text:
As one among many analogies commonly used to describe music as "cinematic," a supposed affinity is often identified between musical discontinuity and film-editing or montage techniques. The modernist assumptions behind these claims (abetted by translation errors) have led to distorted interpretations of Claude Debussy and his music vis-s-vis cinema.
The movies have learned a great deal from music, and now music can learn a few things from the movies.
-Charlie Chaplin
No longer content with being a mere actor, screenwriter, director, and producer, Charlie Chaplin announced in 1925 that he fancied himself a composer and conductor, too. Quick to pounce on this news, the music press leavened its coverage of the filmmaker 's musicianship with a few of his more abstract pronouncements, including the foregoing epigraph. (1) Here, Chaplin proposes a reciprocal influence between music and cinema, in the form of a favor to be repaid. This notion should challenge us to rethink the limits of any potential relationship between the two media: what would it mean for music to take lessons from the movies? In context, Chaplin refers not to the musical accompaniment of silent films, nor to the recorded scores of future synchronized sound films, nor indeed to any combination of music and moving image. Rather, Chaplin is positing an intermedial resemblance whereby the moving image can be musical, and music can be cinematic.
Chaplin may not have realized it, but he was revisiting the Laocoon problem, framed as such by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the eighteenth century: the possibility, and the propriety, of one art aspiring to recreate the qualities or effects of another. Lessing came down against it, but the venerable questions continue still to structure aesthetic discussions about ekphrasis and "medium specificity." (2) Leaving the larger debates aside, the specific trajectory of influence advocated by Chaplin remains obscure within the scholarly literature on music and film. To be sure, the "musical analogies" of film theory and practice are well known, at least within cinema studies. They are also largely exasperating to the musically literate reader, who is bound to wonder, for example, just how legitimately Sergei Eisenstein 's "visual overtones" can really be compared to the acoustics of the harmonic series, and just why Germaine Dulac needed to assert, again and again, that cinema should strive to become a "visual symphony." (3) As David Bordwell pointed out in a classic essay on the topic, these analogies of the 1920s were partly dependent on a familiar ideology of music as absolute, autonomous, and nonreferential, but also on the supposed amenability of music to formal analysis. All of these qualities were attractive in varying degrees to filmmakers intent upon exploring the possibilities of their medium as distinct from other narrative forms. (4) As such--and rather ironically--the musical analogies were fodder in the search for an essential, specific aesthetic of the cinematic medium. A more detailed account of this quest will occupy a central point in my discussion, although its consequences will reverberate throughout the material presented in this essay.
As the mirror image to the discourse of musicality, "cinematic analogies" have received comparatively little serious or sustained critical attention. Unlike the musical analogies, which have tended to be prescriptive in intent, cinematic analogies (Chaplin 's aside) have been mostly descriptive in nature. But, no less than the musical analogies, these too are founded on an array of assumptions that are partial and reductive: assumptions about cinema, in this case, and about the ways in which a musical work might be understood to have cinematic qualities. These assumptions, often indebted to essentialist ideas derived from the discourse of medium specificity, deserve to be put under some pressure: What understandings (or misunderstandings) of cinema and "the cinematic" underpin such analogies? What (if anything) do they really tell us about any music so described? How might a historically responsible approach to interpreting music "cinematically" proceed?
Cinematic analogies were nothing new in 1925 despite the novelty that Chaplin 's comment might imply. They had been activated as early as the twentieth century 's first decade, and they have recurred in various forms ever since. I will return to some of the earliest formulations after first examining the broader outlines of "the cinematic" as it has been attributed to music, and then focusing on an especially resilient set of ideas about montage and modernism. One specific outcome, undertaken in the present article 's second half, will be to correct a common misunderstanding of Claude Debussy 's work in relation to cinema, but the larger purpose of this critique is to propose a departure from received analogies and a reconsideration of what music might, in fact, have learned from the movies.
Listening to Music, Hearing Cinema
At the risk of overkill, the following litany--which could be vastly expanded--begins to map out the variety of cinematic analogies that music has attracted. In what follows, apples and oranges are willfully mixed to demonstrate how broadly analogies to cinema can be found across various modes of engagement with music, directed to different readerships. The sources are eclectic: academic musicologists, composers, performers, music critics, even publicists. The range of music they describe is equally wide. As for the underlying assumptions about cinema, some are specific to genre or era, while others have been widely shared. (5)
* On works by Richard Strauss: the Symphonia Domestica (1902-3) offers "concrete cinematic depictions of the everyday"; Salome (1905) and Don Juan (1888-89) "feature colorful, evocative, quasi-cinematic orchestration."6
* On Alexander Zemlinsky 's Psalm 23 (1910): "Zemlinsky recalls the temple music of his youth, the organ that he played on high days and holidays, the sunlight shining through stained-glass windows.... [H]ere, with almost cinematic realism, [these memories] represent a declaration of solidarity with the Jewish people." (7)
* On Aram Khachaturian, conducting his own works: "[H]e favoured lush, generous portamenti which, combined with the technicolour sonics created by the Decca production team, give his performances an unusually strong, almost cinematic character." (8)
* On Carl Nielsen 's Fifth Symphony (1921-22): "this cinematic symphony, this unclean trench music, this brazen deception." (9)
* On the voice of soprano Renee Fleming: "[C]inematic clarity, directness, naturalism and intimacy in her delivery speak eloquently to an era of democratized communication in which nothing can be hidden." (10)
* On the voice of folk-revival singer Anne Briggs: "emotionally evocative to the point of being cinematic without ever stepping foot into theatrics." (11)
* On Scottish post-rock band Mogwai 's The Hawk is Howling (2008): "[W]ith only two songs under the five-minute mark, this is maybe their most 'cinematic '-sounding record to date (which is saying something)." (12)
* On Georges Bizet 's Les pecheurs de perles (1863): "[T]he librettists anticipated a cinematic technique for isolating one portion of a larger scene: the close-up. In act 3, scene 2, we find Nadir in the forest amid a wild scene of drinking, dancing, and singing. Initially, the audience sees these 'furious dances '; then, as though the stage has shrunk to Nadir 's space, everything comes to a halt, and only the tenor is heard." (13)
* On an indie-rock album by the Microphones: "Music is too often described as 'cinematic, ' but Mount Eerie [2003] evokes that exact quality; it 's almost possible to envision the sets." (14)
* On Wolfgang Rihm 's Jagden und Formen (1995-2001): "It has an almost cinematic quality: The constant movement, unpredictable texture changes and touches of quirky humor conjure images of an intensely dramatic, occasionally zany film, full of action, jump cuts and dissolves." (15)
* On the music of German composer Matthias Pintscher: "intricately assembled self-contained blocks of sound juxtaposed in jump-cut edits.... [O]ne could make a case for ties with the culturally voracious filmmaking of Herzog and Fassbinder." (16)
* On an entire repertoire: "Classical music is like cinematography--it 's using all the moods that exist in ways to make larger designs." (17)
This miscellany may leave the reader suspecting that Jean-Luc Godard was right, in another context, to assert that "everything is cinema." (18) For the moment, I want to set aside the issues of cinematic technique, specifically editing, that some of the citations raise. These issues will soon become central, but first consider the other qualities that writers seize upon when they listen "cinematically": realism, clarity, emotion, visuality, expansiveness, action; the concrete, the evocative, the colorful, the dreamlike, the all-encompassing. Some music is said to anticipate cinema, some is similar to cinema, and some is influenced by cinema, but the boundaries among these relationships often remain blurry. (19) Frankly, there are references here that make little sense at all, and there are very few in which the analogy to cinema is at once accurate and necessary. Too often, "cinematic" becomes a glib synonym for the intense, the atmospheric, or the picturesque; a careful copy editor might simply reach for the red pencil. (20)
Amidst this confused body of analogies, almost any type of music can be assimilated to "the cinematic"--an allpurpose, radically unstable signifier that contradicts its own promise to signify something specific about the medium. Ever since the 1920s, theorists and filmmakers have attempted to prescribe cinema 's proper, narrow domain, but, decades further on, "the cinematic" only seems to become more and more promiscuous: the analogy 's constitutional vagueness is the key to its power and its mischief alike. To call something "cinematic," in an era dominated by cinema as a common tongue, is to abet the medium 's own omnivorous assimilation of other cultural practices. It is almost guaranteed, in some sense or other, to be true. (21) Our register of intellectual fallacies may thus need to admit another entry--a "cinematic fallacy"--to identify the range of reductive and often anachronistic analogies through which we have been enjoined to hear a cinematic music.
The Composer 's Cut
All of these analogies merit interrogation: what exactly is at stake in understanding cinema to be, at its base, a medium uniquely exemplifying "clarity," "realism," or any of these qualities, and how are they imagined to be transferable--in specifically cinematic terms--to music? (22) But one tendency has persisted in a particularly interesting way: the desire to find meaningful analogues for music in editing, among other technical and form-building elements of film. This analogy seems to hold a special appeal for musicologists and theorists for reasons that will emerge in the following discussion. It deserves the deepest scrutiny here precisely because of its apparent intellectual authority.
A detour into another discipline will lay the groundwork. Literary scholars, searching for cinematic qualities in prose and poetry, have gravitated to the same technical analogies as music scholars, especially when modernist literature is the canon in question. (23) Some recent work, however, has critiqued this habit. In an article with the agenda-setting title "This Is Not a Movie," Maria DiBattista revisits one of the usual suspects, James Joyce 's Ulysses (1922), in order to challenge the role that "cinematographic form" has come to play in accounts of the modern novel, expressing unease about "the boldness with which we rhetorically cross the generic borders between film and novel like bounty hunters after quarry living openly in neighboring territory." (24) David Trotter echoes this critique and articulates a concern almost identical to mine: The great majority of the enquiries into literary modernism 's relation to cinema undertaken during the past thirty years or so have been committed, implicitly or explicitly, to argument by analogy. The literary text, we are told, is structured like a film, in whole or in part: it has its "close-ups," its "tracks" and "pans," its "cuts" from one "shot" to another. Writers and film-makers were engaged, it would seem, in some kind of exchange of transferable narrative techniques. The transferable narrative technique which has featured most consistently in debates about literary modernism is montage. (25)
Setting the loaded word montage aside for an interrogation to follow later in this essay, it would be easy to rewrite this passage with reference to music scholarship. Interpretations of Joyce 's cinematic techniques could then be matched with those attributed to Mahler, Dos Passos 's with Stravinsky 's, and so on, triangulating literary and musical modernisms through film technique. Trotter shares my skepticism, however, toward the assumption that editing has played, or must play, the defining role in cinema 's influence on its fellow arts, and in this article he demonstrates that T. S. Eliot 's engagement with cinema has been misunderstood or minimized because the poet 's interests were focused not on the level of form or technique, but rather of content. In the end, Trotter is most keen on establishing how an author 's creative process may, through a historically plausible connection, be indebted to cinema, and his test is commonsensical: "Any account of the literary use to which a writer may or may not have put a cinematic device must be based on an understanding of the uses to which that device was put, at the time of writing, in cinema." (26) This focus on the act of making, if pursued too strictly, would lead us into Richard Taruskin 's "poietic fallacy," but Trotter 's criterion must nevertheless hold for music, too, if any immediate and nonfanciful cinematic influence is to be substantiated. (27) For the moment, however, I am interested in reception, not intent, and the pressing task is to unpack the values that have incited a desire to valorize the "cut" and have thus encouraged misreadings of the "cinematicity" of Debussy 's music, among others.
But, first, a bit of sarcasm. In 1934, the composer and critic Constant Lambert suggested that certain leading modernists had chosen the wrong line of work: It is a tenable theory that much of our dissatisfaction with post-war music derives from the fact that the most typical post-war composers are cinema producers manques.... Instead of producing null and void concertos, Hindemith should be the camera man, Honegger should be in charge of the sound effects and Stravinsky, with his genius for pastiche, should be entrusted with the cutting. (28)
Lambert may be more dedicated to an ostentatious cleverness here than to any kind of serious analysis, and yet his interpretation, with its Laocoon-like assumptions, epitomizes one significant train of thought: if techniques imagined as essentially cinematic can be found in the music of these composers, their work must be--in a word--unmusical. "Cinematic," in a common early spin on the analogy, functioned as code for structural incoherence, with Stravinsky figured here as a special representative of the problem, his music constructed as if by editors ' shears rather than logic.
Lambert clearly did not intend to praise, but the terms of his critique have since been thoroughly neutralized. Musical discontinuity may now be validated precisely because it can be interpreted as cinematic. Another set of examples--in addition to a few already cited--will demonstrate the penchant for hearing musical equivalents to film editing. To remain with Stravinsky, Peter Hill has much more recently cited examples of such editing in both The Rite of Spring (1913) and Petrushka (1911). In the latter, he observes "a collage of brilliantly characterised vignettes which [Stravinsky] then 'cuts ' together like a film editor; each block belongs to a stream of music, woven together with other streams just as a director intercuts different angles of view of a scene." (29) Hill 's point here is heuristic; he is wise not to claim an actual cinematic influence, since in 1911 there were not yet films that looked like Petrushka sounds. Even so, Hill 's understanding of filmmaking--of what "a director" and an (apparently interchangeable) "film editor" actually do--is symptomatically slanted to privilege the act of cutting, as if abrupt edits suffice to evoke an aural cinema. Analysts tend to apply this particular emphasis most pointedly, however, not in reference to accepted modernists like Stravinsky, but to a slightly senior cohort, composers whose careers overlapped with early cinema, but whose place in music history lies on the often uncomfortable cusp between Romanticism and modernism. (30)
Thus, in a description of the late- (or post-)Romantic composer Franz Schreker 's overture to Die Gezeichneten (1918), we find a typical example: "There is at this point a sudden cinematic cut of a kind that is not uncommon in Schreker. Suddenly we find ourselves caught up in the music of the grand masked procession." (31) The cinematic analogy is stated bluntly and pursued no further, eliding the distinction between a composer 's appropriation of film technique and a musicologist 's convenient metaphor. When another study promises "almost cinematographic techniques of discontinuity at key formal moments" of Sir Edward Elgar 's Cockaigne Overture (1900), analogy is pitted against anachronism, for the work predates any similar techniques in cinema. (32) The same is true of La Boheme (1896), yet Jurgen Leukel finds cuts and dissolves in this and other Puccini scores, citing them as evidence of the composer 's "cinematographic technique" and hence--significantly--of his "Zeitaktualitst," his up-to-dateness. (33) Jean Sibelius typically eludes cinematic analogies, but music critic Alex Ross has recently filled that gap: "Sibelius 's early works, like contemporaneous works of Strauss, obey a kind of cinematic logic that places disparate images in close proximity. But where Strauss--and later Stravinsky--used rapid cuts, Sibelius preferred to work in long takes"; revising his Fifth Symphony (1915/19), then, the composer produced "a cinematic 'dissolve '" when he "cut off the ending of the first movement, cut off the beginning of the second, and splice[d] them together." (34) The sheer frequency with which the music of this era attracts description in terms of some kind of editing should arouse our suspicion: why the desire to hear precisely this music in this way?
We can approach an answer by noticing that the analytical gaze in these instances seems perennially to be fixed upon musical transition points--or, rather, upon puzzling moments where a proper or conventional transition is lacking. (Other film techniques, such as the close-up, have also inspired analysts to cite musical parallels. But these cases, too, involve transition points: not just the close-up, but the edit from long shot to framed detail.) Troubling transitions provoke something like a gnostic attitude: they cry out for interpretation and meaning. (35) A vocabulary rooted in cinematic technique can offer the false security of explaining away such apparent transgressions--justifying a violation on the grounds that it obeys a different set of laws. Here the cinematic and musical analogies reveal their reciprocity, for music 's analyzable rhythmic and architectonic features (as already noted) were a part of its fascination for early film culture. (36) For music scholars, in turn, a discovery of "cinematic form" can assuage a phobic resistance to the "formless," and the identification of edits in a score thus plays handily into the music-analytical habit of valuing structure, technique, poiesis above all.
Yet the value of these discoveries, apparently rooted in an assumption that editing is the essence of cinema, is compromised by the untenably narrow view of the medium that guides them. An obsession with technique means always talking about the join, never about what has been joined together; always about form, never about content. (This should remind us of Trotter 's and DiBattista 's critiques of the hunt for cinematographic form in literature.) As a symptomatic example, when Richard Burke sets out to analyze Shostakovich 's String Quartet No. 15 (1974) for possible traces of cinema, he gravitates immediately to the "boldly discontinuous," to transitions and editing, systematically classifying musical gestures in terms of film technique: the dissolve, the overlap, the cut. (37) This is not to discount Burke 's findings, which are intriguing, but simply to ask, what about the rest of the music, and the rest of the film--the parts that come between the edits?
Modernist Montage; or, What Movie Are We Listening For?
[P]eople began to say: "That 's cinematic. That 's not cinematic." At first a charming witticism, this way of passing judgment soon became doctrine.
--Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet (1925) (38)
The question of a cinematic essence--of "medium specificity," as already defined in passing--has been a long-standing preoccupation in serious writing about film. If the very earliest film theorists "struggled to give to cinema the stature of art," in Dudley Andrew 's words, their subsequent project was more prescriptive: as David Bordwell delineates it, "defining cinema as a specific art or medium. What feature of film set it off from literature, theatre, painting, and other arts? What is the nature of cinematic representation, and what relation does it have to the physical and perceptual world it portrays?"--This drive to designate the specificity of the medium became so central to discourse about film that already by 1925 it invited parody as an almost unhealthy obsession: Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet follow the foregoing passage by imagining a dogmatic cinephile who makes the shrill assertion that "the cinema has no other reason to exist except not to resemble any other form of expression." (40)
It would not be possible to do justice here to the full variety of specificities that have been claimed as absolutes on cinema 's behalf; a methodical account would bear some resemblance to the compilation of disparate cinematic analogies already presented in this essay. But the variety itself should be enough to make us hesitate before defaulting to any one of them as the solution. Certainly it ought to be obvious that "the cinematic" cannot be reduced to the edit, much less to an especially discontinuous, paratactic variety of editing. Yet there is a long tradition of asserting the contrary. French theory advanced this argument, drawing again on music for analogies of rhythm that could explain the effect of combining shots of certain durations in particular patterns; musical or not, the "rapid editing" explored by Abel Gance in La roue (1923) was often cited as a touchstone of truly cinematic innovation. (41) But even if French filmmakers could lay claim to an early exploration of the possibilities of editing, posterity has most closely associated their Soviet counterparts--Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and, most famously, Sergei Eisenstein--with such techniques, no doubt partly because of how audaciously they seized this mantle for themselves. For Eisenstein, it was axiomatic not only that "cinema is, first and foremost, montage," but also, speaking on behalf of Soviet achievements, that "montage ... owed its full development, definitive interpretation, and world recognition to our cinema."--
As promised earlier in this essay, "montage" is a term that requires some dissection. Based etymologically in the broad concept of "assembly," it can casually refer to editing practices in general--to any way of putting pieces of film together--though via Eisenstein it acquired connotations of an especially aggressive fragmentation and even "dissonant juxtaposition" of images. (43) In truth, Eisenstein 's conception of montage was capacious. It evolved over time as he elaborated a set of categories increasing in complexity from "metric montage" through "rhythmic," "tonal," and "overtonal" to "intellectual montage" (the musical basis for most of these will be apparent); his theory of montage further encompassed movement within the shot, and later the relationships between image and sound, as well as the relationships among successive strips of film. (44) Although he ultimately determined that "the principle of montage is common to all the arts," a claim that points against the grain of cinematic specificity, Eisenstein also argued that this tool was "at its most specific and significant as a method of influence in the field of cinema." (45) Thus, cinema always maintained a special relationship with montage in Eisenstein 's theory; it represented the fulfillment of the technique 's potential.
The montage principle owes its enduring circulation largely to Eisenstein 's authority; in the judgment of posterity, according to Jacques Aumont, "Eisenstein equals montage." (46) But, in reception, the concept has tended to trickle down in a simplified form, without the shifts and nuances it acquires across Eisenstein 's theoretical ceuvre as a whole. This can be attributed partly to the limited cross section of his writings that were available through most of the twentieth century; (47) to the canonical status (and again the broad availability) of a few of his films and more particularly of a handful of sequences from those films, such as Potemkin 's "Odessa Steps"; and to the sheer quotability of some of the more aggressive statements from his early writings of the 1920s. Here he advocates a montage-based cinema that provides "a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience"; he demands "not a 'Cine-Eye ' ... but a 'Cine-Fist. ' Soviet cinema must cut through to the skull!" (48) Although the later Eisenstein found montage within the shot as well, his younger self had firmly insisted, "We must look for the essence of cinema not in the shots but in the relationships between the shots, just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes, etc." (49) This, with the Marxism either foregrounded or silenced, depending on personal ideological preference, is the Eisenstein whose simplified presence can be felt behind casual references to montage as an art of abruptness and shock. This is also the Eisenstein whose legacy can be felt among the theorists Noel Carroll has dubbed "montage-essentialists," who have held that which holds that the "stylistic choices in any film concerning scripting, set decoration, lighting, etc., must be subordinated to facilitating rapid editing." (50) Only thus, according to this view of medium specificity (which, again, ought not to be attributed to Eisenstein himself), can cinema realize its potential as cinema.
Within film studies, montage-essentialism has enjoyed a long shelf life, sometimes reducing the "stylistic history of cinema" to a chronicle of mere "differences in editing," according to a critique mounted by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs. These theories of montage outlasted by decades the school of filmmaking that gave rise to them, Brewster and Jacobs argue, and have also deformed our understanding of films made prior to their articulation in the 1920s.51 Outside of film studies, this cohort of concepts has wielded disproportionate influence, as well, garnering intellectual credibility thanks to the prestige of their source. I suspect that they have acquired an additional academic cachet thanks to the ease with which they can be mapped onto the perennially fashionable ideas of Walter Benjamin, whose most famous essay privileges "the shock effect of the film," its "constant, sudden change" of images, and the "multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law" in cinema. (52) Crucially, the strategy of defining cinema as montage (which is equally a strategy for constraining cinema) relies on sources with distinctly and respectably modernist credentials. (53) Scholars from other disciplines, looking across the border into film studies, have latched onto some version of montage theory not simply to find "transferable narrative techniques," as Trotter says, but to seek an exemplary cinema that conforms to some combination of the accepted standards of modernist aesthetics: difficulty, progress, innovation, shock, alienation, opposition to mass culture. The last of these should not be underestimated; with different emphases, it was shared by certain French theorists in their advocacy of an abstract "pure cinema" against one driven by narrative (and likely imported from Hollywood), and by the younger Eisenstein in his elevation of the cinema 's didactic potential over its (bourgeois) entertainment value. (54)
In music scholarship, the spirit of early Eisenstein usually seems to hover nearby whenever the language of editing is applied to music. The specific debt, conscious or not, emerges whenever emphasis is placed on the abrupt, the discontinuous, or the violently paratactic in a musical score--something we have already seen several times in this essay--for, once again, Eisenstein 's emphasis, more extreme than that of his Soviet colleagues (or his French contemporaries), was squarely and polemically fixed upon "montage as a collision." (55) As an explicit example, Richard Burke makes a point of describing musical elements that "collide" in Shostakovich 's Fourth Symphony (1935-36), prompting a quote from Eisenstein 's The Film Sense about montage as "juxtaposition." (56) In the context of an article on Shostakovich, Burke 's three-page excursus into Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s may seem unexceptionable, and yet, of the cinematic elements he speculatively identifies elsewhere among the composer 's scores, the majority would not be out of place in any MGM melodrama of the same era. But Eisenstein 's name provides a modernist prestige that correlates with Shostakovich 's own and assures the reader that cinema could be an intellectually respectable influence in spite of its mass-culture connotations (not to mention the low-culture stigma of slapstick film--Burke does also note the "Keystone Kops" element that others have identified as a cinematic resonance in some of Shostakovich 's scores). Burke is an exception in directly citing Eisenstein, but the director 's presence can often be felt even when he is not mentioned by name and even when the word montage is not uttered. When Peter Hill, for example, imagines "a director" building a scene out of juxtaposed blocks, analogous to a Stravinskian musical construction, it 's not just any director: it 's implicitly a montage-essentialist. But how sturdy is any conceptualization of cinema that takes the "Odessa Steps" as the rule rather than the exception?
To bring the discussion of medium specificity deeper into the twentieth century, and to rehearse a dispute in film aesthetics that will already be familiar to many readers: the long take, depth of field, and expressive mise-en-scene are arguably just as cinematic as a rapid or jarring montage, and, in the view of some theorists, preeminently Andre Bazin, these are more cinematic than montage. As with montage theory itself, it is impossible here to explore these positions with the rigor they deserve; what must be made clear is simply the extent to which the place of montage within "the cinematic" has been contested across the theoretical field. Bazin, critical of what he saw as montage 's tendency "to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator," preferred to valorize a cinema "in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it." (57) Writing in the 1950s, Bazin wished to valorize recent Italian neorealist cinema and Hollywood directors such as Welles and Wyler, but also filmmakers going back to the supposed heyday of silent-era montage--Stroheim, Murnau, Flaherty--filmmakers in whose work "montage plays no part." (58) Bazin was hardly alone in this position; Siegfried Kracauer, too, issued polemics claiming that photographic realism was the medium 's essential quality, and that editing makes "no more than a minor contribution to the cinematic."--However, to the extent that editing has contributed to cinema--and Kracauer surely goes to an extreme in minimizing it--the most widely accepted practical language of editing, as developed in the American industry during the silent era, bears scant resemblance to Eisensteinian montage. Here, the typical goal was continuity and the eamlessness of time and space: the invisibility of technique, not a jolting, self-conscious laying bare of it. (60) Even to speak of a cut is to emphasize division rather than the act of connection that editing typically accomplishes. (61) For example, when D. W. Griffith crosscuts between parallel actions (a method for which his innovations were crucial, even if theater and literature provided him with models), the spectator should be absorbed in suspense, not in recognition or admiration of the technique: the editing connects two actions (temporally) as powerfully as it juxtaposes them (spatially). As a sonic equivalent to the visual experience of most cinema, radically discontinuous musical blocks are a poor analogue indeed. If the classical Hollywood style were to be given its historically appropriate due--an anathema for theorists with a doctrinal antagonism toward mass-culture cinema--analogies to its fluid camera motions and continuity editing might be more appropriately identified in seamless, meticulously prepared musical modulations.
In the end, taking sides either with Eisenstein or with Bazin/Kracauer--or even with Hollywood--is to choose one among several restrictive traps. Attempting to dismantle the viability of medium specificity for film studies, Noel Carroll has argued that claims about "the supposedly unique features of a medium" actually work to promote specific stylistic preferences, to validate one agenda among many, and to consign alternative approaches to the uncinematic. (62) Further, theories of medium specificity have typically been mobilized with special force in the service of modernist aesthetics: Clement Greenberg 's insistence that painting restrict itself to exploring the properties of paint; Michael Fried 's assault against the "theatricality" of minimalist art. (63) I would argue that most attempts to discover "the cinematic" in music are predicated on unexamined assumptions about medium specificity, and that they tend to be deformed by the modernist baggage they carry. (64) The ideological stakes should be coming clearly into focus: to hear cinematic montage in the music of a Puccini, Elgar, or Strauss is to grant those composers a modernist prestige they are often denied--recall Jurgen Leukel on Puccini 's Zeitaktualitst. (65) (It can also act as a counterweight to less flattering species of analogy, such as Constant Lambert 's reference, in the case of Puccini again, to "the cinematic emotions of Madam Butterfly." (66)) Working in concert with the lure of modernism, as already argued, editing analogies may satisfy the urge to legitimize music through the demonstration of underlying formal principles--and hence the particular attraction to Eisenstein 's apparent rigor in theorizing montage, completing the circuit that began when film theory first looked to music for a model of rigorous form and analyzable pattern. Whether or not the technique is truly transferable to music, the concept is transferable to the kinds of stories that many scholars want to tell about music: stories that take an assumption about what cinema is, map it onto an ideology of what music should be, and assimilate both to the strictures of modernism.
When we think we hear a "cut," then, we would do well to hesitate and perhaps to contemplate an argument made by Ali Weyl-Nissen in 1929: "Montage is a chief principle of our music. What else is a Wagner overture but a thememontage. What else is any program music? What is music from Bach up to the last consequences of Romanticism, up to Pfitzner?" (67) Although it stretches any usable definition of montage to the breaking point, Weyl-Nissen 's objection should remind us that even if paratactic juxtaposition in music might feel analogous to sensations familiar from the movies, these sensations need not be inherently cinematic. (68) Roger Shattuck would lead us toward a similar conclusion, proposing that a broad twentieth-century urge to imitate the "sudden leaps" of "subconscious thought processes"--and not the influence of film--encouraged composers, poets, novelists, and artists alike toward a "seemingly rough and arbitrary technique of juxtaposition." (69) But there are also specific musical precedents, and Stravinsky points the way back to one of them. Richard Taruskin attributes the elevation of juxtaposition over traditional (Germanic, symphonic) values of development and transition in Stravinsky 's music to a specifically Russian, precinematic, and premodernist aesthetic: drobnost ', or "splinteredness," a "calculated formal disunity and disjunction." (70) Drobnost ' leads forward from nineteenth-century Russian music; it need not be a protocinematic anticipation of Soviet montage. In turn, for composers of Stravinsky 's time and later, writing music that sounds like montage is just as likely a Stravinskian gesture as a cinematic one. (71) Eisenstein himself was well aware that the techniques he prioritized in cinema had a history, one that he traced back variously through Dickens, Flaubert, Pushkin, and Milton to the Acropolis and the hieroglyph. (72) By foregrounding these models in his writing, he necessarily downplays the cinematic specificity of montage--as already discussed in this essay--even if he cites these precedents with a teleological faith in cinema (his cinema) as their preordained heir. But for commentators today to accept this trajectory, and to follow Eisenstein in seeking precursors and analogues to montage for the sheer purpose of labeling them as retroactively and essentially cinematic, is an ahistorical pursuit, to say the least. It ought to be clear in hindsight that technical resemblance is neither an ontological nor a genealogical truth.
Composing a Film: From "musique cinematographique" to "le traitement de cinematographe"
The composers have not had much to say for themselves in the foregoing discussion, and it is time to give them the floor. Among those who pondered the cinema, however casually, not all believed that it offered useful technical lessons. Quoting Constant Lambert again: "It is impossible ... to achieve in music the equivalent of the 'quick cutting ' which is the basis of the Pudovkin-Eisenstein technique. There is no real equivalent in music even of the 'wipe-dissolve ' which leads the eye gently but quickly from one scene to another." (73) On the other hand, some composers openly admitted an attraction to, or a deeper knowledge of, cinematographic techniques. Elliott Carter not only saw Eisenstein 's films, but also read, and quoted, his theoretical writings; analyses of Carter 's music may well ask whether he transferred the idea of montage into his work and with what results. (74) Stephen Sondheim has acknowledged the influence of the French New Wave films of Alain Resnais (with their disorienting, anticlassical editing), among others, and technical implications may be drawn when he asserts that "I think cinematically when I 'm writing songs.... I stage them like a movie." (75) As little as they otherwise have in common, these composers pass Trotter 's test if intention is what interests us: they were demonstrably aware of certain technical principles, inviting the question of how they understood those principles and to what uses they put them. But even an acknowledged influence may well provoke a creative misunderstanding. Though Lambert 's offers no systematic analysis of the problem, intuitively he was on the right track: influence need not be equated to an "equivalent" or a transferable technique, and to listen for "cuts," even in the music of Carter or Sondheim, is not inherently the most productive angle. As Bordwell points out, such equivalences can reach an absurdly reductive point: "An advertisement featuring a roller-skating pizza-delivery boy is not comparable to the Odessa Steps sequence merely because both use 'fast cutting '." (76) Even within the realm of moving images, it is too easy to discover similarities that are not truly analogous.
This brings us, in a roundabout way, to Debussy--but not yet to his music. First, we need to consider his work as a critic, for Debussy may well have been the first to mention Richard Strauss and cinema in the same breath. In a March 1903 review, Debussy responded first to the narrative and visual qualities of Strauss 's Till Eulenspiegel (1894-95): "[O]ne cannot doubt that the music is meant to recount anecdotes and that the orchestra has a role comparable to the amusing illustrations in a book." (77) Debussy gives kinetic and mimetic examples: clarinets soar into the air and a bass drum kicks like a clown, with Strauss 's music proceeding through one such "illustration" after another. In Ein Heldenleben (1897- 98), Debussy is further impressed by "a frenetic motion, which carries you along wherever--and for however long--it wants to"; there is a force of continuity that sweeps away any concerns about heterogeneity. (78) Like Till Eulenspiegel, Debussy goes on, Heldenleben "is a book of images," but here he adds, "[I]t is even cinematographic.... But it must be said that the man who can construct a work of this sort with such continuity is very close to genius." (79)
There is a slight ambivalence here: Heldenleben succeeds musically in spite of being "cinematographic," not because of it. For Debussy, this language implies neither praise nor derision. It simply refers to descriptive music unfolding in time, translating discrete "images" into sound one by one. (As a quality shared by music and film, temporality is often the underlying basis for the analogies made between them.) Crucially, Debussy 's frame of cinematic reference in 1903--which could have ranged from the documentary actualites of the Lumiere Brothers to the fantastical special effects of Georges Melies--is embedded in what Tom Gunning has defined as a "cinema of attractions," a prenarrative cinema, dominant until roughly 1906-7, that prioritized the act of showing rather than telling, spectacle rather than story. (80) Eisenstein must be taken into account once again here, for his early essays were the source from which Gunning extrapolated this concept. Eisenstein 's "attraction," as prescribed for both theater and cinema, is an "aggressive moment" calculated to have a specific emotional effect on an audience; these attractions are then to be arranged in a montage structure to maximize their impact in an ideologically effective "agit-cinema." (81) While the elements of shock and confrontation do persist in Gunning 's projection of a "cinema of attractions" onto filmmaking two decades prior to Eisenstein, the nuances of his account are somewhat different; in particular, the model of audience reception is less mechanistic, and sociopolitical efficacy is no longer a necessary condition. Spectators of this cinema, as defined by Gunning, are astonished rather than assaulted; attractions are "attention-grabbing" rather than ideologically coercive. (82) Even if the concept has been subject to debate and revision since Gunning introduced it, the cinema of attractions should be an essential part of any historically grounded speculation about cinematic tendencies in music of this period. (83)
Consider Debussy 's analogy of a cinematographic Strauss once more. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is not prompted by the narrative content of the tone poems. Nor, by any means, should it be read as a reference to editing, discontinuity, or shock. On the contrary, Debussy remarks precisely upon the surprise of Heldenleben 's continuity. If the score strikes him as "cinematographic," it is because of the episodic "attractions" themselves, which grab our attention in the act of illustration and offer delight in the moment of their hearing. They 're like pictures in a book, but, better still, they move--thus precisely referencing the etymology of cinema.
Debussy 's words here, along with his other written comments on cinema, brief and scattered though they are, have been used to frame cinematic readings of his own music. But an essential context for his subsequent remarks is provided by another French composer, Vincent d 'Indy, who offered his own definition of "cinematographic music" in an article of 1913. D 'Indy 's general view of film was withering; a few years later, he insisted that "[t]he cinema [has] nothing to do with art" and refused to discuss the possibilities for its musical accompaniment. (84) In the 1913 essay, d 'Indy uses his praise for a work by Jean Roger-Ducasse, Au jardin de Marguerite (1901-5), as a springboard for an extended diatribe. This work, d 'Indy writes, is a musical composition of very high standards, where the composer sacrifices very little to the fashion of the day, in other words to cinematographic music. Allow me briefly to explain this term, which I have used here very seriously. It seems to me that a great many modern symphonic compositions, those in which sensation overtakes feeling, would gain from the addition of a cinematograph, which would be called upon to explicate and to demarcate the various sections of the piece. From the moment that all musical form is banished, as something antiquated and old-fashioned, it would seem to me to be indispensable to have all such "sensorial" music accompanied by its plastic representation. This would have a double advantage: (1) to make comprehensible what the composer wanted to say [... and] (2) to present to the eye an agreeable flickering, which would harmonize marvelously with the little orchestral chichis and other auricular titillations that generally constitute the principal merit of these compositions. This is a question worth studying ... perhaps a commission could be appointed... (85)
Suffering from a twofold lack--having neither form nor the capacity for concrete representation--"cinematographic music" is defined for d 'Indy by its sheer incomprehensibility in the absence of a continuous visual supplement. (86)
D 'Indy 's notion soon received an indirect response in the same journal. Twice within a year, Debussy made ambiguous comments about cinema and its potential to revitalize public interest in art music--comments that have been cited to support his own cinematic credentials. On 1 November 1913, Debussy suggested the following: There remains one way for us to revive the taste for symphonic music among our contemporaries: let us apply cinematographic treatments to pure music. It is the film--like Ariadne 's thread--that will allow us to exit this worrisome labyrinth. (87)
Those sentences, echoing d 'Indy 's call for adding a film projection to performances of concert music, have received the most attention. They have also been widely misconstrued and will thus require further analysis. But first, let us continue with Debussy 's train of thought: The countless listeners who are bored when they hear a Bach Passion, or even the Mass in D [Beethoven 's Missa Solemnis] would rediscover all their [capacity for] attention and emotion if the screen would take pity on their distress. Sequences could even be added to show moments of the composer 's life that passed while composing the work.... Just think of the misunderstandings that would be avoided! The spectator is not always responsible for his errors! He cannot always prepare for his listening as if writing a thesis; the normal life of a citizen is not particularly favorable to the suggestion of aesthetic emotions. The author would no longer be betrayed, we would be rid of false interpretations, we would finally know with certainty the truth, the truth, the truth! ... (88)
Somehow, commentators have missed the ironic tone. Crying out for la verite in a climactic crescendo, Debussy echoes one of his own creations, the character Golaud from Pelleas et Melisande (1902), demanding concrete answers from a wife who is unable to grasp what "truth" he is asking for. This is hardly the most sympathetic of intertexts. Debussy being Debussy, can he really have meant for music, any more than Melisande herself, to give up its mysteries in the name of cinematographic clarity? Surely, he is not just responding to d 'Indy 's attack on modern composition, but also blatantly mocking its demand for a visual supplement that would "make comprehensible what the composer wanted to say."
Debussy continued in this vein on 1 February 1914 by mentioning recent rumors about "filming the nine symphonies of Beethoven." Here he suggests, however, that such films would actually "have nothing to do with music, still less with Beethoven." (89) In case a reader did not get the previous article 's joke, which had also referenced a work by Beethoven, this statement clarifies Debussy 's attitude toward films as visualizations of music. It also adds a layer to his response to d 'Indy, for rather than compensating for formless compositions, these films would fit (or fail to fit) the repertoire 's ultimate paradigms of structure.
But more than Debussy 's tone has been misread. An error of translation, perhaps guided by the common preconceptions about cinema already discussed, has skewed the discussion further (at least in English-language circles). Richard Langham Smith 's 1973 article "Debussy and the Art of the Cinema" deserves credit as one of the first serious attempts to explore cinematic influences in any music. (90) However, in citing Debussy 's article of November 1913, Smith interpreted the phrase traitement du cinematographe as "techniques of cinematography" rather than simply "cinematographic treatment" or "adaptation." (91) From this, he concluded that Debussy was advocating a renovation in musical style through the cross-fertilization of the cinema 's technical means--the montage fallacy in a modernist nutshell. But, as we have seen, Debussy was actually riffing on d 'Indy 's notion of making films to be projected in concert--the reference to Bach and Beethoven in Debussy 's article makes this unambiguous--and not suggesting that contemporary composers should imitate cinematic editing in their music. These cinematic treatments, if they were actually meant to be realized, would of course have employed cinematic techniques, but they would have done so within the medium of cinema. Contrary to what Smith 's translation implies, this sentence says absolutely nothing about the composition of music; it refers strictly to the making of films. Smith 's original article rendered another passage from Debussy incorrectly, as well, amplifying the composer 's personal investment in cinema by misconstruing his comment (as quoted earlier) about film sequences that would depict composers at work. Smith directed the reader 's attention here to "Debussy 's open confession that the images of the cinema have not been entirely without influence on his own work: 'One might add here moments of cinema which passed through the composer 's mind just when he was composing his works. '" (92) Debussy was, of course, confessing nothing of the kind.
This latter error was silently corrected in the volume of essays that Smith translated and edited a few years later, Debussy on Music. However, the other mistake ("technique" for traitement) was not fixed; it has been perpetuated to this day in the musicological literature. This essay, as taken in translation from Smith 's anthology, is one of three by Debussy to be included in the 1998 revised edition of Strunk 's Source Readings in Music History: prominent advertising for a misleading (but apparently attractive) notion about Debussy and cinema. (93) The error has thus been granted the status of a central pillar of the composer 's aesthetics, shoring up his claim on modernity while also appealing to the fetish for verifiable formal principles.
The sentence in question is regularly quoted in Smith 's translation or paraphrased, in either case as an accepted fact. (94) On its basis, scholars have been encouraged to hear cinematic traces in Debussy 's music, precisely by listening for discontinuous montage. (Note the presumptive fixation on this technique, even if "technique" itself were the correct translation.) Smith himself refers vaguely to "the film-like sequence of 'Iberia '," which "moves from scene to scene, and within each movement it focuses on this idea, then that." (95) Subsequently, Jonathan Dunsby has used the translated passage to claim that Debussy was "seized by film," going on to speculate, Anyone who cares to make an analysis of [Debussy 's] En blanc et noir [1915] by analogy with film-cutting techniques in the emergence of black and white cinema can have a field day. It is entirely plausible that Debussy took his conception of programme music ... to be a cinematographic scene captured in music.... [The] scene-changing musical contrasts, ... each in quicker tempo, might derive from the then relatively fresh experience of the "cut," a new mode of expression endemic to cinematography after its invention in 1895. (96)
Dunsby also claims a cinematic resonance for the work 's title, translated as "In white and black" (unaware, perhaps, that "black and white" film was quite often color toned and tinted in Debussy 's time). What is again most striking, however, is the music analyst 's eager gravitation to the cut as the ultimate sign of cinematic influence. "Endemic" is a telling word choice, with biological connotations that naturalize the cinematic essence of the cut, asserted here as if contrast and juxtaposition evolved only along with the cinema. (Of course, Debussy was no stranger to Russian music; he must have had more than a taste of drobnost '--even, by 1915, from Stravinsky 's own pen.) As a further anachronism, Dunsby 's description of "cuts" linked to tempo shifts seems like it may be predicated on the Eisensteinian concept of rhythmic montage or alternatively on the "accelerating montage" of Abel Gance, but in either case on a technique that was not theorized or innovated until some years after Debussy 's death. (97) Even if the translation of this mischievous passage were correct, and Debussy really had wanted to import film techniques into music, greater care in assessing the techniques to which Debussy had access would be required (as David Trotter would wish to remind us).
Rebecca Leydon 's work on Debussy and cinema is much better grounded in the filmmaking practices of the composer 's time and draws interesting conclusions related to French film and nationalism. However, she also quotes the mistranslated passage to set up a specific correlation between the "formal disruptions" of film technique and Debussy 's "solutions for the problem of continuity and succession": "Cinematic devices, in other words, may have served as a source of new formal options that became available with the advent of a new narrative medium." (98) Indeed, they may have (even if the place of "disruption" in cinema is once again overvalued here), and I cannot prove that Debussy never thought about cinema in these terms. But once the composer 's words are translated and understood correctly, the comparisons asserted in this study--"punctuation shots, for examples, like the dissolve and the direct cut, have musical counterparts in Debussy 's techniques of transition and enchainment" (99)--come to seem more like correlations without causation, heuristic at best. Leydon is openly convinced, however, of a genuine intermedial influence, proposing that Debussy 's "Jeux might be understood more specifically as a cinematic rendering" of the Prelude s l 'apres-midi d 'un faune, for example, and partly because of its abundant 'formal discontinuity, ' a quality assumed here yet again to be somehow essential and original to cinema. (100) Even if Leydon does locate persuasive examples of what might be heard as sonic close-ups or crosscuts in Debussy 's works, her privileging of syntactic discontinuity as the sign of cinema falls prey to a familiar fallacy--encouraged and abetted by this persistently appealing error of translation.
As a historically grounded corrective to the "cinematic" tendencies that have been projected on Debussy, the appeal that his music actually held for film theorists and practitioners of the 1920s merits a brief digression. Both Eisenstein and Dulac mention Debussy in their essays; Dulac also engaged with his music in her silent-era films, depicting the heroine of La souriante Madame Beudet (1923) at the piano playing "Jardins sous la pluie" from Debussy 's Estampes, and basing the nonnarrative Arabesque (1928) on another Debussy piano work. (101) But, to the extent that Debussy provided a model for Eisenstein and Dulac, musical editing seems to have had nothing to do with it. Of course, this proves nothing about Debussy 's own thoughts on the cinema, but it does point to the terms through which cinematic affinities for Debussy 's music were expressed at the time. For Eisenstein, Debussy (along with Scriabin) was notable for exploring the "whole series of secondary resonances, the so-called overtones and undertones," which Eisenstein construes in "collision with one another and with the basic tone"; this notion, nebulous as it is, becomes a model for Eisenstein 's concept of "visual overtones." (102) Thus, it does play a role in his broad theorization of montage, though it is far removed from the general understanding of montage that guides the musical analyses discussed earlier. As for Dulac, Debussy (along with Chopin) plays into her "musical analogy" as a model of artistic creation that derives from emotion rather than narrative: A composer does not always write music under the inspiration of a story, but more often of a feeling. Debussy 's Jardins sous la pluie or Chopin 's "Raindrop" prelude, for example, are the expressions of a soul that overflows and reacts to things.... The composer 's heart sings in the notes, which, perceived in turn by the listeners, gives birth to the emotion within them.
A filmmaker, she continues, should do the same, but with "light and movement." (103) When Dulac inserts a watery, nondiegetic shot into La souriante Madame Beudet to create a visual translation of the Debussy "Jardins sous la pluie," she suspends narrative for a momentary "attraction," though not by any means a shocking one; in doing so, she may direct us back to an attractional quality in Debussy 's music, as well.
Beyond the Cut: A "Music of Attractions"?
Much of the foregoing critique would amount only to so many slaps on the wrist in the absence of a constructive end point. Assuming we can get beyond listening for aural equivalents of the edit, how might we actually discover the full breadth of possibilities that composers perceived in cinema, and the ways in which they were genuinely inspired or affected by it? To redirect the discussion comprehensively is beyond my scope here, but a few suggestions are in order.
One is to stop dredging the canon for traces of cinema and to delve instead into an almost untapped body of music for which cinematic intertexts or inspirations can be unambiguously established. Elsewhere I have defined this repertoire as paracinematic music--music with a relationship to film other than that of planned accompaniment: Alfredo Casella 's Pagine di guerra: Quattro films musicali (1915), John Philip Sousa 's At the Movies: Scenarios of Cinematographers (1922), Bohuslav Martinu 's Film en miniature (1924), Charles Koechlin 's Seven Stars Symphony (1933), Yves Baudrier 's Le musicien dans la cite (1937), identified as a poeme cinematographique, and dozens, if not hundreds, of others. (104) We even have works like Huib Emmer 's Montage (1977) to satisfy quite explicitly an impulse toward the technical, but the heterogeneity of this list should recommend skepticism toward any attempt to boil the influence of film down to one phantom paradigm of "the cinematic." Discerning the very different ways in which these composers chose to represent, respond to, or substitute for cinema--and the mere fact that they openly sought to do so- opens up a fresh angle for thinking about the relationship between film and music, one that places "film music" itself into relief and situates the composer more carefully within the cinema audience.
But there are also other tracks to pursue, and a careful reading of Debussy points us toward one of them. Recall that, for Debussy in 1903, "cinematographic" referred not to the presence of edits or close-ups, but rather to the picturesque quality of discrete musical objects: literally, "moving pictures." This is important because it shifts attention away from the edit and toward the objects (whether musical or visual) that are "edited" together, and it acknowledges the intensity of perceptual experience offered by those objects. Once again, by analogy to Gunning 's "cinema of attractions," this means emphasizing the act of showing rather than the structural joins between the successive things shown. According to another theorist of this cinematic mode, "The attraction is there, before the viewer, in order to be seen. Strictly speaking, it exists only in order to display its visibility," and not to absorb the viewer in a narrative. (105) Can we imagine, by analogy, an attraction that is there to be heard--that exists only to display its audibility? What might a "music of attractions" offer us as a category for considering music 's potential debts to film within this historical context? To be useful, of course, it would have to be modified, detached from the modernist assumptions that lead Gunning still to prioritize the attraction 's shock effect and to link it with the aesthetics of the avant-garde. Spectacle need not imply an aggressive jolt; certain forms of spectacle (again, whether visual or musical) can be received in a state of contemplative absorption--not of narrative absorption, but of absorption just the same. (106) Taking the attraction into this broader terrain as it crosses from the visual to the acoustic, a music of attractions would avoid projecting a cinematic meaning onto the mere fact of discontinuity. It would recognize, instead, a musical agenda that devalues structure and meaning alike at the expense of showing: of isolating the striking (audible) detail and keeping the listener 's attention invested in the facts of the moment. It would acknowledge music 's attraction to spectacle while resisting the lure of narrative. (107)
Some contemporary evidence exists to establish this as a mode of thought about "cinematic" music. In 1925, the French literary journal Les cahiers du mois devoted a special issue to Cinema; in one section, contributors pondered whether the cinema might transform conventional approaches to the arts--architecture, plastic arts, theater, literature, and music--even independent of a cinematic context. Rarely has this question been posed so directly with respect to music. (108) One respondent was the young Swiss composer Frank Martin, who unwittingly theorized something akin to a music of attractions. He suggests that, even beyond the collaborative process of writing music for a film, cinema may exert an influence on the composer 's "creative sense itself, by suggesting to him a new way of perceiving succession and time." (109) In Martin 's view, the experience of cinema is defined by a particular spectatorial attitude: "the capacity to follow immediately each type of visual or emotional shift, never to linger on the previous scene, an unprecedented swiftness that leads to the destruction of the personal inertia made up of memory, thought, dreams"; at the cinema, we become "electromagnets reacting to the slightest variation of current and capable of instantly reversing polarity." (110) What sets Martin 's insights apart is his grasp on spectatorship, his realization that how film is perceived--by the composer in the audience, among others--will be a key factor in any influence that film might exert. The spectatorial experience is, of course, conditioned by the technical processes through which film is made, but it is not identical to that process, and the former, or the memory thereof, is what an audience takes home from the theater.
In response to this kind of experience, Martin continues, music will become "an art of succession, of the immediate, requiring of the listener a clear consciousness, ready at every instant to savor each detail, [like] the attention of an infant held in surprise and marvel in a perpetual present." (111) The instant and the detail: adding up these discrete moments could produce a music of fragmentation and discontinuity, but, for Martin, it is the attraction-like moments and the spectatorial experience they solicit that are potentially cinematic, and not the edits that join them. The cinema is willing "to establish no relationship between two successive facts," and it is the experience offered in the moment by each fact--not the unestablished or paratactic relationships between them--that can render an elective affinity between music and one sort of cinematic experience. (112)
Listening beyond the cut (or simply between the cuts) might help us better to understand the utterances of other composers, too. Maurice Ravel, for example, said of an unrealized Jeanne d 'Arc project that he could "clearly envision the 'cutting ' adopted by Delteil [the text 's author]: short tableaux in quick succession, along the lines of the episodes in a film." (113) Arnold Schoenberg deployed similar language in a description of counterpoint: "In the course of [a contrapuntal] piece, the new shapes formed by rearrangements (varied forms of the new theme, new ways for its elements to sound) are unfolded, rather as a film is unrolled. And the way the pictures follow each other (like the 'cutting ' in a film) produces the 'form. '" (114) It would be easy to latch onto each composer 's reference to "cutting" (helpfully scare-quoted in both texts) and, then, buoyed by the notion of Ravel and Schoenberg composing under the influence of film editing, to embark upon a montage hunt in their scores. But this would miss the point of each quote. Note how Ravel 's attention shifts from edits to the tableaux themselves, the "episodes" edited together. Schoenberg, too, is more interested in the "pictures" that arrive, one after another; the continuity of "unfolding" and "unrolling" outweighs the discontinuity of the cut. Read carefully, neither Ravel nor Schoenberg seems to be emphasizing a montage technique of construction. Rather, their "episodes" and "pictures" might productively be construed as attractions, if further cinematic parallels are to be drawn.
It may seem that this suggestion only adds another bullet point to the analogy count--another potential rubric for "the cinematic," another musical quality to be sought out and labeled neatly as a lesson learned from film. Perhaps the same works would even still be heard as cinematic, but now for different reasons. Debussy 's music could be recuperated with ease to "the cinematic" based on these ideas, considering his ability to absorb the listener in the moment, to "show" a detail in the form of an "attraction," to emphasize the immediacy of the instant while "establishing] no relationship between two successive facts." But if these descriptions do resonate with our experience of Debussy, or of other music potentially composed under the sway of cinema, then we might do well to consider dethroning montage or, given the apparently compulsory interdependence between the two, at least making room nearby for the attraction. In a small way, this shifts the balance away from fetishized form and the techniques of making, and toward the experience of the individual and ephemeral moment. It acknowledges, that is, the centrality of such experience, whether the moments in question are cinematic or musical in nature--or both.
Endnotes
(1) Helen M. Miller, "Charlie Chaplin, as Composer, Emerges 'From the Dark, '" Musical America, 6 June 1925, 7. See also "Charlie Chaplin a Composer," Metronome, 1 August 1925, 45. Chaplin did go on to create scores for his films, aided by a series of music assistants.
(2) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon (1766). Horace 's Ars poetica, the other classic presentation of this question, takes the opposite side, favoring inter-art influence. For a virtuosic exploration of the Laocoon problem 's twentieth- century ramifications, see Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
(3) On "overtones," see Sergei Eisenstein, "The Fourth Dimension in Cinema" (1929), in Selected Works, vol. 1: Writings, 1922-34, trans. and ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute: 1988), 181-94. For Germaine Dulac and the "symphonic," see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 47-48. These two elements alone, however, do not exhaust the full significance of the "musical" for Eisenstein and Dulac.
(4) David Bordwell, "The Musical Analogy," Yale French Studies 60, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 141-56; see esp. 142, 155.
(5) Although most of my references use the word cinema or cinematic, it is worth noting the distinctions that some theorists raise between cinema and film and thus the cinematic and the filmic. Separate qualities may pertain to "the material base that must be dematerialized in projection" (film) and "the screen effect that results" (cinema), according to Garrett Stewart (Between Film and Screen: Modernism 's Photo Synthesis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 3). Because attributions of "the cinematic" to music have not been sensitive to this subtlety, I have mostly collapsed the terms here.
(6) Bryan Gilliam, "Visual Voice," Opera News, March 2004, 23-24. Gilliam is a musicologist, but was writing here for a nonacademic audience; however, he has also persistently linked Strauss to cinema in scholarly publications, including "Strauss 's Intermezzo: Innovation and Tradition," in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 266-67. Elsewhere, describing the critical response to the October 1915 premiere of Strauss 's Eine Alpensinfonie, Gilliam writes that "some went as far as to describe it negatively as 'cinema music, ' a remarkable claim given that film was still a new medium." Gilliam offers no specific documentation or context here, so it is impossible to discern what the critics actually meant, but his conclusion seems exaggerated, perhaps with the specific aim of associating the supposed modernity of cinema with Strauss as an up-to-date composer (and this for a stage of his career when he was commonly held to have fallen away from the cutting edge). Film, after all, was two decades old in 1915, and the medium 's prestige had recently risen in Germany with the Autorenfilme of the earlier 1910s; also, we will see later in this essay that Strauss 's music was described as "cinematographic" as early as 1903, which might qualify more appropriately as a "remarkable claim" (Bryan Gilliam, "Strauss, Richard," in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40117pg7 [accessed 27 September 2008]). Gilliam makes the same point in The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96.
(7) Antony Beaumont, Zemlinsky (London: Faber, 2000), 416.
(8) David Gutman, "Khachaturian Conducts Khachaturian: Spartacus and Gayaneh Excerpts," liner notes to Khachaturian: Spartacus/Gayaneh (Aram Khachaturian/Vienna Philharmonic), Decca CD 460 315-2 (2000), 6-7. Here the analogy seems to refer to an essentialized sound of film music itself, a category that merits a full article in its own right. The accusation that something "sounds like a film score" is often (although not here) intended to dismiss a work as trivial, retrogressive in its romanticism, and suspect in its populism. Take a classic insult, Stravinsky on Olivier Messiaen 's Turangalfla-Symphonie (1946-48): "Like the [Benjamin Britten] War Requiem [1961-62], it contains passages of superior film music ( 'Charlie Chan in Indochina ')" (Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966], 15). Such remarks virtually always assume a particular kind of Hollywood film scoring and, as such, aim to disparage mass-culture moviemaking; often deliberately anachronistic (when applied to nineteenth-century composers), these analogies also tend to be emphatically ideological.
(9) Victor Bendix 's review referred in the original Danish to "denne Symfoni filmatique" (quoted and translated in Daniel M. Grimley, "Modernism and Closure: Nielsen 's Fifth Symphony," Musical Quarterly 86, no. 1 [Spring 2002]: 151).
(10) Benjamin Folkman, liner notes to Strauss: Four Last Songs, Songs with Orchestra (Renee Fleming/Christoph Eschenbach/Houston Symphony), RCA Red Seal CD 82876-59408-2 (2004), 4.
(11) FT [Fred Thomas], review of Water, by Anne Briggs (1971; reissued 2008), Other Music Update, 17 September 2008, http://www.othermusic.com/2008september17update.html (accessed 19 September 2008).
(12) Mogwai biography page, Matador Records, http://www.matadorrecords.com/mogwai/biography.html (accessed 3 September 2008).
(13) Herve Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 129. Lacombe attributes the innovation to librettists, but his description implies that the composer executed the scene in a fittingly cinematic way, too--not only creating a sonic "close-up," but also the edit to this "shot."
(14) Eric Carr, review of Mount Eerie, by the Microphones, Pitchfork Media, 21 January 2003, http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5267-mount-eerie/ (accessed 16 September 2008).
(15) Allan Kozinn, "In a Cinematic Soundscape, the Hunt Is On," New York Times, 22 October 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/arts/music/22rihm.html (accessed 22 October 2007). Kozinn 's description could be informed by knowledge of another Wolfgang Rihm composition titled Cuts and Dissolves (1977).
(16) Robert Kirzinger, review of Herodiade-Fragmente, etc., by Matthias Pintscher, Fanfare, November/December 2001, 249-50.
(17) Michael Tilson Thomas, quoted in James Jolly, "Farewell to Philosophy," Gramophone, May 2003, 26.
(18) As quoted in Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), xiii.
(19) I have avoided mentioning Wagner here because he is persistently overrepresented in discussions of music and cinema, and often attributed the paternity of film music (or even of film itself). For a critique of certain aspects of this genealogy, see Scott D. Paulin, "Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 58-84.
(20) A more rigorously developed approach to the question, locating a particular pictorial quality (defined as Bildhaftigkeit) shared between cinema and the music influenced by cinema, can be found in Dietrich Stern, "Komponisten gehen zum Film: Zum Problem angewandter Musik in der 20er Jahren," in Angewandte Musik 20er Jahre, ed. Dietrich Stern (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1977), 10-58.
(21) If and when the oft-proposed "death of cinema" occurs, however, "cinematic" may come to connote something quaint, old-fashioned, and faulty. Will we have another set of analogies at the ready to replace it?
(22) Some of the complexities that arise in aligning "realism" with cinema are explored in W. Anthony Sheppard, "Cinematic Realism, Reflexivity, and the American 'Madame Butterfly ' Narratives," Cambridge Opera Journal 17, no. 1 (March 2005): 59-93.
(23) Space does not permit citation of the extensive scholarship on cinema and literature, but a helpful overview of work on the topic can be gleaned from the background presented in Gautam Kundu, Fitzgerald and the Influence of Film: The Influence of Cinema in the Novels (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). The influence of cinema on the theater--including especially, but not limited to, issues of staging--has also produced a substantial scholarly and critical discourse, which then circles back to music via opera and other musical theater. Cinematic influences have also been explored by artists and/or investigated by scholars in the visual arts, photography, architecture, dance, and most likely in every other creative field.
(24) Maria DiBattista, "This Is Not a Movie: Ulysses and Cinema," Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April 2006): 221-22. Already in the 1950s film theorist Andre Bazin expressed skepticism regarding the supposed influence of cinema of the novel (see "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," in Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 61-64).
(25) David Trotter, "T. S. Eliot and Cinema," Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April 2006): 238 (emphasis in the original). I discovered Trotter 's work shortly after presenting my very similar critique (on which the present article is based) in the introduction to Scott D. Paulin, "On the Chaplinesque in Music: Studies in the Cultural Reception of Charlie Chaplin" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2005).
(26) Trotter, "T. S. Eliot and Cinema," 239.
(27) Richard Taruskin, "The Poietic Fallacy," Musical Times 145 (Spring 2004): 7-34.
(28) Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934; repr., London: Hogarth, 1985), 226.
(29) Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53.
(30) It has also been applied to composers such as Berlioz and Bizet. (The adjective "cinematic" should be held under even greater suspicion when modified by "proto-.") For Bizet, see note 13; for Berlioz, see David Cairns, Berlioz, vol. 2: Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 357, 552.
(31) Peter Franklin, "Style, Structure and Taste: Three Aspects of the Problem of Franz Schreker," Proceedings of the Royal Music Association 109, no. 1 (1982-83): 142.
(32) Aidan Thomson, "New Thoughts on Cockaigne: Elgar, Urbanization and German Criticism," in Program and Abstracts of Papers Read (Brunswick, ME: American Musicological Society, 2003), 80. This language appears in an abstract, but Thomson 's talk as delivered at the Houston AMS meeting did not address the point.
(33) Jurgen Leukel, "Puccinis kinematographische Technik," Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik 143, nos. 6-7 (1982): 2426.
(34) Ross 's grasp of film technique is shaky: a "dissolve" is not created with a simple "splice," but rather by doubleexposing film to superimpose two shots (Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007], 162-63, 167).
(35) On "gnostic" tendencies in musical hermeneutics, see Carolyn Abbate, "Music--Drastic or Gnostic?" Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 505-36. The musical transition points under discussion may appear precisely to be "hermeneutic windows" as defined in Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 9-14. But others besides Abbate have questioned the kinds of knowledge that are produced on the basis of an analytical attraction to norm-subverting musical moments, including Suzannah Clark, "From Harmony to Hermeneutics in Schubert 's Ganymed" (paper presented at the sixty-ninth annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Houston, November 2003).
(36) See notes 3 and 4.
(37) Richard N. Burke, "Film, Narrative, and Shostakovich 's Last Quartet," Musical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 414, 418-19. For an overview of Shostakovich 's work for cinema, see John Riley, Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
(38) Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, Idea and Screen: Opinions on the Cinema (1925), translated in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:374-75.
(39) J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 12; and David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 112 (emphasis added). To reiterate an already noted irony, in marking film 's territory off from the theatrical and the literary, some theorists fled happily into the musical analogy, apparently unconcerned about any challenge to cinematic specificity that this strategy might pose. Germaine Dulac, for example, saw no contradiction between calling for cinema to become cinematic and suggesting that it might do so through becoming symphonic.
(40) Abel, French Film Theory, 1:378.
(41) For praise of Abel Gance 's editing in La roue from his contemporaries, see Jean Epstein, "For a New AvantGarde" (1926), and Germaine Dulac, "The Avant-Garde Cinema" (1932), both in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 27, 45-46.
(42) Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot" (1929), in Selected Works (see note 3), 1:138; and "Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves" (1942), in Selected Works, vol. 3: Writings, 1934-47 (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 199. See also Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 145.
(43) Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 120-21; and Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, 29-30. Yet another specific meaning for montage comes from Hollywood parlance, where it signified isolated sequences of rapidly edited visuals, usually used to collapse time within a narrative. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, is credited with "montage effects" for such sequences in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s, whereas other personnel receive the standard editing credit.
(44) The categories from "metric" to "intellectual" are discussed in Eisenstein, "Fourth Dimension in Cinema," 18694. For levels from "micro-montage" (within the frame) to "macro-montage," see Eisenstein, "Laocoon," in Selected Works, vol. 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, trans. Michael Glenny, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 109. Eisenstein elaborates the "vertical montage" between image and sound in the article by that title (1940) in Selected Works, 2:327-99.
(45) Eisenstein, "An Attack by Class Allies" (1933), in Selected Works (see note 3), 1:264 (emphasis added). See also Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 184, 196.
(46) Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, 145. See also Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 259-60.
(47) Wherever possible, my references throughout this article are taken from the multivolume Selected Works published in translation in the 1980s and 1990s, but Eisenstein 's ideas are still probably most widely known from the selections that appeared in The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942) and Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), both translated and edited by Jay Leyda.
(48) Eisenstein, "The Montage of Attractions" (1924) and "The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form" (1925), in Selected Works (see note 3), 1:39, 64.
(49) Eisenstein, "Bela Forgets the Scissors" (1926), in Selected Works (see note 3), 1:79.
(50) Noel Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4.
(51) Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-4. Their study introduces other important revisions into the historiography of early cinema, especially in critiquing prior interpretations of the nineteenth-century theater as "proto-cinematic"; the direct target here is A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). As the title of their book indicates, Brewster and Jacobs document an underlying pictorial aesthetic that filmmakers borrowed from the stage through the 1910s, even in many cases that may look specifically cinematic in retrospect.
(52) Because I am dealing with issues of reception, I quote here from the essay 's most widely cited translated version: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 238, 234. Benjamin is not referring specifically to Soviet cinema in these passages, though he does write of it approvingly elsewhere.
(53) For a candid identification of montage with modernist principles (the superiority of which is taken to be selfevident), see Michael Wood, "Modernism and Film," in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 217-32.
(54) Germaine Dulac addresses the "antagonism" between "commercial films" and "art" in "Avant-Garde Cinema," 43-48. Eisenstein presents an ideological critique of the (bourgeois) American cinema 's use of montage in "Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves," 223-37.
(55) Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot," 144 (emphasis in the original). Eisenstein describes here his ongoing dispute with Pudovkin, who theorized montage around "linkage" rather than collision.
(56) Burke, "Film, Narrative," 421.
(57) Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What Is Cinema? (see note 24), 1:26, 28.
(58) Ibid., 1:26-27. Just as many of Eisenstein 's partisans have presented a simplified understanding of his montage theories, so too did Bazin in his critique of montage. See Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein (259-60), and, for an extended appreciation of Bazin 's importance as a theorist, see Andrew, Major Film Theories (134-78).
(59) As described by Constance Penley, "The Imaginary of the Photograph in Film Theory," in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (London: Whitechapel, 2007), 115. See also Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
(60) "The Continuity System," in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 194-213.
(61) In the words of one practitioner, "In the States, film is 'cut, ' which puts the emphasis on separation. In Australia (and in Great Britain), film is 'joined, ' with the emphasis on bringing together" (Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing [Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995], 5, emphasis in the original). Here Murch entirely omits the Eisenstein view, which amplifies "separation" into "collision."
(62) Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 20. For Carroll 's full critique of medium specificity, see 3-36.
(63) Ibid., 7-8, 25.
(64) Exceptions would be those that historicize the specific cinema to which they believe music is responding. Steve Swayne, for example, traces Stephen Sondheim 's attraction to film noir, to the French New Wave, and so on, rather than to cinema itself, in How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 159-95.
(65) Mahler also plays an interesting role in this constellation. Raymond Knapp has made the comparison between Mahlerian and cinematic "discontinuities": "If Mahler 's music is necessarily like film, that necessity has deeper roots than technology and may be traced most convincingly to cultural estrangement" (Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler 's Re-Cycled Songs [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003], 11-12). If Strauss has sometimes been found "modern" because his music is "cinematic," then Knapp 's language seems to imply by contrast that Mahler 's music must be "like film" because he is "modern."
(66) Lambert, Music Ho! 197.
(67) "Die Montage ist ein Hauptprinzip unserer Musik. Was ist eine Wagner-Ouverture anderes als eine ThemenMontage? Was ist jede Programm-musik anderes? Was die Musik nach Bach bis zur letzten Konsequenz der Romantik, bis Pfitzner?" (Ali Weyl-Nissen, "Stilprinzipien des Tonfilms: Versuch einer Grundlegung," Die Musik 21, no. 12 [September 1929]: 906 [my translation]).
(68) Going to another extreme through sheer omission, one study of heterogeneity and discontinuity in music almost entirely ignores cinema as a significant exponent of montage: Jean-Paul Olive, Musique et montage: Essai sur le materiau musical au debut du XXeme siecle (Paris: Editions L 'Harmattan, 1999).
(69) Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (1958; repr., New York: Vintage, 1968), 341.
(70) Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 383. Daniel Albright also notes precedents in Rossini 's overtures for the "ocularity" of modernist, collage-style music in which "snippets are audibly shoved together without transition" (Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 62).
(71) Precisely this point--the influence of Stravinsky 's block juxtapositions and discontinuities on subsequent composers--is argued in Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17-80.
(72) For an overview of this aspect of Eisenstein 's writings, see Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 165-66. Specific examples can be found in Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot" (on the ideogram or hieroglyph), 138-40; "Montage and Architecture," "Pushkin the Montageur," and "Tolstoy 's 'Anna Karenina '--the Races," in Selected Works (see note 44), 2:67, 203, 281, 264; "Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves," in Selected Works (see note 42), 3:197-222; "Word and Image" (on Milton), in Film Sense (see note 47), 57-62; and "Through Theater to Cinema" (on Flaubert), in Film Form (see note 47), 12-13.
(73) Lambert, Music Ho! 225. Here Lambert is discussing the musical accompaniment of film, but his opinion about music 's inability to "cut" would presumably extend to independent music, as well.
(74) See Jonathan W. Bernard, "Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time," Musical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 644-82.
(75) Swayne, How Sondheim, 1. This quotation is Swayne 's point of entry for grounding Sondheim 's interest in cinema, within which montage is presented as one issue among a range of others.
(76) Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 266.
(77) "Dans ce dernier poeme on ne peut pas se douter de tout ce que la musique pretend s raconter d 'anecdotes et de ce que l 'orchestre a de comparable aux folles illustrations d 'un texte" (Claude Debussy, "Richard Strauss" [Gil Blas, 30 March 1903], in Monsieur Croche et autres ecrits, ed. Francois Lesure [Paris: Gallimard, 1971], 134). Because part of my argument with respect to Debussy hinges on a case of translation (and its impact on reception), I also cite for each reference the standard published English version, from which I have modified my own translations: Debussy on Music, trans. and ed. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 159.
(78) "[O]n est pris d 'abord par sa prodigieuse variete orchestrale, puis par un mouvement frenetique qui vous emporte ls et aussi longtemps qu 'il le veut" (Debussy, "Richard Strauss," 134; translation modified from Smith, Debussy on Music, 160).
(79) "Encore une fois, c 'est un livre d 'images, c 'est meme de la cinematographie.... Mais il faut dire que l 'homme qui construisit une pareille ceuvre avec une telle continuite dans l 'effort est bien pres d 'avoir du genie" (Debussy, "Richard Strauss," 135 [ellipsis in the original]; translation modified from Smith, Debussy on Music, 160).
(80) Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56-62.
(81) Eisenstein, "The Montage of Attractions" (1923) and "The Montage of Film Attractions" (1924), in Selected Works (see note 3), 1:33-58, quotations at 34, 45. Not only Eisenstein, but Walter Benjamin, as well, provide some of the grounding for Gunning 's concept. On the latter, see Gunning, "The Whole Town 's Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity," Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 192-94.
(82) "Attention-grabbing" comes from a more recent definition of the concept in Gunning, "Attractions: How They Came into the World," in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 36.
(83) Strauven 's recent edited book (ibid.) is evidence of the continued centrality of the "cinema of attractions" to scholarly discourse on this period. For an earlier critique asserting narrative 's significance even within the era of "attractions," see Charles Musser, "Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity," Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 221.
(84) "Le cinema n 'ayant, s mon sens, rien s voir avec l 'art, et ses effets m 'ayant toujours semble deprimants pour le peuple, je ne puis avoir d 'opinion sur la musique s adjoindre s ce spectacle." Quoted in Lionel Robert, "Les enquetes du Film: La musique et le cinema," Le film, 15 August 1919; reprinted in Musique d 'ecran: L 'Accompagnement musical du cinema muet en France, 1918-1995, ed. Emmanuelle Toulet and Christian Belaygue (Paris: Editions de la reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1994), 21 (my translation).
(85) "Quoi qu 'il en soit, on se trouve ici en face d 'un piece musicale d 'une tres haute tenue, ou l 'auteur ne sacrifie que tres peu s la mode du jour, c 'est-s-dire s la musique cinematographique.
"Qu 'on me permette d 'expliquer brievement ce terme que j 'ecris ici tres serieusement. Il me semble qu 'un grand nombre de compositions symphoniques modernes, ou la sensation prend le pas sur le sentiment, gagneraient s l 'adjonction d 'un cinematographe qui serait appele s expliquer et s determiner les diverses phases du morceau.
"Du moment que toute forme musicale est bannie, comme suranee et vieux jeu, il me paraitrait indispensable de faire accompagner toute musique 'sensorielle ' par sa representation plastique.
"Cela aurait un double avantage: I) faire comprendre ce que le compositeur a voulu dire s l 'auditeur non snob (car le snob comprend et avale tout ce qui est s la mode ... par definition); 2) presenter s l 'oeil un agreable tremblotement, qui s 'harmoniserait s merveille avec les petits chichis orchestraux et autres titillations auriculaires, constituant generalement le principal merite de ces compositions.
"Ceci est une question s etudier ... On pourrait peut-etre nommer une commission..." (Vincent d 'Indy, "Concerts Lamoureux," Revue musicale--S.I.M. 9, no. 2 [15 February 1913]: 49-50 [my translation; ellipses in the final paragraph, and emphases throughout, as in the original]).
(86) In turn, d 'Indy 's music has also been described in cinematic terms; his Istar was called an "integral film" as early as 1925 (Paul Ramain, "L 'Influence du cinema sur la musique," Les cahiers du mois, nos. 16-17 [1925]: 125-26). D 'Indy 's Poeme des rivages also impressed a later biographer as "cinematographic" (Leon Vallas, Vincent d 'Indy, vol. 2: La maturite; la vieillesse [1836-1931] [Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1950], 270).
(87) "Il nous reste pourtant un moyen de faire revivre le gout de la musique symphonique parmi nos contemporains: appliquons s la musique pure le traitement de cinematographe. C 'est le film--le film d 'Ariane--qui nous permettra de sortir de cet inquietant labyrinthe." The allusion to Ariadne involves an untranslatable pun on fil (thread) and film (Claude Debussy, "Concerts Colonne" [S.I.M., 1 November 1913), in Monsieur Croche, 242; translation modified from Smith, Debussy on Music, 298).
(88) "Les innombrable auditeurs qui s 'ennuient s l 'audition de la Passion de Bach, et meme de la Messe en re, retrouveraient toute leur attention et toute leur emotion si l 'ecran prenait en pitie leur detresse. On pourrait meme y ajouter la cinematographie des instants par lesquels a passe l 'auteur au moment de la composition de son cuvre....
"Que de malentendus seraient ainsi evites! Le spectateur n 'est pas toujours responsable de ses erreurs. Il ne peut pas toujours preparer son audition comme une these; la vie normale d 'un citoyen n 'est pas specialement favorable s la suggestion des emotions esthetiques. L 'auteur ne serait plus trahi, nous serions debarrasses des fausses interpretations, nous connaTtrions enfin avec certitude la verite, la verite, la verite! ..." (Debussy, Monsieur Croche, 24243; translation modified from Smith, Debussy on Music, 298 [closing ellipses in the original]).
(89) "Sait-on, s ce sujet, que chez les fabricants de 'films ' il est question de cinematographier les neuf symphonies de Beethoven? Cela, au moyen d 'evenements, de drames contemporains. Bien entendu, ils n 'auront rien s faire avec la musique, encore moins avec Beethoven" (Claude Debussy, "Concerts Colonne" [S.I.M., 1 February 1914], in Monsieur Croche, 253-54; translation modified from Smith, Debussy on Music, 309). In the introduction to this material in the English version (261), Smith attributes an ironic cast to the Beethoven remark and acknowledges a connection to d 'Indy 's earlier article. But, being wedded to the idea of Debussy 's supposed embrace of film technique, he does not see that the article of November 1913 is also implicated in this irony.
(90) Richard Langham Smith, "Debussy and the Art of Cinema," Music and Letters 54, no. 1 (1973): 61-70.
(91) Ibid., 64. See note 87 for the original language in context.
(92) Smith, "Debussy and the Art of Cinema," 64. See note 88 for the original language in context.
(93) Robert Morgan, who edited the twentieth-century portion of this anthology, calls attention specifically on two occasions to Debussy 's purported recommendation of "techniques" from cinema, in the introductions both to his section of the book and to the document itself. Given this emphasis, it seems possible that this very passage was the reason for the essay 's inclusion (Leo Treitler, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1998], 1278, 1431; Debussy 's article appears on 1432-34).
(94) For one example, see Cross, Stravinsky Legacy, 10.
(95) Smith, "Debussy and the Art of Cinema," 69.
(96) Jonathan Dunsby, "The Poetry of Debussy 's En blanc et noir," in Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 165-66. Dunsby 's analysis of the piece is by no means limited to this point, which plays a subsidiary role in his interpretation.
(97) See note 41 for contemporary praise of Abel Gance 's editing.
(98) Rebecca Leydon, "Debussy 's Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema," Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 223.
(99) Ibid.
(100) Ibid., 232.
(101) Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 67-68; and Germaine Dulac, "Dans son cadre visuel le cinema n 'a point de limites" (1931), in Ecrits sur le cinema (1919-1937), ed. Prosper Hillairet (Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 1994), 147. (The Debussy sheet music is briefly visible in Madame Beudet.)
(102) Eisenstein, "Fourth Dimension in Cinema," 182-86.
(103) "Un musicien n 'ecrit pas toujours sous l 'inspiration d 'une histoire, mais le plus souvent sous l 'inspiration d 'une sensation. Le Jardin sous la Pluie [sic] de Debussy ou Le Prelude de la Goutte d 'eau, par exemple, sont des expressions d 'une ame qui s 'epanche, et reagit parmi les choses. Il n 'y a pas ls d 'histoire sauf celle d 'une ame qui ressent et pense, et cependant notre sensibilite est atteinte. Le coeur du musicien chante dans les notes, qui, percues s leur tour par des auditeurs, feront naTtre en eux l 'emotion. De meme la sensibilite du cineaste peut s 'exprimer par une superposition de lumiere et de mouvement dont la vision emouvra l 'ame du spectateur" (Germaine Dulac, "L 'Essence du cinema--l 'idee visuelle" [1925], in Hillairet, Ecrits sur le cinema, 66; translation modified from Sitney, Avant-Garde Film, 41).
(104) For a typology of paracinematic works, including the compositions listed here along with many others, see the introduction to Paulin, "On the Chaplinesque in Music."
(105) Andre Gaudreault, "From 'Primitive Cinema ' to 'Kine-Attractography, '" in Strauven, Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (see note 82), 95 (emphasis in the original).
(106) Charles Musser proposes that a "cinema of contemplation" existed alongside the more "astonishing" cinema of attractions ("A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertexuality and Attractions in the 1890s," in Strauven, Cinema of Attractions Reloaded [see note 82], 160-62).
(107) Like montage, however, this aesthetic has parallels outside of cinema, such as the nineteenth-century literary style of "sequential naturalism" (or Sekundenstil), which Walter Frisch discusses in his German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40-43.
(108) "Musique et Cinema" section in "Cinema," special issue, Les cahiers du mois, nos. 16-17 (1925): 116-28. A quarter century later, another journal surveyed musicians with a similar question (Pierre Duvillars, "Musique et cinema: Le cinema peut-il influencer l 'art musical?" L 'Sge nouveau, no. 51 [June 1950]: 34-60). But a range of other articles from the late 1920s and early 1930s had also offered interesting perspectives on the possible influence of cinema on music, including the following: H. H. Stuckenschmidt, "Die Musik zum Film," Die Musik 18, no. 11 (August 1926): 807-17; Roberto Gerhard, "Music and Film (1930)," in Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings, ed. Meirion Bowen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 79-80; Tibor Harssnyi, "Sur la musique du Dessin anime," in "L 'ecran et la musique en 1935," special issue, Revue musicale (December 1934): 92-98.
(109) "Le cinema possede deux moyens efficaces d 'influencer la musique, selon que son action s 'exerce sur la technique et les habitudes du compositeur par une collaboration suivie, ou qu 'elle s 'exerce sur son sens createur luimeme en lui suggerant une facon nouvelle de sentir la succession et la duree" (Frank Martin, "Musique et cinema," in the section "Musique et cinema," in "Cinema," special issue, Les cahiers du mois, nos. 16-17 (1925): 116-19, quotation at 116). All translations from Frank Martin are my own. Besides Martin, the other respondents on music were the composer Betove (Michel-Maurice Levy) and Paul Ramain, not a musician but a film connoisseur and organizer of a cine-club. Ramain 's propositions for a cinema-influenced music are as striking as Martin 's for their disinterest in formal and technical issues.
(110) "C 'est une grand passivite en meme temps qu 'une attention toujours eveillee, la capacite de suivre immediatement toute espece de changement visuel ou sentimental, de ne jamais s 'attarder s la scene passee, une legerete inouTe qui va jusqu 's la destruction de cette inertie personnelle faite de memoire, de pensee, de reverie.... En supprimant cette remanence de la sensibilite le cinema fait de nous, d 'aimants permanents que nous etions, des electroaimants reagissant s la moindre variation de courant et capables de retourner instantanement notre polarite" (ibid., 118).
(111) "Elle deviendra par ls un art du successif, de l 'immediat qui demande s l 'amateur une claire conscience, prete s chaque instant s jouir de chaque detail, une attention d 'enfant faite de surprise et d 'emerveillement dans un present perpetual" (ibid.).
(112) "[C]ette volonte et ce gout de n 'etablir aucun rapport connu entre deux faits successifs" (ibid., 119).
(113) "J 'envisage assez bien la 'coupe ' adoptee par Delteil: de petits tableaux brefs se succedant, rapides, s la facon des episodes d 'un film." Quoted in an interview with Gabriel Reuillard, "M. Maurice Ravel va ecrire une 'Jeanne d 'Arc '" (Excelsior, 24 September 1933), in Maurice Ravel: Lettres, ecrits, entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 375 (my translation).
(114) "Im Verlauf des Stuckes werden die durch Lagerungssnderungen entstehenden neuen Gestalten (versnderte Formen des Themas, neue Klsnge seines Elements) abgewickelt, so etwa wie ein Film abgerollet wird. Und die Reihenfolge der Bilder (wie der 'Schnitt ' beim Film) ergibt die 'Form '" (Arnold Schoenberg, "Der lineare Kontrapunkt (1931)," cited and translated in Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation, trans. and ed. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 400- 401).
Paulin, Scott D.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Paulin, Scott D. " 'Cinematic ' music: analogies, fallacies, and the case of debussy." Music and the Moving Image 3.1 (2010). Academic OneFile. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA219655950&v=2.1&u=usaf_portal&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w Gale Document Number: GALE|A219655950

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