Textbook The Orientation of Future Cinema Technology Aesthetics Spectacle 1St Edition Bruce Isaacs Ebook All Chapter PDF
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The Orientation of
Future Cinema
The Orientation of
Future Cinema
Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle
BRUCE ISAACS
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
www.bloomsbury.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
ISBN: 978-1-6235-6913-6
Acknowledgements ix
1 On cinematic experience 3
The technology of vision and visuality: The technological image reprised 223
The technology of material and non-material bodies (including ocean-
liners): Endo-skeletons, morphing shapes and machines 227
Bibliography 265
Filmography 279
Index 287
Acknowledgements
T his book benefited enormously from financial support from the University
of Sydney. The School of Letters, Art and Media provided two annual
grants that contributed to research and writing. I also received a research
grant from the United States Studies Centre that enabled me to undertake
research in Los Angeles and San Francisco in early 2012.
I’m very fortunate to work with a number of great people, who help to
make my job as a film academic a source of genuine pleasure. I wish to make
special mention of the constant support and encouragement over a number
of years of David Kelly, Peter Marks, Judith Keene and Jennifer Milam. These
people, in one way or another, have been instrumental in the development of
my career, my thinking on cinema and art, and my own place in the evolving
role of arts-based scholarship.
I am deeply grateful for the generosity of Sam Cosentino and Jenny Ward,
who were instrumental in getting me ‘connected’ with key practitioners in
the studio system. I thank Steve Ross at USC, who put me in touch with
Tad Marburg, who in turn put me in touch with key production personnel
in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I especially wish to thank Rick Sayre at
Pixar, who was generous with his time, but also interested in what I had to
say. I got to spend an afternoon with Richard King, a key sound designer
and editor at Warner Bros. – Richard’s insights into the contemporary studio
system were illuminating. John Lee, second editor on The Dark Knight Rises,
provided the kind of insight into large-scale studio production that is hard
to get at second or third hand. Philip Lelyveld and Bryan Gonzales at the
Entertainment Technology Center at USC provided up-to-date and insightful
commentary on contemporary 3-D image (and sound, yes, 3-D sound)
technology. Katie Gallof at Continuum Press has been an absolute pleasure
to work with on this project. She brought a fantastic presence to the profes-
sional side of things.
I wish to thank my family, who are keen film enthusiasts. A great deal
of my thinking in this book filters through my twin brother, Herschel,
whose experience of cinema accompanied, and continues to accompany,
my own. Last, I wish to thank Rebecca Goldsworthy, my wife, who has
supported every aspect of my fascination with cinema. Every thought in
x Acknowledgements
this book is bounced off of her first, revised, and invariably enriched. I
thank her for everything she has brought to this book, and to our lives
together.
PART ONE
The age of
late cinema
1
On cinematic experience
╇1
╇ D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 188.
╇2
╇ Auguste and Louis Lumière, L’Arrivée d’un Train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at a Station, 1895),
YouTube Video (0:50sec.), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk [accessed 14 March
2011]. For a lively account of the formation of early cinema, see Kristin Thompson and David
Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010), 3–21.
╇3
╇Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’,
in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1995), 115. While Gunning rejects the mythology of ‘initial terror’ that inflects a
great deal of the theory of early cinema spectatorship, he acknowledges that ‘there is no question
that a reaction of astonishment and even a type of terror accompanied early projections’ (116).
4 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
transfigured in a moving image? How would the spectator have made sense
of such a spectacle?
This chapter reflects on how cinema manifests in individual and collective
minds, from Lumière’s early moving images to what I call the age of late
cinema, in which new technologies, new cinematic spaces, the new material
of cinematic life, transforms the old medium into something equally aston-
ishing.4 I begin by revisiting some of the sacred positions brought to bear on
a century of meditation on the medium: on its claims to aesthetic brilliance,
philosophical truth, or more humbly, to represent that which we already
experience in our sensory lives – the image of the world. Surely this is where
we begin each time we enter the darkened space of the theatre, or sit in front
of our laptops – the cinema gives us back the life we experience through our
senses.
However, cinema could never maintain a century-long life as merely represen-
tation. For the image to be of any real value, it must be greater than, merely,
the image of the world. As Bazin suggests, the question of experiencing the
world through cinema, which is perhaps the fundamental question that drives
its spectators to the theatre, is a psychological one.5 Cinema represents an
obsessive tendency to experience the world in a certain way. In an engaging
meditation on cinema’s effect, Sean Cubitt declares: ‘I want to know what
cinema does. If it causes no effect, however ornery or belated, cinema doesn’t
do anything, and there is left only the question of what it is or, more exactly,
what it fails to be. Cinema does something, and what it does matters.’6 Cubitt’s
charge here is to return to the essence of cinema – the matter that makes it
what it is. But what it is, for Cubitt, is determined by what kind of transformation
it effects. His position is thus a savvy confrontation with the long history of
cinema that traces its being, its ontological presence, without also illuminating
its purpose. How else might a spectator explain an obsession with cinema, but
as a radically new image of the world? Why else would we seek it out?
In this chapter, I wish to charge the spectator (and reader) with the
self-same shock of the image Gunning identifies in Lumière’s early film
╇4
╇ For an account of cinema’s transformation from early to late, and its concomitant transformation
of private and public sphere engagement, see Miriam Hansen, ‘Early Cinema, Late Cinema:
Permutations of the Public Sphere’, Screen 34, no. 3 (1993), 197–210.
╇5
╇André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). Bazin’s reading of the trajectory
of the image toward a ‘total cinema’ implies a psychological and active engagement with that
image rather than a passive absorption of the perfect illusion of the real. See also André Bazin, ‘The
Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 7. The image of the real, for Bazin, is neces-
sarily ambiguous.
╇6
╇ Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1.
On cinematic experience 5
╇ For an account of the creation and industrial development of early cinema in France, see Richard
╇8
Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1994), 10–18.
On cinematic experience 7
image from December 1895, when Lumière first captured a group of women
exiting a factory: La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon [Workers Leaving the
Lumière Factory in Lyon, 1895].9 The clip stream is 38 seconds in duration.
Cubitt makes ingenious use of this simple tract of film (though, of course, it’s
no longer film, a notion I will attempt to project to its radical end), but here,
on YouTube, with the image moving in awkward, spasmodic sections, I wish
to merely stop it in its natural motion. The natural life of this image in 1895
was as an image in motion – as what Bazin terms, in another context, the
image of inherent continuity;10 I address this section of film as a continuous
flow of place and people in time. But now, on my iMac screen, this inherent
continuity of motion, this movement, has been stilled. I have the YouTube
clip on pause, bringing what was a natural progression of early cinema to the
more artificial still-life digital rendering. You may wish to call up this image on
your own screen. The pause is arbitrary, at 17 seconds; the postures of the
bodies are natural, though their stillness is a contrivance of the technology
at my fingertips.
Stilled this way, Lumière’s image takes on a new and unintended life of its
own. My contemplation of the women stilled has altered either my perception
of them or the ontology of the streamed image. Stilling the progression, I
change in some essential way the image as object. The women now seem
constrained by the boundaries of the image; off-screen space, so alive to the
potential of the image in movement, is absent here.11 I read the image as a
still, I am subjected to the perceptual and psychological properties of a static
image. I am prevented from contemplating the possibilities of the ‘beyond
of the image’ because that duration is absent. The photographic image is
not only dissimilar from the moving image, but is made out of the absence
of movement.12 But should I click my mouse and again animate the image,
╇9
╇ Auguste and Louis Lumière, La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon [Workers Leaving the Lumière
Factory in Lyon], YouTube Video (1:50sec.), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO0EkMKfgJI
[accessed 14 March 2011].
10
╇ André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 37.
11
╇For an influential discussion of the image ‘beyond the frame’, see Stanley Cavell, The World
Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
24–5.
12
╇ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 2–3. Deleuze distinguishes between cinema’s
movement that is ‘in the apparatus’ and the still image as a discretized unit, the ‘photogram’. For
Deleuze, the image in movement presents a particular effect and affect: ‘in short, cinema does
not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.’
For a discussion of the photograph’s ‘immanent storytelling’ that ‘project[s] the images into the
past and into the future’, see Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image
of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 143.
8 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
its life becomes a cinema of motion and continuity. And again, in motion, I
sense that this is how it must be experienced – in motion and continuity. The
distinction between the still life of Lumière’s factory (something like a tableau)
and a moving image, a daily ritual of leaving a factory, is a function of the
technology (once a Cinématographe, now a more complex image production
apparatus) that has captured an image of the world.
Critical to our consideration of the meaning of the cinematic image is its
life through movement. Certainly Lumière could have stilled the image in
1895. But why would he want to? Why would a new filmmaker (in its earliest
incarnation, the filmmaker was something like the classical explorer, bent on
discovering a new world),13 a pioneer of the moving image, wish to still it?
Rather, he would play with the coordinates of natural time. Early filmmakers,
notably Méliès, but also Lumière, sped up the image progression, or slowed
it down. It was not for some time that the image fixed to a transparent
narrative context, and even then it maintained the novelty of this new way of
capturing the world, playing with its coordinates of space and time, speeding
up and slowing down life’s internal rhythms, manifesting as a trick effect.14
The moving image, Lumière discovered, could provide a caricatured ‘trace of
the real’, and this is how he used his new technology. It would be some time
before cinema would find its natural, narrative speed, which perhaps consti-
tutes the grounding of narrative realism.15
The upshot of this imagining of the image in the past and present
is to return cinema to a question of materiality, both the material of its
construction, its technology, and the materiality of its purpose, how it trans-
lates to spectators as a part of their lives – cinema’s overarching and essential
use-value. Lumière’s women exiting a factory are bodies in motion. This is
the essential matter of their being, of what I’ve called their cinematic life.
I disagree that progression and continuity is merely one possibility of this
cinematic image.16 Of course I could alter this continuity, I could make this
motion discontinuous. Lumière could have rendered these women before a
factory as a photograph. But in the age of the Cinématographe, why would
13
╇For an engaging account of Robert Flaherty as explorer, see Eric Barnouw, Documentary: A
History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34–51.
14
╇ See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edition (London: Starword,
1992), 34–6.
15
╇ Musser locates early cinema’s narrativization in the travel film, which sought to produce the
experience of movement, a ‘perception which was initially disorienting, then pleasurable’. See
Charles Musser, ‘The Travel Genre in 1903–1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative’, in Early
Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 2010), 128.
16
╇For this position, see Cubitt, Cinema Effect, 35–41. For a persuasive reading of Lumière’s
early cinema as structured narrative form, see Marshall Deutelbaum, ‘Structural Patterning in the
Lumière Films’, Wide Angle 3, no. 1 (1979).
On cinematic experience 9
he want to? Why would the spectator of industrial modernity and its new
technology of seeing wish to see the world in such an archaic, stately, way?
Industrialization craved movement, freneticism and intensity. No, the stilled
image – or the image of discontinuity – is an aberration in Lumière.
And yet, there is nothing aberrant about the stilled moving-image on a
computer screen. The still is like a screen itself. In fact, a simple click and
save and scroll through a Tools menu, and Lumière’s photographic image of
women exiting a factory transforms into my very own wallpaper, inscribed
with the signature of my own spectatorship. The image, no longer the
property of the technology of the new modernity, becomes personalized in
the postmodern, virtual space of the computer screen. On my screen the
still image acquires another life altogether. This object, streamed through
YouTube but stilled for the moment, takes on a renewed life as a still image.
This new life stems from, among other things, how I make use of it through
the technology of the image. And if this is the case for early cinema and its
contemporary presence on an array of office screens, how else might cinema
be made use of? This is the currency of the image in contemporary use:
as technology, as technological object. It is the process of digitization that
reinvigorates celluloid, streaming the past in renewed form, and displaying
it as an image discrete from movement or stasis; streamed on YouTube, the
early celluloid image in movement becomes a discretized object. To concur
with Joseph Natoli, we experience this new technology, and its image, differ-
ently, as a different mode of fascination.17
I use the term itinerary to talk about the cinematic image because in its
essential material, the screened image is a pathway. It makes little sense as
an end in itself. My engagement with cinema is founded upon a desire to
╇ Joseph Natoli, Memory’s Orbit: Film and Culture 1999–2000 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 32.
17
╇ Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
18
2010), 41.
10 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
understand further, and more deeply, the condition of life. Cinema, as has
been told to us by countless theorists, notably Cavell, but also Eisenstein,
Bazin and others, is not life.19 We perceive the world differently to the
world we perceive screened back to us. And if we entertain the notion of
the autonomous apparatus of cinema, cinema itself perceives the world
differently.20 The camera sees something that lies outside of the perceptual
coordinates of our senses, visual and aural. When Dziga Vertov roams the
city with a camera in Man With a Movie Camera (1929), he perceives with
a cinematic-eye, an artificial visual perception. This new perception in Soviet
cinema is also the product of montage, and montage is cinema, to paraphrase
Eisenstein.21 Hitchcock’s subjective shot in Psycho (1960) – for example,
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) spying on Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) – is a
conflation of various conflicted subjectivities. There is something voyeuristi-
cally fascinating and unsettling in inhabiting the subjective space of Norman,
yet we are neither Norman, nor categorically ourselves, but a cinematic
subject beyond the instrument of a simplistic identification. In the legendary
shot of Arbogast’s murder, we survey the falling body through a complex
movement on a matte background as the body ‘falls’ down the stairs. Clearly,
as spectators subjected to the gaze of Norman (who as Mother presumably
views Arbogast’s fall after stabbing him), we cannot equate our common
visual perception with the cinematic perspective offered by Hitchcock (figure
1.2). That shot, that perception of life, is intrinsic to cinema’s creation of the
image. Hitchcock’s other great cinematic image is the famous ‘Vertigo shot’,22
which in some sense signifies Scottie’s (James Stewart) sensation of vertigo,
but provides only the barest trace of the perceptual experience of vertigo for
the spectator suffering from that condition.
The remarkable achievement of cinematic vision, from its earliest manifes-
tation, is to render a new image of the world. This is cinema’s overarching
purpose: to render the world as a creative movement beyond the perception
of life. Yet in spite of the fundamental gap between reality and the cinema, we
must accept that cinema presents life back to the spectator – this is, in my
theory of the cinematic image, a point of origin. Without this itinerary, what
purpose can the cinema image hope to serve? Without a tacit acceptance
19
╇Cavell, The World Viewed, 16–19. Cavell’s critical point, working through Bazin, is that ‘film
awakens as much as it enfolds you’ (17).
20
╇On cinema’s autonomy, see Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006),
5–11. For Frampton, cinema manifests the capacity to think the formation of the world and
experience.
21
╇Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, in Film Form: Essays in
Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harvest, 1977), 28.
22
╇ For a discussion of this shot between Truffaut and Hitchcock, see François Truffaut, Hitchcock
(London: Paladin, 1986), 372–4.
On cinematic experience 11
of this position, of this fundamental relation between the real and its image
counterpart, cinema becomes an esoteric object playing on screens oblivious
to the spectator. Like the quantum particle, the cinematic image materializes
through perception; this is its meaning, its itinerary and its point of coming
into being. And that subjective perception, regardless of how normative or
perverse it might be, searches for the indexical qualities of the image.23
But there is also something else at stake in thinking through the itinerary
of the image. Cinema cannot merely be about personal, individual experience.
What would be the purpose of experiencing cinema in isolation? Cinema
maintains as a popular and pervasive art form. A film like Avatar (2009)
matters for any number of reasons, but first it matters because it was viewed
– and re-viewed – by a global audience of tens of millions of spectators. It
has registered as a cultural and aesthetic object of enormous significance.24
Thus, while cinema gains its material from the world (its essential itinerary),
the world also takes its meaning from cinema. Žižek is no doubt correct in
reading the virtual image of 9/11 as a cinematic image.25 This is at times
Baudrillard’s position on American studio productions, the world as image-
fantasy: ‘The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy,
the war as a succession of special effects, the war become film even before
23
╇ Cavell is again instructive here: ‘Apart from the wish for selfhood … I do not understand the
value of art.’ See Cavell, The World Viewed, 22.
24
╇ I’m pleased to note Cavell’s very similar, and romantic, reflection in prompting a contemplation
of cinema’s importance: ‘Rich and poor, those who care about no (other) art and those who live in
the promise of art, those whose pride is education and those whose pride is power or practicality
– all care about movies.’ See Cavell, The World Viewed, 4–5.
25
╇Slavoj Žižek, ‘Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance’, in Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the
Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 11–16.
12 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
╇Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Detroit: University of
26
FIGURES 1.3–6╇ Synthetic movement and subjectivity: The Dark Knight (2008).
27
╇Buckland offers an astute analysis of the transformation of Spielberg’s ‘brand image’ from
Amblin’s archetypal register of emotion (which Buckland calls ‘the impossible fantasy effect’)
to the emblematic sentimentalism of the Dreamworks logo. See Warren Buckland, Directed by
Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (New York: Continuum
Press, 2006), 23–5.
14 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Nolan’s The Dark Knight partake
of the register of the synthetic image does not in some way negate these
texts, and such modes of cinema, as meaningful experience, as authentic
engagement.28
The register of the synthetic image is most obviously visible in Hollywood’s
classical studio aesthetic, in which the image is the outcome of a carefully
formulated and systematized master-shot technique, continuity cinemato-
graphic and editing strategies, regulated production practices from story
development to distribution and exhibition, and the overarching textual
framework of classical genre.29 While there are anomalies in the system
(notably Welles, and most visibly in Citizen Kane’s [1941] expressive deep
focus cinematography), a great deal of Hollywood’s output during the
classical era exemplifies a compositional aesthetic founded on a synthetic
image. The synthetic image constitutes the aesthetic material of the unique
genius of Hollywood’s industrial system. While some convincing argument
has been made to problematize an aesthetic distinction between a classical
and post-classical Hollywood,30 the synthetic image is clearly visible in
Hollywood production from the height of its classical studio era to contem-
porary production practices. Is Hollywood’s ‘invisibility of style’ not merely
the aesthetic system that organized its production of synthetic images? The
final sequence in Casablanca (1942), in which Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and
Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) part ways, is a marvel of synthetic image strategies:
mechanistic shot reverse-shot relations, camera movement for emphasis,
forced framing, non-diegetic musical accompaniment for emotional effect,
soft focus on the woman to maintain the ephemerality and unattainability of
the female image, etc. (figures 1.7–1.11). Yet in spite of the highly orchestrated
28
╇ Gunning presents an intriguing and ambitious revision of cinema’s essential effect. For Gunning,
more important than indexicality is cinema’s capacity to display movement. Through movement,
cinemas of reality and fantasy display the world to equal and codependent effect. See Tom
Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007), 45–6.
29
╇ For a comprehensive overview of Hollywood’s stylistic practices during the classical era, see
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). See especially
Chapter One, ‘An Excessively Obvious Cinema’. For a detailed analysis of shot composition
and editing styles, see Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930–1980
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
30
╇ For two excellent collections charting the industrial and aesthetic form of a ‘New Hollywood’,
see The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), and The
Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser,
Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Both collec-
tions, while illustrating points of distinction between a classical and a new Hollywood, also provide
subtle analyses of continuity in modes of production and industry formation.
On cinematic experience 15
31
╇Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–24.
32
╇ David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (1979),
57–9.
33
╇ André Bazin, ‘De Sica: Metteur en Scène’, in Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, ed.
Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 65.
34
╇ Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, 27–8.
16 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
35
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 6–7.
On cinematic experience 17
the digitally produced image, as Rombes astutely argues, returns the image
to its inherent reality.36 The desire to manifest the world through the cinema
image, even in the technology of digital production, remains, in current
practice, a matter of an ethical position.37
If we address the cinematic image in terms of a foundational ethic, a
desire for a realistic or synthetic image, Eisenstein’s montage (conventionally
a synthetic image) is not necessarily in conflict with Bazin’s image of reality.
The image that arises out of conflict through montage is of course different
from the image that reveals the inherent continuity of the real (Bazin’s deep
focus/depth of field image in Welles, or later in Rossellini and De Sica). But
the engagement for the spectator is with an image itinerary that strives to
create a vision of the world. In this way also, Welles’s image in depth in
Citizen Kane is not necessarily an image of reality. Deep focus, because it
is not the indexical equivalent of perceptual reality, partakes both of what
Bazin perceived to be an image of reality and the register of the synthetic
image. In fact, couldn’t we say that realism is not purely the manifestation
of the realist image, and its uniquely spatial and temporal relations (Bazin),
but the manifestation of an ethical desire of the film to configure reality?
Could we not adequately describe cinematic realism as the aesthetic system
through which the image manifests an ethical commitment to reality? The
ethical material of cinema was also critical to Eisenstein, for whom cinema
mattered as the image of political consciousness. This is Eisenstein’s plastic
image, the most explicitly articulated synthetic image in early cinema, with
which Tarkovsky would take issue.38 And yet, for all its plasticity, Eisenstein’s
montage, at every step, in his practice and writing on cinema, manifests the
ethical life of an image that seeks to ‘get back to the world’.
36
╇ Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 81–2.
37
╇See Lucia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York: Continuum Press), 27.
Tarkovsky approaches a similar position, albeit through a particularly poetic, almost mystical, sensi-
bility. See Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair
(London: Faber, 1989), 27: ‘Masterpieces are born of the artist’s struggle to express his ethical
ideals.’
38
╇Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 114–21.
18 THE ORIENTATION OF FUTURE CINEMA
39
╇ Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum Press,
2001), 37.
40
╇André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Rossellini: a Letter to Guido Aristarco, Editor-in-Chief of Cinema
Nuovo’, in What is Cinema? Volume 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2004), 97.
41
╇ Time-code references are to Disc One (Rome Open City), Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Rome
Open City/Paisan/Germany Year Zero) [DVD] (The Criterion Collection, 2010).
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sous le consulat de Félicianus et de Titianus; ayant
régné trente ans, neuf mois, vingt-sept jours, et Philost. l. 2, c.
vécu soixante-trois ans, deux mois et vingt-cinq 16 et 17.
jours.
Dès qu'il eut rendu le dernier soupir, ses gardes Cedren. t. i, p.
donnèrent des marques de la plus vive douleur: ils 296 et 297.
déchiraient leurs habits, se jetaient à terre et se
frappaient la tête. Au milieu de leurs sanglots et de
Zonar. l. 13, t. 2,
leurs cris lamentables, ils l'appelaient leur maître, p. 10.
leur empereur, leur père. Les tribuns, les
centurions, les soldats si souvent témoins de sa
valeur dans les batailles, semblaient vouloir encore Till. art. 78.
le suivre au tombeau. Cette perte leur était plus
sensible que la plus sanglante défaite. Les Rufin. l. 10, c.
habitants de Nicomédie couraient tous 11.
confusément par les rues, mêlant leurs
gémissements et leurs larmes. C'était un deuil
lxv. Deuil à sa
particulier pour chaque famille; et chacun, pleurant mort.
son prince, pleurait son propre malheur.
Son corps fut porté à Constantinople dans un Euseb. vit.
cercueil d'or couvert de pourpre. Les soldats dans Const. l. 4, c.
un morne silence précédaient le corps et 65.
marchaient à la suite. On le déposa orné de la
pourpre et du diadème dans le principal lxvi. Ses
appartement du palais, sur une estrade élevée, au funérailles.
milieu d'un grand nombre de flambeaux portés par
des chandeliers d'or. Ses gardes l'environnaient
jour et nuit. Les généraux, les comtes et les grands Euseb. vit.
officiers venaient chaque jour, comme s'il eût été
encore vivant, lui rendre leurs devoirs aux heures Const. l. 4, c.
marquées, et le saluaient en fléchissant le genou. 66-67.
Les sénateurs et les magistrats entraient ensuite à
leur tour; et après eux une foule de peuple de tout âge et de tout
sexe. Les officiers de sa maison se rendaient auprès de lui comme
pour leur service ordinaire. Ces lugubres cérémonies durèrent
jusqu'à l'arrivée de Constance.
Les tribuns ayant choisi entre les soldats ceux qui
avaient été les plus chéris de l'empereur, les lxvii. Fidélité
dépêchèrent aux trois Césars, pour leur porter des légions.
cette triste nouvelle. Les légions répandues dans
les diverses parties de l'empire, n'eurent pas plutôt Euseb. vit.
appris la mort de leur prince, qu'animées encore Const. l. 4, c.
de son esprit, elles résolurent, comme de concert, 68.
de ne reconnaître pour maîtres que ses enfants.
Peu de temps après elles les proclamèrent Augustes, et se
communiquèrent mutuellement par des courriers cet accord
unanime.
Cependant Constance, moins éloigné que les deux
autres Césars, arriva à Constantinople. Il fit lxviii.
transporter le corps de son père à l'église des Inhumation de
Apôtres. Il conduisait lui-même le convoi: à sa Constantin.
suite marchait l'armée en bon ordre; les gardes
entouraient le cercueil, suivi d'un peuple Euseb. vit.
innombrable. Quand on fut arrivé à l'église, Const. l. 4, c.
Constance qui n'était encore que catéchumène, se 70, 71.
retira avec les soldats, et on célébra les saints
mystères. Le corps fut déposé dans un tombeau Soz. l. 2, c. 34.
de porphyre qui n'était pas dans l'église même,
mais dans le vestibule. Saint Jean Chrysostôme dit
que Constance crut faire un honneur distingué à Joan. Chrysost.
in 2 ad Corinth.
son père en le plaçant à l'entrée du palais des
hom. 26, t. x, p.
Apôtres. Vingt ans après, comme on fut obligé de 625.
rétablir cet édifice qui tombait déja en ruine, on fit
transférer le corps dans l'église de Saint-Acacius;
mais on le rapporta ensuite dans celle des Cedren. t. i, p.
296.
Apôtres. Gilles, savant voyageur du seizième
siècle, dit qu'on lui montra à Constantinople, près
du lieu où avait été cette église, un tombeau de Hist. misc. l. 11.
porphyre, vide et découvert, long de dix pieds et apud Muratori, t.
haut de cinq et demi, que les Turcs disaient être i, p. 74.
celui de Constantin.
Gyll. Topog.
Constantinop. l.
Tout l'empire pleura ce grand prince. Ses 4, c. 2.
conquêtes, ses lois, les superbes édifices dont il
avait décoré toutes les provinces, Constantinople lxix. Deuil à
elle-même qui toute entière était un magnifique Rome.
monument érigé à sa gloire, lui avaient attiré
l'admiration: ses libéralités et son amour pour ses
peuples lui avaient acquis leur tendresse. Il aimait Euseb. vit.
Const. l. 4, c. 69
la ville de Rheims; et c'est à lui sans doute plutôt et 73.
qu'à son fils, qu'on doit attribuer d'y avoir fait
construire des thermes à ses dépens: l'éloge
pompeux que porte l'inscription de ces thermes ne Aurel. Vict. de
Cæs. p. 178.
peut convenir qu'au père[86]. Il avait déchargé
Tripoli en Afrique et Nicée en Bithynie de certaines
contributions onéreuses, auxquelles les empereurs Jul. or. 1, p. 16.
précédents avaient assujetti ces villes depuis plus ed. Spanh.
d'un siècle. Il avait accepté le titre de stratège ou
de préteur d'Athènes, dignité devenue, depuis Eunap. in
Gallien, supérieure à celle d'archonte; il y faisait Proœr. p. 91.
distribuer tous les ans une grande quantité de blé; ed. Boiss.
et cette largesse était établie à perpétuité. Rome
se signala entre les autres villes par l'excès de sa Grut. p. 178, no
douleur. Elle se reprochait d'avoir causé à ce bon 1.
prince des déplaisirs amers, et de l'avoir forcé à
préférer Byzance: pénétrée de regret elle se faisait
à elle-même un crime de l'élévation de sa nouvelle [Eckhel. Doct.
rivale. On ferma les bains et les marchés; on num. vet. t. viii,
p. 92 et 93.]
défendit les spectacles et tous les divertissements
publics. On ne s'entretenait que de la perte qu'on avait faite. Le
peuple déclarait hautement qu'il ne voulait avoir pour empereurs que
les enfants de Constantin. Il demandait à grands cris qu'on lui
envoyât le corps de son empereur; et la douleur augmenta quand on
sut qu'il restait à Constantinople. On rendait honneur à ses images,
dans lesquelles on le représentait assis dans le ciel. L'idolâtrie
toujours bizarre le plaça au nombre de ces mêmes dieux qu'il avait
abattus; et par un mélange ridicule, plusieurs de ses médailles
portent le titre de Dieu avec le monogramme du Christ. Les cabinets
des antiquaires en conservent d'autres telles que les décrit Eusèbe:
on y voit Constantin assis dans un char attelé de quatre chevaux; il
paraît être attiré au ciel par une main qui sort des nues.
[86] Lebeau se trompe à ce que je crois. L'inscription dont il parle ne peut laisser
de doute sur le fondateur de ce monument. On va en juger:
IMP. CAES. FL. CONSTANTINVS. MAX. AVG. SEMPI
TERNVS. DIVI. CONSTANTINI. AVG. F. TOTO
ORBE. VICTORIIS. SVIS. SEMPER. AC. FELICITER
CELEBRANDVS. THERMAS. FISCI. SVI. SVMPTV
A. FVNDAMENTIS. CEPTAS. AC. PERACTAS
CIVITATI. SVAE. REMORVM. PRO. SOLITA
LIBERALITATE. LARGITVS. EST.
Les éloges qu'on a donnés dans cette inscription au jeune Constantin, sont un peu
exagérés, il est vrai; mais n'en est-il pas toujours ainsi des dédicaces faites du
vivant des fondateurs? Ceux-ci sont cependant justifiés par les victoires que ce
prince avait remportées sur les Goths et les Sarmates. Les expressions toto orbe,
victoriis suis, semper ac feliciter celebrandus, lui conviennent tout aussi bien qu'à
son père. Il n'est guère probable d'ailleurs que Constantin, qui fit si peu de séjour
dans les Gaules et qui était tout occupé de sa nouvelle capitale, ait songé à faire
élever des thermes à Reims, tandis que rien n'était plus naturel pour son fils, qui
résida presque toujours dans les Gaules, qui lui avaient été destinées par son
père dès son enfance.—S.-M.
L'église lui a rendu des honneurs plus solides.
Tandis que les païens en faisaient un dieu, les lxx. Honneurs
chrétiens en ont fait un saint. On célébrait sa fête rendus à sa
en Orient avec celle d'Hélène, et son office, qui est mémoire par
l'église.
fort ancien chez les Grecs, lui attribue des miracles
et des guérisons. On bâtit à Constantinople un
monastère sous le nom de Saint-Constantin. On Bolland. 21
rendait des honneurs extraordinaires à son maii.
tombeau et à sa statue placée sur la colonne de
porphyre. Les Pères du concile de Chalcédoine Till. art. 78.
crurent honorer Marcien, le plus religieux des
princes, en le saluant du nom de nouveau
Theod. l. 1, c.
Constantin. Au neuvième siècle on récitait encore
34.
à Rome son nom à la messe, avec celui de
Théodose Ier et des autres princes les plus
respectés. Il y avait sous son nom en Angleterre Baron. ann.
324.
plusieurs églises et plusieurs autels. En Calabre
est le bourg de Saint-Constantin, à quatre milles
du mont Saint-Léon. A Prague, en Bohême, on a Pachym. in
long-temps honoré sa mémoire, et l'on y conservait Mich. Palœol. l.
de ses reliques. Son culte et celui d'Hélène ont 9, c. 1.
passé jusqu'en Moscovie; et les nouveaux Grecs
lui donnent ordinairement le titre d'égal aux Apôtres.
Les défauts de Constantin nous empêchent de
souscrire à un éloge aussi hyperbolique. Les lxxi. Caractère
spectacles affreux de tant de captifs dévorés par de Constantin.
les bêtes; la mort de son fils innocent, celle de sa
femme, dont la punition trop précipitée prit la Aurel. Vict. de
couleur de l'injustice, montrent que le sang des Cæs. p. 178.
Barbares coulait encore dans ses veines; et que
s'il était bon et clément par caractère, il devenait
Eutrop. l. 10.
dur et impitoyable par emportement. Peut-être eut-
il de justes raisons d'ôter la vie aux deux Licinius; mais la postérité a
droit de condamner les princes, qui ne se sont pas mis en peine de
se justifier à son tribunal. Il aima l'Église; elle lui doit sa liberté et sa
splendeur; mais, facile à séduire, il l'affligea lorsqu'il croyait la servir;
se fiant trop à ses propres lumières, et se reposant avec trop de
crédulité sur la bonne foi des méchants qui l'environnaient, il livra à
la persécution des prélats qui méritaient à plus juste titre d'être
comparés aux Apôtres. L'exil et la déposition des défenseurs de la
foi de Nicée, balancent au moins la gloire d'avoir convoqué ce
fameux concile. Incapable lui-même de dissimulation, il fut trop
aisément la dupe des hérétiques et des courtisans. Imitateur de
Titus, d'Antonin et de Marc-Aurèle, il aimait ses peuples et voulait en
être aimé; mais ce fonds même de bonté, qui les lui faisait chérir, les
rendit malheureux; il ménagea jusqu'à ceux qui les pillaient: prompt
et ardent à défendre les abus, lent et froid à les punir; avide de
gloire, et peut-être un peu trop dans les petites choses. On lui
reproche d'avoir été plus porté à la raillerie qu'il ne convient à un
grand prince. Au reste il fut chaste, pieux, laborieux et infatigable,
grand capitaine, heureux dans la guerre, et méritant ses succès par
une valeur brillante et par les lumières de son génie; protégeant les
arts et les encourageant par ses bienfaits. Si on le compare avec
Auguste, on trouvera qu'il ruina l'idolâtrie avec les mêmes
précautions et la même adresse que l'autre employa à détruire la
liberté. Il fonda comme Auguste un nouvel empire; mais moins
habile et moins politique, il ne sut pas lui donner la même solidité: il
affaiblit le corps de l'état en y ajoutant, en quelque façon, une
seconde tête par la fondation de Constantinople; et transportant le
centre du mouvement et des forces trop près de l'extrémité orientale,
il laissa sans chaleur et presque sans vie les parties de l'Occident,
qui devinrent bientôt la proie des Barbares.
Les païens lui ont voulu trop de mal pour lui rendre
justice. Eutrope dit que, dans la première partie de lxxii.
son règne, il fut comparable aux princes les plus Reproches mal
accomplis, et dans la dernière aux plus médiocres. fondés de la
part des païens.
Le jeune Victor, qui lui donne plus de trente et un
an de règne, prétend que dans les dix premières
années ce fut un héros, dans les douze suivantes Eutr. l. 10.
un ravisseur, et un dissipateur dans les dix
dernières. Il est aisé de sentir que de ces deux Aur. Vict. epit. p.
reproches de Victor, l'un porte sur les richesses 224.
que Constantin enleva à l'idolâtrie, et l'autre sur
celles dont il combla l'église.
Outre ses trois fils il laissa deux filles: Constantine,
mariée d'abord à Hanniballianus roi de Pont, lxxiii. Ses filles.
ensuite à Gallus; et Hélène qui fut femme de
Julien. Quelques auteurs en ajoutent une troisième Ducange, Fam.
qu'ils nomment Constantia: ils disent qu'ayant fait Byz. p. 47.
bâtir à Rome l'église et le monastère de Sainte-
Agnès, elle s'y renferma après avoir fait vœu de
virginité. Cette opinion ne porte sur aucun Till. note 18, sur
Constantin.
fondement solide.