Tuesday, May 17: LACMA Gallery: 10-12: Focus: Parisian Streetscapes
Reel 2, 54-55 seconds
I was thinking today in class about the idea of the spectator looking back, something that was emphasized both by Vanessa and within the exhibition catalogue. The self-awareness of those who looked into the camera and the importance of being seen struck me as an early sort of disruption of the filmic process, an intervention into what might otherwise be taken at face value (even if everything that was shot was artificially constructed).
This sort of looking, I think, gestures to a greater slippage: that of the physical tangibility of the film that is attempted to be hidden. In other words, just as the spectator looks at the camera operator thus breaking an illusion, so, too, does seeing aberrations in the film remind us that we are watching something that has already been recorded.
The dust, of course, and scratches belong to this category, but I was drawn particularly to a moment in between seconds 54-55 of Reel 2 when, impossibly, letters of text materialize and vanish fractions of a second later. I’m excited to hear more about what these letters indicate (are they the title? do they identify the end of the reel and the beginning of the following reel?), but, for now, already this strikes me as harbinger of how cinema can be manipulated in more unusual ways. When I first saw the letters, I immediately thought of Isidore Isou and Guy Debord and their investments in the disruption of words. Some thirty-odd years after this film was made, Isou would interrogate the future of poetry in his Manifesto of Letterist Poetry (1942), in which he wrote playfully and provocatively,
WORDS allow psychic alterations to disappear.
Speech resists effervescence.
Notions require expansion to equivalent formulas.
WORDS Fracture our rhythm.
by their Assassinate sensitivity.
mechanism, Thoughtlessly uniform
fossilization, tortured inspiration.
stability Twist tensions.
and aging Reveal poetic exaltations as useless.
Create politeness.
Invent diplomats.
Promote the use of analogies
This got me thinking about the role of words within these silent films, and how they generally appear without them when, as is evident from this clip in particular, it becomes clear that including words was very possible, if somewhat technically challenging. And this brings me back to the visual and the role of the verbal within it. It’s fascinating to me that in this moment it seems that verbal was eschewed while the visual was allowed to stand alone.
What exactly is this “mistake” doing in this film? How can we understand “mistakes” like this, specifically related to the film as material, to reveal the intentional gap between the verbal and the visual?
One thread that emerged in Monday and Tuesday’s readings that I am interested in considering further is the ways in which the chromolithographic poster is domesticated into a medium of “fine art,” by appropriating certain medium-specific characteristics while abandoning other formal properties that advertising necessitated. Iskin describes this as “garish and immodest," “non-artistic territory” becoming “legitimized as a new art medium” (117 & 137). I am especially interested in the slippages between these two categories and their representation in different media, including cinema.
Iskin traces the categorization of contemporaneous critics of the 1890s; Marx focuses on the artist’s intention, that is whether the “creator” produced an original “invention” (136) [this sounds to me like a recapitulation of invenzione in early sixteenth-century engraving prior to the subordination of printmaking as a reproductive medium]. In Iskin’s description of Marx’s criticism, it seems that he points to the edition as the full work of art when he cites Philippe Burty, suggesting that a print’s full worth is understood when its multiple copies are accounted for (136). Merellio is invested in the distinct medium-specificity of the fine-art lithograph and the chromolithographic poster. For him too, intention is essential; the idea of the print directly as such sets it apart from the facsimile.
It seems to me that a key distinction between the two that Iskin notes, but could put additional stress on is the tactility of the experience of looking within a domestic space versus the peripatetic viewing experience of the poster in the streets (either through les hommes-sandwich [CoC Schwartz 45] or various modes of transportation [Iskin 179]). Whereas the print connoisseur handles the print and examines its surface with a close eye, the audience of the poster must have “inquisitive eyes” (176) to seek out their bold colors from a sustained distance. In further drawing out this analogy of “domesticating” the unruly poster, Iskin’s discussion of Bonnard’s L’Estampe et l’Affiche and the “interior space of the print” (129) feels especially useful. The interior space of the print becomes a point of tension in several of the posters and portfolio covers created to advertise their domesticated descendants (the Lautrec, and presumably those by de Feurer and de Chavannes illustrated in Iskin). The representation of lithographs (which in all three, are lifted and turned away from us so as the obscure their content) seem to fluctuate between WJT Mitchell’s first and second categories for a “metapicture”—this categorization depends upon whether one believes Marx and Merellio that the fine art lithograph is so different from the poster—and thus if this could be a “mise en abyme” or must be a nested reframing).
Finally, in thinking of these slippages, I was struck by the framing of the poster in the Lumiére Brothers’ Poster Hangers (1897). Recalling Iskin’s analysis of the Steinlen cover of Le Mirliton and her suggestion that the solo appearance of Lautrec’s poster on a hoarding elevates its status to that of a “work of art” (199), so too does the singular presence of the poster in this film. The second poster hanger does not place his poster next to the Grand Four poster, but rather pastes over it, retaining the singularity of the poster within the frame. The poster, now translated to film projection, is deliberately framed as an individual object, thus placing emphasis on the camera’s measured frame.
Iskin traces the categorization of contemporaneous critics of the 1890s; Marx focuses on the artist’s intention, that is whether the “creator” produced an original “invention” (136) [this sounds to me like a recapitulation of invenzione in early sixteenth-century engraving prior to the subordination of printmaking as a reproductive medium]. In Iskin’s description of Marx’s criticism, it seems that he points to the edition as the full work of art when he cites Philippe Burty, suggesting that a print’s full worth is understood when its multiple copies are accounted for (136). Merellio is invested in the distinct medium-specificity of the fine-art lithograph and the chromolithographic poster. For him too, intention is essential; the idea of the print directly as such sets it apart from the facsimile.
It seems to me that a key distinction between the two that Iskin notes, but could put additional stress on is the tactility of the experience of looking within a domestic space versus the peripatetic viewing experience of the poster in the streets (either through les hommes-sandwich [CoC Schwartz 45] or various modes of transportation [Iskin 179]). Whereas the print connoisseur handles the print and examines its surface with a close eye, the audience of the poster must have “inquisitive eyes” (176) to seek out their bold colors from a sustained distance. In further drawing out this analogy of “domesticating” the unruly poster, Iskin’s discussion of Bonnard’s L’Estampe et l’Affiche and the “interior space of the print” (129) feels especially useful. The interior space of the print becomes a point of tension in several of the posters and portfolio covers created to advertise their domesticated descendants (the Lautrec, and presumably those by de Feurer and de Chavannes illustrated in Iskin). The representation of lithographs (which in all three, are lifted and turned away from us so as the obscure their content) seem to fluctuate between WJT Mitchell’s first and second categories for a “metapicture”—this categorization depends upon whether one believes Marx and Merellio that the fine art lithograph is so different from the poster—and thus if this could be a “mise en abyme” or must be a nested reframing).
Finally, in thinking of these slippages, I was struck by the framing of the poster in the Lumiére Brothers’ Poster Hangers (1897). Recalling Iskin’s analysis of the Steinlen cover of Le Mirliton and her suggestion that the solo appearance of Lautrec’s poster on a hoarding elevates its status to that of a “work of art” (199), so too does the singular presence of the poster in this film. The second poster hanger does not place his poster next to the Grand Four poster, but rather pastes over it, retaining the singularity of the poster within the frame. The poster, now translated to film projection, is deliberately framed as an individual object, thus placing emphasis on the camera’s measured frame.