CHAPTER THREE

THE WORLD AS A MEDIA MAZE: SENSUAL AND STRUCTURAL GATEWAYS

OF INTERMEDIALITY IN THE CINEMATIC IMAGE

Introduction: Moving Frames of Reality – Moving Frames of Mediality

According to some of the most enduring metaphors regarding the nature of cinematic representation, the screen is “a window to the world” or a “gateway” towards a fantasy land where the cinematic imagination knows no boundaries. In both cases the “world” conceived either as “reality” or “fiction” prevails over the frame that remains mostly invisible as the spectator is invited to get immersed emotionally and perceptually into the visual spectacle. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener in their latest book (Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses, 2010) discuss the relevance of the metaphors of window, door and frame with respect to film theory, and find that cinema as window and frame can be defined as “ocular-specular (i.e. conditioned by optical access), transitive (one looks at something) and disembodied (the spectator maintains a safe distance),” and also that “the notion of the window implies that one loses sight of the framing rectangle as it denotes transparency, while the frame highlights the content of the (opaque) surface and its constructed nature, effectively implying composition and artificiality” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 14). While the metaphors of the window and door imply the illusion of unmediated contact and tend to efface the frame of the screen in the course of the cinematic experience, foregrounding the frame itself in one way or another “exhibits the medium in its material specificity” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 15).

Nevertheless, as we well know, it is not only the consciousness of the actual frame itself (or even its repeated reflections in inner framings within the filmic image) that can act reflexively and remind us of the cinematic

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world as a closed system of artifice within its own boundaries, but it is often the cinematic image itself that acts as an “opening,” a gateway through which the elusive mediality1 of the moving images is revealed. The term “mediality” has been used in many ways in media studies and also in the aesthetics or philosophy of modern art. In this case, it has to be specified, I use it reflexively – as it is mainly understood in the theories of intermediality –, namely starting from the idea that whenever a so called “medium” is “transparent” we do not perceive it as a “medium,” but we perceive something else that is communicated by it (i.e. the represented world itself), we have the illusion of the immediacy of the object, and we do not have a sense of any mediation taking place. Thus, for instance, the mediality of the cinema becomes visible through diverse techniques of reflexivity that may or may not involve a conspicuous framing of the image, but which always render the image itself less translucent and more opaque (stressing its qualities of being “an image”). The more opaque the image becomes, the less it resembles the world, and also the more it resembles some of the other arts and media. Techniques of intermediality effectively break the transparency of the filmic image, and while they sort of close the image up upon itself, they can also open it up towards illusory inter-media and inter-art “transgressions,” “crossovers.” The cinematic frame, that in so called classical cinema acts as a moving frame through which – despite all the time and space fragmentation of the image – we perceive a continuous world, becomes a moving frame of mediality and a gateway of intermediality shifting between the perceptual frames of cinema and those of different media and arts. And this can happen not only in extreme (and therefore obvious) cases of stylization2 or avant-garde type hybridization of cinema, but also within narrative cinema that maintains its illusions of realistic representation. Paradoxically, in some cases, we can witness a two way porosity of the cinematic image both 1 See more about the nature of cinematic mediality in the essay included in this volume with the title: Reading the Intermedial: Abysmal Mediality and Trans-Figuration in the Cinema. 2 One of the most frequent possibilities of the images to “open up” towards other media is to be subjected to some kind of stylization carried on throughout the film and as a result of which the images will be perceived in a mediated way. Stylization is of course a very wide category that can include all kinds of examples ranging from the iconography of gangster films and film noir movies (heavily borrowing from the imagery of contemporary urban photography and of popular comic books) to cyberpunk and neo-noir cinema, and the deployment of such extreme intermedial techniques as was the case of Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, 2005) or 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006) both created as the digital transposition of the visual style of a graphic novel onto the moving images.

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towards what we perceive as the “real world”3 and both towards its own mediality reflected in a kind of intermedialization of the image: in its being perceived “as if” filtered through the medium of another art (like painting, for example), or being reframed, disassembled by other media.

In what follows I will try to outline some of the possibilities of how intermediality enters our perception of images in cinema, and show how the perception of the images can open up towards the perception of cinematic mediality itself. I will try to do this by pinpointing some of the gateways through which cinematic images within the boundaries of the transparent perceptual cinematic frame of the “real world” get to be “re-framed” by other media.

In addressing this issue I have found the theory of Siegfried Kracauer (1960) an extremely fertile pool of ideas, for among the so called theorists of cinematic realism Kracauer was the one who was not only concerned with the definition of the cinematic medium in its relationship with reality but forged his film theory grounded in his vision over urban life and argued for a cinema that captures the unstaged “flow of life” observable in the sights and sounds of the modern city. In searching for images at the threshold of reality and intermediality I regard Kracauer’s thoughts on the relationship of cinema and city life to be enlightening as I have discovered that urban scenes in cinema offer ample examples for the media intersections that I proposed to explore. Streets and cities can be seen not only as the most common sites of contemporary life but also as privileged sites for intermedia relations to be played out.

Modern cityscapes have been conceived to be breathtaking in their visual splendour, and together with the multitude of media displayed in urban spaces the city amounts to a spectacle in itself: it has become a world composed of images, sounds, light and movement, a web of media communications, as the title of one of Vilém Flusser’s articles describing the rising new urbanism indicates, it has become “a wave-trough in the image-flood,”4 a dynamic “project of projections” (2005, 327). No wonder therefore that ever since the discovery of cinema so many individual films and genres have been set within this environment of moving images of

3 The category of the “real” in this case is not defined in ontological, philosophical terms but in cognitive-perceptual and phenomenological terms, as the image that we perceive through the conventions of cinematic realism. 4 The article, written originally in 1988, and first published in 1990 in German with the title Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut, presents Flusser’s concept of a city as a medium, as a “net” consisting of the intersection of various “channels” of information.

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urban reality.5 From the beginning the modern city emerged as a proto-cinematic environment, moreover – as Scott McQuire has pointed out – “the image of the city illuminated at night became a potent metaphor for the forces of modernization”6 (2008, 114). Films set in the city captured not only the pulse of modern life (beginning already from the silent movies) but also developed visual forms of cinematic storytelling that emphasized the interaction of human bodies with architectural space and the media environment of urban life. In his book on cinema and urban space Stephen Barber insists on such a complex relationship between city space, architecture, human bodies and the presence of media in films. He writes: “Film began with a scattering of gesturing ghosts, of human bodies walking city streets, within the encompassing outlines of bridges, hotels and warehouses, under polluted industrial skies. The first incendiary spark of the film image – extending across almost every country in the world, around the end of the nineteenth century – propelled forward a history of the body that remains inescapably locked into the history of the city” (Barber 2002, 13).

The idea is reinforced by James Orr, who writes: “The metropolis is thus never the sum of its physical parts but an accretion of living tissue of both humdrum activities (work, commuting, shopping, eating, and sleeping) and public spectacle […]. A film is both representation of that living tissue and an integral element within it. It not only records and documents the symbolic. It is itself symbolic. Thus technically film is always a two-fold meditation on the ground and the nature of its own being” (2003, 287). The cinematic city excels at flaunting its media components as Barber states: “The space of the city formed the primary site within which visual media collided and amalgamated with one another, across space and time, from the very origins of film. For all its infinite enchantments and attractions, the city formed a ferocious zone of conflict for cinematic imagery” (Barber 2002, 60), a “zone” that mirrored the “clashes” and “clusters” of media that are manifest within cinema as well, we might add.

5 Kracauer writes: “The medium’s affinity for the flow of life would be enough to explain the attraction which the street has ever since exerted on the screen” (1960, 72). 6 Beside Kracauer’s film theory the relationship between cinema and the modern city has been explored in several more recent analyses, among them: the studies included in the volumes edited by David B. Clarke (1997), Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (2003), the books written by Peter Brooker (2002), Stephen Barber (2002), Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2003), Scott McQuire (2008), Barbara Mennel (2008), Robert Zecker (2008), etc.

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So if urban imagery is such a rich terrain for the merging of the real and the artificial, for the interrelationship between bodies and sensations, between cinema and the other media, how does this “ferocious zone” of cinematic imagery work as a site for intermediality? Returning to our original question: how does the “(real) world” in the cinematic “window” get to be reframed by other media in cinema? The first and most general observation is that the perception of the images of reality (not just urban reality) can be accompanied either by the awareness of being filtered through media, or it can be combined with the specific awareness of different media scattered within the field of vision (and in films set in the city: within the urban landscape). As a rule, the (urban) world populated by media lies in front of the cinematic gaze in a seemingly unmediated, continuous flow; however it can also appear as trans-coded and fragmented by these media. Thus a “cinematic reality” and a “cinematic city” can open up towards the expressiveness, the “affordance” of other media (if we might borrow a term from the ecological approaches of visual perception7), or may even become a scene for intermedial processes to take place.

In this respect I have found that there are at least two basic “templates” that generate a more or less emphatic sense of “intermediality” within cinema:

1. a “sensual” mode that invites the viewer to literally get in touch with a world portrayed not at a distance but at the proximity of entangled synesthetic sensations, and resulting in a cinema that can be perceived in the terms of music, painting, architectural forms or haptic textures; and

2. a “structural” mode that makes the media components of cinema visible, and exposes the layers of multimediality that constitute the “fabric” of the cinematic medium, revealing at the same time the mesh of their complex interactions.

7 See James J. Gibson’s “theory of affordances” in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986, 127–147). Gibson considered that affordances were “action possibilities” latent in the environment (the affordances of the environment are in Gibson’s words: “what it offers,” “what it furnishes,” “what it provides” for the animal or human being, 1986, 127), independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor: so “an affordance points two ways (…), to the environment and to the observer” (1986, 141). In this sense, if we were to transfer the concept onto intermedial relationships, the “affordance” of other media (or arts) for cinema would be to potentially bring into play all their cognitive and communicational characteristics “pointing two ways,” both to cinema and to another media or art.

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1. The Multi-Sensual Flow of the Images of the World and the Flâneuristic Gaze

We can distinguish several tendencies of how visuality or the “gaze” has acted in our culture with marked emphasis beginning from the turn of the 20th century. The first version is embodied in Foucault’s description of the “panopticon,” an idea that also finds its extensions in all kinds of theories of surveillance, and basically means that mediated vision is seen as an all-pervasive agency of control. The “panopticon” induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power (to quote Foucault’s words: “visibility is a trap,” 1979, 200). In fact it is not even necessary that visibility be uninterrupted and effective all the time: the thought in itself that permanent visibility is possible makes panopticism function without fail. So while panopticism relies on actual physical devices and architectural structures that enable surveillance, at the same time it also functions at a psychological level keeping the “inmates” of the panopticon in a state of permanent alert and anxiety.

In terms of cinema, a similarly controlling and intruding type of visibility is manifested in the scopophilia and voyeurism of classical cinema, a cinema in which we, the spectators, can follow from a safe distance the personal lives of others shown to us on the screen. As Laura Mulvey has put it, classical cinema revolves around a “fascination with the human form.” “The mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy” (1992, 25).

Comparable to these, there is another type of “handling” visual experiences, or another type of “cultural gaze” that can be identified in the so called phenomenon of “flânerie,” or as some phrase it, the gaze accompanying “the art of taking a walk.” Flânerie, is in fact, not so much about the control exerted through vision (and the anxiety induced by the possibility of visual control), or the “peeping” into the lives of others, as it is about a sensual mode of reflection, a “mapping” of the world through the eye and the collecting of visual sensations. As such it denotes a complex artistic attitude that was productive both in literature and in the visual arts beginning from the 19th century towards the beginning of the 20th century. In some views the flâneuristic sensitivity of 19th century literature can actually be seen as a forerunner of cinematic vision itself. Flânerie meant a “reading” of the street as a text and also a kind of “photographic recording of experiences” that found its natural extension in

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both the medium of photography and film that appeared later on at the end of that century. The flâneur sees the world as a continuous “cinema of the street,” and conversely, early film displays a special affinity with the realm of the street, the territory of the flâneur (cf. Gleber 1999). Cinema and flânerie share an attraction toward unstaged reality whose impressions “call forth […] kaleidoscopic sensations,” (1960, 50) along “a journey through the maze of physical existence” as Kracauer states (1960, 257) – himself both a practitioner of flânerie and a theoretician of early cinema. However, flâneuristic cinema cannot only be identified in early films displaying fascination with street scenes, but also in the so called modernist cinema of the 1950s and ‘60s that makes a shift from action and character based storytelling to what Deleuze calls “purely optical and sound situations” and to films featuring heroes who have seemingly no other role than to roam the streets. In Deleuze’s words “this is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent [de voyant, non plus d’actant]” (1989, 126).8 Most of the films of the French New Wave, for example, convey a sense of cinematic flânerie also as a critical response from an artistic point of view to a general commodification of visual culture, a society turned into a “society of spectacle” (to quote Guy Debord’s catchphrase).

A flâneuristic attitude can be distinguished from panopticism through the element of entrapment and exercise of power through vision that panopticism implies. The strolling or ambling around of the flâneur introduces an idea of freedom and randomness that can be seen as opposed to the structural (closed circuit) functioning of the panopticon. Some might argue against this distinction observing that the flâneur moves in a similarly enclosed world of urban consumerism, and is both a product and an observer of modern city life. Nevertheless, his “entrapment” in such a world is alleviated by his essentially aesthetic attitude towards his environment.9 As Walter Benjamin remarked (in his interpretation of Baudelaire’s writings on the subject): in the flâneur “the joy of watching is triumphant” (1997, 67). So while panopticism shares similarities with the immanent voyeurism of filmmaking and can offer a theoretical background for the analysis of voyeuristic situations in films, flânerie may prove to be relevant for understanding some of the elemental “gateways” of intermedial

8 In Deleuze’s view this type of film emerged following the crisis of what he described as the “action-image,” here “the characters were found less and less in sensory-motor ‘motivating’ situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling which defined pure optical and sound situations” (1986, 120). 9 “For the flâneur, the […] pleasures of the city stemmed from an aesthetic proximity to others that was wholly detached from any social proximity (and hence from any responsibility or consequence)” (Clarke 1997, 5 – emphasis mine, Á. P.).

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cinema as it entails more than the sense of vision (or aesthetic attitude towards the world through vision). In the writings about literary flânerie one of the most frequent metaphors that pops up is the (already mentioned) “kaleidoscope” implying beyond a fragmentation of vision, also a multitude of physical sensations recorded by the pedestrian wedged into the crowd, impulses that can never be grasped in their totality and never exclusively as visuality. Flânerie implies both a concrete bodily presence and a sense of aesthetic detachment (window shopping activity). Benjamin describes the hectic stimuli of the street in this way: “Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’” (Benjamin 1997, 29).

The flâneur is therefore more than just a hunter on the optical scene of the street; he is also a sensual stroller and observer whose physical impressions mingle with a sensitivity generated by a dreamlike state of reverie. The concrete images of the world are meshed up with the phantasmagorical as the flâneur walks about as if intoxicated and excited by the whirlpool of sights and sounds of the surrounding world. Kracauer considered that “imbibing a thousand casual impressions” the flâneur “indiscriminately absorbed the spectacle of life that went on all around him” and for him “the sights of the city were like dreams to a hashish smoker” (2002, 121).

The “spectacle of life” or the “kaleidoscopic sensations” mentioned by Kracauer can be interpreted as perceptions that are – as we have seen – not limited to the visual, but as perceptions that include cross-sensory, synesthetic experiences that can be considered as sensual “gateways” to intermediality: it is through these synesthetic occurrences that the moving image gives way to “overtones” characteristic to other media, and thus spotlight its own “fabric.” In the following subchapters I will outline some of the possible types of such flâneuristic and synesthetic (inter)mediality of cinematic imagery (being fully aware that the examples singled out here are only fairly random samples from a broad range of films).

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1.1. The “Liquid City:” a City of Lights, an “Electropolis” 10

The modern cinematic city (or metropolis) may appear as a liquid environment constructed of a continuous flow of spots of lights, shades and colours, images sometimes passing in slow motion or in an accelerated or stroboscopic rhythm. The key impression is a kind of fluid synesthesia that records the pulse of the city that invites not just an optical but also a fundamentally “musical reading” of the street. This is usually not only emphasized by the rhythmic montage alternating extreme close-ups with birds-eye views, images speeded up and/or broken down into fragmented, mosaic like details that we see in the type of film that have been called city symphony films (like Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, 1927 or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) but it is also frequently highlighted by a dynamic musical score in fiction films employing this kind of imagery. Such a musical (video-clip like) rendering of the flow of the traffic and the clustering of (illuminated) skyscrapers has also already become one of the running clichés of television series that place their narratives into the hectic urban jungle of contemporary metropolises.11

The coloured spots or lights of the “electric” city are sometimes enhanced by the pictorial quality of more or less blurred images which can also add up to something like a cinematic “action painting.” Examples could range from Martin Scorsese’s famous opening and closing shots that frame the Taxi Driver (1976) to Jean Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love (Eloge de l’amour, 2001), and Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, Tetro (2009) [Figs. 3.1–2].

The substitution of the urban stroller in these films with the urban driver who has his own personal “photographic surface” in the car window12 only adds to the possibility of the images being perceived as

10 The expressions – although with different meaning – are borrowed from Scott McQuire’s book The Media City (2008). 11 The importance of such images to set the mood for the “urban jungle” narratives is demonstrated by the frequency with which these images are incorporated into the characteristic credit sequences of certain TV series (see for example the opening shots – recurring later through the film as shots of transition from one scene to another – of the popular TV series of the CSI and the Law and Order franchises, as well as the shorter lived, midcult courtroom comedy and drama: Boston Legal, 2004–2008; and Damages, 2007–2010). 12 In speaking about the films of Abbas Kiarostami that often stage scenes in cars and show the world as it is revealed through the car window, Jean-Luc Nancy also speaks of the mediating quality of such images. He writes: “The automobile carries around the screen or the lens, the screen-lens of its windshield, always further, and

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mediated within the order of cinematic representation. In all of them the lights that leave traces of their movements over the screen, or seem to be splashed over the reflective surface of the windshield like paint over canvas, resemble what Nelson Goodman (1968) considered as the “autographic gesture” in arts. [Fig. 3.3.] In Goodman’s typology the so called “arts of signature” – like hand-drafted manuscripts or easel painting – are considered “autographic” arts that are primarily defined by the trace of an action, “the physical contact of the artist’s hand” (cf. Rodowick 2007b, 14).13 I believe that such haptic,14 almost tactile imagery [see Figs. 3.1–4.] goes beyond conventional hapticality in cinema (which is thought to be primarily aiming at the construction of realistic space15) and may suggest to the viewer a resemblance with impressionist or abstract expressionist (or as mentioned before, so called “action”) painting,16 and seems to incorporate a kind of “autographic gesture” of the cinema artist himself who “inscribes” these photographic traces over the transparent image, and who makes the cinematic cross over into the painterly as a result of these actions.

At the same time, what such images figurate by their intermedial “overtones” is also another gesture, that of the viewer’s crossing over into a new, somewhat enigmatic (sometimes even dangerous) realm, a territory that is no longer a simple background, a neutral setting for the action of

this screen is precisely not a screen – neither obstacle, nor wall of projection – but a text (écrit), a sinuous, steep and dusty trace” (2001, 66). 13 In this respect Goodman proves to be a precursor of the media theories that emphasize not only the role of the technical apparatus but also the personal, bodily implication of the author in certain fields of media, like Kittler’s analysis of the different media of writing (handwriting, typing, etc.), cf. Kittler 1999. 14 The term “haptic” used in opposition with the “optic” originates from the art historian Alois Riegl. For a detailed evaluation of the influence of Riegl’s notion over theories of film see the introductory essay written by Angela Dalle Vacche to the volume Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History (2003). 15 So called classical narrative films use the technical and stylistic possibilities of cinema (lighting, framing, mise-en-scène, montage, etc.) so as to construct a sense of reality through building a coherent and haptic space that offers the illusion of the spectator moving in a three dimensional space. See the description of the evolution of these techniques in cinema in Noël Burch’s seminal work, Life to those Shadows (1990, 162–186). 16 Nevertheless, it is exactly because the images are in movement and because they already exist within the conventional haptic framework of cinema (the cinematic world being presented with the illusion of three dimensionality and objecthood) that the effect goes beyond the mainly optical sensation that spots of colours or light might confer in a painting, and produces a sensation of tactility.

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the narrative to unfold but an active component of the exchange of tensions that are communicated to the spectator. 17 The image is no longer a mere object of our vision but seems to assert itself against the observer through the pulse of the “electropolis,” a pulse that accumulates into a feeling of vertigo as the whirlpool of lights is no longer in a safe optical distance but draws nearer in its hapticality and threatens to engulf the individual facing the city. (This characteristic is eloquently demonstrated in the opening and final sequences in both Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Coppola’s Tetro in both of which the nocturnal and illuminated city emerges as a threatening terrain harbouring unnamed tensions beyond its shiny surface, see an image from Tetro in Fig. 3.4.)18

The unsettling, paradoxical effect of all kinds of haptic images in the cinema have been described by Laura U. Marks (2002) and more recently by Martine Beugnet (2007) who consider that the threatening impression of hapticality (a way of seeing analogous to tactility) consists in a shift from the voyeuristic and somewhat safe distance of visual observation to a closeness of sensual experience. Laura U. Marks writes: “In the sliding relationship between haptic and optical, distant vision gives way to touch, and touch reconceives the object to be seen from a distance. Optical visuality requires distance and a centre, the viewer acting like a pinhole camera. In a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface. […] But just as the optical needs the haptic, the haptic must return to the optical. To maintain optical distance is to die the death of abstraction. But to lose all distance from the world is to die a

17 It is because of this quality that images of the “electropolis” have become so popular with urban thrillers and TV series that deal with crime and dangerous situations. 18 One might also argue that the latest popularity of 3D cinema is nothing but a step further in making the images even more “tactile,” and even more intrusive into the – originally detached – world of the spectator, who can no longer act as a mere observer, but is forced to react to images in the proximity of an illusory corporeality. However, one of the fundamental differences between the intrusive “tactility” of 3D images and such “haptic” images as described here is exactly this quality of openness towards intermediality: whenever the image appears to be like an impressionist or expressionist painting (like painting in general, or reminds us of the so called “pictorialism” in photography), we are dealing not with a mere illusory display of objects in space that act upon our senses (as in the case of 3D imagery) but with an ambivalence combining both the sense of hapticality (an image that “touches upon” our senses) and the aesthetic perception of the quality of “being like a painting” at the same time. The paradoxical presence of this aesthetic distance is preserved exactly through the “overtones” of intermediality (which are missing from a 3D action movie as practiced today).

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material death, to become indistinguishable from the rest of the world. Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, come close again.” (Marks 2002, xvi.) In Beugnet’s words: “there is something both appealing and potentially threatening in the way haptic perception undermines the strategies of distanciation at work in conventional optical perception” (2007, 68). The inserted extreme close up of the eyes of Robert De Niro hit by the coloured lights in Scorsese’s credit sequence to the Taxi Driver, or the metaphor of the moth circling the light at the beginning of Tetro seem to summarize well the ominous “closeness” of such a “sensual vision” within this type of imagery [Figs. 3.5–6].

One of the most relevant films in this respect that seems to be constructed entirely on the ambivalence of the sensual appeal and the threatening effect of hapticality within the perception of urban space is Claire Denis’s Friday Night (Vendredi soir, 2002). The film presents a woman named Laure (Valérie Lemercier) driving alone at night through the crowded streets of Paris, and caught in a massive traffic jam. The minimalist story revolves around a chance encounter with a stranger and the development of their mutual attraction. The images presenting the “electropolis,” the dark, wet pavement and the reflective surfaces of the vehicles, people trapped within their cars in the traffic jam, the shop windows, etc. are conceived so as to convey both a sense of excitement caused by the closeness of sensual exploration of the world and a sense of apprehension and repulsion – as Martine Beugnet writes – “the close encounter with the abject, that is, the immersion in the anxiety of the self when individuality dissolves into the undifferentiated and formless.” (Beugnet 2007, 32.)

In addition to all these, in all such instances in which hapticality prevails over the optical qualities of the cinematic image, we might also note that a shift is performed in the viewer not only from observation to experience (with all its disconcerting effects), but also the attention is diverted from the diegetic world onto the medium of the film itself in a direct sensual contact.19 Beugnet attributes this to a new paradigm, the

19 The effect also has the potential of acting in a self-reflexive way, provided the movie supports this kind of meta-narrative reading of the film. This is the case of Godard’s Eloge de l’amour in contrast with the other examples named here (especially in a stark contrast to the clichés of TV series), in which such images are placed into a reflexive context of a continuous meditation upon the condition of the medium of cinema itself. In David Rodowick’s interpretation “the narrative of Eloge de l’amour allegorizes the present virtual life of film.” In what Rodowick sees as “Godard’s last exercise in medium specificity” (2007b, 90), by contrasting the black and white first half of the film with the digitally colourized and painterly

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“cinema of sensation” and describes this in the following way: “Beyond the needs of narrative clarity, the cinema of sensation thus plays on the material qualities of the medium to construct a space that encourages a relation of intimacy or proximity with the object of the gaze, privileging primary identification with the film as event, rather than identification with characters caught in plot developments. The effect is an unsettling of the conventional vision-knowledge-mastery paradigm, in favour of a relation where the spectator may surrender, at least partly, a sense of visual control for the possibility of a sensuous encounter with the film – where the subject affectively yields into its object” (2007, 68). Beugnet adds: “Between the cinema of ‘psychological situations’ and that of pure abstraction, the cinema of sensation opens a space of becoming, a space where the human form is less character and more figure, a figure caught again in the material reality of the film as event” (2007, 149).20

Beside an increased hapticality the liquidity of the streets and the flow of people and traffic can also often be accentuated by time lapse photography or blurred images.21 So beyond hapticality and the similarities with painting, what also often happens here is that the cinematic image lays bare its (ontological and aesthetic) connections with the art of photography by way of emphasizing photographic techniques of recording movement or time change (for, as we know, in photography movement or time can only be represented as a material photographic trace).

We can remember how Joachim Paech in a recent seminal essay (2008) contends that the blur can be interpreted as a “symbol of medial experience itself,”22 and describes its complex intermedial status. The blur in photography can be inscribed/repeated within another medium (like painting) as a sign

second half, Godard effectively compares “film and video, the passing present and the emerging future” (2007b, 93). 20 On the interchanges between the fields of the “optical” and the “haptical,” between visual perception and bodily sensation see also Deleuze’s detailed analysis in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), in which he remarks how “a sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story” (2003, 36) and notes how moving away from the “optical” can mean an imposition of a “violent manual space” (2003, 127). 21 Along with the “musical” reading of the “electropolis” time lapses and blurs can also be listed in the arsenal of clichés of the earlier mentioned introductory sequences of popular TV series based on urban narratives of crime (see especially the intros of CSI New York and Damages). 22 “Unschärfe wird zum Symbol medialer Verfahren selbst” (Paech 2008, 358). Paech declares this especially with the widespread use of the effect through digital media, nevertheless the reflexive potential of the blur can be explored in cinema as well.

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of movement. As such the figure of the blur is neither the effect of human perception that is reproduced realistically in the image, nor a genuine painterly experience, but it can be regarded as a “medial figure,” a product of photography as a technical apparatus, an apparatus to which it is linked with its specific medial characteristics, but once the blur is put forward as a representational code, it can also be repeated as a form irrespective of its medial origin. In photography the blur is decoded as the figure of the passing of time and as such it was “quoted” by painting (by Turner, for example and impressionist studies of movement).23 Paech also observes that as a relational code or figure of the connection between clear/unclear, sharp/blurred, etc. the blur can figure in a totally different way in the relationship between photography and painting. While the painterly occurs in photography through the haziness of the reproduction process in copies and from a stylistical point of view it leads to pictorialism, the blur is also a photographic effect in painting, namely in the first place it stands for the static figure of movement.24 In the case of cinema he distinguishes two ways of functioning of the photographic blur: once in a “cinematic” (“kinematographisch”) manner that draws in a media-referential way upon photography, and once in a “filmic” manner in which it is employed

23 The passage is a free translation of the ideas in the original German article. Cf. “Die ‘mediale Figur’ der Unschärfe in der Fotografie wird auf ihren bloßen Code reduziert, der als ‘Zeichen der Bewegung’ in einem anderen Medium (der Malerei) wiederholt werden kann. Die Figur der Bewegungsunschärfe ist also weder ein Effekt menschlicher Wahrnehmung, der realistisch wiedergegeben wird, noch ein genuin malerisches Verfahren, sondern als ‘mediale Figur’ ein Produkt des ‘Dispositivs Fotografie’ (der Fotografie als technisch-apparativer Anordnung), mit dem sich spezifische mediale Eigenschaften verbinden, die, einmal zum Abbildungscode avanciert, auch unabhängig von ihrem medialen Ausgangspunkt als Formen wiederholt werden können. In der Fotografie wird die Zeit ihrer apparativen Bewegung im Kameraverschluss (Zeit der apparativen Darstellung) umcodiert in die Unschärfe als Figur für die dargestellte Zeit und so von der Malerei (etwa bei Turner, dann bei den Impressionistischen Bewegungsstudien) ‘zitiert.’” (Paech 2008, 348.) 24“Als relationaler Code oder Figur des Verhältnisses von deutlich/undeutlich, scharf/unscharf etc. kann Unschärfe in der Beziehung zwischen Fotografie und Malerei ganz unterschiedlich figurieren. Während das Malerische in der Fotografie durch Weichzeichnung im Reproduktionsprozess bei Abzügen entsteht und stilistisch den Piktoralismus begründet, ist Unschärfe ein Effekt der Fotografie auf die Malerei, und zwar in erster Linie für die unbewegte Figur von Bewegung” (Paech 2008, 349).

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thematically and on the level of sjuzhet (as a projection of mental disturbance for instance).25

We can see such a “cinematic” intermedial use of the blur together with sequences of time lapse photography in the examples of Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994) or Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), which not only incorporate these photographic effects [Figs. 3.7–8], but seem to construct a cinema that is based on the enhancement and repetition of these. In both films the markedly photographic effects are used in a primarily “media-referential” way not being motivated on the level of sjuzhet in any other way than to project an image of the hectic rhythm of the “liquid” city. The blurred images in Chungking Express, just like all the other photographic effects in Rumble Fish, make the viewer experience the images as being delivered through the medium of painterly photography.

In both of these films the sense of fluidity is reinforced by the conventional symbolism of flowing water, the surge of clouds and vapours (which also increase the hapticality of the images)26 [Figs. 3.9–10], and we are reminded of the perspective of speeding time by the repeated images of clocks. Also in both cases the spatial and temporal fluidity stands in contrast with the shattered individual lives that are presented against this backdrop of the “liquid city.” Coppola rewrites the now traditional American myth of “rebel without a cause” by showing flashes of the idle lives of the young men loitering about the streets, hanging out in bars, clashing with rival gangs under the imposing skyline of the metropolis. While Wong Kar Wai loosely intersects two stories within the framework of a narrative structure emphasizing chance encounters. The increasingly photographic techniques in Rumble Fish can be recognized not only in the recurring time lapse sequences (showing the metropolis towering over its inhabitants, or exquisite details of shadows moving across walls, of the clouds rushing over the sky or reflected in the shiny metal fender of the motorcycle, see Figs. 3.11–13) but also in the careful mise en scène and framing of each individual shot that can easily be detached from the scene and contemplated as an individual still [Figs. 3.14–15], as well as in the use of expressionist lights and shadows of the gorgeous black and white photography (with surprising details in colour).27 At the time of its release

25 “Sie funktioniert einmal ‘kinematographisch,’ also medien-referentiell auf die Fotografie bezogen, und ‘filmisch,’ indem sie tematisch-sujethafte Aspekte (mentale Aufmerksamkeitsstörungen z.B.) formuliert” (Paech 2008, 350). 26 The use of the imagery of vapours is also remarkable in Claire Denis’s Friday Night, mentioned earlier. 27 Coppola confessed in the audio commentary of the DVD release of the film that he intended to create “an artfilm for teenagers,” and that he drew inspiration for the

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the film received mixed reviews on account of its mixing the aesthetics of the avant-garde with that of mainstream cinema, later, however, it was considered that it was exactly the disjuncture between the visuality of Rumble Fish and its teenage biker story that contributed to establishing the film’s cult status.28 The fact that the film “slides between two hermetically sealed domains: a European aesthetic tradition and a disaffected or delinquent teen culture” (Lebeau 1995, 99) at the same time can be seen as “sliding” between the storytelling tradition of mainstream cinema and a continuous and heightened sensual “mapping” of the world through the “touches” of photo-graphic pictoriality. The “photographic accent” of the cinematic imagery is more than a simple “coating” over the story, it actually contributes to the elevation of the rather conventional (and simplistic), all-American story about individual freedom and coming of age onto a level of an aestheticized discourse about the allures and perils of contemporary urban life, and thus results in a rewriting of the best traditions of cinematic flânerie. Similarly Wong Kar Wai’s film also presents the spectacle of the city through the filter of photographic techniques conveying a sense of visual pleasure that compensates for the frustrations resulting from the fragmentary narrative.

The metaphor of the aquarium that appears in both films reveals the paradoxes of liquidity and entrapment in an urban setting that seems to be without bounds yet at the same time appears as an enclosed space. In Chungking Express the frequent images of shop windows, monitors and glass cages seem to project the protagonists into a giant aquarium of communicating vessels. In Rumble Fish the aquarium becomes an emblematic image of constraint (and therefore the target of youthful rebellion), the city appearing as a mere numeric multiplication of the aquariums seen in the pet shop. This duality of seeing the city alternately “now landscape, now a room” (Benjamin 1997, 170)29 is consistent with the idea how “the street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur” who “is as much at home among the façades of the houses as a citizen is in his four

use of time lapses and other photographic effects from the work of Godfrey Reggio entitled Koyaanisqatsi (1982, in the making of which he was in fact involved as an executive producer). 28 See Lebeau’s analysis in which she defines the “cult film” as a “borderline category” and states: “by disturbing the boundaries between a high cultural aesthetic and the teen violence film, it situates itself as neither avant-garde nor mainstream but ‘cult’ – a term which, however difficult to define, has been consistently attached to the film” (1995, 97). 29 In another place Benjamin speaks of “the transformation of the city into an intérieur for the flâneur” (2003, 101).

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walls” (Benjamin 1997, 37), an idea reflected in the way of existence of the protagonists of both films.30 Nevertheless, in both Coppola’s and Wong Kar Wai’s film the dialectic of openness and confinement goes beyond the paradoxes of traditional flânerie and makes the protagonists themselves ultimately to appear as only would be flâneurs trapped in an environment of the panopticon. [Figs. 3.16–19.]

1.2. Architecture and Abstract Forms against a World of Haptic Textures – the Antonioni Paradigm

a) The (media) “affordances” of architecture

The alternations and contrasts between the optical and the haptic in the images, combined with explicit sequences of flânerie have been explored perhaps in the most sophisticated way in the modernist cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni. In Antonioni’s famous tetralogy31 the conflicting qualities of the optical and the haptic unfold in close relation with another dimension to the perception of cinema open to other arts and media, namely, a dimension provided by the conspicuous presence of architecture within these films.32 Architecture is used both in the form of complete, sometimes famous buildings (as a form of art) included in the diegetic world together with their symbolic values and expressivity of style, and both in the form of being reduced to abstract surfaces or material structures, either by a fragmentation ensuing from the cinematic montage or by being captured in a state of construction, demolition or even decay. The way in which these architectural elements interact with the human characters of the minimalist narratives has been analysed by many scholars

30 Moreover John Rignall connects this idea to the emergence of the figure of the urban detective: “Seeing the city now as open now as enclosing, now familiar, now phantasmagoric, the flâneur also combines the casual eye of the stroller with the purposeful gaze of the detective. His vision is both wide-ranging and penetrating at the same time; he can read the signs of the streets and unlock their secrets.” (Rignall 1992, 10.) And we may observe that in the Wong Kar Wai film one of the main characters who “inspects” the sights and “signs” of the city is a policeman. 31 The “tetralogy” consists of three films often referred to as a trilogy: the Adventure (L’avventura, 1960), the Night (La notte, 1961), the Eclipse (L’eclisse, 1962) plus the Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964), which – being shot in colour – is often not included in the cycle. 32 Antonioni’s lifelong fascination with architecture is well-known and usually attributed to his studies in architecture prior to becoming a film director.

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of Antonioni’s work.33 The modern buildings, the glass and concrete walls, construction sites and fragments of walls with decaying textures seem to be absolutely detached even from the people who come in contact with them.34 Both the imposing sights of buildings and the palpable presence of the texture of the building materials of the city are brought to the foreground in order to reflect a decentring of the human figure within a world that the individual is no longer in control of.35

The city of architecture seems to stand alone and above the human world, as the famous opening sequence of the Night (La notte, 1961) eloquently illustrates with the camera slowly gliding down along the glass wall of a skyscraper in Milan without any hint of a human point of view. Supreme and detached, devoid of life, architecture only puzzles the flâneuristic observer with its mere existence, and the human figure ceases to be the centre of the world and even the centre of the cinematic narrative. [Figs. 3.20–21.] As Seymour Chatman notes, “in the tetralogy we come to read buildings […]. And though the characters do not lose their individual importance, they also function, especially in certain long shots, like mannequins in architectural models” (1985, 102 – emphasis in the original). Mitchell Schwarzer also concludes that in Antonioni’s cinema “the forms and spaces of architecture stalk the viewer,” and that architecture acts both as protagonist and antagonist, as a “nucleus for the slow collapse of perception into a space between the actors’ lines, a visual language with a power all its own” (2000, 198).

Architectural sites in Antonioni’s tetralogy also testify to the failure of the “idealized dreams of pure geometrical cities” (Schwarzer 2000, 201). In the Adventure (L’avventura, 1960) we see an entire cluster of buildings, a kind of ghost town deserted by people. Originally designed during the fascist times of Mussolini, the site may appear, to the viewer who knows the history of the place, as the “relic of dangerous dreams” (as Schwarzer describes, 2000, 201), however, the viewer less familiar with the historical context will only see the emptiness of the carefully designed shapes, the

33 Just to name a few: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1976), Seymour B. Chatman (1985), Peter Brunette (1998), David Forgacs (2000), Mitchell Schwarzer (2000), Giuliana Bruno (2002), Kaiser (2007), etc. 34 We see characters photographed against the background of peeling walls in the Adventure, in the famous flâneuristic scene of Lidia’s walk in the city in the Night, or in the street images of the Red Desert. 35 In another example, in the midcult horror of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) such a domineering architecture serves as a site of the uncanny: the crumbling walls of the dark alleys in Venice construct a festering environment hostile to people.

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lack of human habitat and how eventually the protagonists also abandon the place leaving the baffled spectator to contemplate the lifeless architectural forms (as again the camera does not follow the characters). The futuristic design of the EUR district in Rome dominating the visual image of the city in the Eclipse (L’eclisse, 1962) has the same alienating effect throughout the film. Architecture in Antonioni’s films is no longer presented as a living space, but as a composition of abstract forms, and as an entity wedged into the lives of people, dividing their existence, confining them to separate spaces [Figs. 3.22–25], obstructing their communication (see the example of the often quoted pillar standing between the characters played by Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in the Eclipse, Fig. 3.24.). In the famous final montage of the Eclipse we have the feeling again that the individual shots of architecture and the streets not only become detached but also take charge over the human protagonists: despite their promise to meet again, Vittoria and Piero do not appear as we would expect in a conventional narrative in the already familiar places that remind us of their moments together, instead they are replaced by unknown faces that uncannily multiply and depersonalize their existence. The architectural city absorbs, consumes the action and the human characters that have appeared within its labyrinthine walls and deconstructed structures (cf. the analyses of Deleuze 1989, and Schwarzer 2000).

Moreover, as Schwarzer has pointed out, in Antonioni’s cinema “modern architecture not only cuts people off from each other, it also cuts them off from the past” (2000, 204). Modern design is contrasted with architecture clearly bearing the marks of history and time as Antonioni “juxtaposes the empty lives of the rich with the monumental weightiness of palaces, churches and ancient villages they frequent yet blithely ignore and even degrade. One palace is now a police station; another has become a hotel and a setting for interminable parties” (Schwarzer 2000, 204). We can see this with marked emphasis in the Adventure the protagonist of which is not only a failed architect, but whose search for his disappeared fiancé takes him to architectural experiences that confront and intertwine the old and the new. The modernist fascist design of the “ghost city” appears as “old” and abandoned, for example, while the centuries old, beautiful baroque cathedral of Noto – although also abandoned, and presented as a site of ennui for Sandro, the male protagonist – seems to come alive at one point as something fresh and fragile seen through the inquisitive eyes of a young architectural student who reproduces one of its magnificent details in an ink drawing, just to be destroyed by the frustrated architect, who has already abandoned his creative dreams, Figs. 3.26–27). And we find a similar confrontation in the Eclipse which presents the

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bourgeois home of Piero’s parents crammed with objects of antique and traditional artefacts in stark contrast with the futuristic location of our first encounters with Vittoria. Here the old family home (whose original inhabitants remain absent) again seems to “come alive” for a minute through a small analogy of a classic bust and the sculptural appearance of Vittoria in a clean cut white robe reminding us of a Greek statue [Figs. 3.28–29.], while the obviously new building sites appear instead of being “in construction” more like as desolate sites of decomposition.

Antonioni’s use of architecture can be appreciated as a key element in the context of one the most suggestive redefinitions of the flâneuristic attitude towards urban existence.36 His characters that roam the city are just as “out of place” (or paradoxically, “at home”) in their own apartments as they are in impersonal hotel rooms or in the streets, stumbling around construction sites. Nevertheless, despite all its dismal effects, the aesthetic aspects of flânerie remain intact within his films: architecture may be lifeless and alienating, but it is always impressive. We can agree with Schwarzer’s final evaluation: “The plotless stories, the desultory rhythms, and the lugubrious visual contents wage offensives on two fronts. For Antonioni, architecture is menacing but exact; it is monotonous but exquisite. Modern architecture is Antonioni’s grand metaphor for the turbulence, tedium, and sublimity that make up the age” (2000, 214).

What is also important to note is that with Antonioni the role of architecture is not limited to the use of buildings and architectural elements within the images: in a way his distinctive visual style can be attributed to the fact that it is the image itself that becomes architectural, that it is the image itself that can be “read” similar to an architectural form in the films of the tetralogy. “Passionate about mapping space as ‘architexture’” (Bruno 2002, 98), it seems as if the “spirit” of architecture has penetrated Antonioni’s cinematic image: the image is being constructed not only in depth,37 but as a markedly spatial structure, based on the multiplication of spaces opening upon other spaces that communicate with each other. [Figs. 3.30–31.]

In the same manner, Antonioni’s cinematic art as a whole can be seen as opening up multiple possibilities of the moving images for incorporating

36 By building his film narratives around women protagonists Antonioni can also be seen as one of the champions of adopting the viewpoint of a female flâneuse in cinema (cf. Kaiser 2007). 37 The images exploiting the depth of space together with the long takes were already characteristic for the visual of Antonioni’s early films, but in the tetralogy he devised a more architectural model for the construction of cinematic imagery.

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the “affordances” of the art of architecture conceived as a medium that conveys not just complex spatial and visual experiences but also multiple metaphoric meanings. Antonioni’s similarly much debated relation to painting is also closely connected to his architectural vision. For Antonioni painting is not an art of the surface but a haptic experience in which form, colour, texture, rhythm, abstraction and figurality are in constant interplay and synesthetic fusion as we will see in the following subchapter.

b) Framing and un-framing the haptical

In the films that make up the tetralogy Antonioni’s characters experience an emotional and communicational crisis, a crisis that usually remains unresolved within the minimalist narratives. The characters are caught up – as Deleuze liked to call it – in “purely optical and sound situations,” and we see idle periods “that show the banalities of daily life.” These tensions usually “reap the consequences or the effect of a remarkable event which is reported only through itself without being explained (the break-up of a couple, the sudden disappearance of a woman)” (Deleuze 1989, 7). Theorists of Antonioni’s cinema see in this aspect either a characteristic modern expression of anxiety and loss of orientation within a modern world, or a specific modernist and intellectual rewriting of the genre of melodrama.38 What I am to suggest is that beside all the possible philosophical or genre oriented interpretations, there is also a key feature in Antonioni’s films that can be identified in the sheer sensual contrasts between the “optical” and the “haptical” characteristics of the films’ imagery, and that the “tensions” ensuing from these contrasts offer a strong phenomenological support for the narratives of otherwise unexplained anxieties and emotional turmoil and also a kind of sensual “gateway” into intermediality through which cinema becomes “readable” through characteristics attributed to painting. In other words: the drama is not only psychological (i.e. showing the angst and alienation of characters) or ethical-philosophical (the acute consciousness of the loss of values, cf. Kovács 2007, 98, 394–400), but it is also very much “pictorial:” something preformed on the sheer “painterly” level of the cinematic images. Accordingly, I would very strongly argue against Kovács’s conclusion of seeing in Antonioni’s “pictorialism” a manifestation of a so

38 See the description of András Bálint Kovács of the Eclipse (2007, 96–99), in which he states that “Antonioni has a deeply critical attitude toward the world he represents, and his main artistic purpose is to show the dramatic character of a situation, which fundamentally lacks humanistic values” (2007, 98).

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called “ornamental” style,39 I see much more in this than the confrontation of the “estranged world of the story” (Kovács 2007, 151) and the beauty of the images, or a mere penchant for visual decoration,40 for we cannot disregard what “happens” on the level of the pictures themselves. We can grasp this “dramatic” confrontation of the “optical” and the “haptical” if we consider the cinematic frame in its analogy with painting and observe all the constituents of the image primarily not as parts of a dramatic construction of a narrative, but as plastic elements of a painterly composition. Antonioni’s cinema makes this comparison of cinema and painting easy by its almost “calligraphic” attention given to details in the composition of each individual shot or sequence. Architecture functions either as optical element of the image (i.e. architectural forms, outlines, abstract surfaces) or as a haptic component (i.e. the texture of walls), in both cases subordinated not so much to the narrative dimension of the story as to the aesthetic and phenomenological dimension of the visual ensemble revealed in the cinematic image.

The “optical” and “haptical” duality in Antonioni’s films, however, has multiple possibilities of expressiveness, depending – among other factors – both on a gendered vision over space and also upon their perception within the context of a visible (inner) frame. The image at the beginning of the Eclipse of Vittoria (Monica Vitti) arranging a small object (a sculpture?) within an empty frame placed on the table can be considered emblematic in this respect. [Fig. 3.32.] It does not only draw attention to the repeatedly used inner frames within the cinematic image (which as we know have the potential of reflexively reminding us of the otherwise invisible frame of the screen itself) but it also points to something unusual: the frame does not enclose a world of its own, but it is filled by the observer, who literally

39 As Kovács declares: “the tension between the estranged world of the story and the colorful diversity of the environment almost creates an independent and purely ornamental use of the objects and the space” (2007, 151), later adding a similar remark about the use of landscapes: “the Antonioni style can be seen as a purely ornamental use of landscape” (2007, 153). 40 In this respect my argument is also consistent with Angela Dalle Vacche’s idea of “painting as ventriloquism” in Antonioni’s cinema. Referring to the visual world of the Red Desert Dalle Vacche considered that Antonioni used his main female character’s vision as a form of cinematic ventriloquism in which the painterly image “speaks” in the manner of a “free indirect style” (to use Pasolini’s term) for the author himself. “Although ventriloquism means to speak through someone else’s belly […] Antonioni does not quite endow Vitti with the power of winning words but only lets her have visions so pictorial and so abstract that they push outward the boundaries of what until now we have considered acceptable for the visual track of a European art film.” (Dalle Vacche 1996, 49.)

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reaches into its space and takes hold of the objects. Consequently, the sequence may be seen as a metaphor of the active, haptic vision of the spectator itself getting “in touch” with the world within a frame. We might also observe how what is being framed in this cinematic (and not photographic or painterly) way throughout the sequence is not an image, not even the objects in themselves placed within the visual range of frame propped up on the table but ultimately the gesture itself. This framing of the touch, of the gesture is significant because it emphasizes the importance of bodily sensation and hapticality in the “reception” of images as opposed to a mere optical scanning (or intellectual “reading”/symbolic interpretation) of the visual display; and implicitly, by literally acting as the image of “framing the haptical” it draws attention to the importance of hapticality, and to the import of the sophisticated interplay between the haptical and the optical in particular within Antonioni’s world.41

In Antonioni’s imagery hapticality in itself can have diverse functions. First of all it has to be noted that haptic images are almost always associated with the female characters and the way they experience the world, correspondingly, the way we the spectators perceive them in relation to the rest of the world seen on screen. This characteristic is perceivable in Antonioni’s films (like in the cited sequence of the Eclipse) not only in the fact that the female protagonist is often seen as going about and repeatedly touching the objects, surfaces that surround her (and therefore Antonioni’s camera foregrounding the image of disembodied hands feeling around). Also, it cannot only be attributed to what is usually interpreted as the foregrounding of female subjectivity: women walking around and the spectator being offered the projection of their gendered vision.42 I think that Peter Brunette strikes the right chord when he says:

41 Antonioni’s cinema is therefore an excellent example for a truly “sensuous” cinema that presents touch not simply as a contact but “rather as a profound manner of being, a mode through which the body – human or cinematic – presents and expresses itself to the world and through which it perceives that same world as sensible” (Jennifer M. Barker 2009, 2). This way of thinking of tactility “as a mode of being in and at the world” has been one of the most influential ideas put forward by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it has also been at the core of the seminal works on cinema as embodied experience written by Vivian Sobchack (1992, 2004) and Laura U. Marks (2000, 2002), and as a whole it can be integrated within the paradigm that has been identified – beyond the philosophical framework of phenomenology – as “sensuous scholarship” by the anthropologist Paul Stoller (1997). 42 This is often the case in the interpretation of Antonioni’s films. However, Brunette already emphasized that there is at least an ambivalence in the presentation of the female figures and their subjective gaze: women appear as both

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“One wonders therefore whether it might be more fruitful to take these images in a more purely graphic sense rather than a narrowly symbolic, li terary one. In this way, the ‘meaning’ of these human and material forms, beyond their obvious functions in the narrative and as part of the world of the film, would be emotionally expressive rather than intellectually specifiable” (Brunette 1998, 58 – emphasis in the original).43

In Antonioni’s films there are a great number of specific images which emphasize such a “graphic” analogy between the female protagonist and haptical elements of nature. Although these analogies can well be interpreted as a modernist reconfiguration of an essentially archetypal symbolism (woman at one with nature, woman seen as nature, nature seen as a woman) what seems to be even more relevant is that these sequences suggest another type of “communication” that the character is engaged in. This haptic analogy – seen as a kind of effective “graphic communication” – stands out in contrast to the failures of verbal communication between the characters of the film. Whilst there is a feeling of anxiety, alienation entangling the intricate web of interpersonal relationships, there is a fairly harmonious association of the visual forms of the character and the natural background. This is the case, for example, of the Adventure in which Antonioni uses an abundance of variations in presenting Monica Vitti’s hair against a variety of haptic textures: we see its wavy forms resembling the waves of the sea; then we see the same hair fluffed up in another sequence looking much like the foaming water underneath the cliffs on the island or the clouds hanging above in the sky, in another sequence it is made analogous to the rough surface of the rocky terrain, or in the scene with the lovers in the field the close up of the same mussy hair becomes similar to the leaves of grass, in one of the final scenes of both the Adventure and the Eclipse Monica Vitti’s hair seems to adapt to the forms of a bush wiggling in the wind, and so on [Figs. 3.33–40]. In the Eclipse there is a scene in which Piero (Alain Delon) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti) meet the next day after Piero’s car was stolen. The gruesome discovery that the drunken thief had drowned after driving the car into the river is

objects of the male gaze (as sexual and sensual objects surrendered to the spectators’ voyeurism, a “gender-inflected dynamic of vision” that “ties in with the question of female representation throughout history,” Brunette 1998, 36); and active explorers of the visible and haptic world (the eloquent example would be Lidia’s walk in Milan in The Night where she seems to project all her frustrations or expectations into a world populated by masculine bodies and sexual symbolism, cf. Brunette 1998, 58). 43 It is also true that Brunette does not go on to explore this idea any further than to reject the overly literary or symbolic interpretation of the images.

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counterpointed by a serene scene in which the characters flirtatiously walk around the nearby park. In one of the images we see Vittoria standing unusually close to the pointed, sharp blades of a palm bush, her hair becoming almost indistinguishable from the vegetation in the background. The hapticality of the image is so effective that we almost feel the touch of the piercing blades: the moments of childish playfulness give way to a more enigmatically teasing attitude of the woman as the images become filled with the vibration induced by the visual analogy of the blades and the hair. After a few moments in which the analogy lingers over the image, Vittoria moves away from the frame and Piero (Alain Delon) – who has been standing there as the beneficiary of the gaze in front of which the visual spectacle was performed – is left alone, looking at the bush that stands in for what has been the figure of an enticing woman before. [Figs. 3.41–44.] The scene also seems to be an exemplification of how the eye and the touch become interchangeable in Antonioni’s visual world (the sharp forms of the shrubbery around Victoria can also be seen as the substitutes of Piero’s male gaze that Vittoria teasingly surrenders to, and in the end of the sequence, the bush becomes a substitute of Vittoria herself, the image of the “tease” alone, as she is no longer there to return his gaze). This interplay between the senses is not only synesthetic but can also remind us of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “vision as palpation” (2007, 396) and the complex, chiastic structure and “reversibility of the visible and the tangible” (2007, 403).44

All these images support the observation made by several theorists that the “characters are incorporated in the landscapes” (see Jazairy 2009),45 and starkly contradict the interpretation according to which “the characters cannot interact with their environment” (Kovács 2007, 152). As we have

44 We could also “read” the images in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s following ideas (even if originally he refers to a narcissistic mode of mirroring between body and touch, the same dynamic is applicable to this sequence in which two characters are entangled in structures of vision, touch, desire, attraction, resistance and reflection): “There is vision, touch, when a certain visible, a certain tangible, turns back upon the whole of the visible, the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part, or when suddenly it finds itself surrounded by them, or when between it and them, and through their commerce, is formed a Visibility, a Tangible in itself, which belongs properly neither to the body qua fact nor to the world qua fact – as upon two mirrors facing one another where two indefinite series of images set in one another arise which belong really to neither of the two surfaces, since each is only the rejoinder of the other, and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real than either of them.” (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 399–400.) 45 Brunette also remarks the fact that “female faces are, in fact, often juxtaposed with natural formations” (1998, 37).

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seen, Antonioni’s women can and do interact with their environment; it is true, not on the level of the diegesis, but on the level of the image itself. And even if this does not necessarily suggests – as many have considered – a “secular mystery lying behind the visible” (Brunette 1998, 53), it does arrest the eye of the spectator and it does disjoint all our reflexes of narrative decoding by the amazing array of visual variations that ultimately make all kinds of interpretations evanescent. As a result of these analogies the fabric of Antonioni’s cinema becomes multilayered beyond the narrative, the ideological or the symbolic, and foregrounds the sheer visual and haptical. Thus the failure of the narrative to resolve the conflicts and the failure of the characters to communicate is compensated with the extraordinary success of the film itself to convey a density and richness of sensual experience: just as the action becomes minimal or things are left out of sight,46 the attention is refocused on the images themselves that can no longer be seen as merely ornamental surfaces, but emerge as canvases for the “graphic” drama to be performed.47

There are countless examples of the way in which the optical and the haptic elements of the image actually “stage” the drama for us (which – lifted out of the realm of the verbal, explicit meanings – in this way becomes both more sophisticated and more at “gut level” at the same time). The use of paintings themselves as mirrors or projections of the

46 See the vast literature on the “invisible” aspects of Antonioni’s films and the importance of the “hors-cadre” (space beyond the visible frame). 47 Such an approach is compatible with Susan Sontag’s demand in her notorious essay entitled Against Interpretation: “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. […] Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. […] What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. […] In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” (Sontag 2001, 14.) This “sensual” approach is also similar to what Roland Barthes called “jouissance,” the climactic “pleasure of the text.” See Barthes’s distinction between “text of pleasure” and “text of bliss” (“jouissance”): “Text of pleasure: a text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture, and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss [jouissance]: the texts that imposes a state of loss, the texts that discomforts (perhaps to the point of certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (Barthes 1975, 14).

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characters has already been documented in detail in the literature on Antonioni. What seems necessary to add is that a similar parallelism to the above quoted sequences of natural forms reflecting human figures can be seen in the juxtaposition of female faces and paintings [Figs. 3.45–46] (sometimes statues, as seen in Figs. 3.28–29). Again it is perhaps not so important that the face resembles a natural form or an artefact (although undeniably there is a voyeuristic aspect of women seen as art objects, as beautiful pictures), what is more important is the uncanny visual analogy, something that is repeated in a kind of sheer visual rhythm or “musical modulation” of optical and plastic forms.

The “dramatic” aspect of the use of haptic forms can best be interpreted according to their visual framing or un-framing within the image. The Eclipse, for instance, uses clear and almost obsessive framing techniques. In fact the whole “action” of the Eclipse on the level of the images can be described as a continuous interplay between the optical elements (straight lines, grids, frames, abstract planes, etc.), and the haptic constituents of the image carried on throughout the film. The containment of hapticality within a visible inner frame (a double frame that only reiterates the original frame of the screen) induces a tension between the optical and the haptical and suggests an entrapment of something fragile, soft and alive. In several of the images at the beginning of the Eclipse [Figs. 3.47–50], Vittoria’s face, and most of all again, her hair is presented within straight geometrical forms and immobile inner frames that stand against the line of the face and the texture of the silky hair that is also in continuous motion throughout the scene being blown by a small electric fan. Throughout the film we never really find out why this woman does not feel at ease within the world she is in, nevertheless such cinematic frames paint an eloquent picture: these two elements are not compatible, the tension between the optical-geometrical rigid forms and stifling frames, and the haptical (the fragile, vibrant, live, and uniquely beautiful face) cannot be resolved (the fossilized plant contained in the piece of rock seen later in Vittoria’s apartment is also a reminder of this). The image [see especially Fig. 3.47] actually performs the essence of the drama on a pure pictorial level.

In contrast to the Eclipse, the Red Desert operates more with the un-framing,48 the unleashing of the powers of the haptical with images of

48 There are possible similarities of what Pascal Bonitzer (1987) considered as décadrage (de-framing) as well, however, in this case I am merely emphasizing the lack of interior frames and the free flow of forms and haptic textures within the image (while the original frame of the screen may often act as a de-framing agent just the way Bonitzer described, inducing tensions between what is seen and what is left out of the screen image).

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clouds of vapours, thick fog, and blurred spots of colour without contours (colour becoming textural in this case and quasi-embodied as the shapes become dispersed as amorphous masses identifiable only through their colour). [Figs. 3.51–54.] In Antonioni’s world releasing the haptical forms from the control of the inner frames seems to convey a state of fragility, something that can always be at the peril of disintegration and at the mercy of impending, unforeseeable events and forces. In the Adventure we see Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Claudia (Monica Vitti) in a moment of blissful lovemaking against the pictures of fluffy clouds, and in the subsequent shots a noisy train pushes into the frame dangerously close to the lovers embracing on the ground. In the Eclipse all the fleeting, happy moments of the film are marked by images replete with haptical details (water springing up from a sprinkler, foliage of trees waving gently in the wind, etc.), and all of these elements are repeated at the end with connotations of loss and emptiness. In the Red Desert the world presented through the “indirect vision” of the neurotic protagonist is a world of hapticality in which everything can be interpreted as both fragile and menacing.49 Ultimately the all-pervading painterly quality of the cinematic images and the hapticality that flows beyond all frames means not just a kind of return to a basic, primitive medium of art (like the un-framed cave paintings which naturally blur the border between fiction and reality), but also a deep interconnectedness to the medium of modern abstract expressionist painting (as many theorists have already noted). Such un-framed, un-leashed haptical colours and evanescent forms become just as consuming as their antitheses, the rigid architectural structures.

Antonioni’s cinema offers a unique paradigm of intermediality, one that relies in the first place on the sensual and graphic characteristics, the haptical versus optical quality of the images and opens up the cinematic expression towards a realm where the arts become interpenetrable, intertwined. Cinema does not become architecture or painting, but does become both more “readable” and more “palpable” through its correlations with the medium of architecture or painting.50

49 See the similar effect of such imagery in the already described cinematic figure of the “electropolis.” 50 This paradigm has been fairly influential within the history of cinema, even though not all of Antonioni’s disciples also follow him in activating “the affordances” of other media for cinema in such a complex manner. One of the latest examples is perhaps Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009) which uses architecture in a similar way both as an environment interacting with the main character and as “architexture” penetrating the structure of the images themselves,

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2. The Media Fragmentation of the World

2.1. The World Shattered into a Kaleidoscope of Media Representations

Alongside this “sensual,” synesthetic threshold between cinema and other media that we have seen in the previous subchapters, there is also the possibility of the cinematic flow of images to “break down” into their media components and the image of the world to become spread out as a giant screen of media palimpsest. This time it is not the synesthetic and embodied sensibility of the spectator that leads us to a sensation of “cinema reaching beyond cinema,” of images moving “in between the arts and media” but it is a kind of “structural gateway:” the otherwise continuous and transparent multimediality of cinema reveals its heterogeneity, as media become perceivable in their complex layering within the fabric of moving pictures, activating intricate, reflexive interactions. a) Intermediality as diegetic reflexivity The most common and perhaps “simplest” or “weakest” level of cinema being shattered into its media components but still remaining within a general frame of realistic representation can be seen in instances in which one medium – like language, for instance – emerges in close up and can be interpreted as reflecting something from the narrative that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Beside the title sequences which always feature the medium of writing prominently and are usually deliberately designed to serve as a kind of mise en abyme reflecting in style, motifs and visual appearance the story to be told, a great many classical narratives use this effect as a conventional device to ease the progress of the narrative itself. The insertion of a written text within the filmic world, for example, disrupts the homogeneous media flow of the images, yet it can be easily accepted as a convention meant to fill the gaps of visual presentation (to convey information about the events, to define time and place, to start the narration, etc.), and efforts are made for a smooth integration within the general visual scheme of the film (with a similar background, etc.). As such, nevertheless, a textual insert, for instance, can always bring into play more or less also the “message of the media” that is thus foregrounded. For example, in classical genre films, language is often called upon to

while the whole film also bears strong resemblances to abstract painting (see more about this later in this chapter).

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address the spectators directly, urging them to take an active part in the performance or to take a moral position with regards to the events to be shown,51 engaging in a kind of “communication” that the pictures alone could not initiate. Language, in this way, is meant not only to inform, but to activate its unique possibilities of inflection and focalization. And because such a textual insert is an emphatic visual composition preceding other images; it also projects its own qualities over the filmic image itself, conferring it, in a way, the ability to “speak,” to acquire a visual “voice.” In other cases, superimpositions of texts over the images can confer the images within a narrative sequence the emphatic epic quality of storytelling, the illusion of a narrative being unfold in time and in a time worthy of being recorded, immortalized by writing, by epic literature or historiography. The story of a mythic rite of passage presented in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), for instance, is presented in such a way: the images of the wagons and the mounted cowboys on the move appear in a palimpsest with the text relating the epic journey of the protagonists. [Figs. 3.55–56.] Both image and text reflect each other: the image acquires the role of an illustration as it becomes transparent towards the verbal storytelling, and conversely, the text becomes opaque as it gradually infuses the images with its epic quality.

In other cases we have a certain media representation within the filmic narrative that is used reflexively in one way or another. We can see this for example, in the introduction of the motif of paintings within narratives of crime, detection, film noir, etc.52 We can also see more subtle instances of textual insertions in the forms of diegetic inscriptions scattered around the world portrayed in the film and caught on camera as if by accident in the street, or we can see photographic images of advertisements the function of which is to offer an understated, yet fairly revealing commentary on the story that is presented. This occurs both in some of the classical genre films (see the repeated neon inscriptions announcing “the world is yours” that foreshadow the rise, and later ironically comment the fall of the almighty gangster in Howard Hawks’s Scarface, 1932), as well as in examples of modernist European and American cinema.

51 Howard Hawks’s classical gangster movie, Scarface (1932) begins with the following direct address to the spectator: “This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. The Government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?” (The word “you” stressed in this way so as to reflect an emphatic voice and urging tone.) 52 See also the chapter on Hitchcock’s use of painting included in this present volume.

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Godard’s cult French New Wave film, Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1959) uses a series of diegetic media representations, like newspaper headlines, advertisements and billboards to reflect on the cinematic narrative: the protagonist, Michel Poiccard is defined by a series of quotations from American gangster films (like the famous “dialogue” of Michel with the photo of Humphrey Bogart exhibited in front of a cinema), and on his every move he finds himself continually referenced in representations scattered around the mediascape of the city. [Figs. 3.57–58.]53 Other French New Wave films also use this diegetic media reflexivity. Agnès Varda, for instance exhibits photographs and magazine clips of blonde film stars and models (and all kinds of images from advertisements) in different backgrounds (at work, at home, in the street) against which she presents the male protagonist of Happiness (Le Bonheur, 1965) to remind us of the artificial standards imposed by contemporary mass media. Moreover, the blonde pinup girls bear an uncanny resemblance to both the protagonist’s wife and his mistress, who become interchangeable as the story unfolds (and such “exchanges” could go on ad infinitum, as the multiplied representations may suggest). [Figs. 3.59–60.]

The two Coppola films quoted earlier, Rumble Fish and Tetro also contain some graffiti inscriptions on walls and street signs as visible linguistic traces that the cinematic diegesis leaves upon the realistic photographic representation of the city [Figs. 3.61–62].

b) A world of media collage

On a more complex level the world presented as a media palimpsest can be a vehicle for the modernist ideology of depicting the image of the world itself as a construction, as a sum of media representations, as a collage.54 53 See more about the use of intermediality in Breathless in the chapter entitled “Tensional Differences.” The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Films. 54 All these can be seen, without doubt, as precursors of more radical techniques of breaking down the image into superimposed media representations like in Peter Greenaway’s cinema abounding in images within images and all kinds of media “clusters.” The techniques described in the following subchapters are also all close to what Deleuze described as the shots resembling no longer the perception of the eye than the perception of the brain, in this way: “when the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in an ‘incessant stream of messages,’ and the shot itself is less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information: it is the brain-

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Most of the early (and some not so early) Godard films could be cited as examples for this. The ironic and militant The Carabineers (Les carabiniers, 1963) is one of the films that balance on the verge of realistic representation and absurd stylization. The film is loosely constructed of sequences dominated by a certain media: a handwritten motto taken from Borges, pages of commercial magazines hanging on the wall of a small hut in the middle of nowhere, postcards collected by the two men who enlist in the army and travel around the world, images reproducing early cinema as the naïve protagonist first experiences them, reproductions of paintings in the spaces where the soldiers commit their actions of aggression and looting, etc.), all adding up to a hotchpotch universe in which the two simple minded players are like puppets at the mercy of the whirlpool of media representations and ideologies, stumbling around a world torn violently into pieces.

The same kaleidoscopic effect of media representations is used in a much less sinister, though also “seriously playful” manner in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962): the enigmatic smile of the ancient sculpture reflected in the face of Katherine (Jeanne Moreau), the paintings of Picasso’s different artistic periods used throughout the film to mark the passage of time, the insertions of the freeze frames and photos, the archive footages, the literary references used in the film all contribute to creating a heterogeneous media texture. The famous song heard at one point of the film entitled “le tourbillion de la vie” (“the merry-go-round of life”) seems to capture the essence of the world portrayed: life is viewed as a kaleidoscope of mediated experiences, as a merry-go-round in which representations are not opposed to life, but constitute the very materials that the fabric of life itself is weaved of.

The world shredded into a kaleidoscope of media generally represents in modernist fiction films also the commodification of these ubiquitous media representations and implicitly, the commodification of all aspects of everyday life. Cassavetes uses such imagery in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), or Arthur Penn, in his lesser known film inspired by European art cinema, Mickey One (1965) [Figs. 3.63–64]. In Jean-Luc Godard’s complex philosophical essay film, 2 or 3 Things I Know about her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, 1967) – the title of which refers both to “her” (“elle”) as the woman portrayed in the film (by Marina Vlady) and both to the district Sarcelle, colloquially referred to “elle” (homonymous with “her” in French) – we see everything in a process of being disassembled

information, brain-city couple that replaces that of eye-Nature.” (Deleuze 1989, 267.)

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or assembled. It is not only language that falls apart, as we can see in the word play of the title,55 but the character is also dissected into the actress and the role. In the introductory sequence Godard whispers into the ears of the audience confiding in them how actually what we see is the actress Marina Vlady, then he comments on the very same images again, this time, introducing the figure as a fictional character. Later the director also shares with the viewer his hesitations with regards to the various possibilities of how a particular shot could be filmed. The act of disassembling runs through the film like a leit motif, Godard shows in mosaic-like scenes not only how life in general becomes fragmented and marriages disintegrate in this suburban environment, but sequences of how a radio is taken apart, how cars are repaired and maintained in a garage, how architectural structures are suspended in the process of assemblage, etc., as if everything that moves, communicates or should be steady were stuck in this state of fragmentation, and eventually became a potential commodity to be sold. [Figs. 3.65–68.] Ultimately it is the cinematic discourse itself that falls apart into a veritable kaleidoscope of self-reflexive media (palimpsest-like imagery, authorial narration, philosophical commentary about filmic representation, etc.), and the image of the city emerges as a result of an infinite process of mediation and in the end it is reduced to a cultural wasteland, littered with words and images torn out of context.56 The same effect of the world being disintegrated into a collage of media representations is used in his other films made towards the end of the New Wave period, like Made in USA (1966), Weekend (1967) which show similarly disintegrating structures within a few “minimalist” locations that mark the transition towards a kind of cinema that no longer aspires to retain the illusion of any realistic representation of the world but stages its media interactions mainly within autonomous, artificial settings put together only for the sake of the camera (see for example: The Chinese Girl /La chinoise, 1967) and (The Joy of Learning/Le gai savoir, 1969).

55 See also the earlier chapter on Godard’s word and image plays in this present volume. 56 The film could be compared with Mathieu Kassowitz’s The Hate (La Haine, 1995, shot in the same district almost 30 years later), which, however, resembles more Coppola’s Rumble Fish both in theme – a story of rough experiences of youth, only this time it is set in a multiracial environment – and in style: the uniform stylization in its imagery heavily indebted to black and white photographic effects.

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2.2. Metalepsis

Metalepsis is a literary term that can be applied trans-medially to cinema as well.57 In rhetoric, according to the definition given by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, it is used to denote various kinds of complex figures the main trait of which is that the figuration involves a kind of referential chain: the figure refers the reader to another figure or it requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference (Baldick 2001, 152). In narratology, metalepsis is usually defined as a crossing of the boundaries between the possible diegetic levels of a narrative (extra-diegetic and diegetic, meta-diegetic or diegetic levels: breaking the frame between “reality” and “fiction,” between authorial narration or commentary and the “world” within that frame), or the leap from any hierarchically ordered (intra-diegetic, embedded) level into one above or below (see Genette 2004).

a) Intermediality as a marker for metaleptic leaps

One of the most typical uses of a visible media shift, of employing techniques of intermediality within cinema is to mark the breaking of the narrative frame and perform a metaleptic leap. Sequences that suddenly step from the medium of cinema into the realm of another media and/or apparently employ the language of another art are conventionally markers of a metaleptic crossing from the narrative level of “reality” into one of subjective consciousness (dream, phantasy, memory flash-back, altered mental state, etc.)58 The lavishly elaborate and exuberant song and dance sequences (borrowed from the music halls and variety theatres, operettas, or ballet) inserted within the narratives of musicals are examples for the exploitation of this possibility within classical genres. The artificiality of such scenes is always explicit; sometimes reinforced by other framing devices to mark the fragment exhibiting media difference (visible inner frames, sequences of colour introduced within a black and white film, etc.) Hitchcock’s dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) designed as a moving painting based on sketches by Salvador Dali is an eloquent example of such a metaleptic leap from filmic “reality” onto the level of the dream

57 See a more detailed presentation of metalepsis and the elaboration of further possible forms of intermediality as metalepsis in the films of Agnès Varda in Chapter Eleven (Intermediality as Metalepsis). 58 The effect can be considered somehow similar to the double expositions and superimpositions used in early cinema to render a feeling of crossing over into another, more phantastic, uncanny realm.

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being marked by explicit use of intermediality.59 Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier mentioned Tetro also uses such embedded scenes within the primary narrative to transport the viewer into the “free indirect vision” of the characters employing almost all the possible arsenal of conventional intermedial metalepsis: the realistic presentation gives way to dance and music, tableaux-like, stylized composition of images, effervescent colouring, etc. that break the homogenous flow of black and white cinematography.

Oliver Stone made the most of this enigmatic, uncanny metaleptic effect of breaking down the homogeneous flow of cinematic images into different modes of moving images and media representations of all kinds in Natural Born Killers (1994). The perceivable changes in the modality and mediality of the imagery projected on the one hand the “free indirect vision” of the protagonists’ highly disturbed subjective mental state, and on the other hand, they recorded the hectic media consciousness of the society that generated and harboured such a consciousness.

Another prominent example of the use of intermediality to reflect the moves between layers of consciousness and memory, as well as the multimediality of the “fabric” of memory itself can be seen in the films of Chris Marker. Several of his films can be considered as rewritings of the “city symphony” genre in which the essayistic approach to depicting reality as a surge of memories and free flowing associations is prompted by cultural and personal, sensual, embodied experiences of the world. Reality is deconstructed into flashes of images, words and sounds springing from the sphere of personal memory and expanding with metaleptic leaps into a wider philosophical essay searching the defining features of the “spirit of the world” itself (see for example, The Koumiko Mystery/Le Mystère Koumiko, 1965, Sunless/Sans soleil, 1982).

In other cases intermedial metalepsis cannot be seen as a signal for stepping from “reality” into “subjective consciousness,” or as a representation of the complexities of such a subjective consciousness, but it can perform in itself a leap onto a meta-narrative, self-reflexive level within the film, or it can point to the existence of such a meta-narrative level due to the fact that it always introduces a level of “otherness” into the cinematic medium that can serve as a platform through which a reflexive point of view over cinema can be activated. The inclusion of a series of photographs for instance into Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown. Incomplete Journeys into the Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, 2000) –

59 See a more detailed analysis of Hitchcock’s use of intermediality in the chapter Spellbound by Images: The Allure of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock.

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photographs made by another artist, Luc Delahaye, with the title L’autre (The Other) showing us surreptitiously shot portraits of passengers on a subway – adds to the already mosaic-like scenes another perspective coming from “outside” the diegetic world of the film and “outside” the medium of cinema, bringing another medium’s viewpoint or type of gaze to the film, and halting the narrative flow of the scenes. This perspective that is both “other” (as it is that of the still image within a motion picture) and both related to the essence of film (as it is coming from photography, as the ontological basis of cinematic representation) suggests that the whole film can be interpreted as a (fragmented) meta-narrative over the possibilities of (photographic) representation in the cinema. As several analyses of the film have shown (cf. Conley 2010; Peucker 2010, etc.), Haneke here overwrites the “cinematic” with the “photographic” in the sense Barthes thought about photograph as a message “without a code,” and “seems to revel in the affective charge of the photographic – filmic – image” (Peucker 2010, 139) while effectively questioning our “codes” for mediating reality.

b) Contrasts between the “natural,” the seemingly “ unmediated” and the “artificial” within the image

Since Gerard Genette’s (2004) reinterpretation of the rhetorical term of metalepsis as a narratological concept, the main feature of metalepsis is considered to be that it performs a paradoxical leap between the ontological levels of the “real” and the “fictional/mediated.” In several films we have urban imagery in which the seemingly unmediated flow of “life,” and characters presented as “real” appear against a frame perceived clearly as an “image,” a mere representation. Just consider the well-known scene from the 1962 film Her Life to Live (Vivre sa vie) [Fig. 3.69] where we see Nana, the young prostitute, standing in the street in front of a palimpsest of posters. The frame consisting of the posters in the background with the fragmented sentences and jumbled up words emphasizes artifice, a world constructed by visible signs that need deciphering.60 In a way Nana is also collaged into the posters, her figure projected onto this background is partly reduced to a mere visible sign (an image of a prostitute). However, the composition also highlights the “ontological” collage between the real life figure and the inanimate composition of signs

60 It has also often been interpreted as a puzzle: analyses of the scene often derive meaning from the significations that can be attributed to the possible intertextual references hidden in these fragments (i.e. the reference to the Paul Newman film with the French title L’arnaqueur, etc.)

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in the background. In the filmic sequence the shot is followed by the countershot of the image of the passing cars in the street (that Nana is looking at searching for potential clients), the incessant and spontaneous stream of traffic captured in cinéma vérité style cinematography. Godard stages a fine “dialogue” through Nana between the cluster of disjointed, artificial signs on the one side (the abstract collage of the posters), and the continuous flow of images of “life” contrasting with this, on the other side. Something similar is achieved in the composition that we see in A Married Woman (Une femme mariée, 1964) [Figs. 3.71–72] in which Macha Méril appears in front of a giant poster. In this case the “real life” figure is again framed by an artificial representation. The uncanny effect on the viewer is the result of the differences in the scale of the images of the two women (the huge poster towering over the “real” figure), as well as the perceived ontological difference between them (“life” and “representation”). In both cases Godard not only contrasts the “real” with the “mediated” but also plays with their paradoxes: the “real” Nana can be perceived as a mere representation of a prostitute, and Charlotte, “the married woman,” is shown in an earlier scene just like the poster girl advertising women’s underwear, while the posters, the collages of street life are shown as integral parts of “life” itself. Similarly in Masculine, Feminine (Masculin, féminine, 1966) the “watchful eyes” of poster image of a girl both frames and “participates” in the “conversation” of the live characters [Fig. 3.70].

The collage effect of such imagery can merge the “real,” the sensual with the “mediated,” the “cultural,” or it can be a figuration performing a strange chiasmus, an exchange taking place: the real life characters living in the shadow of these media representations seem to lead a life that is increasingly structured by these media representations, and thus tend towards the artificial, while the representations flaunt their “lifelikeness” in a hyperbolic manner. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher61 (1969) proposes a similar chiasmus when he plays with the difference of the blank walls of the spaces that his characters inhabit and the drawing of the city posted on the wall of a restaurant they repeatedly visit [Figs. 3.73–74]. The images of nothingness, of empty spaces are intertwined: the world his characters actually live in looks dull and lifeless, while the poster on the wall – though highly artificial – is displaying its intricate details and lively, convoluted forms. Pedro Almodóvar’s film, All about my Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999) uses the same kind of imagery in elaborating on the complex questions of what is real and what is artificial

61 The German title is usually not translated into English (’Katzelmacher’ is a Bavarian slang for ‘foreign worker’).

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in a post-modern society [Figs. 3.75]. Godard’s already mentioned Carabineers uses an even more extreme juxtaposition of “representation” and “reality” than the previous examples. In one of its famous scenes [see Figs. 3.76–77.] Godard has its characters playfully substitute one part of their living body by covering it up with a graphic representation of the same body part (pictures advertising underwear in women’s and men’s magazines): thus the images emphasize the way in which representations are not only omnipresent, mirroring and moulding our lives, but the way they continually “fold into” our lives.

c) “Folds” of the immediate and the mediated, of the inside and the outside

Sometimes the metalepsis of the “immediate” and “mediated” takes the form not so much of a side by side comparison but of an uncanny juxtaposition of two images, one of which is considered to be “reality” and the other some kind of representation of the very same reality. Images that superimpose a segment of the world and its mirror reflection usually fall into this category, sometimes combining the “real” and “illusory” antithesis with the confusing overlapping of the two sides of a reflection: the side of the mirror and the side of reality. Such juxtaposition can remind us of Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal image,” an image that condenses an actual and a virtual side. Referring to the well-known scenes displaying multiple reflections in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940) and in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) [Figs. 3.78–79.], Deleuze describes the effect of crystal-like images multiply refracting reality and illusion in this way: “the mirror image is virtual in relation to the actual character the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field. […] When virtual images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others” (Deleuze 1989, 70). The combination of images of the “real” confronted by their mirror reflection were emblematic for cinematic modernity, modernist authors (Welles, Antonioni, Agnès Varda, Godard, etc.) used such imagery in their films in order to raise epistemological questions and to challenge notions of individuality. Whenever the characters of these narratives were reflected in mirrors (or other images that resembled them) we can see this as figures demolishing epistemological certainties about the world and its representation, as well as figures questioning the uniqueness of the individual who got to be

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multiplied, serialized and included into an order of things where the human figure became more and more decentred. [Figs. 3.80–81.]

At the same time, the effect can also be associated with another of Deleuze’s famous concepts, “the fold,” in which we have the inclusion, the doubling of the outside on the inside, rather than their opposition. “The outside is not a fixed limit, but a moving matter, animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than an outside, but precisely the inside of an outside” (Deleuze 1988, 96–97).

In cinema the inside and outside, the on screen and off-screen space, filmic reality and its photographic reflection can be folded into a single image either by way of mirrors or by the use of any other reflective surfaces (glass panes, windows, etc.) One of the greatest modernist masters of this type of imagery is undoubtedly Michelangelo Antonioni, who repeatedly drew on photographic doubles folded upon “real” images within his films, continually transforming in this way the palpable material world into an immaterial, ghost apparition. [See Figs. 3.82–85.] On the one hand such overlaid images seem merely to support the Bazinian interpretation of the “life and death of superimposition in the cinema,” as they constitute a figuration in-between reality and fantasy in which the fantastic dimension may appear exactly due to the “irresistible realism of the photographic image” (Bazin 1997, 73). On the other hand, however, in Antonioni’s cinema this figure became also much more than a “fold” between reality and fantasy, this “overwriting” of the image with its mirror reflection also transposed the minimalist narrative onto a meta-narrative level (performing in this way also a “narrative fold”), a meditation upon the nature of cinematic representation and upon the fragility, the transitory and illusory nature of the (mediated) images through which the world is revealed to us.62

A most recent reiteration of Antonioni’s technique can be seen in Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film entitled Certified Copy (Copie conforme, 2010) [Fig. 3.86], his first to be made outside his home country and considered by some of the reviewers to be a “certified” simulacrum of a modernist European artfilm (besides Antonioni, also strongly echoing

62 Although Bazin considered that such a superimposition could “only suggest the fantastic in a conventional way,” lacking “the ability actually to evoke the supernatural” (1997, 76), and as such doomed to disappear, he also recognized that the impact made by the figure of superimposition relied on the basic characteristic of the cinematic medium, the indexicality of photography. Through repetitions and variations Antonioni’s films managed to make exactly this medial aspect of the figure visible.

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Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy/Viaggio in Italia, 1954).63 The film also resonates with the epistemological issues of modernism in raising questions about the differences between the “original” and the “copy” in art or in life and displays images that turn the characteristic Kiarostami motif of the windshield of the car into a multiple fold of inside and outside, reality and illusion.

d) “Folding” the post-cinematic image and creating a pensive spectator

In some of the latest films, we have a similar proliferation of images juxtaposing reflection and/or mediation over what is perceived as the “immediate” world. The “folds” we see in these films, either in a metaphorical sense (of “overwriting,” “covering up” one medium with another) or in a more concrete sense of the unusual interlacings of spaces and media are used as cinematic figures that reflect the “fluidity” of the increasingly media dominated environment and the “architexture” we are surrounded by, and appear as a continuous (and decorative) interplay of representation and reality. As a result still image is “folded over” movement, exhibited, framed, “museum” art “overlaps” (and effectively effaces) classical cinema, and ultimately the spectator is invited not to a narrative “reading” but to a post-cinematic contemplation over individual frames and scenes.

The uncanny nature of such foldings of artifice into life is an important part of Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, The Limits of Control (2009) which seems to go back to the modernist tradition of conceiving the screen as a canvas and showing the world decomposed into abstract shapes and colours, textures, and populated by cinéphile characters quoting movies and delivering deadpan allusions. The protagonist of the film whose name is not mentioned in the film (referred to as the somewhat archetypal Lone Man in the film’s credits, and played by Isaach De Bankolé) possesses a magnificently carved, statuesque face and body that moves with gracious self-control in these painterly and architectural spaces. [Figs. 3.87–90.]

63 The film could also be interpreted as a variation on the theme of another famous modernist film, Last Year in Marienbad (directed by Alain Resnais, 1961) in which we have similarly a couple in search of their possible (imagined or real) mutual past. Just like in Resnais’s film, in Certified Copy there is a significant scene in which the couple tries to understand each other by contemplating a sculpture by the side of a pool. And perhaps more importantly, it is again the power of the words uttered in the present that ambivalently either evokes (re-creates), or brings to life (creates) a possible “past,” a connection between the two characters.

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The film suggests perfect artistic control over the world seen as a multitude of colours and shapes that fill the carefully chosen frames of the movie. The Lone Man is given a secret mission: he starts a journey to accomplish a task – as we find out eventually – to kill a man surrounded by a fortress in the middle of nowhere and guarded by an army of high-tech soldiers, and whose control appears to be absolute. The film is thus built upon a puzzling parallel: control in a political and social sense (the figure of a mysterious all-powerful man) and control in the artistic and self-reflexive sense, the composure of the Lone Man in all situations and the artistic nature of the rigorous compositions of each set and each frame of the film. Political control and artistic control usually go hand in hand as history has taught us too well; dictators usually aspire to a complete control of both body and mind. However, this does not appear to be the message here, as the two ways of control over reality are set against each other: the Lone Man, who repeatedly ends up in Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum in front of modern abstract canvases [Figs. 3.89–90.], has the mission to destroy the control of the somewhat ridiculous authoritarian figure in the fortress (played by Bill Murray). How does he get in there? How does he go from the “outside” into the “inside” of the fortress? We do not see. Nevertheless we are given a “mysterious” clue right from the beginning: “Use your imagination!” – the first messenger tells him, and this is the same answer the Lone Man gives to the baffled Bill Murray who is surrounded by all kinds of electronic gadgets of surveillance and who asks him how he got inside: “I used my imagination.” Is this an allegory of artistic freedom, of the supremacy of artistic control over technology and political confinement, or ultimately of liberating the image from narrative? The mixed reviews of the film either celebrate the artistry of the film’s visual “craftsmanship” or suggest that Jarmusch’s absolute control over the visual array of the film backfired, and being immersed into weaving a cinematic fabric of free flowing colours and forms, the film failed to offer a real content to ponder. Without taking into account its aesthetic values or limitations,64 we can, nevertheless, observe a recurring use of metalepsis in the film. Throughout the journey the Lone Man makes to reach his destination he continually experiences the loops between art (or between some kind of representation) and the reality reflected in it. In several scenes these “artificial” and “real” forms are shown either consecutively or side by side as an enigmatic fold: the guitar given to him by one of the contact persons and the guitar seen in the painting in the museum, the 64 The film may have ironically acknowledged its limitations (its “limits of control”) when it showed the protagonist sitting in the end in front of an empty white sheet framed as a piece of Arte Povera.

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strange blonde woman with an umbrella played by Tilda Swinton and the poster image of the character using the same costume that we catch a glimpse of in the street, the tower seen in Seville and its postcard representation, later the small desk lamps reproducing the same architectural structure, the small piece of paper folded in the Lone Man’s hand that he finds corresponding to the shape of the mountains seen in the window of the train, etc.65 [Figs. 3.91–96]. All these seem to suggest that the main task of the Lone man has actually been to find this pattern in which the world shows its folds interlacing art(ifice) and reality, representation and direct experience. And perhaps it is in the spirit of this “pattern” that the film uses its main clue in a self-reflexive (or ironical?) way: it was enough to use his imagination and fold the outside over the inside in order to bypass a conventional structure of control. And as the fi lm folds representation over reality, imagination over matter, arthouse movie over genre, and finally – as the repeated scenes at the museum suggest – exhibited, framed art over moving images,66 the effect is not only minimalizing the narrative but also a transgression of cinema as we know it from fiction and narrative construction into a cinema which folds its images into uncanny static visual compositions within well chosen frames, and gives extraordinary attention to details in mise en scène and art direction: a cinema whose images should be contemplated individually and that resemble the abstract and minimalist paintings hanging over the walls of exhibition halls. [Figs. 3.97–100]. Consequently, the film turns out to be much like the wrinkled sheet exhibited in the museum or the white cloth wrapped around a frame in several layers shown in one of its last scenes [Figs. 3.101–102], and ultimately becomes nothing less and nothing more than a post-cinematic exercise in observing the multiple sheets of reality and visual mediation, a play upon their plaits.

65 The repetition of the lines used as a kind of leit motif (“He who thinks he’s bigger than the rest, must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is. It’s a handful of dust.”) in different contexts and media (as part of a dialogue, as a song and dance act, as an inscription, etc.) can also be seen as folding the media layers of the film, just like the cinéphile allusions that “ripple” the surface of the film with their associations of films that the spectators may or may not have memories of. 66 Just consider the images shown in Figures 3.93 and 3.100–101: Figure 3.93 shows the character of the Lone Man in the museum (himself motionless like a statue) between two canvases of modern abstract art, and then the cinematic compositions in Figs. 3.100–101 could well pass for autonomous paintings, resembling modernist still lives.

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In introducing long sequences containing static compositions, as well as representations that exhibit stillness in contrast with the cinematic flow of images (paintings, photographs, advertisements) Jarmusch arrests the conventional narrative fluidity and creates a film that continually touches upon its photographic roots, its qualities of an index as well as upon its foundation in visual arts. The minimalist story line, and the continued deferral of revealing the ultimate purpose of the Lone Man’s journey, includes Jarmusch’s film even more in what Laura Mulvey considers to be a typical “cinema of delay” (2006, 123–161). Relying on the ideas of Raymond Bellour (1987) Mulvey argues that moments of stillness within the moving image and its narrative create a “pensive spectator” who can reflect “on the cinema.” She writes: “Not only can the ‘pensive’ spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image” (2006, 186).

Another example of relinquishing narrative control in favour of spotlighting autonomous imagery and exercising exceptional visual command in composition in contemporary cinema folding towards painting can be seen in the work of Tsai Ming Liang. One can interpret the stunning visuals of The Skywalk is Gone (2002) or Visage (Face, 2009), for example, as forms of exhibitions of moving images. In both films there are long sequences in which within a certain location, a fixed frame even, nothing really happens in the conventional dramatic sense, yet there are minute visual “happenings” that feast the eye. Most often we can observe the folding of a reflection/mediation over the world perceived as an immediate “reality,” as well as an unusual interlacing of spaces (the “outside” and “inside” multiply folded over the image).

We could even consider The Skywalk is Gone a re-writing of traditional flânerie, but the human protagonists and the environment appear as equals in the film, moreover the “gaze” of the character seems to be interchangeable with the impersonal “gaze of the city.” We see, for example, a long sequence of a young woman watching a big screen with moving images in the street [Fig. 3.103], and in the next shot we have the reverse: it is her “moving image” that is “folded” into a mirror reflection that we can observe over the glass wall of another building [Fig. 3.104]. In the subsequent shots the film continues to multiply these images and reflections of the passers-by, confusing the insides and outsides making use of the reflective surfaces that shatter reality into mirror images folded upon themselves [Fig. 3.105]. In the introduction to Visage (2009) – a film

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made in France by the Taiwanese director – the spectator is left to observe for an unusually long time the fragile palimpsest of colours and translucent forms of multiple reflections produced in the window of a café [Fig. 3.106]. Such images display to the full the potential of superimpositions to convey less “meaning” and more “texture,” and to become “gateways” of cinematic intermediality.67 The magic of the sequence results from the fact that it appears to the spectator as a fragile figuration of the cinematic image being situated “in-between” a photographic impression and a painting in motion.

The film as a whole resembles Jarmusch’s previously mentioned work not only in using such static compositions or analogies to painting but also in dropping cinéphile allusions (the spirit of Truffaut is evoked, and two of his actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Fanny Ardant appear in the film). In one elaborate scene we see a paraphrase of Orson Welles’s famous reflections in the magic mirror maze, only this time it is an even more eerie folding of artifice and reality, as the mirrors are apparently placed in a wood juxtaposing the natural with the artificial, and the film noir clichés are substituted with impressions of another classic Hollywood genre: the dreamlike apparition of a musical revue scene featuring Letitia Casta [Figs. 3.107–108]. Later on the highly stylized “action” (in fact a mere sequence of visual “happenings,” or installation art captured in the making) moves into the Louvre, the museum in this way seems again – just like in Jarmusch’s case – to legitimize the loose string of autonomous scenes and carefully designed imagery, and seems to absolve the “pensive spectator” from the urge of looking for a narrative thread connecting the scenes, at the same time, it also invites the spectator to act not as a voyeuristic viewer but more as a browser of the post-cinematic gallery of images, to fast forward or pause the picture as he or she wishes.68

In one of the most memorable constructions of images we see Fanny Ardant lying on a bed and later making a phone call in a room high above the city with large glass windows overlooking a busy highway. The

67 As Marc Vernet describes in the chapter on superimpositions in his book, The Figures of Absence (1988), the layering of two images does not mean more representation, but rather, less representation, the collapse of the depth of field, and at the same time, an increased similarity with techniques in painting and art photography. 68 Mulvey also speaks of the role of digital and domesticated technology as tools in the hands of such a “pensive spectator,” saying that the spectator “who pauses the image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index” (2006, 186).

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camera is positioned just outside the window, so as to capture both the outside and the inside of the room not only dividing the visible frame into two portions but also playing with the reflection of the image of the impersonal highway projected through the glass pane over the private sphere of the character [Fig. 3.109]. Despite all the characteristic elements this is neither classical cinematic voyeurism nor flâneuristic “window shopping.” The whole scene – just like the compositions seen in The Skywalk is Gone – seems to convey, beside the exquisite interlacings and superimpositions of translucent forms and colours, or the mixing of the sensation of the palpable with the illusory, primarily not a confusion of the spectator’s spatial orientation,69 but a new perception of urban space, no longer divided into “outsides” and “insides,” private or public spheres, everything appearing as broken into a kaleidoscope of reflections, images folded upon images. The “fluidity” of such a space is described by Scott McQuire in his book, The Media City, in his way: “The machine logic of fragmentation, which conditioned the ‘shock’ experience of the urban dweller, has been redefined in terms of the network logic of flows, feedback and resistances. The abrupt cut of montage has been displaced by the real time melt of morphing, and the sequential narrative ordering of images on a single screen by the simultaneous viewing of multiple ‘windows.’ Hard buildings have given way to soft cities, structural rigidity to organizational flexibility, stable walls to responsive surfaces, permanent dwelling to nomadism” (McQuire 2008, 89).

It is also remarkable how images that in modernist cinema – despite their undeniable beauty – used to be considered cinematic “figures of absence,” emblematic representations of the dissolution of identity, of spiritual and emotional insecurity, alienation and anxiety (i.e. the folds of the mirror reflections in Antonioni’s films), have now become effective interfaces between the imprint of the real over the moving images and the imprint of the cinematic experiences over the flow of life, and how such images can sustain the interest of a “pensive spectator” relying only on their sheer visual appeal. Such images may have a lesser effect of intermediality, however, they do always reflexively exhibit the photographic roots of cinematic representation (no matter in this case that the image is digital or analogue). Here more than anything else such imagery exemplifies – beyond the interlacings of urban space and “fluid” architecture – the paradoxes of personal lives being conducted in an exceedingly transparent, Big Brother like environment, and reveals how

69 Marc Vernet (1988) considers that this is often the case in such compositions where the transparent glass also acts as a mirror within an image.

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such loops and foldings of outside and inside, of private and public, of material and immaterial, of immediate and virtual have become integral parts of our everyday life, how ultimately the world appears to us as a maze of mediated images.

Conclusion

As I have tried to point out, there can be both “sensual” and “structural” gateways into intermediality as far as imagery conveying an illusion of reality is concerned. The “sensual” mode always involves a synesthetic reading of the world, one of its basic models being based on the attitude of flânerie, on the sensibility of the stroller/driver who wanders around the (urban) landscape, and there is often a sensation of fluidity expressed both by time and space structures. In such a “sensual” mode haptic imagery usually contrasts with the optical, cinema shows a tangible, vibrant, fragile world at the proximity of embodied experience as opposed to clear-cut, geometric shapes that can be observed at an aesthetic distance. The most elaborate forms of such a contrast as well as opening up sensuous interfaces within the image towards the “affordances” of painting and architecture have been conceived in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni.

The “structural gateway” into intermediality, on the other hand, involves either a fragmentation, a shattering of the cinematic world into pieces of media representations or the experience of some kind of juxtapositions, jumps, loops or foldings between the media representations and what we perceive as cinematic reality. If the sensual mode means a perception of the “haptic against the optical,” of an “autographic” imagery opening up towards cinema’s roots with photography and towards painting, the structural mode means a reading of the “figural” as Lyotard (and based on his philosophy, David N. Rodowick, 2001) uses the term: as the figuration of one medium in another, the linguistic in the visual, the photographic in the cinematic, ultimately the representation in the domain of the real. In the latest examples of the “folds” in the post-cinematic imagery paradoxically we can also assist a “folding” of the “sensual mode” into the “structural:” as the palimpsest-like images fuse the haptical with the optical, the tangible with the intangible, and the direct, sensuous experience of cinema with the reflexivity of the “pensive spectator.”

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Figures Figures 3.1–2. Coloured spots or lights and blurred images resulting in a kind of “cinematic action painting:” Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro (2009).

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Figure 3.3. Jean-Luc Godard: Eloge de l’amour (2001): the “autographic” gesture of the cinema artist over the “photographic surface” of the car window (lights splashed over the windshield like paint over canvas).

Figure 3.4. Francis Ford Coppola: Tetro (2009): crossing over into a territory that asserts itself against the observer through the pulse of the “electropolis.” The whirlpool of lights threatens to engulf the individual facing the city.

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Figures 3.5–6. The unsettling effect of the closeness implied by haptic images in cinema: the extreme close up of the eyes of Robert De Niro hit by the coloured lights in Scorsese’s opening images to the Taxi Driver, and the metaphor of the moth circling the light at the beginning of Tetro.

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Figures 3.7–8. The liquidity of the streets accentuated by blurred images: cinema making use of photographic techniques of recording movement (movement presented as material photographic trace). Wong Kar Wai: Chungking Express (1994).

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Figures 3.9–10. The sense of fluidity reinforced by the surge of clouds and vapours (also increasing the hapticality of the images) in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983).

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Figures 3.11–13. Rumble Fish (1983): time lapse sequences of the metropolis towering over its inhabitants, or showing exquisite details of shadows moving across walls, clouds rushing over the sky reflected in the shiny metal fender of a motorcycle.

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Figures 3.14–15. Rumble Fish (1983): the careful mise en scène and framing of each individual shot that can easily be detached from the scene and contemplated as an individual still.

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Figures 3.16–19. The metaphor of the aquarium reveals the paradoxes of liquidity and entrapment in such an environment: the protagonists seem to be would be flâneurs trapped in an environment of the panopticon. (16–17: Rumble Fish, 1983; 18–19: Chungking Express, 1994.)

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Figures 3.20–21. Architecture as a supreme and detached composition of abstract forms: Antonioni’s The Adventure (1960), The Night (1961).

Figures 3.22–23. Architecture as an entity wedged into the lives of people, dividing their existence, confining them to separate spaces, obstructing their communication. Antonioni: The Night (1961).

Figures 3.24–25. The Eclipse (1962).

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Figures 3.26–27. The Adventure (1960): the baroque cathedral in Noto, site of ennui and abandoned architectural dreams versus the fragile and exquisite detail of the ink drawing.

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Figures 3.28–29. The Eclipse: the analogy of a classic bust and the sculptural appearance of Vittoria reminding us of a Greek statue.

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Figures 3.30–31. Mapping space as “architexture,” the architectural image in Antonioni’s cinema: spaces opening upon other spaces (images taken from The Adventure).

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Figure 3.32. Antonioni: The Eclipse (1962): getting “in touch” with the world within a frame. The framing of the touch, of the gesture, emphasizes the importance of bodily sensation and hapticality in the “reception” of images as opposed to a mere optical scanning (or intellectual “reading”/symbolic interpretation) of the visual display.

Figures 3.33–40. Images as canvases for the “graphic” drama to be performed: Antonioni’s The Adventure – Monica Vitti’s hair presented against a variety of haptic textures (waves of the sea, foaming water, clouds, rocks, grass, bush, etc.) The effectiveness of this analogy, this “graphic communication” stands out in contrast to the failures of verbal communication between the characters of the film.

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Figures 3.41–44. The Eclipse: moments of childish playfulness give way to a more enigmatically teasing attitude of the woman as the images become filled with the vibration induced by the visual analogy of the blades and the hair. After a few moments in which the analogy lingers over the image, Vittoria moves away from the frame and Piero (Alain Delon) is left alone, looking at the bush that stands in for what has been the figure of an enticing woman before.

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Figures 3.45–46. Antonioni: The Adventure (1960): faces shown in analogy with paintings.

Figures 3.47–50. Framing the haptical in Antonioni’s The Eclipse: rigid geometrical forms and immobile inner frames stand against (and frame) the vibrant human face and the texture full of life of the silky hair blown by a small electric fan. The image performs the essence of drama on a pure pictorial level.

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Figures 3.51–54. Un-framing the haptical in Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964): unleashing the powers of the haptical with clouds of vapours, blurred spots of colour without contours (colour becoming textural and quasi-embodied).

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Figures 3.55–56. The palimpsest of word and image in classical storytelling: Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948).

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Figures 3.57–58. Media representations scattered around the diegetic world used reflexively, as commentaries upon the story: Jean-Luc Godard A bout de souffle (1959).

Figures 3.59–60. Agnès Varda: Happiness (1965).

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Figures 3.61–62. Francis Ford Coppola: Rumble Fish (1983): graffiti inscriptions on walls and street signs as visible linguistic traces that the cinematic diegesis leaves on the realistic photographic representation of the city.

Figures 3.63–64. The city shredded into a kaleidoscope of media: the commodification of media and all aspects of human life. Arthur Penn Mickey One (1965) and John Cassavetes The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).

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Figures 3.65–68. Jean-Luc Godard: 2 or 3 things I Know about Her (1967): we see everything in the course of being disassembled or assembled. The city is presented as a result of an infinite process of mediation, and as a cultural wasteland.

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Figures 3.69–70. Jean-Luc Godard: Her Life to Live (1962), Masculine, Feminine (1966). “Life” framed by artifice, the collage of “life” and artifice.

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Figures 3.71–72. Jean-Luc Godard: A Married Woman (1964). The huge poster image towering over the “real” figure reminding us of an earlier scene in which the character walks about as a live poster girl advertising women’s underwear.

Figures 3.73–74. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969): the contrast of the blank walls of the room and the lively, convoluted forms displayed in the poster on the wall of a restaurant.

Figure 3.75. Pedro Almodóvar: All about my Mother (1999): the metalepsis in the images used to echo complex questions of what is real and what is artificial in a post-modern society.

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Figures 3.76–77. Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers (Les carabiniers, 1963): representations mirroring and moulding our lives, images emphasizing the way in which representations continually “fold into” our lives.

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Figures 3.78–81. Multiple mirror reflections in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962): the demolition of epistemological certainties about the world and questioning the uniqueness of the individual.

Figures 3.82–85. Off-screen and on-screen, “reality” and its photographic reflection folded into a single image: Michelangelo Antonioni: Identification of a Woman (Identificazione di una donna, 1982), Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders: Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995).

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Figure 3.86. Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (Copie conforme, 2010) as a “certified” simulacrum of a modernist European artfilm: images that turn the characteristic Kiarostami motif of the windshield of the car into a multiple fold of inside and outside, reality and illusion.

Figures 3.87–90. Jim Jarmusch: The Limits of Control (2009) is continuing the modernist tradition of conceiving the screen as a canvas and showing the world decomposed into abstract shapes and colours. The protagonist moves with gracious self-control in painterly and architectural spaces.

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Figures 3.91–96. The Limits of Control as an exercise in folds: the recurring use of metalepsis, loops between representation and reality, “artificial” and “real.”

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Figures 3.97–100. Jarmusch’s film: a cinema which folds its images into uncanny static visual compositions within well chosen frames: a cinema whose images should be contemplated individually and that resemble the paintings hanging over the walls of exhibition halls.

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Figures 3.101–102. The Limits of Control (2009): The long sequences containing static compositions in contrast with the cinematic flow of images create a “cinema of delay” and a “pensive spectator.”

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Figures 3.103–106. Tsai Ming Liang, The Skywalk is Gone (2002): loops, juxtapositions between the immediate and the mediated, “folds” between the inside and the outside. Visage (2009): the fragile palimpsest of multiple reflections produced in the window of a café.

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Figures 3.107–108. Tsai Ming Liang: Visage (2009): a paraphrase of Orson Welles’s famous mirror reflections in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), an eerie folding of artifice and reality, the film noir clichés substituted with the dreamlike apparition of a musical revue scene.

Figure 3.109. The mirror image that in modernist cinema used to be an emblematic representation of alienation and anxiety has become an interface between the imprint of the real over the moving images and the imprint of the cinematic experiences over the flow of life.