Where It All Began:

Tracing the Origins of Cinema to the Mediterranean

and the Baroque

 

The aim of this paper is to show that cinema, in its very essence, can be defined as the logical sequence of a set of representations, whose origins can be traced to the basin of the Mediterranean. These representations have attempted, through time, to reproduce reality with more and more precision.  Furthermore, this paper will show that the baroque, by prefiguring this essential element of cinema that is the illusion of movement, has provided a privileged stage in this evolution, before its actual realization in the late XIXth century.  And finally that this exceptional period that was the baroque, reactivated in the XXth century, has influenced various filmmakers and thus constitutes the very source of their works with a mark on their originality.

 

I will briefly illustrate this last point in my conclusion by focusing on Max Ophüls’s film, Lola Montès, first presented in Paris in 1955, in which he recounts the life and loves of the Spanish-Irish cabaret-dancer, who became the mistress of Franz Liszt and Ludwig I, Maria Dolorès Porriz y Montez, countess of Lansfeld, known as Lola Montès, a film from which I will only repeat, at present, the definition that Lola gives of herself:  “La vie pour moi, c’est le mouvement.”  Life is movement, movement is desire, and desire, as Ophüls said, is cinema.

 

Allow me to begin by quoting the late Fernand Braudel, author in particular of The Mediterranean: Space and History and of The Italian Model: “Before becoming a place, the sea obviously was an obstacle […] (however) the Mediterranean, first and foremost, is a space-movement1.”

 

On the literary plane, a perfect illustration of Braudel’s statement would be the founding text of the Mediterranean, namely Homer’s Odyssey.  Homer’s epic can be considered both as the praise and the anti-praise of traveling, since, at the end of his adventurous voyage – I would prefer the Greek term of periplos, which we have kept in the Romance languages  – Odysseus finds himself at the very place where he had started.  In fact, some feminist commentators are now suggesting that the main character of the Odyssey is not Odysseus but Penelope.  The whole poem, they argue, is constructed with Odysseus’s return in view, not to Ithaca, the homeland, but to Penelope, the spouse, who, by unweaving every night her quilt, allows for the wanderer to return home.  Thus, although presented as an epic poem, when everything is said and done, Odysseus finds himself where he had started without any other reward for himself than the proof of the indefectible fidelity of his spouse.

 

         Here is my first point: When we search texts, or when we look into beliefs and legends, a major contradiction in Mediterranean thought appears: On the one hand, we see clearly the attraction for all that is mobility, voyage, exchange and, at the same time, it is as clear that this élan must be curbed, given the fact seafaring expeditions are especially perilous.  On the other hand, there is the mention, for instance, of those mysterious “peoples of the sea”, about whom we don't know a great deal, but whose escapades we suspect.  A case in point is the one undertaken by those Sardinian master builders who emigrated from their island to populate far away Scotland and who taught the Picts the art of building the mysterious towers made of dry stones that are found on its northwest coast and in the Orcades islands, which are called brochs and strikingly resemble the Sardinian nuraghe2.

 

         We cannot forget to mention as well the Phoenician ships that rallied for the first time the Cape of Good Hope, or even Alexander the Great, who went as far away as the Indus River, but who, as we know, did not return.  Let us salute also the valiance, the curiosity, and business acumen of the Venitian Marco Polo and his China expedition.

 

         Said otherwise, the Mediterranean, if I could retain Dominique Fernandez’s French play on words between the homophonic mer (the sea) and mère (the mother), Mère Méditerranée3 - which the title of his study - behaves like a possessive “mama”, questioning all reasons in her children for leaving her safe haven, and yet she seems to be encouraging in them all types of adventurous dreams.

 

         I could mention in passing that other peoples around the Mediterranean were not as fond of navigation as the ones I’ve just mentioned: the Jews, for example, did not trust those bold navigators that were the Philistines, and those whom they globally called “the peoples of the sea.”  The Romans, on the contrary, developed all forms of land travels with their superb viae : via Appia, via Flaminia, via Aurelia, etc. Marguerite Yourcenar, for instance, in her Mémoires d’Hadrien has the emperor declare: “[La route], le plus beau don peut-être que Rome ait fait à la terre.” (The road, perhaps the most exquisite gift that Rome has ever given to the world.)

 

It is revealing as well that the first cartographers of the Mediterranean, such as Eratosthenos or Ptolemy, had a tendency to reduce the size of that Mare Internum, which still holds true when you examine the Catalan atlas of 1375.  We’ll have to wait until the XVIIth century to have a more accurate geographic representation of the Mediterranean.

 

Therefore, with such a lack of breathing space in his surroundings, what other means did the Mediterranean man have to find an escape?  Paradoxically, he found one in movement, but again a form of movement that did not necessarily force him to displace himself physically.  And, if I may jump over centuries, taking the Quattrocento as my second focus point, we may wonder whether Brunelleschi’s perspectiva artificialis, illustrated by Masaccio, theorized by Alberti, codified by Vinci, was not born from the same profound desire to escape from too confining a space by means, this time, of a visual subterfuge.

 

         This new pictorial system, namely the monocular perspective, which originated in Florence in the XVth century, was going to conquer the Western world.  And for the sake of this exposé, I need to mention at this juncture for the cinema to exist, more precisely for the first photography to be created, the importance of the camera obscura.

 

Early credit goes to Aristotle, whose works in optics were probably taken up in the IXth century by Arab scholars.  On his side, Lucretius, in his De natura rerum, described the phenomenon of the persistence of vision, allowing the human brain to reconstitute movement thanks to a succession of fixed images.  Credit ought to be given as well to Vinci, already mentioned, who discovered that the camera obscura was modeled in fact on the human eye.  In the XVIIIth century, with the addition of lenses, this camera obscura  became the magic lantern.  A century later, in 1822 to be exact, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, a Frenchman, captured the first photograph.  True, it was a nature morte, a “still life”, not yet a “motion picture”.

 

We know also that credit must be given, not so much to the American father of the movies, Thomas Alva Edison, but to Edison’s director of the motion picture project, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who invented the camera and the viewer, called the kinetograph (etymologically “motion writer”), for which Edison simply took credit.  We owe the fancy name of cinématographe to the Lumière brothers, who shot their first film in 1895.  Do I need to add that, in many countries today, the movies are simply known as the cinema, and shooting is known as cinematography?  However, I seem to anticipate…

 

         For there is another major element that Italian Renaissance, in addition to the monocular perspective, has given to the cinema: the quadro, from the Latin quadrus, of course, meaning square, translated into English as frame.  Despite its etymology however, the quadro, in cinema parlance, quickly took the shape of a rectangle, dictated probably by the phenomenon of human vision, wider in range than high in scope.   It is interesting to point out as well that, as early as 1539, the verbal form quadrare already means “to fit well with something.”  I may want to add that the technician we call in English a cameraman, in French, for example, is aptly named a cadreur.  What needs to be emphasized is how this cadre or frame, inherited from Italian Renaissance painting, is one of the most important constituents of cinema.  As Jean Mitry notes in his Esthétique et Psychologie du cinéma :  “The shots and the angles that are the result of a specific choice, or of a cut performed on the outside world, have a common denominator, namely the frame of the image, which is the basic condition of the filmic form4.”

 

         The next illusionist stage toward the creation of cinema, as announced in my preamble, is the baroque.  Whether we derive the word baroque, by which I mean the Italian – Roman more precisely - baroque of Bernini and of his rival Borromini, from the Portuguese barrôco or the Spanish barrueco, meaning in both languages the irregular shaped pearl found in an oyster - and not its pejorative derivation of bizarre - what characterizes this novel art form is the movement or, more exactly, the continuous opposition between the movement and the decorative detail.

 

No doubt that the Italian architects, sculptors, and painters, considered themselves as the upholders of the Renaissance, and no doubt that they found the immediate source of their inspiration in the cadaveri eccelenti of Imperial Rome.  However by re-utilizing the column and the pediment, the oval and the decorative detail, they were given a new life, adding to these dead and massive stones an impression of mobility.  Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin has this concise explanation of the baroque, which needs to be repeated:  “The picturesque is based on the impression of movement. Effects of mass and movement are the principles of the baroque5.”  Now, this attempt to represent the movement in the inert, or what is called the illusion of movement, which could not be achieved technologically in the Seicento, became possible some two centuries later, thanks to Edison’s kinetograph and the cinétographe of the Lumière Brothers.

 

Is there need to repeat hic et nunc, in a city that prides itself in being the birthplace of the American Industrialized Revolution, I will reiterate that the XIXth century’s inventive mind created machines for work as well as its necessary complement, machines for entertainment.  Allow me to make a brief, albeit chauvinistic, parenthesis about our city.  It may be well known that in the 1840s, on a trip to America, Charles Dickens paid a visit Lowell. Much less known probably is Victor Hugo’s reference to our Merrimack Valley. He has the revolutionary student, Grantaire, ask: “Otez Time is money, que reste-t-il de l’Angleterre?  Otez Cotton is King, que reste-t-il de l’Amérique?”  This chapter of Les Misérables was written in 1861, exactly at the time when there were some fifty looms in the twelve Lowell mills functioning in this very neighborhood, at a time when, in New England, Cotton was King6.

 

        To add substance to my point, namely the unique and privileged stage that the baroque constitutes for the advent of cinema, I will add two voices, two French voices incidentally, whose authority however is uncontested in both art history and the history of the cinema.  The first is that of André Malraux, who wrote the following in Les voix du silence:  

Once the era of discoveries in the technique of representation came to an end, painting began to cast about with almost feverish eagerness for a means of rendering movement. Movement alone, it seemed, could now impart to art that power of carrying conviction, which had hitherto been implemented by each successive discovery. But movement called for more than a change in methods of portrayal; what Baroque- with its gestures like those of drowning men - was straining after - was not a new treatment of picture but rather a picture sequence. It is not surprising that an art so much obsessed with theatrical effect, all gestures and emotion, should end up in the motion picture7.

 

         The second is André Bazin, who in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, credits Italian painting for what has been called “a paternity at least conceptual8” of the cinema.

Since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of the baroque art9.

 

         The next question that we can raise, which will be my last point, is the following:  Is all cinema baroque? It may be interesting to point out, for instance, that a good number of directors originate from parts of the world where the baroque of the XVIIth  et XVIIIth century had developed, not only in Italy and Spain, but we cannot fail to also notice the strong presence of filmmakers from Vienna or from the Rhineland, or the importance of Italo-Americans, Coppola and Scorcese, just to name two.  Do I need to point out that France however, except in music, kept her distance from the baroque? In his finest poem, “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage”, the Renaissance poet, Joachim Du Bellay, after his meditations on the vanished glories of ancient Rome, concluded his Regrets (published after his return to France in 1558) with these famous verses:

Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine, / Plus mon Loire gaulois que le Tibre latin, /Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin. /Et plus que l’air marin la douceur angevine.

 

Yet, as Fernand Braudel so rightly said:  “The baroque, that Italy extending beyond Italy, [the baroque,] the last great cultural export of the Mediterranean.”

 

Although many are the filmmakers who, from Wells to Fellini, or from Visconti to Losey, have borrowed from the aesthetics of the baroque, I have chosen to focus on Max Ophüls’s last filmic creation, Lola Montès, which, on the one hand was dismissed as boring and incoherent because of his excess of décor, mise-en-scène and narrative convolution.  On the other hand, by reason of this same excess, it was hailed as a masterpiece of the baroque. From the first reel, we recognize the filmmaker’s touch, namely the architectural overcharge, his fondness for the unusual, not to mention the Vienna morbidity of the tone, in addition to his first use of color and Cinemascope, which, among other things, allowed him such a freedom of movement, mutatis mutandis similar to what Fellini called fantasia, which translates quite well into our word fantasy.

 

Now, allow me to bring the film into context. Although Gamma Films advertised a super-production based on the life and loves of the most scandalous woman of all times, featuring Martine Carol, France’s foremost sex goddess at the time, and an all-star supporting cast headed by the flamboyant Peter Ustinov as Monsieur Loyal, Ophüls chose instead to take aim at the very mechanism that Gamma Films was using to market the film: lurid publicity. In an interview with François Truffaut, he cites the fate of Judy Garland and Diana Barrymore, which he blamed on the public’s appetite for scandal and on the entrepreneurs who shamelessly exploit scandals.

We must kill publicity… I find it dreadful, this vice of wanting to know everything. This irreverence in the face of mystery.  It is on this theme that I have built my film: the annihilation of the personality through the cruelty and indecency of spectacles based on scandal10.

 

Commenting upon the scandal provoked by the film’s initial release, his son, Marcel Ophüls said: “ What was not understood was that the film is a denunciation of exhibitionism in show business and a denunciation of spectacle within the spectacle11.”

 

         As summarized in CineAction, the diegetic present of the film is a circus wherein will be performed the ‘most sensational act of the century’ which contains ‘spectacle, romance, action and history,’ and which will deliver to us the ‘whole truth of an extraordinary life,’ the ‘scandalous career,’ the rise and fall of a femme fatale: Lola Montès. Lola’s life is re-enacted by the entire company with the ringmaster as choreographer.  Complete with whip and provocations, the ringmaster calls upon the audience to ask Lola the ‘most intimate questions’ which he facilitates and edits until he manages to evoke the one question which the design of the show depends upon: ‘Combien d’amants?’ (How many lovers?).  During this parade of suitors, Lola is motionless upon a rotating platform, a circumstance which reaches its apotheosis in the finale, of both the film and the circus act, when she is utterly contained within a cage after her perilous fall12.

 

         Ophüls used the framing device of a mammoth circus set in New Orleans circa 1880 to distance the spectator from the events of Lola’s life presented in flashback.  If life for Lola is movement, then in the circus she is effectively dead, for it is precisely her capacity to move that is impaired.  She is more often moved (generally in circles) than moving.  And when she does move during the performance (as on the tight rope), it is with great difficulty.

 

We can’t help but notice the profusion of circular motions and, in particular, the travelling that turns around Lola exposed at the center of the track, herself placed on a pedestal pivoting in reverse.  This sequence shot, namely the opposed double circumference, is another illustration of the baroque, which is to be understood as the visual translation of the reciprocal gravitation and inner thoughts of Lola and of the world that surrounds her.  We notice as well the circus pyrotechnics and Ophüls’s obsession with monochromy, exemplified by the mineral glows of the lighting gas turning to absolute red when Lola remembers her past.

 

A French critique, Philippe Collin13, has insightfully remarked that, although other films have borrowed aesthetically from the baroque, Lola Montès solely, however, is a film which is ethically baroque, in the sense that each sequence-shot questions the meaning of the preceding ones, and the whole film offers the aspect of a vast array of questions and answers which annihilate and recreate each other indefinitely.  An eloquent illustration of this is offered to our eyes in the last scene, when we see Lola climb higher and higher up the rope ladder, preparing to jump without the safety net, ready for a plunge which, she realizes, could be her death.

 

The next day, however, everything starts anew. Nothing is solved, nothing is explained. Life itsef is both consoling and cruel, both Sphinx and Oedipus.  Or to borrow a last image from that other essential Mediterranean man, Albert Camus, one could conclude with these often quoted words from the Myth of Sisyphus:  “La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”  (The very struggle toward the mountain top is enough to fulfill a man’s heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy14.)

                                                                        Joseph Garreau

                                             University of Massachusetts Lowell

 

NOTES

1. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen. Paris: Colin, 1982 and Le Modèle italien. Paris: Arthaud, 1985. Quoted by Pedrag Matvejevic, Le Bréviaire méditerranéen, Paris: Fayard, 1992, p. 242.

2. See Frank Renwick of Ravestone, Scotland, bloody Scotland. Edinburgh: Canangate, 1986.

3. Fernandez, Dominique. Mère  Méditerranée. Paris: Grasset, 1965.

4. Paris:Editions Universitaires, 1963, Volume I, p. 165 (my translation).

5. Renaissance et Baroque. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1967. Quoted by Pierre Pitiot, Les voyageurs de l’immobile. Montpellier: Climats, 1994, p 98.

6. Cotton Was King (A History of Lowell, Massachusetts). New Hampshire Pub. Co. 1976.

7. The Voices of Silence, tr. By Stuart Gilbert. Doubleday & Co. Inc. NY, 1953, p 121.
8. Pierre Pitiot, op. Cit
. “André Malraux et André Bazin […] surent créditer la peinture italienne de cette paternité au moins conceptuelle.” p 115.

9. What is Cinema? Essays translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1976, p 11.

10. Article Max Ophüls, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers –2 Directors. Second Edition, 1991.

11. Interview with James Blue, Rice University Media. March 7, 1973 in “Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire” Style and Spectacle in Four Films, 1948-1955, by Alan Larson Williams. Arno Press, N.Y. 1980, p 38.

12. Susan Lord, CineAction. Winter, Spring 1990, p 60 (passim).

13. “D’une mise en scène baroque” in Baroque et cinéma. Etudes cinématographiques, Nº 1-2, Vol. 1, Paris: Minard, 1960. “D’autres films ont fait des emprunts à un baroque esthétique, mais seul Lola Montès est un film éthiquement baroque; chaque plan remet en question la signification des précédents et l’ensemble offre l’aspect d’une multitude d’interrogations et de réponses qui se détruisent et se re-créent indéfiniment les unes les autres. (…) Rien n’est résolu, rien n’est expliqué.” p. 97.

14. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. [My translation].