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
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].