A Genesis Out of Light
Would it be preposterous to argue that movies are essentially projected books, books made out of light? Even weirder, let’s entertain the idea that Jules Verne’s science-fiction imagery, which finds itself transfigured early in the development of cinema, is not alone: the audience — you, me and everyone watching — dissolves into moving illustrations. “Motion pictures”. A horrifying thought if we “foolishly” believe that our three-dimensional selves could squish, flatten (and like it!).
Dating at least as far back as Georges Méliès, the cinema of bodily transformation did not necessarily equate with “horror” per se. The horror film was eventually codified as genre from the cinema of bizarre attractions exemplified by Lon Chaney, master of grotesque makeups and bodily contortions, but in the early cinema it was standard procedure to have one's detached head inflated to fill the room (The Man with the India Rubber Head) or multiplied into a row of bodiless noggins, singing or rather mouthing in harmony (The Four Troublesome Heads). Then came Nosferatu, preordained to shimmer on-screen. Vampires, immortals of the night, slain by sunlight, rose out their tombs in the movie theaters of the 1920s and never returned. They sit next to us in the dark, having ceded the power of hypnotism to the glowing screen itself. Photochemical vagaries invariably allow movie darkness to behave in uncanny ways; as if the physical properties of film followed no rules, and thus invited us to accept its essential anarchy without question. Before us, the darkness GLOWS.
By the time Jean Epstein adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, Poe had already passed through the mechanism of carbon-arc projection; his vision, once considered unharnessable, had at last become an industry. Dragooned, pressed into modern service at a pace to be measured in frames-per-second, Poe engrosses us in Romantic conceptions of death as a means to visionary truth. Jean Epstein reveals that same supposedly “elusive” end in our earthly world of telephones, sports cars, Kodak cameras for the everyman, and moderne manicures for the up-to-the-minute dandy. Unlike subsequent generations, the Romantics were not living in the fourth dimension. Cinema, as anyone knew or would know it, had not yet been invented. The antecedents did not exist. Consequently, no medium of expression predating cinema could have wrenched audiences out of linear time as thoroughly as Epstein’s La glace à trois faces (1927) — that is, Epstein’s cinema was born amidst the one-armed poets, battle-scarred dreamers, mystics and cinephiles of post-World War I France. So his aesthetic vision was etched not by the spiritual demise of nineteenth-century ideals alone, but also by vast human wreckage staring him in the face. The French called them “les gueules cassees” (“the broken mugs”). A suddenly passé mysticism fell away like cobwebs, as the shrapnel in Apollinaire’s temple became far more meaningful than Keats’ half-assed love affair with “easeful death.” And today? We can easily affirm Poe’s paranoia in our own well-earned collective jitters. The monasticism of Roderick Usher looms inevitable to us — even wise, as Jean Epstein’s high-speed camera decelerates time almost imperceptibly. Tormented trees scratch at the sky, toads fornicate on tombs, owls evaporate. The wind is incantatory language that reveals what happens when cinema gives up the ghost.
When time “escapes the chronometer,” as Mr. Epstein himself puts it.
“All’s revealed in this transparency of the tombs.”
Transcendentalism barely scratches the surface here. A more apposite term — the one he nuances in his film theory, “photogenie” (a genesis out of light) — pulls transitory moments, otherwise escaping human perception, into focus.
Jean Epstein’s film art demands that we ask: “What is Modernism?” Or: “What is the movement minus transfiguration, mutation, deformation?”
The Victorians were falling away. And with them a system of reality contained in narrow, overwrought performances. Withered technique as a means of reflecting Nature — or, to quote Balzac, the “conjugation of objects with light” — was displaced, uncrowned by Jean Delville’s Death (1890), which embodies an altogether different kind of virtuosity, one no Academy could ever comprehend. The charcoal drawing and ode to Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death yearns with a combination of verve and starkness toward a capital “G” Gloom destined to escape salons.
Coming of age in a series of shady elsewheres — the fairgrounds, nickelodeon parlors and movie palaces of an Edwardian America — nitrate and its twinkling mineral essence gave Poe's crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, however still, rendered in paint or ink. Poe's singularly tormented vision was finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one's mind.
All hail magic mirrors! Celestial mandalas! Giant eggs and butterfly women! Segundo de Chomón's The Red Spectre (1907) ruthlessly invades our eyes with a wraith-magician dissolving through his coffin lid in a red, hand-tinted, flame-flickering hell. His caped, skull-masked presence was to herald the manic new thespic truth that, from this moment forward, the art of acting is in how you respond to light, and how light responds to you. The Specter of Chomon's dark bauble is in every element Poe's Red Death — japing and performing tricks for us, his adoring fans and welcome guests, before announcing our doom — literary metaphor slammed against a literal backdrop of amber stalactites, pellucid as an ossuary.
Doctor Pretorius might have been musing on the history of cinema in 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein when he said: “Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, no nonsense about angels and being good.”
By Daniel Riccuito