Volumes of Light: Books, Movies and Bodily Transformation
It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual form that invites the eye to idle awhile at the brink of transcendence, rather than stand at a distance, remote and unyielding, daring to be comprehended, accepted, believed. Strange and barely recognizable wildlife appears on vellum leaves, creatures that wind and unwind in ceaseless whirlpools of bejeweled abstraction. Or they are, if you prefer, the spirited exoskeletons of snakes, dragons, waterbirds — Celtic and Germanic obsessions meeting the Apostles of Christendom. Emerging in the British Isles between 500–900 C.E., The Lindisfarne Gospels provide an arena, lapidary and starlit, where paganism devours Christianity while also birthing the religion anew into what can only be described, if you're honest, as “motion pictures”.
Put simply movies are books, volumes of light, zoetic leaves and letters that move beyond their trellis, leaving us to decipher a purely visual enigma; all the more impossible to contain within mortal consciousness because the light of this steadfastly irrational art has swallowed up the text. There are those, however few in number, who have claimed to decode this cryptic iconography. But mysteries remain, not unlike those — strange, delved, bewildering — contained within the gospels.
These mysteries urge upon us a wholly radical reconsideration of silent cinema, of the book in film, of whispering pages. Pages fluttering like leaves. Of Stan Brakhage, who gave us a series of works entitled The Book of Film — yet otherwise seemed incapable of regarding the universe independent of its sensual properties. Of Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway and even Wes Anderson, and certainly of Robert Beavers, who incorporates the sound and motion of turning pages, placed in relationships and analogies with other actions, as with the moving of birds' wings in flight. The films of David Gatten, which deeply engage with the idea, even the history of books.
This is not, in other words, the middlebrow notion of film as pure, narrative-bearing text that we are confronting. This is Mallarme’s concept of the book, the Proustian model of the book. It is its ultimate realization, par excellence, and by far the most apposite. Works that require different modalities of reading/touching words and saccadic rhythms involving different velocities of hyphenation and partial retention and compound phrases through the softest of collisions, where we come up against the everlasting mystery of the silent voice, the 'little' voice inside each of us; an imagined external voice that reads to us quietly, that is ours but seems to be another's. This voice is not the voice of the author nor the voice of a corporeal stand-in for somebody who may once have read to us the most thrilling book in the world somewhere in our long-ago childhood. It just is.
Enter the Cinématographe: a contraption born of science, yet ruthlessly throwing human perception into a helpless reverse. If Rene Descartes imagined the world as a set of interlocked gears, springs and flywheels; in other words, as a vastly complex machine, then perhaps the machine’s subsequent dismantling and rejigging by generations of artists was inevitable. Would that he could have witnessed a movie projector in action, that bundle of nerves and nervous energy, his rationalism suddenly vaulted into exquisite pandemonium. Or so it seems now, given the advantage of all our accumulated hindsight.
Adopting this irrational pronunciamento in monk-like contemplation of reality can only mean that, if we don't abandon it entirely, Enlightenment thought may occur to us in radically modified guises; a recrudescence of the veil, as it were, once drawn from nature’s mysteries to expose the rational and mechanical principles governing all things for the elastic fraudulence they always were.
It is here that the occult makes its comeback, invading from within Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 automaton simulating a duck’s digestive tract, or The Mechanical Philosophy’s overarching agenda: namely, replacing occultism and magic with practical, empiricism-based Truth. Da Vinci composed the human body in a harmonious and seemingly inviolable relationship to geometry, and by doing so guaranteed that a sorcerer like Georges Méliès would come along later and discombobulate his Swiss-watch conceptions of our known universe forever.
Méliès visual japes would not have landed at all had they not taken on reason, even science, the whole kit and caboodle, headfirst; those putative laws of Newtonian physics. He delighted in unlinking the mind and the body. Indeed, if one were to forge a catalogue of his ingenious transformations, then a plausible title for the result might well be “The Divisible Man”: Detachable head, multiplying detachable heads, expanding detachable heads, the head as heavenly body, as firmament, the body smithereened and reassembled in a terrifying endlessness.
An art as reliant on technology as cinema was fit from the start to render conventional ideas of inventiveness suspect. Nevertheless Méliès, for all his Star Film wizardry, gleefully cannibalized the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Poe. He poached from their hunting grounds without heed or the least worry about copyright wardens; documenting the same fantastical voyages to the moon or the south pole or the ocean floor; be they by vehicle of an outsize, inhabited artillery shell, an airship or rocket-train, or whatever extraordinary machine he could cobble together in his greenhouse studio in Montreuil. While the literary fantasists sometimes overly concerned themselves with the credible — the science part of their science fictions — Méliès focused on purely visual possibilities: to him, an idea was only any good if it virgin-birthed an image that no one would ever forget.
Withered technique, as a means of reflecting Nature — the “conjugation of objects with light” as Balzac would have it — had been displaced, uncrowned, just before the dawn of the moving image by Jean Delville’s Death (1890), a forbidding charcoal Ode to Poe's Masque of the Red Death, embodying an altogether different standard of virtuosity, one that the Academy could never begin to comprehend, yearning toward a gloom no parlor or salon could contain.
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 would lay in how you respond to light, and how light would respond 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.
Yet motion pictures continually spasm like this and never resolve. The cinema of bodily transformation that so marked early film experiments in Europe did not equate at first with Horror or, indeed, with the supernatural, at least insofar as audiences had come to know it from the Romantic ghost stories they read in the popular press of Victoria's day. In pre-industrial cinema it was simply standard procedure to have a detached head inflate to fill up a room (The Man with the India Rubber Head) or to have it proliferate into a row of bodiless noggins singing or, rather, mouthing in unheard harmony (The Four Troublesome Heads). As a genre the Horror film was eventually codified from the cinema of bizarre attractions which found its first and greatest star in Lon Chaney, master of grotesque makeup and bodily contortions.
Then came Nosferatu, made to shimmer on any screen. Horror had arrived at last, and Vampires, immortals of the night slain by the sun, rose out of their tombs in the movie palaces of the 1920s. They never returned. Instead they took their place next to us in the dark, having finally ceded the power of hypnotism to the luminous screen itself; surrendering to the fantastic notion that the photochemical vagaries of this upstart medium would permit the darkness — your darkness, mine, the darkness of any space, whether shared or solitary — to behave in uncanny ways, as if it were preordained that the physical properties of film would follow no rules, thus inviting us to indulge an essential anarchy without question. Before us, the darkness glowed and the Victorians — not a society so much as a `system of reality contained within narrow, overwrought performances — were falling away one by one.
Nitrate and its twinkling mineral essence would give the crepuscular light of Edgar Allan Poe its time to shine at last and thereby illuminate the world as never before. No longer held in the solitary confinement of mechanically reproduced text or an image, however still, rendered in paint or ink. Poe's troubled vision was now to be rendered alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational principle to the four winds.
Poe had passed through the mechanism of carbon-arc projection many times before 1928, when Jean Epstein adapted The Fall of the House of Usher. His vision, once thought unharnessable, had at last been absorbed, if not in the end tamed, by the nascent industry. Among the noteworthy turns at bat there had been D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience, a 1914 morality play starring Henry B. Walthall based, after a fashion, on The Tell-Tale Heart. Charles Brabin's 1915 take on The Raven for Essanay studios was more of a Poe biopic structured around the poem, with Walthall again, this time as the perpetually tormented author, ultimately reunited in death with his pubescent Virginia (played by 35 year old Warda Howard). Vitagraph dredged up a Caligari-infused adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart in 1928, directed by Charles Klein, the very same year as James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber brought forth their 13 minute Usher. As an adaptation, Watson & Webber's film is a paraphrase of its source; as influence, both technically and thematically, on American avant-garde cinema — particularly the psycho-dramas that were the specialty of west coast filmmakers in the 1940s — it remains unsurpassed.
The censors, however, were really on to something, even if they could never fully articulate the precise blasphemies being committed by, and within, every frame they beheld. God — a nebulous and largely unseen deity spreading life and love, creativity, and a beauty no color process later invented in Hollywood could ever hope to capture — died the moment cinema was born. A new celestial order reigned.
Saints and prophets, as the nascent industry soon learned, made for lousy characters. For all their beatification they were flat; always acting like they just stepped out of a stained glass window. Day-Glo icons preternaturally uncomfortable in motion in three-dimensional space. This new medium rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lackluster clown easily outperformed the miracles wrought by all the mock messiahs in the Book. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest features, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorter works it’s a beautiful snooze. Another execution climaxes Zecca's Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants.
Or maybe it was just that the public, never truly comprehended, could suddenly define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The telescope, once a divining rod for mapping heaven, became the ontological instrument of terrestrial-based voyeurs, while cinema blessed mere mortals with evidence of something greater than mere being: empirical evidence of a shape-shifting, perception-based Self, relieved of original sin and free to indulge in all that remained. For one glorious second, or two, the audience was regent and the watchword was Chaos.
But, yes, there is another sense in which our emotions, the poor things, are enslaved to light, as long as motion pictures have within them the power to render death and decay as conscious states. A word like Transcendentalism barely scratches the surface here, while a more apposite term — the one Jean Epstein would nuance in his writings, “photogenie” (“created by light”) — pulls transitory moments that otherwise escape human perception into crystalline focus, bringing the thorny matter of ethics into play. Not to mention a wealth of correlatives, often unsettling, even gruesome.
Born in Warsaw in 1897 — just around the time Georges Méliès began his film experiments in a makeshift Paris studio — Jean Epstein belonged to that first generation of French filmmakers with no memory of a life before the light of the moving image. This cannot be overstated. The Romantics had engrossed their public in fanciful conceptions of death as a means to revealing a kind of visionary truth. Unlike subsequent generations, they were not burdened by living in the fourth dimension. They knew only the page and the reader. Cinema, as anyone knew or would know it, had not yet been invented. The antecedents, even the allergens, barely existed. Jean Epstein's cinema — like that of René Clair (b. 1898) or Jean Renoir (b. 1894) or Julien Duvivier (b. 1896) — was relatively sui generis, taking flight amid the one-armed poets, battle-scarred dreamers, mystics and cinephiles of post-World War I France.
It was no longer a time for Romanticism. Pressed into service at a Modern pace to be measured in frames-per-second, Epstein pursued the same, supposedly elusive ends as Poe, only he did it in a world of telephones, sports cars, Everyman's Kodak cameras, and Moderne manicures for the up-to-the-minute dandy. His was an aesthetic, etched not by the spiritual demise of nineteenth-century ideals alone, but by the vast human wreckage that was staring everyone in the face.
The French called them “les gueules cassees” (“the broken mugs”): Veterans, late of the Great War, whose immersion in the very real hell of trench warfare resulted in what can only be described as a common physical disfigurement; a visual indictment of war more direct by far than a Wilfred Owen poem. Now returned home, they inspired so much revulsion in their fellow men, more outwardly intact than they, as to render them outcast; not Forgotten Men so much as collectively avoided; unable to resume their place in ordinary society and no longer entirely sure they wanted to. By war's end they had already made their screen debut, after a fashion, as the mass of avenging war dead in Abel Gance's J’Accuse! (1919). The Weimar painter Otto Dix gamely attempted to document their condition, usually in the context of a broader social critique. Only the photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the war, within the span of a shared gasp of horror, chronicle anything like the full scope of a tragedy that would not, and did not, come to an end. Ultimately it's the dignified posture of each subject, slammed against the sheer physical trauma they sustained — the gaping eye sockets and missing jaws of this delinquent portraiture — that give them their everlasting power. Simple poignancy has never felt more obscene.
Before anyone realized it, a suddenly passé stage show mysticism was swept away like cobwebs, as the shrapnel in Apollinaire’s temple assumed far greater meaning than John Keats and his half-assed love affair with easeful death. The ground for a redefining shift in cinematic expression was prepared. No medium of expression predating it could have wrenched audiences out of linear time so thoroughly.
In Epstein’s La glace à trois faces (1927), for instance, we’re offered such spare language, such brutal shifts in point of view that the film’s horizontal axis of a storyline is continually pierced. Close-ups disrupt the plot with vertical thrusts, each intersection confounding narrative’s forward momentum. “The present is nothing more than this instantaneous and incessant molt,” wrote Epstein — whose protagonist, an overly coifed, beautiful man, repellant for his cruelty, lies dead on the roadside. His sudden, synchronous death resolves the film’s fragmented petit-narratives, summoning the filmmaker’s “photogenie” in the form of absence by allowing for a kind of escape; or, again, as Epstein puts it: “I think and therefore I was.”
The close-ups are almost hostile in their determined, shimmering quietude. So freestanding as to suggest that a sensual obsession with light may betray something else: an equal and opposite mania for syntax, for formal perfection, academicism, for death itself. But then La glace à trois faces realizes impossible stillness in ways that defy critical reservation, as the titular looking-glass swallows three versions of its lothario-host, returning each of his images to a different lover, he twinkles and vanishes. Dissolving into that inner arrangement of light and shadow to be recycled at some later time, coaxed by Jean Epstein into multi-dimensional Bunraku figures on celluloid.
Silent dramaturgy becomes séance in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928); an adaptation built on ether with set designs keyed to non-corporeal forms. Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt) is an idea more than a character — half-painter, half spirit-medium, both addled and both seeking Madeline (Marguerite Gance). The unacceptable loss of his other half gnaws at the now febrile, now despairing heart of this dream imbroglio, as a pair of spooked eyes projects mournful incandescence onto the world.
It cannot be overstated. Virtually every point of view shot belongs to the protagonist, even before he is introduced. As Epstein’s high-speed camera decelerates time almost imperceptibly, the monasticism of Roderick Usher looms inevitable — and it’s a panicky moment indeed when we realize that we’re looking through the eyes of a disembodied presence. Roderick’s outsized jellied orbs can’t help but read abiding, everlasting Truth into whatever they see. Even the wind is incantatory, ringing like mystic speech while vast (vast!) interiors grow more expansive than the landscape surrounding Castle Usher. Tormented trees scratch at the sky, toads fornicate on tombs, owls evaporate, all as Epstein’s lens pursues its own weightless agenda: “to photograph the human angel.” It's easier to imagine the maestro's hands bending the invisible beams of a Theremin-like device above the set than crouched behind the camera like a hidden beast, occasionally barking orders like every other movie director in the world to some day player wielding a Klieg light.
Which is to say that a measured take on Jean Epstein would be pointless. In his hands, after all, light can be at once palpable, trance inducing, spasmodic. The old sequence of cause and effect is suddenly, if not irrelevant, then reborn into a higher state as manifest visual logic, with the occasional flirtatious nod to normative storytelling. Who remembers the damn story, anyway, when Epstein commences to leap from a silvery sea to some enormous hand, strumming guitar in slow motion? Or when his necromancy evokes, in a way no one has before or since, the very atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe, whose characters are gossamer creatures, “only slightly dead.” It's the only language that tells you what really happens when cinema gives up the ghost.
By Daniel Riccuito, Tom Sutpen and David Cairns