Cinema is a Cult Object

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:36:00 -0500

Requiem 102: 34^th Minute

Bruce Isaacs

I thank Nick Rombes for the spirit of creativity and experimentation he brings to film analysis with the Requiem 102 project. It’s a privilege to be involved. This entry is as much a reflection on my own engagement with cinema, as it is a reflection on a single film frame – where the present of the frame, and the past of my memories of cinema, converge.

1. In search of…

‘The most beautiful girl in the whole world’ – Harry Goldfarb

Nobody is as good with quotation as Umberto Eco. Eco’s lexicon of textual images (to use his own terminology) is, it seems to me, infinite. I’ve always envied this. To be able to stretch an image infinitely, to suture it to any and all other images in a veritable history of experience. To create some new life out of the connections made renders the image always in communication, a functioning community of sorts that is as much about us – readers, spectators, etc – as it is about text. What a great capacity Eco has to tell us not only what a text means, but - so much more important and dazzling in his work - how it stitches itself into the fabric of our lives.Eco argues that cinema is a cult object, a thing that is made and remade, interpreted ad infinitum; a thing of beauty always in flux. So, a line of dialogue – ‘is that artillery fire or is it my heart pounding’ – becomes a wormhole through which we see the infinity of cinema past, present and future. A shot – Hitchcock’s descending camera in Arbogast’s death in Psycho comes back in full referential glory in Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Coming back in cinema is a reincarnation of sorts, but the ghost of the past subsists in the present. This is the continuous play of text, as Eco (or Barthes) would tell us. How else do we make sense of our love for this art form except that it encompasses the entirety of our memories?

Cinema is a search for the lost object in a labyrinth of signs. ‘In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it’ – again, Eco, passionate about the interrelationships between cinema and life. This is the beauty of cinema – the part, the inhingeable text, is also the whole and the entirety of our experience of the cinema. The part is wholesome and nourishing.

How richly playful – as a text is always playful – must a single film frame be? What would happen if our minds were to roam free of the boundaries of that frame?

2. Requiem For A Dream – 34^th minute:

A still woman, Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), black on white, the gray-white of the ocean. The ocean and the sky is a blank slate upon which to inscribe our cinematic fantasies.

A peephole into the past:

Surely we must first divest ourselves of Marion Silver. Character is so burdensome in opening up the frame. In doing so, we’re divesting ourselves of the weight of the cinematic here and now. Cinema is much more than merely what we’re looking at, or listening to. Marion is interesting: beautiful, delicate, damaged, ephemeral. But the image could be so much more.

We’re not really looking at Marion here; we’re looking at a simulacral ghost:

A fantasy, come to life:

A classical ideal:

3. Let’s dispense with Marion

The burden of identity in stasis, in still life. Now we glimpse the potential of the image-trope. But our search remains fragmented, confined. We’re hung up on Marion as imbued with the ghostly spirit of Jennifer Connelly. Might we not even divest ourselves of this signification, this identification trope, powerful as it is? Searching an image of a woman in a still, might we not only relinquish the hold of character…

The image dissolves, a classical cinematographic trope. The woman is always in soft focus, always a fantasy, a memory.

Reading text is, for Eco, an act of creation; of breathing life into a dormant image.

The eyes:

Tighter on the lips:

The curve of the neck:

4. A cinematic memoryscape in still life.

Which is why cinema and real life, our always-imagined real lives, are phenomena that are never quite distinct.

Thanks to Rebecca Goldsworthy for the composite image.

BruceIsaacs

Cinema is a Cult Object