4 Self-Projection and the Cinematic Apparatus
The film camera, projector, and screen perform as prosthetic devices in auteurist self-projection, in a sense not unlike the actor as avatar. When they appear, they signal the viewer that an artist is present, since the apparatus indicates that the narrative is not “real” but made. At the same time, the presence of the machine in its various forms stands in, often, for an absent auteur, so that the apparatus replaces the human. Cinematic technology, as an extension of photographic technology, makes the absent present—the ghosts of the long-dead walk before us in the dark theater—even as it withholds actual embodied presence, separates the image and the voice from the body that produced it (see Kawin on Godard and Bergman). To begin to think about the apparatus and the auteur, I would like to return to Bergman’s Persona.
Persona begins in darkness, a black screen. Slow, eerie music swells, and as it does, a square of light begins to grow brighter on the screen, soon to be joined by a thin rod with a rounded tip that projects diagonally from the lower right to move toward the square. The rod, too, grows increasingly incandescent as it seems to move closer to the square and the music turns abrasive, chaotic. Suddenly sparks fly, a clattering noise breaks loose, a wheel begins to turn to the left of the square, reveals itself to be a reel, and a film strip begins to spool from one reel to the other. Persona’s enigmatic opening seems to imply that the film we are watching (and by extension, film in general) has its origin in the apparatus itself; but what is the apparatus, and how does it relate to the human? Persona’s representation of its apparatus, with the rod slowly approaching the square frame of light, calls to mind sexual intercourse, an association supported by an almost subliminally quick appearance of an image of an erect penis that flashes across the screen shortly afterward.1 Later, at a crisis moment in the narrative, the film appears to stick in the projector, burn, and break, and when we “reenter” the film, we seem to be inside a human eye, with blood vessels magnified to suggest that the film is contained within that eye. The eye, perceived from the inside (like the projector) and thus viewed separately from the brain and body to which it must belong, seems to exist in a space where it might belong to both the auteur, who originally “saw” the film as creative vision, and the spectator, who reenters the viewing experience through the eye (his or her own eye, and the eye of the film).
Persona: the opening, inside the film projector
Bergman’s implication that the machinery of film is integrated with human physiology was not new in 1966, however experimental Persona may appear. In fact, the idea finds expression already during the silent era, particularly in the work of Dziga Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker who, along with his wife and brother, made Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929). In line with the Constructivist theory and practice of the Kinoks (cinema-eye) filmmaking collective formed in 1919, Man with a Movie Camera represents how the cinematic apparatus (along with other modern technology) can be imagined as an extension of the human mind and body. Vertov had studied physiology and psychology prior to becoming a filmmaker, and he combined his fascination with the human perceptive apparatus and the cinematic apparatus, believing that a combination of the two (chelovek s kino-apparatom) could lead to a more penetrating and expansive view and understanding of the world.
Man with a Movie Camera plays repeatedly and intensively with links (or “rhyming” as Vertov would have it) between human physiology and varied forms of technology, such as the revolving wheels of the camera, turned by the revolving arm of the cameraman, rhymed with machine gears, vehicle wheels, spools turning on a sewing machine, and so on, stressing the extension of human capacity through the machine. The film dwells in particular on an image of the cameraman’s eye visible through the lens of the camera, and it closes with that image as well: as we look into the camera’s lens directed at us, we see the eye of the cameraman, and then the lens slowly closes, in an iris mechanism that imitates the shrinking of the eye’s pupil when exposed to light. And Man with a Movie Camera begins with a sequence in which we enter an empty movie theater and watch the projectionist open and load a reel of film labeled “Chelovek s kino-apparatom”—in other words, “our” film is about to be shown within the frame of our film. The projectionist then turns a crank that moves two rods within the projector closer and closer to each other until a spark flies out, and the film begins to roll. It would seem, then, that Persona’s opening is a citation of Man with a Movie Camera, with a difference. I will explore that difference below.
As we have seen, critical writing on autobiography and film has tended to worry about the split that film demands between the body in front of the camera and the body behind it, but the Kinoks and Bergman’s representation of the movie machine hint that the cinematic apparatus does not divide bodies, but instead facilitates a new kind of fusion between technology and human and, as both Bergman’s and Vertov’s films argue (albeit very differently), among humans. Vertov was a documentarian both in practice and by political and philosophical conviction, and his notion of the fusion produced by cinematic and other forms of technology served the project of Soviet collectivism and Constructivism, though Malcolm Turvey argues convincingly that Vertov’s Constructivist collective is not mechanistic ultimately, but organic, focusing on the human rather than the machine.2 Vertov’s optimistic film stands in opposition to the (sometimes comically expressed) horrors of technology depicted in the silent era by films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and Buster Keaton’s Electric House. And the Soviet filmmaker seems at first glance to be at odds as well with Truffaut’s politique des auteurs, which upholds the artistry and centrality of the author-director as individual genius, distinct from a collective. But Vertov, even as he insists on the integration of the human and the apparatus, stresses the filmmaker’s subject position: “I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only I alone am able to see it.”3 In saying this, Vertov alludes not only to his utilization of technology, but to the machine-nature of the director’s body enhanced by a marriage with technology. “I” becomes an entity that is not limited to a body; the cinematic body represents an extension of the self-model into a technological realm.
One might fear that this move abandons personhood in favor of automation; this is indeed an anxiety that attended the invention of photography and continues to haunt discussions of algorithmic cinema.4 But Vertov seems instead to want to redefine the subject position; his claim of (machine-driven) agency aligns with Truffaut’s idea of first-person cinema, if we allow the person to be both human and machine, both individual and collective. When one considers that Truffaut, in his appeal for a first-person cinema, also proposes to create a collective through cinema as an expression of autobiographical experience and love, we can see how the two filmmakers brush up against each other, though their politics diverge rather sharply. Still, even as the individual seems to take center stage in Truffaut’s politique des auteurs, we can see that the auteur and his self-projection can exist only in relation to others: the actors and technicians, the spectator, and, now, the apparatus.
Following Vertov’s line of thinking into the art-cinema period, the cinematic apparatus becomes something else again. The idea of author-machine can spark a fear that the apparatus will take over the film and the body, and as the body becomes mechanized the tie that connects the self-model to a particular biological entity is diverted to a connection with the machine. Thinking back to Cartesian notions of the body-machine, perhaps the embodied self is nothing more than a (bio-)machine, driven by the necessary fiction of the self-model? And here is the difference between Vertov and Bergman: while Vertov’s representation of the projector includes a projector operator and a theater full of eager spectators, Bergman’s enters the projector so closely that we cannot see what it is. There is no visible human running the machine. Some scholars have read the opening of Persona as a statement that the consciousness governing the film is the cinematic apparatus itself, not a human being (for example, Kawin). At the least, references to the camera, projector, etc., make evident the aspect of cinema that is not human, thus inscribing the anxiety that the apparatus might take over the process and determine it, disrupting the idea of agency that is at the heart of auteurist cinema. (One should recall at this juncture the claim—pronounced in early Soviet film practice by Lev Kule-shov—that film acting is not acting, but montage.)
Perhaps as a direct outcome of the auteur’s anxiety, one encounters in auteurist films a battery of direct representations of (or veiled allusions to) various components of the cinematic apparatus: screens, cameras (and the mirrors contained within cameras), photographs or photo-grams (the individual frames of a film), projectors, and the site of spec-tatorship, the theater. There is a way in which these representations refer to the presence of the author, in the sense that the appearance of the apparatus within the cinematic narrative makes direct reference to the fact that the film is a construction. But the unveiling of the machinery behind the narrative can also propose the absence or impotence of human intervention. A tension develops between the power of the machine and the auteur’s moves to reclaim control over the film, not unlike the tension that exists between the director and actor.
As a kind of comic answer to the threat posed to auteurist agency by the cinematic machine, Lars von Trier made a little film called Direk-tøren for det hele (The Boss of It All, 2006).5 The story focuses on the question of who (or what) is in charge; it deals with a small software firm that has labored under the illusion that they have an absentee boss (the “direktør”), while in fact their work has been supervised secretly by a colleague in the office who pretends not to be the boss. It is he who created the fiction of the absentee boss, the “boss” who is to be blamed for all unpopular decisions. At a crucial moment, this supervisor hires an actor to play the role of the boss and pretend to oversee the firm’s work, and the actor finds himself at the mercy of all the narrative strands the supervisor has previously circulated among the employees about the boss (that he is gay, that he wants to marry one of the female coworkers, etc.). The actor, fanatically devoted to method acting, becomes convinced by his own performance and turns into the “boss” in actual fact, unseating the supervisor’s (i.e., his director’s) authority and reworking the script as he goes along, to suit his own whims. At one narrative level, then, the film focuses on the relationship I have explored in my discussion of the auteur and actor. But there are at least several other levels, one of which involves von Trier himself, as he appears in the film as the narrator, explaining the whimsical nature of the story and emphasizing that the film is a fiction, and a meaningless and trivial one at that.
In a “special feature” packaged with the DVD, we learn that the odd camerawork and editing of the film (strange focus points, bizarre pans, choppy cuts) have an explanation. Our director (von Trier) claims to have decided to abdicate his directorial responsibility for framing and setting up shots by handing that power over to the camera itself, or rather, a process he dubs “Automavision,” a sly gesture toward algorithmic direction. The camera is controlled by a computer program that frames images and moves according to the commands generated by the computer. This means that there are times when the camera, rather than focusing on the actor speaking his or her lines, is looking pointedly at the ceiling or the floor or the table. And the camera will pan when there is no narrative call for a panning motion, glancing randomly through rooms, capturing actors at waist level, rather than framing their faces, as if the camera suffered from some technological form of Attention Deficit Disorder.
This would seem the perfect example of the auteur’s acknowledgment of his own impotence in the face of the power of the apparatus. But of course it is not; we hear in the same special feature that the actors quickly learned to move in response to the volatile camera in order to place themselves within the frame. And not only that, but of course the computer does not decide how the camera will move; we are shown how the technicians programmed the computer and changed the program when the shots were too wild. And finally, von Trier lets us know that the sequences required draconian editing; while it was deemed appropriate for the viewer to be aware that there was something odd about the framing and editing, von Trier did not, in the end, want long shots of the ceiling. So the viewer is reassured that in fact the auteur was the ultimate control, and the gesture of handing the power over to the apparatus was parodic, a comic device that only serves to underscore artistic agency in an age of algorithmic cinema. In particular, the viewer is reminded of the director’s importance in creating an integrated narrative out of disparate parts; some mind must be involved in making a seamless whole of the individual shots and sequences, gestures and lines. The helhetsvision (total vision, vision of wholeness) mentioned by Bergman is nothing less than the incorporation of cinematic body parts into the auteur’s imagined body. But the viewer who does not bother to watch all of the special features would have to guess what the peculiar look of The Boss of It All signifies, if it signifies anything. The joke is reserved for those who approach the auteur more closely, the inner circle—and so the viewer’s motions, too, are controlled by the director of it all.
It is not that references to the cinematic apparatus do not exist in non-auteurist cinema as well, but when what I would call the “auteurist contract” is in place—that is, the film carries and the viewer acknowledges the ascription of authorship—cinematic self-referentiality can be conceived more broadly than just a reminder that the film is, in fact, a film, that is, a created object. It becomes a sign that there is a creator, and that this creator is in league with the machine, and the creator’s imagination determines the perspective of “the machine that reveals the world to you.” In the preceding chapters, I explored how the act of filmmaking finds its way into auteurist films as a signal of self-referentiality, for in those moments when films depict direction and acting, the director of “our” film is clearly implied (and sometimes appears himself within the film). And references to the cinematic apparatus can function in the same way; just as the director within a film’s narrative can be a stand-in for the director of the framing film, a camera or a projector or a screen or some other reference to the cinematic apparatus can be made to act as a sign of the auteur’s presence, an extension of the auteur’s body or consciousness, or, conversely, as a reminder of the director’s unavoidable invisibility (that is, his or her isolation behind the camera) and ultimate lack of sovereignty (the camera is required, along with actors and crew, to perform the auteur’s self-projection).
In this chapter, I will commit an act of metaphorical violence by attempting to separate out specific components of the cinematic apparatus, violent because it tears at the logic of fusion and integration that characterizes cinematic self-referentiality. I think nevertheless that it can be useful to atomize the various components of the cinematic apparatus, with the ultimate goal of understanding how these components emblematize interpenetration and integration, projection and reception. And as I go along, I will point toward the ways in which the components of the apparatus relate to the human bodies and minds that work through them and are represented by them, all subsumed in auteurist cinema under the sign of the auteur.
Projectors and Self-Projection
The questions “What is that?” and “What is happening?” and “What does it mean?” dominate the viewer’s response during Persona’s opening sequence, until the reels of film appear on the screen and the focus of attention moves from the inner workings of a film projector (because that is what “that” is) to the more comfortingly familiar (if archaic) sight of the filmstrip’s countdown numbers projected on our screen.6 Of course we knew that we were watching a film, but perhaps not until then did we realize that we were watching a film projector. The projector in Bergman’s film seems unmanned, automatic, perhaps even volitional. I would like to consider further the sexualized imagery employed in this sequence, which, with its initiatory spark, puts forward the idea of the projector as generator in a near-biological sense. The product of its generation is not only Persona the film, but film in general, film historically. The notion that this is film’s primal scene finds support in the sequences subsequent to the film strip’s countdown: a piece of early animation, viewed not as a projected image, but as a piece of film moving through, then “stuck,” in the projector, brief allusions to early silent film by the Lumieres—in other words, indices of cinema’s origins. And knowing even a little of Bergman’s biography as the son of a Lutheran pastor, a viewer could imagine a scriptural dimension alongside the sexual: God’s finger touching Adam’s, the initial spark of creation.7
Precisely because the opening of Persona is so cryptic, the viewer is pushed hard toward an allegorical reading, a push that only becomes more imperative as the opening of Persona continues to unfurl, with its apparently disconnected sequences of a spider crawling on the screen, the slaughter of an animal, a hand being nailed to a piece of wood, a blank concrete wall, and so on. The images pile up, and the viewer works feverishly: “What is that?” “What is happening?” “What does it mean?” The viewer’s determination to find meaning and synthesis in the sequences and the apparent resistance of the images to narrative interpretation point to the belief in a conscious will behind the construction of the patterns. That is, the viewer, in part because of the auteurist contract, knows that the film on the screen is a fabricated object, that the film did not “make itself” out of random fragments or evolve organically. So the viewer imagines a guiding mind and looks to find what the guiding mind means to communicate. And because the constructing mind(s) and hand(s) are implicitly assumed, the failure of the film to cohere as linear story narrative ought not to be understood as a failure, but as a scheme. In this instance, the narrative one might construct as a viewer resembles at a surface level a dream sequence, in which associations are drawn between the sequences that presuppose an overarching consciousness.
That the guiding consciousness of Persona should be linked directly to the director, Bergman, finds substantiation not only in the film credits that appear after the series of fragments, but in the elaborate game of hide-and-seek the film seems to play with its viewer, first apparently removing the authorial hand from the film’s “personless” opening, then inserting coy references to Bergman’s work, bringing the viewer’s attention back to the hidden auteur. For instance, the spider that crawls across the screen brings to mind a very similar shot from a montage in Summer with Monika (1953) and also recalls the “spider god” of Through a Glass Darkly (1961). Toward the end of Persona’s framing sequence, we encounter a young adolescent boy who might be familiar to Bergman’s experienced viewers. This is because the same actor appears as the child in The Silence (1963), and to underscore the connection to that film, we see him put on pair of glasses and begin to read Mikhail Ler-mentov’s A Hero of Our Time, the same book that appears in the hands of the young boy in the earlier film. It could, with a bit of effort, be argued that, like The Silence, Persona seems to involve a plot in which a boy is torn between two women, forced to negotiate the space between them. This interpretation works only if the frame of Persona is understood as connected intrinsically to the film’s central narrative, and that is an interpretation popular among viewers, whose deep-seated need to perceive meaning and connection in the images and their arrangement leads them to assume that the frame is not random, but an important part of the story of the two women (or one woman and her projected other self?) that dominates the central narrative. One might hypothesize that in Persona the projector mirrors an inner space, the dark place where the spark of creation occurs: the mind. The pre-narrative section of Persona points the viewer toward a deeper consideration of the role played by the associative imagination in making sense of film, and thus positions the viewer as part of the apparatus that produces cinematic narrative.
Though images of actual projectors in auteurist film are relatively rare, a kind of reference to projectors and projection occurs more frequently through synecdoche; that is, through the representation of turbines and wheels that recall the projector’s generating power. Usually Vertov’s “rhyming” of these machines with cinematic projection has been understood as stressing the collective energy of industrial society, but in an auteurist context it seems that the machinery of cinema stands in close relationship to vision of the cinema as an extension of the auteur’s body and imagination, as a representation of the site of the individual’s creative vision. In Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, reference to the cinema occurs explicitly or implicitly throughout the film: when his young protagonists skip school to go to a movie matinee, for instance, or attend a theater performance, in which the camera focuses on the jubilant faces of the young spectators, limned in reflected light. But one moment that evocatively alludes to the cinematic apparatus does not take place in a cinematic context. At one point the two truants enter an amusement park and take a dizzying ride on the Rotor, a spinning barrel-like contraption that, through centripetal force, affixes its passengers to its walls, where they gasp and scream in helpless, frightened rapture. The way Truffaut films this dynamo, with the passengers flashing past the film spectators’ eyes at regular intervals, mimics the turning wheel of the projector and the rhythmically repeated photograms of the film strip that flash through it. Adding to the general impression of the ride’s significance in the film is Antoine Doinel’s position inside the spinning barrel; the protagonist of our film is captured, helplessly, by the dynamo for our viewing, as he is captured and affixed by the cinematic apparatus at the conclusion of the film in a freeze frame. And Truffaut himself is among the riders filmed on the Rotor, a willing victim of the dynamo of the apparatus, though he does not identify himself as a participant in the film’s credits.
Mirrors and Screens, Screens and Skin
Elizabeth Bruss suggests, in her essay on film and autobiography, that “filmed, the unowned image of the body becomes a locus of identity rather than its mask, an expression of personality rather than an encumbrance. Nor is this image of the body the same crude, undifferentiated whole of the stade du miroir [mirror stage], but a new, articulate assemblage, a fresh construction of elements never before juxtaposed, where voice may stray away from body, the whole diffuse and fuse again into yet other configurations.”8 And Kaja Silverman’s book, The Threshold of the Visible World, offers a valuable point of entry into an expansion of Bruss’s idea. Silverman moves from a discussion of the mirror stage into another, more cinematic, image from Lacan’s repertoire: the screen, which he characterizes as opaque and nonreflective. Silver-man writes:
Lacan suggests [as in the mirror stage] that the subject relies for his or her visual identity on an external representation. However, he refers to this representation as a “screen” rather than a mirror reflection. Moreover, rather than simply misrecognizing him- or herself within the screen, the subject is now assumed to rely for his or her structuring access to it on an “unappre-hensible” and unlocalizable” gaze, which for over 150 years now has found its most influential metaphor in the camera . . . the subject can only successfully misrecognize him-or herself within that image or cluster of images through which he is culturally apprehended.9
The screen, then, is part of the system that determines who we can be, what our possibilities are. We read ourselves, interpret and recognize our own bodies, through the cultural representations projected on the screen. The viewer’s identification with the projected personae on the screen has long been part of the rhetoric surrounding cinematic spec-tatorship. I would like to go further and connect Silverman’s argument to Bruss’s vision of the creative act of the auteur filmmaker, who, in Bruss’s model, disowns his or her actual body to project an “unowned” body or bodies onto the cinematic screen in a play of assumed identities, with the screen as both the auteur’s and the audience’s mirror. In putting these projections into play on the screen, the auteur participates in viewership as well, as I argued in chapter 1. And so ultimately the auteur seeks to pass through the screen to the other side, to become the audience that identifies with the projections on the screen, as well as the instrument that projects the images. There is a paradox here, because the materiality of the screen and the screen image’s connection to reality (through the power of photography) are precisely what allow the auteur’s escape from the bounds of his or her material body to take place.
The screen appears, then, not only as a mirror, but also as a kind of skin, a material barrier that is also a conductive surface. The spectator knows at some level that he or she is not looking into a mirror, but at a projected representation of a reality that was photographed elsewhere, at another time. Even so, there are persons and animals and atmosphere and objects, natural and manmade, that appear so real and present that it seems that to touch the screen’s surface would be to touch the glossy horses of Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel or the windswept grass of Tarkovsky’s Mirror. (This is a central point in Laura Marks’s argument on haptic visuality.) Producing the sense that the screened world can be touched promises to bring the spectator into the same sensual space as the auteur’s body, the place where the film was photographed. Brushing up against the actual screen, however, would dispel that illusion, and knowing that the screen is there (that is, that the image is projected and not present) underlies and undercuts any sense that the projected world is touchable or intimately knowable. So the screen operates in a complex way to communicate presence and absence, communicability and barrier. In this way the screen reflects the auteur’s position: represented yet absent, touching yet untouchable. To make this argument clearer, to ground it in cinematic reality, we can turn to films and their images and how they work for the spectator. Once it has been established that the cinematic screen operates as a vehicle for self-projection (both for the auteur and the audience), as a mirror, and as a permeable, touchable membrane, it becomes apparent how devices within the film narrative such as mirrors, windows, screens, and films within our film act as a reminder of the materiality of the screen, the shared desire of auteur and spectator to penetrate or get behind the screen, and the way in which the screen can act as both a reflective and symbolic surface, both reflective and opaque. The intense interest in the materiality that film represents finds further expression in the numerous scenes that emphasize the sense of touch in cinema, particularly those scenes in which someone touches a photographic surface or a screen projected on our screen. I think we can say that film narrative can reflect on and perform the difficulty of capturing the material body in the act of cinematic self-projection. The cinematic screen is conceived as a mirror in which we recognize and misrecognize ourselves, a membrane through which we can move to identify with a projected other, or a space onto which both spectator and auteur project a transformed self-image.
One of Woody Allen’s films, Shadows and Fog (1992), offers a light-hearted instance of the kind of mirroring and self-projection I would like to describe. Toward the conclusion of the film, when our protagonist (played by Allen) is running from a serial killer, he stumbles into a circus tent. And there in the circus tent is the circus magician, the Great Anderson. Circus magicians as a general rule do not go by such prosaic names as Anderson, so the name might offer a first hint at who this magician could be. The second hint is the magician’s humorously heavy Scandinavian accent. When he sees Allen’s distress, he offers a solution to the problem; he suggests that the two of them jump into his magic mirror, a large antique mirror of the type that can revolve vertically on its wooden stand. Allen resists at first, so the Great Anderson goes before him, shouting “Yump, young man, yump!”
And pressed by his pursuer, Allen leaps into the mirror, where he and the Great Anderson now stand together, transformed into reflected images, safe from the threat of the serial killer. To me it seems rather evident that the Great Anderson, the Scandinavian magician, is in fact Allen’s idol, the Great Bergman, who described himself as a “conjuror” and made a film that was called The Magician in English (the Swedish title was Ansiktet, “The face”). That film included a scene in which the magician of the film projects himself into a heavy, wooden-framed mirror of the same type as the mirror in Allen’s circus tent, where his body becomes an image, just as the Great Anderson and Allen become an image in Shadows and Fog. Bergman made a circus film as well, entitled Sawdust and Tinsel in English. If it seems that this example stretches credibility when it comes to Allen’s identification with Bergman (an identification that does, however, find obvious expression elsewhere in Allen’s work), I can move my focus a bit to look at how the mirror in the scene performs differently from mirrors under ordinary circumstances. Rather than reflecting an exterior reality, the mirror becomes a site of projection (literally, as the two men jump inside it) and of an alternate reality, one that cannot be touched by the world outside. In referring to Bergman in this scene, Allen both makes light of his relationship to his Swedish idol and moves to pull Bergman into his own auteurist space, the place inaccessible to the touch of the viewer.
Shadows and Fog: Woody Allen and the Great Anderson (actor Kenneth Mars) inside the mirror
Another remarkable instance of mirroring comes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical work Mirror (1975). At one point early in the film, our protagonist seems to have a dream (the ontology of the scene is not made entirely clear) in which his mother washes her long hair. After she has immersed her hair in a bowl of water, water begins to flow down the walls of the room. Plaster falls from the ceiling in slow motion. These bizarre (rhymed) events, along with the fact that we saw the protagonist in bed before the beginning of the sequence, the switch into black-and-white and the slowed motion, are the only indicators that we are in a dream space. The camera angles change in such a way as to confuse both the woman’s angle of vision and ours. She now approaches a picture covered in glass, and the reflection in the glass acts as a mirror. But when the young mother comes up to the glass, the face of an old woman is reflected there, and this old woman is played by Tarkovsky’s actual mother. The young actress who plays the mother becomes the real (aged) mother in the reflection. And now the audience no longer sees the young woman, who stands outside our line of vision; instead, we confront the reflection of the old woman ourselves, as if the old woman were our own reflection in the glass. We see only the hand of the reflected woman (old or young? we cannot really see which) as it enters the frame when she reaches out to touch the image.
Max von Sydow (left) and Gunnar Björnstrand reflected in a mirror in The Magician, directed by Ingmar Bergman
Tarkovsky’s film plays on a number of levels with the idea of projection and mirroring. His treatment of the figure of the mother, played by two women in a blended role reminiscent of Persona, evokes an idea articulated in the previous century. In August Strindberg’s preface to A Dream Play (read aloud by Alexander’s grandmother at the conclusion of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander), Strindberg explains that in dreams (as in his play), the characters merge, dissolve, double, and flow into one another.10 This seems to be the way Tarkovsky constructs subjects in his Mirror—the two mothers, the mother who is also the wife, the son who is also a younger self—but he employs the cinematic apparatus in the form of a mirror/screen to convey this model of shifting personhood.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror: a reflection of the young woman as an old woman
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona includes yet another version of screen as mirror.11 After a long evening of drinking and confiding secrets to her silent patient, Nurse Alma, played by Bibi Andersson, finally goes off to bed. What follows in the film may or may not be Alma’s dream. As in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, the viewer does not receive any traditional cinematic signal that a dream has begun. Alma lies in bed and an eerie light fills the room. Her patient, Elisabeth Vogler, appears in the doorway in a translucent white gown; she seems almost to float into the room. Alma gets up to greet her and they embrace tenderly. Then Elisabeth turns Alma around to face the spectator, and the two of them stand together, Elisabeth gently pressing Alma’s head down onto her shoulder. The camera moves in closely, and they seem to look intently into a mirror: Elisabeth smooths Alma’s hair and turns in a way that they look as if they become one woman.
Though the spectator has the strong impression that the women are looking into a mirror, they are also looking at us, that is, at the viewer’s space, apparently facing the screen that both divides and unites us, as if they were looking into a mirror in an interrogation room, unaware that the interrogators are looking in from the other side. They perform as if standing before a mirror, but in fact they are standing before us, facing the screen that both divides and unites us. Maaret Koskinen noted the frequency with which Bergman engages such mirror scenes in her book Spel och speglingar (Mirror and Mirrorings), which analyzes in depth the significance of Bergman’s fascination with mirrors. Like Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Persona plays with the boundaries between subjects, merging and doubling and dissolving, and, like Mirror, the film makes use of the mirror/screen as a site for the projection of images of selfhood. In both films, the question of projection versus reflection extends into the space of the viewer as well.
Earlier in the film, before the beginning of the main narrative, another figure treats the space between himself and the spectator as a screen: the young boy in the frame narrative sits up and turns toward us, with his eyes focused on something between us, something we cannot see. Perhaps once again we are in an interrogation roomlike space, looking in at an inmate who is unaware of our presence. He runs his hand over this invisible space, accentuating its materiality for him, its screenlike nature. This time, however, he does not see a reflection of himself but rather a projection of a woman’s face—or two women’s faces, appearing in turn, morphing into each other, splitting down the middle. We know this because there is a reverse shot that moves us from the position of being looked at (but not seen) into the position of seeing what the boy sees. Once again the screen is used as a site for shifting identities and identification, between the women, between the boy and the women, between the spectator and the boy and the women. And the mirror is a mirror that is not a mirror, precisely, but a screen.
Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona: two women appear to look into a mirror as they look at us
What is the boy in Persona, who runs his hand over an image projected onto a screen, really trying to touch? A photograph? A person? The spectator (since, in a reverse shot, he reaches out into the spectator’s space to touch the screen)? Most interpretations of his action allude to the boy’s longing or desire for the absent woman (women). But it is photography (projected photography) that produces an illusion of presence, so that the desired object is available to be touched, at least as a screened projection, so that the boy can run his hand over the face or faces. (We understand that the image is a film rather than a still photograph because the image shifts and changes from one woman’s face to the other’s.) A photograph or an image projected on a screen is not a body, only its trace. It is a flat surface that can contain a reference to a body. Yet that surface is tantalizing in a sensual way, as it has materiality and does make reference to a body.
In Bergman’s foreword to his novel Best Intentions, an exploration of his parents’ courtship and the difficult early years of their marriage, he refers directly to the photographs he inherited from his parents and relates how his relationship to the family photographs led to the idea of writing the novel: “Carefully I touched the faces and fates of my parents, and I thought that I learned a few things about myself.”12 The act of touching the photographed faces emphasizes the materiality of photographs, their totemic quality. Somehow, the parents are in the photographs, and something can be communicated by a physical contact with the surface of the image.13 They become objects of ritual and fet-ishistic importance because they contain actual pieces of the past. At the same time, the physical nature of photographs stresses their enigmatic aspect: the viewer cannot enter the two-dimensional surface because there is no way to penetrate the face or the mind depicted there. Photographs are both windows and barriers, and this polarity makes itself felt throughout Bergman’s work. He attempts to deny or overcome the barrier-like quality of images through an act of imagination. In the same foreword, he writes: “I go into the images.” This is achieved through narration; it is a story. But he realizes that the entrance is illusory, like the reality that fictional film represents.
Bergman’s films offer repeated images of a figure, usually a young boy, placing his hand against a smooth, screenlike surface to try to press through to the other side. These sequences are strikingly cinematic: in Fanny and Alexander, the young protagonist presses his hand against the icy window to look outside. His warm breath creates a circle on the glass, through which he can observe the scene on the street below, but the circle also resembles early cinematic peepholes. And in The Silence, the young boy (who reappears in Persona) stands at the window of a train and looks out. Outside stands a long line of tanks, and as the train moves past them the precise repetition of the “same” tank (for they are identical in appearance) apes the repetition of photo-grams moving through the projector, with blackness (this time the frame of the train window) between. And so the external image becomes the cinematic image, and the young boy presses his hand against the train window and gazes intently at the spectacle. In each instance the boys’ hands are foregrounded, unmissable, a point of focus for our own gaze, indicating the importance of the desire to touch the image, reach that space beyond.
A photographic image like the one projected for the boy in Persona seems to function as a gateway, a portal, for the viewer of the photograph and as a kind of second skin for the photographed subject. It is also a way for the auteur to generate a conduit of sensual experience between the spectator and the screen, and ultimately, I would argue, back to the director, who is imagined as the original source of the screen image, even when the image is not of the auteur’s own body. The screened image can produce the desire to touch, but it can also stand as a barrier to touching. Within the narrative frame of films, images of hands and touching, like the boy moving his hand over the screen in Persona, activate the idea of touch in the spectator and remind us of the materiality of the screen. As Laura Marks writes in the introduction to her study, “The title of this book, The Skin of the Film, offers a metaphor to emphasize the way film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented. It also suggests the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes: I term this haptic visuality.”14 Marks argues for the use of film as skin to help form a notion of collectivity between the film and the audience in a postcolonial setting—a political and personal collectivity—and she references moments in which the camera caresses objects and people, focuses on visually recognizable textures that can produce a unification of the senses (a kind of synesthetic experience).
I would like to add the auteur’s agency to this complex, with the idea that the auteur sets out to “touch” the spectator personally, “heart to heart” (as film scholar Timothy Corrigan says of Francis Ford Coppola), but also sensually, as Bergman says of the “orgy scene” in Persona. In looking at how screens and touch are deployed in auteurist film, we can sense an argument for the auteur’s power to reach the audience in a literal sense. At the same time, the screen is a kind of barrier or wall; not only does the screen resist entry, but when it appears explicitly within the narrative of a film, it points toward the film’s unreality—that it is “only” a film (except in those playful instances when the screen is penetrated, such as Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo). The presence on the screen indicates an absence. Not only is the body on the screen not really there, but the auteur, the person whose imagination first projected the image, is absent. Thus the screen can move from becoming a portal, a site where touching can take place, to a barrier, an impermeable boundary between the “real” world and the film’s narrative, between the “real” world of the spectator and that of the auteur.
Like the examples Marks cites in her study, auteurs employ the representation of touching and texture to produce spectator response. A repeated and significant image is that of a page: a page from a book, a diary, a manuscript, magnified to fill the entire screen, so that the page is screen, the screen is page. In Tarkovsky’s Mirror, a young boy becomes fascinated by an oversized, antique book of illustrations. The camera moves in so that the screen is nearly overwhelmed by the book’s pages. Of the boy studying the book, we see only his hands. With this tight focus, the viewer becomes highly aware of the onionskin paper protecting the plates, the way in which the boy (with his dirty, eager hands) crimps the delicate paper and rushes through the pages in a way that makes us anxious about the valuable book. The presence of a mottled autumn leaf pressed between the pages adds another layer of texture. Clearly part of the experience of watching this scene is to establish the sense of touch, both in terms of the boy’s hand touching the pages and the book’s almost palpable sense of being violated. And among the illustrations, there is a plate of sketches of hands, mirrors of the boy’s hands. The connection between page, film, and hand produces the sense of the body’s sensual presence as well as the relation between representational modes: book, drawing, photograph, film. And surely the artist’s, the creator’s, hand is referenced here as well; one of the reproductions is Michelangelo’s image of God touching Adam.
Pedro Almodóvar’s autobiographical film, Bad Education, approaches the imbrication of the human body and the page and the cinematic screen in a different way. In his film, with its wildly complicated plot dealing with the abuse of children by priests, transexuality and homosexuality, and the profession of filmmaking, Almodóvar focuses on the power of the script, both as platform for story and material object. The physical script of Bad Education circulates dizzyingly between figures at different levels within the film: it is given to the director of a film within the film, and then within the script there is a filmmaker who wants to expose the priest’s abuse and has a script (containing the action of the film within the film within the film) that he gives to the priest as an act of blackmail. The audience of Almodóvar’s film experiences the script as voice-over narration, but also as a material object projected often, taking up the entire space of the screen, becoming the screen. In one sequence, for instance, we see the director of the film within our film, then the blackmailer and his friend as they literally walk into the projected script. The script’s presence as artifact indicates unambiguously the constructed nature of film, both the one being made within our narrative and the film we are watching—all films, in fact.
Thus cinematic auteurs employ haptic visuality to explore the construction of the self through a sensual experience created through auteurist imagination, colloborative production, technological intervention, and audience synesthetic participation. But they also remind the audience of the membrane of fictionality and the membrane of projection (rather than reality) that separates auteur from spectator. Another way this can be accomplished is through the foregrounding of photographic materiality; a photograph can be touched, caressed, torn, or burned, often with the sense that the person photographed is being touched, caressed, torn, or burned. Photography, then, wants to signal the body’s presence and all its sensual power in acts of representation, even as that body is, in fact, absent or even dead, and the screen stands as a kind of communicative surface for the body, another skin.
Almodóvar’s Bad Education comments on the vulnerable nature of photographs and links this vulnerability directly to the fragility of the self-model. At a crisis moment within the narrative, a young boy is sexually abused by a priest, a teacher at his school. Immediately following the priest’s violation of the boy, an image of the boy’s face fills the entire screen. A drop of blood runs down the boy’s face, and suddenly the image seems to tear in two along the track of blood, and the screen goes to white.
We understand that the boy has been profoundly damaged by the attack, which tears at his sense of reality. The idea, inculcated in the boy by the teachings of the church, of the loving priest, is nothing more than surface appearance. The underlying reality of abuse undoes not only the boy’s image of the priest and church, but his self-image, which evaporates to nothing. A visually arresting device of this kind breaks with a realist aesthetic and prompts the viewer to understand the scene as metaphorically representative (and the product of a created vision), but it does not render the experience less “real.” In fact, the slash across the screen, like a rip through a formerly beloved person’s photograph, has a visceral impact and, incidentally, points the viewer back toward the auteur: Who created this image, and what relationship does he have with it? Yet we do not have direct access to the boy’s experience (the projected image of his face “hides” the abuse happening “behind” it), and, in any case, the film reminds us, we are looking at a film. Further, the destruction of the image is not an actual destruction, but a cinematically projected one, like the moment in Persona when, at a similar crisis moment, the film seems to “jam” in the projector and appears to burn to white nothingness. The irony is that even when films insist on their own materiality and haptic visuality, they must project that materiality and touch in an immaterial image. The film does not really burn or tear. The auteurist desire to touch and be materially present is expressed in an ironic gesture of presence and absence.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education: cinematic and personal trauma
Freeze, Die, Come to Life
Finally, I would like to consider the idea of “motion” in film, which depends on the interface between still photographic images (photo-grams) and the projector. At the earliest moments of film history, film artists delighted in showing the audience how the still photograph “awakened to life” through the magic of projection. The Russian author Maxim Gorky described this moment in a review he wrote of one of the Lumière brothers’ screenings in 1896:
When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, “A Street in Paris”—shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility.
All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the carriages. All this moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it.15
When the viewer’s attention is called to the artificial nature of “motion” in an authored film, the auteur’s agency, his or her power to “bring dead things to life,” becomes part of the narrative. The auteur as magician, the auteur as God—these are some of the messages produced through the exposure of the illusion of cinematic motion.
Photographs are both the essential building blocks of film and the medium that threatens to strip away the auteur’s absolute claim of authorship. When photographs were first invented, one of the medium’s most fascinating attributes was its ability to create mimetic visual representations that were experienced by viewers as utterly lacking the intervention of human interpretation. One of the early essayists on photography in the United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes, coined the term “mirror with a memory” to describe photographic technology, which indicates the degree to which human involvement in the photographic process was overlooked in the excitement over photography’s mimetic perfection and machine process. That Holmes attributed to the photographic image itself the ability to remember speaks to the exclusion of the photographer from the creative process, the personification of the image and, by extension, the personification of the camera that produced it. And so it is no wonder that the auteur must make the gesture of identifying with the apparatus in order to reclaim agency: “I am the machine.” Within film narrative one finds not infrequent reference to the photographic medium, when characters within a film take photographs or view them, for instance; but there is a more dramatic reference to photography in one of the editing strategies employed in cinema.
“Freeze-frame” is a term applied to a moment at which a film seems to pause and focus on a single image. In fact, the “frozen” image is a series of the same photogram, rapidly repeating, producing the appearance of screen image as still photograph. One of the most famous of these occurs at the conclusion of Truffaut’s 400 Blows, when Antoine Doinel, escaping from a youth detention center, comes to the edge of the sea and turns to confront the viewer. The “frozen” image in this case reproduces the captivity from which Doinel has just escaped; he is fixed there on the beach as the word “Fin” (The End) appears across his face. Just prior to the freeze frame, the film follows him, for what seems like an eternity, as he flees down one of the tree-lined roads typical of the French countryside. Perhaps precisely because the boy’s flight seems interminable, the viewer can be seduced into looking at something more than just the narrative element of flight. He is running and running and running, and what else is there? There is the flash of dark trees, one after the other, as he passes them: tree, tree, tree. And if we look at the motion and the dark strip of tree that separates one segment from the next, we can see another image superimposed on the boy’s flight: the image of a strip of film running through the projector, light then dark then light. Finally, the near-identical images of the boy’s progress down the road becomes the precisely identical image repeated rapidly: the freeze-frame. At the end of the film the boy, free at last, is captured once more and held fast.
It has grown to be a truism in the study of photography that a truly still image is always of the past, always of the dead. Photography’s power consists in capturing something that was once really there (and in this discussion of analogue films I am always alluding to predigital photography). But precisely because it was once there, it no longer is. The moment framed by the photograph, even if it is a Polaroid taken a minute ago, is dead and gone. The miracle of film, then, is that people are first frozen as photographic images, dying a little death, and then are brought back to life through the magic of “motion” pictures. (Truffaut plays with this by having Antoine first live, then seem to “die,” always with the photographic frames still flashing through the projector.) But of course we know in any case that the “motion” or “life” in cinema is nothing more than an illusionist’s trick, smoke and mirrors. For these dead images do not really move. They simply flash past the light of the projector at a speed so rapid as to fool us into believing they are alive. In The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman describes his conjuror’s trick this way:
No other art bypasses our conscious minds as film does, going straight to our feelings, deep into the twilight chambers of our souls. A tiny glitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated squares a second, with darkness between, but the optic nerve does not register the darkness. When I run the strip of film, frame by frame, across the editing table, I can still feel the rising sense of magic from my childhood: there in the darkness of the closet I cranked forward one frame after another, saw the almost imperceptible changes, cranked faster: a movement.16
The episode that takes place in his childhood closet becomes a kind of primal scene, to which Bergman returns again and again, as in this story from his autobiography. One Christmas his older brother received a primitive film projector as a gift. Bergman traded his entire army of tin soldiers for it. Shutting himself in his closet,
[I] placed the projector on a box, lit its kerosene lamp, and aimed the light at the white wall. Then I loaded the film.
On the wall an image of a meadow appeared. On the meadow a young woman lay sleeping. . . . When I turned the crank (and I cannot explain this part, I cannot find words for my excitement, at any moment I can recall the scent of the hot metal, the closet’s smell of mothballs and dust, the crank against my hand, the shivering rectangle on the wall).
I turned the crank and the girl woke up, sat up, slowly rose, stretched her arms, turned around and disappeared off to the right. If I kept on turning, she lay there again and performed precisely the same movements. She was moving. (23)
Both quotations from Bergman’s autobiography refer to the same formative event—his discovery of cinema, or, more precisely, the thrill of controlling the cinematic apparatus—but they differ on an important point. In the first of the citations, he speaks from the position of adulthood, acknowledging that the thrill he felt came from an optical illusion. In the second citation, he is back in the closet with his hand on the crank, immersed in the illusion and the sensory world surrounding it, his sense of mastery undisturbed by the intrusion of an analytical adult consciousness. A sense of erotic empowerment, recalling the phallic imagery of the opening of Persona, pervades the memory of his cinematic primal scene in the closet.
What begins to emerge when reading Bergman’s description of his experience is that he occupies two positions simultaneously, that of the questioner and that of the believer, the conscious illusionist and the ecstatically deluded spectator. Bergman’s comment on “the glitch in our optic nerve” finds a more theoretical expression in Garrett Stewart’s Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Stewart writes: “My governing question has been how to conceive of a photographic relation to cinema even when the single photographic imprint (known in film analysis as the photogram) goes unperceived as such on-screen. This is not so much a question of how to ‘think the photograph’ from within the moving image as of how to read its suppressions, how to know it as the pertinent underside—what I will come to term the specular unconscious—of image perception.”17 The specular unconscious Stewart mentions is an idea borrowed from Walter Benjamin, who sees a foretaste of cinematic illusion in such protocinematic media as the flip-book or animation, where the lack of true movement and the mechanism for creating the sense of movement is obvious to the viewer. The problem for the auteurist filmmakers is that they are all too aware of the glitches in cinema, aware of merely “seeming,” and the schism between the visions they produce and the undermining doubt they experience finds full expression in their work, though in tellingly different ways for each director.
For Bergman’s part, we might say that the ability to bring the girl to life becomes his obsession: bringing the “dead” (the photographed, the always-already past) to life. In The Magic Lantern, he relates a bone-chilling event from his childhood that relates to this theme. As a boy, Bergman was fascinated by the corpses laid out for burial in a building adjacent to the Sophia Church, where his father served as pastor. One day a caretaker played a cruel joke on him by locking the boy in with the corpses. At first, he says, he was merely curious, but then he began to fantasize that one of the bodies, that of a young woman who had apparently drowned herself, was moving—coming alive. He panicked, threw himself at the locked door, screamed to be let out. Many years later when making Persona, he films what seems to be a morgue; we see a woman and then a man and a boy lying motionlessly on gurneys, mostly covered with white sheets. As the camera moves around the faces, hands, and bodies of these apparently lifeless figures, the woman’s eyes suddenly snap wide open. Bergman employs a jump cut to make the effect as uncanny as possible; the viewer does not have the sense of a normal awakening, but by having the eyelids move unnaturally Bergman underscores that it is not the person waking up on her own, but the technology waking her up.18 The woman’s uncanny awakening on her bier is not the only instance of resurrection in Bergman’s work. In Wild Strawberries the protagonist experiences a dream in which his own corpse awakens in its coffin and attempts to pull the living man into it, while in Cries and Whispers a dead woman awakens and terrifies her surviving sisters by touching and pulling at them. One of them, Maria (played by Liv Ullmann), reenacts Bergman’s childhood panic by rushing to the locked door and banging on it with her fists, desperate to escape. One can understand these repeated and frightening awakenings as part of a larger topos on the boundary between life and death, but given Bergman’s pronounced interest in the power of film to animate, to bring to life, one has to imagine an implicit association with the cinematic medium here as well.
Cinema as a medium of illusionistic “movement” appears in Bergman’s repeated references to archaic, protocinematic entertainment and technology, which occur in the animation and silent film sequences inserted into the opening frame of Persona, among other places.19 It is as if delving into film’s history allows him to share and explore the moment of excitement he felt at making the transition from still to “moving” image, a moment he re-creates dramatically in his autobiographical film, Fanny and Alexander, when Alexander puts on a little magic-lantern show for his sister and cousins on Christmas night. The presentation frightens them thoroughly with the narrative of a young girl haunted by a ghost that eerily floats through her window as she sits, terrified, in her bed. This specter in the magic lantern show alludes to the importance of ghosts in the main narrative of Fanny and Alexander, and also to the fondness of spectral representations in early cinema, when the wonders of double exposure allowed such celebrated Swedish silent films directors as Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström to conjure up spirits and frighten their audiences (Herr Arne’s Treasure, The Phantom Carriage). But the specter has an important metanarrative function as well: it emblematizes cinema’s essential and original interest in bringing the dead to life.
While Fanny and Alexander stands as Bergman’s final major narrative film, the reference to the raising of the dead in association with the cinematic medium occurs early in his filmmaking career. In Summer Interlude (1952), a film Bergman describes as the first over which he felt full artistic control, an uncanny cartoon sequence appears as an apparent comic moment during an otherwise pensive narrative. The film’s protagonists, two young lovers, sit down to listen to some gramophone music, and, in a merry mood, the young man takes out a pencil and begins to draw a series of sketches on the record sleeve. The young woman then joins him in the game and adds her own interpretations to his. Magically, their drawings begin to move and evolve, accompanied by the lively soundtrack that recalls typical early cartoon music.
The sequence created in this clip provides a kind of summary of the entire film’s action up to that point, plus a prophecy of its possible end, which includes the death of the young man’s guardian, an elderly aunt, who, in the cartoon sequence they invent, comes back to haunt them. As a mise-en-abîme, the sequence functions as a self-referential moment not only for the film’s story (as a play within the play), but in terms of cinematic technology as well. For this is impossible animation, of course. What the film pretends, that the lovers are drawing moving pictures, can only be achieved through the intervention of the cinematic apparatus.20 Further, the lovers do not add all the details of the story themselves; some other agent seems to “take over” the movements of the pen, creating a narrative that escapes their control. The accompanying music, with its reference to the period of early animation, provides an additional cue that there is a director here who is referring to the history of his art.
“Magic” animation in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude
Bergman’s fascination with early cinematic technology and film’s ability to create the illusion of movement finds close association with his obsession with the transition from death to life. It is clear that his autobiographical “closet scene,” with its erotic charge of hot projector handle and young girl forced to wake up, then go to sleep, is about power and control—the power to give or take away life, the power to force something or someone to your will, the power to create a spellbinding spectacle. At the same time, this control is illusory. There is control and power, but only over phantoms, and Bergman points this out himself by bringing the history and process of filmmaking to the attention of the spectator.
In La nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973), Truffaut unveils the illusion of the apparatus in order to demonstrate the filmmaker’s power over life and death (in film). Playing the film director Ferrand, Truffaut supervises his editor as they go over the rushes depicting a car crash. First, frame by frame, the car breaks through a railing and goes over a cliff. Then they run the film backward through the projector—and the crash is undone, the victims are brought back to life. Like scientists in a laboratory, the auteur and his technicians observe the images flashing forward and backward through the projector, and with the utterly seriousness they apply to this task brings to mind Bergman’s sense that in turning the crank of the projector in the closet, he was bringing a sleeping/dead woman to life—and sending her back into death, at his whim. The auteur’s desire for control in this instance acquires a divine function: the power over life and death.
In Mein liebster Feind (My Best Fiend), Werner Herzog offers a parallel to Bergman’s obsession with cinematic awakenings and Truffaut’s interest in the film loop’s power to create those awakenings. Herzog notes a strange fascination for Klaus Kinski after seeing him play a German officer in a postwar film, Kinder, Mutter, und ein General (Children, Mothers, and a General, 1955). He specifies one scene as the point at which his imagination was captured—a rather banal sequence in which an exhausted Kinski, dressed in a soldier’s uniform and asleep with his head on a table, slowly awakens and raises his head. The con-gruity with the morgue scene from Persona is striking, as is the incongruity. On the one hand, we are dealing with a moment of awakening, a coming to life that inspires Herzog’s entire film career, as he assures us in the narrated voice-over. In his own assessment of his memory of the scene, he is either unable or unwilling to say precisely what it was that moved him so, and thus the weight he so passionately gives to the sequence strikes the viewer as opaque, almost humorous. Unlike Bergman in Magic Lantern, he does not explicitly reveal his fascination with the movement from stillness or sleep to movement or waking. Nor does the sequence uncover in the same way as Bergman’s sequences or Bergman’s autobiography the artificiality of cinematic illusion. It is up to the viewer to find the clues that unveil the cinematic mystery. One of these is Herzog’s repetition of the sequence; he shows us the same bit of film three times, immediately following one another. By showing us the same action three times, he seems to make an oblique reference to the identical single photograms that run through the projector in a freeze-frame sequence; he shows us how Kinski becomes a still image for him, a frozen frame, an icon.
Kinski’s importance for Herzog’s career cannot be underestimated, as the film My Best Fiend is honest enough to admit. But what specifically does Kinski represent? As I noted earlier, history, and in particular film history, is an important referent for Ingmar Bergman’s work. The same is true of Herzog, but it is a different history, and he expresses his inheritance of that history differently. While Bergman, a Swede born in 1918, discloses the illusion of cinematic movement in part by revealing the flow from protocinematic forms into his own medium, Herzog, born in 1944, during World War II, refers to the German cultural past (including his cinematic inheritance) by creating icons of the past. Kinski’s performance as a German officer in a postwar German film is one such iconic citation of German cinematic history and German history as a whole. One of the results of Herzog’s creation of icons of the past is his bent toward the mythical, which many scholars have noted. It cannot be a coincidence that Herzog repeats the wake-up scene three times, three being the number of repetitions needed for magic to be released. This is true in folklore as well as mythology, giving us the saying “the third time’s the charm.” The Germanic legend of Barbarossa relates that the former emperor, now evolved into a mythic hero, sits at an oaken table under a mountain, sleeping until his beard grows enough to wind around the table three times. At that moment he will awaken and emerge from the mountain to save the German people. Kinski, playing a German officer with his head on the table, not rising until the third repetition of the sequence, hints at a Barbarossa parallel.
If this seems overblown, consider Herzog’s description of himself in Of Walking in Ice. This is his account of a pilgrimage he made on foot from Munich to Paris with the self-appointed mission of saving the life of film scholar Lotte Eisner, who wrote one of the most important studies of German Expressionist film, the period identified by Herzog as formative for his auteurist vision. He means to accomplish Eisner’s rescue solely through the performance of a heroic task: his epic winter walk. He writes: “My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes. She wouldn’t dare! She mustn’t. She won’t. When I’m in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.”21 In another autobiographical piece, his contribution to the series Reden über das eigene Land (Speaking of One’s Own Country), Herzog relates the story of another walking cure he undertook, this time to save Germany. He proposes to walk around the borders of the entire country and thus restore the two halves to wholeness.22 The execution of the plan was attempted in 1982 and failed; Herzog’s pronouncement of omnipotent control over his environment goes awry, but in writing about it Herzog exposes, even highlights, his failure.
To return to his primal Kinski moment, after Herzog shows us the apparently innocuous repeated sequence of Kinski waking up, he relates that the officer Kinski plays goes on to have a young German soldier, whose crime was sneaking off to meet a girl, summarily executed. If Kinski is meant to stand as an icon of imperialist mythology, as I believe he is in Aguirre, Woyzeck, and Nosferatu as well, it is, not surprisingly, a failed or debased mythology. And yet Herzog refers to this debased mythology with sublime imagery again and again; he keeps on assigning himself as director (and consequently, his cast and crew) the task of Sisyphus, always in romantic settings, and, unlike Bergman, he does not openly reveal the gaps between the frame, the fact that his projected mythology is an illusion. Instead, he refers to the phenomenon of “freeze-die-come to life” obliquely, through images not directly associated with film or protocinematic media, and thematically, in such figures as Kaspar Hauser, who emerges from a cellar after years of immobility, or the vampire in Nosferatu (itself a revival of Murnau’s classic German silent film).
The idea of illusion can form a central narrative focus for film in a way that foregrounds the question of reality in film, and the filmmaker’s ability to communicate a reality. In his early film The Magician, a troupe of charlatans enters a small Swedish city. The year is 1846, three years before the birth of August Strindberg. They claim to be able to cure through magnetism and electricity, contact the spirit world, see into the future, and inspire love with potions. When questioned by suspicious local authorities, the man/woman asserts that there is no magic in what they do—it is all illusion, smoke and mirrors and a magic lantern, as she says, “utterly harmless.” But in the end, it seems that their magic has real impact. They trick the town skeptic into believing that one of their troupe has died, and they offer up the body for an autopsy. The skeptic performs the autopsy, and in an unforgettable scene, the body seems to come alive, tormenting the unbeliever until he screams for help. The “magic” produced in the autopsy narrative depends entirely on cinematic illusion; the use of space in the sequence, for instance, would be impossible within a “real” attic. Only cinematic editing can produce the effects attributed to the power of the magician. The final trick the magician performs, in fact, is to seem to bring a dead body—his own—back to life. The victim of this prank, the skeptic, refuses to pay for the performance on the grounds that it was not real. But the magician comes back with a retort: “I made you feel something!” And making someone feel something is real.
The power to raise the dead, to make the dead move, is a correlative of making someone feel something. In the complex of auteur and actor and apparatus and viewer, there is slippage surrounding the identification of what is real. Auteurs do not literally bring the dead to life. They do not literally touch the audience. The actor is not literally absorbed by the auteur. Nor is the actor literally dismembered and reassembled by the cinematic apparatus. The screen does not mirror us and cannot touch us, nor can we touch what is projected on the screen. There is a world out here, and it is not the projected world. The auteur does not literally enter the screen, as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. seems to do. And yet, through auteurist self-projection, all of these things seem to happen as part of a mutually agreed-upon fictional construct of selfhood. As part of the auteurist contract, the auteur and the actors, the technicians and the apparatus, the projectionists and distributors and the spectators, all engage in a project that is designed to make us see, sense, and feel something, and auteurist theory identifies the source for that project in an auteur’s vision. Bergman writes, “I saw four women walking in white dresses in a park,” and that is the origin of Cries and Whispers. Two women sitting on a beach in big hats, comparing hands: Persona.23 The fact that these images may seem inconsequential, opaque, or irrelevant to the films that eventually evolved from them does not release us from the pressure of trying to identify origins, and the origins we apparently seek are not in a system of economics or a production studio, but in a human being. In this way, even as the fragility of “reality” and selfhood are exposed, the auteurist contract and auteurist self-projection reaffirm the conceit of the self-model, the necessary fiction of a connection between mind and body, vision and experience, life and representation.