From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.
From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.
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Overview
From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503601611 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2017 |
| Series: | Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Off-Screen
An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame
By Eyal Peretz
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0161-1
CHAPTER 1
The Off-Screen
Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky
Who's there?
With this question that opens Hamlet — perhaps the paradigmatic work of art in the age we have come to call modernity — something new is announced: the haunting of the world — the apparition of a ghost searching for a place, seeking to be heard — at the heart of the work of art. What is the nature of this ghost, and what does it want from us? What is the nature of its connection to the modern work of art — and to film in particular?
Staging Ghosts
"Who's there?" is perhaps the most fundamental question of what we can call the modern condition. The question itself is already a response to something that precedes it, to a disturbance that might or might not — and this is its constitutive ambiguity — address, that is, mean to call, intentionally draw the attention of the one who responds. The reason for the ambiguity of the disturbance is the unrecognizability of its source. Who, or what, brings disturbance — where does it come from, and for what reason? It is unknown, unseen. But precisely this unrecognizability, which produces a lack of certainty regarding for whom it is meant, constitutes such disturbance as a new kind of address — if we now understand being addressed as becoming implicated in the question of one's identity. Those who are thus addressed are disturbed in their very identity; they do not know whether the disturbance was meant for them or not. They are no longer sure who they themselves are, what their own place in a world of meaning is.
If one reads Hamlet's opening allegorically, interpreting it not just as the opening of this specific play but as making a general claim about the very mode of utterance of the modern work of art, then one can say that the modern work of art activates a disturbing address, or to use a proximate term, a call. This call puts one — and by extension puts all of us, if we take our position as readers or audience to be that of the one who asks "Who's there?" — in question. Facing the modern work, we no longer know by whom or from where or for what reason we are addressed or called. We no longer know who we are. Therefore, the one who asks "Who's there?" is immediately confronted with the demand that follows in Hamlet: "Nay, answer me: Stand and unfold your self" (emphasis mine).
To be put into question by an unrecognizable address or call means that we no longer know who we are, that is, we no longer know what, and thus to what, we are called. We have lost our name in strangeness, in the foreign (Fremde), to borrow Hölderlin's famous words. Being deprived of a proper name, of identity, of what is most our own, means suffering disinheritance. If the father, as traditionally understood, assigns us to ourselves by giving us a name and an identity, then the disinheritance experienced by one who is ambiguously called can be said to mark the failure or death of the paternal principle. The father is replaced by a ghostly disturbance, by a disquietude with no proper place and no discernible origin. Being disinherited by something ghostly means becoming a ghost oneself, that is, nameless and indeterminate, without any recognizable identity or proprietary place. What addressed one from the outside now haunts one from inside, as it were, possessing one most intimately, occupying the heart of one's relation to oneself.
As such, the encounter with the ghostly call qualifies, to use Jacques Lacan's expression, as extimacy — an exteriority that is an intimacy. An essential ambiguity attaches to this ghostly disturbance, as Hamlet shows: What does it want? Is it calling, in the name of the father, for the paternal principle to be restored? Is it, that is, a holy ghost, the spirit that reconciles father and son? Or is it an unholy ghost, severing the father from the son, a voice from beyond the paternal principle, expressing something anterior even to the calling of the father? "Remember me," the ghost enjoins. Is it the father we are called to remember, and so to restore, or is this calling to remember an even more ancient calling than the father's? If Hamlet is indeed a paradigmatic expression of the crisis called modernity, the question then becomes: Can it be that this crisis involves the encounter with something ancient, a memory we have historically repressed slowly coming to reclaim us? Is the modern work of art the "place" in which this ancient call has been resurrected?
Prince Hamlet himself, at least in the first four acts of the tragedy, seems to interpret the calling of the ghost according to the first possibility, as a call to avenge the death of the father and thus restore him to his rightful place. But from the Renaissance onward major works of art have sought to confront the challenge posed by the latter option: to figure out a different way of hearing the significance of the call, a different way of understanding what it demands.
The attempt to make the ancient call resonate is implicated in the coming-to-be of a new medium charged with relaying it and providing the arena of its "resurrection." This medium is the theater, in the logic that Shakespeare gave it: a rigorous system of relations between textual play, actors, stage, and audience. All of these elements follow from the elementary experience at the heart of Shakespearean theater as revealed by the opening of Hamlet: the encounter with a call that puts all who hear it into question.
How does the theater attain its status as a medium for the relaying of this ancient call? Let us start from what is possibly the most fundamental theatrical element, which serves as a condition for all the others: the stage. Let us look again at the opening moment of Hamlet and read it now as an allegorical statement about the being of the stage as such.
If the first words of the one who takes the stage are "Who's there?," this means that the stage is a place where disorientation and loss of identity occur, where one stands exposed to a principle of disturbance that Shakespeare understands as ghostly. The stage is an arena where a ghost manifests itself and speaks, a place where identity is unsettled. As a medium, the stage achieves this effect by becoming a space cut off from, or framed out of, the continuity of everyday life, thereby opening a decontextualized zone, literally abstracted "out of this world." The most basic characteristic of the stage is that it can belong to any time and any place. Those who step onto the stage lose their specific identity in place and time and become exposed to the abstract power of the "any." Onstage, one becomes an abstract "anyone" — someone who could belong anywhere and anytime, a "whoever." "To be" onstage is "not to be" someone or somewhere specific.
Of course, the stage is usually populated by specific characters, say, a Hamlet or a Lear. What characterizes them, however, is the singular way in which who they are, their identity, stands exposed to the power of the "anyone." Indeed, the specificity of theatrical characters is not the specificity of an identity; rather, it is the unique way they live the dissolution of their identity, their "not-to-be-ness," the loss of the "kingdom" as the unraveling of who they are.
We might perhaps say that this abstracting power has characterized the theatrical art since its birth in ancient Greece. However, it was Shakespeare who most fully liberated the abstract potential of the stage, rigorously drawing out the consequences of its discovery as a realm out of context; in essence, his theater is no less abstract than, say, Samuel Beckett's. Since Shakespeare, every stage has been the scene of an endgame, a zone where one rehearses or plays with the end of the world of time and place. The Greek stage, we may say, revealed how the "framing-out" of the world opens a decontextualized zone: a space of fiction or fictionality, in contrast to the realm of myth and ritual praxis. It transformed the zone of the sacred — the exceptional locus of communication with the gods — into a space, the amphitheater, where the gods become fictions and lose their sacred function. In a sense, then, the gods die before our eyes in the amphitheater. But for all that, the Greek stage is not yet fully liberated from the logic of the sacred place, from the power of the temenos, the exceptional locus of communication with the gods. Rather, the Greek stage may be understood as the place in which a disconnection from the gods occurs; they, however, remain in their places. This experience of disconnection reveals a fundamental and constitutive miscommunication with their power to assign destinies and provide orientation. Even if nothing challenges these powers in themselves, they become something to which we are now blind. The sacred thus disappears as communication on the Greek stage, but it persists as an inaccessible source of miscommunication and blindness. Therefore, it is only with the Shakespearean stage that the full consequence of the death of God (onstage), the full emergence of the dimension of fictionality out of the weakening of sacred logic, finally becomes manifest, and with it the loss of any transcendent ground of meaning.
Shakespearean theater, while originating in a specific time and culture, conceived in relation to a specific political regime, is also abstractly universal, since it formally activates an "anytime and anyplace" — a "no specific time and no specific place" — with profound consequences. Shakespearean theater became no longer a specific sacred place but the happening of a globe, or of the world qua globe, a place where any point's relation to the center is equal to any other, and thus a place where there is no longer a (sacred) center in relation to which everything is hierarchically organized. Thus, the stage is no longer a locus of sacred communication but the nonplace, or anyplace, where the disappearance of the sacred is communicated so as to expose a world/globe. The agent of this desacralizing communication is the modern ghost.
The stage, Shakespeare discovered, arises or emerges jointly with an invisible and enigmatic dimension — an offstage, an outside, to which what is onstage seems to relate or with which it seems to communicate. What and where is this offstage? It is nowhere specific and therefore has no actual presence. It is not the actual physical and historical world "surrounding" the stage, since the stage opens as a completely decontextualized zone and, as such, severs its ties to the actual space-time of the world in which it emerges. If "stage" refers to something that is not present — besides the ghost, Hamlet teems with speeches about events offstage or people hiding in unseen spaces, behind curtains, and so forth — what it refers to cannot be part of the actual physical-historical world; rather, it belongs to a realm proper to the theater. The offstage cannot be said to be to the side of, or above, or in any precisely defined spatiotemporal relation to the stage itself. We can distinguish between the Shakespearean offstage and the Greek "obscene" (ob-skene): what could not be shown in the amphitheater, which was usually violent in nature. Whereas the "obscene" — for instance, Oedipus gouging out his eyes — belongs to a realm continuous with the space and time of dramatic events, the offstage marks an interruption in the continuity of the world and an exposure of the stage to something that does not take place in any actual time or place, where the time is "out of joint."
We might therefore define the offstage as a force of decontextualization: discontinuity from, and suspension of, any actual spatial or temporal context. Even if a play refers to actual historical events, they become suspended and displaced, fictionalized, when introduced to the theater. The offstage may be understood as nonexistence that is nevertheless in effect, that is, as something that is not actual, not actually present anywhere, but that nevertheless affects what is on stage by exposing it to a dimension that displaces it. This nonactuality that is nevertheless in effect, nevertheless somehow present (as a ghost), allows a strange actuality to open: the actuality of the stage.
The stage is paradoxical: by being an actuality that can belong to anytime and anyplace, it enables the nonexistent or not actually present dimension that is the offstage to be actual qua nonactual — to show itself as what is unseen or invisible, that is, as what is not anything specific. In other words, the stage grants a strange presence to what is nothing but a capacity not to be; here, strange or paradoxical types of actuality appear, actualities that inscribe, "incarnate," embody, show, or materialize the power of nonexistence. When a personage with a specific identity takes the stage, he or she is exposed to the power of the "any": the force of absolute discontinuity that I term the offstage. He or she is spirited away and comes to stand as one who has lost his or her name, been struck by a phantom or ghost; this specter is the empty power of the "any," the restlessness of what has no time or place of its own.
To invoke some Shakespearean figurations, the one who comes to occupy the stage turns into a blind madman roaming the heath, a sovereign stripped of his kingdom, a wanderer in an enchanted forest where no one is him- or herself, or a castaway on an enchanted and disconnected island controlled by a magician. Perhaps most significantly, however — and hence the privileged status of Hamlet among Shakespeare's unparalleled explorations of the stage — the one who comes onstage becomes the one who loses his given name and is subject to the calling of a ghost, to the calling of that restlessness that has no time and place of its own. The ghost in Hamlet thus stands for the way in which the offstage is made present as a haunting disturbance in the theatrical medium. The modern theater can be described as a medium devised for showing the dimension of the offstage, for conjuring ghosts, for making them present. This is why Hamlet opens with the question of the night watchmen, the first witnesses of the ghost — watchers who serve as a figure for the modern audience.
By aligning its thematic content, an encounter with a ghostly call, with the form of the theatrical medium as constructed upon an onstage-offstage relationship, Hamlet offers a general theory about the logic of modern theater. Moreover, the play can be seen as making a statement about the logic of the modern work of art in general; as such, I will argue, it serves as a matrix for thinking about the artistic media in modernity. I will argue for the generality of this logic by showing how it operates in two other arts, those of painting and of film. In two works, both of which deal with a son's loss of the father, reflection about the father/son question becomes a way to think about the nature of their respective artistic media.
The Modern Image: Falling into the Landscape The work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder illustrates how the medium of painting developed by the great Renaissance painters came to articulate and understand itself as a medium structured around a relation between an on-space and an off-space. Though a loose connection between Bruegel and Shakespeare has often been felt to exist, what has not been analyzed, as far as I know, is how the Shakespearean stage and the Bruegelian pictorial plane operate according to a similar logic.
Although I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about painting from the perspective of art history to say whether Bruegel deserves a place of honor similar to Shakespeare's, his understanding of painting as a modern medium — that is, a medium guided by the new, nonsacred logic of the "ghost" — is as complex and profound as Shakespeare's understanding of the theater. As such, his work serves as a particularly interesting case study for understanding how art in modernity articulates itself according to the same logic across media.
One of Bruegel's most famous paintings, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, displays, in a particularly clear way, the "Hamletian logic" guiding his understanding of the pictorial plane. Ostensibly, the theme comes from a passage in Ovid describing the flight of Icarus and Daedalus from the Labyrinth; Icarus plummets from the skies because of his urge for transcendence, which brings him too close to the sun. However, something in particular stands out upon closer observation: it is not at all clear what the painting is about, what kind of meaning it is trying to convey or make visible. This lack of meaning and "aboutness" arises because nothing in the painting seems to provide a stable point of orientation; there is nothing telling us where to direct our gaze, what occupies the center and what stands at the margins — in other words, what is more or less significant in terms of hierarchy. Accordingly, one is left with a vague feeling of indeterminacy. One starts to meander, as if lost, looking for a point of anchorage. To be sure, the prominent figure of a farmer working the land may catch our eye earlier than the sight of splashing feet, which are almost hidden in the lower right-hand corner; but there is no way to decide (among many other pictorial elements) which is more central and provides orientation: both the farmer and (obviously) the feet are effaced or faceless, like so many of Bruegel's figures; as such, they provide no identity to hold on to or point of rest for the observer. Similarly, another prominent figure, a shepherd, though not faceless, seems to be gazing at an indeterminate spot above and possibly outside the frame (the flying Daedalus? a bird? or is the shepherd just lost in thought?); it is impossible for us to determine what is at stake in his gaze. Unsure what the painting is about, not knowing how to orient our gaze, we lose hold of ourselves, of who and where and when we are; without grounding for our existence (without a determined place and orientation), as it were, we start to fall — perhaps like those angels cast down by the Father in another of Bruegel's famous works, The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Off-Screen by Eyal Peretz. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
The Unframing ImageThe Off-Screen: Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky
1. On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance
2. The Actor of the Crowd–The Great Dictator: Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang
3. Howard Hawks's Idea of Genre
4. What is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds