The insistent fringe: moving images and the
palimpsest of historical consciousness
Vivian
Sobchack
Uploaded
16 April 1999 | 2929 words
Abstract
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History decomposes into images, not into narratives.
--Walter Benjamin
[W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are
elements "below which nothing more can be done except
display," and through which saying reaches its limit, as
near as possible to showing.
--Michel de Certeau
In Medias Res
In his 1954 essay on "The Romans in films", Roland
Barthes points to the "insistent fringes" that repetitively
mark the foreheads of all the Roman men in Mankiewicz's
Julius Caesar (1953). What does he make of this
hirsute cinematic generalization? "Quite simply the label of
Roman-ness. We therefore see here the mainspring of the
Spectacle--the sign operating in the open. The
frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt
that he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent:
the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate "questions
of universal import", without losing, thanks to this little
flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical
plausibility. Their general representativeness can even
expand in complete safety, cross the ocean and the
centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood
extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the
quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where
Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair
on the forehead".
(1)
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(1)
Roland Barthes, "The Romans in films", in
Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972),
26.
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In our experience of visual media, it is the image of
"things" that first occupies the center of our
consciousness, that mediates between the world and our
understanding of it. Borrowed, to be turned with purpose
against his condemnation of it, the "insistent fringe" of my
title thus refers not only to the reduction of complex
historical temporalization Barthes locates at the supposed
"naturalized" site -- and sight -- of a Roman hairstyle in
an American film. Here, I mean it also to trouble and
critique this view: a view that far too quickly judges the
iconic and synchronic signification of moving, yet "fixed",
images in popular films (and popular consciousness) as
"mythological", "ahistorical" and "bourgeois", and the
spectators who watch them as downright dumb, historically
befuddled, and ideologically suspect. This seems to me too
easy, dismissive, and elitist a perspective -- particularly
if we want to understand how historical consciousness
emerges in a culture in which we are all completely immersed
in images (if also surrounded by print), and what this might
mean not only to the historical future, but also to the
relevance and function of what is legitimated as "proper"
(that is, academic) historiography.
In the context of the culture in which both filmgoers and
historians currently live, the historian's traditional
iconomachy seems feeble in its injunctions, its hostility to
images irrelevant to the life-world of both filmgoers and
historians alike. Indeed, filmgoers and historians have
become one and the same. Immersed in a culture in which the
proliferation of visual representations has accelerated and
understanding of "textuality" has become pervasive,
perpetually confronted with contestation between competing
representational claims and forms, filmgoers have become
unprecedentedly savvy about (mis)representation and have
learned the lessons of Hayden White's Meta-history
even if they've never read it. That is, filmgoers know that
histories are rhetorically constructed narratives, that
"events" and "facts" are open to various uses and multiple
interpretations. And, as filmgoers have not been able to
escape the lessons of historiography, so, on their side (and
try as they might), historians have not been able to escape
the lessons of the movies and television. Also caught up in
the acceleration of visual representation and perpetually
confronted with and "overwhelmed" by screen "evidence", even
historians have succumbed -- often against both their
injunction and will -- to the seemingly immediate power of
the moving image to, at least in the moment, "naturally"
persuade one of its cause. Which is to say, historians are
often moved by movies -- even historically "inaccurate"
ones. Today, then, in our culture, the binary oppositions
commonly posited between the transparency of the image and
the opacity of the word, between "mythology" and "history",
between "filmgoers" and "historians" no longer hold.
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Establishing shot
The mise-en-scene is a screen, in this instance the site
of a scholarly electronic discussion group called
H-Film,(2) one of a
large number of such groups subsumed under H-Net based at
the University of Chicago (and endorsed by the American
Historical Association, the Organization of American
Historians, and the Southern Historical Association) . No
images here: just written text -- even if its subject matter
is the cinema. What follows is a true historical
account--perhaps, more appositely, an authentic historical
account. That is, even though I shall elide the specific
dates, names, and places that might identify the
participants, it is an account that, I daresay, will "ring
true" and resonate in many of my readers as it did for me.
The event at its center not only provoked this present
meditation, but also demonstrated that, although they may be
differentiated to some degree, there is no future in
opposing mythology to history, filmgoer to historian.
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(2) the "H" standing
for History: URL <
H-film@h-net.msu.edu
>
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Not so very long ago, someone (it could have been a
professor, an independent scholar, a student) posted a short
inquiry to H-Film asking for recommendations of films that
"realistically" depicted the Middle Ages. Edited for
brevity, these were some of the responses (also from
professors, independent posters, and students): "I'm afraid
that period is a little before my time, so I can't speak to
it personally. I'll ask one of my friends if he can recall
what it was like. But seriously, three films stand out in my
mind that are generally regarded as successfully conveying
the atmosphere of the Middle Ages: The return of Martin
Guerre, Beatrice, and Andrei Rublev."
Another: "Maybe The lion in winter--at least what
reading I've done about the main characters suggests they
got them right as people (although not as historical
events--there was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year).
There seems enough muck and dirt and rushes on the floors to
suggest something of the twelfth century." Another: "Orson
Welles' Chimes at midnight has the most realistic
medieval battle that I've ever seen (not that I've seen very
many [diacritical marks of a winking face]). I'd
also suggest Robin and Marian, The advocate, The name of
the rose, Flowers of St.Francis, and Monty Python and
the holy grail, The seventh seal and The virgin
spring -- if you equate realism with graphic depictions
of squalor." Yet another: "I think Jabberwocky and
The navigator: a medieval odyssey both contain quite
realistic depictions of medieval life." Then: "See the essay
on this topic by Attreed and Powers in the January 1997
issue of the American Historical Association's
Perspectives. Many suggestions." And back to the
films again: "A quick comparison should be made between
Braveheart and First knight. Braveheart
for the most part had the feel in terms of language,
behavior, attitudes. In close ups, you could see dirt on
their hands, since they didn't wash their hands as often.
Food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl, eaten without
utensils but by dipping bread in it. Lots of mud, dirt,
rain. They had poorer shelters then unless they were
wealthy. First knight, by comparison, seems
glossed-over and shiny modern day. Everyone was sparkling
clean, the set was elaborate, and hardly anyone got dirty.
Even the torture scene in Braveheart seemed accurate;
the torture implements look dull and dirty, which would have
been more painful, and the dwarfs came out 'to entertain'
the crowd before the events began. This all seems
historically accurate." Countered by this: "I am not an
expert on Scottish history, but a pile of distortions
occurred in Braveheart to make Wallace appear like a
typical hero of an action film. Correspondingly, Robert the
Bruce was made to look like a petty crook who implausibly
defeats the English army at Bannockburn thus gaining
recognition for Scotland's independence without any merit of
his own. Some degree of surface authenticity apart, the film
made little attempt to render a genuine account of the
historical events. I would suggest that this kind of
adventure film, historical or otherwise, has no such
ambitions nor does it seriously pretend to. In this sense,
they are not lies. They are just entertainment." Yet another
from someone who must be a "real" historian: "I would add
Sorceress. What distinguishes that film and Martin
Guerre from the others thus cited, which have few
redeeming values as 'realistic depictions of medieval life'
(unless you define medieval life in terms of 'squalor,
knights in armor,' and the like) is the active participation
of historians in their making. Films such as Flowers of
St. Francis and The passion of Joan of Arc also
are reasonably faithful to the history and lives they
depict. Other films (biopics) like Becket, The lion in
winter, or the Bergman Joan of Arc and Seberg
Saint Joan are a melange of cinematic (or in these
cases playwright) invention and intermittent historical
fidelity." And then: "I want to second Tavernier's
Beatrice and add Herzog's Heart of glass for
which he purportedly hypnotized his actors to get them
thinking outside twentieth century culture, progress, etc.
Both films concentrate on the idea of difference, making
strange, in order to put forth the idea that another,
disconnected time is being framed. By doing so, they make
the representation of a past we cannot possibly know (except
through its documents) as much the focus as is the
'realistic' depiction of that past." And finally: "I suggest
a television source: the Brother Cadfael series on the PBS
show Mystery -- a little less dirt than reality, but
artifacts and terms are in correct context."
After this, the postings on "realistic depictions of
medieval life" petered out as such a round of postings
usually do, and the issues of historical realism, historical
accuracy, and historical authenticity were displaced onto
yet another set of screenings of the past.
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Flashback
Raising the challenge that the cinema poses to
traditional historiography, historian Robert Rosenstone
writes: "Surely I am not the only one to wonder if those we
teach or the population at large really know or care about
history. . . Or to wonder if our history--scholarly,
scientific, measured -- fulfills the need for that larger
History, that web of connections to the past that holds a
culture together. . . Or to worry if our history really
relates us to our own cultural sources. . .
"(3) These are
significant concerns, indeed.
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(3)
Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the past: the challenge of
film to our idea of history (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 23
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As a child born into American culture a decade before the
last half of the twentieth century, I have a great
investment in the palimpsestic relation -- at times, the
contradictions and, at times, the conflation -- of
mythological and historical consciousness. At an early age,
I was overtaken by moving images -- by their ability to
tell me things by showing them to me, by their
spectacular narratives of display. Indeed, I admit to
not having really known or cared much about "academic" and
expository history until rather late in my life.
In grade school, we had to memorize dates and remember
who had fought what battles and signed which treaties;
uninterested in what seemed to me hollow and timeless
historical acts and figures, I was more curious about "real"
people "back then" and wondered whether they laughed and
what they ate and wore and if they used forks. So,
forgetting the substance or import of some such historical
activity as "colonization" or moral imperative as "Manifest
Destiny," I went off to the movies to watch a past unfold in
which people drank wine from jeweled goblets, ripped apart
roasted meats with their hands or swords, and sopped huge
rounds of bread in the ambiguous contents of rough wooden
bowls. (This particular visual marking of material interest
is hardly uncommon or merely generational for a culture
in medias res: hence, the student -- more than forty
years later on H-Film -- noting Braveheart's
historical accuracy because it showed that, in the Middle
Ages, "food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl eaten
without utensils but by dipping bread in it.") At any rate,
Benjamin, while dead right about the age of mechanical
reproduction, was dead wrong when, stirred by an antique
spoon in a shop window, he wrote: "One thing is reserved to
the greatest epic writers: the capacity to feed their
heroes." (4) The
movies do it all the time.
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(4)
Walter Benjamin, "One way street", trans. Edmund Jephcott,
in Walter Benjamin, Selected writings, volume 1
(1913-1926), eds Marcus Bullock & Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, 1996), 466
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I also watched those Romans with insistent fringes, the ones
who wore togas and gave speeches in the Forum. I encountered
people who once lived in castles, who were encased in armor
and chain mail, who killed and conquered natives (not yet
described as "indigenous peoples"), who opened the Northwest
Passage, who had their heads put on the block, who sailed
and/or pirated trade and war ships (often hard to tell
apart) in the Indies and Caribbean (also hard to tell
apart), and who lived history in extravagant clothes
and--particularly if they were women--spent a good deal of
history changing them. In those formative years, the history
that fired my imagination (as distinct from the history that
dulled it) came in concrete and spatialized images--images
that moved and moved me. I confronted the colonization of
the "New World" through The captain from Castille and
Plymouth adventure, medieval Italy through The
flame and the arrow, and came to really care about Henry
VIII's England by identifying with the political (as well as
romantic) education of head-strong and adolescent Young
Bess.
In college, I was an English major and, through the
imperatives of scheduling, continued my historical education
according to no principled chronology. I took a course in
Shakespeare before I took one in Chaucer, took Chaucer
before I took Milton; I had no inclination nor charge to put
them in temporal order (let alone temporal relation). My
lack of historical consciousness in the classroom, however,
was again offset by my historical experience at the movies.
This was the time of, among other great foreign directors,
Ingmar Bergman; the strangeness and power of his The
seventh seal and The virgin spring allowed me
(paradoxically, of course) to feel and comprehend the
"otherness" of medieval existence in a world of flagellants,
plague, dark and dank interiors, dancing bears, real
superstition, real religious belief -- and, yes, rounds of
bread dipped in bowls of ambiguous stew.
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Did I believe all these images? Did I think these narratives
were the most accurate accounts of past events? Did they
ruin me? Now that I read history and teach historiography,
am I cured? Has "real" history replaced the "false" history
of my formative years? Not really. As a child in medias
res (that is, cinematically competent), I don't think I
ever believed the image as a historical record. How
could one, with stars like Garbo or Flynn or Charlton Heston
figured on the screen, with pirate ships and palaces that
were spic and span (no insistent squalor here), with gold
lamé push-up bras? Indeed, I find it rather funny
that Hollywood historical film is so often castigated not
merely for its historical "errors," its melodrama, and its
"bourgeois ideology," but also for the seductive
"transparency" of its supposed "seamless" construction. One
could be perverse and make a counter argument, enumerating
all the "distancing" and reflexive devices that point to
such films as highly stylized, opaque, and meta-historical
productions -- not least among them the presence of stars
who represent not "real" historical personages, but, rather,
their historical
"magnitude."(5)
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(5)
Vivian Sobchack, "Surge and splendor: a phenomenology of the
Hollywood historical epic", Representations 29
(Winter 1990), 36
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As a child, then, I believed the image as image, a real
image of real things: hence my intense material interest in
it. I also didn't believe in the narratives as accurate
accounts of past lives and times -- or, for that matter, as
the only accounts. They were, however, the most
compelling accounts. In moving and showing human
bodies disposed and active in space, they moved me in
time. Indeed, so much so that they eventually led me
elsewhere: first to art histories and film histories, and
then to what is legitimated as academic, "non-fictional"
history. This movement, however, was not "progressive."
Earlier images and narratives have not been erased from my
adult historical consciousness, nor would my sense of
history be somehow purified by their disappearance. Indeed,
all those "insistent fringes," all that medieval squalor,
all those Christians dying and buffalo stampeding, all that
clanking armor and swordplay, do not merely haunt the
sophistication of my present sense of history; they also,
dare I say, quicken it, flesh it out, nourish it (even if
with ambiguous stew). If they do not quite constitute (and
they just might) Benjamin's "dialectical image," then, they
at least, through their material means and the concrete
purchase they give us on an absent past, make us care.
Amidst competing narratives, contradictions, fragments,
and discontinuities, the massive authority of institutions
and the small compass of personal experience, sometimes the
representation of phenomenal "things" like dirt and hair
are, in medias res, all we have to hold on to -- are
where our purchase on temporality and its phenomenological
possibilities as "history" are solidly grasped and allow us
a place, a general premise, a ground (however base) from
which to transcend our present and imagine the past as once
having "real" existential presence and value. And,
acknowledging that the past once was existentially valuable
to real people who moved -- like movie images -- in space
and time, creates a present in which we might care enough
"to educate the image-creating medium within us to see
dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the
historical
shade."(6)
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(6)
Susan Buck-Morss, The dialectics of seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades project (Cambridge, Mass : MIT
Press, 1991), 29
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