The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences

This interdisciplinary volume is dedicated to exploring the idea of the cinematic sublime by bringing together the disciplines of film studies and aesthetics to examine cinema and cinematic experience. Explores the idea of ‘the sublime’ in cinema from a variety of perspectives; the essays range in focus from early cinema, through classical Hollywood, documentary, avant-garde and art cinema traditions, and on to contemporary digital cinema. The book aims to apply the discussion of the sublime in philosophy to cinema and to interrogate the ways in which cinema engages with this tradition.

Offers new and exciting insights into how cinema engages with traditional historical and aesthetic discourse. Original and wide-ranging, this clear and coherent volume is a useful resource for both post-graduate students and established scholars interested in the interrelations between film and philosophy. The range of material covered in the individual essays makes this a wide-ranging and very useful introduction to the topic.

A significant new contribution to the literature on Film-Philosophy. What sets this reader apart from the existing books on the subject is the wider scope. It embraces both philosophers and film scholars to consider films from throughout film history in light of theories of the sublime from throughout the history of Philosophy. In doing so it aims to demonstrate the diverse value of sublime approaches (versus a singular definition and philosophical perspective) to a wider range of films than has previously been considered. 

An original and stimulating collection of essays contributing new insights into the crossover between historical and aesthetic approaches to contemporary cinema and cinematic experience.

The main readership will be academic markets including film studies and philosophy, and academics with an interest in the legacies of Burke and Kant on aesthetics. Useful for teaching aesthetics through cinematic illustration and application.

Appropriate to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in ideas at the boundaries of contemporary film studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789382402

Book preview

The Cinematic Sublime

The Cinematic Sublime

_________________

Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences

EDITED BY

Nathan Carroll

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Cover image: Image from Decasia (Bill Morrison, USA, 2002).

Original source: Meet Me Down At The Luna (1905, Lubin), archived at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Production manager: Laura Christopher

Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Print ISBN 9781789382396

ePDF ISBN 9781789382419

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Joan Hawkins

Introduction

Nathan Carroll

Part I

Sublime Spectatorship

1. Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View

Samantha Wilson

2. Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime

Claire Sisco King

Part II

Staging Sublimity: Presenting the Unpresentable

3. Between Preservation and Disintegration in Decayed Cinema: The Uncanny and the Weird of the Sublime Archival Image in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia

Kornelia Boczkowska

4. Negative Epiphanies and Sublime Emotion in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence

James Kendrick

Part III

Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments

5. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Historical Sublime

Steve Ostovich

6. Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust and the Limits of Invisibility

Chris Dumas

Part IV

The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes

7. A Short History of the Long Take: Digital Cinema and the Infinite Cut

Nathan Carroll

8. Stalking the Sublime: Nature and Affect in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Robert Lee Jones

Part V

The Limits of Light: The Other(s)

9. Sublime Abject or Abject Sublime: Sublimation and Jouissance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Szamanka

Carolin Kirchner

10. The Fear of Beauty and the Beauty of Fear: The Sublime in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

Kwasu David Tembo

Bibliography

Notes on the Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

I wish to offer my deepest gratitude to everyone who participated in compiling this project, first and foremost the contributing authors for their time and continued commitment to this project. I would especially like to thank Joan Hawkins for contributing the foreword, and Chris Dumas for conforming the manuscript to the Chicago style. The staff at Intellect Press have been extremely generous with their help and comments throughout the process of bringing this manuscript to print. I would also like to thank the filmmaker Bill Morrison for allowing the use of an image from Decasia on the cover of this book.

This project was made possible by the Department of Communication, Theatre, and Art at The College of St. Scholastica, which granted me sabbatical leave to finish the project. I also wish to thank, retroactively, the Department of Communication and Culture (CMCL) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Although the department has now been dismantled, during its all-too-brief existence CMCL produced many excellent scholars and colleagues with its commitment to a truly interdisciplinary approach.

Finally, this collection is dedicated to my partner, Laurie, for all of her incredible patience and help.

Foreword

Joan Hawkins

As a philosophical and aesthetic concept, the sublime encompasses many concerns crucial to contemporary film studies: formalism, affect studies, taste politics, and audience cultures, to name just a few. But while the sublime encompasses these contemporary film studies topics, its actual intersection with film studies scholarship has been a vexed enterprise. The journal Film-Philosophy occasionally publishes essays treating some aspect of the sublime; Cynthia Freeland and Steven Shaviro continually struggle with it (to interesting effect) in their work. But for the most part, contemporary film studies has tended to regard discussions of the sublime with deep suspicion, as though simply evoking the term is to summon an entire moribund tradition of elitist snobbery and textual essentialism.

This anthology seeks to reinvigorate scholarly consideration of the cinematic sublime and its uses in taste culture. It does this largely through challenging any stable, monolithic articulation of the sublime. Like Susan Rubin Suleiman’s provocative discussion of the avant-garde, which argues for the existence of multiple avant-gardes, The Cinematic Sublime begins its intervention with a direct hit on expectations of a unitary, solipsistic articulation of the sublime.¹ The goal of this collection, Nathan Carroll tells us, "is to apply . . . various ‘sublimes’ to specific films and to general topics in film studies. The point is not to manufacture theoretical continuity between different philosophers and film scholars, but to recognize overlaps and identify differences" (emphasis added).

The book’s introduction is key here, providing a helpful and well-articulated framework for understanding its organizational logic. It presents a useful thumbnail teleology of the category sublime, situating the term’s various iterations in philosophy and cultural history. Therefore I would recommend that you read it before dipping into the collection. But after that, you should feel free to sample at will. The volume is divided into five parts, each of which pairs chapters that are similar in topic or approach. So it invites us to read according to Eisensteinian logic, allowing one chapter in a part to comment upon the other. But it certainly doesn’t require the reader to follow that strategy. One of the strengths of anthologies, it seems to me, is their ability to disrupt cause-effect logic and traditional categories, to cluster ideas and approaches around a central thorny issue and allow contradictions to emerge. Following a slightly different dialectical strategy than the one governing Soviet montage theory, they allow us to think outside the box and create multiple arguments (or stories) from the same text. This is particularly true in the case of The Cinematic Sublime, which like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), will reward repeated polyvalent reading strategies and approaches.

As someone who has spent much of her career interrogating taste categories, I find the breadth and scope here refreshing. Chapters on celebrity culture and banality, Steven Spielberg, and Jerry Lewis sit alongside chapters on Hollis Frampton, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the use of the long take. In that sense, the book enacts the kind of taste politics that I’ve long advocated.² Especially interesting is Part III titled Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments, which pairs a chapter on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah with a piece on Jerry Lewis. Using the sublime to analyze Shoah, a work remarkable for its denial of any possible aesthetic engagement with Holocaust imagery (Lanzmann famously refused to use archival footage or images), itself opens new readings and interpretive strategies. But pairing it with the Lewis piece is brilliant, repositioning Shoah within a historiography that interrogates the limits of an appropriate or truthful historical Holocaust narrative, while simultaneously asking us to consider what is foreclosed in film history through the suppression of certain bad objects (Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried).

All of the parts pair canonical titles or themes (the long take) with more popular—or in the case of Lewis, derided—texts. As Carroll notes in his introduction to this volume, via sublime aesthetics, the study of Michael Bay is potentially every bit as productive as is the study of Stan Brakhage. And from that standpoint, this volume has resonance for scholars working in fields outside normative studies of the sublime, those interested in a limit-test or event horizon to their own systems of Film Theory, fixing the extent to which their larger theories of meaning hold firm (or don’t) in the face of the unimaginable.

So far I’ve spoken about the book’s significance for scholars working and teaching in film studies. For philosophers, too, this volume will resonate. In an academic system increasingly driven by enrollment figures and, by extension, courses in popular culture, Philosophy departments frequently scramble to maintain their budgets and curriculum. The Cinematic Sublime certainly provides one model of demonstrating the applicability of philosophical ideas to art and to popular movies. But it also opens some space for us to reevaluate and reconsider the post-structuralist Philosophy/Theory divide, which apportioned courses on Hegel and Heidegger to philosophy departments and courses on Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze to film, literature, and critical studies. In this volume, the larger discussion of the sublime (which dates to Longinus, but generally invokes Kant) unfolds alongside renewed consideration of Deleuze, Kristeva, François Lyotard, and Hayden White. In so doing, it invites us to read our own disciplines in the same way that we, as scholars, read culture. It invites us to interrogate the foreclosed limits of our own fields of knowledge.

NOTES

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

2. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Introduction

Nathan Carroll

How do we process and resolve seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between thought and physical experience, reasonable concepts and extreme perceptions, logical expectations and irrational observations? The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences aims to bridge the fields of aesthetics and film studies in order to filter such philosophical questions through the lens of cinema. This volume is a collection of ten original essays by contemporary film, cultural, and philosophy scholars from around the globe; each chapter applies different aesthetic theories of the sublime to various topics and case studies.

What counts as sublime? The concept has had a long and varied history of philosophical and cultural use; its specific meaning is wholly dependent on who is using it, and to what end. In anthologies of philosophical writing, there is a distinct subgenre dedicated to explicating the term in its varied contexts; the goal of this collection is to apply some of these various sublimes to specific films and to general topics in film studies. The point is not to manufacture theoretical continuity between different philosophers and film scholars, but to recognize overlaps and identify differences.

It is a truism that the only common factor in all theories of the sublime is the (admittedly frustrating) lack of agreement between them, not only in how the term is defined but also in matters of cognition and judgment in regard to experiences of the sublime. While this could easily be the point at which some readers (and, anecdotally speaking, some students) throw up their hands in preemptive confusion, I take the opposite view: these difficulties are precisely what makes theories of the sublime so interesting. From Longinus’s initial treatise On the Sublime, about the impact of powerful rhetoric (e.g., the goosebumps effect of great public speakers), to accounts by wealthy men hiking through the Alps (i.e., Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury), from the Enlightenment era of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to the Gothic literary movement with its exploration of both internally and externally haunted spaces, and finally to the evolving impact of psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, feminist, and postmodern theories on all of these previous categories: each separate theory of the sublime becomes a cultural marker of the time and place of its origin. Further, philosophers such as Kant have engaged theories of the sublime as a limit test or event horizon to their own systems, fixing the extent to which their larger theories of meaning hold firm (or don’t) in the face of the unimaginable.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, pop culture added a new element of consideration, insofar as the very word sublime, drained of its specificity, is now overused and commodified. Historically, sublime experiences were considered rare, extreme, and often life-changing. But, as Claire Sisco King notes in her chapter in this volume (on celebrity culture and the banal sublime via David Nye), the category of the Sublime is now decapitalized (from Sublime to just sublime) and is often used merely as shorthand for cool or wow or, more to the point, awesome; it no longer signifies a singular, mind-blowing experience fostering existential introspection. Yet that cultural diffusion, from unique experience to mass spectacle, is itself a marker of a cultural shift toward the management of aesthetic expectations in the era of late capitalism. We want our technology smaller, and our experiences larger. We use the gigantic spectacles that are offered to us to help ourselves create meaningful life memories. The contemporary sublime comes to represent our (increasingly commodified) everyday desire for the Other: other parts of the self, other identities, other experiences, mysteries, spiritualities, sexualities, and so on. One could argue that the sublime is that which, by definition, is undefinable. Alternately, sublimity can be a cultural condition, a personal obsession, an intersubjectively negotiated experience (e.g., a mass UFO sighting), an ontological crisis of signification (e.g., gender fluidity), an epistemological fracture in the judgment-making process, an extreme weather event, the negative space that defines an image, or—perhaps most crucially—a term that privileges the sensory experiences of elites over those of the hoi polloi. What is inarguable, however, is just how provocative the sublime, as an aesthetic principle, can be. As a cluster of challenging philosophical concepts, theories of the sublime test the outer limits of reason, meaning, experience, and critical judgment.

Nonetheless, there are some similarities across the wide range of theories of the sublime. For example, it is usually agreed (from Longinus to Lyotard) that the feeling of sublimity is the most intense aesthetic experience available to consciousness, even more so than encountering the beautiful. An overwhelming sensation of awe typically accompanies what was also theorized by Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 Critique of Judgment (Section 23), as a negative pleasure, in which moral feelings and aesthetic judgments are intensified by the simultaneous, contradictory sensations of fear and personal safety. It is this contradiction, between expectation and reality, self and Other, that is finally at the troubled, uncanny core of the sublime. Is sublimity a property of the object, the subject, or the system?

For most philosophers who work with these discourses, perceptions of sublimity are typically more than we can reasonably handle as human beings; we tend to panic in the face of the unexpected and overwhelming. However, the exact process of that cognitive fracturing is conceptualized differently, both in terms of cause and effect, from one discourse of the sublime to another. Another key historical element of theories of the sublime (at least, between Longinus and Freud) is this contradictory mixture of elation and horror, the threat of pain tempered by feelings of awe and, ultimately, a heightened pleasure that could be read as sadomasochistic (especially in Burke). The observer feels as if she will be harmed, but is finally safe from threat. Elation, and critical judgment of the experience qua sublime, presupposes a critical distance (in space, or time, or both) from the event. The further away you are from (for example) that horror movie you just watched, the more you can sensibly judge whether or not the experience was sublime.

Another goal of this anthology is to demonstrate how cinema is the modern art form of sublimity. Through montage and, with it, the ability to manipulate space and time (the negotiation between the frame and whatever is just outside of it)—that is, through the mastery not only of negative space but also its use in storytelling—cinema has historically embraced the aesthetic of the sublime. The movie camera, on the one hand, archives visual reality (the Dziga Vertov sense of a mechanical-spiritual kino-eye), and on the other, participates in the late-capitalist exploitation of material resources for the purpose of mass distractions. Film industries (and/or filmmakers) create spectacles, meant to be passively consumed in elaborate structures with giant screens, maximizing effects of sublimity. Early theories of the sublime (Immanuel Kant in particular) argued that an observer could only experience true sublimity in raw nature. At best, Hollywood offers a simulacrum of the natural sublime. Yet in many ways, the cinema as a twentieth-century art form evolved by stealing techniques from other arts, incorporating mass-industrial models of labor and, increasingly, policing popular culture through the management of celebrity.

Amid the urbanization of the industrial age, cinema laid claim to a new sublime, one that we could call the cinematic sublime. The cultural ritual offered by Hollywood, in the days before home video, was a lights-out communion with strangers, an experience in which one could feel completely immersed in a world of giant images, unique characters, engaging stories, and fantastic landscapes. With the aid of high-dosage deliveries of sugar, caffeine, hyped expectations, and gorgeous celebrities—as well as an ever-increasing palette of new technologies—film spectacle aimed, on an industrial scale, to turn communal experience into corporate profit. As a modern immersive art, the cinema demonstrated that audiences could be made to suspend the belief in their own time and space and enter someone else’s manufactured narrative, a trip into Other time and Other space. In that sense, it is just as useful to examine mainstream Hollywood spectacle as it is to frame avant-garde cinema in terms of the sublime. Academic discourse on the cinema and the sublime thus has the added value of embracing a broad range of filmmakers and techniques as objects of critique. Via sublime aesthetics, the study of Michael Bay is potentially every bit as productive as the study of Stan Brakhage.

The point of the traditional invisible Hollywood style is to conceal the discontinuities—ruptures between scenes and frames, illogics of time and space—for audiences, a strategy that is more successful in some cases than others. A sublime cinematic critical approach conversely aims to unmask such ruptures, and privileges dwelling on the relative significance of their respective meanings in relation to the overt text. The cinematic sublime is therefore fundamentally a critical practice that genealogically privileges the role of subtext (intended or not), disjunctions (accidental or deliberate), and negative space in the construction of meaning through storytelling, which in conventional Hollywood genres and spectatorship studies is strategically elided in favor of continuity.

The wide-ranging analysis of aesthetic extremes in cinema contained within this volume thus begs the question: Can canonical films in classic genres also be studied as examples of the sublime? In other words, how does the sublime function in a system motivated to erase the sublime? As an example, let’s look at the paradigmatic year of classical Hollywood, the annus mirabilis of 1939. If we choose two key films—The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, both enormous spectacles that were (nominally) directed by Victor Fleming—to study in those terms, will they in turn support a coherent and useful analysis? Suffused with the sublime, The Wizard of Oz is a hybrid of several conventional Hollywood genres, including the fantasy, musical, and children’s film; each of these genres allows for a certain loosening of restrictions with respect to continuity ‘design’ and audience expectations. Yet, with these multiple genres combined into this singular film, the screen explodes with typically repressed sublime elements. Under the narrative blanket of these complex genre intersections, a tornado can believably whisk away a young girl and her dog from the troubles of Great Depression–era Kansas farmland to a magical, surreal space of three-strip Technicolor, where two mothers can compete for control of Dorothy (the bad one, screaming, melts into a black puddle) and the male elder can appear as a phantasmatic godhead before the inevitable drawing of the curtain. Nothing seems outside the realm of possibility here, as fantastical and surrealist imagery is worn as a badge of convention and thus is masked as normalcy; social reality, if it can be said to intrude, does so as a pair of sepia-toned bookends. However, for reasons that could bear a book’s worth of scrutiny, those conflicting sets of imagery still, and perhaps inevitably, generate an eruption of the sublime that exceeds the generic parameters that usually allow, and even necessitate, that eruption. Perhaps the best way to frame the film’s sublime aspects is to reference its use, qua diegesis, in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart—particularly the climactic appearance of the Good Witch and the subsequent melting of the bad one, a moment that offers the sublime (and exclusively cinematic) realization that the entire movie, with its extremes of body horror and sensory dislocation, has been taking place inside The Wizard of Oz.

By contrast, Gone with the Wind offers a different set of contradictions for critical analysis vis-à-vis the sublime. Still the greatest box-office success of all time (when adjusted for inflation), it appeared at a time when Civil War veterans would have still been alive; hence the lived experience of that war was still within cultural memory. How would the sublime erupt in a narrative like this? Haunted by the historical rift of the Civil War and the specter of America’s foundational crime—slavery, here mobilized as a narrative device and therefore redacted as a cultural problem—Hollywood’s attempt to memorialize that devastating war is staged as a spectacular act of forgetting. Not unlike Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) in epic scope or blockbuster reception (but quite unlike Griffith’s blockbuster in its work to elide or paper over racial matters), Gone with the Wind employs the tricks of immersive spectacle to conceal narrative gaps, revise historical subtext, and redirect attention from the scarred depths of a nation’s cultural trauma toward a white woman’s economic and romantic woes. (She, of course, is the real victim of the war.) If we take the famous crane shot that slowly pulls back and up from Scarlett O’Hara at the train station to encompass the massed Confederate soldiers, the end of that shot reveals the true point of the scene: this overwhelming staging of mass casualty is completed by the appearance of the Confederate flag, a punctum that both fixes the shot’s meaning and sets it aside. (This shot, with its intent to overwhelm, recalls the patriotic triptych at the conclusion of Abel Gance’s Napoleon [1927], a similar gesture with similar affect.) As with the lavishly filmed burning of Atlanta sequence, itself an attempt to call forth the sublime, the true horrors of history are here masked by the Hollywood spectacle of practical-effects destruction, which finally memorializes the act of historical forgetting. This chasm between the seen and unsaid is precisely the gap from where a sublime analytic would proceed.

I hope it is obvious from this brief comparison that the mainstream cinematic canon is just as available to sublime aesthetic critique as are art-house or avant-garde films. Further, while this claim lies outside the scope of this particular anthology, sublime cinematic critique could just as usefully focus on other regional and postcolonial canons of world cinema, yet must always be positioned from a fundamental respect for the sociohistorical differences that mark each genre and each national culture industry. How would these historical approaches to the sublime intersect with more direct theoretical aesthetic critiques? Historical context is key to mobilizing our conceptual understanding of cinematic sublimity, and such contexts, as explicated in several chapters within this volume, historically situate the various origins of theories of the sublime without necessarily fixing and, thus, strangling authors’ contemporary conceptual positions. History, like memory, is primarily a function of the present, of the performative act of recall, and therefore is also a function of the cultural ordering of concepts as explicit narrative renderings of power and desire. This volume, then, hopes to explode the notion of fixed historical truths as unassailable and unavailable as resources to contemporary writers. In order to remain vital, any contemporary study of the cinematic sublime must both acknowledge and embrace its traditional historical infidelity to a pre-filmic world. The goal of studying the cinematic sublime, as elucidated in this volume, is not to play fast and loose with the history of aesthetic theories and philosophical traditions, but to more accurately situate theories of the sublime in order to remobilize their respective values for contemporary film scholars.

***

The five parts of this anthology are each built around similarities of topics and/or approach; each part juxtaposes two chapters on a common theme or methodology. Part I, Sublime Spectatorship, features chapters on the historical role of the cinematic spectator. Samantha Wilson’s chapter, Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View, provides an historical analysis with respect to intersections between eighteenth-century aesthetic contemplation of the natural sublime and new consumer experiences of technological astonishment in early twentieth-century British scenic films. Wilson terms this emergent spectator position the tourist’s sublime, arguing that natural contemplation and cinematic immersion historically interconnect in order to fundamentally change the stakes of aesthetic experience. Conversely, in the second chapter, Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime, Claire Sisco King situates the increasingly commodified role of sublime spectatorship in terms of contemporary celebrity culture, using David Nye’s concept of the consumer’s sublime. Together, these two chapters demonstrate the