Romanticism and Film

Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation

Will Kitchen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501361357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The relationship between Romanticism and film remains one of the most neglected topics in film theory and history, with analysis often focusing on the proto-cinematic significance of Richard Wagner's music-dramas. One new and interesting way of examining this relationship is by looking beyond Wagner, and developing a concept of audio-visual explanation rooted in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, and employing it in the analysis of film discourse and representation. Using this concept of audio-visual explanation, the cultural image of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, a contemporary of Wagner and another significant practitioner of Romantic audio-visual aesthetics, is examined in reference to specific case studies, including the rarely-explored films Song Without End (1960) and Lisztomania (1975). This multifaceted study of film discourse and representation employs Liszt as a guiding-thread, structuring a general exploration of the concept of Romanticism and its relationship with film more generally. This exploration is supported by new theories of representation based on schematic cognition, the philosophy of explanation, and the recently-developed film theory of Jacques Rancière. Individual chapters address the historical background of audio-visual explanation in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, Liszt's role in the historical discourses of film and film music, and various filmic representations of Liszt and his compositions. Throughout these investigations, Will Kitchen explores the various ways that films explain, or 'make sense' of things, through a 'Romantic' aesthetic combination of sound and vision.

1

Culture and transcendence

Three explanations of Romanticism

Introduction

When we read the word ‘Romanticism’, it might initially evoke a number of names. In a literary context, these names might include a handful of poets who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller – names which might be roughly divided into English and German traditions. In a musical context, this word might evoke the names of certain composers who lived between the late work of Beethoven and Schoenberg’s turn to atonality, or between Schubert and the mature works of Mahler or Richard Strauss. For philosophers, names such as Novalis and Hölderlin will suggest themselves; for painters, Delacroix, Friedrich and Turner.

From the variety of these names, the styles they represent and the historical periods in which their bearers lived, it is clear that no unified and incontestable definition of the word ‘Romanticism’ can be presented. This word can mean many things, and is perhaps best understood as a colligatory construct, an explanatory tool, an example of what Michel Foucault termed a ‘discursive formation’, or what Morse Peckham called a ‘disjunctive category’ – a category created by differences developed within institutional practices whose members do not all share the same thing in common.¹

This chapter undertakes a rather deep dive into the backwaters of film and philosophy. It attempts to outline a detailed, fictive and pragmatic explanation of Romanticism that permits us to discuss its relationship with film. This relationship, of course, has the potential to be traced and developed in many different ways, enabling different kinds of analysis. For the purposes of the current study, we will utilize three explanatory paradigms: cultural transcendence, the aesthetic regime and philosophical aesthetics. Together these concepts will enable a correspondence between theories of ideological social explanation and audio-visual aesthetics, while permitting these categories to be of use in analysing the relationship between Romanticism and film. Subsequent chapters will proceed from this basis by inviting Franz Liszt, as a figure representative of Romanticism, to take centre stage in an exploration of various selected points of contact between these subjects.

What is Romanticism?

Romanticism is commonly explained as a historical reaction against Enlightenment doctrines of empiricism, positivism, manifest truth and an ordered universe – an outburst of irrationalism which found among its catalysts the political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Terror of the French Revolution, the music of Beethoven and the anti-foundationalism of post-Kantian German Idealism.² (‘Anti-foundationalism’ can be defined here as a renunciation of the claim that knowledge can be authorized by appealing to its source or origin, and rather crediting an appeal to a critical discussion of the state of existing knowledge in light of its historical and fictive character in reference to an objective criterion of truth that acts as a partially knowable regulative principle.) But taken at its broadest meaning, Romanticism characterizes something less definable about the so-called long nineteenth century – a historical period bookended by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and German Idealism at the one end and by artistic modernism, the Second World War and cinema at the other.

Romanticism does not name a historical period, a style or a cohesive set of aesthetic theories, yet it is colloquially treated as one or all of these. The term potentially activates a number of schemas associated with a period in European history between the late 1700s and the early 1900s, the result of a series of emergent philosophical and aesthetic positions, individuals, artworks and behaviours forming part of wider social, economic and political transformations. In addition, Romanticism’s reaction against the empiricist and positivist attitudes of the Enlightenment situates it, as we will see, as a noteworthy historical precursor to certain trends in twentieth-century philosophy, including critical rationalism, philosophical hermeneutics and critical theory.

Like the ideas often subsumed by the term ‘postmodernism’, Romanticism accommodates various contradictions. Aspects of classicism and the Enlightenment often survive within its schematic framework, despite being concepts that Romanticism supposedly defined itself in the process of overthrowing. Also, like postmodernism, Romanticism is not a distinct break with an earlier period, but is an accumulation of disparate responses to prevailing social standards as they have been recorded across the histories of a number of cultural fields. This idea does, however, crystallize something that lies near the heart of Romanticism: the idea of genius, or innovative response – the idea that something is encountered, judged to be imperfect by someone special and responded to in a new way. By the end of this chapter, we will recognize the relevance of this Romantic image of genius to both film and audio-visual explanation.

Throughout its brief history, Film Studies has appropriated many of its most significant concepts and theories from the more respectable domain of literature. As we might expect, Romanticism has a strong critical heritage in literary criticism, where scholars such as M. H. Abrams, Northrop Frye and Frank Kermode created a robust theoretical field for a specific English literary tradition which became canonized in English universities during the mid-twentieth century. Yet the simple equation of Romanticism with concepts such as ‘expression’, ‘imagination’ and ‘feeling’, enabled by analysing the work of poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron, creates a limited and misleading scope for application. A primarily ‘literary’ explanation of the relationship between Romanticism and film, based on such ideas, might quickly find itself reduced, by way of analogy between the practices and aesthetics of film and melodrama, to a familiar historical correlation between the style, performance and musical traditions of nineteenth-century theatre and their later Hollywood counterparts, and might miss many of the more interesting and significant elements to be explored throughout this book.

The field of literary criticism is also partly responsible for Romanticism being burdened with several decidedly negative ideological associations. In a tradition dating back to Goethe and Kant, several critics, including T. E. Hulme and Irving Babbitt, attacked Romanticism for its supposed aesthetic and ethical failings. An emphasis on nationalism, extreme emotion, subjective intuition, anti-rationality, ideologically mystifying sublimity and a valuation of individual genius at the expense of tradition and community has, in addition, long tainted the cultural images of figures such as Wagner, Herder, Hegel and Nietzsche as they fall within the retrospective historical shadow of the Third Reich.

As we will see throughout this book, it is often illuminating to bear in mind these complex associations, and perhaps even to give a certain amount of credence to a rhetorical position that treats the simultaneous development of both National Socialism and film as being among the many ‘consequences’ of Romanticism itself. By the end of this chapter, we will have seen how the near-simultaneous emergence of fascism and cinema in modern European history (give or take a decade) exposes the connection between the three explanatory paradigms we have chosen to explore.

It is therefore not literature but philosophical aesthetics more generally (understood to contain an intrinsic political or ideological dimension) which provides the necessary tools for the current study of Romanticism and film in terms of audio-visual explanation. The writings of Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Novalis and Schlegel, in particular, present an invaluable resource for understanding the philosophical context of Romanticism as a consequence of German Idealism. We must be open to this history of European philosophical aesthetics if we wish to understand how and why the word ‘Romanticism’, as a fluid discursive formation, can accommodate and enrich the analysis of cultural products as diverse as the work of Liszt and Hölderlin, Friedrich and Wagner, in addition to Nazism, rock music and cinema itself.

Romantic agency: Cultural transcendence

According to Morse Peckham, the term ‘Romanticism’ is perhaps best used to identify the cultural legacy of certain behaviours exhibited by a number of historical individuals who contributed to a changed perspective on Western cultural values.³ Peckham explains Romanticism by coining the term ‘cultural transcendence’, or social deviancy and innovation as a distinct behavioural pattern:

This arises from the [Romantic individual’s] judgement of explanatory collapse (the failure of ideologies), alienation from the culture and society’s institutions, cultural vandalism, social withdrawal, reducing the interaction rate to a minimum, randomising behaviour, selecting a promising emergent innovation, collecting a little group of supporters and propagandising the cultural emergent.⁴

These behaviours result in a critical and constructive interaction among various schemas of cultural value. The typical array of key Romantic phrases, tropes and ideas – including subjective introspection, revolution, progress, solitude, freedom, irrationalism, madness and a fascination with nature, antiquity, death and extreme emotional states – developed because they were fruitful concepts for accommodating the oppositional activity of cultural transcendence. This term subsumes freedom, dynamism, movement, dissatisfaction with things as they are and, as we will see further, an incessant desire for the unification of what the German Idealists called the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’. It gives Romanticism the character of an infinite striving.

Rhetorically speaking, the Romantic individual is a utopian; they feel at home nowhere save in that ideal that their imagination can almost grasp. They act to transform their world while guided by an ideal. In Romantic art, the classical emphasis on final achievement changes to this sense of perpetual striving – from pleasure to constant dissatisfaction and from unity to fragmentation and back again. As we will see when we analyse the relationship between the audio-visual explanation and the Romantic genius figure, this last is a shift which, due to the influence of the aesthetic category of the sublime, corresponds problematically to that other perpetually differed split between community and individual.

The dissatisfaction with one’s environment and an incessant striving for ideals is the critical imperative that forms the essence of Romanticism’s political progressiveness. (This is also the reason why it cannot be compared anachronistically, although it certainly can incompletely, to later philosophical positions such as critical rationalism, philosophical hermeneutics and critical rationalism.) For Peckham, the typical Romantic fascination with death, madness or antiquity develops a continually transformational imperative, ‘not to question the value of life is to accept unhesitatingly the platitudes of one’s culture . . . [its] ideology’.⁵ If the Romantic individual is one who stands apart from society, or things as we find them, in order to criticize them through the power of the imagination, then this paradoxically places the unique individual – the ‘genius’ – at the heart of culture itself. Kant’s description of the concept of genius in the Critique of Judgement (1790) exemplifies the role it was initially allocated in Romantic aesthetics.⁶ The artistic genius is the one who ‘gives the rule to art’ in nature’s stead.⁷ The recipient of a gift from nature, the genius operates through untutored originality; they are unable to communicate their gift to others, and are also themselves blind to the motives which inspire their work. After Kant, the concept of individual genius takes pride of place in Romantic aesthetics, replacing, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explained, the previously privileged concept of the judgement of taste and appropriating with it an implied knowledge of the means to realize an ideal community.⁸

Due in no small part to Romanticism, individuality, subjectivity and anti-social behaviours – the questioning of the status quo – came to the fore as significant schematic elements of cultural value throughout the nineteenth century. This history is partly responsible for the conflicts and tensions surrounding the genius figure as a cultural type. Situated as society’s other, the genius possesses a unique perspective, enabling them to shape their subject – whether it be music, politics, literature or science – in ways that reveal truths otherwise inaccessible to the community. But in the creation of great w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Culture and transcendence: Three explanations of Romanticism
• 2 The archaeology of film music: Wagner, Liszt and the symphonic poem
• 3 Audio-visual explanations of Franz Liszt and his music: Cultural image and schematic types
• 4 ‘Nothing untrue, simply convenient’: Song Without End (1960) and the Hollywood composer biopic
• 5 ‘Piss off, Brahms!’: Lisztomania (1975) and Ken Russell in 1975
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Music and language
• Appendix B: Wagnerian terminology and film
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright