Cinema & Counter-History

Marcia Landy

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253016195
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Despite claims about the end of history and the death of cinema, visual media continue to contribute to our understanding of history and history-making. In this book, Marcia Landy argues that rethinking history and memory must take into account shifting conceptions of visual and aural technologies. With the assistance of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cinema and Counter-History examines writings and films that challenge prevailing notions of history in order to explore the philosophic, aesthetic, and political stakes of activating the past. Marshaling evidence across European, African, and Asian cinema, Landy engages in a counter-historical project that calls into question the certainty of visual representations and unmoors notions of a history firmly anchored in truth.

1

A Crisis of the Movement-Image
and Counter-History

A FORM OF history making, associated with the cinematic treatment of national history, involved monumental and antiquarian modes of filmmaking; these flourished in pre–World War II cinema and were described by Deleuze in Cinema 1 as characteristic of the movement-image. In this chapter, I examine films that are representative of the movement-image as exemplified by the Hollywood western, a cinema where history and myth converge to express ethical leadership, the presence of a people, an organic relation to nature, and the performance of requisite action. Two westerns from the mid-silent era are addressed: James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923) and John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924). This form of filmmaking—much as with the earlier epics by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—underwent a crisis in identity and belief in the post–World War II world, giving rise to forms that revealed altered modes of perception, affect, and action, as these effect thinking differently about historicizing. Hence, I also discuss three Hollywood films from the sound era that exemplify the crisis of the action-image from the interwar years up to World War II: John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (1939), and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

Deleuze’s discussion of the “crisis of the movement-image” (1989a, 43) extends his explorations of the cinematic image into a different type of image, the time-image, which he claims was initiated by Italian neorealism and further developed by the French New Wave as a cinema of thought. However, the movement-image did not disappear; instead, it accommodated to more self-reflexive and critical forms of narration evident in Paths of Glory (Kubrick 1957), a fictional treatment of World War I trench warfare. The film dissects the rules of war and visually identifies characters and milieu with the game of chess. Refusing to monumentalize, reinforce national identity, and elevate heroic action, this counter-historical film destabilizes revered styles of militarism and patriotism derived from official and popular history, photography, and cinema to stage a crisis of the movement-image and belief in action.

In writing on the movement-image and its realization of action, Deleuze engages with philosophical and aesthetic concepts that account for the power of the cinematic image both to animate confidence and belief in historical agency and to express symptoms of a loss or transformation in this belief. His is neither an archival nor an empirical study of history proper; nor is it a generic study of historical films, though his work speaks to the changing functions of film that are indeed historical. Rather, his is a taxonomy of cinema’s expressive uses of the body, of faces, and of spaces that engender affects as sensations conducive to action on a milieu generated through “movement as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness” (Deleuze 1986, xiv). His emphasis is on “images and the signs which correspond to each type” of “pre-verbal intelligible content” (ibid., ix), involving a perception of images before they are consciously apprehended or acted on.

What engages Deleuze’s attention in the exploration of the movement-image realized through perception is its mobilization of a sensorimotor response to constitute a delayed reaction “between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action” (Deleuze 1986, 65). This hesitancy is resolved, on the one side, through affects being “actualised in an individuated state of things, and in the corresponding real connections (with a particular space–time, hic et nunc, particular characters, particular roles, particular objects)” that are essential to realization of the action-image (ibid., 102; his italics). But there are perceptual responses not realized in affection and action. When the affection-image is idealist, spiritual, or even degenerate, perception points to an “‘acentred’” state of things (Flaxman 2000, 97). This form of cinema is exemplary of a crisis of the movement-image and contributes to an understanding of what escapes history proper. What is distinctive is how the affection-image, contrary to the action-image, introduces the element of time—in terms of a choice for violence and destruction rather than the moral imperatives of the action-image.

In discussing the movement-image, Deleuze distinguishes among perception-, affection-, and action-images to designate bodily modes of response that transform movement to produce a new response to the images received (Rodowick 1997, 34). Hence, Deleuze creates a taxonomy, a classification, of the variety of images and signs “to present a world situation that is recognizable to the spectator and which can put coherent subjects to work to re-order that world” (Deamer 2009, 162). Following philosopher Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1998) and Matter and Memory (1988), Deleuze derives his conception of perception from the physical universe, in which images are matter in movement reliant on “the propagation of energy and force” (Rodowick 1997, 31). The images are “everything that appears” (Schwab 2000, 112) but are distinguishable from what they will become through the bodies, the sensory organs and mind that perceive them. The initial perception of images emerges as a prehension of things that “are incomplete and prejudiced, partial, subjective” (Deleuze 1989a, 64), since they entail a subtraction, an elimination of unwanted data.

Henri Bergson’s conception of an acentered universe accords with Deleuze’s conception of the universe “as a perfect metacinema but only when it has also given rise to ‘living images’ and to everything that our ordinary perception sees and names: actions, affects, bodies” (Marrati 2008, 32–33). Deleuze relies on a twofold character of the image as an origin of effects and as a reaction to the image in differential forms of expressivity that are both subjective and objective, involving both inside and outside. While perception is one side of the movement-image and its other is action (images to be acted on), affection conveys the emotional intensity that animates the “domain of the action-image” (Deleuze 1986, 97). Affection serves, on the one hand (as in close-ups), to “tear the image away from spatio-temporal coordinates in order to call forth the pure affect as the expressed” (ibid., 96). On the other hand, affect leading to action in a determinate space–time is “actualised in a state of things” (ibid., 106), producing real connections among objects, people, and events and, thus, conducive to historical films via movement as moral action.

The movement-image as conceived by Deleuze in Cinema 1 is dependent on organic, dialectic, quantitative, or intensive forms of montage. This image involves the “people” or their representatives, who find themselves in situations where they must overcome a threatening milieu and establish (or restore) a moral order to the community. The generation of affect and forms of action differs among American, Soviet, German, and French pre–World War II filmmakers such as Griffith, Eisenstein, Gance, Renoir, Murnau, and Sternberg, though the impetus in each is toward “a true and a good world, that bestows order on life from a transcendent perspective” (Rodowick 1997, 135). These various forms of montage are composed of segmentations of space whose parts are commensurate with the whole of the film in producing universal, linear, and teleological conceptions of history. What connects the various kinds of montage that Deleuze identifies is their adherence to expressive organic or machinic forms that convey belief in the world via the combination of the senses via affection and realization through meaningful actions.

One expression of the movement-image in its action-oriented incarnation is conveyed in its large form, a form of universal or monumental cinema, in which actions are determined by heroic figures acting in the interest of the community to modify situations through action (Deleuze, 1986, 146–48). Following Nietzsche’s discussion of monumental and antiquarian forms of history, the affect of monumentalism can be seen as a celebration of great figures and actions and that of antiquarianism as veneration of customs and artifacts from the past. The epic form—the large form, as Deleuze terms it—belongs to forms of historicizing that involve the vast natural landscape and address the hero’s passionate commitment to contend with forces that lie in the way of realizing the ethical goals of overcoming or subduing natural and social obstacles that confront a community and its survival. But there are forms other than the large that are also characteristic of the action-image, discussed by Deleuze under the rubric of the “small form and burlesque” (ibid., 169–77), indicative of a critical or comic treatment; these too may be counter-historical, that is, critical of ways of seeing and, hence, thinking about events.

FRONTIER SPACES AND AFFECTION-IMAGES

The Hollywood western from the 1920s to the 1940s is a key genre for tracing the rise and transformation of a mode of cinematic history making tied to a project of nation building. These films convey a form of historicizing based on a nineteenth-century faith in the constancy and universality of truth, the efficacy of enlightened moral action, and chronological progress, invoking the telos of progress as the ultimate aim of history and the dynamic role of the people. The cinematic vision of the western frontier world was expressed through a form of montage meant to inspire awe and confidence in the imperative of collective moral purpose through progressive action on the natural and social environment. This cinema of the movement-image accomplished through the action-image offers a version of cinematic history making in such silent films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Covered Wagon (1923), and The Iron Horse (1924).

The “Large Form” of the American Western

Deleuze’s conception of the American cinema in the Griffith model (for example, The Birth of a Nation) is as an archetypal epic—in Deleuze’s terminology, “the birth of a nation-civilisation” (Deleuze 1986, 148). In relation to the movement-image in this epic, “the principal quality of the image is breath, respiration” involving the treatment of space: “It not only inspires the hero, but brings things together in a whole of organic representation and contracts or expands depending on the circumstances” (ibid., 145–46). The western in its incarnation as Cruze’s The Covered Wagon was indebted to a form of representation in which the character is acted upon by the milieu, becomes equal to it, and, through a series of duels with the aid of the community, is able to “re-establish its accidentally or periodically endangered order.” In the large or epic form “the hero . . . does not modify the milieu, but re-establishes cyclic order in it” (ibid., 146).

The Covered Wagon was cast in a large form in its narration of the conquest of the American West, described in the intertitles as “empire building.” The film solicits the viewer’s perception of a series of duels between men, and battles with nature and with other hostile forces, to arouse sensations of curiosity, wonder, and admiration. In Kevin Brownlow’s assessment of the film’s treatment of spectacle, “the filming of the epic western . . . was an epic in itself” (Brownlow 1997, 334). Even the intertitles are more than dialogue, description, or explanation: the language “gain[s] an almost epic poetry, exactly fitting the mood of the film” (ibid., 295). According to its publicity, the film employed the services of a thousand Native Americans from reservations in Wyoming and Mexico (under the direction of a military officer). Forty thousand feet of canvas was used for the Conestoga wagons. The numerous “wild” bison (five hundred) for the hunt were hired from a firm known as Buffalo Livestock Corporation. Cowboys managed the animals, including 150 steers and a thousand horses (The Covered Wagon, 1923).

The film bears comparison to the Wild West shows of the time, and the director, James Cruze, a former traveling actor in road shows, was the perfect impresario for this type of spectacle. Through the panoramas, the viewer perceives the vastness of the country and of the natural obstacles faced by the characters. The photography of the landscape is of high mountains, expansive space, and dangerous waterfalls. The movement through space is connected to the trials that the pioneers encounter in their westward movement, demonstrated by the various obstacles entailed in such a long and arduous trek: the dangerous and dramatic crossing of a deep river by the wagons, buffalo hunting, an attack by Native Americans, and fights among individuals and factions. Rather than focusing on a psychological treatment of the individuals, the film’s epic style insists on situating its protagonists within long and difficult collective emotional ordeals: childbirth, death, shortages of food supplies, and dissension among groups, culminating in a split between those men who seek gold in California and the “men of the plow” who want to settle the land and create a community.

The choreography of the large cast filmed against this landscape also contributes to its epic character. Woodhull (Alan Hale) is the antagonistic and obstructionist figure who attempts to turn the journey into a personal duel between himself and Banion (J. Warren Kerrigan), the “natural” leader of the pioneers capable of bringing them to the “promised land.” Cruze’s casting of actors is consistent with the focus on the physical ordeals of the journey. The dominant figures are the pioneers and Kerrigan as their deliverer. While the film presents Banion as playing a critical role in the trek westward, he is less an individual hero distinguished from his men than a social type dependent on others for the realization of the collective good. Slight of figure and short, less athletic, and visibly older than many heroes, without benefit of low-angle shots, Banion is a nurturing figure, a chivalrous defender of women and children, a maligned hero fighting untrue reports about his military past, and a man of honor who refuses to use violence unjustly. What is significant about Kerrigan’s unprepossessing physical appearance as Banion is that it does not eclipse the physical trials confronted by the pioneers. His physiognomy and bodily form distinguish him from the traditional wilderness scout exemplified by the portrayal of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo and by the hunter-hero image of Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders,” comprised of aristocrats and cowboys (Slotkin 1992, 56).

Unlike Tom Mix and Fred Thomson, who appear in other westerns of the time, Kerrigan lacks the distinctive physical appearance associated with later heroes of this action-oriented genre, such as John Wayne and Henry Fonda. Cruze’s emphasis, however, is not on the actor’s unique performance (a star quality) but on the character Banion in relation to the physical appearance and gestures of the other figures with whom he interacts. Banion is often grimy and disheveled, hardly a larger-than-life portrait. Moreover, the antagonism between him and Woodhull does not threaten to overwhelm the larger imperial mission but personalizes the drama, providing melodramatic affect. Both Tully Marshall’s Bridger and Ernest Torrence’s Jackson, who provide comic interludes, also overshadow Kerrigan’s dominant role.

In a film that uses close-ups sparingly, Molly Wingate, a former school-teacher played by Lois Wilson, receives the largest share. She is often framed by the arched front of the Conestoga wagon, akin to an iris-shot (cum halo) that situates her in the position of threatened femininity. Molly embodies the image of an attractive pioneer woman: not glamorous, exotic, or clinging but wholesome looking and adventurous—the Prairie Madonna. She is the object of contention between Banion and Woodhull, but the duels between the men involve not only possession of her person but also the political fate of the pioneers on their journey. Banion, cleared of false charges brought by Woodhull (and eventually rid of Woodhull, who is shot dead), becomes a wealthy man, thanks to his also having prospected for gold. The pioneers divide, one group to continue to prospect gold, the other to settle on the land. Banion is united with Molly to form the basis of a new society, and the plow that Banion and the other pioneers employ to break the plains becomes the sign of the coming civilization.

The Covered Wagon, then, encompasses the different persons and groups that undertake the journey to the promised lands of California or Oregon. The affective elements on which it draws are eclectic, involving adventure, romance, threats to the body, and antagonisms with natural forces that are reconciled through romance, marriage, and work. The film is prophetic, though, of the death of the “red man” (as articulated by the Native Americans in the film). However, despite showing Native Americans in scenes where they attack the encircled wagons, Cruze plays down images of bloodthirsty “Indians.” Though presented in a comic vein, Bridger is “married” to two Indian women and serves as helper to Molly and Banion.

John Ford’s The Iron H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Crisis of the Movement-Image and Counter-History
• 2. History Growling at the Door: Horror and Naturalism
• 3. Comedy, Theatricality, and Counter-History
• 4. Minoritarian Cinematic Forms as Counter-History
• 5. Memory, the Powers of the False, and Becoming
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index