kong v gonga & a miniature city symphony

Mellard ("Framed in the Glaze," available via WebCT) argues that O'Connor offers, in Hazel, a kind of "case history ... a scene of original trauma ... that trauma's effects" (52) and offers a Lacanian reading of the novel that focuses on the novel's depiction of the gaze and anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is defined by the OED as a "distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it appears regular and properly proportioned; a deformation." Perhaps the most famous visual example of anamorphosis is Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where an image of a skull in encrypted near the bottom of the painting.



Mellard argues that O'Connor uses metaphor to effect this same kind of transformation, noting in particular Mrs' Hitchcock's observation of "The outline of a skull under [Haze's ] skin" (10;57). This image introduces one aspect of the novel I want you to consider: its fascination with the visual realm and that fascination translated into writing. From its opening description of Hazel's eyes moving from the window to the carriage aisle the novel adopts, I argue, a cinematic orientation to the representation of its imaginary spaces.

Perhaps equally important is its analysis of the cinematic space in the diegesis. Taulkinham is represented as a city of lights, reminiscent of the signage that dominates the cityscapes of the city symphony film: "PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY" (Chapter 2) and Hazel arrives on the train, as by this point we might anticipate or require. Later Enoch goes to the movies and finds himself engulfed in its "maw." The first film Enoch witnesses concerns "a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control ... only his eyes looked at the screen." The movie palace offers another scene of trauma, one supplemented by the appearance of Gonga, and of Hazel who preaches in front of the Odeon theatre. Gonga, a dimly and debased descendant of King Kong, orients the question of vision around phenomenon of film as he views Enoch through "celluloid eyes."



Marshalling these indices, some lines of flight emerge between:
* the city symphony and King Kong
* the city symphony and Wise Blood
* King Kong and Rose Hobart
* East of Borneo and King Kong
* Kong and Gonga
* writing and film

And one final intersection, the reworking of Wise Blood by John Huston in his 1979 Wise Blood, which we will watch, in part, in class.



A late entry in our catalogue of "city symphony" films, this animated short was shot in 1975.

More from its maker here.

Kaleidoscope, Hypnosis, Snack

Our class on Piccadilly marks the last week of our investigation of city films, which started with a consideration of the "city symphony" and closes with a drift to melodrama in a film that nonetheless recapitulates some of the concerns of the first two city films. Piccadilly's bright lights augur also the move to our next sequence, where we look at transmedial conjunctions of cinematic writing and written cinema through Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.

So to mark today as a kind of intermission, here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.

The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals, a registration of cinema's collective hypnotic.

Jean Cocteau: "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist seance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25).

variously virtual

Victor Burgin: "What we may call the 'cinematic heterotopia' is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as 'a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness'. (The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

Blog entries can be considered part of this heterotopia, in particular for their capacity to orient in another way 'the psychical space of a spectating subject.' Thanks to everyone for their blog entries -- I have a good pile of reading for the next week or so!

Calligraphic Modernism

Scraps of paper are very important to the plot of Piccadilly. In particular, the camera rests on the signature of Shosho, whose contractual relationship to the Piccadilly Club is never quite clarified, as if the matter of monetary loss and gain, ostensibly the engine of the story, can be established in writing but never disclosed with precision. The film's interest in scenes of writing establishes a special link between the written word and the cinematic. We see more action in Wilmot's office than onstage, and we see comparatively lengthy scenes of writing and blotting. Wilmot's blotting might have struck you as odd: it gestures to an archaic technology, the fountain pen, and a temporality of writing that generally escapes observation. When writing with a fountain pen, one either waited for the ink to dry or else blotted the page on a special kind of paper, blotting paper, which was often used as the "desktop" of a writing surface, as it is here. I'll have more to say about writing and in particular the use of calligraphy in Piccadilly. If you haven't yet watched the film, stay tuned for the scene where Shosho signs her contract with both a European signature and a series of characters.

Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.

Rancière: The Ignorant Schoolmaster

In one of his most influential books, Jacques Rancière tells the remarkable story of the "ignorant schoolmaster" to open the question of what he calls "universal teaching." At a time of political crisis a French academic named Jacques Jacotot was forced into exile, and he left his teaching post in Dijon to take up another in the Netherlands. Many of the students who wanted to be taught by him were unable to speak French and he was unable to speak Flemish, so the situation was perplexing. His solution was novel. He found that "[t] here was … no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him," and '[y]et he wanted to respond to their wishes" (1-2); their desire to learn. Jacotot decided to improvise by establishing what Rancière calls "the minimal link of a thing in common" between himself and the students" (2), a link he secured through the use of a novel, written in French, with a parallel translation in Flemish. And what he found was that by reading the book carefully in Flemish, and studying the French, his students were able to decipher the text in French and to learn that language, decipher its grammar and understand something of its meanings. Rancière uses the story of Jacotot to question the role of explication in teaching. He writes:
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.