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Introduction: Baring the Device
- University of Texas Press
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Introduction: Baring the Device Art (and by this I mean the ‘‘other’’ visual and plastic arts: painting, sculpture , photography, architecture, etc.) has been reflected and represented in, thematized by and structured into narrative films in myriad ways throughout the history of cinema. This book considers a range of such incorporations, drawn from the postwar classical and contemporary narrative cinema—European and American. I am particularly interested in attending to patterns relating to the signification and symptomatization of sex, gender, sexuality, and psyche in the way art and artists figure in film, as I believe these to be the basic problems from which much else in human nature and culture derives. The ‘‘otherness’’ of the other visual arts has, to cinema, a significant, although rarely simple or directly correlative relationship to the way that other ‘‘othernesses’’—primarily, but not exclusively gender difference—function in the larger culture and society within which cinema operates. Committed to no one methodology, I have found a complex of formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods—those in which I was educated and am, for better or for worse, most fluent—necessary for pulling apart the tangled relationships I see around art and psyche in cinema. If I employ no one single methodology per se, there is method here, however , and that method is essentially art historical. From the field in which I was trained, I inherit a tradition of close looking and close description—at and of form, structure, and style—and ways of approaching historical and cultural patterns in art and imagery: the iconography and iconology so aptly defined by one of art history’s great innovators, Erwin Panofsky.1 Panofsky, to the eternal surprise of many who think of art history as a conservative and stodgy discipline , was of course a rather early and very eloquent articulator of the cinema’s close relationship to the other arts, who perceived the applicability of art historical method to cinematic objects.2 But Panofsky was not my teacher. Among those who were, foremost for me are Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss, from 2 Art in the Cinematic Imagination whom I learned that the disciplinary rigor of art historical method need not be abandoned under the influence of new intellectual paradigms. Nochlin’s brilliant feminism and Krauss’s incisive and protean critical insights are always rooted to the object and its problematic nature by investigation, fascination, and close regard. They are my exemplars. Methods and attitudes about seeing and interpreting objects learned from them and others have strongly influenced my viewing , teaching, and writing in the field of cinema studies. For me theory never precedes my interest in an object but always follows from it. There is a small but significant body of scholarly work that has been done in and around this border area between cinema and the other visual arts in the past decade, including John Walker’s Art and Artists on Screen, Brigitte Peucker’s Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts, Angela Dalle Vacche’s Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film, Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire Me: Das Bildnis in Film, and volumes of collected essays edited by Patrice Petro (Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video), Dudley Andrew (The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography), Dietrich Neumann (Film Architecture: From ‘‘Metropolis’’ to ‘‘Blade Runner’’), Linda Ehrlich and David Desser (Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan), and Angela Dalle Vacche (The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History ), as well as a number of landmark exhibitions. I hope and believe that my work contributes to this meaningful interdisciplinary trend in several ways. My background in art history enables me not only to approach the film object art historically, but to comprehend and elucidate the art objects within it. I recognize art historical citations and investigate the particularity of the works that are shown, be those relatively minor elements of the mise-en-scène or deeply imbricated with the narrative. I hope that my knowledge of modern and contemporary art, in particular, has enabled me to represent the complexity of its representations on film with sensitivity. Another contribution I hope this study makes is in connecting this interdisciplinary project to one of the dominant paradigms in cinema theory: psychoanalytic feminism. I find the basic tenets of psychoanalysis deeply persuasive and I am a feminist: I believe gender is the foundational difference that has ordered human...