The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place

2 Voyages of Life

The Voyage of Life as Protocinema When I arrived in Utica, New York, in fall 1971 to teach film studies and American literature at Utica College of Syracuse University, I brought with me a set of aesthetic prejudices—common to my generation, I’m sure—that led me to admire the twentieth-century art at Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (the collection includes paintings by Dalì, Picasso, Gris, Mondrian, Sheeler, Hopper, Pollock, and Rothko) as fervently as I despised the highlight of the institute’s collection of nineteenth-century art: the 1840 version of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life (see figs. 3–6).1 Cole’s four-part exposition of the stages of human life—“Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” “Old Age”— seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, in its representationalism, in its theology, c h a p t e r 2 Voyages of Life 23 and in its assumption—an assumption obviously typical of most nineteenthcentury art—that human life was the life of men (“Manhood,” indeed!). During the following years, when I sent students to the institute and asked them to write essays about what they saw, I became accustomed to their admiration for Cole, whose accessibility they often used as a weapon in their attacks on the Institute’s “obscure,” “self-indulgent” modernist painters. As a teacher, I was simultaneously bored and excited by this response: that they inclined toward the easy, old-fashioned Cole paintings provided me with an opportunity to school them on the formal and ideological dimensions of the more challenging moderns. Gradually, I came to realize that, regardless of its “old-fashioned” elements (and to some degree because of them), The Voyage of Life was “modern” in its own way: in particular, it had enough in common with cinema to be consid24 V O Y A G E S O F L I F E Figure 3. Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Childhood (1839– 40), oil on canvas, 51£" × 78"; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.105. ered, if not precinematic, at least protocinematic. Most obviously, Cole’s images had width-to-height dimensions not so di¤erent from the 16mm films I was presenting in my film classes; and like most commercial films, they focused on the development of a single character.2 At first, it seemed a stretch to see Cole’s paintings as cinematic in any but the most general sense, if only because his four compositions are presented in extreme “long shot” (a function of Cole’s interest in seeing human development as part of nature’s divinely instituted grand scheme), a far cry from the modern commercial cinema ’s usual articulation of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups. As I watched students engage The Voyage of Life, however, I realized that those willing to explore the individual images of the work and their relationships to each other inevitably developed an experiential process analogous to what modern film directors achieve through editing: that is, most viewers see each 25 V O Y A G E S O F L I F E Figure 4. Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Youth (1840), oil on canvas, 52™" × 78™"; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.106. of the sections in an “establishing shot” and then move in to make their own “medium shots” and “close-ups.”3 Of course, what viewers discover as they explore the individual paintings is that Cole’s articulations of the particular qualities that define each individual stage of human life make sense only in juxtaposition to the qualities defined in the other three paintings. As a result, many viewers move back and forth from one painting to another—creating their own intercutting between the four stages of life. Further, Cole’s decision to use four successive paintings with considerable time gaps between the stages of life depicted is analogous to the way in which film editing condenses time as a means of generating storytelling energy. The more I’ve examined The Voyage of Life, the more analogies to cinema I’ve discovered. For example, with benefit of twentieth-century hindsight, we can see that the four paintings are “edited” together in a manner that recalls a 26 V O Y A G E S O F L I F E Figure 5. Thomas Cole’s The...