The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect

Chapter 2. The Two of Us

77 2 The Two of Us The leap of mortality, the salto mortale, an old acrobatic trick and crowd pleaser, goes all the way back to a primitive doubling and replacement ritual in which the priest and his priesthood are simultaneously overcome and renewed through an act of extremity. Nietzsche plays upon it in the Prologue to his Also Sprach Zarathustra: The tight-rope walker had begun his work: he had emerged from a little door and was proceeding across the rope,which was stretched between two towers and thus hung over the people and the market square. Just as he had reached the middle of his course the little door opened again and a brightly-dressed fellow like a buffoon sprang out and followed the former with rapid steps. “Forward, lame-foot!” cried his fearsome voice. . . . With each word he came nearer and nearer to him: but when he was only a single pace behind him, there occurred the dreadful thing that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye: he emitted a cry like a devil and sprang over the man standing in his path. But the latter, when he saw his rival thus triumph, lost his head and the rope; he threw away his pole and fell. . . . (Ansell-Pearson and Large 259–60) The primitive rite upon which this celebrated description stands was familiar in the earliest days of recorded history, and is set forth in Frazer’s The Golden Bough: In the sacred grove [of Nemi] there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen 78 The Eyes Have It to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier. (Frazer I: 8–9) The leaping buffoon in Nietzsche transcends both time and space through the power of his excellent gesture: he triumphs by being both behind and ahead of his competitor at once, by exemplifying both the past and the future. And similarly at Nemi, the prowling priest is both alive and dead, both himself and the negation of himself (by a successor who will slay him), just as this successor is seeker and victor at once, and also not-priest and priest, now, and for eternity. The ritual of the salto mortale is recapitulated, revised, modernized, and itself overcome in the“Circus” ballet of Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (1956; music by Jacques Ibert). Here, in an eighteenth-century French public square done up in magnificent pastels by Alfred Junge and photographed in London in Technicolor by Freddie Young,¹ a forlorn Pierrot (Kelly), caught up in an impossible love-fascination for the ballerina“Columbine ” (Claire Sombert), is vanquished in his efforts by the dark and cunning lover (Igor Youskévitch), who slyly out-woos him. In a particular gesture that references both the Grove of Nemi and the Nietzschean acrobat , the lover shows off by doing an elaborate tightrope routine in which he somersaults both forward and backward while balanced high above the crowd. At twilight, when the mournful Pierrot realizes that there is little hope for him, he climbs up to the rope and tries to walk it himself, tottering pathetically at its center before plummeting to his death. Here, then, the (somewhat callous) lover represents novelty, youth, and the future while Pierrot is the delicate and vulnerable past; and while one body does not exactly leap over the other, there is still a tightrope competition invoking the dangerous flip (it being evident that the lover is merely showing off his virile capacity), and a final unequivocal triumph imbricated with the pathos of lost love. It may be that the unfamiliarity of contemporary audiences with both the form of the commedia dell’arte, in which the ballet is set, and the legendary background of the leaping competition which climaxes the“narrative” led to the extremely cautious reception that the film—or at...