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5.0 out of 5 stars
Where the static art object meets the moving reel, August 16, 2008
This review is from: The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)
The Material Image is concerned with cinematic adaptations of two-dimensional art images, ranging from tableaux vivant to painting, photography, and even literary images, and their impact on narrative and spectator response. When these two-dimensional forms are introduced into the temporally active space of moving pictures, the result is a more complicated visual representation that invites increased spectatorial awareness of the filmic image as a constructed representation rather than as a "true" reflection of reality. The two-dimensional image either textures the narrative, increasing symbolism and visual depth at the moment of representation, or stultifies the narrative, rupturing the illusion of the film text as reality. Peucker also discusses moments of "collapse of the image with the real" (192) that seem implicitly to follow from tromp l'oeil painting, such as when actors break the imaginary fourth wall of the set to address the audience directly, or when the image becomes so compelling that the spectator is somatically affected by it.
Peucker begins with a chapter on the aestheticization of surfaces (drawing from the visual theories of Bazin and Kracauer discussed in her introduction), and quickly moves into subsequent discussions on the role of visual signification in narrative film and its ability to represent reality intertextually by displaying still and moving images, sound, and writing on the screen. Later chapters focus on methods of using static images either to create distance or to draw the viewer into the film, classical and counter- cinematic techniques of representing space and the body, and the visceral impact of layered, fragmented, and mediated film images. While Peucker investigates film's capacity to excite both visceral and cognitive responses from its audience, ultimately her concerns gravitate toward the body as the site of reception for cinematic images that represent violence, the erotic, and the abject.
My favorite chapters were the ones on Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Haneke. In her readings of Hitchcock's films, she explores the relationship between two-dimensional art and death (death as the body's collapse into the world of stasis). She studies Hitchcock's preoccupations with still-life images and surrealism, bodily fragmentation, taxidermy, doubling, the use and placement of mirrors, characters' gazes both within and out of the filmic frame, and the self-reflexive inclusion of cameras in his films. Her second chapter on Hitchcock further explores the impact of characters' gazes into off-screen space, effecting the interpellation of the spectator and causing a figurative collapse between the image and the real.
In her reading of Kubrick's The Shining, Peucker observes the relationship between the hotel's photographs or figurative memory, and the return of the repressed elicited by the family's isolation within the disturbed psyche of the eerily expansive hotel. The space of realism within the film text begins to dissolve into the realm of the phantasmagoric as Jack's experiences collide with his imagination of the hotel's former "life." The still photographs of wild hotel parties from an earlier part of the century seem primed to burst into animation again, but with the emergence of festivity comes violence. Peucker remarks on the juxtaposition between the static photographs and the uncanny materiality of this violence, between Jack's deranged facial expressions and his later frozen grimace in the snow.
The book's longest chapter on Michael Haneke--the one I was reading for-- looks at his entire corpus as a postmodern experiment in bourgeois melodrama and family violence. Peucker argues that Haneke's work explores violence not by making a spectacle of it, but by launching an "assault" on the spectator's senses, including his use of sound and narrative suggestion. In some cases, as in Funny Games, the camera's gaze is carefully averted from violence, so that the most violent scenes of the film are mediated through sound rather than sight. Peucker quotes Haneke in saying that he feels this method of portraying violence actually creates a more powerful audience response than the recycling of overused spectacles of murder and mutation. In Benny's Video, the visual experience of violence is not averted but mediated by an extra layer of video footage, so that the real documentary footage of a pig slaughter unfolds within the diegesis of the film at a second remove--on one of Benny's video tapes, which he obsessively plays again and again. When he later brings a girl to his bedroom and murders her, Peucker remarks that the video transforms from a representation of violence to a source of violence. Benny actually tapes this second murder as well, and the tape later serves as legal evidence against him.
In keeping with the trajectory of her thesis, Peucker argues that while Haneke claims to engage his audiences in a participatory and self-reflexive relationship with his films, his films actually provoke a stronger visceral than cognitive response. However, other aspects of her analysis reveal the director's strong appeals to audience cognition, such as Haneke's signature use of the "rewind" effect in his films. In Benny's Video, Benny plays the film of the pig slaughter forwards and backwards voyeuristically; the fragmented and mediated video image continually reminds the audience that the slaughter is not happening in (Benny's) "real time" and thus allows the audience a certain contemplative distance from the image. In addition, Peucker comments on the film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, in which black-outs in the film text rupture the diegesis and prevent the viewer from re-assembling the fragments of the text into a coherent whole. In one scene, the cinematic frame includes the image of a ping-pong ball machine, which keeps thrusting balls at the camera lens (and hence at the audience). Peucker points out that the ping-pong ball machine is in a sense a mirror image of the camera (both shooting at each other). Here, "the film sets up a mirror relation between character as both player and spectator (who receives images/Ping-Pong balls), and the spectator of the film. Hence, the point at which the film's spectators are most aware of themselves as corporeal is also its most self-reflexive moment, a moment when the film points to its apparatus" (Peucker 140). While Peucker doesn't discuss the opportunities this cinematic self-reflexivity provides for viewer reflection, her reading of the scene clearly implies that the film is constructed to provoke thought as well as feeling. She writes off these experiments as "lip service... paid to self-reflexivity" (132), but she simultaneously claims that "Haneke's films wrest their spectators from passivity by preventing the tears that melodrama seeks to solicit" (156).
I highly recommend The Material Image to anyone interested in film studies or visual theory. The book is unabashedly theoretical without alienating readers who lack a strong background in film theory. Peucker also makes it easy for students to excerpt relevant chapters and save the rest for later.
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