Incorporating Images (ebook)

Argumento de Incorporating Images (ebook)

Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in film's relation to its rival arts, Brigitte Peucker analyzes central issues involved in generic boundary crossing as they pertain to film and situates them in a theoretical framework. The figure of the human body takes center stage in Peucker's innovative study, for it is through this figure that the conjunction of literary and painterly discourses persistently articulates itself. It is through the human body, too, that film's consciousness of itself as a hybrid text and as a "machine for simulation" makes itself deeply felt.

In films ranging from Weimar cinema through Griffith, Hitchcock, and Greenaway, Peucker probes issues in aesthetics problematized by Diderot and Kleist, among others. She argues that the introduction of movement into visual representation occasioned by film brings with it an underlying tension suggestive of castration and death. Peucker goes on to demonstrate how the encounter between narrative and image is both gendered and sexualized, rendering film a "monstrous" hybrid. In a final section, she explores in specific cinematic texts the permeable boundary between the real and representation, suggesting how effects such as tableau vivant and trompe l'oeil figure sexuality and death.

Originally published in 1995.

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"Peuker takes her bearings from the writings of Kleist and Diderot for this agile, wide-ranging reflection on film's intrinsic hybridity and its uneasy relation with the body."--Sight & Sound0List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Bodies and Boundaries 3 Ch. 1 Movement, Fragmentation, and the Uncanny 8 Unnatural Conjunctions: The Heterogeneous Text 10 "Its Strange Mixture of the Natural and the Artificial": The Presence of Kleist 15 "Bits of Bodies": The Fragmented Text 17 Man and the Cinema Machine: Magician, Psychoanalyst, Scientist: The Case of Dr. Caligari 21 Fritz Lang, the Apparatus, and the Fissured Text 31 Magician and Surgeon 42 "Knife Phobia" 44 "Doing It with Scissors": Dismemberment in Hitchcock 45 Ch. 2 Monstrous Births: The Hybrid Text 55 Miscegenation and the Sister Arts: Griffith's Broken Blossoms 57 Hitchcock's "Half-Caste" 67 Murnau 73 Cinematic Vampirism 73 Painting and Repression 79 Herzog's Unassimilable Bodies 88 Witchcraft, Vision, and Incest: Dreyer's Day of Wrath 94 The Phantom of the Cinema: Body and Voice 101 Ch. 3 Incorporation: Images and the Real 104 Trompe l'Oeil Effects 104 Cinema and the Real 114 Body Language: Kleist's and Rohmer's Marquise 119 Hitchcock as Pygmalion 130 Wings of Desire: Reality, Text, Embodiment 137 Kleist, Tableau Vivant, and the Pornographic 143 Fassbinder's Cinema of Mixed Modes: Tableau Vivant and the Real 147 Incorporation in Greenaway 156 Painful Images 166 Afterword: Ut pictura poesis 168 Notes 175 Index 215