American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between by Rebecca A. Sheehan

Author:Rebecca A. Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Disassembling Vision Through Dimensional In-Betweens

The filmmakers of this chapter commonly use cinema to generate embodied uncertainty on the part of the spectator, and do so to incite renewed encounters with and new positions vis-à-vis the known (either the medium itself or a familiar set of images). Using cinema’s illusion of movement and of depth, its standard projection onto a rectangle containing images that generally align with the x-, y-, and z-axes determined by this shape, these filmmakers interrupt, defamiliarize, and rearrange these relations, creating experiences in which the spectator is uncertain as to how to comprehend the images on screen (as flat, as deep, as up, as down, as moving, as still). These films thus ask their spectator to assemble and reassemble the space they present to her over the course of their duration and, more importantly, to orient and to re-orient her body in relation to their images. Part of the avant-garde’s use of cinema to create such a spatially discombobulated spectator cultivates aspects of what Tom Gunning famously called the “cinema of attractions”—pre-1907 films that tended to acknowledge the spectator’s presence and that frequently toyed with the tendencies of early cinema-goers to miscomprehend the space of the screen as an extension of the space of their real, three-dimensional world, not yet having fully learned cinema’s illusionistic nature.1 A particular genre of these early films is singularly instructive for understanding how the American avant-garde films in this chapter recruit the spectator’s body and what they do with it once they have it engaged within the world of the screen. Trick films like Edwin S. Porter’s What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901), Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900), and even the Lumière brothers’ early experiment in realism, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), play upon extending the space of the screen into that of the theater, exploiting the spectator’s sensation of feeling physically embodied in the film he or she is watching. Porter’s film begins in a train car where a white man flirts with a white woman sitting next to her black maid. The train enters a tunnel and the screen goes black, extending the darkness of the theater and making the audience feel as if they are in the tunnel with the characters, in suspense as to what they will see when the train emerges back into the light. The train leaves the tunnel and the man is kissing the black maid instead of the white woman, a racist joke. In The Big Swallow, a man approaches the camera talking until his mouth eventually covers the entire screen; we see the cameraman fall over this man’s teeth and into his mouth as if we are being swallowed. In How It Feels to Be Run Over, a film likely inspired by the common reaction to Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, at screenings of which spectators frequently squirmed in their seats thinking a train traveling from

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