Moving Images and Historical Consciousness

THE INSISTENT FRINGE:MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

ABSTRACT

Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical con-sciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of bothshowing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argueswith Roland Barthes’s critique of the duplicity of the “insistent fringes” that supposedlyreduce and naturalize “Roman-ness” to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes pre-sumes a “certainty” in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it mythological—that is,“it goes without saying.” Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue thatthe “insistent fringe” is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a “dialecti-cal image”: a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it con-cretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showingare privileged in medias res—in a culture saturated in images and textuality, in compet-ing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparkedand constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the “insistent fringe” is preciselynot clear-cut—and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as alimit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domainswhich it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hard-ly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywoodcinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They co-exist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratio—thus constituting the “rationality” of contemporary historical consciousness.

History decomposes into images, not into narratives.—Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk

[W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements “below which nothing morecanbe done except display,” and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possi-ble to showing.

—Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

IN MEDIAS RES

In his 1954 essay on “The Romans in Films,” Roland Barthes points to and gloss-es the “insistent fringes” that repetitively mark the foreheads of all the Romanmen in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953). What does Barthes make ofthis hirsute cinematic generalization?

Quite simply the label of Roman-ness. We therefore see here the mainspring of theSpectacle—the sign—operating in the open. The frontal lock overwhelms one with evi-dence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent: theactors speak, act, torment themselves, debate “questions of universal import,” without los-ing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibil-ity. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the oceanand the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, every-one is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, whereRomans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.1

In our experience of visual media, it is the image of “things” that first occu-pies the center of our consciousness, that mediates between the world and ourunderstanding of it. Borrowed, to be turned with purpose against his condemna-tion of it, the “insistent fringe” of my title thus refers not only to the reduction ofcomplex historical temporalization Barthes locates at the supposed “naturalized”site—and sight—of a Roman hairstyle in an American film. Here, I mean it alsoto trouble and critique this view: a view that far too quickly judges the iconic andsynchronic signification of moving, yet “fixed,” images in popular films (andpopular consciousness) as “mythological,” “ahistorical,” and “bourgeois,” andthe spectators who watch them as downright dumb, historically befuddled, andideologically suspect. This seems to me too easy, dismissive, and elitist a per-spective—particularly if we want to understand how historical consciousnessemerges in a culture in which we are all completely immersed in images (if alsosurrounded by print), and what this might mean not only to the historical future,but also to the relevance and function of what is legitimated as “proper” (that is,academic) historiography.

In the context of the American culture in which both filmgoers and historianscurrently live, the historian’s traditional iconomachy seems feeble in its injunc-tions, its hostility to images irrelevant to the life-world of both filmgoers and his-torians alike. Indeed, filmgoers and historians have become one and the same.Immersed in a culture in which the proliferation of visual representations hasaccelerated and understanding of “textuality” has become pervasive, perpetuallyconfronted with contestation between competing representational claims andforms, filmgoers have become unprecedentedly savvy about (mis)representationand have learned the lessons of Hayden White’s MetaHistory even if they’venever read it. That is, filmgoers know that histories are rhetorically constructednarratives, that “events” and “facts” are open to various uses and multiple inter-pretations. And, as filmgoers have not been able to escape the lessons of histori-ography, so, on their side (and try as they might), historians have not been ableto escape the lessons of the movies and television. Similarly caught up in theacceleration of “medias res” and visual representation, immersed “in the middleof” the “things” of moving images, perpetually confronted with and “over-whelmed” by screen “evidence,” even historians have succumbed—often against

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 5

1. Roland Barthes, “The Romans in Films,” in Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York,1972), 26.

both their injunction and will—to the seemingly immediate presence and powerof the moving image to, at least in the moment, “naturally” persuade one of itscause. Which is to say, historians are often moved by movies—even historically“inaccurate” ones. Today, then, in our culture, the binary oppositions commonlyposited between the transparency of the image and the opacity of the word,between “mythology” and “history,” between “filmgoers” and “historians” nolonger hold.

ESTABLISHING SHOT

The mise-en-scène is a screen, in this instance the site of a scholarly electronicdiscussion group called H-Film (the “H” standing for History), one of a largenumber of such groups subsumed under H-Net based at the University ofChicago (and endorsed by the American Historical Association, the Organizationof American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association). No imageshere: just written text—even if its subject matter is the cinema.

What follows is a true historical account—perhaps, more appositely, anauthentic historical account. That is, even though I shall elide the specific dates,names, and places that might identify the participants, it is an account that, Idaresay, will “ring true” and resonate in many of my readers as it did for me. Theevent at its center not only provoked this present meditation, but also demon-strated that, although they may be differentiated to some degree, there is nofuture in opposing mythology to history, filmgoer to historian.

Not so very long ago, someone (it could have been a professor, an independentscholar, a student) posted a short inquiry to H-Film asking for recommendationsof films that “realistically” depicted the Middle Ages. Edited for brevity, thesewere some of the responses (also from professors, independent posters, and stu-dents):

I’m afraid that period is a little before my time, so I can’t speak to it personally. I’ll askone of my friends if he can recall what it was like. But seriously, three films stand out inmy mind that are generally regarded as successfully conveying the atmosphere of theMiddle Ages: The Return of Martin Guerre (Vigne, 1982), Beatrice (Tavernier, 1988), andAndrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966).

Maybe The Lion in Winter (Harvey, 1968)—at least what reading I’ve done about themain characters suggests they got them right as people (although not as historicalevents—there was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year). There seems enough muckand dirt and rushes on the floors to suggest something of the twelfth century.

Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966) has the most realistic medieval battle thatI’ve ever seen (not that I’ve seen very many...;-) I’d also suggest Robin and Marian(Lester, 1976), The Advocate (Megahey, 1994), The Name of the Rose (Annaud, 1986),Flowers of St. Francis (Rossellini, 1950), and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam,1975) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) and The Virgin Spring (1958)—ifyou equate realism with graphic depictions of squalor.

I think Gilliam’s Jabberwocky (1977) and New Zealand’s The Navigator: A MedievalOdyssey (Ward, 1988) both contain quite realistic depictions of medieval life.

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See the essay on this topic by Lorraine Attreed and James Powers in the January 1997issue of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives. Many suggestions.

Without much thinking, a quick comparison would be between Braveheart (Gibson,1995) and First Knight (Zucker, 1995). Braveheart for the most part had the feel in termsof language, behavior, attitudes. In close ups, you could see dirt on their hands, since theydidn’t wash their hands as often. Food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl, eaten with-out utensils but by dipping bread in it. Lots of mud, dirt, rain. They had poorer sheltersthen unless they were wealthy. First Knight, by comparison, seems glossed-over andshiny modern day. Everyone was sparkling clean, the set was elaborate, and hardly any-one got dirty. Even the torture scene in Braveheart seemed accurate; the torture imple-ments look dull and dirty, which would have been more painful, and the dwarfs came out“to entertain” the crowd before the events began. This all seems historically accurate.

I am not an expert on Scottish history, but a pile of distortions occurred in Braveheartto make Wallace appear like a typical hero of an action film. Correspondingly, Robert theBruce was made to look like a petty crook who implausibly defeats the English army atBannockburn thus gaining recognition for Scotland’s independence without any merit ofhis own. Some degree of surface authenticity apart, the film made little attempt to rendera genuine account of the historical events. I would suggest that this kind of adventure film,historical or otherwise, has no such ambitions nor does it seriously pretend to. In thissense, they are not lies. They are just entertainment.

I would add Sorceress (Schiffman, 1987). What distinguishes that film and MartinGuerre from the others thus cited, which have few redeeming values as “realistic depic-tions of medieval life” (unless you define medieval life in terms of “squalor,” knights inarmor, and the like) is the active participation of historians in their making. Films such asFlowers of St. Francis and The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) also are reasonablyfaithful to the history and lives they depict. Other films (biopics) like Becket (Glenville,1964), The Lion in Winter, or the Bergman Joan of Arc (Fleming, 1948) and Seberg SaintJoan (Preminger, 1957) are a melange of cinematic (or in these cases playwright) inven-tion and intermittent historical fidelity.

I want to second Tavernier’s Beatrice and add Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976), forwhich he purportedly hypnotized his actors to get them thinking outside twentieth centu-ry culture, progress, etc. Both films concentrate on the idea of difference, making strange,in order to put forth the idea that another, disconnected time is being framed. By doing so,they make the representation of a past we cannot possibly know (except through its doc-uments) as much the focus as is the “realistic” depiction of that past.

I suggest a television source: the “Brother Cadfael” series on the PBS show Mystery—a little less dirt than reality, but artifacts and terms are in correct context.

After this, the postings on “depictions of medieval life” petered out as such around of postings usually do, and the issues of historical realism, historical accu-racy, and historical authenticity were displaced onto yet another set of screeningsof the past.

SUPERIMPOSITION

This historiographic heteroglossia, this dialogic layering of various voices fromthe more or less historically informed, might well be expected in an electronic


discussion group. H-Film serves as a reasonably open and democratic screen sitethat displays the competitions, coincidences, and slippage of various languagesand discourses that constitute our perceived and expressed experience of both“popular films” and “academic history”—not only on the movie screen, or in ourclassrooms as both professors and students, but also in our waking lives. Theselanguages and discourses may work according to quite different (and oftenincommensurable) logics, and when they engage each other, as Mikhail Bakhtinputs it: “[T]hey all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement oneanother, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. As such, theyencounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people.”2 Thiscertainly seems the case with the discussion above. Yet what emerges cannot besaid to exist merely as a hodgepodge of voices or only as symptomatic of anirreconcilable argument between two incommensurable logics. Indeed, insofar asthey do not simply coexist, but significantly “intersect each other in a variety ofways” within this electronic conversation, I would argue that these seemingly“contradictory” and “oppositional” discourses form what Bakhtin calls a “newsocially typifying ‘language’” or discourse.3

Indeed, I will go further and suggest that the “new socially typifying” dis-course that emerges on H-Film is not all that different in its heteroglossic dynam-ics from similar discourses in the culture at large as it constitutes and engageswhat we might call the “historical field.” Contradictions and oppositions are notreally resolved or synthesized in the debate over what might constitute “realis-tic” historiographic representation of the Middle Ages in the cinema or in thelarger arguments about the conditions under which cinematic representation canenter the “historical field” to do “proper” historiography at all. Rather, the dis-cussion on H-Film presents a “new socially typifying” discourse that dramatizesand reveals contemporary historical consciousness—and consequently contem-porary historiographic discourse—as palimpsestic. One discourse does not“undo” another: the acquisition of what counts as “legitimate” historical knowl-edge does not “replace” that historical knowledge which is deemed “illegiti-mate,” “mythological.” Indeed, as indicated both within and across the postingsabove, our encounters with a variety of historicized images and narratives froma variety of textual sources both layer themselves and sit beside each other as thehistorical field—and none of them can be completely erased. In the H-Film dia-logue, for example, the posting on The Lion in Winter indicates the writer’ssophisticated historical knowledge and awareness of the film’s misrepresentationof specific events (“there was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year”), yet weare also told that the film got the main historical figures “right as people” whichis an extremely peculiar (and vaguely grounded) assessment for a proper histori-an to make; furthermore, the writer falls, almost unself-consciously, into the per-suasive materiality of the mise-en-scene, finding the “muck and dirt and rushes

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2. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M.Bakhtin, transl. M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist and C. Emerson (Austin, 1981), 292.

3. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 291.

on the floors” evocative of “the twelfth century.” What is noteworthy is that thispalimpsest of ways of knowing the past is less sedimented than it is effluvial,unstable, and shifting. Thus, however knowledgeable and ironically self-aware,even the academic historian is susceptible to being overwhelmed by Barthes’s“insistent”—and mythological—fringe. This is what we learn by entertainingseriously the H-Film dialogue as both a microcosm of the contemporary histori-cal field at large and a macrocosm of the historical consciousness of both the con-temporary historian and filmgoer.

Consider, for example, how the naiveté of the initial inquiry evokes in respon-dents a playful reflexivity and awareness vis-à-vis the problematic status of anyclaims to “realism” that might be made by the cinematic representation of a his-torical period pre-existing cinema. Indeed, in one instance using the newly-gen-erated markers of computer diacritics to indicate an ironic “wink” about what isto follow, the play extends so as to privilege—as the only test or “text” of real-ism—existential presence and its discursive corollaries: witnessing and testify-ing: “Chimes at Midnight. . .has the most realistic medieval battle that I’ve everseen (not that I’ve seen that many...;-).” Despite these self-aware disclaimers,however, everyone enters the “history” game—recommending films “about theMiddle Ages” from the ridiculous to the sublime (which is which is not at allclear). These litanies of films include—most often without remark on their gener-ic differences—those cinematic texts that dramatize actual historical events(however or not accurately or authentically), those that dramatize mythologicalhistory, and those that dramatize historical fantasy. Here and there, the chidingvoices of academic historians emerge: “The facts are inaccurate.” “Read thisarticle in the American Historical Association’s journal for a real gloss on thesefilms as history.”

There is, however, a theme that runs throughout. Much like Barthes’s “insis-tent fringe” that signifies and fixes “Roman-ness,” a general and generalizingimage comes to signify and fix the “real” Middle Ages: the image of what wemight call “insistent dirt and squalor.” Evoking a particular and concrete imagethat condenses historic event, historical narrative, historiographic account intosomething more general, more “mythological,” this image underlies (even whenmade explicit) yet also overwhelms “with evidence” the heteroglossic discours-es of H-Film’s historical field. Here, then, we find the “mainspring of theSpectacle—the sign—operating in the open.” The “muck and dirt and rushes onthe floor,” the “graphic depictions of squalor,” the “dirt on their hands,” the“mud, dirt, rain,” “overwhelms” the participants in H-Film with what apparent-ly does count as historical “evidence.” That is, “no one can doubt” (even as theydo) that such descriptions place us “in” the Middle Ages. And, to slightly para-phrase Barthes (whose argument, for the moment, we are following here), thiscertainty seems permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debatequestions of universal import, without losing, thanks to the dirt displayed on theirgrubby faces and hands, the squalor of their houses and surroundings, any oftheir historical plausibility. Thus, as Barthes would have it: “[N]o matter, every-


one is reassured.” Whatever their differences, even in the midst of debate, con-tradictions, competing narratives and intentions, scholars and students, academ-ic historians or historically-interested film goers alike, all are “installed in thequiet certainty of a universe without duplicity,” where and when the Middle Agesare the Middle Ages “thanks to the most legible of signs”: insistent dirt andsqualor. And this sign’s self-evidence, its insistence, like the fringes of Romanhair, would seem to synthesize and “fix” the heteroglossic flux of the contempo-rary historical field into a solid, reductive, and concrete mass—that is, into aniconic image which, through its repetition, overwhelms contingency and destroysthe specific meaning of time across time. In medias res, is this what has becomeof history? Or worse (from the view of historians), is this what has become ofhistoriography?

MONTAGE

In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss asks parallel questions thataddress not only the specific “values” of academic historiography, but also theunexplored historiographic value of popular cultural objects and, indeed, ofmateriality itself:

Can academicians . . . , for whom scholarly meticulousness is all that is required of intel-lectual responsibility, be trusted as the guardians and transmitters of the cultural heritage?And more, can we view seriously, with reverence, the discarded material objects of massculture as monuments to the utopian hope of past generations, and to its betrayal? Whowill teach us these truths, and in what form shall they be passed on to those who comeafter us?4

Consider the following. On New Year’s Eve, at the end of nearly everyevening television news broadcast, the “historic events” of the year are gatheredtogether and presented in a series of moving images underscored by sound bitesand music. On December 31, 1996 in Los Angeles, for example, the local NBCaffiliate offered the following litany of unidentified images that marked the yearand made it sacred:

—A scene of flood waters and partially-immersed homes (presumably in the mid-West)—A scene of wreckage from an airplane (presumably TWA Flight 800)—A scene showing a massive blizzard (presumably in the mid-West)—A scene of (presumably) hostages walking out of a building (presumably the

Japanese embassy in Peru) —Bill Clinton at a podium—Bob Dole shaking hands—O.J. Simpson in a courtroom—A scene of a raging fire (presumably in Southern California)—Michael Jackson smiling with his new wife—Michael Jackson smiling with his new baby

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4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 336.

—Madonna dressed in 1940s clothing (presumably a shot from the movie Evita)—Madonna smiling with her new baby—Princess Diana looking grim (presumably after her divorce from Prince Charles)—Boris Yeltsin dancing (presumably after recovery from his recent heart surgery)—A mass of people dancing the “macarena”—A shot of a rooftop with people looking upward at a giant spaceship (definitely from

Independence Day)—A scene of Yankee ballplayers hugging each other (presumably after winning the

World Series)

There seems very little reason—if some rhyme—in this montage of imagesmeant to evoke both the year’s “history” and its remembrance. “History” here isnot even offered as acausal chronicle: no linear temporality dictates the editorialorder of these images that mark “historic” events. Emplotment, too, seemsvague, sporadic—briefly organized around catastrophe at one point, then aroundcelebrity at another, neither strong enough to render narrative comprehension ofthe “year” as a whole. Furthermore, the abstraction of each image makes of itboth something hermetic and temporally general (“any” fire, “some” moment ofMadonna’s life)—yet it also insists upon evoking other forms of knowledgeexternal to it to inform it with a historical specificity that, given its abstraction,can never be quite fixed or certain. (That is, the crash site and wreckage I see isnot definitely, but only presumably, TWA Flight 800, any of my certainty aboutit coming from the insistent repetition of that scene not in my experience, but inprevious televisual mediations.) In some ways, what emerges here seems pre-cisely an expression and evocation of what Claude Lévi-Strauss has identified as“primitive thought,” whose peculiarity is that “its object is to grasp the world asboth a synchronic and a diachronic totality.”5 And, yet, the organizing schema forcreating order and making meaning here is neither totalizing nor analogic (asLévi-Strauss characterizes the “savage mind”). Instead of making meaning fromthe worldly correspondences and continuities found by those deeply embedded“in the middle of things,” we who live in the mass-mediated and virtual cultureof images like the New Year’s Eve montage make meaning from the iconic cor-respondences found analytically abstracted in medias res. While the montage asa whole does seem to “grasp” the past year as “both a synchronic and diachron-ic totality,” each of its images is complete, hermetic, and encrypted—temporallydiscontinuous, if contiguous, with those that surround it. Thus, both the parts andthe whole of the montage call forth a temporalizing hermeneutic, one bent lesson understanding its analogical correspondences than on unpacking the meaningof its iconic abstraction and density.

In a work that considers the significance of visual iconicity to political culturein medias res, S. Paige Baty makes a distinction relevant to understanding thecomplex constitution and operations of both the “insistent fringe” and the NewYear’s Eve montage in provoking popular historical consciousness:


5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), 263.

For stories, figures, and identities to be transmissible as icons, they must first be com-pressed into units able to quickly circulate through the channels of mass mediation. I callthese units mediaphemes. The mediapheme is the most common unit of communicationin mass- mediated iconographic modes of remembering. . . . Mediaphemes are quickencapsulations; once a story, person, or event is translated into mediapheme form, it rico-chets through the channels of mass mediation with ease. Mediaphemes may becomeicons, but they rarely do; they tend to last as long as a story, issue, or person is “hot.”Icons, in contrast, outlast single, short-lived versions of an event, character, or history:they are the sites for repeated stagings of narratives, the sites on which the past, present,and future may be written. The mass-mediated mode of iconographic remembering relieson both icons and mediaphemes in the construction of the remembered world.6

Barthes’s “insistent fringe” is clearly an icon: in its repeated stagings (not onlyon the screen, but also art historically), it has become a site for—and the sightof—Roman-ness of a particular (if generalized) period. The New Year’s Evemontage, however, mixes mediaphemes—people dancing the macarena, BobDole shaking hands—with icons: on the one hand, unidentifiable and generaliz-ing floods and fires standing for specific and various natural disasters, on theother, Madonna and Michael Jackson in further stagings of themselves.

What is evidenced on my television set (both on New Year’s Eve and all yearlong) is a faith in the communicative and affective power of the visual icon as ahistoriographic form: on the one hand, its power to condense the diachrony of ahistorical narrative into an abstracted, synchronically dense—and thus moving—fixity of a historical “moment” and, on the other, its power to evoke from this“momentous” density and “monumental” concretion a sense not only of generalhistorical temporality and narrative, but also of a certain (yet unfixed) historicalspecificity. As a historiographic (rather than a merely poetic) form, the medi-apheme and visual icon here aggregate and constitute as concrete a whole his-torical field: they mobilize both specific historic instants and general historicaleventfulness; they paradigmatically offer up a site—and the sight—of multiplepossible narratives for the syntagmatic unfolding of various historiographic tra-jectories. They also evoke the very contexts and forms of historiographic expres-sion they themselves lack: a specific historical narrative, an elaboration and inter-pretation that demands more determinate language. Thus, as a sign of “history,”in its attempts at overdetermination, the visual icon (as differentiated from themediapheme) is always insistent (like the fringe) upon its underdetermination;that is, within its field, we are truly trans-fixed—always also led elsewhere: toother images, to other narratives, to words.

The iconicity of this New Year’s montage and its historiographic operationswould seem to stand, then, less as a clear-cut expression of a mythic or “primi-tive” collapse of history into the totalizing or analogic presence of “the thingsthemselves” than as some new and highly complex mutation of thoughtimmersed and grounded in a pervasive (if unself-conscious) awareness of repre-sentation and intertextuality. Each iconic “historical” image (and the “insistent

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6. S. Paige Baty, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (Berkeley, 1995), 60.

fringe” is one) operates only tangentially as an index of its referent; rather, as inthe case of highly abstracted religious icons, its primary function is to constitutean abstract and contemplative site, a “historical field.” This mode of thought, Iwould argue, has become the dominant model of popular historical conscious-ness in contemporary America’s over-textualized and ever-accelerating medias-cape, and it embraces visual imagery not analogically, but pre-analytically—or,to put it in more precise phenomenological terms, in a synoptic operation of pre-conscious analysis. Insofar as we have become a culture completely familiar withthe practices and manipulations of mediation, the visual icon has become lessand less secure and trustworthy as denotation, as an “image of,” and more andmore the historical and historicizing circumscription of a spatial site that boundsand condenses without necessarily synthesizing a set of variously related, “pos-sible” narratives. It is this iconic historical logic that underlies not only the“insistent fringe” and the New Year’s Eve montage, but also the “new sociallytypifying “language” or discourse found on H-Film.

Thus, although it may sound heretical—indeed perverse in relation to theacademy’s general disdain not only for “mass culture,” but also for the “mass-es”—I am arguing that we at least entertain the thought that the iconic powerpossessed by this New Year’s Eve montage might be read not merely as a mani-festation of bourgeois nostalgia generalizing the past, but also as a calling up of,and provocation to, historical consciousness. If we were to follow Benjaminrather than Barthes, these fragments of the past year offer, perhaps, less “adegraded spectacle”7 than a “dialectical image.”8 Indeed, Benjamin suggests thatto understand the past in its relation to the present, historians would do better touse “a visual, not a linear logic”—with “concepts. . . imagistically constructed,according to the cognitive principles of montage.”9 Montage generates intellec-tual and critical meaning by the juxtaposition and collision—not continuity—ofabstracted images. Thus, Benjamin believed: “Historical objects are first consti-tuted by being ‘blasted’ out of the historical continuum. They have a ‘monado-logical structure,’ into which ‘all the forces and interests of history enter on areduced scale.’”10 These “forces” and “interests” are circumscribed and concret-ed in the “dialectical image”—that historical field which contains without resolv-ing the contradictions of the image-object as fossil (the visible remains of the pastas “ur-phenomena”), as fetish (constituting “mythic phantasmagoria, the arrestedform of history”), as wish image (a “transitory, dream form” of the potential for“the ‘dialectic’ of awakening”), and as ruin (the “rubble” of past wish imageswhich sit as “loosened building blocks . . . out of which a new order can be con-structed”).11 However crude, the New Year Eve’s montage (its own narrative con-


7. Barthes, “The Romans in Film,” 28.8. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 210-212.9. Ibid., 218. My emphasis.10. Ibid., 219.11. Ibid., 211-212.

stituting a “wish image”) seems to strive not merely for the nostalgia of “auldlang syne,” but also for a “dialectic of awakening.”

FLASHBACK

Raising the challenge that the cinema poses to traditional historiography, histori-an Robert Rosenstone writes:

Surely I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large reallyknow or care about history. . . . Or to wonder if our history—scholarly, scientific, mea-sured—fulfills the need for that larger History, that web of connections to the past thatholds a culture together. . . . Or to worry if our history really relates us to our own cultur-al sources. . . . 12

These are significant concerns, indeed.As a child born into American culture a decade before the last half of the twen-

tieth century, I have a great (and self-defensive) investment in the palimpsesticrelation—at times, the contradictions and, at times, the conflation—of mytho-logical and historical consciousness. Like most of my cultural consociates, at anearly age, I was overtaken by moving images—by their ability to tell me thingsby showing them to me, by their spectacular narratives of display. It is hardlysurprising, then, that, although I read a good deal of historical fiction, was fre-quently (and happily) taken to art museums to look at paintings of people andevents in the past, and greatly enjoyed historical documentaries on television, Iadmit to not having really known or cared much about “academic” and exposi-tory history until rather late in my life.

In grade school, we had to memorize dates and remember who had foughtwhat battles and signed which treaties; uninterested in what seemed to me hol-low and timeless historical acts and figures, I was more curious about “real” peo-ple “back then” and wondered whether they laughed and what they ate and woreand if they used forks. So, forgetting the substance or import of some such his-torical activity as “colonization” or moral imperative as “Manifest Destiny,” Iwent off to the movies to watch a past unfold in which people drank wine fromjeweled goblets, ripped apart roasted meats with their hands or swords, andsopped huge rounds of bread in the ambiguous contents of rough wooden bowls.(This particular visual marking of material interest is hardly uncommon or mere-ly generational for a culture in medias res: hence, the student—more than fortyyears later on H-Film—noting Braveheart’s historical accuracy because itshowed that, in the Middle Ages, “food was often a soupy mixture in a bowleaten without utensils but by dipping bread in it.”) At any rate, Benjamin, whiledead right about the age of mechanical reproduction, was dead wrong when,stirred by an antique spoon in a shop window, he wrote: “One thing is reservedto the greatest epic writers: the capacity to feed their heroes.”13 The movies do itall the time.

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12. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 23.

13. Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” transl. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: SelectedWritings, Volume 1 (1913–1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.,1996), 466.

I also watched those Romans with insistent fringes, the ones who wore togasand gave speeches in the Forum. I encountered people who once lived in castles,who were encased in armor and chain mail, who killed and conquered natives(not yet described as “indigenous peoples”), who opened the Northwest Passage,who had their heads put on the block, who sailed and/or pirated trade and warships (often hard to tell apart) in the Indies and Caribbean (also hard to tell apart),and who lived history in extravagant clothes and—particularly if they werewomen—spent a good deal of history changing them. In those formative years,the history that fired my imagination (as distinct from the history that dulled it)came in concrete and spatialized images—images that moved and moved me. Iconfronted the colonization of the “New World” through The Captain fromCastille (King, 1947) and Plymouth Adventure (Brown, 1952), medieval Italythrough The Flame and the Arrow (Tourneur, 1950), and came to really careabout Henry VIII’s England by identifying with the political (as well as roman-tic) education of headstrong and adolescent Young Bess (Sidney, 1953).

In college, I was an English major and, through the imperatives of scheduling,continued my historical education according to no principled chronology. I tooka course in Shakespeare before I took one in Chaucer, took Chaucer before I tookMilton; I had no inclination nor charge to put them in temporal order (let alonetemporal relation). The history classes I was required to attend I regarded as quiteseparate from those in literature and, again, found my mind wandering amid anirrelevant and very arid field of dates and facts and causal narratives about whichI did not care. My lack of historical consciousness in the classroom, however,was again offset by my historical experience at the movies. This was the time of,among other great foreign directors, Ingmar Bergman; the strangeness and powerof his The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring allowed me (paradoxically, ofcourse) to feel and comprehend the “otherness” and “incomprehensibility” ofmedieval existence in a world of flagellants, plague, dark and dank interiors,dancing bears, real superstition, real religious belief.

Did I believe all these images? Did I think these narratives were the most accu-rate accounts of past events? Did they ruin me? Now that I read history and teachhistoriography, am I cured? Has “real” history replaced the “false” history of myformative years? Not really. As a child in medias res (that is, cinematically com-petent), I don’t think I ever believed the image as a historical record. How couldone, with iconic stars like Greta Garbo or Errol Flynn or Charlton Heston figuredon the screen, with pirate ships and palaces that were spic and span (no insistentsqualor here), with gold lamé push-up bras? In this regard, I find it rather funnythat Hollywood historical film is so often castigated not merely for its historical“errors,” its melodrama, and its “bourgeois ideology,” but also for the seductive“transparency” of its supposed “seamless” construction. One could be perverseand make a counter argument, enumerating all the “distancing” and reflexivedevices that point to such films as highly stylized, opaque, and meta-historicalproductions—not least among them the presence of stars who represent not“real” historical personages, but, rather, their historical “magnitude.”14


14. Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood HistoricalEpic,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 36.

As a child, then, I believed the image as image, a real image of real things:hence my intense material interest in it. I also didn’t believe in the narratives asaccurate accounts of past lives and times—or, for that matter, as the onlyaccounts. However, in my experience, they were the most compelling accounts.That is to say, in moving and showing human bodies disposed and active inspace, they moved me in time. Indeed, so much so that they eventually led meelsewhere: first to art histories and film histories, and then to what is legitimatedas academic, “nonfictional,” and “accurate” history. This movement is not, how-ever, to be taken as “progressive.” For, these images and narratives have not beenerased from my adult historical consciousness, nor would my sense of history besomehow purified by their disappearance. Indeed, all those “insistent fringes,” allthat medieval squalor, all those Christians dying and buffalo stampeding, all thatclanking armor and swordplay, do not merely haunt the sophistication of my pre-sent sense of history; they also, dare I say, quicken it, flesh it out, nourish it (evenif with rounds of bread dipped into wooden bowls of ambiguous stew). If theydo not quite constitute (and they just might) Benjamin’s notion of the “dialecti-cal image,” then, they at least, through their material means and the concrete pur-chase they give us on an absent past, make us care.

Rather than “fixing” and “reducing” history to things, they just might be“moving” us through time. Amidst competing narratives, contradictions, frag-ments, and discontinuities, the massive authority of institutions and the smallcompass of personal experience, sometimes the representation of phenomenal“things” like dirt and hair are, in medias res, all we have to hold on to—are whereour purchase on temporality and its phenomenological possibilities as “history”are solidly grasped and allow us a place, a general premise, a ground (howeverbase) from which to transcend our phenomenal present and imagine the past asonce having “real” existential presence and value. And, acknowledging that thepast once was existentially valuable to real people who moved—like movieimages—in space and time, creates a present in which we might care enough “toeducate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopi-cally, into the depths of the historical shade.”15

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Whatever its historiographic objective and however it is semiologically emplot-ted in ideologically suspect or politically correct narratives, for most historiansthe cinematic image is inherently mythological in relation to its objects. Here,Barthes is apposite: “Myth,” he writes, “is a pure ideographic system, where theforms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by along way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation.”16 Thus, mostacademic historians would, in all likelihood, be embarrassed by and critical of

VIVIAN SOBCHACK16

15. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 292.16. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 127.

the “insistent squalor” that has made its mythological mark on H-Film; theywould also, like Barthes, find those Roman fringes problematic: that is, a dan-gerous “showing” that reduced all the things that could be said or written aboutthe Romans of a given time to a single attribute that smugly named them andcontained their motivations, their actions, and their history in the triviality of anoverwhelmingly visible, “showy” yet “natural,” condensation. Thus, in passingitself off as both sign and nature—indeed, as the sign of nature—the fringe oper-ates mythologically. In this regard, Barthes writes:

In passing from history to nature, myth. . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it givesthem the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going backbeyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictionsbecause it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establish-es a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.17

That is, things “go without saying.” Indeed, this is the special effect of myth: “Totransform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is a language robbery.”18

For Barthes, the “language robbery” effected by the fringe seems to lie (punintended) with the material and concrete nature of the cinematic sign, particu-larly as it is aggregated and mobilized to signify a generalization while simulta-neously—and reversibly— displaying itself in the guise of the particular. ForBarthes, this mobilization is pernicious, duplicitous. Indeed, the fringe’s insistentambiguity seems to bear no relation to—or, indeed, seems the opposite of—theprivileged “obtuse” or “third meaning” Barthes was to write about in 1970 as that“level” at which “the ‘filmic’ finally emerges” in the contingent and unspeakableconcretion of an image which outruns and is in excess of its denotative and con-notative signification.”19 For Barthes, the unethical semiotic power of the fringelies not in an unspeakable excess or underdetermination of meaning, but ratherin an overspoken insistence on what, through repetition and multiplication,emerges as a concreted pervasion and overdetermination of meaning: it makesnot just a general historical claim, but a universal one. Thus:

[T]he intermediate sign, the fringe of Roman-ness. . . reveals a degraded spectacle,which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice. For although it is a good thingif a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both reprehensible anddeceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified. And it is a duplicity which is peculiarto bourgeois art: between the intellectual and the visceral sign is hypocritically inserted ahybrid, at once elliptical and pretentious, which is pompously christened nature.”20

But, we might ask, just who is it who has confused the sign with what it signi-fies? Certainly not Frenchmen who, Barthes suggests, find the little Romanfringe on American foreheads comic, who recognize that “the sign in this caseovershoots the target and discredits itself by letting its aim appear clearly.”21


17. Ibid., 143.18. Ibid., 131. Emphasis mine.19. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, transl. Stephen Heath (New

York, 1977), 64.20. Barthes, “The Romans in Film,” 28.21. Ibid., 26.

Barthes too quickly refuses the fact of a spectator (even a bourgeois Americanspectator) who understands not the cinematic sign and narrative as nature, but thenature and possibility of the cinematic sign and narrative to move from the realmof the concrete and dramatic to the conceptual, from showing to saying—that is,a spectator who understands the fringe as it functions “intellectually” as well as“viscerally.” Taken up as it is insisted upon—that is, doubled, repeated, evenfetishized—the visceral and particular sign of the fringe is mobilized to makeand concretely comprehend an attributive proposition based on an aspect of anentire subject class (“All Roman men wear fringes”)—and this yields the intel-lectual generalization (“Roman-ness”). Furthermore, it is important to note herethat to generalize is not necessarily to universalize—since this attributive propo-sition would be understood by almost all competent cinema spectators as a gen-eralization inclusive only of that class of Roman men who lived during a certainand finite historical period (even if the typical spectator would not be able tospecifically name and date it). In this way, the fringe does not “go without say-ing.” Rather, it says as it goes.22

FINAL CUT

If one still insists that the insistent fringe of the cinematic image instantiates inthe historical film a clear-cut “language robbery” in which things “go withoutsaying,” we might also point to the limitations of written historiography. For his-toriography has a comparable mythological grounding in its duplicitous insis-tence on elements that instantiate an “image robbery,” that repeat and naturalizewords so that they seem to “go without showing.” Here, de Certeau is apposite.In the epigram that opens this essay, he tells us: “[W]hat proliferates in histori-cal discourse are elements ‘below which nothing more can be done except dis-play,’ and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possible to showing.”He refers particularly to the historiographer’s “multiplication of proper names(personages, localities, coins, etc.), and their duplication in the ‘Index of ProperNames’.” And, he notes:

With these proper names the signifying system is grossly expanded on its extreme deicticborder, as if the very absence it studied made it turn in the direction where “showing”tended to stand for “signifying.” But there are many other indications: the role of maps,of figures, or of graphics; the importance of panoramic views and recapitulative “conclu-sions,” of countrysides which the book stakes out, etc.23

This argument is a significant one. The word seeks the image of the thing andnever quite fulfills its desire for discretion and specificity. In some ways, then,every proper noun in historiographic writing is an assertion that disguises whatit lacks as a representation: not the thing itself, but its image.

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22. For further elaboration on how the visual image “means,” and how it effects less a “languagerobbery” than a mode of visual “typification” (what I argue here as generalization), I would direct thereader to Hayden White, “AHR Forum: Historiography and Historiophoty,” American HistoricalReview 93 (December 1988), 1193-1199.

23. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), 100.

In this regard, as a concrete and always specific image, the “insistent fringe”of cinematic historiography interrogates the general privilege accorded to pro-fessional historiographic writing as a non-mythological saying able to go “backbeyond what is immediately visible.” For it is here, at the fringe, where the con-ceptual and interpretive discourses of professional history run concretelyaground—forestalled, as de Certeau suggests, by the resistance, opacity, and“just there-ness” of such signs as “proper names (personages, localities, coins,etc.),” whose linguistic presence signifies an absent concreteness and specificity“below which nothing more can be done except display.” In written historiogra-phy, one could argue, the proper noun is precisely mythological.

However, in its concretion as a conceptual abstraction, in its iconic condensa-tion through repetition, the “insistent fringe” also interrogates the historian’s per-ception of popular historical film as a debased showing of the immediately visi-ble in which “saying reaches its limit” and “things appear to mean something bythemselves.” For it is here, at the fringe, where the presentational and performa-tive discourses of popular historical cinema are also stopped short and both“immediacy” and visual display reach their limit—as the multiplication and vis-ibility of particular and concrete things (personages, localities, coins, and so on)come to signify neither a “naturalized” past world nor to manifest an elementalshowing, but rather to aggregate as a set of material generalizations that seek anyfurther expression in the conceptual rather than the concrete, in historiographicsaying and writing. Here, a picture is not worth a thousand words.

Despite the certainty that Barthes accords it, then, the “fringe,” after all, is pre-cisely not clear-cut—and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated or brokennature as a border, a margin; it is an articulated limit that differs from but is con-stituted by the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates andconnects: those of visual historiography and written historiography. Indeed, thereis a dynamic and functional coexistence between the mythological historieswrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic historieswritten by my institutional peers, a co-existence and co-operation that contin-gently plays itself out in a constantly varying ratio—or historical rationality.This ratio or rationality emerges from a palimpsestic, heteroglossic, sometimesdialectical, and always shifting historical field and constitutes the particular valueand affect of “history” to real people highly invested in their present, and active-ly located in medias res. Thus, the “insistent fringe” insists itself across a broad-er canvas than Roman foreheads in the cinema, and both covers and lays bare theliminal place where the discourses of historiography and mythology meet andcooperate—finding their necessity, value, and affect each in the other in an inter-rogative and imbricated relation that is less hierarchical than it is reversible.

Buck-Morss asks: “How are we to understand the ‘dialectical’ image as a formof philosophical representation? Was ‘dust’ such an image? fashion? the prosti-tute? expositions? commodities?” (Sounds like a movie.) And she continues:

The cognitive experience of history, no less than that of the empirical world, require[s] theactive intervention of the thinking subject. And yet Benjamin insisted, in accordance with


the method of literary montage: “I have nothing to say, only to show.” Here . . . is thesource of a dilemma of interpretation. Are dialectical images too subjective in their for-mulation? Or, are they not subjective enough?24

COMING ATTRACTION

Guadalupe, Calif.—An ancient Egyptian eye, unblinking in the sandy wind, stared up atPeter Brosnan. And Peter Brosnan, a bearded Angelino with $10,000, a borrowed ground-penetrating radar system and a crazy dream, stared back. “Take a look at this guy,” saidBrosnan. “That’s the Pharaoh.”

And that’s why Brosnan, 38, a screenwriter, teacher and documentary filmmaker, start-ed digging in the dunes near this Santa Barbara County city of 5,500 in 1983. This iswhere Cecil B. DeMille filmed the silent movie version of “The Ten Commandments” in1923, and where DeMille buried and abandoned one of the largest sets in feature film his-tory—the City of the Pharaoh, with walls that rose 110 feet and sprawled 750 feet inwidth, its entrance flanked by 21 sphinxes and four 35-foot Pharaoh statues.25

What is needed here is an archeology of the “dialectical image” in medias res.“The goal is to bring to consciousness those repressed elements of the past (itsrealized barbarisms and its unrealized dreams) which ‘place the present in a crit-ical position.’”26 Contemplating the prospects of the dig in 1990 (when he wasinterviewed for The Los Angeles Times article above), the executive director ofthe Santa Barbara Trust for Historical Preservation said: “This is utterly unique,and it gives you a sense of time having passed—that movies are now a part ofhistory.”27 Fossil, Fetish, Wish Image, Ruin. As of this writing, the site has notyet been excavated.

Department of Film & TelevisionUniversity of California, Los Angeles

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24. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 221-222.25. Christopher Reynolds, “An Archeology Spectacular: Unearthing the Set of DeMille’s 1923

‘Ten Commandments,’” Los Angeles Times (20 November 1990), F1.26. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 338.27. Reynolds, “An Archeology Spectacular,” F1.

Documents

Moving Images and Historical Consciousness