Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime 9781501384769, 9781501384721, 9781501384745

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Visual Storytelling and Filming the Historical Past
The Historical Film
“Visioning the Past”—New Research on History Painting
The Films Chosen for This Analysis
Chapter 1: Realism and the Sublime in Cinema and Painting
Realism: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism
The Sublime
History Painting and the Historical Film
Loutherbourg: The Realistic Sublime
Bryullov: The Empathetic Sublime
Cole: The Apocalyptic Sublime
Gérôme: The Spectacular Sublime
Chapter 2: Meek’s Cutoff: Realism and the Sublime in the Historical Film
Realism and the Sublime in Meek’s Cutoff
Landscape and the Sublime
Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism: Realism and History
Chapter 3: Girl with a Pearl Earring: Realism, Representation, and the Dutch Golden Age
Making the “Real”
Looking and Seeing
Eroticism of the Everyday
Film as Art History
Chapter 4: The Baader Meinhof Complex: “Journalism” as “Art”
The Baader Meinhof Complex and Journalism
Realism and Authenticity
Visual Rhetoric and Narrative Structure
The Inventio, or the Process of Developing and Refining the Argument
The Dispositio, or Arrangement
The Elocutio: Visual Style
History as Thriller, Thriller as History
Chapter 5: Roel Reiné’s Admiral: Grand Narratives and the Spectacle
National History, the “Nationalist Historical Film,” and Nation Building
Epic Scale and the Grand Manner
Past into Present
Chapter 6: Belle: Slavery, Race, and the Portrait
Portraiture, Politics, and Identity
Authenticity, History, and Realism
Painting Embodied
Chapter 7: al-Mumya’ (The Night of Counting the Years): Time and History
Time and History
Ancient and Modern in Egyptian Cinema
Shadi Abdel Salam’s al-Mumya’
Realism, the Sublime, and the Anachronism
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Art and the Historical Film

ii 

Art and the Historical Film Between Realism and the Sublime Gillian McIver

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Gillian McIver, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover images (from top): Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825) © Art Reserve / Alamy; Still from Belle, 2014, Dir. Amma Assante © DR / DJ Films / Collection Christophel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McIver, Gillian, author. Title: Art and the historical film: between realism and the sublime / Gillian McIver. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An important examination of fine art’s impact upon filmmaking that grapples with the question of authenticity”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018276 (print) | LCCN 2022018277 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501384769 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501384738 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501384752 (epub) | ISBN 9781501384745 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501384721 Subjects: LCSH: Historical films–History and criticism. | Art and motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H5 M4525 2022 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.H5 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/658–dc23/eng/20220718 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018276 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018277 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8476-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-8474-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-8475-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Olga.

vi

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Visual Storytelling and Filming the Historical Past

1

The Historical Film

1

2

3

4

x

6

“Visioning the Past”—New Research on History Painting

10

The Films Chosen for This Analysis

12

Realism and the Sublime in Cinema and Painting

15

Realism: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism

17

The Sublime

20

History Painting and the Historical Film

25

Loutherbourg: The Realistic Sublime

29

Bryullov: The Empathetic Sublime

31

Cole: The Apocalyptic Sublime

32

Gérôme: The Spectacular Sublime

34

Meek’s Cutoff: Realism and the Sublime in the Historical Film

49

Realism and the Sublime in Meek’s Cutoff

52

Landscape and the Sublime

55

Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism: Realism and History

63

Girl with a Pearl Earring: Realism, Representation, and the Dutch Golden Age

73

Making the “Real”

78

Looking and Seeing

84

Eroticism of the Everyday

91

Film as Art History

94

The Baader Meinhof Complex: “Journalism” as “Art”

103

The Baader Meinhof Complex and Journalism

105

Realism and Authenticity

113

Visual Rhetoric and Narrative Structure

114

Contents

viii

5

6

7

The Inventio, or the Process of Developing and Refining the Argument

118

The Dispositio, or Arrangement

120

The Elocutio: Visual Style

122

History as Thriller, Thriller as History

136

Roel Reiné’s Admiral: Grand Narratives and the Spectacle

139

National History, the “Nationalist Historical Film,” and Nation Building

141

Epic Scale and the Grand Manner

143

Past into Present

163

Belle: Slavery, Race, and the Portrait

165

Portraiture, Politics, and Identity

168

Authenticity, History, and Realism

174

Painting Embodied

190

al-Mumya’ (The Night of Counting the Years): Time and History

193

Time and History

194

Ancient and Modern in Egyptian Cinema

202

Shadi Abdel Salam’s al-Mumya’

209

Realism, the Sublime, and the Anachronism

218

8 Conclusion

221

Bibliography Index

227 252

Figures 1.1 Edward Francis Burney (1782) A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon 2.1 Meek’s Cutoff (2010) 2.2 Kensett, J. (1872) Eaton’s Neck, Long Island 3.1 Girl with a Pearl Earring (2004) 3.2 De Hooch, P. (1670) Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House 4.1 The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) 4.2 Van Haarlem, C. (1590) Massacre of the Innocents 4.3 The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) 5.1 Admiral (original title: Michiel de Ruyter) (2015) 5.2 Beerstraten, Jan Abrahamsz (1653–66), The Battle of Terheide 6.1 Belle (2013) 6.2 A Surgeon and His Black Assistant Letting Blood from a Lady’s Arm c. 1780’s 7.1 Wanis meeting the Stranger among the ruins in al-Mumya’ (The Mummy, 1969) 7.2 Wedjat Eye Amulet, c. 1070–664 BC

16 50 60 74 79 104 125 131 140 147 170 191 214 217

Acknowledgments I must express my gratitude to everyone who helped me—wittingly or otherwise—with the completion of this work. Notable among these are my PhD supervisors Michael Witt and Chris Darke at the University of Roehampton, with whom I enjoyed some of the most stimulating conversations about art and film I’ve ever had in my life. Brad Cross (St Thomas University), Susannah Lipscombe, and Michael Cullinane (Roehampton) reinvigorated my sense of history as a discipline. Deep thanks are also due to the editorial team at Bloomsbury, particularly my editor Katie Gallof. I also want to thank those whose presence in my life made this possible: the McIver family, the MCL (Kate Dangerfield, Elif Grant, Thea Thomadiki, Svitlana Tubaltseva, and Judith Rifeser), Soléne Heinzl and Lorena Balbinot, and especially my dearest friend, the artist Nazir Tanbouli, who taught me how to truly understand painting.

Introduction Visual Storytelling and Filming the Historical Past

I am at a symposium of the world’s leading art historians, in one of the world’s great museums. They are talking about Michelangelo Merisi, or Caravaggio (1571–1610), the first and perhaps greatest painter to show how high drama can be made by painting light and shade. His mainly religious pictures bring the often violent and dramatically spiritual world of the Old and New Testaments to life. The experts speak of everything to do with Caravaggio: his teachers and clients, his acolytes, his lasting influence, his tumultuous personal life. The word that keeps coming up repeatedly is “cinematic.” Caravaggio is “cinematic.” Yet the term is never examined or defined. We all just “know” what it means. One famed art historian posits, not without a note of disdain, that Caravaggio is so popular in today’s museums because he is so “cinematic.” The next speaker points out that his legacy is so deep-rooted because it is so—you guessed it—cinematic. Another one remarks that the painter’s greatest works operate between the cinematic and the realistic. Someone notes Martin Scorsese’s well-known love of Caravaggio.1 Why are movies constantly intruding on a discussion of early modern painting? The term “cinematic” appears frequently and anecdotally in discussions of paintings but is rarely explained or defined. “Cinematic” means “of the cinema”— yet it is used to describe paintings from the baroque Italian Caravaggio to the modern Canadian Alex Colville (1920–2013)2. The “cinematic” painting is a persuasive image that communicates various things that make a still image resemble or recall a filmic image. This use of the term “cinematic” could only come into being once cinema (the moving image) became a common language applicable across other art forms. The cinematic image communicates movement and a sense of time; it communicates space through perspective and depth of field; and it communicates sound through the visual rendering of imagery such “Beyond Caravaggio” exhibition and symposium; National Gallery London, November 17 2017. Today the term “filmic” is most often used to mean “of the cinema” or filmed entertainment practices.

1 2

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Art and the Historical Film

as steam, machinery, the active presence of noisemaking elements (e.g., mouths open and shouting), or deliberate silence. Activities appear to continue outside the picture through subjects moving out or into the frame. Areas to consider in terms of the “cinematic” painting are its composition, color, and tonality, lighting, mise-en-scène, gesture, and the illusion of movement. Above all, the cinematic painting offers the possibility of a story. If we consider the gigantic Burial at Ornans (1849–50) by Gustave Courbet, we start to wonder, who are these people, and who has died? What does it feel like to be one of them, mourning under that louring sky? Likewise, it is not uncommon to find the word “painterly”—again, undefined—used to discuss the visual style of some films or directors. Still, tableaux have appeared since early cinema,3 but “painterly” does not mean that the film is “like” a painting. Rather, the film style recalls a painting or paintings. As we will see in the case studies, the painterly film can successfully employ the same visual elements to convey the desired mood in a painting: composition, color and tonality, lighting, mise-en-scène, the illusion of motion or stillness, and gesture. Filmmakers as diverse as Uli Edel, Kelly Reichardt and Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Julian Schnabel have been called “painterly” for their style (Berger, 2014, 259). But painterly imagery can do more than that: it can rhetorically convey a sense of “high culture” by linking the filmic image to the high-art image, as an attractant to persuade the viewer they are watching a “quality” film (McIver, 2018, 310–17). Though the history of film is not typically included in art history, the history of art is in film. Angela Dalle Vacche makes this claim at the beginning of Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film. Dalle Vacche’s trailblazing study was my starting point to examine the cinema-art relationship in Art History for Filmmakers (McIver, 2016). In this volume, I have chosen to explore how this relationship operates in a single genre: the historical film. In these films, visual art may offer filmmakers information about what the past looked like, but what is the relationship beyond this (already problematic) function? In terms of visual aesthetics and visual storytelling, how has the depiction of people and events in artworks influenced the depiction of historical events in films?

“Early cinema” I am defining here as the period of technical, aesthetic, and structural development between 1880 and 1910, as discussed by Nancy Mowll Mathews in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910 (2005), though of course the period is international, not purely American, since cinema spread around the world more or less at the same time.

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Anne Hollander’s Moving Pictures (1989) was one of the first significant studies of the relationship between cinema and painting, looking at the relationship between Northern Renaissance painting and cinema. However, her focus is limited to looking for specific elements which prefigure cinema. Angela Dalle Vacche champions an approach which synthesizes art theory with film theory (Dalle Vacche, 1996). Susan Felleman’s Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) examines how films use artworks in the narrative and the self-reflexivity of cinema as an art form. Finally, Halva Aldouby’s Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film (2013) has some pithy and valuable things to say about analyzing the cinema-painting relationship. Aldouby contends that Fellini “interweaves painting and film into a richly textured fabric where cinema is nourished by painting, rather than engaging in aggressive appropriation of its cultural and social aura” (Aldouby, 2013, 7). Aldouby’s insight is a major step forward in understanding what to look for in the cinema-painting analysis. The book aims to show how both film and art (mostly, though not exclusively, paintings) have created representations of history that rely upon a tension between realism and the sublime: between a quest for “authenticity” and a desire for intense emotional engagement. It seeks to establish how filmmakers might use art as part of visual storytelling in the historical film to help them create the film’s “historical look” and mood and emotional engagement. Additionally, the analysis aims to determine how artists of the past understood history visually and how contemporary filmmakers have used these ideas. To investigate this, I analyze historical films’ aesthetic and visual narrative properties through arthistorical, rhetorical, and historical readings. This interdisciplinary approach draws on critical works by Dalle Vacche, Kenneth Burke, Hayden White, Eleftheria Thanouli, and others. This book examines the representation of history in cinema and painting, looking at how these art forms can create a sense of the past and address the meaning and significance of historical events. From Eugene Delacroix’s interpretation of the 1830 revolution to Steven Spielberg’s version of Omaha Beach, 1944, visual representation of historical subjects is pervasive and influential. Art has shaped “the past” for us, and our continuing allegiance to art’s interpretation of events demonstrates the power of retinal communication or communication delivered through visual means, such as pictures, colors, or visual symbols. Many of the most popular and acclaimed paintings and films address historical events and portray real persons. The research asks how assumptions and conventions have survived from art history and thrived in the

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history genre of film. By studying representative works of history painting and films that overtly address “historical” subjects, I examine the depiction of history in film and its visual-rhetoric roots in painting. Exploring the shared aesthetics of cinema and painting and looking at cinema’s restaging of the past, the book asks how cinema and painting address the tension between realism and the sublime that appears in their representations of history? How has art history created conventions, tropes, and tendencies that have been inherited and repurposed by cinema? I will argue that cinema does not directly use art images in most cases, but instead reuses and reinterprets imagery and techniques established in painting. Adaptation of art into film is nuanced; there are various ways that it happens. Transposition is the most direct and rarest form, when a painting is (more or less) faithfully recreated as a filmic image, such as the recreation of Vermeer’s Milkmaid (1657) discussed in Chapter 5. At other times films “invoke” paintings by offering elements that actively conjure up a memory of a painting or paintings, as in the realistic recreation of Vermeer’s world, described in Chapter 3. Filmic moments that “evoke” paintings operate less obviously, explained in the discussion of fear and violence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Massacre of the Innocents paintings in Chapter 4. Referencing happens when a picture is used as a reference point, though it may be altered; the use of David Martin’s work is an example discussed in Chapter 6. Therefore, I will not simply refer to “adaptation” of art into cinema but will explore the nature of that adaptation. Early film theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim in Film as Art (1957; first published 1932) were aware of the relationship between cinema and painting, but many were trying to justify cinema as an art form on the same terms as painting (Dalle Vacche, 2003, 1–32). Some wrote sensitively and thoughtfully about painting, but many engaged in a modernism that disfavored much of representational art history (Phillips, 2015, 31). Though André Bazin’s essay “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest” is about literary adaptation into cinema, not the adaptation of visual images, he opens with a reference to painting and the repository of the art museum, tantalizingly raising the issue. The significance of the visual elements of cinema is rarely examined in relation to the much longer history of painting. The disciplinary divisions between art history and film studies or the commercial division between fine art and mass media have often obscured the interconnections. The book’s case studies demonstrate how films that represent the past use artworks to orient the visual narrative, which creates a complex and often

Introduction

5

unrecorded relationship between cinema and art. Susan Felleman asserts that “When a film undertakes the representation of art as a theme or engages an art work as motif, it is, whatever else it is doing, also more or less openly and more or less knowingly entering into a contemplation of its nature and at some level positing its unwritten theory of cinema as art” (Felleman, 2006, 2). I am working from the belief that films are art, and that they exist in the same trajectory of creative expression as all art has done since the first cave paintings. While the technology and means of production are not the same, increasingly, the means of consuming art and film have narrowed. Today, all art and film belong to the “museum without walls,” André Malraux’s notion of a collection of all significant works of art represented in our imagination (Malraux, 1967, 16), and is increasingly becoming accessible through digital means (Hogben, 2012, 315–19). It is now possible to simultaneously visit a (virtual) museum and watch a movie. When viewed like this, the relationships become more apparent, as does the necessity for transdisciplinary analysis that brings art and film together. I am concerned with how films address the telling of history through visuals and how this imagery is derived or reinterpreted from art, especially painting. This process makes it possible to discern how visual narratives express political ideas or values. Both Angela Dalle Vacche and Susan Felleman, who are primarily responsible for establishing the terms of this study of cinema in relation to visual art, describe their methodology, and I have largely followed them in acknowledging the necessity for an interdisciplinary approach. Felleman (2006, 1) states that her method is “essentially art historical” comprising a tradition of “close looking, close description—of form, structure and style—and ways of approaching historical and cultural patterns in and art and imagery” with particular attention to Erwin Panofsky’s concepts of iconography and iconology. If Felleman approaches cinema from an art-history perspective, Dalle Vacche explains her self-described “intertextual” approach as exploring the “power filmmaking has to redefine art history” (Dalle Vacche, 1996, 3). On the other hand, historian Thomas Freeman revealingly reads films as historical texts, while acknowledging film’s limitations in that unrequested role. My training and practical experience as a historian, film scholar, and filmmaker engender admittedly eclectic methodologies, bearing in mind Christine Geraghty’s injunction that “In the end, theoretical models are only fruitful if they help us share an understanding of the particular films we are subjecting to analysis” (Geraghty, 2008, 197).

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Art and the Historical Film

Concerning theory, Jacques Aumont describes his “toolbox technique” of “taking what I can use wherever I can find it” (Fairfax, 2017). Interdisciplinarity requires an extensive toolbox and an awareness of one’s specialisms and limitations. The reason for the interdisciplinary—and often eclectic—approach is that although there is a large body of work on the historical film by historians as well as film scholars, these do not, as a rule, focus on the visual. Especially they do not focus on how and why the visuals appear as they do or from where they come. Yet people involved in filmmaking—directors, production designers, and cinematographers—will often mention in conversation or interviews how they used particular artworks to inspire or even to help create the “world” of the past. While this “anecdotal evidence” (Cubitt, 2013) is often ephemeral and difficult to research, much can be obtained by close reading the film’s imagery with reference to art history, and this is the approach I have taken.

The Historical Film The dramatized, visual representation of history did not emerge with cinema. While history, as revealed in both painting and cinema, has been little addressed to date, scholarship has certainly addressed the historical film as a genre. There has been significant research on Hollywood’s history films, for example, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema by J. E. Smyth (2006) and Robert Burgoyne’s The Hollywood Historical Film (2008). In addition, The Epic Film in World Culture has the benefit of allowing a comparative approach (Burgoyne, 2011). Likewise, academic historians have weighed in on the historical film, from the oeuvre of Robert Rosenstone to Thomas Freeman and Susan Doran’s 2009 collection of essays on The Tudors and Stuarts on Film. History always has an agenda, whether it is subversive or overt. For good or ill, Peter Seixas (1994) warns that many people get their history lessons from films and television and not from nonfiction or formal education. Of course, this process predates the moving image: as Marc Ferro has observed, “When we think of Cardinal Richelieu or Cardinal Mazarin, are not the first memories that come to mind drawn from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers? . . . The more time that passes, the less historians can change that” (Ferro, 1988, 12–13). The world-making of the historical film is essential, argues Hannu Salmi, because it indicates a “mental universe” which he describes as “information about the opinions and mentalities, ideas and visions of

Introduction

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that person—or of that culture—that has produced them” (Salmi, 1995, 1). Nevertheless, few scholars have focused on visual communication in the historical film. As Marc Ferro has argued, films pass ideas and ideologies to viewers (Ferro, 1983, 2003). I argue that this is done as much through their imagery as through their narratives. The storytelling aspect of the historical film appeals to audiences as a way to “learn” about history, and the narrative aspects of history-recounting have been addressed most notably by Hayden White. Although White is a controversial figure in the field of historiography, he pays valuable attention to the rhetoric of history writing (Paul, 2011, 76). Furthermore, White’s invocation of Nietzsche’s notion that history is historically conditioned in order to make way for creative artistic perspectives on the past (as explored in The Birth of Tragedy) seems to validate the “historical film” as—not history writing exactly—but as a kind of history-telling that has agency. White claims that historical narrative does not—cannot—reveal any “true” essence of past reality; what it does is impose a structure on the events it purports to describe. White goes further and calls this structure “mythic.” The notion of myth connects White’s perspective to Northrop Frye and indirectly to Carl Jung and his literary heir Joseph Campbell—and inexorably in a filmic sense to Christopher Vogler’s cod-Campbell, The Writer’s Journey (2007). Before we mock, Vogler’s book has been wildly influential in Hollywood’s “epic” filmmaking, which is dominated by historical film; many film courses still teach the book (Neild, 2013). Herman Paul claims that after the contentious publication of Metahistory (1973), “also encouraged by the rather enthusiastic reception of his tropology among students of literature, White began to put his hope in novelists and film directors rather than historians” (Paul, 2011, 80). In his article “Historiophoty” for the American Historical Review, White argued that “some information about the past can be provided only by visual images” (White, 1988, 1194). However, he does not give any clear methodology for identifying that information, interpreting such images or understanding their means of creation. While he is correct that “every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation” (White, 1988, 1194), the term “filmed representation” is vague. What is a “filmed representation?” Does this encompass only actuality, or does it include documentaries and movies intended as filmed entertainment?

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Despite these limitations, film scholar Eleftheria Thanouli’s book History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (2019) proposes a formalist approach, offering a useful methodology for using White’s notion of visual history together with David Bordwell’s ideas about the poetics of cinema—in particular Bordwell’s structure of narrative forms—to analyze the historical film. Her methodology involves mapping the narrative structures (modes of narration) that Bordwell develops in his 1985 book Narration in the Fiction Film and the later Making Meaning (1989) onto the historical film. She demonstrates the approach through robust case studies of a range of recent films. Thanouli convincingly insists on using the “post-classical narrative” category, which Bordwell rejects; however, her reading of the term is more subtle (or less political) than that offered by Barry Langford in Post-Classical Hollywood (Langford, 2010). I have followed Thanouli’s lead in classifying my chosen case studies according to the categories she outlines. Thanouli’s approach is formalist. Though she acknowledges the role of craft, artistry, and mise-en-scène, she does not analyze it, nor does she address to any extent the aesthetic or cultural analysis of films. Instead, she demonstrates a framework that places the film within a narrative structure, which the audiovisuals then activate. Thanouli is significant for how she brings White back into the discourse about the historical film (Thanouli, 2008, 2019). She draws attention to the five elements White identifies in historical accounts: the chronicle, the story, emplotment, argument, and ideological implication. “Every historical account,” Thanouli writes, asks “what happened, when and why” and “what is the point of it all?” so that “comprehension of the events and interpretation of them appear as two separate and yet intricately interconnected activities that feed off each other” (Thanouli, 2019, 112). Thanouli maps White’s elements onto the structures of film narrative: chronicle and story map onto narration as defined by Bordwell. “Starting from the film’s narration, we can gradually move on to the explanations by mode of narration, mode of argument and mode of ideological implications, just as White did for written history” (Thanouli, 2019, 113). Thanouli’s purpose in the chapter “The Representation of History in the Fiction Film” is to “present the range of historical explanations available to historical films, depending on the narrative form” and ultimately to consider the historical film as a kind of history writing along the terms suggested by Hayden White. Thanouli does not offer a clear methodology for interpreting audiovisual images in themselves (her case studies have no scene or shot analyses, for example). However, she does suggest that dispensing with “essentialist definitions

Introduction

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of mediality” in favor of a kind of Godardian analogical thinking about cinema and history is a viable and fruitful way to understand the continuities between history in words and history in images (Thanouli, 2019, 13–14). It is a good question whether White’s notion of historiophoty might not play down the analytical aspects of historiography and favor appeals to the emotive side of the spectator’s engagement with images. However, the historical monograph is no less “shaped” or constructed than the historical film or historical novel. Different principles may shape it, but there is no reason why a filmed representation of historical events should not be as analytical and realistic as any written account. Thanouli acknowledges that filmed history cannot recreate the past, but it is “capable of resurrecting” the past as a set of ideas and impressions and vicarious experiences. All attempts to tell stories about the past fail on some level because they are interpretive, creative acts (Thanouli, 2019, 242). Thanouli concludes by predicting that “developments in historiophoty and historiography . . . will have a central place in the wider political and philosophical debates regarding the meaning of truth, knowledge, power and subjectivity in our Western societies.” The role of the historical film will necessarily be deeply implicated in this debate (Thanouli, 2019, 248). The serious attention paid to historical films by both film scholars and historians demonstrates that even if pedagogues do not consider filmed entertainment a legitimate conduit for history, it was and remains both popular and influential as a means of identifying “the past.” However, these works do not sufficiently contextualize the historical film’s presentation of history that originated in other arts, such as paintings.4 Nor does most of this research address the visual to any significant extent.5 This book aims to extend the scope of research on historical film. It draws upon various film cultures, looking at films in the context of art history’s images of the past. Belén Vidal, in Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (2012a), notes that in many recent period films the desire for visual “realism” of historical detail is stylized and the mise-en-scène of historical reconstruction is pushed to a degree she terms “Mannerism” (Vidal, 2012a, 11). For Vidal, Mannerist practice in cinema prioritizes an imaginary, aestheticized past, allowing a historical reconstruction that is less concerned with historical Freeman’s “A Tyrant for all Seasons: Henry VIII on Film” looks at filmic representations in the context of the Holbein portrait of Henry VIII (2009, 30–45). 5 Kristin Moana Thompson (2011, 39–62) discusses the techniques of digital technology in creating past “worlds.” 4

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accuracy than with an extravaganza of immersive detail. Vidal describes “Mannerist aesthetic” as a “fetishism of the markers of period reconstruction” together with a conventional system of realism that has become figuratively excessive (Vidal, 2012a, 22). This figurative excess I identify as being strongly haptic, multisensory, and expressed through intense attention to detail. However, it can also be manifested by excessive attention to the art-historical, to the reconfiguration of historical painting into the mise-en-scène. Vidal’s examination of period films (mostly adapted from literary sources) demonstrates how this Mannerist aesthetic operates. I would argue that all historical films are—to a greater or lesser degree—imbued with this kind of Mannerism, which is why the concept is so important. The question is how far the films indulge in it, and when (if) they move away from it. It is probably impossible to avoid extravagance in period reconstruction, given that this almost fetishistic obsession with extravagant detail appears to have been a feature of historical recreation since at least the oeuvre of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824– 1904). Vidal posits that indulgence in this Mannerism is usually a sign that the film—in its themes and its production process—is indicative of a conservative, aestheticized “heritage” turn in filmmaking (Vidal, 2012a, 25).

“Visioning the Past”—New Research on History Painting It is worth noting that, for most Western art history, history painting was considered the apogee (Green and Seddon, 2000). Portraits, landscapes, and still life were rated and valued considerably lower. History painting (which included mythological and religious subjects and real-life events) was always dramatic, cinematic. History paintings were often huge: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) is more than 3 meters across. History painting was lavish, time-consuming, and involved the artist and a team of apprentices or assistants. Most importantly, history painting was not decorative: it served a political, ideological purpose. History painting depicting real-life events was unusual before the eighteenth century, though Diego Velasquez painted The Surrender of Breda (1634) only ten years after that event, in modern dress. The “historical” history painting emerges in the eighteenth-century work of Benjamin West, a moment when reportage is “manifested” in history painting, and the genre is revealed as holding the tension between realism and a kind of mythic elevation verging on the sublime (Wind, 1938, 119–21).

Introduction

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In The Film in History: Restaging the Past (1980), Pierre Sorlin asserts that understanding how films express history can give us a greater knowledge of how we create and use history. Sorlin (1996) notes that the historical film’s relationship to history also applies to the historical painting. The history painter often looks to extremities and is deliberately provocative, inviting the viewer to confront values (Sullivan, 2015, 16). This focus on the dramatic extremity features in most historical films, often in a set piece that borrows heavily from painting’s visual codes. In his essay “What Is the History in History Painting?” Mark Salber Phillips (2015, 31) notes how much twentieth-century criticism about history painting was obscured by what he calls “modernist hostility to didactic narratives.” In Art History for Filmmakers (McIver, 2016, 198), I have suggested that this is where the divergence between fine art and cinema begins; cinema continued to offer didactic narratives while art largely left them behind. If we examine the history of cinema, we can begin to see how historical films may have equally often served a political, ideological purpose, or at least invited perspectives on historical events. More recently, traditional “history painting” has been undergoing a critical reconsideration, bringing about a fresh scholarship. Greg Sullivan points out that British art had little “official” history painting and the history paintings were often the opposite of conservative, “elitist, academic or politically regressive” (Sullivan, 2015, 15). Historian Mark Salber Phillips ponders what we are looking for when we seek the past in an artwork. Looking at the work of Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche, Phillips emphasizes the importance of contrast in the paintings to create a dynamism suggestive of time and development (Phillips, 2015, 31–42). Reconsideration of hitherto-ignored academic painters has enriched the film-painting discussion. Roy Strong’s Painting the Past: the Victorian Painter and British History (2004) opens up an under-addressed history of how the past has been made visible and how British painters were instrumental in developing historical painting, influencing Delaroche and others. Strong explains how the painters researched their subject matter and how popularly written history emerged alongside mass reproduction of paintings as prints for the middle-class market. The roots of popular historical films surely lie here. In History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (1993), Francis Haskell explains the dilemma: “serious historians showed themselves to be increasingly reluctant to use the evidence offered by art or artefacts when trying to interpret the past” (Haskell, 1993, 2). Haskell notes how concerned diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) was about the lack of any visual evidence for many

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of the most significant episodes in English history. Evelyn wrote that he was lamenting that “the defeat of that Invincible Armada In ’88 . . . [was] in danger of being quite forgotten due to the lack of visual commemoration” (Haskell, 1993, 86). Haskell also considers the limitations of painting as reportage and as history writing. He describes how nineteenth-century writer Edgar Quinet (1803– 75) was struck by the realization that Italian Renaissance art provided only a “specious” impression of history. Quinet observed that, in judging the Venetian past by its art, “you assume that these men must have lived in a state of perpetual festivity” (Haskell, 1993, 364). Still, though the history in art and film may be specious, it is often powerfully emotive and popular, which is a good reason to examine it purposefully.

The Films Chosen for This Analysis Belén Vidal points out that the historical genre is broad and encompasses terms like “period film,” “costume drama,” “heritage film,” and “historical film” even though most films are never precisely one or the other (Vidal, 2012, 9–10). I have selected films that address and recreate, in part, events and persons that are part of the historical record and, however fictionalized, maintain faithfulness to the record as it was understood at the time of the film’s making. I have taken my lead from historian William D. Paden’s evaluation of the 1968 film The Lion in Winter (dir. Anthony Harvey) when he writes “But even though we don’t know for sure what the truth about these things was, we also don’t know for sure what it wasn’t. The film is a gripping representation of Plantagenet life on or about Christmas 1183. I do not know a truer one” (Paden, 2005, 84). Hollywood history has been well covered in the recent literature,6 so in the light of that, I have deliberately chosen to examine a range of films that originate elsewhere. These include the popular arthouse Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2004), the American independent Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), and Belle (2013) made by the Ghanaian-British director Amma Asante. NonEnglish-language films are represented by the high-octane The Baader Meinhof Complex thriller of 2008 (Uli Edel) and the haunting al-Mumya’ (The Mummy: The Night of Counting the Years), an Egyptian classic of 1969 directed by Shadi See Burrow (2007), McGee (2012), Winkler (2004), Burgoyne (2008), Toplin (2002).

6

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Abdel Salam. Sergei Parajanov’s Legend of the Suram Fortress (1985) is in the established canon of cinema history; others, like Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2015), have been under-analyzed to date. Except for Legend of the Suram Fortress, based on Daniel Chonkadze’s 1859 novella Surami Fortress (itself based on a folktale), and Girl with a Pearl Earring, which adapts Tracy Chevalier’s eponymous novel, the films are based on historical research, not fiction. The paintings examined in relation to the films are mostly (but not all) Western paintings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. And examining a variety of paintings that relate to the films under discussion, I will address the development of “historical painting” in the first chapter. This type of picture emerged in the mid-eighteenth century out of the established genre of “history painting.” History painting is a broad category of large-scale paintings, usually with mythological and religious subject matter—for example, Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents (1611). Historical painting depicts real-life events in the “Grand Manner”—heroic, grandiose, and emotive. It became popular in the nineteenth century and framed many visual reference points for the new art form of cinema. The films and paintings chosen for this analysis present an interpretation of history manifested in part through fidelity to visual authenticity and using the images rhetorically to persuade the viewer that what they are seeing is authentic. Each of the films selected for analysis employs art-historical imagery in different ways, ranging from oblique references to direct adaptation. The ways the films use this imagery in the presentation of realism (examined as degrees of accuracy and authenticity) and the sublime form the core of this book. The following chapter will look more closely at realism and the sublime in historical painting, and how these ideas fed into the development of cinema. If realism in the historical film has long been focused on achieving material authenticity and surface verisimilitude, historical painting proves to be quite similar. Though cinema studies has rarely approached the sublime, the sublime is a concept that is central to art history. As we shall see, the development of the sublime in painting accompanies the development of historical painting, and both are entwined with ideas about realism.

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1

Realism and the Sublime in Cinema and Painting

In depictions of the past, the aesthetic approach shared between cinema and painting tends to cohere around realism or making something that happened feel “real” (see Figure 1.1). Often, the most-used terms are the least well defined. “Realism” is one of those. It is difficult to unpick the term in art (Lucie-Smith, 1994, 9). Generally, the term “realism” in art history means painting that depicts observable reality with attention to detail. But not always. In Arnold Böcklin’s Centaur in the Village Blacksmith’s Shop (1888), for example, all the details of the scene—the shop, the smith, the people, the landscape—are painted realistically, yet the central figure is a centaur, with naturalistic human and horse details, a creature that does not exist, and has never existed.1 This is complicated further by the fact that when discussing films, the terms “realistic” and “realist” are used frequently in a broad and general sense. Furthermore, the concept of realism in film is not only about style; it has a sociopolitical dimension. Jacques Aumont points out that what we like to call “realism” is in fact “a collection of social roles which aims to regulate the relation of the representation to the real in a way that is satisfactory to the society that creates those rules” (Aumont, 1997, 75). Aumont’s explanation is just as readily applicable to art. As Eleftheria Thanouli puts it, “realism is a set of conventions that determine how and why the sign appears to be truthful and authentic” instead of being an expression of the truth (Thanouli, 2019, 55). “It is essentially what we perceive it to be, in the circumstances of the time,” writes Edward Lucie Smith in American Realism. “As an absolute value or quality it is now, just as perhaps it has always been, unattainable” (Lucie-Smith, 1994, 13). Classical film theorists mostly felt that one of the main differences between film and painting is that film is wholly dependent upon the camera, upon filming A filmic equivalent—there are many—might be Wonder Woman striding around in convincing First World War trenches (Wonder Woman, 2017, dir. Patty Jenkins).

1

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Art and the Historical Film

Figure 1.1  Edward Francis Burney (1782) A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon. Drawing; British Museum.

“reality”—what is in front of the camera lens—whereas a painting is the product of the artist’s imagination (Andrew, 1976, 103–5). Since a film is as much a construction as a painting, René Clair refers to film realism as “imitated reality”; more specifically, mimesis, or realism interposed by style. Clair maintains that good style should give the illusion of reality but not be it (Barsacq, 1976, p. vii). Christian Metz also points out that “realism is not reality” (Metz, 1974, 21). In short, though there is “realism” in films, it is expressed in various ways and made by many different methods. There is no movie “reality”—every film always constructs its own “reality” in the world of the film, so the realism of a film is part of the film’s world-making. Many kinds of film realism have strong echoes in treatments of realism in visual art (McIver, 2016, 52–85). Moreover, although there are general tendencies, these can differ starkly across film cultures and periods as well as genres; the state of “realism” needs to be evaluated for each film. Examining the different approaches to film realism will be part of the task of this book. It is also necessary to draw a distinction between “realistic” (simulating what verifiably exists in life, via a prop, a set, a costume, etc.) and “realism,” which is a more totalizing artistic approach to representation (Aumont, 1997, 74–5).

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Realism: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism No amount of artistry or technology can recreate the historical past, but cinema has long been concerned with the challenge of creating an acceptable facsimile of it, one which will engage and immerse the audience and allow the narrative to play out. Most historical films claim accuracy, and increasingly, demonstrable accuracy has become important as an indicator of value (Freeman and Smith, 2019, 15). However “accuracy” means different things to different filmmakers, so while Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette sought accuracy by referring to the book by Antonia Fraser (a movie tie-in reprint was issued when the 2006 film was released), for Peter Webber, detailed material recreation of a seventeenthcentury Dutch home was key for his Girl with a Pearl Earring (2004). The former film is based on a history book and the latter on a historical novel. The question of literary adaptation—fiction or nonfiction—is beyond the scope of this book but is an important one. However, the argument about fidelity in adaptation is worth mentioning here; How far is “fidelity” relevant to realism in the historical film? Casie Hermansson asserts persuasively that for all the attempts of adaptation scholars to dismiss “fidelity” it keeps returning to the discourse (Hermansson, 2015, 147–60). Of course, fidelity is not precisely the same thing as historical accuracy, but the notion of fidelity to a source is relevant in a historical drama, particularly when the sources are acknowledged.2 Still, one recurrent criticism of the historical film is that it is factually inaccurate. Pierre Sorlin (1980, 21) believes that there is no point in expecting historical films to be accurate. Thomas Freeman (2009, 5) points out that we should not absolve films about the past from any responsibility to the past. Although it is true that films usually subordinate accuracy to the drama, the film text itself often begins by announcing or concluding that the film is based on actual events. Freeman cites Rossellini’s The Rise to Power of Louis XIV and its “unqualified assertion that ‘it is all in the documents, nothing is invented’” (Freeman, 2009, 5), which is, as he points out, nonsense. Assuming that the historical film will be somewhat inaccurate in terms of its adherence to the historical record, where is realism found? In surface verisimilitude: material authenticity in the film’s visuals supports historical authenticity in its storyline, just as it did for the history painters. Painting can Coppola’s film does stick closely to Fraser’s account, which was itself a fairly controversial depiction of the subject; see Chapter 7.

2

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provide film with a guide to material authenticity in terms of a credible set or costume design. I will suggest that the historical film also often seeks a link with “high culture” through an attempt to create a popular form of erudition, one that may (or may not) be well informed and which acts (intentionally or not) as a substitute for a scholarship or educated knowledge of the historical subject. Based on the research of Roy Strong (2004), I will further suggest that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies in historical painting sought the same connection to scholarship. In short, people are interested in history and want to learn about it in a pleasurable way; the specifics of the topic at hand are less important than the experience of it. Visual experience, through painting or cinema, has a viscerality that made these genres popular, as historical films continue to be. Finally, as well as facing questions about historical accuracy and material authenticity, historical film also continually engages with the problem of anachronism. Anachronism is always present, yet it is surprisingly underaddressed in scholarship. Obviously, there are many accidental anachronisms in period films, including many imperceptible at the time of the film’s making, such as the standards of beauty applied to the actors. But anachronism can also be a powerful interjection in the historical film, drawing in audiences to a sense of shared knowing-ness, or engineering shock or surprise. Hans Kellner’s (2014, 237) notion of chronoschism, or splits in time, is a way of understanding filmic anachronism. Kellner explains chronoschism as “a split in time, the creation of distance that can be used to make a case.” In filmic terms, chronoschism is the sudden awareness of distance a viewer experiences when watching a historical film and compares the past—as represented in the film— to the present. Historical films also often invoke chronochasm, an awareness of a huge gap in time, which can convey a deeper meaning, perhaps a film’s overarching theme (Kellner, 2014, 240). While historical films cannot completely prevent the viewer’s experience of chronoschism, anachronism is generally a “problem” of realism’s quest for authenticity and accuracy—unless, as we shall see, incidents in the film deliberately invoke anachronism to serve the narrative. Turning to literary theory, Joseph Luzzi’s article (2009) on the rhetorical frameworks of anachronism in literature—particularly his discussion of Henri Morier’s conceptions of rhetoric—opens new possibilities of how we might understand anachronism in cinema. Morier identifies the anachronisme progressif as an “out of time” element that appeals to the audience in defiance of the carefully constructed surface verisimilitude of the film’s world. The tendency

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to cast physically attractive actors is one example, as is the deliberate stripping out of complexity and period detail to direct the viewer’s focus on the action. Morier also describes the catachronisme—a false equivalent between past and present. Georg Lukâcs’s classic 1963 work The Historical Novel offers some (perhaps unexpectedly) useful points about the difference between “necessary anachronism” in drama and the novel, which I have extrapolated to cinema studies—proving once again that the interdisciplinary approach can be a disruptor and instigator of new ways to think about the subject. If, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, history includes “dreams and nightmares, ideas and visions” (Deleuze, 1989, 190) this offers the historical film many opportunities to be creative in “world-building.” Rasmus Falbe-Hansen (2003) agrees that “the historical film must be taken seriously on its own premises—as an interpretation of the past and as a poetic speculation on the past.” The “poetic speculation” can take different forms, and playing with anachronism is one of them. The final chapter examines these ideas in depth and asks what anachronism in all its forms brings to the historical film, addressing anachronism as a tool and technique in its own right, as a radical method of addressing the past. If film critic André Bazin is the champion of realist cinema, Marco Grosoli points out that “Bazin’s notion of reality is by no means simple” (Grosoli, 2012, 2). Bazin’s perspective is important because he conceived of realism (and film in general) not as a specific thing but as an idea, manifested over time through different technologies (Bazin, 1967, 10). Acutely aware of the sociocultural, economic, and political contexts of film narratives and film styles, Bazin felt that film was able to “grasp different realities, among them social and culture realities,” which, while making cinema “the quintessential realist medium,” also made the notion of what defines realism quite unstable (Grosoli, 2012, 2). Bazin also understood that the human eye always seeks to adjust spatially, “like a lens, to the important point in the event which interests us” (Bazin, 1980, 42). Angela Dalle Vacche writes about Bazin’s fascination with film’s “possibility to see according to human perception, but in a nonhuman way through the fresh eye of the camera” (Dalle Vacche, 2012, 15). She uses the term “fresh eye” deliberately because Bazin did not claim that the camera “eye” is objective (or still less than a film could be “objective”), just that it is not a human organ, even if it is organized and controlled by human operators. As Edward Lucie Smith puts it, “the lens has its own way of seeing, which is not necessarily that of the human eye. . . . The camera is monocular and looks fixedly at objects rather than scanning them as a human eye does” (Lucie-Smith, 1994, 12).

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Because of this tendency of the eye to investigate and analyze the space of reality over time, visual artists organize their compositions to direct the viewer’s eye. Caravaggio is a useful example. In his paintings we see everything, but he does not show too much. Caravaggio reveals a word of characters and actions but forces us to focus on them and not get lost in other scenarios. Before Caravaggio, many scenes contained secondary points of action or attention or even a completely split frame. For example, the Martyrdom of Saint George (1564) by Paolo Veronese divides the frame into upper (Heaven) and lower (Earth) with completely different scenarios in each. Caravaggio scholar Richard Spear has conjectured that one of the reasons for Caravaggio’s mass popularity is that the painter simplifies the image and it is easy to access (Spear, 1971; Spear, 2016). Yet within Caravaggio’s simplicity, all the necessary information is there. The “simplicity” is deceptive because, although his pictures may be immediately accessible, they invite you to look deeper and uncover the emotional detail. In films, the real has additional characteristics. It exists visibly within the frame, or mise-en-scène, but it conceptually includes all that is out of the frame but is assumed to exist in the film’s world and may be revealed by a camera movement. However, the frame usually contains as much as the eye can see, what the eye can take in. That is, it has a focal point of action and attention. Cinema strips down the cacophony of everyday life through scenography. As Bazin puts it, the film’s direction “exercises, in our place, the discrimination with which we are faced in real life”; the film shot “excludes the imminent ambiguity of reality” (Bazin, 1980, 42). The real as seen through the camera does not include, as a rule, an enormous amount of mass or detail at any one time; we do not have to struggle to pay attention to the principal action. In this respect, it follows the compositional arrangements set out by Caravaggio: focused, stripped of unnecessary detail but richly evocative of time and place. So, film realism does involve delimitation. However, we also need to consider what happens when we are overwhelmed by the perceived limitlessness of the world displayed in the artwork, which brings us to the notion of the sublime.

The Sublime Philip Shaw (2006) points out that “the sublime” has many applications, from simple value judgments to descriptions of a state of mind. For Shaw, the sublime refers to “the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a

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thought or sensation is defeated. Yet through this very defeat, the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language” (Shaw, 2006, 3). In a sense it expresses “the idea of infinity beyond words” (Shaw, 2006, 1). But the concept of the sublime has a history and not a linear history either but rather a weighing-in of different thinkers and philosophers over some 200 years. Moreover, these notions of the sublime do not necessarily follow from one to the other, and they seem to posit quite different conceptions of what the sublime signifies. However, the thinkers on the subject agree that the sublime is something beyond realism, ordinary apprehension, and straightforward explanation. As Simon Morley puts it, the sublime experience is “fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder in order and the destruction of the stable coordinates of time and space. Something rushes in and we are profoundly altered” (Morley, 2010b, 13). Ashfield and de Bolla, presenting a collection of texts on the sublime in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, warn against a teleological view of the sublime which starts in eighteenth-century Britain as “a kind of dress rehearsal for the full-fledged philosophical aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and his heirs” and recommend that the earlier thinkers be taken seriously and individually on their own merits (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, p.2). Several of these offer an opportunity to consider the sublime in art specifically, and a potential way to develop a reading of the sublime in film. English artist Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725) is essential for thinking about the sublime in art. For Richardson, the sublime does not simply mean “the very best,” rather the sublime is “the state which fills and satisfies the mind, nothing appears to be wanting, nothing to be amiss, or if it does, is easily forgiven. All faults die, vanish in the presence of the sublime which, when it appears, is as the sun traversing the vast desert of the sky.” The sublime “ravishes,” Richardson continues. “It transports, and creates in us a certain admiration, mixed with astonishment” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 46; italics in the original). Painting is not about simply striving for realism but going beyond it: “he that would rise to the sublime must form an idea of something beyond all we have yet seen; or which art, or nature had yet produced” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 47). Richardson’s argument can be applied to the notion of an artwork being immersive: so well realized that we cannot perceive or imagine any flaw or fault. Richardson’s early concept of the sublime may be a useful way to understand the sublime in film: a sense of totality, an immersion that operates across the senses and emotions.

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John Baillie in An Essay on the Sublime (1747) thought that size, or vastness, was a vital element of the sublime but pointed out that experiencing the sublime would be disappointing: “two or three days at sea would sink all that elevated pleasure we feel upon viewing a vast ocean” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 90). This, Baillie thought, is where art is useful, since “the sublime of painting consists mostly and finally in representing the sublime of the passions” and marveled at how “for the space of a yard of canvas, by only representing the figure and color of a mountain, shall fill the mind with nearly as great an idea as the mountain itself ” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 99). Baillie identifies that the sublime can be experienced through constructed spectacle and draws attention to the point that it is the vicarious experience that is the true sublime: we can see an avalanche on the canvas or the screen or perhaps through binoculars and it is sublime. If we are actually in it, less so. The notion of the sublime as a kind of unsettlement, a vicarious shock and horror was expressed by Edmund Burke (1730–97) writing in 1756, that “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 132). The sublime, then, produces fear and vicarious pain that gives pleasure. In Critique of Judgement (1790), Immanuel Kant made it clear that the sublime is not a thing and does not rest on a thing but upon apprehension, the effect that the sublime has on the mind and the imagination. In his example, the ocean is not sublime in itself but it can be apprehended as sublime under certain conditions, which he expresses as metaphors: the ocean can be apprehended as a “clear mirror of water only bounded by the heaven” or “an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything” (Kant, 1914, Kindle Location, 2783). The sublime is subjective and has no absolute and determinate concept. It is realized through perception, not in that which triggers the perception. Unlike Richardson, who offers a practical consideration of the sublime in relation to painting, neither Burke nor Kant wrote about the sublime specifically in terms of art. Kant’s own experience of the sublime was limited. Not only did he never leave the environs of Königsberg through his entire life—so he never did a Grand Tour, taking in the Alps or the Italian coastline—he had little exposure to art in the original, seeing mainly reproductions such as engravings. Therefore, Kant’s concept of the sublime is a largely intellectual one, while it is an experiential and practical one for Richardson.

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To Paul Roncken, the sublime “can be interpreted as an extreme type of aesthetics, a supernova of sensations” (Roncken, 2018, 9). It is valuable to consider these “extreme aesthetics” in film aesthetics. If we look closely at the sublime described by Burke, it offers an evocative description of the spectacular film, which seeks to create an immersive experience that provides vicarious shocks and terrors. Though spectacle and the sublime are not the same, many historical films engage with the sublime as spectacle, through creating immersive, visually stunning set pieces with dramatic landscapes or natural disasters, violence, or other kinds of visceral shocks in the service of the historical narrative (Lukinbeal, 2005, 11). To eighteenth-century thinkers, this sensation was often linked by extreme landscape or forces of nature: a volcanic eruption, a rocky crag, a lightning-illuminated sky. The crucial importance of setting, particularly as regards nature, is visible in artworks which invoke the sublime: the glowing sun of Claude, the burning sun of van Gogh, the implacable desert sun in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962)—or the haunting two suns of Tattooine in Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977). When we apprehend the sublime in art, what is the nature of these supersensations that we feel? Richardson and Baillie seem to conceive of it as being related to vastness, not of the object itself but of the depiction of vastness through composition. As per Baillie and Richardson, this rhetorical sublime is the sublime of artifice, the created sublime that invokes a thrilling experience. This is often done by creating spectacle, which, if successful, can potentially invite the audience to a sublime experience. The sinking of James Cameron’s Titanic comes to mind. The natural sublime, following Burke, is experienced through our apprehension of nature, either direct or mediated. We might cite a tourist excursion to the Canadian Rockies, National Geographic’s remote wilderness photographs, or images from space. The rhetorical sublime and the natural sublime are brought together in cinema, where sublime nature itself can be included in the mise-en-scène through location filming or replicated, enhanced, and made more exciting through methods such as matte painting or digital special effects. In an article for Aeon, philosopher Sandra Shapsay notes that “Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate affective arousal, which is not a highly intellectual aesthetic response.” This arousal she terms the “thin sublime” (Shapsay, 2018). In contrast is the “thick sublime”— the more deeply philosophical ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, who offer transcendental accounts—“that is, accounts that involve putatively universal

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cognitive faculties.” They conceive the sublime as an “emotional response in which intellectual reflection on ideas, especially ideas about humankind’s place in nature, play a significant role” (Shapsay, 2018). This book is less concerned with the sublime itself than how it is invoked or manifested in art. This is where Shapsay’s idea is useful. Instead of assuming that the “thin” sublime posited by Burke is (because largely reactive and not necessarily provoking deeper thinking) intellectually inferior to the “thick” sublime of Kant and the discipline of philosophy, perhaps it is worth considering that the thin sublime offers an interesting way into reading the sublime in art. The “immediate reaction of awe,” which Shapsay calls the mark of the thin sublime, is embedded in the structure of many films, and, as we will see, in the work of certain history painters who actively sought to elicit a strong and immediate emotional reaction in the viewer, without necessarily wanting or needing to provoke an intellectual engagement. However, Temenuga Trifonova demonstrates that the sublime is a broad concept that simultaneously bears many separate and often contested definitions. We move easily from the Burkean sublime, based upon human apprehension of nature, to the disruptive “inhuman sublime” of Lyotard, a sublime with no transcendental pretension whose sublimity rests upon its “resistance to rationalist appropriation or narrative representation” (Trifonova, 2018a, 16). “Of fake and real sublimes,” Trifonova’s essay on the contemporary sublime, though short and fairly general, potentially opens up exciting new routes into the discourse around the cinematic sublime; in it she identifies a variety of “versions” of the sublime which manifest within contemporary art forms (Trifonova, 2018b, 74–87). But the historical film seeks to bring us back to an earlier sublime, perhaps suffused with nostalgia or at least a sense of safety: whatever horrors may have happened in the past, we are here now, in the present. The simulated past becomes both a temporary prophylactic against the worries of the present and a lesson in rationalism, as the narrative structure guides the viewer toward a conclusion that is always already known. In any case, as James Kirwan points out, the sublime articulated by eighteenth-century English writers has been consistently “drawing in cinema audiences for over a century” (Kirwan, 2018, 64). In his essay “Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime,” Kirwan (p. 68) argues that this eighteenth-century sublime—which he describes in terms very similar to Shapsay’s “thin sublime”3—functions within the film industry as an And expressed more comprehensively in the first chapter of his Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Rational in the History of Aesthetics (2005).

3

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“active ingredient” of what has already been successful; the eighteenth-century sublime has “clearly been an endearing aesthetic resource in cinema.” In this book, I argue, in agreement with Kirwan and demonstrating through the case studies, that the success of this sublime was established by painting and then consistently reused in films.

History Painting and the Historical Film Historical painting derives from Grand Manner history painting but depicts actual events rather than mythology or allegory. The imagery of historical painting created a framework for filmic representation of the past, in some cases generating or affecting ideas about history and society’s relation to its past. I will demonstrate how the development of historical painting segues into cinema. I will consider how “history” is visualized in cinema and painting. At the same time as ideas about the sublime were being debated by painters and philosophers, painters were involved in creating the first truly “historical” paintings, depicting things that had happened. The pictures, while seeking realism, were strongly influenced by ideas about the sublime. Through an analysis of five paintings made between 1780 and 1872, I will examine techniques of presenting realism and the sublime in the representation of history. However, the importance of the historical paintings was not limited to their subject matter. Painters operated in commercial markets involving sales, exhibitions, and reproductions. They were deeply engaged in devising new exhibition and distribution systems that have potent echoes in the distribution strategies of early cinema. The final section discusses these strategies as a general tendency. In his foreword to The Visual Turn (2003), Donald Crafton warns that one should avoid the “historical fallacy.” This is the “assumption that two events occurring at the same time or in succession are necessarily related to each other” (Crafton, 2003, ix). However, his claim that “to equate the art historical consciousness with the cinematic consciousness should probably be resisted or at least indulged in moderately” goes too far (Crafton, 2003, x). Although indeed they should not be “equated”—which is impossible—it is untrue that art history has little to teach cinema studies. Film studies already lacks sufficient examination of how visual codes originated and why they are still valid. Crafton also fails to acknowledge the historical place of painting in the evolution of film:

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backdrop and matte painting and production design have always relied on a deep understanding of art history (Christie, 2009, 5; Barron and Vaz, 2002). On the other hand, Crafton is right that we should “resist representing historical relationships according to the principles of causal narration, temporal contingency, psychological agency” or storytelling (Crafton, 2003, x). Instead, as Angela Dalle Vacche demonstrates in Cinema and Painting (1996), we can analyze the relationships between cinema and paintings through case studies and aesthetic theory. The relationships are reciprocal and not causal. In What Is Cinema? André Bazin cites André Malraux’s claim that cinema is “the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance and found its completest expression in baroque painting” (Bazin, 1967, 10). Bazin writes that painting became torn between the representation of ideas (symbolism) and realism (“the duplication of the world outside”), noting that the best painters combined both. This “appetite for illusion,” as he describes it, originates in “the proclivity of the mind towards magic” (Bazin, 1967, 11). In other words, imagination. Therefore, I argue that we can identify a kind of imagined realistic past, created by painters, that has been used consciously and purposefully by filmmakers since the beginning of filmmaking. However, this imagined past is marked by what I will call—in defiance of Crafton—“cinematic thinking.” By this, I do not mean that painters anticipated cinema, but that certain motifs and techniques created by painters were deemed useful and effective by filmmakers and have endured. In the Introduction, I described the “cinematic” painting and its techniques of lighting, coloring, use of gesture, and tonality. Next, I will examine some of these techniques that historical paintings displayed. Bazin identifies that these technologies have contributed to the development of visual thinking of which cinema is a recent outcome: not only the photographic apparatus but the camera obscura, the lens, the magic lantern, and so on. However, he maintains, the idea of cinema is not technological: “on the contrary, an approximate and complicated visualization of an idea invariably precedes the industrial discovery which alone can open the way to its practical use” (Bazin, 1967, 18). One of the arguments in this book is that cinematic painting is part of that “visualization of an idea.” Historical painting, or the representation of historical events, derives from the artistic category of history painting. I will keep the broad term “history painting” to describe the genre. More specifically, “historical painting” will describe those pictures which sought to depict narratives of real-life events and people. First

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defined in the Renaissance, and developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, history painting was universally considered the most important and “highest” kind of painting in Western art. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative and aim to convey a noble, moral message. Initially commissioned and designed for churches, palaces, and public buildings, the paintings were often enormous. From the sixteenth century, secular history paintings depicted mythologies of ancient Greece, the “heroic tales of Rome with their examples of valor and selfsacrifice” and allegorical subjects “illustrating some general truth by means of personification” (Gombrich, 1995, 481). During the eighteenth century, history painting’s subject matter expanded to include historical painting—depictions of the past with attention paid to visual accuracy based on research. The traditional themes remained but were often ambiguous. Historical paintings are essential in understanding the visual development of the historical film. Questions about accuracy, rhetoric, ideology, and the manipulation of history arise as often in discussion of the history painting as they do with regard to the historical film. The ways historical painting challenges or reinforces prevalent ideologies such as gender, religion, nationalism, and patriotism reappear in the discourses around the historical film. In historical painting, the question of the tension between realism and the sublime appears as early as the eighteenth century and, as will become clear in the subsequent chapters, continues into the present-day historical film. All the elements present in the modern historical film—the representation of violence, prurience, eroticism, and nationalism and the manipulation of history to suit contemporary tastes—are present in historical painting. Furthermore, the historical film from the beginning of the twentieth century effectively replaced representational historical painting for audiences. The kind of erudition and historical lessons offered by historical paintings were replicated in historical film which, by and large, achieves a synthesis between the historical painting and historical novel.4 The significant period of historical painting lasted about 100 years, from the 1770s to the late 1880s, and then began to decline. However, just because the fashion for historical painting died out in the salons and the discourse of the critics, it does not mean it did not remain popular with the public, who Many nineteenth-century painters adapt historical novels, for example, Ivanhoe by Léon Cogniet (1794–1880). There is no space in this book to discuss the historical novel, but it develops alongside historical painting. See Degroot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (2016) and Lukâcs, The Historical Novel (1963).

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accessed the works largely through prints. Exploring these ideas through case studies of paintings, I will follow the development of the “realistic sublime” by the Franco-British painter Philip James de Loutherbourg in his Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1796). The Russian painter Karl Bryullov, who spent much of his life in Italy, offered the Last Day of Pompeii (1830–3) with pathos and realism. A specifically American example, the striking cinematic sequence The Course of Empire (1833–6) by Thomas Cole, is, I will argue, one of the great shapers of a particularly American narrative about nature and culture. Finally, I will examine Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, an artist whose popular work is an aesthetic precursor to Hollywood’s “sword and sandal” history films. I will proceed with the discussion chronologically, but my point is not that the artists “influenced” one another. Instead, they participated in cultural and social trends that allowed them to develop work that created and responded to public demand. These examples demonstrate some of the ways that historical painting developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on antiquarianism, material accuracy, and visual spectacle. But alongside this interest in visual accuracy, there is a kind of quasi-erudition in these works, a sense that they want to both “inform” and excite the viewer. One of the arguments I make here is that this quasi-erudition becomes a hallmark of the historical genre and has decisively passed into cinema. In Painting the Past (2004), Roy Strong shows that the major shift in history painting toward historical painting (particularly in England but influential everywhere) came about due to painters taking an interest in antiquarianism, a field of enquiry that emerged in the eighteenth century (Strong, 2004, 23). Most painters tended to use the research of others, although a few were themselves antiquarians. The same era also saw a revolution in history writing. The careful study of the historical record—following the examples of Edward Gibbon, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, David Hume, Catherine Macaulay, and others—became the standard approach, even if the argument was wholly rhetorical. As the following passage from Hume’s History of England (1754–62) demonstrates, the retellings were visual and dramatic: The King came accidentally to the house after the hunting party . . . and as the occasion seemed favourable for obtaining some grace from this gallant monarch, the young widow flung herself at his feet, and with many tears entreated him to take pity on her impoverished and distressed children. The sight of so much

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beauty and affliction strongly affected the amorous Edward; love stole insensibly into his heart under the guise of compassion. (Hume, quoted in Strong, 2004, 23)

The word “theatrical” comes to mind, and theater was also transformed in the period. Historical settings were popular, and David Garrick (1717–79) was the first to bring reasonably period-accurate costume and scenography onto the London stage for his Shakespearean productions, which until this point had been played in modern dress (Strong, 2004, 26). As discussed previously, the discussion among artists and philosophers about the sublime began in the eighteenth century, particularly in England, then was taken up by German thinkers, most notably Immanuel Kant. We can thus see that between Jonathan Richardson’s 1725 Essay on the Theory of Painting and Kant’s Critique of Judgement in 1790, the sublime became established as a concept. As such, the sublime was addressed by painters from de Loutherbourg to German romantics like Friedrich and read retroactively into works by Rubens and Salvator Rosa, with many diverse pictorial interpretations of what “sublimity” could be. However, in the quest for the sublime, realism was not forgotten. Joshua Reynolds in 1770 exhorted painters not to simply “copy” from life but to transcend the meanness of the everyday; he also exhorted them to get all the details right (Reynolds, 1901). During precisely the same period—and it is not “historical fallacy” to make this connection—painters, and in many cases the same painters, were also exploring the historical as subject matter. For example, Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe caused a sensation because it dispensed with most of the usual classical trappings in depicting a “noble” subject. Still, even in the depiction of real history, the sublime was often sought. If history painting of the religious or mythical type had long contained something approximating the sublime, now painters looked to achieve some kind of mutually sustaining relationship between realism and the sublime in the depiction of history.

Loutherbourg: The Realistic Sublime Philip James de Loutherbourg uncovered the real secrets behind dramatic yet realistic historical painting without bothering with classical allusions. Born in Strasbourg, France, de Loutherbourg was a prodigy, much praised by Diderot, and the youngest painter to be admitted to the Paris Académie by virtue of his

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dynamic landscapes. Moving to England, he was hired by the actor-manager David Garrick as the principal scenic designer for the Drury Lane Theatre (McCalman, 2006, 344). Here he embarked on a five-year career of specialeffects theater design, the like of which had never been done in Britain. Although there is no evidence that de Loutherbourg had any direct prior experience in creating theatrical spectacle, he clearly had enough knowledge and training to quickly become the highest-paid scenographer in Britain; under his influence the English stage “achieved a level of spectacle never before seen” (Kornhaber, 2009, 45).5 He continued to paint and, within a decade of arriving in London, was elected to the Royal Academy. Acclaimed by leading arbiter of artistic taste Sir Joshua Reynolds and a close friend of Gainsborough, de Loutherbourg was a highly influential artist and personality, bringing his theatrical sensibility into his painting. He understood Diderot’s injunction that theatrical scenes ought to “look like sublime paintings,” and with the support of Garrick he was able to make the scenography an integral part of a visual narrative (Bermingham, 2016, 379). His Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588, depicts the English defeating the Spaniards at sea. What makes this rendering of the historical moment so compelling is that it fully achieves the “realistic sublime” (Wood, 2001, 42). The composition and its details have been made realistically, detailed enough for the Royal Maritime Museum at Greenwich to identify the participants: The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s flagship, the “San Martin,” flying the Papal standard at the main above a religious banner and the Spanish ensign on her stern, is immediately beyond to the right. The central Spanish ship beyond the “San Martin” flies the flag of Leon and Castile at the main and the ragged saltire cross of Burgundy on a striped ground as an ensign. . . . The English fleet is attacking from the right, with the “Ark Royal” half into the canvas in the right foreground. The royal arms of Elizabeth I are visible on the foresail with the Royal Standard and St George’s flag flying from the main- and foremasts respectively. (Royal Museums Greenwich, n.d.)

The archival description reveals that in 1779 de Loutherbourg designed a staging of the Armada as a spectacular scene in Sheridan’s comedy The Critic; or a Tragedy Rehearsed at Drury Lane. While he made this painting almost twenty

Ann Bermingham notes that De Loutherbourg “is credited today with creating the realist stage” (Bermingham, 2016, 380).

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years later, “it is the only image which may suggest the general style of this scene” (Royal Museums Greenwich, n.d.). Theatrical the picture may be, but it is realistic: there are no heroic gestures, no classical allusions, and no angelic figures; nor is there even any especially thrilling and awful violence. Instead, de Loutherbourg invokes the sublime by an almost shocking use of color, along with diagonal lines to divide the picture. The strongest diagonal runs from the top right to the bottom left dividing the picture into two-color fields: green-blue and strong shades of red. The red section depicts the Armada fleet being burned by the English fireships. The green section is the roiling, churning water, representing another horror of the battle. There is little description of actual violence in the painting, but the colors themselves offer a kind of violence, a visual that rhetorically proffers the choice of two dreadful fates: death by water or death by fire. There is nothing available to indicate that de Loutherbourg did any form of historical or antiquarian research to do this or any other history painting, but we know that he observed topographical scenes with alacrity; therefore, his rendering of the sea, the sky, and the position of the ships was probably based on observation (not, of course, of the Armada). De Loutherbourg’s “strong bent for pictorial naturalism” is here combined with lurid color to create a sublime that nevertheless remains plausible6 (Altick, 1978, 120). His dramatic effects and achievement of a realistic sublime had appealed to Diderot, though with reservations about the heavy-handedness of the color in the early paintings from his Paris period (Bermingham, 2016, 379). In Armada, de Loutherbourg’s mastery of strange, febrile yet brilliant color is what makes this picture thrilling.

Bryullov: The Empathetic Sublime In 1833 Russian painter Karl Bryullov (1799–1852) exhibited Last Day of Pompeii in Italy and Paris, to sensational effect. The sheer size of the work, a 6-meter canvas, makes it one of the biggest history paintings of the period and one of the most popular and influential historical paintings of the century. Bryullov spent significant periods of his life in Italy and had probably visited the recently A strange and interesting aspect of the artist is his lifelong interest in alchemy and occult practices, including doing chemical experiments, leading to discoveries in how to blend, fix and intensify color pigments. Therefore, it seems likely that there may be some purpose behind the strikingly intense, lurid use of color in the painting (McCalman, 2006, 345).

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discovered ruins of Pompeii; he was not the first painter to depict the scene. However, Bryullov’s is the first version of the subject that we might consider truly cinematic. The lighting is reminiscent of Loutherbourg’s Armada (which he had not seen) in employing red and green light through two different light sources: dramatic red light from the volcano engulfing the pale yellow-green light coming from the sky. Bryullov depicts a small group of people in the street, at the moment when they realize what is happening. The volcano has begun to erupt, flinging red hot lava into the sky, which has started to fall upon the people. They cower; some start to run away, but a young mother in a yellow dress has already collapsed on the street, with her infant child next to her; “statues topple, and the city itself already looks like a vast tomb” (Daly, 2011, 272). Possibly Bryullov saw some of the pathetic human remains discovered at Pompeii and wanted to find a way to bring them back to life. The painting was widely praised, particularly for its seamless combination of classical forms (mainly in the smooth, clear depiction of the figures and architecture, reminiscent of Poussin and David) and romantic emotion (Gray, 2000, 102). Most significantly, instead of heroes or myths, Bryullov shows ordinary citizens in a moment of panic and shock, simply reacting to the disaster. He gives relatively little space to the volcano in the upper right-hand corner of the picture. The focus is on the human experience and the reaction to danger. Bryullov’s painting has characters; we see their faces; we read their emotions; we feel pity. Rhetorically, it is a surprising and unusual approach to the subject, urging the viewer to feel empathy and emotion, fear and sadness, rather than experience a thrill. Filled with pathos and terror, the picture calls the viewer to identify with the people. It is not about the volcano; it is about the people—a lesson that filmmakers took on board. What is crucial here is Bryullov’s decision to combine character and narrative with the apocalyptic sublime of volcanic destruction, and his choice of a particular “moment” in the event. It is not surprising that the painting inspired Edward Bulwer-Lytton to write the phenomenally successful novel The Last Days of Pompeii, published the following year.

Cole: The Apocalyptic Sublime Although best known as America’s first great landscape painter, founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole approached the “Disaster” genre with The

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Course of Empire (1833–6). This is a series of five paintings depicting the rise and fall of an imaginary city. In it, he expresses his unease at the despoliation of the landscape by “civilization” (a theme he returns to in other paintings). Cole’s series follows a coherent narrative, almost a film storyboard, tracing the story as a primeval community develops into a vast empire, and then falls into decadence. The first of the pictures is The Savage State where primeval humans hunt and live simply in a landscape reminiscent of the sublime vistas painted by Salvatore Rosa, all swirling sky and rough terrain. Cole’s “savages” reference aboriginal North American life, based presumably upon his friend James Fennimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, rather than an experience of actual native communities, which had been largely eradicated from the Hudson River region. If the “generic savages” in The Savage State are appropriated from Native American cultural imagery, according to Tim Barringer, “Cole makes it clear that the figures in The Course of Empire are to be understood as European.” The savages do not represent any specific ethnicity; even less do they represent a conquered people, they are instead “the origins of modern society” (Barringer, 2018, 56). Next is The Arcadian or Pastoral State, resembling the early days of Greece, bucolic and peaceful. Here the same landscape has been painted in the style of Claude Lorrain, with golden light and gentle slopes. Cole collages different ideas about pre-imperial societies: a stone temple resembles Stonehenge, a woman whose stance and dress echo Greek statuary and—crucially—a boy making a drawing on a slab of stone. It seems to be an ideal state. However, even here, Cole offers portents: in the background, a ship is built in the style of the Greek trireme, a soldier strides through the landscape and smoke rises from a temple in the background—indicating religious activity, possibly sacrifices. Following this idyll, a lavish empire arises. The Consummation shows the empire at its zenith: the whole area has been urbanized, and the frame is filled with glorious, white-marble buildings, almost obliterating the mountain. Crowds of people cavort under the gaze of a magnificently clad ruler sitting atop a tall, elephant-drawn carriage. Temples and palaces shimmer, and there is a red column, which strongly resembles the famous rostral columns of St. Petersburg, linking the imagined scene to real-world, present-day artifacts. It is beautiful, detailed, and highly artificial, even Mannerist. Nature has been all but banished, all the leafy trees are gone, and the canvas is alight with gold and pink tones. Of all the pictures in the series, this one catches the

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eye immediately, even at a distance; it is compelling and absorbing, clearly attractive, yet its artificiality is disquieting. Needless to say, anyone who had read their Gibbon or for that matter Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) knew that Destruction would logically follow. The first thing we notice in that painting is that the decorative fountain from the lower right foreground of Consummation has been replaced by an enormous martial figure, a testament to the hubris of the now-vanquished Emperor. An invading force is arriving in ships, and there is a terrible, vicious fighting; a woman falls to her death escaping a soldier, while other soldiers set fires. True to the notion of apocalyptic sublime, nature is also involved in the disaster, conjuring up an enormous storm roiling the sea and clouding the sky, only to meet the thick black smoke of the marauder’s fires. By the time we reach the final painting, Desolation, everything is over. The decadence of Consummation and the violence of Destruction are in the past, and nature has taken hold. It is twilight, and a full moon is in the sky. Cole has effectively “zoomed in” to this composition, placing the viewer close to one of the few remnants of the old empire, an overgrown mossy pillar surrounded by broken pieces of architecture. In the background, we see crumbling ruins. It is beautiful and peaceful, borrowing extensively from the visual vocabulary of the picturesque. No sign of human life appears. Instead, a small lizard crawls up the ruined grand column, toward a lone heron nesting on the top, and a deer stands at the water’s edge. Depending on one’s point of view, it is a bleak vision of the future when all aspects of human civilization have been wiped out. Or, it is a chance for a new opportunity to perhaps do things differently—a new hope, as it were?

Gérôme: The Spectacular Sublime If Thomas Cole’s apocalyptic vision of the end of civilization was an exciting subject for history painting, the details of the decadence itself were even more appealing. In the nineteenth century, classical themes from Roman history (à la Jacques-Louis David) gave way to frank depictions of the decadence described and criticized by Tacitus and Suetonius. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was one of the most prolific, best-selling, and most reproduced history painters of his day, and it was he who formulated the compositions that fed most directly into cinema. By the twentieth century, he was best known for his outspoken rejection

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of the Impressionists, which immediately categorized him as anti-modernist and he was almost completely forgotten. However, over the past decade, his work is being reappraised. Although the verdicts of his contemporary critics such as Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola have not been overturned, Gérôme is becoming appreciated for his historical importance in the history of painting and visual culture. Crucially, scholars are examining his importance to the visual history of cinema, particularly in his paintings of ancient Rome. In Pollice Verso (1872), Gérôme’s favorite and perhaps best-known painting, we can see what Marc Gotlieb calls a “singular powerful moment of pictorial unity” (Gotlieb, 2012, 61). The crowd is united in their attention to the tension of the moment. To the right, we see a group of vestal virgins—one is drunk— unanimously pointing thumbs down in the spirit of the moment. The crowd is in suspense. The Emperor looks on; How will he exercise his prerogative of the power over life and death at this moment? Is Gérôme commenting on absolute power? Perhaps, but he is not saying anything particularly original or insightful about it. What he does portray well is the mass excitement of the crowd, their collective attention, and clearly their willingness to be participants in such a spectacle. Here we see all the principles of the cinematic picture coming into play: the frozen moment of drama and suspense; the indication of time through the slashes of daylight from between the overhead awnings, slicing the muted light of the arena; and the dominant use of red, both in the splotches of blood soaked into the sand and the furnishings of the arena. The expressive and emotive gestures of the characters are theatrical but not exaggerated: the defeated man holds his arm up in a gesture asking for mercy while the gladiator’s powerful body swivels in the direction of the crowd, as his helmet-clad head— face hidden—looks up at the people in the stands. He is not looking directly at the Emperor but at the vestals and the group above them; the Emperor himself looks at the gladiator. Everybody is looking at everybody else; the moment is frozen in time, enticing the viewer to scrutinize each of them in turn. In Pollice Verso we are awaiting the decisive moment: the victorious gladiator looks to the signal from the Emperor: Thumbs up or thumbs down? Will he kill or spare his defeated opponent? What is going to happen next? French art and film critic Dominique Païni observes that what is significant about Gérôme’s painting is that his compositions depict not the decisive action but the moment just before or just after (Païni, 2010, 333–40). He certainly learned this from his teacher, Delaroche. But, while Delaroche excelled in painting the fateful before, Païni points out, Gérôme also painted the moment after. We can

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see this clearly in many of his pictures. In a later painting of the Roman arena, Gathering Up the Lions in the Circus (1902), the violent games are over; keepers try to put the lions back into their enclosure. One of the beasts is recalcitrant and confronts a keeper. Bodies and hunks of bodies lie in the sand, oozing blood and puddles of blood dry under the late afternoon sun, as the stragglers of the audience drift away. The charred remains of the crucified line the perimeter of the amphitheater still smoking. It is all tremendously atmospheric, shocking, and utterly vile.7 So what kind of history is Gérôme offering here? If the period of historical painting began with the emergence of history writing as a practice, by educated men and women who sought to understand the past and bring it to life through narrative, the period of traditional, representational historical painting ended with the emergence of history as a discipline. What kind of history did the painters offer, and what did it achieve? The idea of history as visualized in de Loutherbourg’s Armada picture is romantic, accurate, and exciting. The realism and the sublime in this picture appear seamless, one reinforcing the other; the almost lurid color offset by the accuracy of the ships and seascape. The scene is exciting but does not lose sight of what is going on: a terrible scene of death at sea. Although the subject is English victory, it is also horrific. The danger is not directly from the English but from the fires and the sea. De Loutherbourg manages to be both patriotic and empathetic. Does de Loutherbourg’s painting also have any nationalistic values to offer? He painted it in 1796, the year that, frightened by French military successes, the British sought to alter the balance of power and the government began to repair and reinforce coastal defenses and bolster the Royal Navy. De Loutherbourg’s Armada served as a reminder of a past victory that became a national legend; it is an image less about individual heroism than about British sailors working together to defeat the Spanish. De Loutherbourg painted several canvases of naval victories as part of the war effort, including the Battle of the Nile (1798) and the Battle of Camperdown (1799). Perhaps, as a Frenchman in England, he felt this was the best way to keep himself firmly above suspicion. Thomas Cole’s view of history is cyclical: civilizations emerge out of primeval conditions and eventually destroy themselves, only for nature to subsume them again. The relatively constant state of the natural world is juxtaposed against the transience of human endeavor and the human facility for corruption. In Gathering Up the Lions in the Circus is in private hands and is rarely seen.

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sequential images, Cole stages the conflict between liberty and power, human vigor, enterprise, and decadence. Cole, an early advocate of conservation, was highly critical of American expansionism and despoliation of the landscape. It is hard not to read into The Course of Empire a deep disgust with human hubris. The paintings are commonly, and quite rightly, interpreted as Cole’s admonition to the empires of the Old World and a warning to the emerging New World (Barringer and Raab, 2018, 42). But in the silent beauty of Desolation, despite its title, one can also sense a kind of satisfaction in the eradication of the human. Traditional history painting, as we have seen, wants to contain some moral meaning, whether it is about spiritual courage (e.g., Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ), valor (David’s The Oath of the Horatii), patriotism (de Loutherbourg Defeat of the Armada), or even moral criticism (The Course of Empire). Delaroche, for example, does make the viewer think about history and the morality of events like the execution of teenager Jane Grey or the inexorable mortality of a great ruler. However, with Jean-Léon Gérôme, morality recedes and is supplanted by a narrative image that is simply about spectacle, and which, as Lawrence de Cars puts it, “cries out to be animated” (de Cars, de Font-Réaulx and É. Papet, 2010a, 28). With Gérôme, we see an entire career mostly given to historical painting. As a pupil of Delaroche, Gérôme was aware of the popularity of the genre and its imaginative possibilities. According to Gülru Çakmak, Gérôme “aspired to make history truly experiential by mobilizing the viewer’s imagination,” through composition techniques, with the aim of “bridging the abyss between the lost past and the living present” (Çakmak, 2017, 1). The idea of history as visualized in Pollice Verso is notable because for all his conservatism the view he offers is from the gladiator’s side of the situation. The viewer is placed in the arena looking up at the Emperor, the vestal virgins, and the populace, awaiting their verdict. It is a strange glimpse of a kind of “history from below” perspective, alien to the way that the classics were normally presented. Before this picture, nobody had ever painted gladiators. What can we make of Gérôme as a history teacher? His paintings offer the classical world to those without classical education; they offer history lessons that supplement the school books. Moreover, like school books, the message is conservative and quietist. François de Vergnette, writing about Gérôme’s politics, holds that his themes could “never be described as neutral,” pointing out the painter was closely associated with the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and “presents autocrats such as Louis XIV or Frederick II in a good light”

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(Çakmak, 2017, 3). Gérôme’s is “a conservative iconography.” Equally, it reveals nostalgia—for the imagined certainties of authority, combined with delight in the material trappings of the past, such as the splendor of Louis XIV’s courts and Rome’s grandeur. Gérôme enjoyed visual extravagance because he painted it in fine detail. Arguably, the paintings evince the same nostalgia that we see in many Hollywood films, particularly the films of the first half of the twentieth century. As Çakmak points out, Gérôme thought deeply about history painting, and, aware of the inability of the viewer to physically enter into the picture, sought to give “at least a fantasy of the experience” (Çakmak, 2012, 77). While Mark Gotlieb (2012, 59) asserts that Gérôme’s paintings offered cinema “a vision of the narrative and immersive future,” that future is ideologically conservative and based on retinal pleasure. By the 1860s the sublime as a point of discussion among critics and philosophers had somewhat subsided. However, as Alison Smith points out, painters still pursued the sublime; though the notion itself “may have been in crisis, it nevertheless continued to have an impact in multifarious ways” (Smith, 2013). British art from the mid-nineteenth century, says Smith, “ostensibly eschewed the visual rhetoric of the sublime out of a concern for objectivity and ‘truth,’ but which at the same time offered new ways of harmonizing analysis with symbolism in confronting themes such as judgement, vastness, transcendence and terror, all traditionally regarded as manifestations of the sublime” (Smith, 2013). This description can be applied to Gérôme’s historical paintings. Though he insisted on authenticity and accuracy, his themes and imagery offer the emotional thrill and visceral vicarious experience hitherto associated with the sublime. Breaking with the traditional models of history painting, and adopting what would come to be cinematic conventions of visual narrative suspense, Gérôme’s history paintings have complex narratives that do not simply show the viewer the scene but lead the eye around the pictures (Gotlieb, 2012, 55). The narrative strategies and compositional mise-en-scène of Gérôme’s pictures are important not only for film history but for any understanding of narrative imaging. Although he did not invent them, Gérôme’s secret ingredients were simple: sex and violence. His visions of the decadence went much further than Cole’s. His Roman history paintings, including Pollice Verso and The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, offer a prurient and titillating mix of eroticized violence as mass spectacle, disguised as history and religion. Revoltingly, Gathering Up the Lions in the Circus depicts a prone, nude young woman, her body already half-

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chewed, in the left foreground. Gathering Up the Lions was, of course, painted in 1902, near the end of Gérôme’s life, and demonstrates the waning of his powers as a creator of illusion. Here his signature hyperrealism has become a garish cartoon, with an illustrative kind of realism, which lacks drama. It is worth noting that one of the tropes of history painting is the “victimized innocent,” usually a woman. The trope is in Bryullov’s Pompeii, Cole’s Consummation, and Delaroche’s Lady Jane Grey. However, in Gathering Up the Lions the woman is not just victimized, she is displayed in a pornographic way. Why was Gérôme so successful? He was not, then or now, considered a “great” painter by any critic or art historian. As visual history, Gérôme’s pictures are fascinating: they are highly detailed and follow the fundamental faculties of the cinematic image: lighting, color, movement, and gesture. Following examples set by his teacher Delaroche, a genuinely great painter, Gérôme’s history paintings are anecdotal, avoiding the obviously heroic (Cogeval, 2010, 12). Gone are the classical gestures we see in Bryullov’s Pompeii, and the impersonal, purely action-based imagery of de Loutherbourg’s Armada and Cole’s Course of Empire. The action in Gérôme’s pictures is naturalistic. Gérôme’s Roman arena paintings are part of a movement away from embracing classical ideals and valorizing classical antecedents. The prurience of Suetonius, not the fortitude of Cicero, is the approach of painters like Gérôme and novelists like Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis (1895). Bryullov sought to democratize the image of the ancient world by portraying ordinary Pompeiian citizens rather than Roman heroes. But Gérôme and Sienkiewicz went much further and demolished the Romans’ supposed “classical virtues” by focusing on the decadence in rich, complex realistic detail. Sienkiewicz aimed to demonstrate the moral superiority of Christianity (a riposte to Gibbon), but what was Gérôme’s intention? Reading Gérôme’s Roman paintings rhetorically, it is difficult to find any deeper meanings or subtext other than his invitation to “look.” Gérôme was known to be conservative, and it seems that he had nothing new to say. He does not use the Romans as David uses them, to symbolize classical virtues. They are a pure spectacle. While Delaroche’s history paintings have defined characters (the terrified princes in the Tower, fragile Jane Grey awaiting the executioner’s ax, raddled Elizabeth I dying in her bed), Gérôme’s do not. What Gérôme offers instead, is a mise-en-scène of immersive realism, implicating the viewer in the action within the frame. He achieves this by shifting the perspective, putting the spectator “right in the sand of the arena” (Winkler, 2004). As Çakmak explains,

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Gérôme invented techniques of composition that “acknowledge the viewer . . . as a historically situated and embodied subject, and by reconciling history painting as the painting of the historical processes that underlie and sustain the present” (Çakmak, 2017, 2). You are not looking at the keepers gathering up the lions, you are in the circus with them. It is you who have stumbled across the body of the slain Caesar and witness the fleeing killers. You are in among the gladiators, waiting for the Emperor’s verdict. The painting addresses you. You are in history. As outlined in the Introduction, this book explores how visual ideas about history appear in painting and cinema. Representational historical painting developed an approach that brought realism together with the sublime, to depict and to thrill. This type of painting begins to decline before the commonly accepted emergence of cinema as a viable medium of mass entertainment in the 1890s. But what is notable is how much of the imagery of painting was replicated in cinema, particularly in historical films. In a 2014 article the curator and critic Mohamed Salemy observes that it is interesting “how film was able to successfully obscure its alien function behind a familiar human face.” He points out that the technology of film did not determine its use. People chose to use it to “focus on humanity,” insisting that film adopt the “long love affair with performance and narrative” of arts such as literature, theater, and painting (Salemy, 2014). Salemy’s point is that this was never intrinsic to film, yet it is what film has done from the beginning. And we see this in the way that film leaped immediately into recreating historical events. One of the first films made was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Made by Alfred Clark at the Edison Lab in 1895, it is an early example of “trick” photography: Mary approaches the block, kneels, and her head is cut off. That is all. Yet in that forty-second shot, all historical painting from the past century and a half is present. The attempt at authentic detail in the Tudor-y dress. The composition limits the scope and centers the action, not unlike Delaroche’s Jane Grey (though seen from the side). This is important because, of course, any filmed version of the scene is different from a theatrical performance; the mise-en-scène must be composed and the composition adhered to. The “victimized woman” motif here is only the first of countless versions in cinema. Gérôme died in 1904 and it is tempting to imagine that he spent his final years attending the new attraction of the cinema. Had he done so, he might have noticed how many early films were historical in subject matter and how influential his aesthetics of history proved to be. By this time, Gérôme had long fallen out of favor within the academy, and in hindsight his feud with the

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Impressionists made him look hopelessly out of date. He was seen as a terrible reactionary: grotesquely vulgar, anecdotal, staidly academic, and impossibly bourgeois (Allan and Morton, 2012, 2). To Rob King, it is remarkable that “at the moment when history painting was no longer revered as the grand genre” the new medium of cinema sought legitimacy from precisely this artist (King, 2012, 142). Translated into French in 1900, the first stage adaptation of Quo Vadis in France in 1901 used scenography strongly based on Gérôme’s paintings (de Cars, de Font-Réaulx and Papet, 2010a, 140). The first movie version of Quo Vadis was also in 1901, by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet. Polish historical painter Henryk Siemiradzki probably inspired Sienkiewicz. Siemiradzki’s Nero’s Torches (1877) shows the decadent Emperor enjoying a lavish party while in the right of the painting a row of human torches is in the process of being lit. There is a similarity between Gérôme and Siemiradzki in their lavish vision of a classical world which is brutally violent but at the same time titillatingly erotic. Since the artists were unlikely to have directly influenced one another, one can only assume that what they were painting was a late nineteenth-century zeitgeist, which was to find its fullest expression in the cinema. Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur has as its climax a violent, exciting chariot race in the Circus Maximus, a scene that Jean-Léon Gérôme had painted in 1876 (Wallace likely saw a reproduction). Ben Hur captured the imagination of the cinema, and it was first produced as a motion picture as early as 1907, using as scenery some of the scene paintings— themselves based on well-known paintings—made for a pyrodrama (theatrical production with fireworks) of The Last Days of Pompeii performed at Manhattan Beach in July 1885 (Mayer, 1994, 98). The nineteenth-century realist historical paintings depicting scenes from ancient Rome made by Gérôme, Siemiradzki, and others such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema indulged fantasies, especially in America. On the one hand, the pictures tell their audience that the “virtuous” Romans were not any better than the citizens of modern industrial nations. In fact, with their debauchery, gladiators, and slaughter of Christians, some of them were worse. On the other hand, struggling to maintain Republican virtues, Americans feared the “Old World” vice. As the nation grew increasingly prosperous, fear of decadence grew. Cecil B. DeMille was so sure in 1932 that “life in ancient Rome is singularly similar in many of its aspects to life in modern America” that he printed these words in a souvenir booklet of the film The Sign of the Cross (Malamud, 2004, 133). At the same time, everybody wanted to see the decadence for themselves,

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whether it was in Gérôme’s visions of brutality and salaciousness or DeMille’s fabulous scenes. French director Louis Feuillade even made an entire film based around an orgy, Héliogabale or L’orgie romaine (1911). The cliché depravity of the Romans was resurrected again by Tinto Brass in Caligula (1979) and every depiction of ancient Rome on screen, though the historical evidence for such depravity is rather thin. Ultimately Gérôme (along with other popular nineteenth-century history painters) offered an ersatz classicism for those not formally classically educated. Gérôme was a reasonably educated Frenchman of his period; he was familiar with Michelet and like most bourgeois Frenchmen had studied Suetonius and Plutarch at school. However, he aimed at a wider audience, primarily through his reproductions. Perhaps recognizing a fellow traveler, Alexander Dumas père approved the 1867 painting The Death of Caesar saying “the painter is on a par with the historian” (de Vergnette, 2010, 115). Readers of historical novels, then and now, will find that they recognize the world presented by Gérôme. He offers history for the reader of Bulwer-Lytton, not von Ranke. History was changing. The dramatic and entertaining narrative styles of Hume, Carlyle, and even Gibbon were superseded by the new “scientific” history writing coming out of Germany. Perhaps this was more accurate, but it was far less entertaining; Sienkiewicz, Wallace, and others stepped in to claim the audience for historical narrative, while Gérôme provided the pictures. The lesson was not lost on Giovanni Pastrone, Cecil B. DeMille, and others: history is not the secret knowledge of the upper classes. Their historical films made audiences feel as if their intellectual abilities were being appealed to—and sold tickets. It has sometimes been held that early cinema was a coarse, unartistic medium, in contrast to the “high art” of the past (Higashi, 1990, 181; Storey, 2017, 25). This attitude may still endure in some quarters, and it certainly exists in some of the popular discourse around “mainstream” and “arthouse” film (Sarkhosh and Menninghaus, 2016, 40). But is “high art” painting so removed from the commercial, popular sphere? It is noticeable that showmanship and commercial nous appeared as soon as the British and Americans decided to take up painting in earnest. The link between theater and painting becomes manifest in the eighteenth century, in ways that also prove illuminating when considering the relationship of painting to cinema. The Shows of London, a 1978 book by Richard Altick, and still the definitive study, details the entertainment culture of London from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Altick reveals how an

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entrepreneurial culture brought together “high” art like paintings and sculpture, with theater and a range of popular entertainments. From the décor of Vauxhall and Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens to the scenic paintings of Drury Lane theater, artists engaged in commercial activity alongside easel painting; Vauxhall also had a picture gallery showing the work of Hogarth, Francis Hayman, and others (Altick, 1978, 320). The British Library has an admission ticket to “Mr Copley’s Picture of the Siege of Gibraltar as Exhibited in the Green Park near St James’s Palace.” Despite being a member, painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) challenged the custom of exhibiting paintings first at the Royal Academy.8 Instead, Copley hired exhibition spaces and “staged” his enormous paintings for the public. He hired rooms, draped the painting in a velvet surround, and carefully lit the space (Altick, 1978, 105). In referring to this endeavor as a “raree-show,” Copley’s critics linked Copley’s exhibitions to the lowest form of public spectacle (Kamensky, 2016, 303). But Copley’s instinct was right. His exhibitions were sensations, attracting large crowds of the public, lengthy reviews, and, crucially, revenues (Kamensky, 2016, 305–6). For one exhibition, no exhibition space was big enough, and so the artist hired an enormous tent that was some 25-meters long in Green Park. The king and his family had their own private view before the exhibition was thrown open to the public. Critics were divided, but the crowds were not. In Jane Kamensky’s words “Copley’s tent was a mass experience, a spectacle.” Copley later recalled that more than 60,000 people had attended the exhibition in Green Park (Kamensky, 2016, 352). The kind of spectacle Copley offered, the staging for the painting and the reproductions on sale, prefigure the kind of commercial attitude to cinema. Copley’s ground-breaking exhibition strategies created new audiences for painting, which look uncannily like later cinema audiences. It is strange how Philip James de Loutherbourg has been almost written out of history. Successful and praised, he proved more than capable of achieving and exceeding the prevailing standards. Yet none of his paintings has survived as part of the art-historical canon. Many of them are not even on display. His name has begun to appear in theater history, science and technology, and culture, but only very recently in art history research.9 In theater, he was a significant inventor of special effects. He not only revolutionized scenography; he developed a prototype moving-image theater. After leaving Drury Lane, he invented a Copley and his major works are discussed in Chapter 6. T he inclusion of de Loutherbourg’s 1801 Coalbrookdale at Night in the Thomas Cole: Atlantic Crossings (2018) exhibition is a sign of the new interest in the artist.

8 9

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commercial moving-picture show, the Eidophusikon, which combined lighting, moving painting, and sound (McCalman, 2006, 341). Debuting in 1781, the Eidophusikon was set up inside a large room, seating about 130 people. It consisted of a small stage about 8 feet wide and 6 feet high. A mechanism moved painted flaps and transparencies, employing on the smaller scale the same special effects he had devised for the Drury Lane stage. It was accompanied by live music. Audiences were thrilled with the Eidophusikon (Lindsay, 1981, 149). It was successful, but after perfecting it and running it for two seasons, de Loutherbourg lost interest and sold it, returning to history painting. While in one sense the Eidophusikon was just another gimmick in the London show culture, it was recognized as being unusual and important. Altick quotes The European Magazine that it was “one of the most remarkable inventions in the art, and one of the most valuable, that was made” (Altick, 1978, 125). Both Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, and de Loutherbourg’s close friend Thomas Gainsborough visited the show often (Vaughan, 2002, 187– 8). The subject matter varied, from exciting natural scenes of “The Effects of Nature” to painted re-enactments of the Gordon riots of 1780 and a recreation of Milton’s “Pandaemonium,” clearly drawing upon the history-painting genre (Altick, 1978, 125). After de Loutherbourg sold it, the Eidophusikon continued to entertain audiences with changing shows until a fire destroyed it in 1800. And imitators emerged, including “the whole of the Battle of the Nile aided by the united Powers of Mechanics Painting and Optics, from its commencement on the evening of attack until its glorious termination on the ensuing morning” (Altick, 1978, 126). Altick (1978, 126) concludes that the Eidophusikon was an important moment in the history of theater scenography and technology, as indeed it was. But it also must be seen as a significant step in the history of cinema. Moving images had long been seen in camera obscurae, which remained popular entertainments. De Loutherbourg combined the idea of light and painting in motion, to create a show that was fixable and replicable. He only needed to make the paintings once, and the same show could be restaged over and over to ticket holders. Unlike theater, the Eidophusikon relied on pre-created images, not actors, to provide the narrative. And, as at Copley’s painting exhibitions, de Loutherbourg’s audiences were captivated by images presented in darkened, specially lit rooms with seating—so different from the typical gallery or salon presentation.

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The repeatability of the Eidophusikon show signals another important point: the dissemination of historical pictures. One often-neglected aspect of art history is the importance of printed reproductions. Cole and Bryullov’s works generated thousands of prints for sale. Copley’s exhibition strategies were intended not to sell his paintings but to sell prints. Just as today, with our proliferation of art books and images on the internet, most people saw paintings in reproduction rather than in person. Etchings, engravings, aquatints, lithographs, photographs, all of these techniques were the principal vehicles for the consumption of images. This is important in understanding how the most popular, often-reproduced images such as Gérôme’s were influential in the scenography of early historical cinema. Gérôme may have responded to a zeitgeist in historical narrative, but perhaps he was instrumental in creating it. Because Adolphe Goupil, his father-inlaw, owned one of the biggest printing presses in France, Gérôme had ready access to high-quality printing using the latest techniques. He reproduced and sold his images through the company, where they spread across France and Europe, and the Americas. To Émile Zola, Gérôme simply painted “in order to reproduce painting” (Bowyer, 2010, 33). The effect of widespread reproduction was immense; Lawrence de Cars points out that “thanks to the quality and spread of Gérôme’s works in print the visual imagination of a whole generation was nourished on his works” (de Cars, de Font-Réaulx and Papet, 2010a, 18). Furthermore, de Cars insists, Gérôme must be seen as a “highly convincing preHollywood artist” with a great appeal to the American market, establishing his real heritage in America, a culture that “appropriates the old continent’s history through moving images” (de Cars, de Font-Réaulx and Papet, 2010a, 20). Copley’s exhibition scenography, de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, Cole’s narrative series, and Gérôme’s proliferation of prints indicate that, for history painters in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, there was a desire for painting to do something more than hang on a wall in a salon. Copley, de Loutherbourg, and Gérôme sought much broader audiences. They also looked to make money. Cole (who started his artistic career in his teens as a printmaker) wanted to tell, and spread, a bigger story than one painting could carry (Kornhauser, 2018a). The same sensibility was embraced by Albert Bierstadt and George Catlin in the United States, among others. Many of these artists, apart from Cole, have been neglected by art history until recently; Is their “showmanship” partly to blame? However, their developments in subject matter, their embrace of technology and distribution strategies all demonstrate a way of

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thinking that prefigures cinema. Perhaps it is significant that the most innovative pre-cinema painters were history painters, painting in the historical mode. By the nineteenth century, history painting as a genre appealed because it offered a kind of erudition that was popularly accessible yet based on research and desire for accuracy. Typified by the efforts of Delaroche and his pupil Gérôme, history painting sought the juncture between the satisfyingly dramatic anecdote and the demonstrably accurate history lesson. It also often depended on the emotional engagement delivered by the sublime. History painting draws on historical knowledge, especially of the antiquarian variety, but is focused on the image’s appeal, just as the historical novel and film are focused on the character and the drama, respectively. The history painting must be considered a parallel development to the historical novel in the period. Both feed directly into the history of early cinema and continue to the present day, as the adaptation of both word and image continues to dominate the historical film. Many more pictures were being painted than ever before and these were reproduced widely. The print markets made their work hugely influential across Europe and North America. Print led to diverse dissemination; collectible prints and book illustrations and covers. The narrative link between the novel and the painting/print to a notion of “history” as a popular subject was affirmed, along with other qualities, such as titillation (the revealing garb—if any—supposedly worn in the past), violence and patriotism. Both history painting and the later manifestations of historical film have common approaches largely expressed through visual rhetoric. Both give visuality to actual historical events instead of mythology or religious stories. Both place the viewer into the past, conjuring up an imaginary situation that combines the familiar (e.g., human endeavor, victory, or suffering) with the unfamiliar (e.g., costume, props, and architecture). Painters like Delaroche and Gérôme were able to invoke a psychological approach to history: the horror of coming across the slain Caesar’s body in the Senate house as the perpetrators flee; the pathos of the beautiful and doomed Jane Grey approaching the execution block; the dogged Bonaparte crossing the wintry Alps on a small sturdy donkey, resolute, grim, and determined. Character is important. The melodramatic elements of hero and villain, which have been excised from historical discourse for over a century, continue to appear in historical films, reanimating the gestures presented first in history painting. With a romantic approach to history, focused upon the character and actions of individuals, personality becomes a potential element in the depiction of historical figures.

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We cannot forget the role of titillation, the presence of sex or violence, and often both together, in the history painting and the historical film. Feminine pulchritude and male physical splendor are as mandatory for the casting director as for the history painters. Whether it is J. W. Waterhouse’s sultry Cleopatra (1887), John Collier’s Borgias (1893)10 or Gina Manès as Joséphine de Beauharnais in Gance’s epic, Rita Hayworth as Salome, or Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie as Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, the historical film frequently needs the principals to be desirable according to the fashions and standards when the film is made. Most importantly, perhaps, history painting and the historical film offer a kind of escapism into the past, where the present can fade away or be addressed in a sublimated manner, to be a respite from present worries. Hence English audiences were happy to watch Elizabeth I successfully commanding the Armada in Fire Over England (1937, dir. William K. Howard) when the imminence of war with Germany was becoming impossible to ignore. Historical painting has left, and continues to leave, an indelible mark on the historical film. The visual rhetorics that operate between painting and film usually seek to persuade the viewer of the historical authenticity of what they are seeing. However, while historical paintings themselves may not appear within a film’s historical mise-en-scène, historical painting looms over the historical film. Escapism and erudition are at the heart of both. The following chapters present case studies which examine the different ways that historical films use paintings to communicate ideas about history visually. Each of the films discussed in the chapters uses painting in different, critical, direct, and indirect ways to address history.

A Glass of Wine with Caesar Borgia; Collier is an example of an influential painter of lavish historical subjects who is now completely forgotten.

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2

Meek’s Cutoff Realism and the Sublime in the Historical Film

Meek’s Cutoff (2010) is an American independent Western directed by Kelly Reichardt (DP Christopher Blauvelt1). Meek’s Cutoff depicts a party of migrants on the Oregon Trail, and I will argue that the relationship of realism and the sublime in the film creates a dynamic tension that both supports and comments upon the narrative (see Figure 2.1). Both the realism and the sublime in the film are achieved by implementing techniques derived from painting. Perhaps, instead of imagining realism and the sublime as two “things,” we should notice how they essentially act upon the viewer in the same way: if we agree with Kant that the sublime is not “a thing” but is a process of apprehension, we could argue that the same is true for realism. Realism does not simply lie in things, even realistic-looking things, but on how we perceive them. At the same time, the material properties (from sets and costumes to camera lenses or angles) that create realistic or sublime moments, can be identified and analyzed. André Bazin describes in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” how notions of realism developed through stages of visual art into cinema (Bazin, 1967, 10–12). The relationship between painting and cinema in the depiction of the past is a significant and enduring one. Art history acknowledges the importance of the concept of the sublime in art; therefore, to investigate the relationship between painting and cinema, the concept of the sublime in cinema shall be examined here. Temenuga Trifonova (2018, p. 24) points out, in cinema studies the concept of the sublime has most often been discussed in conjunction with the concepts of “spectacle” and “cinematic excess” but asserts that there are different ways the sublime is manifested in film: her conception of the “classical, natural sublime”—the example she gives is Iñárritu’s The Revenant—seems most When introducing a film that will be discussed in detail, I will indicate the director of photography (DoP) as well as the film’s director.

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Figure 2.1  Meek’s Cutoff (2010), directed by Kelly Reichardt. New York: Film Science. The hostile salt flats.

indicative of the sublime in historical films and indeed of the case study in this chapter. However, while I agree with Trifonova in her essay “Of Fake and Real Sublimes”(2018, 74–87), there are a variety of different approaches to the sublime in the historical film, and these traverse her designations of the sublime of aestheticized violence (the sea battles in Admiral, see Chapter 5), the “technically virtuosic CGI sublime” (e.g., the rendering of Elizabethan London in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, 2011), and—very occasionally—a cosmic sublime, arguably present in Parajanov’s Legend of the Suram Fortress, discussed in Chapter 7. I will, therefore, argue throughout that the sublime is present in film, though in a different way to its presence in painting, and it appears in the historical film in a variety of ways. Finally, I explore the sublime in Meek’s Cutoff with reference to (largely) American landscape painting. If the question of the sublime in the historical film has not hitherto been posed, that of realism has not been resolved. The historical film presents a particular problem in cinema in terms of realism. One the one hand, realism as

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an expression of the observable is impossible, since we cannot see into the past. We have only remnants of it: such material artifacts and documents as survive. On the other hand, many historical films announce that they are the “true story” of the past and proclaim their faithfulness to material detail, so attention must be paid to establishing those details that indicate the time and place of the narrative. However, as it is impossible to “recreate” the past, what is created is a version, an interpretation, an illusion. Siegfried Kracauer believed that historical drama could not be realistic and was not filmic. The organizational aspect of recreating the past denied the possibility of realism. Writing that “since reality is essentially incalculable and therefore demands to be observed rather than commanded, realism on the screen and total organization exclude each other” (Kracauer, 1966, 76), Kracauer believed that trying to visualize a past that is by definition no longer present was fruitless, since the historical film can only envision things as they might have happened.2 Fruitless or not, the depiction of historical events in art has been popular since the eighteenth century and shows no sign of abating in film. The sublime in most historical films does not adhere to the postmodern conceptions of the sublime as described by Slavoj Žižek and Jean-François Lyotard,3 but harks back to earlier conceptions such as those of Richardson and Baillie, discussed in the Introduction. These earlier conceptions of the sublime derived from Longinus are rooted in rhetoric, as a communication which is a “combination of wonder and astonishment” which exerts “invincible power and force” (Longinus, quoted in Shaw, 2006, 12). As Shaw puts it this sublime is a “discourse of domination; it seeks to ravish and intoxicate the audience so that a grand conception may be instilled in the mind without any bothersome appeal to reason and justice” (Shaw, 2006, 12–13). This may be the key to the argument against Kracauer’s notion that the historical film is fruitless because it can never be based on true realism. The act of world-creation of the past delivers not a world of imagination as much as an imaginary re-creation of something which has been lost and cannot be found again. This totalizing world (to which the viewer does and does not belong), in In From Caligari to Hitler Kracauer has much to say about German historical films, and mentions their “realism” but is mostly concerned with the politics of the films, rather than their style or visual content. 3 T h is book does not explore Lyotard or Žižek’s conceptions of the sublime, not only for reasons of brevity but also because historical film, for reasons which shall become clear, deliberately engages with the older notions of the sublime through the deliberate use of art-historical images. Philip Shaw’s discussions of the postmodern sublime open up possibilities of this sublime for more general film analysis (Shaw, 2006, 115–47). 2

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its comprehensive grand conception and its sheer immersiveness, does indeed ravish and intoxicate the audience. This Longinian conception of a sublime of ravishment and intoxication perhaps operates in the same way that the sublime ravishes the viewer with a vision of the past in the historical film. This view is supported with regard to film by the philosopher of aesthetics Martin Seel in “Realism and Anti-realism in Film Theory” (2008) and his recent book The Arts of Cinema (2018). Seel notes that the ability of film to show the real and the not real simultaneously is one of the ontological aspects of film. Seel challenges what he calls “the false alternative between realism and anti-realism,” pointing out that the strength of films “lies in their capacity to let the imagination of reality and the reality of their imagination play with each other in the awareness of the viewer in such a way that they carry or interrupt each other, that they penetrate each other, that the one dominates the other, or that a delicate balance is created” (Seel, 2008, 172–3; italics in the original). Seel’s assertion that film “breaks through every clearly delineated alternative between realism, illusionism and anti-realism” (Seel, 2008, 174) means that it is not very useful to talk about “the realism of a film” itself, but instead address the modes of realism that may be employed at any given moment in a film (as well as any modes of un-realism, including the sublime, that may also occur). The modes of realism I will be examining throughout this book are accuracy, authenticity, and anachronism.

Realism and the Sublime in Meek’s Cutoff A wagon train crosses a river, the medium close-up shot honing in on a small procession of people and animals, establishing the period as the middle of the nineteenth century. The sun is shining gently upon water and grass. The river is blue, abundant, deep, and its flow is loud. There is so much water that the women crossing the river are submerged up to their chests. Buckets are filled, clothes are cleaned, and animals drink. The water is bountiful, a life force, the essence of the quotidian. Four minutes later, some unspecified time on the journey has elapsed. The wagon train is crossing a territory of salt flats, dry baked ground, a white and cracked surface. The bleak horror of the salt flats becomes apparent only when we see one of the women (Glory White, played by Shirley Henderson) running back from the group to retrieve her hat which has blown away in the strong wind. As she runs after the hat, which is still moving, the camera pulls back and

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reveals the utter barrenness of the environment—an alien lifeless place, sublime in its vastness and intensity yet nevertheless real. Meek’s Cutoff recounts a real-life journey of a lost wagon train along the Oregon Trail in 1845. Three families, migrants heading for Oregon, hire blustering but experienced Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to guide them on a safer route to the coast, only to find themselves lost in a waterless region. When they come upon a lone Native American man, they must decide whether to entrust their fate to his potential ability to find water or die together in the wilderness. Filmed by Reichardt and DoP Christopher Blauvelt in a location in eastern Oregon, the film’s depiction of the relationship between people and landscape offers a means of reflecting upon how both realism and the sublime operate within the historical film. Like the other films examined in this book, Meek’s Cutoff takes as its subject a real-life historical incident and characters and retells the story through dramatization and fictionalization that does not veer too much from the historical record or challenge the findings of established historical research. Reichardt’s film uses the history of the westward migration of white Americans—the Meek party on the Oregon Trail—to invite the viewer to reconsider received ideas about migration, gender relations, and the mutual encounter between migrant and aboriginal. She achieves this by combining her signature minimalist style of filmmaking with a strong sense of painterliness in the film’s visuals. The film appears to be deeply realist, but invokes the sublime at key moments, as the characters’ encounter with the landscape becomes a confrontation with the unknowable. Firmly located in the tradition of the “revisionist Western” diverging from the older American Western genre derived from pulp novels, Meek’s Cutoff questions notions of heroism, masculinity, individualism, “civilization,” and the visual interpretation of the Old West.4 As explained in the Introduction, painterliness is a quality attributed to films in which the visual techniques of composition, color and tone, lighting, mise-en-scène, and gesture appear to refer to painting. This can happen as a direct reference, or simply echoing a particular style or tendency in painting. Painterliness also often implies the illusion of stillness. Meek’s Cutoff visually Revisionist Western films include Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990); the Coen Brothers’ 2010 remake of True Grit; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) directed by Andrew Dominik; Appaloosa directed by Ed Harris (2008) and Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019). All these are mainly focused on male experience. True Grit (particularly the Coen’s remake), McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Quick and the Dead, and The Homesman do have female protagonists or co-protagonists.

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invokes painting; Reichardt uses the painterly qualities to slow down the action in the film and encourage a more contemplative approach to what is happening on the screen, emphasizing the slow time experienced by the characters lost on the Oregon Trail. The film is suffused with a visual sublime familiar from landscape painters, from Salvator Rosa (1615–73) through J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) to Albert Bierstadt (1830– 1902) and re-emerges in modern artists like Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) (Morley, 2010).5 In its slow, detailed depiction of everyday life on a small wagon train of pioneer settlers, Meek’s Cutoff stands apart from almost every Western genre film. Except for its historical setting, it seems to be rooted in the same kind of direct, social realism that director Reichardt achieves in Certain Women (2016), Old Joy (2006), and others. Sam Littman (2014) describes Reichardt as “favouring a sparse, undecorated aesthetic, subtly cultivated suspense, contemplative pacing and reverence of the otherwise mundane that combines to achieve laudable Bressonian realism.” A. O. Scott describes the director as a “Neo-Neo Realist” (Scott, 2009). Though the story is significantly stripped down and dramatized, it recounts a real-life event, the disastrous “Lost Wagon Train” of 1845. Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond consulted accounts written by the actual migrants on the train in their research (Quart, 2011, 40). Though Kelly Reichardt has been described as a “minimalist” filmmaker (Simmonds, 2011; Sandhu, 2011), her films are highly detailed, and Meek’s Cutoff perhaps most of all.6 The rhythms of the quotidian are relentlessly repeated, as the people walk on and on, alongside their horses, their oxen, and their wagons. Reichardt has said that she wanted “to present this idea of going west as just a trance of walking” (Gilbey, 2011). The daily chores are repeated over again: getting water, gathering wood, making fires—until the water begins to run out and the group’s very survival is called into question. Realism as visual authenticity has increasingly become a cornerstone of the revisionist Western, with architecture, props, and costumes being as historically authentic as possible. Meek’s Cutoff pays detailed attention to authenticity as we see the wear on the collars and cuffs of the women’s pastel dresses, which get dirtier and dirtier the further they go without access to water. Eventually clothing, faces, DoP Christopher Blauvelt describes how paintings are a core part of Reichard's research (Hunt, 2020). Costume designer Vicki Farrell likewise describes how paintings were shared among the production team. (Pirvu, 2020). 6 Reichardt’s feature film oeuvre to date: (Rivers of Grass, 1994; Old Joy, 2006; Wendy and Lucy, 2008; Meek’s Cutoff, 2010; Night Moves, 2013; Certain Women, 2016; and First Cow, 2020). 5

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and hands are all covered in grime. Insisting on as much authenticity as could be mustered, Reichardt even refused the actors’ requests to wash the costumes for the duration of the shoot (Gilbey, 2011). Writing about the significance of water in the Western genre, Gilberto Perez observes that water is “a civilized amenity” that allows people to clean themselves and their possessions. “Water,” he writes “plays a part in the frontier transaction between frontier and culture” (Perez, 2019, 45–6). Meek’s Cutoff is a film about the breakdown of that transaction, where nature and culture collide over a parched, pitiless landscape devoid of emollient moisture. The women are often seen together and their fading, colored dresses offer spots of unnatural color against the raw hues of the landscape, particularly the pink dress worn by Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams). Their stark strangeness undercuts the femininity of the dresses and bonnets against the natural landscape, and the restriction the garments seem to stand for. Meek’s bright red shirt also stands out against the tones of the land but in a different way: showy, bloodred, aggressive. The separateness of the men and women is not only reflected in dress. Authority and duties are gendered in the film, as they were on the wagon trains. Matt Connolly mentions the “sharp delineation of gender politics within the assembly, the women often grouped on one side of the campground, going about their chores and wondering what the men are discussing across the way” (M. Connolly, 2011).

Landscape and the Sublime In his film review, Sukhdev Sandhu says that the landscapes “seem to know that they—and not the humans—own this story” (Sandhu, 2011). From the opening shot of the wagon train crossing the river, which is mostly seen in mid and close-up shots, gradually the film expands out into long shots and more wide shots, emphasizing the stark isolation of the characters in the increasingly inhospitable landscape. At first the landscape is intimate and tactile and although it is wild it has a nurturing quality, with bountiful rivers and lush grass. But the rolling hills give way to rocky landscapes; they are severe, hard, and unpleasant—almost parodying the mountainous landscape of the classic sublime imagery of Salvatore Rosa. There is a strangeness in the beauty of the landscape, particularly evoked by violently colored sunsets. Filmed entirely on location, the film denotes the timelessness of the landscapes, still untouched,

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empty, and perhaps uninhabitable.7 Conditions for filming were not significantly better than they were in 1845, as crew vehicles broke down in 43-degree heat (109.4°F) (Gilbey, 2011). The sublime principally occurs in the film when the landscape becomes more forbidding, beginning with the bone-white and unyielding salt flats. When the camera pulls out and reveals Glory White as a tiny, colored dot in the expanse of the salt flats, the effect is unsettling and dreadful. The viewer becomes aware that the land itself may be hostile, along with anything else that may appear. The film frequently emphasizes the arrangements of figures in the landscape, returning often to the smallness of the human figures—especially the females—in the landscape. This sublime is one of vastness, a limitlessness force of nature that is terrible in its inhospitability. After announcing “water ahead” while astride his horse on the crest of a ridge, in the next moment Stephen Meek stands with his back to the camera, facing a large flat blue lake; the composition is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer in the Sea of Fog (1818). But why? The lake surely represents the longed-for water source the desperate party has been questing. But Meek turns to face the party and reveals that the water is alkaline. The sublime landscape that we see behind him is deadly. So, the land is not only inhospitable; it is actively malign from the point of view of the settlers. The sublime aspect of the natural world that surrounds and engulfs the migrants is felt only by the viewer. The travelers never stop to take in the majesty of the salt lake, the beauty of the sunrise or the towering rock face they pass by. Instead, they continue to endure, weary and worried, putting one foot in front of the other. This illustrates Baillie’s point that being in the sublime landscape would be unpleasant, but the vicarious experience of it can be enjoyable (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 99). As in her other films, Reichardt’s realism is painterly, not surprising for a director who spent part of her career working in art departments.8 The lighting and composition of Meek’s Cutoff recall the lighting and coloration of some paintings by John Singer Sargent and others; Jean-François Millet is invoked often, particularly in the scenes with the women, and certain light effects recall the Impressionist Camille Pissarro’s Hay Harvest at Éragny (1901). The campfire scenes powerfully evoke Rembrandt, and even pure abstraction appears; we listen in on Emily’s conversation with her husband while the screen is filled T h e film was shot near Burns, Harney County, Oregon, which Reichardt has called “the least populated town in America” (Hewitt, 2011). 8 Kelly Reichardt interview onstage, March 5, 2017, British Film Institute. 7

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with black night, as dense and mysterious as an Ad Reinhardt painting, until the yellow dot of a lamp orients us. The realism of the domestic chores that we see the women performing echo the labors depicted by Millet. For an innovative, modern take on the Western, Meek’s Cutoff is surprisingly traditional in its attention to the same concerns about nature and the sublime that engaged eighteenth-century writers, and Reichardt’s sublime is made effective largely through the painstaking painterliness of the shots she and Blauvelt compose. If Burke identified a dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful, so does Reichardt. It is beautiful; the warmth and saturation of the colors of the land seduce the viewer. The naturalism of the cinematography is pumped up in the color grade, which imbues many (not all) of the daylight scenes with a warm saturated golden tone, creating an augmented realism through slightly idealized color and warmth. The Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro here delivers a sense of the sublime through the intensity of the blackness of the night, implying the vastness and un-knowability of the cosmos. The first important exposition of the narrative takes place in velvety darkness with a small, moving single point of lamplight. In this scene the Tetherows’s disembodied voices discuss their situation—lost on the Oregon Trail with an unreliable guide—and although they are too stoic to directly express fear, we sense it. Later, the blue sky becomes less benign. Its beauty gives way to a kind of relentlessness. It is too much blue, too much landscape, too much everything. We sense it bleaching the dry salty ground, drying out the water and shriveling the grasses. The color grade is harder, hard light infuses the screen. Yet still the settlers endure. Another aspect of the film’s painterliness is its use of stillness. The figures in the landscape are arranged in formation that momentarily evokes still life, arrangements of forms and colors rather than tableaux-vivants. Yet they are not still but continue small and slow movements as the viewer is invited to feel the time pass, to feel the slow, steady, inexorable but possibly pointless eclipse of time as the wagon train progresses. In this stillness, the viewer is invited to contemplate the sublime and perceive life’s terrifying essence against the elements. So it is there in the diminution of the figures, the Sisyphean tasks undertaken (hanging out laundry that cannot be washed, and gets steadily dirtier) and finally, the gnarled, lone half-leafed and half-bare tree at the end of the film. Is the tree the tree of life—representing potentiality (of water)—or an indication of the final expiration of life?

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The painterly references to European art in Meek’s Cutoff are numerous, such as the pointed engagement with Friedrich apparent in the salt lake scene, but the tradition of “western” painting is also present in the film. As evinced by Albert Bierstadt in paintings such as A Storm in the Rocky Mountains—Mount Rosalie (1866), the sublime was a key element in most nineteenth-century American landscape paintings, but these paintings demonstrate quite different interpretations of the sublime. Bierstadt’s were certainly about vastness, with huge canvases and dramatic scenery. Other, such as the Luminists, were more concerned with the infinite, mainly expressed in their treatment of light (Wilmerding, 1980, 25). Arthur Danto describes the American sublime as an approach to painting “whose makers subscribed to the theory that God expresses himself in nature and does so with particular vehemence in those aspects of nature which have a certain grandeur” (Danto, 2003, 150). Danto claims that the Hudson River School’s paintings—which featured nature itself at its most immense—were huge because the artists chose the large size to instill the awe and wonderment their depicted scenes aroused (Danto, 2003, 150). This is probably true for Frederic Edwin Church and certainly is for Albert Bierstadt, whose 1867 Domes of the Yosemite measures 9 by 15 feet (Malczewski, 2016, 367). The popularity of panorama painting may have influenced these painters. However, many other American landscape painters, particularly the Luminists, worked on a much smaller scale. Kelly Reichardt’s choice of the “Academy” 4:3 screen ratio is interesting in this context. Why did she deliberately choose the smaller screen for Meek’s Cutoff? As well as deliberately reducing the opportunity for panoramic shots (such as Dean Semler’s astonishing buffalo stampede in Kevin Costner’s 1990 film Dances with Wolves) and forcing the audience into intimacy with the characters, the 4:3 screen is much closer in shape and composition to the smaller Luminist paintings as well as the mid-nineteenth-century realist paintings of artists such as Millet. Meek’s Cutoff draws upon the American painterly tendency that came to be known as Luminism. American landscape painting has its roots in the Hudson River School of painters (1825–70), but there were several divergences from the approaches taken by founder Thomas Cole and his immediate followers. One approach was an overt sublime, such as the monumental, dramatic scenes of American wilderness depicted by German-trained Albert Bierstadt, which often contrasted sublime mountain scenery with idyllic, Edenic native villages (The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863). But not all American landscape artists went searching for spectacle. The Luminist painters sought a quieter,

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more contemplative sublime (Powell, 1980, 80). In American Visions the art critic Robert Hughes notes that “Luminism” is more a description than a school or movement; it is a term used to denote similarities between rather different painters (Hughes, 1997, 167). Aside from their focus on the American landscape, they had in common a self-effacing style that suppressed the brush strokes (in contrast to the style of French painters such as Delacroix), aiming for a glassy, polished effect. The pictures have a stark, spare kind of realism. Drama comes from naturalistic weather effects rather than theatrical composition, notably atmospheric effects achieved by superfine gradations of tone and exact studies of what Hughes calls the “luminous envelope” around near and far objects (Hughes, 1997, 167). These pictures orient around glowing light that infuses the entire scene, indicating a triadic relationship between nature, the self-in-nature and the divine (Novak, 2007). An example is Martin Johnson Heade’s painting Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay (1868) depicting the moment just before the tumultuous outbreak of a thunderstorm. The light in the painting seems to offer a sense of spirituality that bridges the corporeal, through closely observed details of natural phenomena, and the divine, expressed through the treatment of light. In Meek’s Cutoff, the light can be nurturing, as in the opening scenes by the river, or cruel, as the sun burns the surface of the salt flats and desiccates both the land and the temperaments of the migrants. In the absence of light, around the campfire or lamplight, the travelers express thoughts and fears that are unspoken during the day. Soft light bathes the women as they glean or work their chores; hard light follows them as they walk on and on, almost stumbling, after the wagons. The camera shows us the sun—a single shot, with the sun centered in the frame—suggesting heat, radiance, glow, intractability, intensity. Blauvelt uses a lens flare in this shot. The artificiality here is important because, as we cannot really look directly at the sun, we are much more likely to see its orb through a lens or on the screen. The lens flare thus indicates the film’s thickness and artificiality, connecting it to depictions of the sun’s intensity found in Van Gogh’s or Monet’s fierce orbs, or even William Blake’s disturbing, mystical suns. Yet it also reminds the viewer of the devastating effect of such intense sunlight on human skin and eyesight. Luminism is a realist mode that subtly invokes the sublime. Unlike impressionism, the realism in Luminism is important: the illusion of replicating the eye’s detailed experience of things amid nature’s constant activity. Although

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Figure 2.2 Kensett, J. (1872) Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

the subject matter is different, one of the Luminist paintings most clearly evoked in Meek’s Cutoff is John Frederick Kensett’s Eaton’s Neck, Long Island (1872; Figure 2.2). The painting is, at first glance, unremarkable, a stark vision of land and water unrelieved by distinguishing features. It is the opposite of a dramatic, gorgeous Bierstadt or Frederic Edwin Church picture. It is just under a meter wide, so not overwhelming in size. Robert Hughes points out how the painting is “as bare as could be” with its limited forms and clarity of light within very subtle tonality, it is a kind of abstraction within realism (Hughes, 1997, 171). It refuses any sense of drama or even identification with narrative; the landscape is there for itself, not for humans to impose meaning upon it. Only on the far horizon do we see the white dots of sails that indicate human presence: meager, unimportant, ephemeral, ready to be blown out of the scene by the wind. Reichardt’s landscape is much the same, though it is land-bound. Yet neither Kensett nor Reichardt presents this landscape as forbidding: it is beautiful, but the beauty is not there for human nurture or sustenance. Unlike a picture such as George Inness’s Peace and Plenty of 1865, which seeks to emphasize the bounty of America—a painting imbued with hope for postwar reconciliation and prosperity—Eaton’s Neck promises nothing material. Instead, however, it offers respite, peace and space for contemplation, both as a viewing experience and as a picture of a real place to experience. As the philosopher of aesthetics Nicholas Guardiano put it, this “American sublime” can be distinguished from traditional conceptions of the sublime in the history of aesthetics. It is grounded in the contemporaneous philosophy of

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New England transcendentalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Guardiano, 2014). These ideas are rooted in a German romantic tradition that identified spirituality with a holistic conception of nature (Von Engelhardt, 1988, 111–14). As the founder of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view of nature connects the idea of the sublime to the natural world explicitly through an identification of the natural sublime with what he calls “the city of God”—that is, a spiritual, pantheistic connection. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Emerson, 1836). Nature, to Emerson is not only connected to pantheistic godliness but is intrinsically superior to humankind. Contrasting wild nature to human activity, he writes that man’s “operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an expression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result” (Emerson, 1836). Barbara Novak sees a reflection of “the popular religion of the period” in American landscape painting before the 1880s, which she describes as “nature as the unfailing repository of the society’s ideals” (Novak, 1976, 6). America’s dedication to Christianity existed alongside a “secular mode of faith—based on a unique interfusion of optimism, transcendentalism, nationalism and science” (Novak, 1976, 60). This notion goes back to Thomas Cole, deeply influenced by romanticism and an idea of nature as God’s “undefiled works” in which “the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things” upon beholding wild nature, as he wrote in his Essay on American Scenery (Cole, 1836, 5). Robert Hughes muses that the landscapes of nineteenth-century American art are oriented around “an American God whose gospel is manifest destiny. It is pious and full of uplift. No wonder it was so quickly absorbed as a metaphor of religious experience” (Hughes, 1997, 140–1). In John Faragher’s study of the diaries and memoirs of the migrants on the Overland trail, the writings “seemed to adhere to a naturalistic aesthetic standard, which appreciated the landscape as God’s artistic masterpiece” (Faragher, 1979, 14). Reichardt seeks to critique this view. Her sublime in Meek’s Cutoff not only is sympathetic to Emerson’s exaltation of nature but also challenges it. Yes, the landscape is powerful and overwhelming, but the director avoids permeating the natural world with spiritual signifiers. While the shots make a connection between the film’s imagery and that of the Luminists, at times using the framing and lighting to suggest something otherworldly within the picture’s realism, she

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then refuses to allow the spiritual to manifest. At one moment the film suggests a Luminist reference, evoking the spare, almost empty light-filled vistas of John Fredrick Kensett, but in the next moment the scene returns to the same repetitive treading of the land, the ongoing fruitless search for water.9 There is a sense of metaphysical and spiritual significance about the land, a significance that is not sensitive to the needs of any of the humans. Though the white family is seen praying and the Native American man prays and marks his prayers on the stones, neither act seems in any way efficacious. In all its vastness and sometimes inhospitability, the natural world exists in and for itself and does not serve or respond to the human presence. Man has absolutely no dominion. Filmically, this means there is no relief, no redemptive moments, no sudden offering of bounty from the land. The film ends before the real-life wagon train did find water and resumed its journey. It leaves the viewer unsatisfied, the characters unredeemed, and the migration project unresolved. Reichardt also challenges Emerson’s notion of human insignificance, showing that the rituals of “chipping, baking, patching, and washing” may not be impressive but these core functions are what bind humans together, they are acts of survival. She argues that these tasks performed by the women are important and maybe all we have to save us from giving in to despair. Returning to the notion of the washing line in the waterless wilderness as a manifestation of hope and a belief in civilization, it is perhaps a counterpoint to Emily’s colonialist uttering, “you would not believe the things we’ve built.” It is hard to escape the idea that there is a spiritual dimension to the light in the film, but it is an unspecified one. The white family are shown in Bible study and praying, putting their trust in God. But, as Scott Esposito and Michael Smith discuss, “this is very much a film about being driven out of the Garden, or perhaps trying to return to the Garden” (Esposito and Smith, 2012). Esposito notes that Reichardt grounds the whole film in the biblical narrative. But if the Bible provides the emigrants with a narrative, as they go on this narrative is increasingly fragmented: patriarchy begins to dissolve, and the leader becomes the led. Smith concludes that “It’s interesting to see a Western containing Biblical references ultimately resigning its characters to an inevitable fate; there is no individualist triumph, no Providence, no overcoming” (Esposito and Smith, 2012). By denying the resolution that did in fact occur, Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond are rejecting a redemption narrative: “altering Reichardt’s 2006 Old Joy “explodes transcendentalist notions of finding oneself in the wilderness” (Seymour and Fusco, 2017, 8).

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and questioning the very form of the Western and its attendant mythologies” (Esposito and Smith, 2012).

Accuracy, Authenticity, and Anachronism: Realism and History Meek’s Cutoff borrows from the American tradition of “western” painting, which has framed the Western film genre since the beginning. At the same time as the Meek party wandered the Oregon desert, other wagon trains carrying artists were traversing the western regions. George Catlin (1796–1872) and Swiss Karl Bodmer (1809–93) painted hundreds of portraits of Native American people. John Mix Stanley (1814–72) and Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–74) painted landscapes, wagon trains, and Native American people.10 But these artists were interested in documenting what they saw. It was Albert Bierstadt who mythologized it. Bierstadt (1830–1902) applied the aesthetic sensibility of German romantic painting of the Düsseldorf School to the grandiose American landscape. But Bierstadt’s mythologizing of the West, created on several excursions beginning in 1859, chimed with an intense curiosity about the West that, fed by stories of the Gold Rushes, had, as Nancy Anderson put it, “reached a fever pitch” (Anderson, 1991, 70). It is one of the confusing aspects of art history that artists are often grouped with one another to create categories of similarity. However, that similarity may lead to more confusion. Bierstadt painted the Hudson River valley extensively, and as a result is sometimes considered a Luminist but his work has little if anything in common with Kensett, Heade, or Fitz Hugh Lane (1804–65) for example. What Bierstadt did, which he had in common with Frederic Edwin Church, was treating landscape painting like history painting. Bierstadt dramatized the landscape. The weather effects of the Luminists become ravishing or apocalyptic. His Rocky Mountains soar to impossible heights and his valleys plunge into limitless green depths.

Robert Hughes (1997, 183) points out that for all his apparent sympathy for Native American peoples, Stanley’s 1846 Osage Scalp Dance—a “racial melodrama” with its swooning white lady surrounded by threatening natives—was one of the talismanic images of the “demonic Indian” that embedded itself into American folk culture, and later into the Western, signposted in Meek’s Cutoff by Mille Gately’s (Zoe Kazan) panicked fear of imagined Indians.

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Bierstadt was also a photographer and made stereographs of his journeys, which proved to be so commercially successful that he persuaded his brothers to set up a photography business (Wright, 1991, 267). Therefore it is clear that Bierstadt’s relationship with realism was complex. He understood the role of the camera in capturing “what is there” and his paintings are precise with naturalistic detail, but he also appreciated the process of selective composition and how to create drama and interest through the lens. He applied this to his paintings, which are overall not of any actual place. Most are landscapes that are imagined, though based on careful observation, which Andrew Wilton describes as a “romantic reconfiguration” (Wilton, 2002, 32). It is this romanticization of the American Western landscape, a century and half of it, that Meek’s Cutoff sets itself in contrast to.11 After Bierstadt, artists imagined the West even more romantically though perhaps less effectively and often less artistically. N. C. Wyeth and Frederic Remington were hugely successful illustrators who had only tangential real-life experiences in the western regions. These images are even more chimerical than Bierstadt’s: the visual mythology of the West was established as one of covered wagons, bucking broncos, and buckskin-clad cowboys.12 And, as Robert Hughes observes, the images slid wholesale into the movies: “there are passages in John Ford’s westerns such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon based entirely on Remington’s pictures, which in turn . . . have come to look like action-movie stills” (Hughes, 1997, 203). If Wyeth’s and Remington’s illustrated “Old West” created the visual mythology of the Western, George Catlin’s portraits of Native people—done with their permission and not commissioned by a government authority—offer a very different perspective on the migration story.13 The spare, realist paintings of Andrew Wyeth are another influence in the film, in his deep studies of physiognomy as well as material space—as Blauvelt’s camera lingers on a face, or a long take where we see mostly stillness. Seymour and Fusco (2017, 58) note the way Meek’s Cutoff draws attention to the technologies of settlement, showing the Conestoga wagons and the Arguably, even the most oppositional Westerns still indulge in the romantic Western landscape; even Easy Rider (1969, dir. Dennis Hopper) has its moments. 12 Both artists offer a hyper-masculinized, monoethnic portrayal of the West, which is ahistorical. 13 Remington (1861–1909) and Wyeth (1882–1945) spent some time in the West as young men, but Catlin (1796–1872) devoted his whole artistic life to recording the portraits and visual culture of the native tribes of the West. His work was used in the design of Dances with Wolves (1990, dir. Kevin Costner) (Costner et al., 1990). 11

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ox-teams, as much as Bierstadt and Frederic Remington did. But Reichardt shows how fragile these were, and how uncomfortable. Piled with possessions at the start of the journey, as the privations become harder, the furniture and effects are jettisoned to lighten the load, leaving behind a trail of the trappings of civilization—chairs, clocks, cushions—strewn across the grasslands. The film, both in its script and visual design, largely adheres to what is known about the Meek Expedition and the Oregon Trail in general, with a few exceptions that will be discussed. There is a reasonable amount of information available about the Meek Expedition, as there are five known diarists who traveled the Meek Cutoff (Ragen, 2013, 15); four published their memoirs and the diary of the fifth, Eli Casey Cooley, is published online with commentary by his descendants (Cooley and Cooley, 1870). But many other Oregon Trail emigrants left behind diaries, memoirs, and letters which, as we shall see, often challenge the image of the “pioneer” later offered up by Hollywood. The material conditions of the trip are rendered with accuracy by Reichardt and her team. The journey through the desolate landscape was real. As Ragen points out, the region was “largely unoccupied” and is still highly underpopulated, which made it easier for the filmmakers to use appropriate locations. Needless to say, the “pleasantries of life in the American East were non-existent” on the trail (Ragen, 2013, p. ix) and Reichardt depicts this in detail. As the film shows, the emigrants traveled in covered ox-drawn wagons, nicknamed “prairie schooners” since their billowing canvas covers resembled a ship’s sails. While the wagons could carry over a ton and could traverse mud, streams, and sloughs, they were cramped and uncomfortable to ride in, so “most people chose to walk, and they generally ate and slept outside” (Ragen, 2013, 6). The wagons were indeed sturdy: the versions built for the film remained functional even though the automobiles failed in the 40-degree summer heat of the Oregon desert (Gilbey, 2011). The film opens when the group has already turned off the main trail to follow Meek’s supposed shortcut. They have already been on a very long journey: typically the route from the Missouri River to Oregon’s Willamette Valley took about five and a half months during this period (Ragen, 2013, 3). The journey was also fraught and almost unchartered, as eastern Oregon was a largely unknown territory. Few of the rivers or mountains shown on the available maps were recorded with any accuracy (Ragen, 2013, 18). In terms of the film’s specific factual accuracy, Meek (Bruce Greenwood) was a real person and according to one emigrant, William Barlow, the film version is not far off the mark: “He said he knew every trail and camping ground from

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Fort Laramie to Vancouver, west of the Cascade mountains. But he proved himself to be a reckless humbug from start to finish” (Ragen, 2013, 10). Of the other characters, Solomon Tetherow was a pioneer on the Meek journey, and “Emily Tetherow” was his daughter’s name. The real Solomon traveled with a larger family. The film’s principal departure from the historical account is in the number of people. Wagon trains normally ranged in size from twenty to one hundred wagons, but many were bigger. It has been estimated that over 1,000 people with some 200 wagons and 2,000 cattle, horses, and mules voted to take Meek’s route (Ragen, 2013, 10). Obviously these numbers were impossible for the film’s budget, but the impossibility of an “accurate” portrayal offered Reichardt the opportunity to reframe the story as one of a small band of lost travelers and to focus on intense relationship dynamics. The privations and incidents of the journey are recounted in the film in a way that feels authentic. Eli Cooley’s diary frequently records the brief message “water & wood plenty” (Cooley and Cooley, 1870) and indeed we see the company regularly going through the process of gathering wood and taking water. Cooley records the long period on the trail without water, but he does not mention the salt flats or the salt lake (now called Lake Harney). It is not entirely clear what the Meek company’s exact route was; this forms the basis for Brooke Gear Ragen’s 2013 book The Meek Cutoff: Tracing the Oregon Trail’s Lost Wagon Train of 1845, which attempts to trace the route using the diaries and memoirs. This uncertainty gave Reichardt more freedom to imagine the route and the terrain, while at the same time her research supplied period data to guide the project. The stoicism of the pioneers that Reichardt depicts might be illustrated by Cooley’s diary entry for Mon 12th May, in a scene which may have been too dreadful to feature in this (or any) film: “The Company traveled today. The rode [sic] is first rate. Wee [sic] had a sprinkle of rain this morning but the day has been fine for traveling. Camped on the Second fork of the Nimahaw—wood and water was plenty. When the Company was forming at night a small child of Mr. Hall’s fell out of the wagon and the wheel ran over it’s [sic] head; which at this time there is no life expected. A sprinkle of rain tonight.” (Cooley and Cooley, 1870) The encounter with the Native man (Rod Rondeaux) is frustrated by the mutual inability to communicate. By the mid-1800s many Native people had some grasp of English, but not all, and the Oregon Trail was relatively new. Emigrant W. A. Goulder wrote in his memoir that “It had been made known to us that the Walla Walla and Cayuse Indians” of the region “were somewhat disposed to be unfriendly

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to the whites, and that they had threatened to make themselves troublesome to immigrants passing through the country” (Ragen, 2013, 8). In reality, it was the natives who saved the travelers in the end. As Brooks Ragen indicates, “with the assistance of helpful Indians, probably Paiutes, the emigrants dragged and pulled their wagons and animals across the river” (Ragen, 2013, 13). The film establishes a rhythm of repetition, manifested by the attention to detail, especially of women’s work. Within this microcosm of a few families engaged in the quotidian labor of migration and survival, Reichardt examines social relations and attitudes to race and gender. While the film depicts and remains rooted in the world of the 1845 emigrants, it proffers opportunities to examine the frontier myths that have been perpetuated by many American films. The small-scale nature of the narrative opens opportunities for detailed material authenticity: in patterns of speech lifted from the memoirs, in costume and prop design and in the way the actors and crew were able to move around in the landscape. At the same time, the art-historical references that recur in the film— Friedrich, Rembrandt, Millet, Pissarro, the Wyeths—imbue the film with a sense of the historical. Here Reichardt brings art-historical references into the film’s mise-en-scène as a way of recreating the past through painterliness. This book demonstrates that art-historical references are a feature and a function in many historical films. The visual references to paintings, real artifacts from the past—even in the oblique, fragmented form that they are rendered in the film—place the film’s story and character within a recognizable “sense-ofthe-past,” a framework of authenticity that is more than simply an effect of what the props and costumes can achieve. Jonathan Rayner asks whether a filmic landscape appears as a “realist record, the only authentic and unperformed element in the frame” (Harper and Rayner, 2010, 245)? It often seems so, though in the case of the Western, the sheer saturation of landscape images (such as the overused Monument Valley, which has virtually become a meme) makes it hard to argue this claim.14 Meek’s Cutoff eschews many of the Western’s usual landscape tropes, partly because both the narrative and the history are set in eastern Oregon. Practical considerations such as budget may have influenced the choice. However, the topography of the landscape actively performs within the film. As Rayner and Graeme Harper point out, though what they call the “realist sway” of a film and the “formal Sergio Leone, given a proper budget for Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), felt obliged to include a shot of Monument Valley, despite the fact that the film was shot in Cinecittà and Spain.

14

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and ideological properties of the cinematic apparatus itself ” may obscure the constructedness of landscape in the scenes, the active selection of what and how to include the landscape “alerts us to the landscape’s presence as a role, as another performative element” (Harper and Rayner, 2010, 10). In other words, the camera’s action in isolating Glory White in the salt flat, or framing Meek like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, constructs the landscape in the frame, allowing it to perform as a character—in the former scene as an indicator of desolation and in the latter as an indicator of romanticism. In asking “how does a geographical landscape become a film scape?” Rayner says that landscape’s presence in some films reminds us of “an idiomatic and rhetorical address, deliberately incorporated performance of acculturated meanings” (Harper and Rayner, 2010, 245). This certainly is what happens in Meek’s Cutoff, which offers up a trove of such meanings, from the heavily bearded patriarch in the biblical wasteland to oblique art-historical and filmic references ranging from the romantic sublime to Wyeth-like realism. At the same time, Harper and Rayner acknowledge that “found cinematic landscapes” such as the topography of eastern Oregon “have existences independent of their depictions and uses in filmic images. Their persistence in the frame embodies a realism that belies the contrived placement and inescapable artificiality of the human performance in the more sharply focused foreground” (Harper and Rayner, 2010, 9). Yet the independent existence of the empty landscape around Lake Harney belies the reality that the region is actually populated and has roads and internet and television reception; the filmmakers had to find appropriate spots to create the sense of desolation. The appeal to the painterly also serves to somewhat mitigate the film’s inevitable anachronism. The scene at the salt lake, where Meek is momentarily framed as Friedrich’s Wanderer, sets up a connection to the kind of romantic ideas that eventually gave rise to the westward expansion of migration: ideas of democracy, the centrality of the individual and his right to dignity, and the unlimited possibilities inherent in progress and change. Moreover, the brief shot acts as a signifier of how romanticism’s philosophy of individual experience generated the notion of American exceptionalism, exemplified by the call of the frontier, and embodied in Meek. But Meek is, as his travel companion noted, a buffoon. And he has not found water, but only more salt. And so the shot serves to undercut the whole romantic idea. While there are few obvious anachronisms in the film, other than the impossibility of truly “recreating the past,” the increasingly outspoken character

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Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) has been called anachronistic by some critics (Ventura, 2011). This evaluation indicates some ignorance of the female experience of the migration. It is true that women were not in decision-making positions, and “enjoyed little overall responsibility for the direction or outcome of the migration” (Faragher, 1979, 75) but they did have views. Many pioneer women wrote assertive and opinionated memoirs about their journeys: Susannah Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), a bestseller about her emigration to Upper Canada. And Emily does not utter anachronistic views: as the women gather before sunrise we hear her sigh “Like niggers, once again” as they go about their work; her unthinking Eurocentricity is fully in place as she speaks to the captive Indian: “You can’t even imagine the things we’ve done,” she tells him, “the cities we’ve built.” Defiance of Meek did happen on the trail, but it’s not clear if the women had any voice in this. Still, we should remember that the Seneca Falls Convention took place only three years later, in 1848. Women were—literally and figuratively—on the move. The sexual gender tension between Emily and Meek is well played out in the film, though in reality Meek’s new wife accompanied him on the trail (Ragen, 2013, 1). As Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller note, “every company was composed of strong-willed, vociferous pioneers who were not slow to criticize those who held positions of leadership” (Clark and Tiller, 1993, 7). Ultimately, as John Faragher points out in Women and Men on the Overland Trail “despite the overwhelming masculine prejudice of our backward glances at the American West, in the day-to-day experience of wagon travel the emigration was not a he-man but a family experience.” And emigrant Mary Elizabeth Warner wrote in 1853, “they talk about the times that try men’s souls but this was the time that tried both men and women’s souls” (Faragher, 1979, 4), which is the approach that Reichardt takes. Aumont’s notion of realism raises another issue around anachronism as “a collection of social roles” regulating the “relation of the representation to the real” adequately to “the society that creates those rules” (Aumont, 1997, 75). These rules change over time and across cultures, which is one of the principal sources of anachronism in the historical film: not the film’s lack of faithfulness to the period being depicted (which may be very difficult to determine with precision except by a historian of material culture). Rather, anachronism may be found in historical film’s lack of convergence with the social roles and rules valued by the present-day viewer. To give an example: Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti” westerns and their imitators depicted the West as a grubby place, whereas classic

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American Westerns often featured characters clad in clean, pressed shirts or highly decorated dresses with hairstyles and lots of makeup. Leone’s attempt to capture something of the living conditions of the frontier heralded what might be assumed to be a more “realistic” approach to the Western, seen in films like McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) up to Dances with Wolves (1990) and Meek’s Cutoff, but these innovations were just stylistic shifts in the genre. Having examined a range of different approaches to the visual in the film, we might ask how the film operates rhetorically. Because the characters do not escape the wilderness in the film’s span, there is no resolution or conclusion to the “argument,” and any identification that takes place is limited. The notion of identification posited by Kenneth Burke (1950, 19–20) is a fundamental part of most historical films. In Meek’s Cutoff we are not asked to identify with the characters themselves as much as with their situation and “to consider the structural limitations placed on them” (Seymour and Fusco, 2017, 7). We are not even expected to identify with Emily Tetherow, since the character’s articulation of racist and Eurocentric attitudes—completely acceptable in the 1840s—puts her at odds with what one might consider Reichardt’s modern audience. Reichardt refuses to provide a back story or clear motivation for her characters’ actions (Seymour and Fusco, 2017, 67). Yet we can identify with Emily’s struggle for both survival and justice, and her understanding of how these are linked. At times, however, we can even identify with Meek’s boasting and blustering into the emptiness, a defense mechanism that though fruitless still temporarily fills the terrifying void. In short, rhetorical identification in the film is subtle and sophisticated; not based on inviting the audience to identify with a “hero” or even a character, but to imagine walking the dispiriting miles in the migrants’ cracked, painful shoes. We see the faces getting more parched, feel the discomfort of the tight dresses in the blazing sun and, as the landscape gets visibly drier and drier, even feel the pinch of thirst. The rhetorics of realism and the sublime operate within the film’s themes. The film’s story is foreshadowed at the beginning by a clever shot where the characters walk forward and off-screen and then reappear at the top of the ridge in the distance. The vista opens out, yet we sense that perhaps the characters are simply looping, just moving around within the landscape and not actually going anywhere. As the film visually veers between detailed domesticity and landscape sublime, we come to see that the interrelationship between the real and the sublime is the story of Meek’s Cutoff, an ambivalent story where the uneasy coexistence of

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realism and the sublime gives the film its dynamism. As Seymour and Fusco (2017, 51) point out, this is a critical and oppositional recounting of the Western migration myth: “through pacing and a story that questions the very notion of progress. . . . Reichardt emphasizes the non-evitability of western settlement.” However, Reichardt also denies the viewer the catharsis of the real-life conclusion of the Meek Expedition, so the journey is never justified or rewarded. Instead the film ends on an ambivalent note, as the “Indian” strides off into the hills. Reichardt is interested in ambivalence because the whole pioneer project is ambivalent. The illegitimacy of the settlers’ presence in the landscape is real, equally the settler’s fear of the wilderness is real and their fear of the aboriginal natives is also real. When Meek says “they never dream of sparing a woman,” this strikes fear into the heart of the female pioneers because massacres did occur and there was genuine danger as the historical record has shown. The film does not invite the audience to sympathize with the settlers as much as to acknowledge their experience. Nevertheless, the viewer cannot help having some admiration for the settlers, whose endeavor is challenging, whose determination is clear and whose struggle is manifest, while at the same time accepting the injustice of the settlers’ presence in the alien land. Finally, Meek’s Cutoff is a Western without a hero, a historical film without a conclusive resolution, and a road movie without a hint of romanticism. There is no romanticization of the landscape in Meek’s Cutoff just as there is no romanticization of the settler project nor of the “noble Savage” (which the Native man is not). “The Indian” (as he is billed in the credits) is just a person, and the migrants are just people and we can acknowledge them, and fear for them, without having to sign up for the political project of colonization. In this way, Meek’s Cutoff is a powerful historical drama about settler colonialism, but a sui generis one which, in its refusal to mythologize, confronts the viewer with the mythos of most of the historical accounts (filmic and otherwise) of the subject. This analysis of Meek’s Cutoff explores aspects of a historical film that uses painterliness as a strategy to reinforce the realism of the fictionalized narrative, to invoke ideas about colonialism, gender relations, and the human relationship with and dependence upon the environment. The notion of the sublime is activated several times in the film, not only generally in the audiovisual experience’s immersiveness but also in the painterly references that both serve and undercut the film’s narrative. While engaging deeply with Luminism’s sparsity and subtlety, and turning away from the romantic landscapes of Bierstadt, the film rejects the mythology of Manifest Destiny to invite the viewer to a critical perspective. The

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film achieves a sublime that is both contemplative and essentially nonhuman. In this analysis I have demonstrated how painterliness and the sublime operate in a historical film dominated by realism and minimalism. Realism and the sublime in the historical film are not oppositional: they create a dynamic tension that supports one another and serves the narrative.

3

Girl with a Pearl Earring Realism, Representation, and the Dutch Golden Age

Inveighing against those who consider film primarily a storytelling medium, filmmaker Peter Greenaway warns that “cinema is not an excuse for illustrated literature” (Greenaway 2001). When considering the adaptation of texts into film, rarely is the adaptation of painting into cinema considered as thoroughly as literary adaptation. Girl with a Pearl Earring (2004, dir. Peter Webber, DP Eduardo Serra) adapts the novel of the same name by Tracey Chevalier (see​ Figure 3.1). It also adapts, in a variety of ways, several paintings made during the so-called Dutch “Golden Age” (roughly, the Netherlands region during the second half of the seventeenth century) by painters such as Jan Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Meindert Hobbema, and others. These painters absorbed the achievements of Caravaggio and his Flemish followers, but here the naturalistic style of the Caravaggists becomes something akin to realism, due to the way these paintings seem to visually describe everyday life. The works, commonly referred to as “genre” paintings, offer an illusion of reality due to a combination of forms rendered as lifelike as possible (i.e., naturalistic painting techniques), and compositions that use lighting and spatial arrangement to create the illusion of depth, while recreating scenes from daily life or real-life place or events. How does Peter Webber transform the novel into cinema through the adaptation of visual images from paintings? I will examine what the paintings themselves do—and do not—tell us about the historical era that the film portrays, and how they create a sense of real life in the mise-en-scène. It seems clear that, both through viewing the film and following the production team’s accounts, a highly detailed and scrupulous realism was the overarching and overwhelming aim of the filmmaking team of director Peter Webber, producer Andy Paterson, and cinematographer Eduardo Serra (The Art of Filmmaking,

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Figure 3.1  Girl with a Pearl Earring (2004), directed by Peter Webber. London: 20th Century Fox.

2004). The filmmakers are obsessed with recreating a multisensory “real” on the studio backlot, a fascinating blend of authenticity and artifice. I will analyze the film through close reading of the film text and the paintings referred to in the film text, using models of visual rhetoric described in the Introduction. The film lends itself particularly well to a rhetorical analysis due to its narrative structure which is, following the classification set out by Eleftheria Thanouli, a classical narrative (Thanouli, 2019, 117–20). “Real” and “realism” are slightly different for each chapter and each film under discussion. Once again we turn to Aumont’s description of “realism” as “a collection of social roles which aims to regulate the relation of the representation to the real.” In the case of late seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the whole discourses of “real” occupy art history, sociocultural history, and indeed the history of science. In the case of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a slight story set in the imagined world of a servant girl in seventeenth-century Delft, the sense of realism adapted from paintings delivers a thoroughly immersive experience, a participatory fantasy of the past. “Realness,” as delivered by the paintings and offered up as “proof ” of period authenticity, creates a visual rhetoric of realism that totalizes and defines the period and place. I will examine how the film achieves this in a key scene that addresses the controversial question of Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura and how the film’s realism argues a case for how Vermeer lived and worked. Finally, having established the significance of realism as the core element of the film, I will evaluate the film as a work of “visual writing” of art history and history.

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In an era of great realist painters, Johannes Vermeer stands out as one of the most profound realist artists of the seventeenth century. Out of all the artists of the period, he is most likely to have used the camera obscura. Some art historians are still troubled by the notion that some painters used the camera obscura to aid painting, though Samuel van Hoogstraten recommends it quite strongly in his 1678 instructional book Introduction to the Academy of Painting; Or The Visible World. Van Hoogstraten claims that the camera obscura revealed “what color qualities ‘a truly natural Painting’ should possess” (Weststeijn, 2008, 331). This question is addressed within Girl with a Pearl Earring, which visually describes Vermeer’s methods. A high level of detailed realism in the mise-enscène is the film’s most remarkable aspect and drives its narrative. The rhetorical use of Golden Age Dutch paintings establishes realism and persuades not only because they are so full of detail but also because they are reasonably familiar, at least in style, and thus establish the period effectively. The naturalism in these paintings presents a rhetoric of realism that we quickly recognize because it is descriptive; the pictures recount the material conditions of “everyday life.” Svetlana Alpers refers to it as “the art of describing” (Alpers, 1983, passim). The amount of detail in the depictions of everyday life sits within a framework of pictorial composition activated through dynamic composition, lighting, and use of color. The combination of literal description with the arrangement of elements into a recognizable world leads to what I term a “rhetoric of realism” because the paintings make us feel as if we are looking at “something real”—whether it is a still life by Rachel Ruysch or Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Peter Webber calls it “an illusion that feels real” (Anatomy of a Scene, 2004). The sense of “the real” is persuasive in these pictures. For example, in Dutch still life, every element is observed in minute detail, giving the illusion of “total realism” using naturalistic painting techniques. However, the precarity of the arrangements and the presence of unseasonal fruits or flowers appearing within the same picture means that what we see in these still lifes could never be a “photographic” image (Stechow, 1966, 63–4). If visual images are carriers of meaning, their meanings are fluid and change over time, combined with and supplemented by other information. The meaning of the highly detailed realism in a representational visual object cannot be taken for granted but must be unpacked and questioned. For example, as Simon Schama points out in his seminal study The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), in the prosperous bourgeois society of seventeenth-century Holland, cleanliness was seen as “a virtue bordering on an obsession” (Schama, 1987, 304). Many

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paintings of the era show cleaning being done, for example, Pieter Van den Bosch’s Woman Scouring a Pot (c. 1650) and Pieter de Hooch’s Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House (1670), because depicting domestic cleanliness conveyed the spiritual “neutralizing power that kempt housekeeping exerted over dangerous affluence” (Schama, 1987, p.393). Through the use of light and the ordering of the composition, for example, the viewer can imagine that is “really” how Dutch people kept their homes. Schama points out that nothing threatens the “scene of unblemished domestic tranquility. Under the kind of safe housekeeping depicted here, the home was indeed Christian Arcadia” (Schama, 1987, 396). These pictures are communicative and persuade viewers that they see something of lived experience. However, the visual rhetoric of realism in these paintings is not precisely the same for every reader or every age. Today we are more likely to find the rhetorical “real” in the paintings persuasive and interesting because they show us the material conditions of the Dutch home: how domestic life was organized at the time, the role of class and gender in domestic work, and so forth. We may no longer need to be reminded of the spiritual benefits of a clean home, though the cleaning—done by women—may also show us that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The fact that the pictures are not realistic—in the sense of being “documents of life”—doesn’t detract from their rhetorical ability to convince us that what we see “feels real.” If visual images are invested with “the ability to offer audiences propositions” (Helmers, 2004, 64) then the realism in these paintings proposes that painting can be a window on the world (of your back yard); that is, the painting can offer a way of looking at the world which reveals things which may not have been noticed, such as the way that light streams through a window or how the pattern of the floor-tiles reflects upon a satin dress. Even centuries later, viewing these paintings can sensitize the audience (at least temporarily) to the minutiae of everyday life. However, we are not merely talking about the realism in the Dutch paintings, whether they are transposed into a film or observed simply as paintings. We also need to address the realism in the filmic images. Fortunately, it is possible to understand a little more about the intentions and processes by which the filmmakers sought to achieve realism in Girl with a Pearl Earring. Why were they so insistent upon powerful, detailed realism in this film? In part, it is down to the film team’s desire to make a “high-quality” drama film, but even more, it is because the film addresses the subject of looking and seeing, noticing and

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discerning. The complex role of the camera in filming “what is there” is addressed in the film, through the agency of Vermeer’s camera obscura. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells a wholly imaginary story about how the eponymous painting came to be. Set in seventeenth-century Delft, Griet, a teenage daughter of an impoverished Protestant tile painter, is sent to be a maid in the household of the painter Jan Vermeer. Vermeer’s family is well to do, cultured, and Catholic, and presided over by matriarch Maria Thins. As one of Griet’s duties is to clean the painter’s studio, Vermeer notices her interest in his paintings, and gradually a relationship develops between the two. She begins to help him in the studio, preparing his paints. However, it soon becomes clear that the Vermeer household is a precarious one, as the painter is wholly dependent upon his patron Pieter van Ruijven, a lecher and predator. Nevertheless, Vermeer agrees to paint Griet for van Ruijven, and this brings servant and master together clandestinely, as it is kept secret from Vermeer’s wife, Catharina. Although the relationship between the two is never sexualized, much less consummated, it is the catalyst for Griet’s coming-of-age story. The story, created by writer Tracy Chevalier, is wholly fictional and is based on historical research into the life of Vermeer and the social and material conditions of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. It was recognized early by the filmmaking team that it would be impossible to transpose the first-person narrative of the novel, which is seen entirely through the eyes of Griet, the servant, onto the screen. Additionally, art history graduate Peter Webber understood that it was important when making a film about a painter, to ensure rich, detailed visuality and to communicate as much as possible through visual images (Audio Commentary. Girl with a Pearl Earring, 2004). The film’s dedication to realism is manifested through its deep attention to surface verisimilitude and artistic reference points: “Webber assumes the responsibility of setting his story in a place that looks at every moment like 17th-century Delft” (Leitch, 2009, 204). Dutch Golden Age paintings perform an iconographic role in the film’s visual narrative, which assumes a recognition factor in authenticating the historical setting and the art-historical importance of Vermeer. The film communicates primarily through its visuals, and understanding how these are selected and deployed invites a much richer reading of the film’s achievements than simply following its plot and characterizations. There are plot differences between the novel and the film, notably the time frame of the conclusion (Voss, 2012, 249). However, one of the critical differences, caused by the filmmaker’s desire to streamline the story as much as possible,

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was the film’s detachment of Vermeer from any sense of his wider life. In the novel, Griet notes that Vermeer is often in the tavern. Vermeer’s family were innkeepers, and Vermeer probably still owned or had an interest in the family inn (Snyder, 2015, 27). Webber’s Vermeer is a more isolated figure, and it is Griet who moves through the city, observing and participating in its life and culture. This has the effect of separating the two characters (who are already separated by class and gender), and we are aware that it is Griet’s “world” we are seeing.

Making the “Real” Girl with a Pearl Earring makes a great effort to give a sense of “the real.” The cast and crew repeatedly use the word “real” in the discussion about the film. This use of the word indicates that their true aim is the fine line between “realisticseeming” and “authentic” (Audio Commentary. Girl with a Pearl Earring, 2004). This goes above and beyond the usual requirements of surface verisimilitude. Period authenticity consumed the film’s budget, with elaborate sets and a large cast of extras playing the folk of bustling, prosperous Delft (Weddle, 2004). Although some of the scenes were shot in Delft town square, the everyday life of the modern city made it impossible to do much more. Fortunately, they found a studio in Luxembourg with an impressive back lot with a canal, so it was much easier to shoot the necessary canal scenes. Since most of the film takes place inside Vermeer’s house, it was important to build a credible and functional set, which looked like a Dutch townhouse (tall, steep, and narrow) but could accommodate the cast, crew, and equipment. The house set was constructed as realistically as possible, with rooms connecting, allowing perspectives strongly resembling the paintings of Pieter de Hooch (​Figure 3.2), where we are constantly looking through doorways into other rooms, and still other rooms, or through windows and doorways into the yard, or from the yard through doorways. The production team could underline the importance of “looking at” and “looking through” in Dutch art using the camera. According to screenwriter Olivia Hetreed, the set had “very little trickery, which is unusual for a built set” (Anatomy of a Scene, 2004). The house was as functional as possible: the floorboards squeaked and the doors and windows opened. The kitchen was functional too, to show the physical labor of the maidservants Tanneke and Griet. Producer Andy Paterson describes Vermeer’s world as one of “unheated houses with inadequate clothing; life is pretty tough,” so the film was concerned

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Figure 3.2  De Hooch, P. (1670) Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.

with portraying what “the reality of that world was” (The Art of Filmmaking, 2004). The desire for authenticity and realism meant lighting the house was also a challenge. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra points out that “in period films it is important to keep the dark, because people then lived in darkness; it’s important not to forget” (Anatomy of a Scene, 2004). Paterson notes that Serra’s “simple set of lighting choices dictate how the house must have felt” in order to “contribute to the sense of reality in the film” (Webber and Paterson, 2004). Webber claims that the paintings that inspired them guided the lighting choices and “a lot of those Dutch paintings are lit the same way: tall, diffused light coming down at an angle through a window which is often on the left-hand side of the room. So that kind of limits your options” (Grandón, 2004). In all cases, realism to an almost obsessive degree appears to have driven the making of this film. Peter Webber’s

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insistence that “we wanted to create a world where you could almost smell it” led to actor Cillian Murphy being taught how to butcher for his role as Pieter the butcher’s boy (The Art of Filmmaking, 2004). The tools in Vermeer’s studio were handmade reproductions of what artists at that time would have used: crude horsehair brushes, shellac and oils, and various pigments from different sources, from lapis-lazuli to bull’s urine. In the making of Girl with a Pearl Earring documentary, Webber and actor Colin Firth, together with art director Todd van Hulzen, visited an art supply shop that creates and sells traditional art materials such as Vermeer would have used. “One of the things the film actually can’t really communicate, which is really striking, is the smells,” remarks Firth, who practiced extensively with the materials (Stein, 2003). The exterior scenes are created with as much verisimilitude as the house. Aside from the scenes shot in Delft town square, they shot most of the film on the backlot, in winter, and the actors’ breath is visible in the cold. Again, Webber believes that it is detail like this that “helps you to feel that the world is real.” However, he goes on to note that in terms of costume and gesture, he did not strictly follow seventeenth-century models, “I strip a lot of that stuff away; we got rid of a lot of wig-wearing” because he wanted to make a “quieter, more intimate film” (Audio Commentary. Girl with a Pearl Earring, 2004). It is also arguable that too much period authenticity could alienate the viewers: were Delft’s streets so clean? Were the Vermeer family’s teeth and complexions that good? Period wigs that to us would be ridiculous could have made Colin Firth as Vermeer laughable, not attractive. As in every period film, the line between “authentic” and “realistic” needs to serve the drama first. If the film strives for realism through faithful reproduction of a material world transposed from Dutch paintings, the same meticulous attention to detail— alongside the editing, which creates the pace and rhythm of events—engenders a fully immersive experience. For the viewer, watching Girl with a Pearl Earring feels like being there, with the characters, walking the cobbled streets of Delft and waking up to cold winter mornings in the tall, unheated house. Rather than pulled along by the story, this sense of being fully embedded in the world is an example of a limitlessness sublime, embodying Richardson’s notion of a “state which fills and satisfies the mind, nothing appears to be wanting, nothing to be amiss” (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996, 46). Girl with a Pearl Earring’s attention to realism promotes a highly persuasive participatory fantasy about the past involving director and audience alike. To

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Belén Vidal, this hyperrealism “enhances the style of the film as close to pastiche: citation of the painting style becomes a way of reproducing a worldview corresponding to the period.” The myriad painterly references, not only to Vermeer but to also de Hooch, Hobbema, and others, “draws the spectator into the illusion of the lived reality” (Vidal, 2012, p.123). The filmmakers’ desire to create something that “feels real,” and the lengths that they go to in creating this detail, opens a space for fantasy in which the romance can take place, while at the same time allowing the audience to feel that they are watching something “properly historical.” One of the rhetorical ways that the film does this with great effectiveness is its constant references to Dutch painting, although Webber admits he drew from all kinds of paintings, including da Vinci’s Last Supper, to work out ways of framing specific scenes. However, the director notes that the richness of Golden Age Dutch painting was a significant factor in designing the film, saying that “this is a period of painting where there is a lot of domestic detail . . . [an] incredible wealth of almost documentary-like detail of what life was like at the time” and that gives a full picture of the material reality of life in the Dutch Golden Age (Anatomy of a Scene, 2004). It is interesting that Webber, a documentary filmmaker, uses the term “almost documentary-like” because the pictures themselves are not documentary. The Dutch domestic paintings of the time offer up an enormous amount of information, but they do not necessarily “tell the truth” about life in that era. Instead, they are full of persuasive visual indicators about the ways to live well. As well as containing various kinds of encoded symbolism, the paintings variously describe the ideal order and cleanliness of the domestic home, the display of wealth (in the form of silverware, glassware, porcelain, and textiles) and sometimes, the swagger of men and the delightfulness of women. Even the few paintings that genuinely show poverty, such as Gerard Ter Borch’s The Stone Grinder’s Family (1653–5), are not meant as social realism. Simon Schama notes that this is “one of the few authentic pictures of the kinds of hovels in which many of the poorest artisans and semiskilled laborers lived in Dutch towns. Yet for all the dereliction and squalor, it is also unmistakably an image of domestic virtue” (Schama, 1987, 395). Realist in style, they may be. Documentary they are not (Schama, 1987, 391). The paintings present, over and over, a visual rhetoric of “the real as ideal” and “the ideal as real.” The material facts of daily life are re-presented in the paintings in ways that persuade the viewer that they portray everyday life as it should be and, importantly, can be. We should remember that these “genre” domestic scenes were popular and

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widespread, reinforcing the values of “order and virtue” in many households. For the present-day viewer, this creates a fantasy about the past which is easy to enter, because the detail makes it seem so tangible. The image is always bounded by the implications of context. When Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Young Woman with a Water Jug are transposed, replicated, or reenacted in the film, this is different from seeing the same painting in the gallery or indeed reproduced in a book or on the internet. Therefore, we need to ask why a particular painting is invoked at a particular point in the film, whether it is a detail in a costume, or a reenactment (e.g., when Griet finally poses for the painting in the studio). Deductive visual-rhetoric analysis can be helpful here to understand the effect of the presentation of the paintings in the filmic narrative. We can divide the deductive analysis into three parts, following the three principal canons of classical rhetoric: inventio, which generates the visual argument and introduces the proposition; dispositio, the arrangement of the elements of the argument; and elocutio, the visual style. The appearance of Vermeer’s paintings across the whole of the film can be analyzed according to this schema, to ascertain how the paintings operate as visual points in the narrative. The film is set during the period when Vermeer made the eponymous painting, so no works after Girl with a Pearl Earring appear. Painting references appear throughout the mise-en-scène as, Linda Cahir notes, “scenes that we already are familiar with from Vermeer’s paintings appear in a moment, on which the camera lingers, as just as quickly, the film moves forward in the story” creating “momentary tableaux vivants showing how life becomes reconstituted into art” (Cahir, 2006, 252). Vermeer’s house contains several paintings, but we see these only in passing; his paintings are distributed sparingly throughout the narrative, at particular plot points. In mapping the substantive argument made by the placement of the paintings and painting references throughout the narrative, we can see that the first stage (the inventio) appeals to the film’s values. The film’s values include fidelity to the Dutch painting aesthetic and adherence to the notion of the “quality” film. It is an emotional appeal designed to win over the audience. This is achieved early on, when Catharina, wearing the blue silk jacket of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter leads Griet into Vermeer’s studio. Griet enters and sees the setup for Woman with a Pearl Necklace and stares in wonder at the unfinished painting, which we see briefly in full frame. Other Dutch paintings are alluded to in the momentary tableaux vivants and the framing of the shots. We understand the type of film it is, the attention to detail,

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and, most importantly, the full embodiment of the world of art in the lives of the characters. We are engaged. The second stage of the argument, the dispositio, is about the arrangement of Vermeer’s paintings in the narrative structure. His paintings appear rarely. Woman with a Pearl Necklace, now completed, is shown at the van Ruijven feast, when the patron scrutinizes the painting he has commissioned. We then see van Ruijven with his collection, including The Milkmaid, View of Delft, The Little Street, and especially Girl with a Wineglass (all c.1657–61) which he shows Griet, saying “perhaps that will be my epitaph.” Girl with a Wineglass in the film illustrates van Ruijven’s seduction of a previous Vermeer housemaid. It serves as a warning to Griet of the dangers that the patron represents to her and the danger of any consummation with a man out of her social class, including Vermeer. Seeing van Ruijven’s ownership of these paintings clearly illustrates his power over Vermeer. However, the placement of the View of Delft, which we see clearly as it frames Griet in this scene, implies the rich man’s ownership and control over the town, and all their lives. The next picture is the (incomplete) Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c.1662–5) in the studio. In another scene, Catharina plays harpsichord while her husband stands beside her, echoing several Vermeer works showing female musicians, though none have the same composition as in the film. Webber’s composition of Catharina “feels” like a Vermeer. However, in the scene where we expect to see the Girl with a Pearl Earring—the dénouement where Catharina confronts Vermeer and Griet—we see the painting fleetingly, as Catharina, enraged, tries to destroy it. In this scene, it is the faces that dominate: Vermeer (irritation, then shame), Catharina (jealousy and rage), and Griet (disappointment and pride). The scene ends with Catharina’s tear-stained swollen face in the foreground, made ugly by rage, with the painting’s beautiful glowing face out of focus behind her. Finally, the last element in the argument is the elocutio or style. Here the paintings’ style is the determining factor, and as we have seen, the film team was concerned with creating a visual style that married historical authenticity (to a reasonable degree) in the mise-en-scène to the style of a range of Dutch painters (Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Hobbema, Ter Borch, and others). They create a whole visual “world” that we recognize from art. This created world conveys an idea about the past and persuades us that what the viewer experiences of the historical past in the film is “true.” The argument is completed by the last shot of the film, which is only the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring itself—the first time

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we fully see any Vermeer painting in the film without van Ruijven’s ownership being asserted—and we are invited to contemplate it slowly, as if to give the viewer time to ask “was all of this chaos and pain worth it, for this one painting? Yes, it was.” This resolves and concludes the argument and indeed, the film.

Looking and Seeing The critical scene in the film that acts as a catalyst to bring the protagonist, Griet, and the artist, Vermeer, together—alone—for the first time, is when Vermeer demonstrates a camera obscura in his studio. The scene, which occurs one-third of the way into the film, is shorter than in the novel. Its substance is conveyed visually rather than through dialog, of which there is little. The scene is preceded by a short sequence where Vermeer is painting in his studio, silently contemplating the setup for Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c.1662–5; the film ignores this time frame, and we do not see the picture painted over two years). Vermeer is not painting; he is sitting in front of the canvas staring intently at the model. We infer a difficulty, as he does not move to begin to paint. The shot of Vermeer’s face (medium close up) cuts immediately to the hallway, as men carry a large wooden object upstairs. It is not clear that this object has anything to do with Vermeer’s artistic struggle from the previous shot. Griet is sweeping the hallway and watching the object taken up to the studio with mounting curiosity. We next see the object in the studio as Griet enters; a short time has passed and the object lies on the table. It is a wide shot and the instrument stands visible and well-lit, drawing the eye toward it, amid the studio clutter. It is large, sleek, new, and made of raw, unstained wood. It does not look like anything else in the studio, nor indeed anything else that has appeared up to this point. On the contrary, it appears almost like an alien form within the familiar confines of Vermeer’s home and studio. From the moment the object first appears in the hallway, the viewer is persuaded to be as curious as Griet, and as mystified. Its camera-like property slowly becomes apparent in the shot, due to the way the shot is composed (at a dynamic ¾ angle with the lens prominent), even to viewers who could not recognize the object as a camera obscura, which is probably a large proportion of the cinema audience. Therefore, one might anticipate that the question of whether Vermeer used a camera obscura will be resolved now. However, that is not the purpose of this scene. Instead, and this

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has visually been made clear since the beginning of the sequence where we see Vermeer looking intensely at his subject in the studio, this section of the film is about looking and seeing. Looking can be broken down into two parts: watching, paying attention to the action; and looking, searching for meaning in what is before the eyes. Seeing, then, is the outcome. The camera obscura is the catalyst around which the characters, and the viewer, contemplate the relationship between seeing and painting, and seeing and looking. Griet moves forward and starts looking at it curiously. Vermeer espies her from behind the curtain and watches her looking at the object. All the action is about watching and looking: Griet looking at the object, and Vermeer watching Griet. In both cases, they are consumed by curiosity. On the painter’s face, we read his fascination that the maid is interested. He moves forward into the room and offers to show her how the instrument works. This is the first time the two characters have had any meaningful contact in the film. Griet is visibly nervous and shy being in the company of her master and cannot look directly at him. As she bends and looks at the ground-glass screen of the camera obscura, Vermeer removes his cloak and sweeps it over her head to darken the viewing space. As Griet spies the composition setup from the room reproduced on the screen, she utters a sharp intake of breath. Suddenly we see Vermeer’s face in close-up as he then joins her under the cloak and watches her looking at the image. The two are momentarily side by side, almost face to face, almost touching. It is a powerfully erotic moment in the film. Griet feels it, but almost immediately withdraws from under the cloak. Bemused, she asks, “how did the picture get in there?” Vermeer explains how the lens works and then to simplify the explanation says, “it is an image, a picture made of light.” Griet asks, “does the box show you what to paint?” Vermeer is momentarily amused, thinks for a moment, then answers, “it helps.” The sequence explores the painter’s problem: “How do I solve the problem of how to see what I wish to paint?” This part of the film is not only about Griet but (perhaps even principally) about Vermeer. Griet’s role in this section is to push Vermeer into understanding how he carries his vision onto the canvas. Although in his struggle to realize his picture, he calls in the brand-new technology of the camera obscura, under Griet’s questioning, he realizes that all it can do is “help.” However, as Marguerite Helmers points out, “looking is always framed by past experiences and learned ideas about how and what to see” (Helmers 2004, 65). We can read this section of the film as a series of visual encounters, in which the characters engage in looking, and as they look at that which is unfamiliar,

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they slowly begin to see. Vermeer looks at the unfamiliar sight of the servant girl’s intellectual curiosity; Griet looks at the unfamiliar sight of new technology, and the appearance of a picture on the screen. Their respective frameworks of experience are shattered. And through the images, the viewer becomes privy to some new knowledge: the artist and his servant have discovered an affinity. We witness the artist’s internal struggle to see, and the potential of the new technology to help him do so. When we see the image’s appearance on the ground-glass screen, we are surely persuaded that this is exactly how the (familiar) painting was made. But as Griet probes what we have seen—that is, the perfect function of the camera obscura—Vermeer is made to think about his relationship with the tool. Although Chevalier makes further reference in the novel to Vermeer again borrowing the instrument, the camera obscura does not make another appearance in the film, nor is it mentioned again. We can glimpse in the studio a grid frame resembling the “Alberti veil” (Snyder, 2015, 84–5); this was a much more traditional instrument used to grid the image. However, the Alberti veil is usually a drawing tool, not a painting aid, and because we have little evidence of Vermeer’s drawings (Gifford, 1995, 187), we also do not know if he used the Alberti veil either. Producer Andy Paterson says, “I think we took the view that he would’ve been fascinated by it [the camera obscura], that he would’ve seen it as just another tool for seeing things” (Webber and Paterson, 2004). By seeing the camera obscura and the Alberti veil, we are persuaded of Vermeer’s expertise in and understanding of the modern, scientific elements of art-making; however, by not seeing them used in the actual art-making, we are persuaded that the brilliance of the paintings is down to Vermeer alone. Chevalier neatly gets around the evidence problem of ownership by attributing the camera obscura’s ownership to his close friend, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. There was no listed camera obscura in the inventory of Vermeer’s possessions when he died. He died young quite suddenly in 1675, aged fortythree, and most of his possessions were immediately sold to pay his debts. There is also no extant record of him buying or selling a camera obscura. Moreover, as brand-new technology, it would have been expensive. Peter Webber points out the newness of the camera obscura in the film, saying that it was essential to have the object look brand-new because it would have been new at that time (Webber and Paterson, 2004a). Tracy Chevalier uses what is known about both Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer, and posits a warm friendship between them, to the point that van Leeuwenhoek lends Vermeer his valuable camera obscura. Chevalier makes van Leeuwenhoek

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a kind, thoughtful, and sensible personality, in contrast to the dreamier, obsessive Vermeer (Chevalier, 1999). Whatever the actual relationship between Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek was, in the story, Chevalier uses the characters to link together seventeenth-century painting with science. This is important, because it is in this time that painters explored the observed world more actively, and we can certainly see this in Dutch painting where deeply secular domestic subjects were popular and developed to exceptionally high levels of artistry (Shaw-Taylor and Buvelot, 2015, 31–6). Seventeenth century Netherlands was a culture which encouraged the pursuit of scientific knowledge based on intense observation, and Delft was a center for the manufacture of precision instruments like microscopes and lenses.” Van Leeuwenhoek in the novel represents the warm relationship between art and science in seventeenth-century culture, is a “voice of reason” and humanist morality compared to Vermeer, and supplies the camera obscura. However, the film removes this relationship. Working with the scriptwriter Olivia Hetreed and producer Andy Paterson, Webber deleted the character of van Leeuwenhoek to maintain focus on the Griet–Vermeer relationship. Van Leeuwenhoek is critical in the history of science, but he is not well known enough to be immediately familiar with audiences, unlike Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin, for instance. In the novel, it is easier; the reader can stop and look up van Leeuwenhoek. Although the filmmakers have not specified why this character was cut, it is easy to understand that explaining the significance of van Leeuwenhoek would involve too much exposition. And if the viewer does not know who this historical figure is, they lose van Leeuwenhoek’s significance within the story. However, this does mean that the film courts a historical problem that Chevalier has at least partially managed to avoid in the novel. Did Vermeer even use a camera obscura in the production of his paintings? This is an ongoing and as yet unresolved argument. It is not resolvable because we lack historical evidence. “Hard” evidence that Vermeer used the camera obscura could include, for example, a written record of the camera obscura in Vermeer’s possession. A letter, diary entry, or other written document indicating that Vermeer purchased, borrowed, or was observed using the instrument would give us a clear indication that he at least accessed the camera obscura, though not necessarily how he used it. None of these written documents exists. Circumstantial evidence can be convincing and offers up rich pickings for conjecture and argument but does not provide what a historian would accept as evidence. As for the paintings, as Wolfgang Lefebvre says, “Deducing

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a production technique solely on the basis of the finished product is clearly a questionable position to adopt” (Lefèvre, 2007, 5). It is interesting to see how art history has handled the question. Some books blithely assert that “we now know that Vermeer used the camera obscura for most of his paintings” (Schneider, 1999, 67). Svetlana Alpers also makes this claim (Alpers, 1983, 87). But of course, we do not “know” anything of the kind. Other art historians claim that the instrument was not directly used to compose pictures until the eighteenth century (Franits, 2004, 169). The most vocal advocate of the camera obscura argument is Philip Steadman, who has undertaken comprehensive research to ascertain whether Vermeer used the instrument. The key elements of Steadman’s argument are as follows: most of Vermeer’s paintings appear to have been painted in the same room and in similar dimensions. Recreating the conditions of Vermeer’s studio and using an approximate version of a camera obscura from Vermeer’s time, Steadman has found that the projected images end up being the same size as Vermeer’s canvases (Steadman, 2005, 290–1) and believes that Vermeer would have traced the pictures from the camera obscura image (Steadman, 2005, 290). However, it is dubious that Vermeer would have used it simply to trace out the painting composition, but he may have used it to work out the compositional elements. This is the way that Chevalier and Webber imagine him using it. Did Vermeer even need a camera obscura to create the paintings? What is principally striking about Vermeer’s paintings is the color and the use of light. Would the camera obscura have been helpful in this? Quite possibly. The camera obscura could be useful because it keeps all the elements within the frame but visually excludes anything not in the frame. It could have helped him to focus. Also, the camera obscura offers true, vivid color. That is, assuming that it was possible to get a clear image in Vermeer’s studio. Would there have been enough light for Vermeer to use a box camera obscura in a room where the sole light source was a window, particularly a leaded window that is at least partially closed in most of the paintings? When Griet looks through the window at the Vermeers’ feast with van Ruijven, the panes are thick, rough, and offer a blurred view. This glass is not smooth, modern glass, it is a replica of seventeenth-century window glass specially made for the film. It is cracked and blurred. According to Peter Webber, using these realistic details “helps us to understand” the world that the film is trying to present (Webber, 2004). If Vermeer did rely on the camera obscura, he might have been able to paint only on bright and sunny days, which are not

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guaranteed in the Northern European climate. On the other hand, we know that Vermeer painted relatively few paintings and appears to have been quite slow at it, which is a plot point in Girl with a Pearl Earring. Again, this is tantalizing and offers much conjecture but does not uncover evidence. There are other arguments for Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura, the most powerful of which is his use of what appears to be depth of field in the rendering of some of his paintings. The most celebrated one is Girl with a Red Hat (1666–7) which is not featured in the film as it may have been painted later. It has the same wet, full lips and sideways glance as the Girl with a Pearl Earring’s subject, but she is a different girl. More than any other of Vermeer’s paintings, Girl with a Red Hat has been claimed to be produced with the aid of the camera obscura (Vergara and Westermann, 2003, 255). In addition, the wood carving in the foreground of the painting appears to be out of focus; this is considered to demonstrate Vermeer’s sense of the depth of field, which of course can only be seen through a lens and not with the naked eye (Jansen n.d.). Girl with a Red Hat may have been painted a year after Girl with a Pearl Earring, so in Chevalier and Webber’s fictive Vermeer world, we can imagine that Vermeer made more use of the camera obscura than he did hitherto, or that he indulged his desire to experiment with the tool. We can also conjecture that after the departure of Griet, he found a new muse. The same long-faced girl reappears in at least one other of Vermeer’s paintings, Girl with a Flute (1666–7). In the novel, Tracy Chevalier has Vermeer say of the camera obscura, “this is a tool. I use it to help me see, so that I am able to make the painting.” Griet protests, “But—you use your eyes to see.” And Vermeer replies, “true, but my eyes do not always see everything.” He goes on to explain that “the camera obscura helps me to see in a different way . . . To see more of what is there” (Chevalier, 1999, 63–4). Griet struggles to understand and asks, “what is an image sir? It is not a world I know.” Vermeer’s replies, “it is a picture, like in painting” (Chevalier, 1999, 64). This is an interesting response because at this point we see Chevalier’s Vermeer echoing the problem Johannes Kepler had: as he got more familiar with the camera obscura he started to confuse the imago (which is a term that had been hitherto been used to describe pictures in the imagination), with the projection created by the camera obscura (Dupré, 2007, 71–2). It is an imago, but it doesn’t reside purely in the imagination, we can see it. Yet it has no substance; it’s not exactly a “picture” in the traditional sense of pictura, a painting. The film’s rendering of the camera obscura sequence differs from the novel; it is decontextualized from the van Leeuwenhoek relationship, and it is a “turning

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point” in the narrative. It visibly connects the protagonist with Vermeer; it asserts forcefully yet ambivalently the place of the camera obscura in Vermeer’s world, and it reveals to the viewer the strangeness of the appearance of the object itself—an object which appears in the film, self-reflexively, as a historical antecedent to the film camera and projector. The film contributes to the question of the availability and use of the camera obscura to seventeenth-century painters and its value in creating realism. Certainly, Vermeer appears to be concerned with giving a true likeness, and van Ruijven remarks upon this over the painting of his wife, “the illusion is perfect.” However, though the film demonstrates Vermeer’s familiarity with, and occasional use of, the tool, it makes a distinct point of showing Vermeer painting from life, not from drawings or through an optical tool. The film deliberately eschews Philip Steadman’s claim that Vermeer traced his pictures using a camera obscura. However, it does agree with Steadman that Vermeer “set up by arranging furniture and other ‘props’ with extreme care, in an actual room in his in-law’s house” (Steadman 2005, 287). Rhetorically, it is important that the setup for Young Woman with a Water Pitcher is shown in this sequence. It connects the camera obscura specifically to Vermeer and his methods, but at the same time, this is not one of the paintings that shows the shallow depth of field associated with the use of the tool. Had Webber chosen to use Girl with a Red Hat as the studio setup, this would have changed the argument entirely. While the novel offers a fuller and more detailed explanation for Vermeer’s relationship with the camera obscura, in the film narrative the camera obscura is—by the director’s admission—primarily a catalyst to bring Griet and Vermeer into close physical proximity, under the enveloping cloak (Webber and Paterson, 2004b). However, by visually demonstrating the camera obscura in the studio, and having the artist’s character explain both how the instrument worked and how he used it (“it helps”) the film allows the viewer to understand the importance of the camera obscura as a pivotal stage in the development of the camera, and therefore of cinema. As Vermeer and Griet see, we see the appearance of an image through the agency of the combination of lens and light. It is a moment of “cinema.” Not without a touch of hyperbole, director Peter Greenaway says that “Vermeer was the first cinematographer because he dealt in a world completely made manifest by light” (Bugler, 2005). The connection between Vermeer, the camera, and the cinematographer in the production of realism, though not supported by historical evidence, may be supported by aesthetic evidence, and

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the fact that Vermeer, like Rembrandt and Caravaggio, has been an important teacher to generations of cinematographers. Yet, in Webber’s limited use of the camera obscura, we are denied the fantasy that Vermeer was a protocinematographer. He is a painter. The film also offers a convincing way out of the historical conundrum of whether Vermeer used the camera obscura. The film wants to say that he did, but not to any great extent, and this is how and why he did it. As things stand currently, this is probably the most accurate position to take in the absence of any other evidence. And yet, later in the film, when Griet is alone in the studio, she looks at Woman with a Water Jug’s unfinished canvas and the setup. Then after deeply scrutinizing these, she moves the chair that Vermeer painted in the foreground of the picture. There is no chair in the finished painting, but x-rays indicate that there may have been one (certainly there is a shadow or outline on the wall behind the woman). This scene suggests, visually, that the human eye on its own is sufficient, and that the camera obscura may not be needed at all.

Eroticism of the Everyday The camera obscura scene not only brings the scientific developments of the seventeenth century into the story; it is also a catalyst that triggers the romance. Of course, within this scene, there are many things going on that are important to both the story and the film’s themes. Vermeer teaching Griet about the camera obscura is the first step in his role as artist instructor. The camera obscura is the catalyst that moves Griet from being Vermeer’s cleaner to being his assistant. Then follows a series of shots where she works alongside him in the studio, their hands side by side working with the raw materials. Again, all of this has little dialog, so the gradually developing relationship is told visually. The art materials are themselves deeply sensual, glowing with color and shiny with liquidity. The constant framing of Vermeer’s and Griet’s hands and eyes in these shots makes the viewer actively aware of the relationship between looking and touching. They touch the materials, and look at each other; they look at the materials, and touch each other—his body almost pressing at her shoulder, his hands on hers as they grind the pigment. Yet in these scenes, the eroticism between them is in the look more than in the touch, which remains practical and earthy, based on the work. Much later, when Griet poses for Vermeer, and he looks at her hair

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and pierces her ear, the look and the touch finally become erotic and dangerous, leading inexorably to the dénouement. The eroticism of these scenes echoes the eroticism in Vermeer’s paintings. The way that the filtered light gently caresses the faces and the folds of the clothing of Vermeer’s women. The slightly open, wetted lips of Scarlett Johansen are there in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Girl with a Flute, and Girl in a Red Hat. It is interesting how some art critics have read Vermeer’s paintings. For example, writing about Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664), Norbert Schneider says that Vermeer is “portraying the sin of vanity in this picture of a woman. . . . Therefore, this painting can be seen as a criticism of such conduct” (Schneider, 1999, 56). Even if we reject Schneider’s reading, it is a picture of a woman reveling in material luxury. Woman with a Pearl Necklace is the first Vermeer painting Griet sees, revealing a sensual world of luxurious textiles and lustrous jewels to the servant. However, the implication of empty-headed vanity (as read by a man) is raised in the film. In the film, the woman with a pearl necklace is van Ruijven’s wife, and the patron uses the unveiling as an opportunity to insult his wife publicly: “All of this lavished on my dear Emily,” he says, putting his hands onto the woman’s head “it’s almost as if she were thinking.” However, to the viewer (and the dinner guests), van Ruijven’s behavior is unpleasant, unjust, and embarrassing. Thus the film undercuts the “sin of vanity” reading. It is all but impossible to know exactly what Vermeer meant by the painting. Looking at it inductively, it is hard to see it as a criticism of sinfulness, but it certainly reveals sensuality. The entire picture is a study in golden tones: the light coming in through the window, the golden draperies and gold-tinted walls, the beautiful yellow ermine-trimmed jacket, the creamy tints of the pearls, and how the sunlight illuminates her face, which is open and wide-eyed, looking out onto the world. Indeed, it does not look like a picture of sin, but of a beautiful, erotic female moment where earthy sensuality meets radiant light. The same lavish jacket recurs in several other pictures, such as Lady Writing a Letter (c.1662–7), Guitar Player (c.1670–3), Woman Playing a Lute (c.1662–5), and Lady with Her Maidservant (c.1666–8). The yellow jacket also appears in the film. We assume it is Catharina’s garment that Vermeer has appropriated for his models. When Vermeer is trying to decide how to paint Griet, he asks her to dress in the fine clothes in the studio; Griet is appalled: “I cannot wear her clothes,” she cries. While Webber plays on the visual sensuality of the proximity of Griet and Vermeer, physical proximity between the figures in Vermeer’s paintings can also suggest eroticism. In the Music Lesson a young woman plays the virginals and

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a young man stands next to her with his arm resting lightly on the instrument. They do not look directly at each other but her reflection in the mirror above does appear to be looking at him rather than down at the keys. We sense something passing between them; it is an erotic, mysterious moment that fires the imagination. We see this in other paintings of couples, even though many of them follow the conventions of the time, such as the Soldier and the Laughing Girl (1658), or Girl with a Wineglass (1659); we do get a strong sense of the sensual feelings that are passing between the characters in the paintings. If The Procuress (1656) is vulgar, with the red-clad gentleman’s hand clearly and openly clutching the breast of the young woman, the other images of women and men together in Vermeer’s oeuvre are much less overt, possibly are even romantic. Through the agency of the actor Scarlett Johansson, Webber shows us the eroticism and sensuality of Griet’s attraction to Vermeer. On the one hand, she is driven by her natural coming-of-age into sensual desire, which she eventually consummates with Pieter. On the other hand, Griet also feels desire toward Vermeer as a master, as her teacher, as an older knowledgeable worldly figure, to whom she can look up and admire. In turn, Vermeer is attracted to the young maid because she shows intelligence and interest in his work, which his wife does not. There is also the desire of the older man for the younger woman. Both Webber and Chevalier say that they firmly “believe” that Vermeer in the story truly loves his wife, and his attraction to Griet is never acted upon because of his loyalty to Catharina (Webber, 2004). Webber allows us to see Vermeer expressing his sensual desire toward his wife; Griet witnesses this also and is visibly disturbed, aroused, and jealous. This “eroticism of the everyday” is a key element in Vermeer’s work. Seventeenth-century painting has a great deal of lavish eroticism, from the florid sensuality of Rubens (particularly those modeled by his wife, Hélène Fourment) to the almost perverse images of Hendrik Goltzius (Lot and His Daughters, 1616; Jupiter and Antiope, 1612), who also had a hugely successful business in erotic prints. Other paintings combine sex with violence, such as various renderings of Judith and Holofernes. Near the end of the film, we see the patron van Ruijven with Rubens’s painting Roman Charity (depicting the myth of Cimon and Pero, a young girl suckling her aged father), as another token of the patron’s lechery. However, the eroticism in Vermeer’s paintings is deliberately subtle, ambiguous, and tangible. Anne Hollander also notes ambivalent sexuality and eroticism in the work of another Delft painter, Pieter de Hooch (frequently referenced in the film), noting that in some of his paintings “the sexual themes are

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treated as they are in certain modern European films,” mentioning Antonioni’s works in particular (Hollander, 1989, 136). In Webber’s film there is a kind of voyeurism affecting the characters, constantly looking at each other. Daughter Cornelia, jealous of Vermeer’s attention to Griet, watches the maid and despoils her possessions. Catharina watches Griet, perhaps jealous of her youth. Maria Thins watches Griet and Vermeer, aware that if the painter’s interest in Griet can be controlled and channeled, it will lead to another lucrative commission. Vermeer watches Griet as she works, as she uncovers her hair, as she learns and wonders. And Griet watches them all, studying them, trying to make sense of them in relation to herself. Most of this happens in silence; there is little dialog, and desires are never expressed. We see but are never told. Serra’s camera frames the shots, then pulls back to reveal more, then again more, as we see the layers of watching that all the characters engage in.

Film as Art History Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a biopic, but it does offer a comprehensive demonstration of a particular stage in the life of Vermeer when he was producing a particular body of work associated with his greatest output. Although it functions on the level of a romantic narrative, focused around Griet, in another sense, it can also function as an audiovisual piece of art criticism or critical art history, which opens out the rhetorical content of the images. As discussed earlier, the film has been extensively researched for verisimilitude in terms of its setting and the story has been researched to include details about Vermeer’s life that can be verified, with relatively few embellishments, for a fictional piece. Leaving out the entirely fictional romance, could we consider the film as a critical work of art history? In terms of traditional art history, the Vermeer portrayed in the film is not more or less valid than the artist portraits offered to us by Vasari. The film addresses several aspects of the art-historical record regarding Vermeer and Dutch art of the period: the social and material condition of the artist at that time; the role of the patron in the bourgeois art market; the theories about the camera obscura, and Vermeer’s methods. Lastly and most significantly, the film rhetorically uses paintings in the creation of the realistic filmic image. The film gives a good account of the social conditions of the painter in seventeenth-century Dutch society. It features two painters, the historical Vermeer and Griet’s father who, as a tile painter, would have been on the lowest

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artisanal level of working artists, contributing to the vast Delft tile industry. Griet’s father has been rendered disabled, and so therefore the family lives below the poverty line. On the other hand, we have Vermeer who, having a wealthy patron and having married into a wealthy upper middle-class Catholic family, enjoys a much more comfortable existence. We see this in the conditions of the home, in the dress and the material goods in their possession. Simon Schama has pointed out that above all, this was an age of material acquisition. Citing Melchior Fokkens’s description of Amsterdam in 1662, Schama writes that “in the cornucopia of the Warmoestraat” (the Amsterdam street that linked the docks to the city center) “the dedicated shopper could purchase Nuremberg porcelain, Italian majolica or Delft faience; Lyons silk, Spanish taffeta or Haarlem linen bleached to the most dazzling whiteness” (Schama, 1987, 302). These luxuries are all shown in Vermeer’s paintings. “He thinks we don’t know how to celebrate a birth, does he?” says Tanneke, cueing a montage of material goods that the Vermeers put on display at the feast: fine silver and tableware, luxurious food, blue Delft porcelain. This is one of the most interesting sequences in the film from a social history point of view, as it dovetails neatly with Simon Schama’s analysis of the sudden material wealth that flooded into the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. At the same time, the montage’s assemblage of items (from glinting glassware to dead game) reminds the viewer of the Dutch tradition of still life painting. Schama notes that the attitude toward material acquisition “can only be characterized as a lust for consumption, and one which the craft industries, not only in Amsterdam but in Delft and Harlem, did their best to gratify” (Schama, 1987, 304). And this included a lust for painting. Most of the paintings of interiors show one or more paintings hanging on the wall, such as de Hooch’s Interior with a Woman Reading and a Child with a Hoop (1662–6). The lecherous Pieter van Ruijven of the film has little in common with the historical person. There is no way of knowing if he was a lecher, but he did have a relationship with Vermeer. He may have been one of several of Vermeer’s patrons. Pieter van Ruijven’s son-in-law Jacob Dissius was an important patron; we know this because nineteen of Vermeer’s paintings are mentioned in a 1682 inventory of Dissius’s property (Schneider, 1999, 10). However, there is some disagreement between Vermeer scholars as to the specificities of Vermeer’s relationship with his patrons (Janson, n.d.). It is not even certain that van Ruijven was ever a patron, although his son-in-law certainly was (Janson, n.d.), whereas Michael Montias in “Vermeer’s Clients and Patrons” claims that Dissius acquired the paintings on

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the death of van Ruijven (Montias, 1987, passim). Schneider mentions Dissius, but not van Ruijven (Schneider, 1999, 10). Vermeer appears not to have painted at all except by commission for a small number of patrons. This was not unusual; it was the ideal situation for the finest of painters, and Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris did the same (Montias, 1987, 68). These patrons were all members of the upper class or the wealthy bourgeoisie and all were from Delft. This limited circle left Vermeer vulnerable to the financial vicissitudes that affected his patrons. For a significant part of his career the family was also supported by the fact that Maria Thins had a significant amount of property, but during the FrancoDutch War (1672) revenues were unpaid, and without any new commissions Vermeer’s financial difficulties began in earnest. The film brings the financial difficulties forward to 1665, where there is no reason to suspect that the family was in straitened circumstances, but it accurately represents the underlying precarity of Vermeer’s position. “I won’t turn out for small beer and biscuits.” Van Ruijven warns, and so the Vermeer household stretch their finances to the utmost to provide a lavish feast to celebrate the birth of the newest child and— more significantly—the unveiling of the latest commission for the patron, in the hopes of receiving another. This image of patronage in Girl with a Pearl Earring highlights not only the weak position of the artist but also the client’s desire to commission and display the painting. The film demonstrates that painters were dependent upon an art market and depended on commissions by wealthy secular patrons, in the absence of a court or church. Caravaggio did most of his paintings for the Catholic Church. Vermeer’s near-contemporary Velasquez was the official painter of the Spanish court. In the Netherlands, this was not even an option. Instead, painters got commissions from local dignitaries, communities, governing boards, and charities (Franits, 2004, 157–8). As Gombrich points out, “an artist whose manner appealed to this public could therefore hope for reasonably steady income. Once his manner ceased to be fashionable, however, he might face ruin” (Gombrich, 1995, 416). If a painter “didn’t have a commission they had to paint the picture first, and then try to find a buyer” (Gombrich, 1995, 416). The competition was fierce; there were many painters throughout the Netherlands making an enormous number of paintings. The film hints at this in the feast scene where, when asked by Maria Thins what would be his next painting, van Ruijven deliberately mentions another artist to whom he’s given a commission: “a coming fellow from Amsterdam, studied under Rembrandt van Rijn—although, who hasn’t these days?” We see

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the look on Vermeer’s face (angry), Catharina’s face (fearful), and Maria Thins’s face (appalled)—disaster awaits—but they must force themselves to be composed and continue the gaiety of the event. This scene happens in the first-third of the film and triggers the events of the rest of the film: Griet helping Vermeer in the studio—he has no assistant, there is no historical record of him having an assistant or pupils—and Vermeer making the titular painting. Therefore all of the rest of the events of the film, including Catharina’s jealousy, Griet’s growing attachment to the painter, and the painter’s drive to create a perfect painting, are all underpinned by the family’s financial precarity. Griet’s position is also precarious, as she is largely supporting her own family out of her meager wages. So underlying the romantic plot, and the story of making the painting, is a much darker financial plot, where all of these characters are dependent on the whims of a wealthy and callous patron. The film does not exceed what we know about Vermeer. According to Vermeer’s biographer, “in comparison with Rembrandt, who had a strong, assertive personality and who frequently appeared as the subject or the object of depositions, lawsuits, etc., Vermeer seems to have lived a fairly retired life, with his wife, his dominant mother-in-law and his numerous children (mainly girls). Thus only a shadowy image of his character emerges from archival documents” (Janson, 2003). We can only guess at what connections Vermeer had with other artists of the period, such as Pieter de Hooch or Gerard Ter Borch, who may have influenced him or been influenced by him, and the film does not indicate any artistic circle or influences. From a historical perspective, the film neglects to show any wider contexts, neither the social context described by Montias, nor the scientific context described by Snyder nor the social and political context described by Schama. However, we can ascertain some of these contexts through a close reading of the film’s visual images. We can see the place of the servants in the household, and the material differences between social classes. In the city scenes, the prosperity of the town and the availability of food are demonstrated, but so are the consequences of bankruptcy, in the shot of the bailiffs evicting a family. Webber’s decision to show the bailiffs with a brace of Rottweilers adds a level of threat that looms over the characters for the film’s duration. We understand that patrons like van Ruijven like to spend their money on art and they take a personal interest in the painter and the subject matter. Through the costumes, particularly those of Catharina, we see that despite outward appearances, the Vermeer family is not as well to do as first impressions might indicate: Catharina wears the same

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clothes repeatedly, and Vermeer’s cloak is somewhat threadbare. The feast scene indicates that the Vermeers have a wider social circle of bourgeois friends. Scientific context is shown by the camera obscura and the Alberti veil. The social and political contexts would be much harder to communicate since Vermeer’s actual financial disaster began during the rampjaar (the Year of Disaster, 1672) when war broke out, not in 1665. As an art history film, it clearly benefits from the cinematographer Eduardo Serra and director Peter Webber both having studied art history as a discipline. It is not simply an adaptation from a successful novel; as the director has said, “Girl With a Pearl Earring is a painting I’ve known for a long time. I’ve always loved Vermeer and the sense of mystery surrounding his work. There’s something very special about the world he created, which is very cinematic. I found Vermeer quite obsessive: the way he returns to the same corner of the room again and again” (Grandón, 2004). Webber’s film adapts paintings as much as it adapts Chevalier’s novel. We might ask under what conditions these paintings came to be, as the film depicts the precarity of Griet’s and Vermeer’s households, as well as the luxurious life of the collector. Arnold Hauser’s copious Marxist study The Social History of Art looks at the socioeconomic underpinnings of art production. His insistence on addressing how this both created and affected the great canonical artists offers a useful perspective on historical films. His discussion of class and poverty in the era of the Dutch Republic, though brief, and of representation in Dutch genre painting are valuable aids in working out the social aspects of the visual culture represented in the paintings. Hauser notes that the conditions of the art market were such that “the Dutch painters lived mostly in such miserable circumstances that many of the greatest of them were forced to turn to another source of income outside of the artistic profession” (Hauser, 1999, 202). He cites Hobbema’s work as a tax collector, which forced him to quit painting for a time; and Jan Steen’s role as innkeeper, among others. There may have been a great demand for painting in the Netherlands but probably too many artists to sustain adequate living for all. Vermeer’s poverty, then, was not unusual among artists of the day, though his was a genteel poverty. This is shown in the film, contrasting the material poverty of Griet’s family with the more lavish lifestyle of the ThinsVermeer household, which is revealed to be not much less precarious but richer in material goods. If one were to assess Girl with a Pearl Earring as a history film, the broader lack of context is a distinct limitation, yet the visual realism gives a thought-provoking

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flavor of the period. The film has an affinity with the “microhistory” school of social history writing, which presents a large quantity of narrowly focused detail to demonstrate the “world view” of ordinary people and their conditions of life (Robisheaux, 2017). As Istvan Szíjártó points out, “micro historians always look for the answers to ‘great historical questions’” (Szíjártó and Magnusson, 2013, 5) and the film addresses two: How did Vermeer live and work, and did Vermeer use a camera obscura? That neither film nor novel can offer a definitive answer is in keeping with the paucity of historical evidence. What is available to reconstitute the “world view” of Vermeer and his household—alongside the historical research of Simon Schama, Michael Montias, and others—is the hoard of Dutch paintings that grace the world’s museums. Therefore the historical propositions made in the film—that Vermeer’s personal and professional life was precarious, and that he used a camera obscura but not to any significant degree—are made through the ordering, reconstituting, and transposing of visuals from the paintings into the filmic image. In terms of rhetorically promoting values and ideology Girl with a Pearl Earring—both the film and the eponymous painting as it is seen today—carry the values of “high art” and “culture” which have connotations of class and education, and anchor the viewer firmly in the Western European cultural tradition. However, in both the plot and the visuals, the film calls attention to the social stratifications and attitudes that delimited the seventeenth-century world. Through the material creation of the mise-en-scène, as well as the characters’ gestures, the spectator is informed of the social context, which not only bolsters the “realism” but also renders the world distant and archaic. There is a rhetorical appeal here: inviting the viewer to “experience” a limited, class-bound society that—however full of art (“high” culture)—is bounded by harsh privation and hierarchy. The wealthy, comfortable figure of van Ruijven is not one most spectators would identify with nor aspire to be. Girl with a Pearl Earring deliberately uses paintings rhetorically, to persuade us of the film’s realism—and the “realness” of the world portrayed—and mostly succeeds. Many films use paintings, but few do so as systematically as this one. Perhaps its most significant achievement is that it manages to avoid one of the clichés of the artist biopic, the desire to make the film “look like” the painter’s paintings (Tashiro, 1996, 27). But with the film’s desire for intense realism, insisting on a totalizing Vermeer aesthetic would have been counterproductive to the aims of the filmmakers; “to do so would be to trivialize the artistic achievements it is celebrating” (Leitch, 2009, 204). Therefore the production

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team were quite aware that not everything should look like a Vermeer painting (Huggins, 2004). Apart from the titular work, there is no straightforward recreation of any Vermeer painting within the frame; instead, the film shows the methods by which the paintings were made. Outside of the studio, other Dutch painters make up the “visual world” of the film. Webber mentions Rubens and Rembrandt, Hobbema and Ter Borch, and it is easy to spot their paintings referred to throughout the film. However, Pieter de Hooch appears to be the most dominant. None of his paintings is replicated precisely; it is de Hooch’s way of depicting space and how people occupy space that the film uses. A relatively under-researched artist, there is an almost inverse proportion of studies on his work compared to those on Vermeer. De Hooch suffuses the entire film not least because of the geometrical perspective aspects of his paintings which are quite “distinct from the routine perspectives created by Dutch artists for the home and export market throughout the 17th century” (Shaw-Taylor and Buvelot, 2015, 72). Careful study of de Hooch’s paintings (through infrared reflectography) reveals him adjusting his perspective lines in a slightly freehand way. From a filmmaker’s point of view, what comes to mind right away is adjusting the camera. Additionally, the pervasive and highly sophisticated way in which de Hooch uses light is much more complex than Caravaggio’s or Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro. De Hooch is sometimes considered to be inferior to Vermeer because his figures are not as naturalistic nor as interesting, and this is a fair criticism. However, de Hooch’s paintings fascinate because of their “compelling perspective and spatial complexity” and “impressive daylight effects” and arrangement of figures (Franits, 2004, 161). De Hooch’s interiors and his perspectives lend themselves to cinematic interpretation, which can be seen throughout the film through the themes of “looking” and “being looked at.” The rhetoric of realism in the film, and in the paintings used in the film, persuade the viewer that the “world” they perceive is (temporarily) real. Through a complex interplay of the cinematic and painterly qualities shared between film shot and painting, iconographic recognition and an understanding of the art-historical “importance” of the (fictional) story, the audience is able to enter into the film’s world. At the same time, the paintings themselves function on their own as autonomous works of interest. The process of making, the complex materials, the decisions and the struggles, the optical technology, the studio setups, and the role of the patron are revealed in the film and serve to enhance the appreciation of the paintings outside of the film’s world, when the pictures are seen again in a museum, in a book or online.

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Why is it so important to have such powerful period realism in the film? Why does Webber want to persuade us that it “feels real?” The main thrust of the relationship between art, cinema, and history in Girl with a Pearl Earring is to achieve heightened realism in the total recreation of seventeenth-century Delft life. It not only is about a great painter but offers an “everyman” character whose story we follow. The paintings of Vermeer, de Hooch, Ter Borch, Rembrandt, Steen, Hobbema, and others are referenced over and over again to establish the mise-en-scène, and insist upon the “realness” of what is seen. The paintings— both seen and referenced—“prove” the film’s period authenticity, by creating a visual rhetoric of realism that is reinforced by the period detail of setting, costume, and props, creating a complete visual impression of period and place. This has a distancing effect in the film and allows us to enter the period fantasy without a sense of indulging in a “lowbrow” romance. Somewhat less than Chevalier’s book, the film does portray the class and gender limitations of the era. At the same time, the intense realism offers a focus that, to some extent, offers an escape from the romance and invites the viewer to contemplate and imagine life in a distant past which they already know and recognize from art. Tracy Chevalier’s narrative is focused on Griet’s inner life. But Webber steps back and subsumes Griet, Vermeer, himself, and us in seventeenth-century Delft. The film uses Golden Age Dutch paintings to locate itself in history and create an illusion of the real. However, despite the visual reference points, the world of the film and the world of the paintings are not identical. There is tension between the film world and the painting world. The painting world is one of domestic calm, full of space and warm light; it feels open. Vermeer’s and De Hooch’s works offer domestic tranquility amid the everyday tasks. This world feels timeless, but it is one which is always desired and never really achieved. The world represented in the film is urban, cluttered, often dark, quite cold (the main action takes place over a winter), agitated, emotionally fraught, and totally bound by complex social roles. It is recognizably “modern” in its concerns (relationships, status, financial precarity) but relentlessly “other” in its period setting. Vermeer’s paintings in the film offer not only visual cues of “realism” but a promise of something better. Girl with a Pearl Earring is a film about learning to see. The characters in the film at first look and judge, then they learn to see: Vermeer and Maria Thins learn to see the potential in a humble maid; Griet learns to see what painting is, and how it is made, but she also sees well beyond what meets the eye. The camera obscura is presented as a tool for seeing, but the characters learn to rely

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on their intuition. The audience, in turn, learns to see familiar paintings in a new light. We understand how the paintings came out of the lived experience not only of Vermeer and his family but of Delft at that time, with its class divisions, poverty and wealth, social relations, and material conditions. The romance is never consummated even in the slightest way; the protagonist is not rewarded outside the scope of what could be expected from somebody of her status and gender. The unremitting realism, with its stark limitations that all the characters experience, is not depressing, because, the film wants to say, it is all endured in the service of Art. The following chapter explores the problem of creating a film world while strictly adhering to well-documented facts. Yet even here, the interpolation of painterly imagery can bring heightened emotional value to the narrative.

4

The Baader Meinhof Complex “Journalism” as “Art”

The relationship between painting and cinema is not necessarily one of direct adaptation. Period context provides a distinct schema for the transposition of an art image to a film image. Nineteenth-century paintings are referenced indirectly in the 1845-set Meek’s Cutoff. The Girl with a Pearl Earring depicts well-known seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and refers to others throughout the miseen-scène. How can art-historical images work within films which are based on recent history, when there are still memories of events and visual evidence in the form of photographs and moving-image footage? Are not films that depict recent history fated to choose between being dramatized journalism, or fictionalized versions that merely refer to the historical record? (See Figure 4.1.) This chapter is framed around art critic Charles Baudelaire’s throw-away comment about “M. Horace Vernet, veritable journalist rather than true artist” in The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire, 2010, 25). Baudelaire was writing in 1863 about Horace Vernet’s paintings of recent historical events, which he considered (pejoratively) to be too factual, too concerned with documenting. Baudelaire is not rejecting the realism of Vernet’s paintings; he is rejecting what he sees as a failure of imagination: Vernet’s work is journalism rather than art because he is just painting what he sees. For Baudelaire, imagination is what he calls, in The Salon of 1859 (1859) “the queen of the faculties,” which is, in turn, the “queen of truth”; this is one of the reasons he disdained photography (Baudelaire, 1981, 298–302). Baudelaire claimed that only imagination could enhance prosaic reality “with the ‘language of dreams’ and the contemplation of the infinite,” writes Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, and this infusing of reality with imagination “was paradoxically Baudelaire’s conception of genuine truthfulness” in art (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, 2017, 253). Baudelaire wanted artists to paint modern life and to find in it the grand and the epic (Baudelaire, 2010, 12–16).

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Figure 4.1  The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008), directed by Uli Edel. Munich: Vitagraph Films. Violence of June 2, 1968.

Another criterion precious to Baudelaire is the intensity of aesthetic experience. The conception of the sublime is, as we have seen, frequently concerned with strong emotional reactions. Romantic ideas held that emotion and imagination—not conscious intellect—are at the root of all that is important to life and art (Stokstad and Brinkley, 2008, 956). However, this may be problematic when trying to turn current or recent events into art, and even more so into films. As we have seen, the default mode of historical film is realism. Presenting events that fall within living memory in a way that is persuasive but honest is often fraught with difficulty, as recent events are even more emotive and contested—as part of ongoing political and social questions—than more distant events which rely wholly on history books for information. Moreover, despite the availability of evidence, fictionalizing still occurs in dramatic feature films based on well-documented factual events— often for good reasons. Still, some feature films try very hard to adhere to the facts. Where, then, is the space of imagination? Does this mean they are, as per Baudelaire, “journalism” instead of “art”? The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex) directed by Uli Edel (2008, DP Rainer Klausmann) recounts the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1970s Germany, an era within the lifetime and memory of the writer, director, and producer. The film is essentially a straightforward

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adaptation of journalist Stefan Aust’s nonfiction book (also titled The BaaderMeinhof Complex). Aust, who knew many of the RAF members personally and has been an active journalist since that time, has amassed a huge amount of research on the subject. Aust wrote the first draft of the screenplay, which was completed by producer Bernd Eichinger (also the writer and producer of the 2004 film Downfall, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel) and director Uli Edel. What kind of cinematic journalism is delivered in The Baader-Meinhof Complex as drama, and how is its filmic historical realism presented as a kind of reportage? I will examine the film as an example of high realism and devotion to historical accuracy. However, the film’s pacing resembles that of the thriller genre, and Edel employs stylistic visual approaches that may be called “painterly.” For this reason, I will discuss the film’s visual rhetoric in the context of a selection of artworks that can be related to the film’s mise-en-scène. If this chapter is rather more dense in terms of contextual material and detail than the others in this book, it is due to the abundance and weight of the material, the still-controversial aspect of the film’s subject, and its place within the canon of German postwar (and post-Wall) cinema, all of which proved a challenge to the filmmakers.

The Baader Meinhof Complex and Journalism The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a dramatized retelling of the German radical underground movement, the RAF, that emerged in the late 1960s and embraced violent militant action, including bank robberies, bombings, and, eventually, kidnappings and assassinations. The film traces the beginnings of the group, as it coalesced around the trio of Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin, through their capture and deaths in Stammheim prison, and the emergence of second- and third-generation RAF groups, each more violent than before. The film attempts to be a factual yet dramatic recounting of a stillcontentious and divisive recent history. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is part of a movement that Matthias Frey calls “Post-Wall” German cinema. It is one of a body of popular works that include Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004), The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006), Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) and others, including Uli Edel’s TV miniseries Hotel Adlon (2013). Frey notes that this post-1989 “post-Wall” cinema is dominated by historical films, to the point

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that, internationally, “the global presence of German cinema is associated almost exclusively with one genre” (Frey, 2013, 1). There has long been a special subcategory of German cinema that was born long before the Wall fell: the RAF film. Thomas Elsaesser has called the RAF a “‘zombie’: dead and yet at the same time, alive,” and the continuing fascination with the subject seems to bear this out (Elsaesser, 2014b, 22).1 The Baader-Meinhof Complex is part of a manifestation of what Maren Thom has called the “RAF mythos” (Thom, 2014). At the time of the events shown in the film, journalist Stefan Aust was a colleague of Ulrike Meinhof at the magazine her husband edited. Aust is therefore both an investigative journalist and an inside witness to the early stages of Meinhof ’s radicalization. He is a briefly seen, minor character in the film. The film maintains a strict adherence to Aust’s book, even down to the time frame, which covers essentially the same period: from Meinhof ’s denunciation of the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin on June 2, 1967, and the subsequent debacle at the Deutsche Oper, up to the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe on October 18, 1977, in prison, and the subsequent murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on the same day. Aust did not only research and investigate the events, but he was also a direct witness to many of them. Possibly because of his links to the German left at the time, he obtained many candid interviews with former members of the RAF, reflecting on their actions and motivations. The Jordan scenes are drawn from the evidence of photographer and journalist Peter Homann (1971, 2002), Meinhof ’s companion at the time who, though not directly implicated in the group’s radical actions, chose to accompany Meinhof to the guerrilla training camp. Homann (played by Jan Josef Liefers) quickly fell out with Baader; his interviews and journalism offer an insider’s look at the group in that period.2 While fictionalized accounts of the Baader-Meinhof Group abound, in films, novels, and plays, The Baader-Meinhof Complex relies exclusively upon investigative reportage and journalism. The narrative follows the established timeline; all the characters are actual people; none are composite or fictionalized; and the judgments suggested by the film are judgments largely agreed by experts. It is important to understand the film’s relationship to the facts, and how the T h ese films include Germany in Autumn (1978), shot by Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and others in the immediate aftermath of the Stammheim deaths; If Not Us, Who? (2011, dir. Andres Veiel) about Gudrun Ensslin; Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters (1981); and Christopher Roth’s Baader (2002), both heavily fictionalized. 2 We can assume that there must be a measure of self-serving in interviews and statements by all of those involved, but the journalistic evidence available is comprehensive and wide-ranging. Moncourt and Smith dispute some of Homann and Aust’s claims (2009, 557). 1

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journalistic approach and the dramatic approach cohere. Yet the film is no mere recitation of facts. It operates on the viewer emotionally, through scenes that adhere faithfully to the factual account but are visually presented as thrilling and, at times, sublime. It is a factual thriller that—and this is a rare case—does not sacrifice historical truth to the drama. To Maren Thom, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is “an example of how the merging of authenticity and mythos in a cinematic image, creates a new understanding, in this case of the RAF” (Thom, 2014, 241). Thom’s view is that the film, instead of “failing to deliver a critical analysis of the RAF and its mythos” deliberately eschews that kind of analysis, noting that writer-producer “Eichinger emphasized that he is not interested in the why but the how of the RAF, allowing the deeds to speak for themselves and allowing a multiplicity of readings.” I argue that Edel and Eichinger achieve this by combining both “art” and “journalism” approaches, through an engagement with painterly visuals as much as through detailed attention to authenticity. The filmmakers’ perspective is revealed in two documentaries about the making of the film by Gwendolin Szyszkowitz,3 and these, along with press interviews, form the basis of my understanding of the decision-making process and the conscious motivations of the participants. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a film about a journalist. Although the film is ostensibly about a group, for much of the narrative it principally follows Ulrike Meinhof ’s gradual transformation from a left-wing journalist into an active, armed radical of the RAF. Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a socialist and antinuclear activist, worked for the left-wing magazine Konkret, covering the burgeoning student activism in 1960s Germany, as well as appearing as a panelist on television news programs. Ulrike the “journalist who exchanged her typewriter for a gun” (Dargis, 2009) is shown in the beginning of the film as a wife and mother, and we see this identity stripped away, as she experiences both the pain of her husband’s infidelity and the state’s violence toward unarmed student protestors. Meinhof ’s left-wing bourgeois respectability is shown at the beginning of the film, on a family holiday on the island resort of Kampen, and immediately afterward at a party at her large, well-appointed home. We are curious: How can a famous and respected journalist end up an armed revolutionary? Edel wisely refrains from offering a too-pat rationale for her slide into extreme radicalism. However, the filmmakers are fully aware that Meinhof—even more than the History in the Making and On Uli Edel (both 2008) appear as DVD extras.

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others of the group, whom historian Michael Burleigh (2008, 189) terms the “guilty white kids”—continues to fascinate, as the wealth of online material and comments demonstrates. At the same time, the film’s focus on Meinhof surely also has something to do with the fact that Stefan Aust, the journalist whose research is the foundation of the film,4 was a colleague of Meinhof and was able to craft her narrative with thoroughness.5 In contrast to the other RAF films, The Baader-Meinhof Complex has the most comprehensive narrative, the biggest budget, the biggest stars, and a recognizably “thriller” style and pace, which led to both controversy and acclaim upon its release. It is also the film that sticks the most closely to the known facts of the Baader-Meinhof Group’s story. Besides there being no fictionalized characters, there are no stretched time frames, no speculation and very little psychological “motivation” implied; even the little “psychological” evidence offered is backed up by published journalistic material. Though not a documentary, it is effectively “journalism as cinema.” The radical difference between The Baader-Meinhof Complex and other films about the same subject is the visual style and the audiovisual sense of time and space. Certainly, Edel’s film of The Baader-Meinhof Complex omits certain things, no doubt in order to strip away at least some of the complexity of the story. It might have been worth mentioning the link between the group’s legal counsel, Klaus Croissant, and the Stasi (Reuters, 1993). Horst Mahler, seen in the film initially as a lawyer for the students and then RAF member, later became a far-right activist and was imprisoned for Holocaust denial (Deutsche Welle, 2017). East Germany is never mentioned in the film, even though Aust specifically revised his 1985 book in 1997 to incorporate new findings revealed by the reopened Stasi files6 (Aust, 2008, xx–xxi). Likewise, the fact that hostage Schleyer, who is killed at the end of the film, was a prominent former SS officer is not mentioned, though it was the very reason he was taken hostage. “To many on the Left, Schleyer was the picture of evil, proof that the Bundesrepublik had not fully broken with the fascist strains of the Third Reich” (Scribner, 2015a, 32).

In the credits, the film is “based on the book by and in consultation with” Aust. Aust (Huffman, 2008) believes Meinhof ’s involvement in the RAF was “due to many personal and psychological reasons,” but Edel eschews addressing Meinhof ’s psychological state, depicting her as the youth of the time saw her, as an aspirational figure gone wrong. 6 Aust revised the book again for the 2008 edition, with new evidence about the activities of the secret service in Stammheim prison. Since then it has been further revealed that the police officer who shot Benno Ohnesorg was a Stasi agent (Kulish, 2009). 4 5

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The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an example of an adaptation of a work of journalism into “art,” a dramatic retelling that brings to life the journalistic texts, still photographs, and news clips. Eichinger remarks upon how Edel approached the research for the film “with an unbelievable intensity” (Szyszkowitz, 2008b). As well as the ongoing narrative of Meinhof the journalist, the story is seen through actual journalism, due to the interpolation of television footage throughout the film. It strictly rejects valorizing or offering a heroic or positive reading of the situation or characters. Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin are portrayed by well-known “stars,” already involved in significant German “history” films; German history is a part of these actors’ star texts. Moritz Bleibtreu (Spielberg’s Munich), Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others), and Johanna Wokalek (Aimee and Jaguar) are iconic German actors of their generation, working with directors such as Oliver Hirschbirgel, Oskar Roehler, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Los Angeles-based Edel had been, in the decade and a half before The Baader-Meinhof Complex, better known for American films: the cult film Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) and Madonna-starring thriller Body of Evidence (1993), as well as a slew of US television films and series. Empire critic Kim Newman described him as “returning from the TV-movie wilderness” (Newman, 2008). However, his first major film was the shocking real-life drama Christiane F (Christiane F.—Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo; 1981), an unsparing look at drug abuse and child prostitution in West Germany. Bernd Eichinger produced both Christiane F and the equally harrowing Last Exit to Brooklyn7 (based on the Hubert Selby Jr. novel) and chose Edel as his director after he optioned Aust’s book (Szyszkowitz, 2008b). Charity Scribner observes that “within the scope of post-militant culture, the complex relationship between history and memory has particular relevance to film” (C. Scribner, 2015a, 161). Edel and Eichinger are of the same generation and experienced the Baader-Meinhof era in much the same way. Edel remarks that the two men share a birthday: the same date when Rudi Dutschke was shot. “The Dutschke shooting means an awful lot to us. . . . We know exactly where we were. It had an extreme emotional effect on our generation, or at least on left-wing students” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). Both Eichinger and Edel were left Both films can be seen as preparations for the realism of Baader-Meinhof Complex. Vincent Canby’s review of Last Exit (1990, 15) saw an “an unusual honesty, often frowned upon by critics who believe that fiction has an obligation not only to expose corruption but also to point the way toward moral uplift.” He goes on call the scenes of the strike “some of the roughest ever seen in a fiction film” and concludes that the film “never appears to exploit its sensational subject matter.”

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sympathizing students, studying together at the Munich Film School. Both were driven to try and explain to the next generation of young Germans what had happened, to reach beyond the myth and the artworks and the recriminations.8 To Edel, it is personal, it’s really a film about the history of my youth as well, not that I was involved in it, but I lived through those times. . . . I lived through all that and was very aware of what was going on. To recreate this feeling, to recapture this mood that was also what attracted me to this project. I’ve also tried to convey feelings which I had myself at the time. And therefore for me it was also a journey into the past . . . which you can reappraise. (Szyszkowitz, 2008b)

Eichinger notes that “I hadn’t realized it, but that time obviously affected him [Edel] deeply; the events of that time got under his skin” (Szyszkowitz, 2008b). At the same time, remembrance of the past was surely affected by the commodification of the RAF as “terrorist chic” in the late 1990s, which Christopher Homewood identifies as problematic, “a very selective process of remembering and forgetting, which threatens to decontextualize and depoliticize the RAF through ignorance of the hard, often uncomfortable historical facts” (Homewood, 2011, 133). The film seeks to restore those facts to public awareness. Glamor sticks to the Baader-Meinhof gang nonetheless. Some critics felt that the actors cast were “too pretty”—certainly better looking than the mugshots of the actual RAF members plastered all over West Germany (Ascherson, 2008). Others assert that in fact, “many of the actors bear a striking resemblance to the people they play” (Brunskill, 2009). Clive James noted: “I can easily recall what was happening in the 1970s, and I can assure anyone too young to remember that the Baader Meinhof bunch weren’t attractive at all.” However, he admits that “Some of them were quite good looking, and the actors playing them in the movie are even better looking, which is already a worry” (James, 2008). In his article “A German Complex,” Ian Brunskill notes that indeed Baader was “a handsome, violent, amoral lowlife” (Brunskill, 2009). According to Kate Connolly, “the Porsche-driving Baader modelled himself on the Hollywood actor Marlon Brando, and he and Meinhof, a successful journalist, epitomized the glamour that gave the gang its appeal” noting that the glamor “endures in popular culture even today” (K. Connolly, 2008). For her part, Meinhof ’s T h e mythos of the RAF was established early and includes Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings titled 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977) from 1988. Charity Scribner’s After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (2015) discusses this work of Richter’s (43–68).

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daughter Bettina Röhl rejected the film, saying it “glorifies brutal killers as goodlooking idealists” (Brunskill, 2009; Röhl, 1995). In fact, the glamor is necessary. As Manohla Dargis (2009) notes, accusations that the film glamorizes terror miss the point “that all terrorism is performative.” The “glossy emptiness” is an integral part of what made the RAF so successful and popular with the youth of the time; as Charity Scribner has pointed out, “The leaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavy on style but light on political analysis” (Scribner, 2015a, 88). Edel’s establishing of the glamorous terrorists in the first half of the film is necessary, to systematically break down the image into one of violence, fractiousness, and despair, sparing nobody, not the group members in or out of prison, nor the state. To critic Kenneth Turan, it is “an exploitation film on a socially conscious subject,” observing that “even though its purpose couldn’t be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp” this approach is “probably fitting for a group that started out with high-minded goals and ended up robbing banks and blowing people away” (Turan, 2009). Astrid Proll, a former RAF member, has said in an interview that they were “a bit like media stars” (Birkett, 1998). Aust himself has likened the Baader-Meinhof Group to “rock stars” in the admiration they generated among the youth in Germany and around the world, saying that “there was an amazing cult about those people” (Fine, 2009). He points out that “it would be impossible for a book reader or film viewer to understand why so many people followed them if they were portrayed only as villains and criminals. It was their charisma that made them so dangerous” (Huffman, 2008b). The charisma is also shown in, for example, Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita where it is impossible not to like Rita (Bibiana Beglau), and in The German Sisters, where Barbara Sukowa’s Marianne is, as her sister Julianne says, “a remarkable woman.” In contrast, Edel establishes the charisma but then eviscerates and demolishes the viewer’s attraction to it, slowly and systematically. Aust admits that the film is conflicted, “because the issue itself is a conflicted and unresolved issue in German history” (Marc Olsen, 2009). The purpose of the film, for Aust, Eichinger, and Edel, was primarily to show “what happened” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). Aust acknowledges that despite the success of his book, “You had to show their story in a film or people wouldn’t understand why it lasted so long” (Fine, 2009). Aust had previously scripted a version of the group’s story, Stammheim—The Baader-Meinhof Gang on Trial (1986) directed by Reinhard Hauff and, in the same year, a documentary BaaderMeinhof. The appearance of these films the year after the publication of the first

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edition of The Baader-Meinhof Complex demonstrates that Aust saw the film as a necessary medium for communicating the Baader-Meinhof story. With Edel and Eichinger, his aim is realized: a genuinely popular, successful, and factual recounting of the history, reinterpreted as a thriller. However, if terrorism is spectacle, then the history of terrorism is spectacle also. To Katja Nicodemus, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is “not a historical film, nor an analysis, nor an excursus on the Society’s underlying violence. Rather it is an action film extravaganza” (Nicodemus and Turk, 2009, 56). When some critics then sneered at the “thriller” aspect and asked “is the Baader Meinhof film a ‘tasteless action movie’?” (Paterson, 2008), Stefan Aust responds that “we were trying to show that this was an episode in history, not only something a few crazy people did, and that they were embedded in a certain time” (Hornaday, 2009). Aust’s own research demonstrates that the thriller approach to the story is, terrifyingly, appropriate. In his book he quotes Beate Sturm, who was briefly a member of the group between 1970 and 1971; she told him that “Baader managed it that our heroic political notions went right out of the window, and there we were, right in the middle of a thriller.” Sturm observed that once the opportunity came to be part of the group, “you just slip into that sort of thing.” And once in, the group had its own momentum. It was exciting; Sturm tells Aust that “as we thought we knew we got into all this for the correct political reasons, we liked the thrill of it too” (Aust, 2008, 90). The group members enjoyed being “right in the middle of a thriller,” and there is evidence that they were themselves motivated and influenced by movies. Holger Meins was a film student, and Ensslin appeared in at least one avantgarde student film (Iranian TV 2011). Andreas Baader’s favorite film was Battle of Algiers, and he attempted to write a “Socialist” film script himself (Preece, 2012, 20). Ulrike Meinhof researched and wrote a screenplay for television, Bambule (1970), about a rebellion in a girl’s home, based on her research into juvenile home conditions.9 It was filmed but not shown, as she became an outlaw on the eve of the broadcast. Louis Malle’s Viva Maria!, a lavish musical comedy about a revolution in a fictional Central American country, was popular with the young German left, including Meinhof and Rudi Dutschke10 (Preece, 2012, 19). Gunter Grass himself compared the group to the Arthur Penn film Bonnie and It can be seen on http://ubu​.com​/film​/meinhof​_bambule​.html Incredible as that may seem. New German Cinema director Volker Schlöndorff worked with Malle on Viva Maria! A poster for Viva Maria! is seen in the credit sequence of Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita, a film about a fictionalized Baader-Meinhof-style female guerrilla.

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Clyde, noting the erotic energy of the bank robberies and the media attention, and how it all quickly degenerated into sordid violence (Preece, 2012, 21). If The Baader-Meinhof Complex presents history as spectacle, then it is because the RAF were themselves presented as spectacle in the news media at the time, most dramatically by their sworn enemy, the Axel Springer Press. The RAF and Springer appear to have had a mutually beneficial relationship; the RAF sold papers, and Springer guaranteed publicity for the group. Edel shows Baader and Ensslin posing and “playing to the gallery” in court, in contrast to Meinhof and Raspe. Yet Meinhof, who was never a “leader” of the RAF despite the moniker “Baader-Meinhof,” was the one most demonized in the press, possibly because she was already well known from her television appearances defending left-wing politics. As Stefan Aust points out, the plethora of footage of Meinhof made it easier for Martina Gedeck to craft her character, whereas there is virtually no film of Baader or Ensslin, apart from news clips where they are seen under arrest or in court (Fine, 2009).11

Realism and Authenticity As has been argued in the previous chapters, accuracy, authenticity, and anachronism are key components of the way historical films address realism. The Baader-Meinhof Complex, like all historical films, has some minor anachronisms.12 Stefan Aust’s book supplies the script with much of the factual data and serves as the guarantor of historical accuracy. Both Edel and Eichinger have expressed that what they desired most of all was “authenticity” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). Authenticity as a component of realism in historical films and paintings can take a variety of forms but is generally concentrated on visual, material details. The interpolation of news media footage into the film played a major role in determining the film’s visuals and “look.” Many of the images used were already well known in Germany and have passed into the “RAF Myth” which— depending on one’s political views—frames the RAF as either lions or demons. Uli Edel hoped that by unpicking and re-presenting the images, the film would result in “demystifying what happened. The mystification of what happened took Possibly Edel has a sneaking regard for Meinhof. He creates empathy—though never sympathy—for her. Both Szyszkowitz’s documentaries show Edel at Meinhof ’s grave, looking pensive. 12 T h ese have been aggregated on IMDB https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0765432​/goofs 11

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place before we picked up a camera. It has already taken place over the last 30 years” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). Thomas Elsaesser agrees, noting how many scenes culminate with “the re-enactment or restaging of one of the iconic photographs known from press coverage of the time and kept in active memory by the media and RAF folklore ever since” (Elsaesser, 2014a, 142). However, Elsaesser’s critique of the film accuses it of tending toward Belén Vidal’s concept of Mannerism: “made to look authentic by their sheer quantity, the props’ insistent ‘look-at-me’ tipped them towards camp and pastiche” (Elsaesser, 2014a, 142). Indeed, the quest for visual authenticity meant that the crew often used the actual locations where events happened. Whenever possible, they would use natural lighting and authentic props. In History in the Making, production designer Bernd Lepel demonstrates, showing photographs, how he recreated Gudrun Ensslin’s prison cell at Stammheim. Claiming that “all the sanitary facilities are the original ones from Stammheim,” Lepel recreated the high-security wing in which the RAF members were held at film studios in Munich—the only section of the movie shot in a studio. The trial scenes were shot at Stammheim, in the same purpose-built structure where the original trial was held. The actors playing the defendants sat in the same place as the actual defendants had sat. During the shooting of those scenes, Edel observes that “We have an adviser who was there [at the trial] every day . . . we really can’t make it any more authentic” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). Elsaesser does not deny the factual basis of the film, but has issues with the way the narrative is played out; the visual quest for authenticity he sees as exaggerated, and maybe a weakness of the film, while the filmmakers held it to be a principal strength (Elsaesser, 2014b, 142).

Visual Rhetoric and Narrative Structure Thomas Elsaesser is right that The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a “conventionally linear chronological account” showing how Meinhof became drawn into a more violent wing of the student protest movement (Elsaesser, 2014b, 140). The film does not try to explain why these radical ideas took hold but instead tries to reveal how Meinhof ’s participation moved from bystander and sympathizer to radical actor without demanding the audience take a position. Elsaesser is only one of several critics who object to this approach. Esther Leslie in Radical Philosophy points out that “hurtling along a historical trajectory, it never clearly banners its stance. To make that clear, or to make it possible for the viewer to

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take sides, the film would need to wrest a moment for contemplation among the incessant stream of actions” (Leslie, 2009). Leslie’s objection is precisely the point Edel and Eichinger want to make: the film is designed to not allow sides to be taken; contemplation, if it comes, comes after the credits roll. The Baader-Meinhof Complex follows a classical mode of narration (Thanouli, 2019, 119–20). This is hardly a surprise; as Thanouli (2019, 117) points out this is the dominant model for historical films; moreover, the film is, as Elsaesser notes, aimed at a Hollywood blockbuster market (Elsaesser, 2014b, 133). The film largely adopts character-structured causality, principally by following Meinhof ’s induction into and participation in the group; similar causality is driven by other characters, including the second-generation members Peter-Jürgen Boocke and Brigitte Mohnhaupt. Elsaesser remarks that the film has a “very conventionally Manichaean scheme of protagonist and antagonist” which again is typical of the historical film (Elsaesser, 2014b, 134). In this schema, “history is presented as an individual driven process guided by the personal initiatives of the key protagonists” (Thanouli, 2019, 119). While this is a general principle for classical historical films, it is particularly significant in terms of this film. The protagonist is, at least in the first half of the film, the RAF (particularly Meinhof), the antagonist is the state, represented by the police in the June 2 scene. The memory of that scene lingers through the first half of the film. Only when we meet Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz), the chief of the German Federal police, do we begin to get a sense of perspective on the terror that has been unleashed by the radicals. The methodical, sincere but utterly unglamorous Herold becomes the film’s protagonist. Still, the actions of historical individuals (and what drives them) are something that cannot really be subjected to the rigors of “authenticity”; even the diaries of Meinhof, mined by Aust and Edel, cannot simply be replicated on the screen. It is left to the visual design to convince the viewer that what they see is “true.” The most striking aspect of the film is not simply its desire for visual historical authenticity and the methods used to achieve it, but the visual structure of the film. While the two parts of the film are knitted together stylistically by Edel and Rainer Haussman’s attention to period authenticity, and a realism structured by contemporary news clips, the pace of the film is very different over the two parts. Once the characters are in Stammheim, the pace slows down, and the contrast between the physical violence on the outside and the psychological violence on the inside becomes strikingly apparent. However, it is the dramatic and magnificently realized set pieces that dominate the first part of the film, that

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capture the audience, preparing them for the unfolding of the second part of the film. There are three principal set pieces of striking visual composition, pace, and audiovisual impact. The first is the recreation of the June 2, 1967, demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin. The second is a rally at the Technical University in Berlin, as student leader Rudi Dutschke gives a speech protesting the Vietnam War. The third is the mass protest at the Axel Springer publishing company in Kochstrasse, April 11, 1968. In each of these, we see the visual manifestation of the massed bodies of people. In each, there are huge crowds of people, all active, gathered in protest at what they perceive to be injustice. The frame is filled with the mass of human bodies. The camera is always at eye level so that the viewer is among the mass. Cian Duffy and Peter Howell (2011, 151) explore the relationship between the crowd, or mass of people, and the sublime. They note that eighteenth-century thinkers saw the crowd as either “a vast mass of people and minds working in unity, to transcend what was hitherto thought” or, more ominously especially in the wake of the 1780 Gordon Riots, as “an awful assemblage of people caught up in an ecstatic enthusiasm, losing the will to think.” In both views, the idea of the mass of people as a kind of sublime; “its power and complexity transcends the normal experience of the individual.” In Elias Canetti’s 1962 Crowds and Power, Canetti writes about the idea that “in the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person” (Canetti, 1962). This “belittling” of the individual—surrounded by vastness—and “self-aggrandizement” of being incorporated into a far greater whole is, to Duffy and Howell, an example of what they consider the “cultural” sublime. This idea of the mass of people as a variety of sublime is presented in several key scenes in Edel’s film, with specific reference to the development of the radicalization of Ulrike Meinhof. In the first scene, June 2, there are three masses of people. The mass of protestors, holding signs, standing behind the barricade, comprise a crosssection of “ordinary Germans” of all ages and social classes. The second mass of people is the supporters of the Shah, all dressed exactly alike, all male and of the same age. The third mass is the German police, ostensibly there to keep peace in their role to protect German citizens. The Shah’s secret police attack the unarmed demonstrators; the police join in beating the demonstrators and the mass breaks up. In the university scene, the mass surrounds the charismatic leader, forming a kind of protective wall around him. When an interloper grabs the microphone

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and tries to denounce the rally, he is grabbed and physically dragged out as the mass rises and boos at him. Although the scene does not turn violent, the gestures of actor Sebastian Blomberg, playing Dutschke indicate that this is because the leader himself has ordered that there be no violence, and the mass obeys. We are given to understand the potential of the mass for violence, yet at this moment the potential is not embraced. In the third set piece, the attack on the Springer press, the mass clearly intends violence. However, they exert their aggression on objects: the papers, the delivery trucks, and the building, smashing things, lighting fires, and destroying as much property as possible, but they do not attack people. In the three set pieces we see the mass as victim and aggressor, the mass as solidarity and camaraderie, and finally the mass as active agents exerting contained aggression, but with the potential for destructive violence. After this, the huge masses are not seen again in the film. There are substantial crowds in the scene at Holger Meins’s grave and in the courtroom at Stammheim, but these are comparatively visibly diminished. In terms of composition, the masses in these scenes are also visibly contained: by the walls of the prison courtroom and by the trees in the cemetery in the funeral scene. The large masses of people seen in the aforementioned scenes evoke a sense of the sublime through the way they are shot. The shots are made inside the crowds, often at eye level, moving through the use of Steadicams and handheld cameras. The sense of pleasure, of exhilaration at being one with the crowd, active, belonging, and purposeful, is mixed equally with a sense of terror. As James Kirwan points out, terror is not enough: the sublime is problematic because it is pleasurable (Kirwan, 2005, 6). The horrifically violent scenes of the June 2 and the murder of protestor Benno Ohnesorg remain in the viewer’s memory so the threat of institutional violence is ever-present in the subsequent scenes. Each of the three set pieces is a key event in the radicalization of Ulrike Meinhof. During June 2, she watches the violence on the television; she is present at the Technical University, where she begins to feel a sense of belonging with the students and their supporters; her sense of purpose is confirmed as she attends the anti-Springer protest, although she does not take part physically in the demonstration’s destruction of the Springer property. According to Aust, Meinhof did experience these events in the way shown in the film (Aust, 2008, 24–36). Although these events feature in other films about the period, these are usually interpolated television news footage. Uli Edel has gone to great lengths to authentically recreate the events. One might ask why, given that it was so

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expensive to recreate them when a plethora of news footage already exists. The clue lies in the way in which these scenes are filmed; Edel puts Meinhof right in the center of the action, building up a strong identification with Meinhof and her growing commitment. In the following section, I will examine the three set pieces using deductive visual-rhetoric analysis, modeled upon the three canons of visual rhetoric: inventio (invention, or the laying out of the argument), dispositio (arrangement of the argument), and elocutio (visual style), followed by an examination of the scenes set inside Stammheim prison.

The Inventio, or the Process of Developing and Refining the Argument The argument is posited by showing in dramatic detail the events of June 2, 1967, when the Shah of Iran and his wife visited Berlin and attended an event at the Berlin Oper on Bismarckstrasse. The facts are well established. Peaceful protestors (students and others) were violently set upon by supporters of the Shah, and then by the German police. A student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot and killed. This sets the context for the whole film, an event that awakens a generation. As the events of June 2 unfold, they are intercut with the house party scene. We are gradually introduced to an attractive, female bourgeois journalist who, as the riot begins, we learn is Ulrike Meinhof. Edel’s decision to introduce Meinhof as a successful bourgeoise is a rhetorical appeal to identification; she is “one of us,” normal. We have already seen her at the very start of the film on a family holiday (Aust, 2008, 24), enjoying herself with her children. Yet, something is not quite right. She is secluded in a beach chair, framed by the chair’s brim and fabric, instead of being out in the sun. There is a sense in which she is hiding away. Aust quotes from Meinhof ’s diary of early 1967, when she had begun to take a professional interest in the left-wing student movement. She wrote, “our house, the parties, Kampen, all of that’s only partly enjoyable, but among other things it is the basis from which I can be a subversive element” (Aust, 2008, 24). She mentions her TV appearances and her career, and says “I even find it pleasant, but it doesn’t satisfy my need for warmth, solidarity, belonging to a group.” This, she goes on to say, “corresponds only partially to my real nature and needs, because it involves me adopting the attitude of the puppet, forcing me to say things smilingly when to me, to all of

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us, they are deadly serious—so I say them with a grin, as if masked” (Aust, 2008, 24). It is this Ulrike, searching for a genuine sense of purpose, that Edel shows us in the first half of the film. The inventio continues with the second set piece, as eloquent and inspiring student leader Rudi Dutschke speaks against the Vietnam War at the German Technical University. Like Meinhof, we are caught up in the moment as the mass of students roar with approval at Dutschke’s analysis of the American operations in Vietnam. The third set piece presents the argument for radicalization in the students’ attack on the Axel Springer building following Dutschke’s shooting. This is an exhilarating night-time carnival, fizzing with anger and energy. Meinhof is welcomed and visibly begins to feel a sense of belonging. This concludes the “invitation to radicalization” section of the argument. The middle section of the film sees Meinhof join with Ensslin and Baader and conspire to break Baader out of prison. As she really did jump through the window at the Institute for Social Issues, Edel frames the window scene as her “moment of choice” between continuing her role as a radical crusading journalist or joining the guerrilla underground. The window scene is not only metaphoric,13 it actually happened. Edel lets the camera linger on the open window after Baader and the others have already jumped out; we see Meinhof pressed against the wall in shock, the camera lingers on the writhing bodies of the wounded and then back to the window, and finally we see Meinhof moving quickly to the window and leaping out. In fact, according to Aust, “Baader was the first to jump out of the window, followed by Ulrike Meinhof. The others fired a few more tear gas cartridges and jumped after them” (Aust, 2008, 8). Edel communicates to the viewer that Meinhof ’s decision was spontaneous and unplanned, possibly as a reaction to the violence she had just witnessed; it is important in the structure of the story because we have not yet lost identification with this character. This is followed by the sequence at the Jordan training camp, where we learn more about the personalities of Baader and Ensslin and begin to wonder how Meinhof can remain with such volatile characters. However, she becomes increasingly embedded in the group, using her intellect to plan strategies and standing up to the loud and aggressive Baader. Baader himself is shown as he no

Edel reprises the window motif later in the film; the last thing we see of Meinhof is her gazing out the prison window.

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doubt was: by turn a loud, aggressive bully and a sexual, charismatic bad-boy.14 Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ desire to cram the whole narrative journey of the RAF into the film does not allow time for any character except Meinhof ’s to be examined in much detail.15 The arrest of Baader, Meins, and Raspe largely recreates the television footage of the siege of the underground garage (History in the Making 2008). Keeping watch, Raspe is the first to be arrested, following a shootout with the police. The police then besiege Baader and Meins in the garage until Baader is shot, and the arrest is completed. What is striking about this scene is the way the camera moves up to the windows of the surrounding apartments and shows the people standing there, looking out the window and watching the action. Edel did the same in the scenes on the Bismarckstrasse. By showing ordinary citizens watching the events taking place in their own neighborhoods, the film demonstrates how close the violence of both the RAF and the state was to the people. They also remind the viewer that there are witnesses to the historic events. The arrest of Baader completes the first half of the film and the argument for radicalization. Through the June 2 sequence, we see the justification of the opposition to the state, and the state’s own violence. In the scenes at the Technical University and the attack on Springer, we witness the camaraderie that forms within dissident groups. At the same time, we see the attraction of the youthoriented rebel culture and how Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof appear to revel in being the leaders of a group of younger people. However, the group’s actions lead only to death or prison. This concludes the inventio; the argument has established identification with Meinhof (and possibly with Baader for some of the audience) and laid out the emotional case for the RAF’s views. What remains is for the film to demonstrate what happens to the Baader-Meinhof Group.

The Dispositio, or Arrangement The inventio lays out the argument that although radicalization is understandable—based on just causes and a sense of solidarity—taken to the Chris Homewood analyzes Moritz Bleibtrau’s “star persona” and its relevance to Edel’s casting of him as Baader (Homewood, 2011, 142). 15 Alexander Fehling’s portrayal of Baader in If Not Us, Who? is more interesting and nuanced despite being a small part. Fehling’s Baader is a spoiled, slightly camp denizen of the Munich arty underground, turned petulant radical, brimming with dirty pretty-boy charisma. Interestingly both Fehling and Bleibtrau eschew Baader’s real-life lisp. 14

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extent the RAF does, it leads to arrest and death. It is interesting to notice how other films about the subject tend to either focus on the period up to arrest (If Not Us Who?, Baader) or after the arrest (Stammheim, The German Sisters). Edel wants to show the whole story, not only what happened to the principals but also the formation of the second and third generations, when the legacy of student radicalism became toxic in the hands of a few. The difficulty in arranging this sequence of events is that in the early part of the film, there is a great deal of mass action, but the latter part is much more about individual struggles. There must be a shift in mood and in the type of sequences; it is no longer possible for the film to rely on exhilarating, sublime action scenes where the viewer is embedded within the scene and feels part of it. In the second half of the film, the viewer should cease to identify with the political struggle as it is expressed by the group and become more and more estranged from it. The pace becomes slower, and prison becomes the focus. We see state violence again, in this case against the prisoners in the form of isolation and force feeding. However, this is counterpointed by scenes outside the prison, where we witness the formation of the next generation of terrorists led by Peter-Juergen Boocke, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Christian Klar, who until now have been shown as followers of Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin. There is more reliance on television footage to show what is happening outside the prison. In the dispositio or arrangement across the whole film, we can see that the set pieces consecutively build an argument through which the viewer comes to identify with Meinhof ’s agreement with the student movement and sympathy with a more action-based alliance. This is then undercut in the second half of the film when we realize that not only she has taken the wrong path but how she has taken it and how wrong it is. The film focuses on Meinhof ’s radicalization instead of less well-known figures (such as Raspe, Boocke, and Astrid Proll). Meinhof was a 37-year-old, successful writer with a public profile. Because of this, she was not a naïve or stupid youth. People could and did—and can and do—disagree with her views, but she cannot easily be dismissed as brainwashed or ignorant. Nor can Meinhof be accused of joining revolution for the sexual thrill, as Ensslin and Baader sometimes are.16 These scenes do not only feature Meinhof. Peter Homann is also present: he is one of the demonstrators in Bismarckstrasse; he is at the In If Not Us, Who?, the sexual relationship between Ensslin and Baader is examined with sensitivity and depth, creating a coherent psychological impression of the pair. Whether it is accurate is difficult to tell.

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Technical University, where he meets Meinhof, and he is present at the Springer demonstration. In each of these scenes he is accompanied by a curly-haired friend (played by Christian Näthe, listed only as “Kommunarde” in the credits). Therefore, we see how Meinhof ’s experience of the events of 1967–8 is shared with Homann and others. Homann, as we have seen, was briefly involved with the RAF at its very earliest stage (though not as a participant in their crimes) yet he rejects this very same radicalization that Meinhof embraces. So Homann— and the “Kommunarde”—become both counterpart and counterpoint to Meinhof. While we see Homann breaking with the group in Jordan, the nameless Kommunarde simply disappears from the film. This is because he represents the left-wing students who, although feeling strongly about their cause and willing to fight in the streets if necessary, rejected the militant action of the RAF.

The Elocutio: Visual Style To Edel, the story of the RAF is a “German tragedy” (Szyszkowitz, 2008a). As in all tragedy, it invokes powerful emotion. “I don’t think you can understand anything at all unless you can understand it emotionally as well,” Edel says in interview. “I don’t believe in a purely rational analysis of things. I believe that a purely rational analysis must always be supported by an emotional analysis as well” (History in the Making, 2008). Reframing the story of the RAF as a German tragedy is an unusual approach within the body of films on the subject, and Edel approaches it through the visual style of the film and through—surprisingly— some deeply embedded art motifs. This sense of tragedy is conveyed less through the story, which in its journalistic form is fairly grubby and complicated, than through its visual reference points. I will now analyze the principal sequences, to explain how this visual style operates within what we have already seen is a historically authentic recreation of historical events, aiming for a realistic style based on period visuals, principally news footage, and photography. However, what is particularly important in each of the set pieces is that they move toward a manifestation of the sublime. In each case they begin in realism and continue to faithfully recreate the actual historical event, while at the same time ramping up the emotional charge of the scene through the arrangement of the mise-enscène, culminating in a moment meant to evoke the sublime, so that the viewer will be carried away emotionally. In the next section, I will discuss the film’s

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relationship to painting in the implementation of a visual style that moves from journalistic realism to painterly sublime. The Baader-Meinhof Complex, like Christiane F and Last Exit to Brooklyn, manifests what Los Angeles Times film critic Sheila Benson has referred to as “Edel’s accomplished and painterly eye.” Of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Benson mentions the appearance of a “Pieta and a Christ on the cross among the film’s visual references” and so it is no surprising to find the director reprising this approach in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, putting visual references from art history into the mise-en-scène (Benson, 1990).17

A Death on the Bismarckstrasse, June 2, 1967 The recreation of June 2’s riot in West Berlin’s Bismarckstrasse shocks the audience by plunging them into the outrageous violence perpetrated by the Shah’s secret police in tandem with the German police, culminating in the murder of a protestor. The absolute injustice of the violence perpetrated on civilian protestors is delineated in detail and aims to bring the viewer to criticize the establishment responsible for the injustice. City authorities granted the production permission to shut down Bismarckstrasse, a six-lane highway in the center of the city by the Deutsche Oper. Cinematographer Rainer Klaussman points out that “finding a visual approach to the film was easy because to my mind, you can’t play around with history—you have to go for the facts.” These, he says, are “so well-known that to stray too far from reality would have alienated the film’s domestic audience” (Hope-Jones, 2009, 34). According to First AC Astrid Meigel, four cameras were used on Bismarckstrasse to capture the chaos of the demonstration that descends into violence and panic: one held-held, two Steadicams, and one studio camera fixed on a static dolly (Hope-Jones, 2009, 37). Although having four cameras was chaotic, Klaussman points out that “we wanted to get specific images that have appeared on the original news coverage of the event. You have to start with the big shots, with everybody there, and then you move closer and closer until you’re getting little moments like the young girl being crushed against the barrier” (Hope-Jones, 2009, 37). The effect of the constantly moving, eye-level camera is to involve the viewer to a degree that it becomes viscerally frightening: the moment when the water Edel’s work on Twin Peaks, Episode #2.14 has also been praised for being “painterly” (Morse, 2010).

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cannon knocks the fleeing people to the ground and then sprays right into the camera is harrowing. Christopher Hitchens in his Vanity Fair review called it “the best 1960s street-fighting footage ever staged” (Hitchens, 2009). The cameras are, always, at the eye level of the victims. We run alongside young and elderly people alike and see them smashed in the face by the Shah’s supporters’ wooden staves, beaten, and trodden on by German police. Finally, one of the protestors is shot dead. In short, the scene is one of shocking and distressing state violence wreaked upon unarmed civilians. However, looking at the news footage of the events, there is a great visual difference between what the news cameras captured18 and what the fiction film viewer experiences. Unlike the news cameras, Klausmann’s cameras are immersed in the scene; there is no sense of the camera “looking on” at the action, but always “being inside” of it. Even more crucially, in the news footage we can see that the news cameras mostly accompany the police (there are many shots from behind police lines) and are not among the demonstrators, so their perspective takes the point of view of the authority (Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg n.d.). One can describe the scene of June 2, 1967, as depicted in The Baader-Meinhof Complex another way: as a “massacre of the innocents,” one of the most potent artistic tropes in the history of art. Based on the story in the New Testament, in the hands of Flemish artists the massacre of the innocents (known as the “kindermoord”) becomes a terrifying indictment of state violence on civilian populations. Many artists have painted the subject; three of the most graphic and compelling examples are those by Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, and Cornelis Van Haarlem. In each case, the picture depicts state violence against a mass of unarmed and innocent people. In his Massacre of the Innocents (1565–7), Pieter Breughel the Elder (c.1525– 69) is the first to transfer the biblical story to the present day. His snowbound Flanders town is visited by a detachment of soldiers, who force their way into the houses and tear the children from their mothers. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum version swaddled babies lie already dead on the ground. It is a horrific scene of “wintry stillness on the one hand, murder and manslaughter on the other” (Hagen and Hagen, 2004, 10–11) made even more dreadful by the wealth of detail in the painting. In the mise-en-scène, the viewer’s point of view is on the higher ground looking down upon the scene, perhaps from the point of view of the Holy Family as they flee. However, instead of being a distancing effect, T h is footage is used in If Not Us, Who?

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this means the viewer becomes involved because one must look very closely to see each scenario of terror played out: soldiers kick down a door, half-naked toddlers are dragged out into the snow; a woman sits on the ground with her dead baby in her lap. Bruegel is saying, matter-of-factly, “this happens here.” It is not possible to take in the content of the picture quickly; the painting has so much detail it must be looked at closely, and the viewer can spend a great deal of time in front of it. Therefore, it is decentered, resembling less a film shot than a film sequence, as the viewer’s eye moves like a camera from incident to incident, continually shifting from the “wide angle long shot” of the whole canvas to the many small scenarios playing out right across the surface. Cornelis Van Haarlem’s (1562–1638) version of 1590 is the most disturbing, the most horrific, and the most sublime of the renderings (see ​Figure 4.2). There is nothing in the painting but terror; it is a nightmare vision. Apparently, as a child he was present during the Spanish siege of Haarlem in 1572, in which the Garrison and many of the civilians were massacred (Schrijver, 1973; Rijksmuseum n.d.). Here the soldiers have been replaced by enormous nude men, with perfect classical bodies; they are like demigods but bent wholly on violence and destruction. Again, the ground is strewn with dead babies, while

Figure 4.2 Van Haarlem, C. (1590) Massacre of the Innocents. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.

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women and children are brutalized. The nudity is grotesque, not sexual: the dominant figures are seen from behind, exposing large muscular buttocks; they are pure masculine power, the dominant male as brute. The women are fighting, as they actually did during the siege (Rijksmuseum n.d.); on the left-hand side of the picture, three women have brought down a soldier and are beating him on the head with stones. The city in the background is rendered with architectural period detail; it may be Haarlem or any town which suffered during the long and violent Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). Although the huge canvas (2.45 m × 3.58 m) is immediately overwhelming and shocking in a way that Breughel’s is not, the worst horror is also in the details, and it takes time to take them in. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) made a somber version in 1611–12; the image has returned to the biblical past, and soldiers wear Roman helmets. Here we are much closer to the action, almost a part of it. Dead babies lie in piles on the ground while living ones are brutally manhandled. One soldier holds an infant in the air, as if to smash him into the ground. The women are fighting back: one is holding onto the soldier’s sword blade and biting down upon his hand; another rakes her nails across the face of the soldier. It is a ghastly image of vicious injustice, but one which shows women furiously rejecting the state’s violence, which is tearing their families apart. Even modern audiences are stunned by the picture. According to Nico van Hout, “to present-day’s viewers, jaded by horror films and the reports of war correspondents” the viewer’s recoil from the “unbridled aggression” of Massacre of the Innocents indicates “the strong and enduring impact of Rubens’s scenes of violence” (van Hout, 2014, 24–6). Van Hout confirms Rubens as a cinematic painter, describing him as “a true film director avant la lettre” a notion that is “firmly rooted in the art historical literature” (van Hout, 2014, 17). This picture is more strictly cinematic than Breughel’s and van Haarlem’s due to its composition: it is oriented around a single group of figures and so the eye is drawn to the center of the picture and does not get so caught up in the periphery. Nevertheless, all three versions of the biblical story contribute powerfully to the trope of the “massacre of innocents”: state violence, hideous brutality, visceral abuse of women and children, clear injustice, and pathos. The “massacre of the innocents” expresses in dreadful detail political injustice and the arbitrary nature of state violence. In terms of The BaaderMeinhof Complex, the fighting women become even more pointed: the RAF had many women members, its theoretical materials were written by women, and

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a number of women died or were imprisoned for their RAF actions (Scribner, 2015a, 10).19 The June 2, 1967, scene is a recreation of the “massacre of the innocents” as a modern political event. The injustice of the violence, the viciousness of its perpetrators, and the innocence of the victims are made thoroughly clear throughout the scene. Through Edel’s direction, the viewer empathizes with the victims and is horrified at a state that would allow such violence to be perpetrated. It is an emotional call to arms, recruiting the viewer into a worldview that leads to the formation of the RAF as a logical response to the atrocities of the day. Yet it is primarily an emotional appeal, not an intellectual one. We are thrust into the violence and experience it as a sublime moment of terror. Women are beaten and bloodied, echoing the violence meted out to the women in the paintings. Using multiple cameras and numerous points of view and fast-paced editing, the viewer is plunged into the scene, making the massacre of the innocents feel horribly real and deeply affecting.

“We don’t have much time!” The Vietnam Congress at the Technical University The second set piece is the mass student congress against the Vietnam War held at the Berlin Technical University on February 17, 1968. Here we see a sense of mass solidarity, and assurance that the movement is large and of one mind; there is a sense of companionship in the struggle. While the focus of the scene is on the speaker Rudi Dutschke (Sebastian Blomberg), we also see Meinhof becoming more embedded into the student movement, meeting photographer and sympathizer Peter Homann. Most importantly, we get a sense of the vigor and energy of the mass of people supporting the movement. Although there are many scenes in art showing large crowds of people, one work from the period of the French Revolution depicts that tumultuous moment when a political gathering roars its unity, together as one. Serment du Jeu de Paume also known as the Tennis Court Oath20 by Jacques-Louis David (1790) shows the decisive moment when the revolution is born, as the Third Estate transforms itself into the National Assembly, taking the oath of solidarity to stay unified “until the constitution of the kingdom is established.” The oath T h e film is—unusually—an action film with many active female characters, not only Ensslin and Meinhof but also Petra Schelm and Brigit Mohnhaupt. 20 Although Jeu de Paume is not quite the same as tennis. 19

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was deeply revolutionary, asserting that power lay in the people, not in the monarchy. A direct challenge to the absolute monarchy, it was the foundation of the principles of the French Revolution. David’s depiction of the taking of the oath is a faithful recording of the event, with each member of the group clearly delineated. The image was widely circulated as a print although the canvas (now in Versailles) was never completed. David himself was so inspired that he later became a member of the National Assembly. The painting is a useful one to consider in the context of the film because it is one of the first pictures to show contemporary radical political action and contains the same elements that Edel uses in the Dutschke sequence. The event was documented in other (less clearly heroic) prints, but David brought a kind of grandeur to his depiction as befitted the history painting he intended it to be. In the film, Rudi Dutschke is at the central point of the scene, the action swirls around him, and his booming voice is heard; he permeates the scene. As he leads the massed crowd in a group chant of “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” he is looking straight at Ulrike, as if addressing her directly. Ulrike is no longer isolated, as we saw her at the start of the film, shrinking back into her beach chair. The focus is on the charismatic, compelling Dutschke. Edel and Klausmann use only available light in the scene, but the swirling action of bodies around the orator forms a kind of light and dark around his vortex. David’s rendering of the Tennis Court Oath depicts the same intense focus on the words of the leader. The deputies are looking toward the speaker, Jean Sylvain Bailly, demonstrating their support for him. Bailly stands upon a table; the deputies crowd around him, most with their arms outstretched in approval. In the upper third of the frame, large windows are open and the public peers in, cheering on the deputies. Simon Schama describes the “enormous compositional pull of the work towards its patriotic center, where light plays on the head of Sylvain Bailly commanding the oath.” He also points out that David’s interpretation of the events was “editorialized most optimistically” (Schama, 1990, 569). In both the painting and the film, this scene of group cohesion under inspiring leadership is important because it shows the agreement of the people as the foundation of the revolutionary principle that “Power lies with the People.” The visual rhetoric of the “mass of people” in the revolutionary context is significant. The revolutionary principles were perverted in Germany by the RAF and in France by the Jacobin Terror. Both resorted to extreme violence, and both met their end at the hands of the state. For both Uli Edel and Jacques-Louis David,

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this scene expresses their own feelings. However, unlike Edel, David embraced the Jacobins.21

“Bild pulled the trigger!” The violent protest against the Springer organization is the point when the film reaches a cathartic sublime. Meinhof finally reaches a sense of transcendence through radical action. Earlier in the film, Gudrun Ensslin’s father, after her arrest for fire-bombing department stores, claimed that his daughter appeared to have reached a “condition of euphoric self-realization, a really holy self-realization such as we find mentioned in connection with Saints” (Aust, 2008, 40). Edel uses this transcript of Aust’s interview verbatim and depicts Aust conducting the interview. It is the attack on the Bild-Zeitung and all it stands for that brings Meinhof to her own “condition of euphoric self-realization.” The students attacked the Axel Springer Verlag because of the way it portrayed them in the press, and for its support for the government’s position on Vietnam. Edel was there, in spirit if not in body. “We were right behind all the actions taken, against the Springer Bild newspaper delivery . . . when the lorries were set on fire.” In Munich, where Edel was living, there were similar riots in which two people were killed. “It was a very emotional time then,” the director recalls (Szyszkowitz, 2008b). The scene takes place on the evening of the day Dutschke is shot. Meinhof and Homann are driving along the road surrounded by hundreds of young people, running at full tilt toward their destination. Meinhof is openly weeping, as they listen to the radio report on Dutschke’s progress. They are going to report on what is about to happen, but their emotional involvement with events is clearly manifest. “Bild pulled the trigger!” and “Springer, murderers!” the students shout. Like June 2 and the Technical University scenes, there are huge crowds of people, but now they are militant. The sheer mass of them attack, and the delivery vehicles are overpowered, tipped over. Someone has started to set fires. Aust (Volker Bruch) is there, joining in. “I’d never have thought you’d be part of something like this,” he shouts to Meinhof, and she smiles at him. Soon she is passing along the cobblestones those at the front of the crowd are using to attack the building. The police storm in and the protestors fight or scatter. See Danton (dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1982) which shows David as a silent observer. Wajda’s film uses the French Revolution as a metaphor for contemporary Polish history.

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Everything is silhouetted against the night sky and lit by the bonfires the protestors have set, like a moment from Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell (1490). And in the middle of it all, Meinhof stands, silent and still, bathing in the chaos and frenzy all around her. A growing euphoria is clear upon her face. Then she is suddenly grabbed and dragged off to the police vehicles.22 As she moves away, and out of the frame, we hear someone crying out “Dresden!” “Hiroshima!” “Vietnam!” and the camera pans to a hellish wasteland of turned-up cobbles, strewn newspapers, and burning delivery trucks. In the middle of the chaos stands a bearded, bare-chested young man with long dark hair, holding his arms out in a crucifixion pose. As the fires burn around him, the camera moves in for a medium close-up as he stands, Christ-like, silhouetted against the fires, crying out “Dresden! Hiroshima! Vietnam!” This shot is immediately followed by newsreel clips of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam self-immolating, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and other significant worldwide events of 1968.23 For Edel, this scene is central to the film (see Figure 4.3). Ulrike goes to the delivery depot of the Bild newspaper and is there when the delivery of the Bild is prevented that same night. And when the delivery vehicles went up in flames, she was in the last few rows, and she passed stones along, she said. Cobblestones, which were thrown out of the windows of the Springer building and with which the lorries were also bombarded. Along with Molotov cocktails. And she said she didn’t throw any, but she passed them along. So it was the first time that she was actively involved in the concrete act of resistance.” (Szyszkowitz, 2008b)

This scene of street fighting, and the exhilaration of direct action, invokes several significant art-historical motifs. The motifs are not simply reconstructed in the scenes. Instead, elements of the paintings—particularly color, lighting, composition, and mood—are brought into the film’s mise-en-scène to create the same or similar response that the paintings do. This also connects the modern real-life subject to the timeless, “high art” position of the paintings. Edel’s use of

Meinhof was charged with using her car to intimidate the Springer vehicles but was acquitted, claiming she was working as a reporter. In the film, she is immediately let go at the site by the police when she is identified as a journalist. This is one of only two points in the film where the story is altered; the other is Gudrun Ensslin shown watching the June 2, 1967, riot on television, when she was actually present—in If Not Us, Who? Ensslin returns home with a cut on her head. 23 To contextualize the events, the Springer press (particularly Bild) was demanding repressive laws to curtail demonstrations. Bild was avidly read by Dutschke’s would-be assassin Joseph Bachmann (Kurlansky, 2005, 154–5). German audiences would be familiar with the ongoing debate around Bild. 22

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Figure 4.3  The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008), directed by Uli Edel. Munich: Vitagraph Films. Action at the Springer Press.

painterly references makes a connection between history and tragedy through art. If June 2, 1967, invoked the motif of the Massacre of the Innocents, then April 2, 1968, invokes the motif of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830) and the lesser-known Barricade at rue Soufflot, 25 June 1848 by Horace Vernet (1848–9). Barricade dans la rue de Soufflot is a painting of the French Revolution of 1848, depicting the street fighting of June 23–26, an action that followed the 1848 revolution that deposed King Louis-Phillipe. The point of view is from behind the barricade, which the soldiers at the center are attempting to storm and break through. In the foreground are riflemen shooting; and atop the barricade, one man heaves a large paving stone. Vernet shows what happened and how the fighting was organized; it is a good account of what the street barricades in Paris probably looked like. (Rue de Soufflot is the principal street that leads from the Panthéon to the Luxembourg gardens.) It is, as Baudelaire pointed out, a work of journalism, an onlooker’s perspective. We do not even see the expression on the faces of the street fighters. The June days were incredibly violent (Fortescue and Fortescue, 2005, 114). But as an experience, the picture is timid; the viewer is behind the barricade but is not part of the action: an observer, not a participant. Like a journalist, we are forced to hang back, not get involved. As the soldiers break through the barricade, we do not feel threatened.

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Like the June days of 1848, the three days of street fighting in Paris on July 26–29, 1830, were violent and pitted civilians against the military and national guard. The euphoria of the July uprising is caught in several paintings held in Paris museums: Battle outside the Hôtel de Ville by Jean Victor Schnetz; Battle at the Rue de Rohan by Hippolyte Lecomte; and most famously, Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. All were painted quickly, during or just after the events themselves. Although the three works differ greatly in style, they all capture the urgency of the situation: the violence and the urban environment. In Delacroix’s painting, the crowd surges forward over the barricades, but the guntoting insurrectionists are dominated by the female figure of Liberty bearing the revolutionary tricolore. The difference between Horace Vernet’s approach to street fighting and insurrection and Delacroix’s approach to the same subject brings us back to Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s dismissal of Vernet’s painting as journalism makes sense when seen in the context of Liberty Leading the People. Baudelaire, as we have seen, argued for a kind of intensity of the everyday. Delacroix, says Baudelaire, “is the true painter who is able to extract from modern and everyday life its epic side, and to show and teach us . . . how great and poetical we are” (Bussy, 1912, 66). In Liberty—one of the most successful paintings of all time, which is reproduced endlessly and daily attracts large crowds in the Louvre—Delacroix has indeed shaped the real into the sublime, through the arrangement of forms within the frame. In the figure of Liberty, Delacroix has personified an idea, and we understand what the people are fighting for. At the same time, the grimy naturalism of everything else in the picture gives a visceral intensity to the scene, bringing home the struggle and the sacrifice. There are other aspects of the composition which should be mentioned: the chiaroscuro lighting and the repetition of the tricolore in the garments of the fighters. The composition uses a pyramid structure, with the dead in the bottom foreground, the injured in the middle foreground, and the active fighters at the top of the pyramid, which is surmounted by the figure of Liberty. Her head stretches up to heaven, just as the sun breaks through the cloud. Moreover, though the painting is populated by individuals—they are characters, not figures; they shout, cry out, pant, and sweat—this is a romance of the group, not of the individual. It is difficult to stand in front of the picture or even its reproduction and not feel engaged, attentive. Delacroix makes us understand that the scene is horrible but exhilarating, as the crowd breaks its way through the

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barricades to make its final assault on the enemy. What Delacroix gives us is the sublime. Liberty is an allegorical personification inserted into a realist painting. Antonella Sbrilli calls it “an allegory which is made real, whilst reality itself is made sublime.” The effect is a kind of “double tension between the stylistic and the ideological” (Sbrilli, 1989, 312). The very end of the scene, with the Christ-like figure howling in the flames, cannot be situated in relation to these pictures of Delacroix and Vernet; we need to look to older works from an earlier mindset. In fact, this figure seems confusing because nothing in the film indicates any kind of religious perspective, and one wonders “what is Edel doing here?” Yet the Christ-like nature of the figure is very clearly delineated. Later, in the scene showing the starvation death of Holger Meins, Meins himself takes on the skeletal, tortured features of Grunewald’s Christ in the Isenheim altarpiece. What is the meaning of these quasi-religious references? Again, we need to look for Ulrike: to use Pastor Ensslin’s words, the Springer riot is Meinhof ’s own moment of “holy self-realization.” The clue comes in the film Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978, dir. Kluge et al.). In one of the sequences, Horst Mahler is interviewed in his prison cell. He talks about the notion of “evil” and the role of personal responsibility within the dissident groups. He observes that the question is, “how is it that a person like Ulrike Meinhof is willing to kill, or at least accept it as a possibility?” He goes on to talk about how “the moral rigorousness of the revolutionary—which can easily lead to an arrogant presumptuousness—at the same time provides the basis to overcome these qualms.” He goes on to say that as the “moral degeneration of the capitalist system” is completely apparent, and those who act within it do so in a corrupt manner, “we judge them morally, condemn them, and, based on this moral judgment, we recognize them as evil.” Mahler concludes, “that means that we believe that personal guilt plays a role in this. Therefore it is justified to destroy it as evil, even if it is in human form. In other words, killing people” (Schlöndorff, Fassbinder, and Kluge, 1978). Aust observes, “for me, the whole struggle from the very beginning of my research was realizing that the RAF had a quasi-religious character more than a rational political character” (Huffman, 2008b). Therefore, by framing the revolutionary cause as a Christ-like self-sacrifice to deliver us from evil, Edel gets right to the heart of how the radicals saw themselves. For all their talk of freeing themselves from the shackles of the historical past, and joining in with the oppressed of the world for new internationalist world socialism, they remained culturally embedded in the Judeo-Christian mindset with which they were

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brought up. They were able to convince themselves that they were good, because those whom they opposed were evil. And those whom they opposed were evil, because they were good, or at least meant well, or meant better. Using the visual references to the massacre of the innocents and to the suffering Christ—images embedded in Western art and therefore in the Western worldview—in the context of a violent riot and the hunger-striking prisoner, Edel offers a visual manifestation of what Horst Mahler articulates: the theological worldview of the modern revolutionist. To sum up the elocutio, the realist style is still dominant in each set piece and carries on throughout the film. But in the set pieces, we see realism move toward the sublime, in the depiction of the terror of violence, the invigoration of the mass, and in the Springer scene, catharsis. Each of these scenes visually maps onto an existing visual motif in painting, and each of the paintings communicates something about contemporary events. Moreover, each painting manipulates the mise-en-scène in order to indicate something of the sublime: the celestial light falling upon Bailly, the terrifying violence of the “kindermoord,” the exhilaration of direct revolutionary action. This sublime is undercut and demolished in the second part of the film, where the narrative moves to a claustrophobic, gray world of prison cells and utilitarian courtrooms, punctuated by bursts of horrific violence. In these scenes, the RAF is broken, not only by the state’s violence toward them, in the form of isolation and force feeding, but also principally by the disintegration of their rationale, to the viewer and even to themselves. The film is largely, as Eichinger claimed, interested in showing how—and not speculating as to why—the RAF existed at a moment in history. As the producer has pointed out, the film does allow a multiplicity of meanings (Thom, 2014, 241). Edel demolishes any residual romantic ideas about the RAF. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) is never a hero, though he does acquire a shred of dignity near the end. Meinhof is an initially well-meaning but ultimately wrongheaded person who sacrificed her humanity. Edel does not exonerate the state and its role in the debacle. However, as we have seen, the oblique visual references to artistic tropes, and the rhetorical arrangement of the high-impact scenes, while avoiding any moral interpretation, do embody a proposition. The film proposes that anyone can identify with the Baader-Meinhof Group; anyone can be as Beate Sturm once was, “right in the middle” of a real-life thriller. But only up to a point. It is less about “understanding” the motivations and ramifications of being in the RAF, than in making the viewer recognize their own emotional engagement with the

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group, or any group that appears to offer revolutionary thrills. The recognition is aided by the inclusion of scenes, which are composed with reference to emotionally gripping imagery established in art. The film’s representational strategy has been seen as a “corrective” to the RAF myth. But if we are to accept Eichinger, Edel, and the crew’s assertion that the film is “as authentic as possible” this implies that the film can be claimed as a historical chronicle, even implying scholarly impartiality. Although Edel explicitly disavows this claim, to some the film has a factual documentary quality, and “seemingly sidesteps the highly problematic relationship between popular film and its function as an ‘authentic’ memory text” (Homewood, 2011, 134). As we have seen, this material authenticity is reordered and reconfigured through “high art” into the popular art of the thriller. Copying exactly the visual material elements of the past does establish a claim to authenticity and a visual rhetoric of the real. But it is the transposition of dramatic, moral paintings into the world of the film that creates another, parallel rhetoric, a rhetoric of the sublime. Even if the light fittings of the Berlin Technical University are the same ones that shone on the real Rudi Dutschke, the scene still “nods and winks” toward Jacques-Louis David. Even if the sinks in the Stammheim prison cell sets are culled from the real prison, and even if Gedeck’s glasses are the same as those worn by Meinhof, the film’s emotional engagement is not in these details of “authenticity” but instead is impelled by the dramatic and thrilling set pieces, along with the performances. Horace Vernet witnessed the 1848 uprising in Paris and sought to reproduce it as exactly as he could. Aust likewise was a witness to the RAF era. He spoke to the relevant players and for years he delved into the archives. Edel on the other hand was like Delacroix. He was there, but he was not present. As a young film student, he knew about the events but was not an active participant and had no access to deep information. Therefore, in a sense one could say his BaaderMeinhof Complex resembles Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. It too is an intense, exciting, vicarious experience of a moment neither artist actually participated in. This removal gave both of them the space for imagination to occur. But the film does not actually do this. Edel pulls back before offering up any film equivalent to Liberty. Instead of allowing the audience to stay caught up in the violent thrill of the chase and the story of misguided wellmeaning revolutionism, Edel instead leads the viewer to a forensically clear and thoroughly unromantic perspective on the revolutionary moment. The critic Manohla Dargis (2009) praises the film for being “forcefully unromantic,”

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a “terrible, mesmerizing story of curdled idealism,” which is a fair assessment of the film’s effort in demolishing the traces of romanticism from the 1968 generation’s tarnished heroes.

History as Thriller, Thriller as History The Baader-Meinhof Complex shares with other “post-Wall” films what Matthias Frey describes as an “aesthetic preoccupation in their desire for authenticity” in the form of visually authentic, almost forensic, representation of the past (Frey, 2013, 5). These films, Frey continues, seek a “re-creation of the recent past without any kind of mediatory indicators” such as those used in most of the New German Cinema’s “historical” films (e.g., the theatricality of Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun, the grotesque in Schlöndorff ’s Tin Drum, ambiguity in Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and so on). There are few “Brechtian” tendencies in the post-Wall films. They aim for “an all-enveloping verisimilitude and direct access” (Frey, 2013, 5). More than the other post-Wall films, The Baader-Meinhof Complex moves toward high-concept filmmaking: “the RAF story as a thriller.” Yet to achieve this, without losing the factual and visual authenticity demanded of the postWall historical film, Edel and his team draw on images from art, without directly adapting them. Visual-rhetoric analysis uncovers the way that the film reaches beyond a journalistic approach, locating the emotional and artistic impulses within the film’s mise-en-scène, by invoking renderings of state violence in the Massacre of the Innocents, or the romantic, exultant insurrection typified by Delacroix. Though faithfully following Aust’s journalistic account, and adhering to both the newsgathering images and the published histories on the subject, Edel’s film manages to combine the exactitude of the “veritable journalist” and the intensity sought by Baudelaire’s idea of “plunging” into the world. It incorporates elements of a melodramatic structure, set pieces that indirectly reference culturally embedded “high art” paintings, and invoke a sense of the sublime. Just as the tension between Vernet’s desire for accuracy, faithfulness, and authenticity and Baudelaire’s disgust at the lack of imagination is resolved in Delacroix’s cinematic painting Liberty, Edel, Eichinger, and Aust’s film seeks to combine accuracy and authenticity with drama and emotive engagement. This tension between the faithful recounting of “what happened” and the desire for

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imaginative and interpretive drama through the invocation of the sublime is at the heart of what Uli Edel is trying to do in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a challenge that many historical films attempt but cannot always achieve. However, there are great risks when a film turns journalism into successful, compelling art, and that is when art comes to stand in for journalism. The June 2 sequence from The Baader-Meinhof Complex has been uploaded to YouTube and presented as footage of the June 2 riot (Tore231 2009). The uploader does not mention that it is in fact footage from a dramatic film made in 2008. Even if the sequence was filmed with perfect accuracy, with not a single mistake (and Edel admits that it is not—there is one brief moment where you can clearly see one of the camera operators in the shot), it is not the actual footage of the event, and therefore it is not a historical document. “I’m not a historian, I’m a filmmaker,” says Edel. “I’m certainly not making the claim that this is an educational work” (Szyszkowitz, 2008b). Yet as Homewood observes, The Baader-Meinhof Complex “burns itself onto the past, referring to, yet ultimately overwriting the photographic record with its own “truth” for the media generation” (Homewood, 2011, 136). The reality is that the film—like many other historical films before it and doubtless to follow—will be a greater source of historical “knowledge” than any other source in the popular mind. The Baader-Meinhof Complex seeks to explore a particular moment in German history and explain how it happened to a present-day audience. A thread of didacticism runs through the genre of the historical film and is manifested in different ways. In the following two chapters, I examine the “history lessons” in historical films and explore how visual images play an integral role.

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Roel Reiné’s Admiral Grand Narratives and the Spectacle

The historical moments that films portray can vary in terms of their significance, and the meaning that we are invited to take away. Meek’s Cutoff depicts a situation that affects only a few people but becomes a paradigm for the dangers and sacrifices of the westward migration, and the film operates as a critical analysis of the pioneer narrative, Eurocentricity, and the American concept of Manifest Destiny. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, only the viewer is privy to the fact that the events are significant; hundreds of years later, when the longdead Vermeer is an established master of art history, everything that happens in his studio is loaded with meaning. As we have seen, the RAF was conscious about its place in “history,” but the filmmakers wanted The Baader-Meinhof Complex to question that place. Here I will examine another kind of historical film, one more readily associated with the genre: the film about nation building. Admiral1 (2015, dir. and DP Roel Reiné) uses spectacular set pieces to tell a largely accurate, well-researched history of the Anglo-Dutch wars (1652–1764) and their turbulent politics The history in this kind of film is frequently recounted in “the grand manner,” expressed by a coherent classical narrative that traces a continuous line of development, while highlighting the fortuitous character of particular outcomes. This is especially true for the “nationalist” historical film. “Nationalist Historical film” is a term inspired by Susan Hayward’s definition of “national cinema,” to

T h e film is called Admiral for the English language release; its original Dutch title is Michiel de Ruyter.

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Figure 5.1  Admiral (original title: Michiel de Ruyter) (2015), directed by Roel Reiné. Netherlands: Farmhouse Film & TV.

describe films which engage with Hayward’s “national cinema” typologies2 in the presentation of historical subject matter (Hayward, 1993, 8–9). I am using the term “nationalist” in the sense proposed by Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities. Anderson describes the development of a sense of “nationhood” as a socially constructed community, imagined as such by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group (Anderson, 2016). Realism and the sublime are used in the delivery of grand narratives in the nationalist historical film, and these films move visual communication derived from painting into a kind of mythmaking through spectacle. I am using the term “grand narrative” here to describe films which offer not only the story of historical events but an overarching, coherent system of established ideas and ideologies that can be expressed simply and without need for qualification or much explication. Admiral would fall under the category Hayden White identifies, in The Content and the Form, as the “master narrative” of bourgeois progressivism3 (White, 1987a, 151). White traces this back to eighteenth-century historiography, and the “myth of progress” (White, 1987b, 65).

Hayward’s typologies of the national cinema include narrative, genre, visual codes and conventions, gesture and morphology, the star as sign, and cinema as the mobilizer of the nation’s myths and of the myth of “the nation.” 3 I am not using the term “bourgeois progressivism” in a pejorative way. White’s other master narrative categories “from among which Western man may choose, are those of Greek fatalism, Christian redemptionism and Marxist utopianism” (White, 1987a, 151). Only the last one is not commonly offered in cinema narratives. 2

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National History, the “Nationalist Historical Film,” and Nation Building The “nationalist history” film is a generic form which nevertheless has distinct country-specific tendencies. This type of film offers a kind of history lesson, with a broad, simplified, and often simplistic narrative.4 It is less concerned with “uncovering” hidden or under-acknowledged history than is in re-presenting the schoolbook story. It takes known heroes and burnishes them. It deals in “grand narratives,” with plots that are based on causality and—sometimes—superficial psychological analysis. It tends to follow the established historical record and is not so much about critically reflecting on history as about re-presenting it as filmed entertainment with a purpose. It is a kind of “schoolbook” history, not based on a novel5 but on the lesson, brought to life. Its purpose, often (but not always) framed around war, is to speak to a sense of “nation and nationhood,” to bring the audience together as a “nation” of shared values and recognized identity. The nationalist historical film usually pays great attention to visual period details, through mise-en-scène and especially costume, and will often invoke the sublime by exciting, visually stunning set pieces. The representation of history through spectacle presents the past as a place of emotional engagement and intrigue, escapism, and excitement. Visual spectacle creates a kind of “emotional sublime” where the viewer is transported into “the past” and can be rendered uncritical. The images and emotions of that experience then stay with the viewer and become embedded in their conception of the history. Admiral imagines the Dutch nation and its history in a certain way and seeks to persuade the presentday Dutch audience of it.6 I have selected Admiral because it typifies this particular direction in historical cinema, together with a high degree of visual spectacle and many painterly Examples include the infamous Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson) but also more “worthy” efforts like Passchedaele (2008, dir. Paul Gross); Amazing Grace (2006, dir. Michael Apted); Cromwell (1970, dir. Ken Hughes); Un peuple et son roi (One Nation, One King, dir. Pierre Schoeller, 2018), and the Russian Викинг (Viking, 2016 dir. Andrei Kravchuk). 5 La Reine Margot, directed by Patrice Chéreau, is an example of a lavish “history” film that is actually based on a novel, by Alexandre Dumas père. 6 Anderson points out that this concept of “nation” comes about after religious identity ceases to dominate, along with implicit belief in the nation as the sole preserve of dynastic forces (Anderson, 2016, 12–22). He places this period in Europe as being around the early eighteenth century (11), so just after the events of the film. Admiral depicts the breakdown of religious uniformity and the questioning of dynastic power, making it a film which, following Anderson, is ultimately about nation building. 4

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moments. The film had an (unexpected) international release, despite the lack of “stars”7 and Dutch history being less familiar to the international audience. The release happened because of director/cinematographer Reiné’s success in creating spectacular sea battles onscreen. Admiral offers a useful opportunity to examine a popular, mainstream historical film dealing with an under-addressed subject, aimed at a small and specific national audience, to see how the film rhetorically creates identification using visuals. As with The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the use of local rather than international stars offers a distinct perspective on the “star texts” of the film. Another reason for the choice is that although there are substantial studies in English on the British historical film, and studies of some other national cinemas, there is very little in English on Dutch cinema. Lastly, I have selected the film because the director is also the cinematographer, and the film’s visual images are particularly acute and well realized. Paintings of the Dutch Golden Age appear in different ways throughout the film’s mise-en-scène, and this shapes the film’s narrative and its message. Admiral, like many nationalist historical films, relies on spectacle. Spectacle, with its dependence on the ocular, is about bringing high emotional value to the visual sense. Geoff King defines “spectacle” as “the production of images at which we might wish to stop and stare” and points out how spectacle has “long played an important part in the creation of popular entertainment, from contemporary and early cinema to pre-cinematic forms such as the diorama and the magic lantern show, theatre, and whole traditions of religious and secular ritual” (King, 2000, 4). Spectacle is what gives the history lesson its entertainment value. Spectacle is achieved through scenography—costume, set design, lighting, camera angle, and action—including gesture, camera movement, and editing pace. As one of the principal visual codes and conventions of the nationalist historical film, painting is frequently employed in a variety of ways in the production of spectacle, for example by visually connecting the film’s subject with well-known works from nationally recognized artists, casting and styling the characters, recreating paintings as shots, basing significant set pieces on paintings and showing paintings within the mise-en-scène. In the historical film, the so-called Grand Manner8 is often conjured up onscreen through the overwhelming and impressive visual spectacle of heroism and idealism.

Rutger Hauer has a cameo and Charles Dance plays England’s Charles II. T h e term “Grand Manner” was popularized by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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Epic Scale and the Grand Manner The “Grand Manner” is associated with Charles Le Brun, head of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts under Louis XIV. It is an idealizing style of large-scale painting that references classicism and the art of the High Renaissance. One of Le Brun’s creations was a series of scenes from the life of Alexander the Great (1660s), with Louis transposed as Alexander (Posner, 1959, 237). In this way, Le Brun combined the tradition of history painting’s depiction of the classical past and mythology with contemporary realities, on giant canvases. And there is something cinematic about Le Brun’s visions. Speaking to art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, Nicolas Milovanovic, Louvre curator of paintings, points out how massive the Alexander paintings are: as each painting is 12 meters wide by 4 meters high “you have to enter into the painting.” Milovanovic says that Le Brun’s aim was “to create a kind of cinema for us,” though the whole project was overseen by the king who visited the painter every day and told him what to paint. Graham-Dixon rejoins that “so in a sense, Louis is almost the director of the movie and Le Brun is the cinematographer” (Graham-Dixon, 2017). During this time, Le Brun became director of the Académie, where he laid the basis of an academicism that had a lasting influence on all European art. Le Brun’s Apotheosis of Louis XIV (1677) is one of the superlative history paintings of the era, all special effects and ludicrous hero-worship, as Louis/ Alexander on a white horse is about to be crowned by the Virgin while under him writhe a host of defeated, tormented souls, as dragons consume the rest at the bottom of the painting. Although viewed today it seems fairly ridiculous, when considered in the context of Louis’s fearsome power as an absolute monarch, at the time it would have connoted something of the sublime. Not to be outdone, a decade or so later Charles II commissioned Antonio Verrio’s The Sea Triumph of Charles II (c.1674), which is essentially more of the same, with a marine theme. We should be familiar with the gist of this scene from films: the hero is beautiful, brave, and good, the enemies are vile and will meet a horrific end, and God and fate have willed it to be. From Birth of a Nation to Star Wars, virtuoso artistry has delivered this core theme, harnessing this message to whatever “national characteristics” the filmmakers and their patrons wished to promulgate, no matter how dubious. However, the imperatives of conventional dramatic narrative demand attention to plot progression, and spectacle is there to punctuate or momentarily rupture plot progression, serving the narrative by exciting the viewer but not

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swerving away from the narrative. In Admiral, a range of painterly visual reference points are employed to visually create and reinforce a sense of “nation,” “belonging,” and, above all, identification. As a Grand Manner film about seventeenth-century Dutch naval commander Michiel de Ruyter, Admiral is a traditional “heritage lesson” film, essentially offering a more enjoyable version of the history that may be found in popular histories and schoolbooks. These films often invoke art-historical paintings not only for historical period detail (which is a given) but also to reuse known effective symbolism, to communicate with the audience through a well-known image, and sometimes to give added gravitas by invoking a national-historical painting. The story of Admiral (from a script by Lars Boom and Alex van Galen) is ambitious, covering a twenty-year period from the end of the First AngloDutch War at the Battle of Scheveningen in 16539 to the death of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter in 1676, fighting the French at the Battle of Agosta. The film covers the political, social, and military issues in the Netherlands and the deeds of Prime Minister10 Johan de Witt and his friendship with the admiral. In the film, de Witt promises peace and unity, and achieves his political aims with the military help of de Ruyter, but is fatally undermined by enemies: France, England, and the Orangeist faction around Prince William. Running alongside this political narrative is the story of de Ruyter’s relationship with his wife Anna and their family life. Because of its ambition, the film runs into several problems, such as the under-development of certain characters and weak explication of complex political issues. It depends principally on its visuals, as well as on charismatic performances by the leads: Frank Lammers playing the admiral de Ruyter and Barry Atsma as politician Johan de Witt. Although the title of the film—in Dutch Michiel de Ruyter, in English Admiral—indicates that de Ruyter is the hero of the film, in fact the film has two protagonists: the military man de Ruyter and the politician de Witt. Each evinces a different kind of heroism. De Ruyter, commanding and winning great naval battles, offers a glimpse of the sublime in the spectacle. De Witt, intellectual and decisive, shines on the political stage but comes to a spectacular, horrific end.

Sometimes known as the Battle of Terheide; this can make it confusing to identify paintings—it is the same battle. 10 T h e film’s subtitles call de Witt “Prime Minister”; in fact the title in the Netherlands was “Grand Pensionary.” 9

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Most historical films are constructed around one or another genre; in the case of Admiral that genre is the “epic.” Since 2011 the Dutch film industry has produced several historical epics, with varying success; Admiral is the most successful to date.11 The film is part of a body of work revaluating de Ruyter which appeared in the Netherlands following 2007, the quadricentennial of de Ruyter’s birth (Bruijn et al. 2011, 1). One significant aspect of Admiral is the way that it continually appeals to Dutch painting, in a variety of dynamic set pieces as well as more subtle references. It differs markedly from Girl with a Pearl Earring, which takes the art world specifically as its setting; Admiral uses art as a visual reference to stage the action. The marine battles invoke the works of Abraham Storck and the van de Veldes. The Great Assembly of the States General scene, where de Witt enjoins the members to work together “as Netherlanders” is modeled on The Ridderzaal of the Binnenhof during the Great Assembly of 1651, painted that same year by Bartholomeus van Bassen. As Marcia Landy notes, “the national narrative relies on common sense as articulated by Gramsci and involves a mélange of discursive elements derived from tradition and official history” (Landy, 1996, 35). It is important to pay attention to the “history” in the nationalist historical film, not to check its accuracy as much as to inspect what ideas are being delivered through the medium of “the past.” There are also significant elements of “common sense” rhetoric in Admiral, which are, as we shall see, principally aimed at national cohesion around shared values. But filming the national narrative is not just about using elements from tradition and official history; it is about revivifying those elements, bringing them to life. While often not overly concerned with accuracy, these films are actively concerned with authenticity, or seeming authenticity, expressed as visual realism in material culture. Some visual aspects may be reasonably faithful to the record while also astonishing the audience for their apparent recreation of the past.12 A primary concern is for strong visual “authentication” of period through production design, but even this is not always historically accurate. The museum ships used in Admiral’s sea battles, for instance, include an eighteenth-century Russian frigate, and some of the costumes are inaccurate, but most viewers would not notice. The main aim is for it to all “look right,” that is, to achieve

Additionally, Kenau (2014, Maarten Treurniet.); Nova Zembla (2011, Reinout Oerlemans), and Reiné’s less successful Redbad (2018). 12 For example, the Charge of the Scots Greys in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970). 11

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surface verisimilitude. Therefore, despite the vaunted “historical” nature of the film, these films principally appeal to sentiment about the historical inheritance. Relying, then, on monumental and antiquarian histories, with their “excessive veneration of the past—of great men, heroic deeds and grand narratives” (Landy, 1996, 35) the nationalist historical film itself deals in grand visual narratives, selecting and constructing images and stories out of the historical record, which appear to be totalizing in their representation of the past. Rich in material detail, broad in their scope and often facile in their explication of events, they are highly effective in constructing, through visual storytelling, an entertainment-based narrative, which uses history to say something about the nation or the national identity. Geoff King points out that while it may seem that spectacle dominates the film, making the narrative seem “less coherent,” nevertheless “narrative and spectacle can work together in a variety of changing relationships and there is no single all-embracing answer to the question of how the two are related” (King, 2000, 2). Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory of identification is crucial here. Popular cinema, with its need for large, even mass, audiences has identification at the core of every single production, and this desire is not only exploited in the nationalist historical film, but it is also one of the film’s core purposes. As will be explained, Admiral sets out to win and retain the audience’s identification with de Ruyter and de Witt. Fine art within the mise-en-scène helps create identification and engage audiences by offering visual codes of not only historical reality but also a “fine art” imprimatur of quality. To Reiné, it was clear that Dutch painting had to be at the foundation of a film about a naval hero, both as visual framework and as national identity. However, “the story had to be both intimate and epic” (Reiné, 2017) so not only the maritime paintings are referenced in the film, as a general painterliness appears at points throughout the film. “I wanted to create a world that would bring the audience back to the 17th Century. The film’s visual inspiration is derived from the works of Dutch master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer” (Reiné, 2017). Therefore we can see how paintings operate rhetorically at different points in the film and in different ways. Admiral restates and restages the well-established grand narrative of bourgeois progressivism in Dutch history as the story of Dutch liberalism—exemplified by de Witt and defended by de Ruyter—and its enemies. Reiné uses paintings to associate “true” Dutch identity—represented by the artistic glories of the art of the “Golden Age”—with liberalism. Reiné peppers the film with painterly moments that reinforce this argument, by embedding paintings within the mise-en-scène and through direct painterly references. Paintings appear less as sustained rhetorical argument and rather

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as emphatic rhetorical punctuation for an already stabilized historical narrative that adheres closely to the popular textbook version. Put more bluntly, Reiné has nothing new to say about de Ruyter and his world but seeks simply to retell it in a new medium, using visual spectacle to emphasize the value of the exercise. Reiné is less concerned with persuading the viewer of something new or complex than in persuading them simply to be interested and, in the process, to reaffirm liberal values. Painting cements the story’s time and place and affirms its significance. While the film tries to ensure a sense of visual realism, this is designed to serve the drama, and the painterly references give the film credibility as a true work of “heritage” cinema. Reiné is clear about his objective, writing that Michiel de Ruyter “deserved a work of passion and grand filmmaking” (Reiné, 2017). Indeed, Admiral is all about “great men and great deeds.” However, this is constantly interwoven with the domestic story, as the film moves from generalized images derived from marine painting to images derived from genre painting. Additionally, specific Dutch paintings of the period are frequently invoked or alluded to at points in the narrative, with varying rhetorical aims. The paintings are both product and memento of a period of glory in Dutch history. They invoke memory and suggest an imprimatur of authenticity and quality (Figure 5.2). The film opens in 1653, near de Ruyter's family home, as his heavily pregnant wife Anna (Sanne Langelaar) runs out across the sand dunes to see the battle

Figure 5.2  Beerstraten, Jan Abrahamsz (1653–66), The Battle of Terheide. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.

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of Terheide/Scheveningen, followed by her children. In fact, the battle could be seen from shore, and in this and other cases, people did stand and watch the battles. It is a fearsome sight, and we see Anna clutch at her stomach, clearly in pain. We then see a painterly wide shot of the battle and are immediately transported onto the ship, into the midst of the mayhem. Michiel de Ruyter’s bourgeois life and relationship with his wife Anna is an important thread of the story. Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657) is dropped into a sequence of de Ruyter’s homecoming. As his children rush past in excitement at their father’s arrival, we glimpse a kitchen maid pouring milk, then the camera moves on. While the shot is not an exact recreation of the Vermeer painting, it is similar enough that it sparks immediate recognition. The woman in the film is younger and prettier than Vermeer’s sturdy housemaid, but she wears the same yellow top and blue skirt. Similarly, the light streams in from a leaded window, although the placing of the window is reversed. Reiné does not seek to copy Vermeer but to pay homage to him and, in this very brief shot, to assert the moral “Dutchness” of the de Ruyter household. To Thomas P. Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, out of all of Vermeer’s paintings of domestic life, in The Milkmaid “we discover Dutch self-reliance and well-being in an individual who appears to have her own thoughts and feelings but also evokes the hard-won peace and prosperity of the Golden Age” (Liedtke, 2009, 3). The milkmaid herself has even been considered to convey a “physical and moral presence unequaled by any other figure in Dutch art” (Liedtke, 2009, 6). The painting is remarkable and memorable because of its intrinsic simplicity: the use of the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and a complementary scheme of light and shadow (Liedtke, 2009, 8). It is, in short, iconic and it functions in this brief shot as an icon, as a metonym for Dutch values of domesticity as “the good life.” But the counter to the “good life” is the life of service, and de Ruyter and his wife are torn between these. They choose service, and in doing so save the nation. Though the visual reference seems like a non-sequitur, rhetorically it does several things at this point in the narrative. The nod to the painting reinforces and reminds the viewer of the period context; the use of Vermeer performs validation of the “high art” credential of the film; the Vermeer painting itself acts as an emblem, as a high art “sanctification” of domestic life. This sanctification of the domestic is presented as “common sense” visual rhetoric through the use of the picture. These are important because the principal personal struggle that the protagonist de Ruyter experiences is the question of whether to fulfill his duty to his country or to his family. He sacrifices his family life for his nation. This

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brief shot is also a strong call to identification: it is an assertion of “Dutchness” aimed at the film’s domestic audience. It operates also as a validator of period authenticity and high culture for an international audience, connecting the film—a piece of popular art—to the high art of Vermeer and the museums where Vermeer’s paintings reside. As we have seen, one of the calls to identification that historical films offer is to high culture—and this operates even if the viewer has no actual interest in visiting the Mauritshaus or Rijksmuseum. The 1651 Meeting of the Estates General, at the Binnenhof in The Hague,13 where the character of Johan de Witt is introduced, lays out the political aspect of the plot, the macro-story that runs alongside de Ruyter’s micro-story. Upon the death of Stadhouder14 William II, the Estates General general called a special assembly in 1651 and decided not to appoint a new Stadhouder. In 1653 the estates general agreed to work under the direction of Johan de Witt, the representative for Holland (the biggest and richest state, which included Amsterdam, Leiden, and Haarlem among others) and west Friesland, who was elected as Grand Pensionary. The mise-en-scène for the sequence is clearly indebted to, and based upon, Bartholomeus van Bassen’s painting Ridderzaal of the Binnenhof during the Great Assembly of 1651. Bassen’s painting has a dual aspect. In the middle of the painting there is a hinged metal flap showing the delegates assembled, and the Latin motto of the Dutch Republic, “Unity makes strength.” When the flap is raised, the room is bare, with people and dogs milling about. The scene is set in the Ridderzaal and the assembly is already underway. The great hall is bright, with high windows, but Reiné has lit the room in a much more dramatic way than Bassen. The large room is filled with shifting chiaroscuro; we become aware of what is clear and what is hidden, but it is in flux. As in Bassen’s painting, the assembly are soberly dressed. One immediately recalls the Dutch group portraits of worthies, all starched white collars and stark black coats—Thomas de Keyser’s Amsterdam Goldsmiths Guild (1627) or Rembrandt’s Clothmaker’s Guild (1662)—as the Estates General members are all dressed in the same, sedate fashion. Enters de Witt, whose suit is subtly embroidered in gold. Light streams in from above and forms a halo around him. What he says is appealing too, a call to unity and nationalism: “The English want to wage war against us, because we are Free Dutchmen!” He denounces the kings who are T h e Binnenhof is the Dutch house of Parliament in The Hague. The Ridderzaal, or the Knight’s Hall, is the room where the assembly met. 14 To the Dutch audience the office of Stadhouder would be well known; in the international release it is represented more as a monarchic role. Stadhouder was a heritable office but not technically monarchy. 13

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the Netherlands’ enemies (though at the time the main enemy was not a king, but Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell). Rejecting monarchy and princes, de Witt proclaims that “No leader is more important than the country itself.” Freedom, he continues, includes every man being free to decide how they will worship God. This statement is important because it is both historically correct—de Witt was a strong proponent of religious toleration—and, presented as “common sense” rhetoric, relevant to present-day conditions. The exhilarating speech by the golden-haired, glowing prime minister is intercut with a montage of images of Dutch life and industry. This sequence strongly resembles an educational film of the 1970s. Although it is useful for making a point about the diversity and sources of wealth of the Netherlands at the time, it is almost laughably didactic and stylistically jarring within the film’s overall structure. As visual rhetoric, it reinforces the “history lesson” aspect of the film, which puts the viewer into a virtual schoolroom. On the one hand, the lesson is risible, on the other hand, we are familiar with the mode and unthinkingly accept it. Summing up his speech, de Witt proclaims that he knows why the Dutch have so many enemies: “We are too rich and too free,” he cries. However, we notice that some of the assembly do not like what de Witt is saying; his anti-monarchist statements are met with mutterings and whispers. At this point we see the setup of the protagonist and antagonist: Johan de Witt as the representative of elected democratic nationalism and “freedom,” and Johan Kievit (Derek de Lint) the Orangeist regent of the young Prince of Orange. The lines are drawn then, between republican democrats and monarchist Orangeists. Kievit’s dastardliness (which is never fully explained) is effectively evoked by a dark costume and silver hairstyle which are strongly reminiscent of Ian McDiarmid’s Senator Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999, dir. George Lucas), which (unsurprisingly) does not match any extant portraits of Kievit. The visual rhetoric of contrasts is strongly manifested here—dark and light, gold and gray—matching the contrast between de Witt and the Orangeist faction. Admiral is a traditional heritage film that seeks to explain the Anglo-Dutch wars (there were three wars, 1652–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4) to a modern audience that wants to be seduced by grand sea battles and high drama. The exciting sea battles, which take up a significant part of the film, owe much to the wellknown and substantial visual record left by the Dutch maritime painters, with sea battles a popular subgenre. The paintings are referred to in these scenes as an indicator of authenticity. To prepare, Reiné took the crew to Amsterdam’s

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Rijksmuseum. “We set up scenes that recreated real paintings in high detail,” the director notes (de Vries, 2016). The challenging sea battles had to look real and “affect audiences visually and emotionally” (Reiné, 2017). There are many of these paintings extant—the biggest collections are in the Rijksmuseum and the Maritime Museums in Amsterdam and Greenwich—and they offer a wide variety of perspectives on the way the ships looked, both at rest and in action, in stormy or calm waters, in harbor or out at sea. Willem van de Velde the Elder, for example, was an official artist of the Dutch fleet and was present at many battles (Wheelock, Jr. n.d.). Ludolf Bakhuizen (1630–1708), Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (c.1562–1640), Abraham Storck (1644–1708), Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraten (1622–66), and the Elder and Younger van de Veldes helped to establish the sea battle as a subject for the marine painting genre. While the specificities of the ships changed, so that marine paintings of the early seventeenth century look different from those of the early eighteenth century, the genre (in paintings and engravings) was popular in England as well as the Netherlands. The sublime in Admiral is located in the sea battles. Each battle in the film is identified with a title, making it easy to look up later. The battle scenes focus on the splendor of the sailing ships; Reiné’s camera feasts on them, creating a “Boy’s Own” adventure element, where looking at the ships is appealing for its own sake. The film tries to make naval combat intelligible: Reiné moves between overhead shots, giving a bird’s-eye view so we can see how the ships operate in formation and maneuver in battle, and handheld shots on deck in the thick of the battle. The wooden ships splinter when hit by cannon, water pours in, and things catch fire. The Four Days’ Battle (1666) is the film’s centerpiece, a tourde-force of extended onscreen combat. The battle scenes combine a concern for realism, with moments of the sublime which are communicated through the cinematography. Reiné uses camera movement rather than cuts, or at least, the camera movement disguises the cuts. The overhead shots offer the vastness that is at the core of the sublime. The mid-shots place the viewer in the tumultuous action. The slow motion creates tension, prolonging the shock of the explosions. And the close-ups confront us with the visceral, brutal reality of war. The viewer, seated in the present, has the sublime, exhilarating experience of the vicarious thrill of both being in “the past” and fighting on board a warship. But the sublime is not only manifested in cannon explosions and soaring perspectives. At one point a seaman below deck is caught in a beam of light from above, like a Ribera painting. In another shot, the Union Jack slowly unfurls as it sinks underwater, a powerful image of defeat. The brutality of seventeenth-

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century warfare is not hidden; bodies fly into the air and into the sea, although there is an absence of gore. Reiné’s camera is dynamic and active, building tension and excitement but revealing the horrible violence of seventeenthcentury warfare. This is something that the maritime painters could not show, even when they tried. Beerstraten’s and Vroom’s depictions of battles do not hide the sinking ships and drowning men, but they are trapped in the eternal wide shot, whereas Reiné’s camera goes right into the action. Reiné moves from overhead shot to wide shot to close action, with much use of slow motion and dynamic camera movement instead of cuts. The scene is a combination of real ships (the production used several replica ships, normally used as museum ships) and a flotilla of computer-generated ships. However, if we are seeking historical accuracy, the filmic battles veer quite far from the historical record in ways too numerous to recount here. The Chatham raid, for example, which is depicted in Dutch Attack on the Medway, June 1667 (Pieter Cornelisz van Soest, 1667) was not a surprise guerrilla operation by a few stalwart men at midnight, though Reiné creates a gripping scene of tenebrism and tension. In reality, the English were half expecting something to happen, as Samuel Pepys wrote, “the Dutch are known to be abroad with eighty sail of ships of war, and twenty fire-ships; and the French come into the Channell with twenty sail of men-of-war, and five fireships, while we have not a ship at sea to do them any hurt with” (Pepys, Monday, June 3, 1667). The attack, when it came, was terrifying; it took three days of cannon fire, ship burning, and finally the English fleet scuttled its own ships to block the river (Rideal, 2016, 219). Days later Pepys noted the “sinking of ships at Barking-Creeke, and other places, to stop their coming up higher” and he sent his father and wife out of London “with about 1300l. in gold in their night-bag,” while he stayed in London “in fright and fear” (Pepys, Thursday, June 13, 1667). But Admiral makes the past come alive in a visceral way, using strong visual rhetoric to convince the viewer to identify with the national mission as articulated by de Witt and de Ruyter. The shots of the battle of Lowestoft, followed by the damaged warships and shrouded dead lying on the wharf, demonstrate the civilian price of war. The sight persuades de Ruyter and Anna that he must accept the commission and become Admiral of the fleet. Throughout the film, the civilian point of view is always shown, from the townspeople standing on the shore watching the sea battles, or the people of Maastricht running in panic from the invading French troops. Reiné uses an eye-level camera to show the civilian perspective, to persuade the viewer of the urgency of de Witt’s and

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de Ruyter’s missions. Ultimately, what Reiné wants to argue for are de Witt’s patriotic, tolerant, peace-seeking values; it is these which are heroic, and de Ruyter is heroic for serving them so well. In the matter of Admiral’s “star texts,” the casting of the film is interesting and relevant. De Ruyter is played by Frank Lammers, an actor best known to the wider Dutch audience from supermarket advertisements (Zagt, 2014). This meant that the challenge to the production to shape the actor as one of the country’s greatest, most unifying national heroes was enormous. One of the ways that Lammers credibly “became” de Ruyter was by modeling his appearance on the portraits of the admiral. The actor’s unglamorous looks fit with the extant images. There are many paintings of de Ruyter; the Rijksmuseum has a portrait by Ferdinand Bol in 1667 and a 1662 portrait of the de Ruyter family by Juriaen Jacobsz. The admiral was also the subject of many popular, widely distributed prints, so there is abundant material to draw upon, but at the same time, the historical figure is recognizable to the Dutch. It is known that he came from a lower-class background, and probably went to sea at a very early age. In his performance, Lammers crafted the gestures of a large, ungainly man who is very comfortably “at home” on board ship, but clumsy and out of place on land, even in his own home, and still more so in official milieux. Ronald Prud’homme van Reiné, the author of a 1996 biography of de Ruyter, felt that Lammers’s portrayal of the character was realistic, even if the film has inaccuracies (Wielaert, 2015). De Ruyter as played by Lammers contrasts well with de Witt as played by Barry Atsma, a Dutch actor who also works internationally. Atsma’s de Witt, though not physically resembling the historical de Witt, captures the learned mathematician and man of the Enlightenment that de Witt actually was (Edmundson, 1922, 203). Historian George Edmundson’s evaluation of the historical de Witt is that it is “impossible to withhold admiration from de Witt’s marvelous diplomatic dexterity, and from the skill and courage with which he achieved his end” but this was achieved by “double-dealing and chicanery” which, though most likely done from a sense of pure patriotism, made him enemies (Edmundson, 1922, 203). Atsma plays de Witt as a man of good intention, courage, and intelligence whose tragic flaw is that he nevertheless fails to recognize that these very qualities can make him seem aloof and lacking empathy and understanding to those less well informed than he. The patrician de Witt and the more proletarian de Ruyter are known to have been real friends and are shown in the film sharing family dinners and events (Rowen, 2016, 193).

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The two heroes of the film—the naval hero and the political hero—are also good family men. One of the principal ways that Reiné persuades the viewer of the heroic yet humane qualities of both de Ruyter and de Witt is by maintaining the use of the golden light that suffuses de Witt in his scenes (and de Ruyter’s domestic scenes), while the scenes with Prince William, Kievit, and Charles II use a much colder light. The golden light also alludes to the notion of the “Golden Age” which did begin to decline after the death of de Witt and the ascendancy of William. The other notable Dutch historical character portrayed is William, Prince of Orange (later William II of England) played by Egbert-Jan Weeber. William is often shown with an uncomfortable, laughably ill-fitting wig. As Charles Tashiro demonstrates in his analysis of Dr. Zhivago’s hat, a simple prop or piece of the costume can be a visual key to a whole ideological argument (Tashiro, 1998, 144). Following Tashiro’s method, we can ask what does the wig bring to Admiral before it takes anything away? What does the wig acquire from, and how does it work with, the rest of the film to achieve new associations? It is worth undertaking visual-rhetoric analysis to understand the wig as one of the film’s important yet problematic motifs. Wigs were used in Europe since Roman times but became properly fashionable in the seventeenth century, in Louis XIV’s France. The long flowing hairstyle, the chevelure, emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century but not everybody was blessed with a full head of silky locks. As Louis XIV aged, the wig presented itself as a solution, and what Louis did, his court did too. The wig in fashion was the long, curly allonge, a fashion which according to historian Johan Huizinga soon “lost all pretense of counterfeiting a natural chevelure and became a true element of style” (Huizinga, 1949, 184). As historian Michael Kwass writes, “By the end of the Sun King’s reign, wigs had spread well beyond France, crowning kings at royal courts across Europe and becoming an essential feature of European noble costume” (Kwass, 2006, 634). However, as we can see in both the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age and in the characters in Admiral—bar William—the Dutch were not wearing wigs. Jan de Baen’s portrait of de Witt shows his long dark chevelure, but it does not look like a wig. Men in the Netherlands generally grew their own hair long, if they could, but only those with baldness might have ordinarily worn wigs, in keeping with the general taste for soberness in male dress but splendor in accessories, as seen in the desire to own art and beautiful things. Vermeer’s interiors show paintings, glassware, gorgeous rugs, and draperies (see The Astronomer, 1668, for example). In France,

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and England after the 1660 Restoration, it was different. The French determined, and in terms of luxury goods production, even controlled fashion (WoodMurray, 2017). As well as rich colorful fabrics, men’s fashion began to include elaborate wigs worn purely for style—even if the fashion did originate with a balding king. Samuel Pepys writes about his wigs often and, writing about seeing King Charles II without his wig, observed that “I never till this day observed that the King is mighty gray” (Pepys Monday, November 2,1663). If the allonge is, as Huizinga maintains, “perfectly suited to express the style of young Louis XIV and his epoch” (Huizinga, 1949, 184) in the film, William’s wearing of the wig is therefore connected to French ideas of absolute monarchy, fashion, and consumption and even a hint of “not-quite-Dutch-ness.” William’s wig certainly operates as a major rhetorical device in the film. William’s wig is an indication of his royalist outlook, but as the wig is not comfortable, neither is the position of the House of Orange at this time. William himself at the outset is naïve and unclear about his purpose, but he is ambitious. Wearing the wig is a sign of his vanity, ambition, and allegiance to a royalist, non-democratic ideal, but he is not yet comfortable with it. He slams it on and snatches it off, treating it with emotion rather than simply as an article of clothing. Sometimes the wig seems to bother and irritate him, at other times he preens with it, posing like a present-day Instagrammer. It is not clear why William persists with the wig, but he does. Under the wig, William has a full head of dark hair cropped as short as de Witt’s. In contrast to both, de Ruyter has a mane of long, unstyled dark hair. If we note the portraits, however, we will soon see that both de Ruyter and de Witt had long, dark hair, and de Witt’s was quite long. The decision to keep Barry Atsma’s hair short and blond for de Witt may have been to capitalize on the actor’s blond good looks and golden aura, but more importantly, it sets up an interesting visual contrast between the prince and de Witt, counterpointed by the contrast between de Witt and de Ruyter. The latter is a harmonious contrast, best expressed by the rhetorical term “Concordia discors” (in which contrasts paradoxically create an overall harmony),15 between the political hero, the intellectual, social man, and the military hero, the apolitical man of service and action. The other is a harsh contrast between personality, ideology, and morality. In the film, as we momentarily glimpse the prince, shorn and “pure,”

Samuel Johnson explains the difference between discordia concors: “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike,” which differs from concordia discors the harmonious combination of opposites (Johnson, 1779).

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the temporary likeness to de Witt demonstrates the gap between who and what he is, and who and what de Witt is. Unsurprisingly then, the film hints at what for historians is a contentious and unproven claim: that the Prince of Orange was party to the conspiracy to bring down de Witt, and was at least partially responsible for the murder of the de Witt brothers at the hands of the mob. Historian Wouter Troost does not believe that William gave instructions for their murder; however, he must have known the brothers were in danger, concluding that “the prince must bear some of the blame for the frightful assassination of his political opponent by the citizenry” (Troost, 2017, 86). In the film we see de Ruyter accusing the prince of complicity; the prince’s response is to order de Ruyter to fight the French in the Mediterranean, knowing he would not return. This is not historical; although de Ruyter did go to the Mediterranean to fight the French, there is no evidence whatsoever that his death was planned. However, it is important to realize that simplification of the political maneuverings of the seventeenth century is probably necessary. How to make the complexities of the past quickly relatable to present audiences? The fact is, there were no political parties in the modern sense, nobody was vying for election, the role of the political players does not correspond to what we have today, and the factionalism that the film shows happened very differently than we would understand it today. It is difficult to get that across in the short space of a film, and so the film needs to simplify the details and rely on visual rhetoric to carry the viewer along emotionally through the narrative. An interested viewer can look up the precise details later, should they be so inclined. The other prominent wig-wearer in the film is Charles II of England, but he is very comfortable in his wig. Unlike young William, the much older Charles fully embraces his monarchic role, which gives him ample opportunity for intrigue. William visits Charles in London, where Charles holds court in (presumably) the Great Hall at the Palace of Whitehall, which seems strangely bare. Interestingly, it is true that upon his gaining the throne after the Interregnum, Charles found that his father’s large art collection had been sold off by Cromwell, and his palaces seriously lacked décor. Restoring them to splendor by buying and commissioning art was a major preoccupation of the king, who was an aesthete and art patron. In the film, and arguably in life, Charles is a libertine, and his court is depraved (Webster, 2005, 11). One of his many mistresses, Louise de Kerouaille, flounces about with her top open, flaunting her breasts at the visiting dignitary, in this case, William. Charles notices William’s lack of interest and asks pointedly, “don’t you like girls?” By this time, we have already seen William

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in the constant company of his friend William Bentinck, and we never see him paying attention to women. This brings us to another aspect of William’s honey-colored, silky wig with its long, curling ringlets. Huizinga views the allonge as a kind of applied art: “the wig framed the face in the manner of the picture frame” and was tremendously flattering; “it served to isolate the face, give it a fallaciously noble air, raise it, as it were, to a higher power” (Huizinga. 1949, 184). However, in the film, it can be argued that the wig offers a feminizing overlay to the character, hinting at the long-standing rumors about William’s homosexuality. The film never directly mentions homosexuality, but repeatedly shows William in intimate proximity with “pretty-boy” Bentinck (Jelle de Jong), and the device of the wig reminds the viewer of this unresolved historical question, if they were aware of it.16 Historian Joris Belgers believes that the young prince did not wear a wig and that it is only used in the film to insinuate his supposed homosexuality (Belgers, 2015). The wig-wearers—lascivious, heirless Charles and sterile William—are contrasted in the film with the fertile, family-oriented, and clearly heterosexual de Witt and de Ruyter. William’s wig and his intimacy with Bentinck show him as a man lacking a secure public identity, and the implications of homosexuality are there (Belgers, 2015). The film’s own publicity materials even make a point of describing William as an “alleged homosexual.”17 Of course, modern notions  of  “homosexual” did not apply in the seventeenth century, so any portrayal of William’s wig in this way is strongly anachronistic (Webster, 2005, 251). Is William’s homosexuality presented as a positive, negative, or neutral thing? It is hard to say. The close (though not explicitly sexual) relationship with Bentinck is shown and is not mocked or criticized. In fact, we see them together as William confesses that he is going to marry Mary Stuart. Both look unhappy and stricken, and the viewer is invited to empathize. In the spirit of Johan de Witt’s tolerance, which the film wants to promote as a “common sense” value, one would think that homophobia is not something that the film would endorse. On the other hand, the prince is not a positive character, and the film does not discourage his homosexuality as being seen as another aspect of his Troost believes that the rumors about William’s sexuality were probably true, but admits there is no decisive evidence. He cautions the reader not to apply modern concepts to the historical situation (Troost, 2017, 24–5). 17 T h e blurb about the film by the production company states that “Holland is the first republic in Europe [not true, Venice was much older]. The royalist Orangeists seek to put the young, unfit and alleged homosexual William III (‘King Billy’) on the throne, bringing the country to the verge of civil war” (Farmhouse TV & Film n.d.). 16

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distastefulness. In any case, it would be wrong to assume from the film that the wig itself is an emblem of sexuality, since from the 1660s it increasingly appears in formal portraits of notables of all kinds, including—occasionally—Dutchmen.18 There is even a 1674 painting by an unknown artist showing de Ruyter in “a very fashionable but therefore uncharacteristic allonge wig” (Bruijn et al., 2011, 220). On the whole, it is more rewarding to read the wig’s connotation in the film as being less about William’s sexuality than about his feelings about his monarchic position and his growing acceptance and comfort with it. The heroic alliance of de Witt in the government and de Ruyter on the sea falls apart during 1672, the Rampjaar (“disaster year”). Invaded by France and outwitted by Charles II, the Netherlands was in trouble and this was blamed on the de Witt government. Reiné shows how the disasters abroad were exploited by Kievit and his allies around the prince, which is borne out by the history. It begins with the public execution of conspirator Buat, followed by the invasion of the French at Maastricht. A torch-wielding mob, shouting denunciation of de Witt, attempts to attack de Ruyter’s house and is faced down by Anna de Ruyter in an act of astonishing bravery.19 The scene prepares the viewer for the savagery of mobs, as it foreshadows the gruesome murder by the mob of Johan and Cornelis de Witt on August 20. The torture of Cornelis—a woefully underdeveloped character—is a bloody, chiaroscuro nightmare. It is only now that we understand why all the sea battles have not produced an ounce of gore: the real horror has been reserved for this. Johan arrives to his brother’s aid only to fall into Kievit’s trap. The brothers are dragged into the torchlit street, beaten, shot, then left to the baying mob. De Ruyter arrives, but too late; de Witt catches his eye and indicates “save yourself ” and de Ruyter, guilt-ridden, flees as the mob finishes off his friend. The camera lingers on the dying grasp of the brothers’ hands, showing the love between the brothers and prolonging the horror of their killing. There is no evidence that de Ruyter was ever there, it is improbable, but the scene portrays the deep loyalty the admiral had to de Witt. In the Rijksmuseum there is a painting of the event: The Corpses of the de Witt Brothers, by Jan de Baen painted c.1672–5. It shows the flayed corpses of Johan and Cornelis de Witt on public display in the Groene Zoodje, the execution ground on the Vijverberg in See Michael Kwass, “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in 18th-Century France” in the American Historical Review (Kwass, 2006). DeRuyter’s first biographer Gerhard Brandt is the only source of this story; he writes that “a family member” put down the revolt firmly but does not say whom (Bruijn, van Reine and Davies, 2011, 51).

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the middle of The Hague. It is probably one of the most repellent images ever painted, vying with Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (c.1570). Both the film and the painting reveal the sickening sight by torchlight, as an animal licks the blood on the ground. We glimpse de Witt’s intestines being pulled out. It is horrible enough, but Reiné persists and we hear—but do not quite see—the mob eating the de Witts’ body parts, which actually happened. There is another painting of the scene by Pieter Frits (1627–1708). This one is unusual because it is a sequential image, telling the story of the whole incident in one frame. Reading it, we can see Johan arrive at the Gevangenpoort prison to retrieve his brother Cornelis; next, we see the brothers forcibly removed from the prison. Next, Johan is shot by four riflemen; Cornelis is stripped. At the far right, the naked bodies of the brothers are mutilated, and in the last “shot” are hung by the feet at the Groene Zoodje and enthusiastically eviscerated. What is interesting about this painting is that at no point are these actions being done by a “mob.” In the far-right background the rabble looks on and is clearly being orchestrated, but the killing is done by substantial men, who clearly know what they are doing. It was originally thought that, as Reiné shows in the film, once Johan de Witt was shot the mob took over and tore the brothers to pieces and ate them. However, if Frits’s painting is admissible as evidence, even the mutilation and evisceration were organized. And it happened in broad daylight. Interestingly, the section of the painting showing the mutilation was hidden until very recently by a cannon that was painted over the two corpses, thus hiding the most horrible aspect of the picture. However, to depict this kind of brutality would have been unbearable in a film. There is a reason films use techniques such as chiaroscuro and oblique angles to hide as much as they reveal. Paintings can be much more violent and awful than films, even horror films. Historical films, which often must address real-life events that would be sickening to witness, normally try to find a way to limit the stomach-churning detail. In the film, after the de Witts have been killed, Kievit and Tromp walk past the scene where the bodies are still hanging like sides of meat. Someone offers to sell Tromp de Witt’s severed penis. Kievit and Tromp are both disgusted with the visceral evidence of their actions, but they are angry and disgusted at the people whom they have incited to commit the crime. As they pass we get a glimpse of Jan de Baen’s easel set up nearby, as the unseen artist is busy painting the corpses in situ, though of course it is not known if he actually did this. These two paintings demonstrate how horrible events such as the de Witts’ killing are mediated and aestheticized through art and invite us to reflect on how

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they are then preserved and made available in a decontextualized way through the museum. When the scene leaves the canvas and is reenacted through cinema, however, it takes on a new aspect as we see the scene reframed within a political discourse. Admiral uses this real-life atrocity to make a relevant point about today. When de Ruyter confronts the prince and accuses him of complicity, he refers to how pamphlets and agitators “smeared the de Witts for months, then the mob took over.” This nod to populist libel and smearing to bring down elected politicians, orchestrated by elites, has a modern resonance. The prince, now fully comfortable in his wig, realizes de Ruyter will not abandon his loyalty to de Witt even after de Witt is gone, and acquiesces in the plan to be rid of the admiral. Ruyter’s final self-sacrifice plays out to his death off the Sicilian coast, the last sea battle. Upon learning his famous opponent has been killed, Admiral Abraham Duquesne offers an all-gun salute and retreats. Duquesne did admire de Ruyter, reporting to Louis XIV that the Dutch fleet under de Ruyter “can enter a moonless night in heavy wind and fog and emerge the next day in perfect line ahead” (Grant, 2010, 144). This is integrated into a montage that includes William’s marriage to Mary Stuart and Anna walking alone, silhouetted on the beach. The penultimate shot (before the end title),20 a close-up of Anna’s weeping face at de Ruyter’s coffin, is one of sacrifice and sorrow. It is a strange and downbeat way to end an epic film, foregrounding domestic, civilian sorrow rather than military glory. As well as the recreation of specific paintings (Vermeer’s Milkmaid) and the transposition of scenes which are captured in paintings—the murder of the de Witts, the estates general in the Ridderzaal, and less precisely, various sea battles—at certain points in the film, actual paintings are shown at key points in the narrative. These operate rhetorically, again not in a structured way but as emphatic punctuation. By connecting the film to the intellectual culture of history and the high culture of art, the pictures remind the Dutch viewer of what they already recognize: the art-historical legacy, which can be seen today in museums (or indeed online) and the era when the Dutch were the masters of painting. To the international viewer, the specificities of Dutch history may be obscure but the validation offered by painting again lifts the film above the charge of being “mere” entertainment. T h e final shot shows the real de Ruyter’s memorial in the Nieuw Kirk, by Rombout Verhulst (1681). The end title says William invaded England and became king, thus fulfilling his monarchical ambitions—but in England not the Netherlands, which the film implies is “naturally” republican.

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The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn (c.1650) hangs in de Witt’s chambers. It depicts a swan fiercely defending its nest from a dog. The painting came to be interpreted as a political allegory: the white swan was thought to symbolize Johan de Witt protecting the country from its enemies (Rijksmuseum n.d.). The swan reappears as a motif in the film, decorating a pie served at the de Witt’s party. In this scene Cornelis de Witt and de Ruyter argue with Johan de Witt about his failure to address the fears and concerns of the civilian population about the war situation. De Witt responds that he is handling it and that diplomacy is the best way forward: Cornelis: the people don’t understand diplomacy. Johan: I can’t adopt my policy to people who understand less than we do.

There’s nothing more to say; Cornelis gets up and moves to the table, where he takes a knife and plunges it into the swan pie. The swan—de Witt—has been wounded by his own hubris, and he will take his brother down with him. In this scene Reiné demonstrates the risks of hubris to the liberal project. De Witt has a large painting of a sea battle in his room, underlining the basis of Dutch power, though this is less symbolic than simply realistic: the pictures were popular and sold well. Later, a well-dressed man in the street passes by carrying a painting under his arm. The picture is Rembrandt’s The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, known as “The Syndics,” painted in 1662. It is the painter’s only corporate group portrait, showing the men responsible for overseeing the quality of dyed cloth. Who is this man who scurries past, momentarily part of our story then just as quickly gone? Is he one of the drapers? The moment is gone, and we don’t know. The inclusion of the man in the painting offers a shred of material realism, serves to remind us that this was the time of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the great art market of the Netherlands and invites the audience to a game of recognition, flattering the cognizant viewer. Portraits are also significant in the film. However, the treatment of the portrait in the film also represents its most problematic aspect. Unsettlingly, the protagonists of the film do not age at all through the film’s twenty-year narrative arc, told over two and half hours. The film opens in 1653 at the Battle of Scheveningen and ends in 1676 when Michiel de Ruyter died at age sixtynine—yet he does not visibly age at all in these twenty years and paradoxically continues to look about forty years of age throughout the whole film. This strange fate of agelessness is shared by the rest of the characters. The children

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remain young and the wife gains not a wrinkle. William, who is mentioned as being a small child at the start of the film, appears to be in his early twenties when we first see him, and remains that age throughout, as does Bentinck (both would be about twenty-six in 1676). Whereas—and possibly most damagingly from a historical point of view—England’s depraved King Charles II (Charles Dance) is from the beginning portrayed as much older than the age (forty-two) he was at the time, and did not even ascend the English throne until some time after the film begins. In fact, Charles, the de Witts, Kievit, and Tromp were all around the same age; de Ruyter was about eighteen years older and William about twenty years younger. However, to create the tale of loyalty and friendship, the film makes the protagonists the same age, and the antagonists, Kievit and Charles, significantly older. Though Admiral is generally accurate and is a good example of a wellresearched, well-realized historical film, the agelessness of the characters encourages the viewer to wrongly believe that the Anglo-Dutch wars happened over a short period of time. The director has said that his principal reason for not aging the characters was so that the audience would connect with them more, instead of using different actors or prosthetics (McCarthy, 2015). The comparatively low budget of the film (8 million euros) could have been a factor here. However, from a visual-rhetoric point of view, showing an attractively melancholic yet stoic wife and sad, devoted children, the film’s ageless characters create the identification that Reiné sought. They continually reinforce the pathos of the Admiral’s constant sacrifice of his relationship with his wife and family for the greater good of the Netherlands. It is also a device reminding the viewer that although what we see looks like “the past,” it is not. An illogical weakness here tries—and almost succeeds—to become an artistic strength. De Ruyter and de Witt are portraits of national heroes. The de Ruyter family are idealized portraits of “the Dutch family.” They do not age because they are not real people, but exemplars. Does it work? Rhetorically, yes, up to a point. Charles looks old and raddled because he is corrupt and decadent. William is eternally twenty, callow, and headstrong. Admiral creates memorable portraits: the rumpled, practical man of action de Ruyter, the rational, charismatic Prime Minister de Witt, the petulant, foppish William of Orange, and the leering, saturnine Charles II are as memorable to the viewer as any museum portrait. England is shown as a place that accepts rotten Charles and, later, awful William. This is not a perspective English viewers would like, but this movie is—for a change—about

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Dutch greatness. Historian Joris Belgers, reflecting on the way the film never mentions de Ruyter’s piety, reasons that “a filmmaker must connect with the audience of today” and historical figures need to be ever so slightly reshaped to fit that (Belgers, 2015). However, rhetoric only really works when the audience is not aware that they are being manipulated, and unfortunately, the agelessness of the characters cannot be avoided as an illogical and strange aspect of the film.

Past into Present As Marcia Landy has pointed out that “narratives involving the past are never innocent; they are instrumental in enhancing or occluding interest in the present,” and Admiral is no exception (Landy, 1996, 35). While Landy cautions against “hegemonic” and uncritical “investment in formulaic, sanctified versions of the past” (Landy, 1996, 35) Admiral, while following the schoolbook versions more or less accurately within the dramatic framework of a filmed entertainment, does go beyond simple hagiography of de Witt and de Ruyter. If it does not engage in a critical consideration of the past, it does bother to define “freedom” as being liberal, open, tolerant, and peaceable, even as it promotes a version of “Dutchness” that is primarily patriotic. The film comes at a time when the Netherlands has seen successful far-right populism and anti-Islam agitation under Geert Wilders. De Witt’s message of openness and toleration is shown in the film as an essential element of “Dutch” identity and patrimony. However, to do so, Reiné has had to ignore de Witt’s own political cunning and dissembling. Interestingly there is some redemption for Tromp, though historians have argued that he was one of the chief conspirators in the de Witt murders.21 As James Chapman points out, it is “a truth universally acknowledged . . . that a historical feature film will often have as much to say about the present in which it was made as about the past in which it was set” (Chapman, 2005, 5). Admiral seeks to overcome the present divisions of Dutch society and points to a perceived need for a Dutch hero in a fragmented cultural space (Thissen, 2013). Cinema spectacle is a way to tempt audiences into cohesion by demonstrating a shared celebration of values. Reiné relocated to Los Angeles in 2005 and, until Admiral, made a career directing cheap straight-to-DVD action films, so he presumably has few T h is is disputed (Israel, 1995; Troost, 2017).

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illusions about film culture.22 Despite its flaws, Admiral is an energetic, exciting, and largely enjoyable film to watch. It proves that Dutch history is interesting, winning the audience over with set pieces that thrill and invoke the sublime, as well as validate the history by referring to the art that is an ongoing source of national pride and identity. Admiral depends upon the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age as touchstones to validate the “authenticity” of the film’s Dutchness, its relationship to high art and the culture of the museum. The film’s director claims that his film is “70% accurate” (Leyland, 2016); this is a good ratio for a drama. It is bolstered by the visual authenticity of settings, action sequences, and props; and these are based on the paintings that he and his crew studied. Using visual cues, the film reveals sympathies with republicanism, and ambivalence bordering on hostility to the Orangeists and to royalism in general, a position that is framed as a kind of sturdy, inclusive anti-elitist nationalism. If the paintings validate the Dutchness of the film and give it a “high culture” imprimatur, their use can also be seen as an attempt to harness Dutch painting’s impression of material realism to the filmmaker’s own subjective, ideological interpretation of Dutch history. The paintings reinvigorate the film’s bourgeois progressive grand narrative. Like Grand Manner painting, nationalist historical films all practice “cherry picking,” creating the image of who we would like to be, not who we really were. Admiral seeks to reify the idea of the Dutch nation, pointing to the past as an exemplar, but ultimately reducing it to a heroic epic of good versus evil. In the following chapter, I will examine another kind of nationalist historical film, one which also speaks directly to a present-day audience about present-day issues. This second type of film seeks to uncover “hidden” areas of the nation’s history and—though continuing to deliver a grand narrative of bourgeois progressivism—has more complex things to offer in terms of critiquing the social structure and human relations between present and past.

Also, an episode of Black Sails featuring a sea battle (2017).

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Belle Slavery, Race, and the Portrait

If Admiral and The Baader-Meinhof Complex take well-known historical narratives and retell them, there is another kind of nationalist historical film, which seeks to uncover a lesser-known story or a neglected historical subject. These films attempt to “tell a truth” that has been hidden. Belle (2013, Amma Assante, DP Ben Smithard) is a revisionist historical film about the British eighteenth-century slavery question, framed around the 1779 painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (David Martin; originally attributed to Johan Zoffany). Belle brings together a relationship between artworks both seen and not seen in the film: political paintings and paintings of Black people in eighteenth-century England. Referring obliquely to the relationship between spectacle and history, Belle depicts a female world of public rituals and amusements, where conspicuous consumption and complex protocols determine everyday life. In Belle, the use of portraiture and the film’s status as a “national historical” film employ visual communication in mythmaking and mythbreaking, offering new ways of looking at history and the relationship between persons and events. Belle addresses the abolition of the slave trade through a dramatic plot framed around a famous court case of 1783: the Zong slave ship, whose owners tried to claim the insurance on their cargo which, the shipowners argued, had died at sea and had had to be jettisoned. The insurers argued that the slavers had in fact thrown their cargo of sick slaves overboard to collect insurance. The slavers were never charged with murder; the case came to court as an insurance case. Eventually, the case came to the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Mansfield, who was expected to make judgment, either in favor of the insurers or the shipowners.

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However, Belle is not a courtroom drama, even if the dénouement takes place in the court. It is the fictionalized story of a real person, a great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice, the mixed-race woman Dido Elizabeth Belle. Described by one critic (Mark Olsen, 2014) as “part Jane Austen-style period romance and part socially-conscious legal procedural,” Belle offers a reasonably factual history of a nationally important event that has relevance to modern audiences, through the fictionalized dramatization of real-life characters. Belle is inspired by and based upon a 1779 painting of two aristocratic young women in eighteenth-century England, Dido Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray, great-nieces to the Earl of Mansfield.1 Raised as sisters, both are young, beautiful, and educated, but that is not enough to secure their futures. Dido is Black, the daughter of an aristocrat and a slave; despite being an heiress, her social position is ambiguous and questioned. Elizabeth is penniless and must find a wealthy husband. While the aristocratic Mansfield family struggles to secure stable and dignified futures for the girls, Dido is awakened to the antislavery cause, as she learns about the Zong case and the murder of its cargo of slaves at sea. This discovery not only causes conflict with her guardian, the Lord Chief Justice of England, but also brings her together with a passionate young lawyer and abolitionist, John Davinier. The painterliness of the film is established with an opening shot of Bristol Harbour c.1769, reminiscent of Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula (1641) by Claude. The film soon moves to Kenwood House, the Mansfield home near London. Painting plays a central role in the plot and is not simply a tool for establishing period detail or mapping exciting set pieces. The film’s themes of gender and race, and the role of jurisprudence, are played out visually through engagement with painting. Paintings not only provide the visual texture of the mise-en-scène, they generate significant plot points and indicate bigger ideas than the film itself addresses. Belle is a postclassical narrative according to the classification proposed by Eleftheria Thanouli (Thanouli, 2019, 130). However, instead of being parodic, Belle offers a romantic pastiche laid on top of the real-life historical narrative of Lord Mansfield’s judgment on Zong case. Belle fulfills what Thanouli calls the “alternative view of the historical process” (Thanouli, 2019, 131) presenting the judgment on the slave trade by the Lord Chief Justice, embodying power, from the point of view of a young Black female, who embodies powerlessness. T h e historical figure is “Dido Belle”; the film character is “Dido.”

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In terms of narrative structure, which frames the visual-rhetoric arguments within the film, there are four principal threads of narrative. The first thread is Dido’s search for identity as a mixed-race person of visible color, in a society where whiteness is the norm and the repository of power. This is argued visually using a contrast between Dido’s darker skin and the white characters, and by revealing the paintings that show the ancestors and their Black servants. The second is Dido’s search for love, both romantic love which she finds with Davinier and parental love which she finds with the Mansfields. The former is shown largely through the framing of the characters in medium-close-up shots; the latter through compositions that reference “conversation piece” paintings (Retford, 2007). Third, the Austen-esque analysis of the financial “rules” of society and their effects on human relationships is demonstrated through the story of Elizabeth, who, though white and privileged, is forced to marry for money. The fourth thread is the historical argument about the Zong case and its importance in the history of slavery and abolition, and Mansfield’s difficulty in pronouncing the judgment. These latter two follow visual conventions set by historical romance and by the courtroom drama. Modern viewers are invited to relate to the first two narratives on a personal level: first, on the search for identity and, second, on the universal search for love. In the third, financial narrative, we look “from afar” at “how things were” but the film’s critique of the dominant financial structures in eighteenth-century England—framed through a Jane Austen-inspired marriage subplot which is also infused by issues of race and class—invites us to muse upon the “rules” of power today and how these affect our own human relations. In the fourth narrative, the Zong case, it is Mansfield who is the main character. He is torn between his head and his heart and cannot decide. His head is logical and is in the end resolved by John Davinier, who offers him a logical, moral, and ethical legal argument based on case law. His heart is resolved by Dido, who also offers a moral and ethical argument but one framed by love and an appeal to humanity. This heart relationship is expressed through art, in the painting of Dido and Elizabeth. The plot of the film, therefore, is how Mansfield comes to integrate his head and his heart, and when he does, he is able to pronounce his legal decision. Because the narrative operates over four separate yet connected threads, the visual-rhetoric approach of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio is less useful as a tool of analysis. Briefly, however, as will be shown, the inventio generates the visual argument through the deployment of portraits in the Mansfield home

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(Kenwood House) and introduces the proposition of the racial conundrum the Lord Chief Justice faces in his personal and professional life. The dispositio arranges the elements of the argument according to plot structures borrowed from Austen, and the historical romance in general. Considering the elocutio, the visual style strongly adheres to period imagery taken from art, including the “conversation piece,” and exhibits a restraint associated with the neoclassical.

Portraiture, Politics, and Identity Portraiture is at the foundation of the film, in the characterization of the protagonists and the development of the plot. The significance of the portrait in filmmaking is clear. In a most basic sense, it is useful to have an idea of what a historical person looked like—or at least their style of dress and hair. Both Abel Gance in Napoleon (1927) and Youssef Chahine in Adieu Bonaparte (1985) chose and styled their actors playing Napoleon Bonaparte (Albert Dieudonné and Patrice Chéreau, respectively) according to well-known portraits of the French general. Interestingly, both depictions are modeled on the dashing, romantic Bonaparte of the Napoleon at the Bridge of the Arcole (Antoine-Jean Gros, c.1801) rather than Delaroche’s less glamorous Napoleon at Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814 (1846), which bears a much stronger resemblance to the Napoleon embodied by Rod Steiger in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970). One of the challenges to the portraitist has always been honoring the subject while achieving realism. Formal portraits of important people seek to demonstrate the person’s power or wealth or status. By the mid-eighteenth century people wanted portraits to keep at home, to honor their family connections, and as part of the decor. But what was the appropriate mode for such pictures? Realism? Or idealization? We have already seen how Charles Le Brun created heroic, sublime visions of Louis XIV. Joshua Reynolds brought the Grand Manner into painting ordinary well-to-do people, gentry, aristocrats, and actors, in pictures, which seek a compromise or balance between realism and idealism. Reynolds calls upon the sublime, but tames it. This notion of a conscious compromise between real and ideal or realistic and sublime frames the art of the eighteenth century, lays the foundations for nineteenth-century art, and informs cinema from the beginning. As discussed in the first chapter, this compromise is full of tension. The art history of the eighteenth century—in portrait, landscape, and history painting—is a history of innovation and ingenuity, social mobility, and

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the harnessing of realism to extraordinary spectacle. In my discussion of Belle I will address not only the way the film rhetorically uses painting to structure the narrative but also how the paintings of the period reflect the problems and issues raised in the film. We might ask, what is the difference between a filmic close-up and a portrait? Both are dominated by the human face, and both are integral to their respective art forms. Unlike painting and sculpture, cinema makes possible a variety of distance ranges, when the camera comes to rest on a character and frames them in such a way that they occupy more or less of the screen. Luis Giannetti describes how, when we are brought into very near proximity to a character, so their face fills the screen, such close-up or extreme close-up compositions create an often-overwhelming intimacy. Personal distance, where we see the full head and part of the upper body—the range that is most common in portraiture—is approximately a medium-close shot (Giannetti, 1987, 62). But what, if any, are the connections between the filmic close-up and the painted portrait? What does the painted portrait communicate and what does the close-up communicate? Film plays with the difference between a close-up and a portrait. For example, sometimes a film deliberately incorporates elements from portraits, so that painterly qualities are sometimes ascribed to a film’s rendering of the characters in a close-up shot. The lighting, color, and framing of the subjects in a film can be manipulated to resemble or suggest the appearance of figures in particular paintings, including portraits. But the film also plays with the differences: the film close-up is mobile, expressive, and fleeting, whereas the painted portrait is fixed and usually formal, adhering to rules or conventions. Typically, portraits do not depict the subjects laughing or even smiling outright; the usual appropriate expression is sober, not flirting or angry. Few portrait painters were interested in capturing expressions, because this is generally not what was wanted. However, the Dido Belle painting is more expressive than usual. One of the very few things known about Dido Belle is that she had her portrait painted with her cousin Elizabeth Murray (Figure 6.1). It was painted in 1779, at a time when British interests were engaged in the slave trade, and it was preserved during a later period when racial theories argued that color scientifically determined a person’s worth and ability. The painting survived, little-understood, as a curiosity; it was only in the 1990s that Dido Belle was identified in the painting, which was hitherto simply known as “Lady Elizabeth Murray” with no mention of the Black woman. So, what is distinctive about the painting?

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Figure 6.1  Belle (2013), directed by Amma Asante. London: British Film Institute.

Anna Storm writes: There are two women in the 18th-century portrait, one black and one white. The white woman is situated more prominently in the foreground. From the book she holds low in her lap, the painting’s compositional through-line travels at a curve—rising, dipping, rising again—before finally coming to rest upon the face, and smile, of the black woman. If you were to draw this line on a piece of paper, it would look like an “S” turned on its side. It meanders, but ultimately terminates at a point above where it began. It began at Lady Elizabeth Murray and ends with her half-cousin, Dido Elizabeth Belle. (Storm, 2014)

This description of the S-curve immediately suggests the compositional principles laid down by eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth (1697– 1764) in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. The painting, long thought to be by Johann Zoffany (1733–1810), is now attributed to Scottish artist David Martin, who also painted Lord Mansfield. This kind of picture, known as a “conversation piece,” is notably informal, relatively small in scale depicting family members or friends. It is very different to the paintings Dido sees when she arrives at the Mansfield house. She sees, and is disturbed and fascinated by, a painting of a presumable ancestor, with a small Black boy next to him, clearly a servant. This was common for portraiture of the upper class at the time; from the seventeenth century onward, small Black children and other Black servants are frequently portrayed in portraits. Partly this may reflect the presence of Black people in England but perhaps even more: it is an aesthetic strategy to demonstrate visual contrast between dark and light. Immediately

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then we are introduced to one of the film’s principal rhetorical devices: the use of contrast. Unlike Admiral and The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Belle is not retelling wellknown national history events to create a nationalist historical narrative. The film does appeal to an “imagined community” in the Andersonian sense: a postimperial, multicultural British community that craves a fuller picture of its own history. The histories of slavery in Britain usually mention the judgments of Lord Mansfield, but until very recently the existence of his Black great-niece has not been mentioned. The film wants to argue that Dido Belle’s relationship with Mansfield is a significant element in his legal judgments on slavery. The film uses contrast to propel this argument: contrasting characters (the venal Ashfords contrasted with the kind Mansfields), attitudes (cerebral versus emotional), and environment (London and Kenwood). The visual rhetoric of the film often employs contrast through black and white, both on the family portraits which are frequently seen in the frame, and Dido contrasted visually with the other characters. Her blackness is always asserted, even as the characters—including Dido herself—try to argue that it does not matter, or that it can be ignored or subsumed. When Dido is brought to Kenwood House, at the start of the film, it soon transpires that the Mansfield household is full of paintings of the family with Black servants. By constantly showing the paintings in the mise-en-scène and by echoing painterly compositions, the film’s visual rhetoric indicates that painting is a key to “belonging.” At the outset (given as 1765, though we don’t know when the real Dido Belle arrived), the child Dido and Mansfield bond over the paintings in the house, as he shows her a portrait of himself. Because most of the paintings in the Mansfield home appear to be of ancestors, this means that the characters always appear to us, and to one another, in connection with the ancestors. Ancestry is a strong thread throughout the film, as the Mansfield family wants to play up Dido’s connection to them and play down her connection to her African mother. Dido is constantly reminded not only of her Mansfield ancestry but also of her mother’s position, because so many of the Mansfield portraits have Black servants. Paintings in almost every shot in the Kenwood scenes constantly frame the characters and operate rhetorically to remind the viewer that the characters are unceasingly aware of—even trapped by—the “family tree” and constantly aware of family bonds and responsibilities. Paintings are important in the film’s narrative structure and play a variety of roles within it. Dido and Mansfield bond

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over the portrait of Mansfield, linking portraiture to the idea of “belonging.” The paintings in the house explain the position of the Mansfield family. The paintings Dido gazes at, for example the woman in seventeenth-century dress with her Black servant, attest to the family’s lineage. Among the paintings in the film are Princess Henrietta of Lorraine with her page, painted by van Dyck, and a particularly fine example of Reynolds’s skill, Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington and a [Black] Servant (1782) standing in for Mansfield relatives. The timeline of the film—which differs from the historical timeline—is set by the painting of Dido and Elizabeth. Once the story setup is established, and the Ashford suit is introduced (preparing the marriage theme), the painter appears. Though the process of painting is almost unseen in the film, the painting is completed and delivered on the eve of the Zong judgment. Looking at it together, Mansfield and Dido exchange their final words before the case. As in the beginning of the film, it is painting that brings the two of them together. Looking at the paintings in the house and having her portrait painted bring Dido to her sense of identity and place in the world. She is a Mansfield, but she is also the daughter of her African mother. Her journey from alienation to accepting her identity is mirrored by her embracing of the abolitionist cause. By extension, the “romantic” genre of the story is subverted by the romance being a true meeting of minds around a worthy cause. In the Dido and Elizabeth painting, Dido is shown to “belong” as an equal, rhetorically negating the hierarchical portrayals of Black people in her family home. The Dido-Mansfield relationship is mainly expressed visually, through looks exchanged; Mansfield’s face softens when he looks at Dido. The film is about two relationships, the romantic love that grows between Dido and John Davinier, and the even more important filial love between Dido and Mansfield. The observations of those who saw the way that Dido Belle was treated in the family home make this reading of the relationship credible. We know that Mansfield’s marriage to Lady Elizabeth Finch was a love match, and the two had a strong bond (Byrne, 2014, 71–2); it is not an imaginative stretch to imagine that the couple extended their affection to their wards. Mansfield’s love for Dido needed to be visible. Asante observes that “I had never seen a white character on screen loving a black child in this way. How important it was to bring that to an audience for the first time” (Storm, 2014). For Asante, painting was key to the film, as it was inspired by a painting, which is so different from other depictions of Black and white together. She wanted to make a film that would bring together politics, history, and art (Morales,

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2014). The eighteenth-century environment serves as a backdrop to the story; there is no Mannerist lingering over details of the luxuries—the costumes, accessories, and architecture are there to frame the subjects, not as things to enjoy in themselves. The design of the film is restrained, Neoclassical, elegant. Within the household, the interior scenes are composed to resemble the scenes in Hogarth’s small-scale “conversation pieces,” or informal group portraits (e.g., The Strode Family painted 1738) and the paintings of Francis Hayman, or Joseph Highmore’s paintings illustrating Richardson’s Pamela (1740s). “Just as in life we are no better in paintings,” observes Dido as she sees yet another depiction of the Black servant, this time in the Kentish Town pub sign. Asante points out that “during that period, people of color were normally in the painting because we were kind of like pets. We were there to express the status of the main focus of the painting. So we were usually in the background” (Storm, 2014). Asante’s observations are completely borne out by looking at any of the myriad representations of white Europeans with Black servants. “We were usually lower down, never looking at the artist who was painting us. We were usually touching the main focus of the painting, who was obviously always white. The hand would be going up, and it would draw your eye to the main focus, and we would be looking adoringly at that person” (Storm, 2014). Anna Storm writes that “The portrait of Dido and Elizabeth is so anomalous because it subverts traditional representational norms as they should have applied to both women. Not only is the eye drawn to the black Dido and not the white Elizabeth (who, for all her foreground prominence, is reaching out to touch her co-subject, and not the other way around)” (Storm, 2014). The closeness of the two in the film is shown in many different compositions from the chiaroscuro of the bedchamber to the Watteau-like gatherings in the gardens of Kenwood. As in the painting, the characters are almost identical in height and physique and frequently seen next to each other. This way the film very cleverly replicates one of the key tropes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, which continues even into the nineteenth century—think of Manet’s Olympia—of showing a pale white woman next to a dusky Black servant. Yet the film is playing with and subverting this idea, because we are constantly aware that not only is Dido not a servant, but that she and her family are fighting to find a way for her to live with dignity. Equal within the household, she is nevertheless unequal in front of visitors and in the wider world. Therefore the visual contrast between dark and light is played out in the shots of the two girls together, at the same time undermining established ideas about the contrast of

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“dark” and “light” as good and evil, or enlightenment and ignorance. Although at first reluctant to sit for the artist, Dido comes to value the painting and uses it as evidence to remind Mansfield of his ability to break conventions and rules when he knows that it is the right thing to do, and something that he wants to do. However, we need to be aware that the painting which is unveiled in the film and clearly depicts the two actors is demonstrably not the same as the real painting which is shown at the very end of the film. The Dido Belle in the actual painting is clearly exoticized compared to the Dido in the film’s rendering. In the painting, Dido Belle carries a basket of fruit, which is not unusual, but she wears a turban-like hat with a feather, which at the time of painting is a bit unusual. At no point in the film is Dido seen in such headwear. Draped turbans like this were sometimes worn, as portraits of the writer and traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) show. By 1796 they were again fashionable: James Gillray satirizes elaborate and enormous turbans worn by women in High-change in Bond Street,—ou—la Politesse du Grande Monde. In the 1780s the turban was not a typical article of clothing, and appears to have been chosen for the painting either because Dido Belle wore one (to hide her African hair?) or simply to exoticize her for the picture; we just do not know. And yet, look at her. Dido Belle is on the move, striding forward, looking right at the viewer and gesturing, pointing at her cheek as if to say “I, too, am here.” It is a playful gesture, but one full of meaning. Asante chose to completely eschew the gesture in the film’s version of the painting. More importantly, the turban is also omitted in the film, which is perhaps overly dissembling given that it is one of the few things we know about Dido Belle.

Authenticity, History, and Realism Like The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Belle is part of the crop of post-2000 historical films that do not simply employ genre conventions in their evocation of the past, but instead play knowingly with these conventions, while interpolating elements of other art forms. In Belle, the romantic subplot both places the story within the period—this was the era when the novel as a form was being developed— and removes it from the historical discourse around slavery. After all, no slaves were freed by the Zong case; it would take another half-century for an Act of Parliament to abolish the institution. However, the film makes it clear, through its layered narrative structure, use of star texts, and avoidance of presentism, to

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weave the romantic story in with the “history” without sacrificing the important issues and problems the film wants to address. As Jonathan Stubbs points out, many recent historical epics are depoliticized or stripped of deliberate analogy (Stubbs, 2013, 128). Like Admiral, Belle wears its politics openly. Belle, as a nationalist historical film, offers a lesson about the life of a Black aristocrat and the presence of Black people in eighteenth-century England, together with an episode from the history of the slave trade and the (eventual) abolition of slavery in Britain. It is broadly realist in both approach and style, while at the same time being harnessed to the genre of the romance, specifically the subgenre of the Jane Austen romance of manners. This subplot has Dido and Elizabeth as marriageable girls trying to find the right husband. It is essential to discuss historical authenticity as an aspect of the question of realism in this film. Unlike Admiral and The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Belle veers away significantly from the historical record. Like The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Belle fictionalizes the story of real people but unlike that film, it depicts significant world events (the Lord Chief Justice’s role in the slavery question). Therefore it is vital to understand how fact and fiction intertwine and how this is expressed visually. What do we know about Dido Belle? The historical record is slight. She was brought to the Mansfield household around 1765 by her father John Lindsay, Mansfield’s great-nephew. She was raised in the Mansfield home at Kenwood along with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, and lived there for thirty years until Mansfield’s death in 1793. She married John Davinier, recorded as being a steward by occupation, that same year, and left Kenwood for Pimlico, where she and Davinier had three sons. She died in 1804. Nothing more is known about her. Despite being an educated woman, she left no known letters or diaries, no published writings, and almost no commentary from others. She is not known to have been involved or associated with the abolition movement or any other project (Byrne, 2014, 215); (Houliston and Jenkins, 2014). The film was researched and scripted by British-Nigerian screenwriter Misan Sagay, who has said that she was inspired by the painting of Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray at Scone Palace, the family seat of the Murray family in Scotland (Myers, 2014). The painting, which used to hang at Kenwood, was moved in the 1920s when the Murrays sold the London estate. The script was reworked by Amma Asante and then went into production with Damian Jones (Kidulthood, The Iron Lady) as producer. It is not clear if any historical consultants were used in the screenwriting or production stages. However, Damian Jones appears to have been highly aware of the fictive nature of the film and so took the relatively

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unusual step of commissioning a book on the history of Dido Belle, giving a much fuller picture of the period and its mores, and of the role of the Mansfield judgment in the abolition of the slave trade. Published in 2014, Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle was written by the popular historian Paula Byrne. Byrne’s job was to fill in the historical context that is missing from the film, and to “correct” the film’s deliberate errors. Her book is well researched from secondary and some primary texts, giving a clear account of the status of slavery in the British Empire and the legal cases that addressed it. Byrne relates the little that is known about the historical Dido Belle, acknowledging the artistic license taken. The book finishes by relating Dido Belle’s tenuous but fascinating connections to Jane Austen. Some of Dido Belle’s connections relate to the world of art and, even more curiously, to the earliest origins of cinema. Belle the film is not a “true story” but it is based loosely on three interlinking true stories: the biography of Dido Belle, the painting of the Dido BelleElizabeth Murray portrait, and the Earl of Mansfield’s judgment in the Zong case, together with several strands which offer commentary on the position of women in society, racism, and sexuality, and the role of painting in creating a cultural “national narrative.” The Dido narrative is almost wholly fictive, because information about Dido is very scanty, resting almost entirely on entries in the accounts of Kenwood House, remarks in James Beattie’s Elements of Moral Science,2 and diary entries made by the former governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, who was a guest in 1779. Hutchinson dined several times with Mansfield at Kenwood during his time in London (he mentions it in his diaries), but only once makes an entry about Dido Belle (Hutchinson and Hutchinson, 1883). The script, therefore, had relative freedom to imagine Dido Belle’s life and her relationship with Mansfield. The script veers between a relatively historically accurate narrative and a purely imaginative romance, to describe issues of race, class, and gender in English history. The abolitionist narrative is heavily fictionalized, since the film omits to include the influential abolitionist Granville Sharp, replacing his moral activism in the story with that of John Davinier. Dido Belle’s actual husband-to-be was neither lawyer nor abolitionist but was instead a steward. The failure to give any scope to the abolition movement is the principal historical problem in the film. Beattie describes meeting “a negro girl about ten years old, who . . . repeated to me some pieces of poetry, with a degree of elegance, which would have been admired in any English child of her years.” In a footnote, he explains that “She was in Lord Mansfield’s family; and at his desire, and in his presence, repeated those pieces of poetry to me. She was called Dido, and I believe is still alive” (Beattie, 1817).

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Although the gradual enlightenment of Dido to the facts of the slave trade and her growing alignment with the abolition movement are well expressed in the film, the complete absence of Sharp—the famous agitator met Mansfield on several occasions and he both praised and attacked the Earl in print—denies the viewer a clearer picture of how the abolition movement operated. It lacks credibility that a well-educated woman who lived with the Lord Chief Justice would not have heard of Sharp who was, among other things, an expert publicist (Reddie, 2007, 141–2). However, from the filmmakers’ point of view, Sharp is sadly not very well known today, so it was easy to dispense with him as a character or even as a referent. By focusing on the role of the jurist Mansfield, the script demonstrates a clear desire to show how instrumental the application of the law was in the struggle for abolition. The script wants to have it both ways. By omitting the role of indefatigable persons like Sharp, or for that matter the African former slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (who originally alerted Sharp to the Zong case), Asante can portray the case as one revolving not around individuals but around the correct, moral judicial application of the law. However, the fictional intervention by Dido and Davinier in influencing the case through Mansfield does imply that emotions, feelings, and notions of moral right were an essential part of the abolition story, perhaps even more so than the decades of hard work by activists. The audience is kept very much inside Dido’s confined, social world of home and occasional outings. We, like her, have very few glimpses of the world outside of the Mansfield family. It comes almost as a shock then when Dido goes clandestinely to the High Court to see Mansfield give his judgment on the Zong case, to realize that the gallery holds a significant number of Black and mixedrace people, who all see her—a richly dressed, fine lady—and wonder. This is the main cathartic scene, when Mansfield pronounces the High Court judgment for the insurers. It is the moment when Dido’s love for her surrogate father and her trust in his values are fully realized. Dido witnesses the judgment in the gallery together with other Black and mixed-race Londoners, looking down on a room full of bewigged white men. Until this moment, Dido and the maid are the only Black people who the viewer has seen in the film, outside of the family paintings where Black people occupy servile positions. In the brief shots of the courthouse gallery, we see a significant number of Black people being present and integrated into London life. This serves to inform or remind the viewer of the broader social context of race and Empire, which we have hitherto not seen. One recalls the small Black children seen in the paintings: What happened to them when they stopped being small and cute? Some were returned to the Americas for slavery

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(Byrne, 2014, 104) while others simply melted into the wider cosmopolitan population of England’s cities (Olusoga, 2016, Kindle Locations 1742–3). The people involved in the film have all stated that they believe that Dido Belle was instrumental in influencing Mansfield’s judgments on the slave question (Belle: DVD Extras, 2014). It is impossible to say whether the relationship colored Mansfield’s legal decisions, but laws are made and enforced by people, within social and cultural contexts, so it is of course possible that the personal relationship was involved in influencing the Lord Chief Justice’s perspective, if not his judicial ruling. Paula Byrne’s conclusion is that “the spirit of the film is true to the astonishing story of Dido’s bond with Lord Mansfield” (Byrne, 2014, 238). However, there is absolutely no evidence that Dido Belle actively did anything whatsoever for the anti-slavery cause, even after Mansfield’s death in 1793, when she married. This is interesting because the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787 by Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and others, was having some success in spreading anti-slavery sentiments around England (Reddie, 2007, 142–3). The racist attitudes described in the film are clearly expressed but would have been much stronger. In the marriage subplot, it seems improbable that someone of Oliver Ashford’s social standing would have thought of marrying an illegitimate woman of color, even if she had a fortune, let alone made a formal proposal. Mixed-race marriages did happen in Georgian England but they tended to happen at a lower level on the class scale. Michael Fisher has shown how marriages between Indians in England and white English people were not infrequent but did not happen among the gentry (Fisher, 2004, 160–4). Paula Byrne notes the instance of Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s heir. As an educated man of African origins, Barber, like Equiano, married a white Englishwoman, and as Byrne points out both “are examples of successful interracial marriages”; however, she goes on to point out that mixed-race marriages in this era tended not to be problematic because they primarily occurred among the working classes (Byrne, 2014, 232–4). Byrne also cites the case of a white footman named John McDonald who “felt himself unworthy of a black woman called Sally Percival, not because of her race but because she was wealthy, having been left an inheritance by her former master” (Byrne, 2014, 234). John Davinier, as a steward, was a type of senior servant, better understood today as the manager of a gentleman’s household. His elevated status suited his marriage to a woman who was essentially the Mansfield chatelaine.3 On the other hand, it is clear from T homas Hutchinson observed in his diary entry for August 19, 1779, that “She is a sort of Superintendent over the dairy, poultry yard, &c., which we visited, and she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said.”

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Hutchinson’s account that Dido was socially welcomed in the household, though not dining formally when guests were present. This was considered unusual enough for Hutchinson to remark upon it and to repeat what he had heard about the Mansfield situation. Hutchinson was a guest but not a close friend; Mansfield’s close friends do not seem to have remarked upon it at all. Racism is expressed overtly through the characters of the Ashford family. The Ashford mother (Miranda Richardson) and brother James (Tom Felton) are strongly racist (though the mother is venal enough to accept Dido for her fortune) and the suitor, Oliver Ashford (James Norton), though not as overtly racist as his family, clearly objectifies and sexualizes her as an “exotic.” In one deeply unpleasant scene, James Ashford, angry that she is to marry his brother, behaves violently toward Dido and is clearly aroused by his own brutality. After speaking to her abusively, he reaches out and caresses her face. Terrified, she stands there, frozen. His features twisted with hate, he crushes her face with his hand and strikes her body with his other, unseen, hand. Recovering herself, but not wanting to draw attention, Dido hisses at him “How dare you? HOW DARE YOU!” and he replies, calmly, “With ease” then walks away nonchalantly. Dido— and the audience—are reminded of the fate that most Black women met under slavery: degradation, physical abuse, and rape. This short scene is constructed in such a way that the sexual violence is not made exciting or more extreme than it need be. An explicit connection is made between Ashford’s “right” to sexually abuse Dido because of her race and her gender. Slavery and its proceeds permeated countless parts of English life and culture, from the beverage at the coffee-house to sugar at tea-time. It made great fortunes for nonentities and propped up many a fading aristocratic dynasty. In the film, as in life, Mansfield has to weigh up the legal case for judgment against the slave interests, but take into account the sheer power of the pro-slavery lobby which included not only the planters but merchants and city traders and all those who profited from the Atlantic trade. One example is the plantation owner, writer, and sybarite William Beckford of Fonthill, author of the Gothic novel Vathek. One of the richest men in England, he inherited enormous wealth and spent it quickly, mostly on luxury and riotous living. One of his extravagances was a party in which he hired the painter and scenographer Philip James de Loutherbourg to create a fantastic image and light show; the artist produced a terrifying “pandaemonium” for Beckford’s guests. Loutherbourg was also the deviser of the Eidophusikon, a significant stage in the development of the moving-picture show. In fact, Beckford’s fee paid for the preparation of the

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second season of the Eidophusikon and the “pandaemonium” was featured there (McCalman, 2005, passim). So one could argue that, as with so much of English cultural development, the earliest history of the cinema was at least partially financed by the proceeds of slavery. Writer Misan Sagay states that “from the outset, even though I was dealing with class and race and even slavery, I wanted to write a love story, not a hate story” (Sagay, 2014). Sagay and Asante took a different approach to that of films such as 12 Years a Slave and made a conscious decision not to include depictions of the slave trade, avoiding the brutal scenes of other dramas. And it was difficult to finance a film with a Black female protagonist. Asante told Julie Walker in The Root, “What I wanted to do was make an Austen-esque typical period drama, where I could put a woman of color front and center and prove it could be done. If I had made it a much harsher movie, that would not have proved those types of period dramas could contain a black woman front and center and could work” (Walker, 2014). The timeline in the film adjusts the historical record by making the portrait, which was painted in 1779, before the Zong case, appear completed in 1783. The narrative deliberately omits any mention of the earlier Somerset vs. Stewart case, which was the first judgment of Mansfield’s over slavery, and which was, if anything, much more dramatic in terms of the slavery question than the later Zong case which is featured in the film. In this case, Mansfield found that the common law in England and Wales did not in fact offer any support for chattel slavery: no legal terms of slavery in England and Wales existed (Olusoga, 2016, chapter 4). It is in the Somerset case that Mansfield made his famous pronouncement that he would “let justice be done, though the heavens may fall” (Reddie, 2007, 142). The script borrows some of the text of Mansfield’s Somerset judgment: The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law. . . . It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged. (Howell’s State Trials, 1771)

What is Mansfield’s legacy in the history of the abolition of slavery? David Oldham writes that “Popular history often credits Lord Mansfield with freeing the slaves in England by his decision in the Somerset case. That he did not do so is by now agreed and is a point featured in modern scholarship on slavery”

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(Oldham, 1988, 45). In his reevaluation of Mansfield’s judgments he concludes that “Mansfield was caught in the middle. He was genuinely ambivalent about the subject of slavery. He accepted and endorsed the widely assumed mercantile importance of the slave trade, yet he doubted the validity of theoretical justifications of slavery, and he sought to redress instances of individual cruelty to slaves” (Oldham, 1988, 45). He seems to have been genuinely opposed to the principle of slavery but also, as a jurist, very alert to the domestic ramifications of abolition. Though Oldham’s research on Mansfield’s slavery judgments predates the renewed interest in the Dido Belle connection, he does cite Hutchinson’s diary but notes that Mansfield “did not tell Governor Hutchinson that Dido was Lindsay’s own child” (Oldham, 1988, 66). Oldham concludes that Mansfield’s judgments were indeed highly significant, not least because they opened the way for the abolition movement and offered slaves the opportunity to assert their freedom in England. Belle’s title character is played by then-unknown Gugu Mbatha-Raw; it can be a great benefit to a film, having an unknown historical figure played by an actor with no star text. However, a film with such historical gravitas also required actors with some known quality. Tom Wilkinson is a highly versatile British actor who has made a strong career playing a wide variety of roles in both British and US productions. He has had roles in many popular “costume” dramas notably Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) and Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998). As we have seen, Wilkinson was Jacob van Ruijven in Girl with a Pearl Earring, playing the art collector as a lecher. Wilkinson has played several significant historical roles; in recent years he has taken on real-life roles as he appeared as Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014) and as barrister Richard Rampton in Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016), demonstrating that he can project the gravitas needed for a role like Mansfield. There is no clear “star text” visual rhetoric attached to a Wilkinson appearance in a film; his characters cannot be presupposed. Throughout his career Wilkinson plays both “heroic” and malign characters, so his appearance in a film does not indicate to the viewer which way his character will turn, an advantage in Belle for those who do not know anything about the real Mansfield. Emily Watson, who plays Lady Mansfield, is a respected and versatile actor with a career path of challenging character roles, though in recent years she often portrays benevolent or positive characters. Her Lady Mansfield is younger than the real woman, who was born in 1704 and therefore would have been almost eighty, as indeed was Lord Mansfield (born 1705). Lady Mansfield died in 1784, the year after the Zong

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case. However, Hutchinson notes in 1779 that although she “must be about 80— has the powers of her mind still firm, without marks of decay: her dress perfectly simple and becoming her age—is said to be benevolent and charitable to the poor. . . . How pleasing, because natural, Lady Mansfield’s appearance!” Watson plays the role much in this manner, as a direct and intelligent woman, practicing the social mores but not trapped by them. Tom Felton’s star text infuses his performance as the unpleasant aristocrat James Ashford. Felton is best known for his portrayal of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. In terms of pathognomy, Felton’s performance of Ashford includes many of the same expressions and gestures—especially the supercilious, sneering lip—that he employed as Malfoy. This is not inappropriate: both characters are designed to be examples of arrogant, entitled, privileged white males—in stark contrast to the lower-middle-class Potter, the intellectual Davinier or the mixed-race Dido. The film set of Kenwood House is filled with paintings. These are all portraits; we see (clearly, at least) no history paintings or landscapes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the real Mansfield does not seem to have collected art; books were his passion. The inventory of Kenwood before its sale contains few paintings and none of the note apart from family portraits. (The current collection at Kenwood is the unrelated Iveagh Bequest.) Mansfield did commission and sit for several portraits and pictures. As we have seen, this was normal for someone in his prominent public position. Mansfield was painted twice by John Singleton Copley. In 1778 Copley painted Watson and the Shark showing a violent real-life shark attack, which was described to him by the victim. It shows Copley’s understanding of painting the cinematic moment, as the men in the boat desperately try to hang onto and pull the panicking Watson aboard while the shark is only inches from his head. It is as realistic as it could be without being gory; the real-life Watson lost his leg to the shark, and Copley shows the mutilated leg under the water. The painting was well received, and, although making most of his income from portrait painting, Copley was determined to take on another major history subject, possibly influenced by the phenomenal success of his friend Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770). He decided, in 1781, to paint the moment William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, collapsed during a debate in the House of Lords (he later died). As we have seen in the second chapter, Copley understood there were opportunities for exhibiting art and shrewdly reasoned that people would pay money to see such a sensational picture. Accordingly, he rented a

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space to display it, specially lit, mounted, and hung with velvet drapes—much like a cinema screen. The plan was to use this spectacle to sell prints, and the plan worked (Kamensky, 2016, 302). One reason the picture was so successful is that Copley painstakingly painted fifty-five real portraits into the picture, one for each of the Lords. Mansfield, who was a political adversary of Chatham, is shown among them. Mansfield has a very dramatic role in the picture: while the rest of the Lords rise or otherwise show alarm at Chatham’s collapse, he remains seated, shockingly indifferent. Jane Kamensky observes that “Most of the individual portraits were not only striking likenesses, but strongly marked with character: that is both particular and transcendent. Lord Mansfield’s portrait was said, sardonically, to outdo the original” (Kamensky, 2016, 305). Despite depicting Mansfield’s laconic indifference to Chatham’s plight, Copley must have pleased the jurist, because in 1783 he commissioned Copley to paint a large portrait. The historical record doesn’t say, but could there possibly have been a meeting of minds between the painter and Lord Mansfield? One thing that is striking in Watson and the Shark is the fact that one of the sailors is Black, and in contrast to most paintings of Black people at the time, he is not painted in a subordinate position. He is positioned head-to-head at an equal height to the white sailor holding the harpoon, at the top of the composition. Edgar Wind describes the painting as showing “the negro [sic] leading the rescue party” (Wind, 1938, 119). From the seventeenth century until the twentieth, when Black people were represented in art, they were usually represented in a subordinate position. Copley does not do this. His later Death of Major Pierson, 6 January 1781 (painted in 1783) is one of the most cinematic British history paintings made in the eighteenth century. It depicts the French attempt to seize the island of Jersey. In the battle, the young major was killed by a French sniper, and immediately Pierson’s Black manservant shot the sniper dead. Copley presents an active Black hero, possibly the first one in Western painting. The dead major is in the center of the painting, as women and children flee in terror on the right. The active hero, said to be named Pompey, stands out due to his black uniform, and strong diagonal body position. Like the sailor in Watson, he is shown in absolute equality with the white soldiers, using his weapon and shooting down the enemy. Jane Kamensky, Copley’s biographer, notes that it is “impossible to say if Copley meant, with this revolutionary image, to ally himself with the rising tide of antislavery sentiment in England. It would be convenient to think so . . . [but] there is no evidence that he enjoined any of the groups then organizing and supporting

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abolition” (Kamensky, 2016, 323–4). However, she goes on to reflect that while he was working on Major Pierson, Copley was also painting Mansfield’s portrait, and presumably coming into contact with Dido Belle (Kamensky, 2016, 324–5). If the film veers between history and romance, what about its visual authenticity? The film is not lavish but there is great attention to detail. The scenes are confined to only a few locations: we see Bristol’s docks briefly, the Mansfield homes at Kenwood and Bloomsbury,4 the High Court, New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall (renamed Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1785), and a stretch of working-class Kentish Town where the abolitionists meet and Dido walks with Davinier. All these locations were constructed by the production designer Simon Bowles. A set was built on the Isle of Man. The street was made up of a series of archways and overhead walkways with an inn facade at the end. To create the canal-side scene I removed some of the archways and shot the scene featuring the waterway below. When creating Bristol Docks I removed all the archways, dressed in ships and featured the view away from the inn so looking out at the real sea view on location. (Bowles n.d.)

These sets have a wealth of material detail and are sufficiently populated by extras that, though glimpsed only briefly, offer a sense of period authenticity that satisfies the viewer’s desire for realism. Kenwood itself was undergoing restoration at the time, returning sections of the house to the original design of Scottish architect Robert Adam as it was first commissioned by Lord Mansfield. This was actually advantageous to the film, as the pre-restoration Kenwood was not very authentic. Adam was remarkable because he was not only an architect, he also controlled every aspect of the design of the places he built or renovated, down to the details of the decor. The production was filmed in different stately homes to make up Kenwood House: Chiswick House and the Adam-designed Syon Park and Osterley Park in London. Bowles and Asante were able to exert some freedom in designing the interiors, based on research into Adam’s designs. They chose the color schemes and style that fit with Adam’s light and airy pastel-toned interpretation of the neoclassical, and Bowles dressed each room with the desired furniture, art, and textiles. Some of the colors were altered digitally in post-production (Bowles n.d.). Bowles’s website has detailed views of his set design, as he transformed In fact, the Mansfield home was attacked and badly damaged in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the family never returned to it, remaining at Kenwood.

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bare rooms into fully dressed sets, replicating as much as possible the light and clarity of Robert Adam’s design for Kenwood, though with much more gilt and faux-marble than Adam would have wanted. Large, strategically placed mirrors were a feature of Adam’s designs and are prominent in the real Kenwood’s restoration, but Bowles eschews these because the script requires mirrors in a much more intimate setting, Dido and Elizabeth’s boudoir. After confronting the family portraits in the hall, and briefly and awkwardly conversing with Davinier, Dido reflects upon her ambiguous position in the household. Clearly, as she reaches adult womanhood, the anomaly of her position has become more problematic. Alone in her room, she looks at herself in her mirror in agitation. In one of the film’s most disturbing and poignant moments, she clutches at her chest and face in tears, beating and pulling at her skin. The camera moves back to reveal the luxuriously appointed room, and the heroine is seen in a wide shot from behind, hunched over with her face in her hands, utterly miserable. It is a haunting and memorable image of alienation. In a later scene Dido is in her bedroom, trying to brush her curly hair, the Black maid Mabel offers to help, but Dido initially rebuffs her. Mabel says gently, “you must start from the ends, miss.” Dido relents and the shot cuts to Dido in front of the mirror with Mabel behind her, brushing out her hair. We see the mirror, with the two Black women facing it, and Elizabeth looking on. Dido and Mabel catch each other’s eye in the glass and Dido smiles. The rhetorical device of contrast fades: here is harmony. The dim light even softens Elizabeth’s pallor, adding to the tonal effect. This is an important moment in the film because here Dido has momentarily crossed the rigid line of class to achieve a kind of racial solidarity with the maid. It is a significant step toward her self-realization as a Black person and an abolitionist. Cinematographer Ben Smithard used natural lighting as much as possible throughout the film (The History Behind the Painting, 2014), and so eschews using much in the way of warm or cool lighting or highlights and shadows in the portrayal of the characters. The principal exceptions are the deep chiaroscuro night-time scenes when Dido and Elizabeth lie in bed, alternately talking quietly about their hopes and fears for the future or lying in contemplative silence. More than lighting, composition is key to understanding the visual rhetoric of identification in the film. Since the film is built around a portrait, the theme of portraiture and the rhetorical values of portraiture are explored constantly alongside the film’s narrative. Many shots of Dido and the rest of the family frame the characters against a painting or part of a painting, constantly juxtaposing

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the past and the present. Significant to the film are the close-ups and glances between the characters, particularly Dido and Elizabeth (who form the subject of the real-life portrait), Dido and Davinier, and Dido and Mansfield. Dido’s world is very closed. She must cajole the coachman to take her to Kentish Town and to the Courts. This was not necessarily the case for women of that period, since many traveled extensively, but as an upper-class unmarried female it was almost impossible to travel alone. It also may have been too dangerous for her to be out alone as a Black woman. Mansfield makes the point of saying that the maid Mabel is “under our protection.” It is also clear that the Mansfields fear for Dido: when she goes off with Oliver Ashford at Vauxhall, Lady Mansfield worries that “people will think she has no family”—since it is only by staying physically close that Dido can be visually identified part of the Mansfield group. Throughout, the film keeps this world quite tightly focused, with many medium-close-up shots and relatively few wide shots. Aside from the clandestine meetings with Davinier in Kentish Town and the visit to the Law Court at the end of the film, we see Dido mainly at home, with one striking exception: the visit to Vauxhall Pleasure Garden. Vauxhall was a private pleasure garden for the urban gentry and upper classes, along with a substantial public from the middle classes. It was a seasonal resort of concerts, theatrical performances, and spectacle shows. As the film demonstrates, it was also a place for assignations and secret meetings and was one of the few public venues where men and women could meet with any freedom. Bowles’s set shows the nightly firework performance and concert but does not give a full sense of the way the gardens were full of art. They boasted sculptures, paintings, and unique furniture. William Hogarth held a golden pass allowing him to lead coachfuls of visitors into the Gardens (Coke and Borg, 2011, 22). The idea was a kind of commercial fête champêtre, catering to fashionable pleasure-seekers in their twenties and thirties but it was also frequented by Samuel Johnson and Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, and others in the literary scene. Entry was free and heavily scrutinized, though the different attractions within were ticketed. The Gardens offered expensive food at “supper boxes” and elaborately dressed picnic tables, each of which featured a painting of a social scene. Coke and Borg stress how even though the venue constantly strove to be highly respectable, the forested walkways were known as a good place for couples to tryst and men to meet prostitutes. It was a place of fashion and conspicuous consumption often satirized in the press. The outdoor gathering or fête champêtre probably started in Louis XIV’s court and became a popular pastime in Louis XV’s France, being a popular

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subject for the Rococo painters Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Pater and many imitators. The popularity of the fête champêtre spread quickly to England with the establishment of Vauxhall during the Restoration. Over time the gardens became more elaborate, featuring a Chinese pavilion, an orchestra that accommodated fifty musicians, follies and ruins, arches, statues, and a waterfall. It was lit at night by hundreds of lamps, as shown in the film. A contemporary wrote that “Vauxhall Gardens is peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a mixture of curious show—gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear” (Coke and Borg, 2011, 20). Vauxhall tried to be refined and attract “the quality” but it was a public place, not a private home and therefore featured the worst as well as the best. It was a risky place, where reputations could be undone, and worse. David Olusoga mentions in Black and British: A Forgotten History that the former slave and celebrated author Ignatius Sancho (1729–80) and his daughters were racially abused when they visited Vauxhall Gardens during the same period (Olusoga, 2016, chapter 3). The worries that Lady Mansfield expresses when Dido goes missing are not misplaced. Vauxhall is also where Dido and Davinier come together, which is the very beginning of their romance, in keeping with the reputation of the place as a site of romance and assignation. But it is the backdrop to the couple’s first serious discussion of the Zong case and attitudes to slavery. Of course, many of the fortunes of the persons in attendance would have been built on slavery—in trading sugar and slaves. The pleasure gardens are here deliberately incongruous, becoming a setting for Dido’s first expression of strong antislavery sentiments. The scene contrasts the gaiety of the pleasure garden with the urgent, unromantic discussion of slavery. The moment between the two is snatched, furtive, and dangerous. It is dangerous because everything—as Jane Austen makes clear throughout her oeuvre—rests upon reputation. The social rules are strict. The third theme in the film, that of female dependency, is addressed through Elizabeth’s lack of inheritance, which is not historically accurate. Although Dido Belle was well provided for, she was not an heiress by any means, but the film uses this fiction to create both an Austen-like gloss (how to marry without a “portion” or dowry) and a comment on women’s position at that moment in history. In the film, Dido is an heiress, but the Mansfields worry that marriage would lead to a drop in social status, whereas Elizabeth needs a wealthy marriage

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to maintain her social status. Dido explicitly links the position of women—of any class or color—to that of the slave. When Elizabeth observes that “we are their property” she is not merely uttering a turn of phrase: under English law at that time, females were bound by the laws of coverture. Coverture “eclipsed the legal identity of a married woman, leaving her unable to sign a contract or sue or obtain credit in her own name” (Erickson, 1993, 3). This regarded the husband and wife as one person (the “entirety”) and that one person was the husband. Therefore, the personal and property rights of the wife were suspended during the marriage and merged into that of the husband. This meant not only that she lost the capacity to make contracts, or act as an independent entity, it also meant that the husband was entitled to all the wife’s personal property, including her copyrights. An exception could be made in the dowry, which could specify that some property was for the exclusive use of the woman. If Dido did not marry, the Mansfields in the film reason, she will retain control over her inheritance, since by law any unmarried adult female was a feme sole (Erickson, 1993, 5–6). It may well be that this is the reason Dido Belle did not marry until the Earl’s death, to spare him the worry. In terms of anachronism, there is surprisingly little. The historian and Guardian film critic Alex von Tunzelmann observes of Belle’s heroine that critics who assume her black liberation and feminist lines must be a 21st-century imposition by the filmmakers are mistaken. There were prominent black and female voices expressing just such views at the time. It is not beyond historical possibility that these thoughts have been given to Dido, who was an educated woman in an unusually well-read household; and doing so allows Belle to present the position of women and of the slave trade’s by-blows in the 18th century accurately and movingly. (Tunzelmann, 2014)

Although Dido Belle herself is not recorded as having anything to do with abolitionism, certainly the sentiments expressed in the film—indeed Mansfield’s own words are used—were expressed by people at the time. There is relatively little “presentism” in the film; it does not seek to transpose modern actions onto the past. We understand that there will be no “modern” escape for the characters, they will remain in their time; accordingly, the story ends in Austen-esque fashion, with Elizabeth’s and Dido’s marriages described, without ambivalence, in the end credits. Although Belle addresses issues relevant to today—such as race and the position of women—it never offers a counter-narratives or “modern” characters.

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That Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray were well educated is a matter of record; Dido is often seen in the film carrying or reading a book. Indeed, the late eighteenth century saw the emergence of important female intellectuals such as the historian Catharine Macaulay and the writers Hester Thrale, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, in France, Germaine de Staël and Olympe de Gouges, as well as the sharp-witted literary works of Fanny Burney. The mild questioning of women’s roles that Dido and Elizabeth undertake was no doubt echoed in other homes. But Austen world goes further than the concern with marriage. There is a connection between Elizabeth Murray and Jane Austen, through Austen’s brother who was a family friend of Elizabeth Murray and her husband when the author stayed with him in 1805 (Byrne, 2014, 243–5). By then Elizabeth was married with children and although the women did not become friends, the visits must have left an impression on Austen, who went on to write Mansfield Park, which engages with the issue of slavery, and Sanditon which has a “half-Mulatto” character. Did Elizabeth talk to Jane about Dido? Did Jane see any picture or token relating to Elizabeth’s cousin? Austen was an abolitionist: Did the women discuss slavery or race at all? We will never know. These tenuous, but real and fascinating connections to Austen justify Amma Asante and Misan Sagay’s harnessing of the Austen world to the story of Dido Belle and the slavery cause. In any case, ideas were on the move and the film hints at this. Dido is shown as a “lady” of accomplishment after being repeatedly referred to by the Ashfords as a “negro.” She is invited to play the piano, and as she does so, we see clearly that the piano lid bears a detailed landscape of a ruin. The painting shows a gathering of people, one fishing, next to a ruined castle. “In the 18th century, ruins were objects of contemplation, reverie and sober enjoyment. They were an opportunity to reflect on the passing of empires and the vanity of human effort” (Jones, 2001). The period saw a growing awareness of historical documentation, with major histories by David Hume, Catherine Macaulay, and Edward Gibbon. Scientific excavations of sites like Pompeii, whose excavation began in 1748, also affected the interest in ruins, as did the “Grand Tour” of Italy, where the upper classes took in the cultural legacy of classical antiquity. Frequently “created” as well as found, ruins invited spectators’ reflections on transience, death, and decay (Woodward, 2003, passim). We can see the ruin in the context of this scene, as an indication that old attitudes, such as the prejudice of the Ashford family, will crumble away in the face of Dido’s obvious accomplishments and talents.

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Painting Embodied While the Dido and Elizabeth painting is the only one yet known to portray a Black woman together with a white woman in a non-servile position in eighteenth-century painting, one notices interesting developments in portrait painting of women in the same century. Reynolds’s exhortation to paint “in the Grand Manner” led him and several others to expand their imaginations and paint their sitters into complex, often symbolic scenes. The painting of Dido and Elizabeth posing as equals, side by side, is no less complex and symbolic though it appears to be a simple “conversation piece.” But, like Copley’s history painting Major Pierson, the embodied Black person here is expressed in a way that is very different from conventional depictions of servility, as does the painting of a surgeon and his Black assistant by an anonymous painter in 1780s London (Figure 6.2). Zoffany’s portrait of Hasan Reza Khan, minister to Asaf al-Daula of Oudh (1784), does the same, as does his Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match (1784–6), which shows a large, expressive, and fully individuated crowd of Indian people. These pictures offer up active Black subjects who engage with the viewer rather than serve the white subject, if there is one. Pompey is performing a heroic act, not to serve the dead Pierson but in his capacity as a military agent. Reza Khan has not been “westernized” or exoticized, but commands respect and attention: an image of power. And the crowd at the cock match are not even interested in the clique of Englishmen lounging on the right-hand side of the frame. The Englishmen have invaded their space, attending their entertainment; they are tolerated but are not (yet) dominating. I would argue that the presence of the fully embodied Black subject in these paintings offers a rare visual manifestation of an alternative view of race and color, a view expressed by Beattie in his eloquent rejection of slavery and racism, The Elements of Moral Science, published in 1817. Beattie, who had met Dido when she was ten, asserted that “I will not admit that any benefits derived from the trade of the western world, though they were ten thousand times greater than they are, can ever justify our enslaving and destroying black men” (Beattie, 1817, 639). Unlike the supplicating slave in the famous Wedgewood anti-slavery medallion, the best-known visual image of the abolition movement, these paintings offer a strong and positive view of Black personhood. They operate rhetorically as arguments for the dignity of the Black person.

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Figure 6.2  A Surgeon and His Black Assistant Letting Blood from a Lady’s Arm. Oil painting by an English painter c. 1780. Wellcome Collection. One of several painted depictions of eighteenth-century Black Britons.

When Misan Sagay (Sagay, 2014) writes that “film is the major narrative art form of today; we all share memories and are joined together because of it,” she is indicating that the history writing in a film like Belle is as vital and necessary to our understanding as the “proper” history in books. The connection between art, cinema, and history is well expressed in this film. So many paintings show the passive role and low status of Black people in England at the time, with only two outstanding exceptions: Dido Belle and Copley’s Pompey. Historians have worked to put the pieces together and uncover the mystery of who Dido Belle was, and her relationship to the Mansfield judgments, but it is cinema that pulls the story into place and communicates it to the wider public. The sheer interest in Dido Belle’s story—seen in the revamped displays

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at Kenwood, and their use in education programs—attests to the film’s current value in disseminating knowledge not only about the history of slavery but also about themes of integration, the rule of law, and self-acceptance. Belle also offers a different and powerful narrative of the position and perspective of women in history. The film recognizes paintings as a record of the past, which can reveal truths, but, told as the story of the process of one painting, demonstrates that these truths can be challenged in life. As becomes clearer with repeated viewings, there is something radically counter-hegemonic in Asante’s Belle, in its assertion of the Black body coming into political self-acceptance framed within the familiar genre of a British period drama.5 The following, and final, chapter turns to the subject of anachronism in the historical film. Anachronism is unavoidable in trying to “recreate” the past, and so far we have looked at it in the context of realism. The following case studies examine films which deliberately use art in relation to anachronism and concepts of time, to say something about history, purposefully tweaking the idea of “realism.”

In Cinematic Geopolitics, Michael J. Shapiro (2009, passim) argues that films are capable of effecting actual sociopolitical change without “preaching” specific ideas. While he does not discuss the historical film genre, he emphasizes the way that such films can formally challenge the perceptual limits of their spectator-subject, as can be seen in Belle, where the viewer is placed in close proximity to the marginalized protagonist. The recognition Dido Belle’s story has received upon the release of the film, which coincides with an emerging interest in Black British history (with works by Miranda Kaufman, David Olusoga, S.I. Martin, and others) supports Shapiro’s view of the value of film narrative as a way of communicating progressive ideas, even if the ideas actually presented in the film are themselves not fresh or radical (anti-slavery is hardly a new idea).

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These discussions of realism and the sublime have acknowledged the issue of anachronism, which we can define as the condition of being “out of time.”1 The previous chapters have examined anachronism as a potential problem of accuracy and authenticity in film realism. Now we take another route and examine anachronism in the historical film as a strategy, used to question, comment upon, or subvert the illusion of “the past” created in the film. Here, the term “anachronism” will refer not to mistakes or “bloopers” but to filmic strategies of depicting time and the meanings thereby revealed. This chapter’s case studies will also explore the role of art in relation to time. As has been shown, the presence of painterly techniques—references, adaptations, and evocations—itself alludes to anachronism, pulling an artifact from the past into a framework created in the present and designed to be experienced in the future. So, for example, the reference to Millet’s Gleaners in Meek’s Cutoff is anachronistic as a nineteenth-century image used to create a composition for a twenty-first-century film. This is so common it is almost unnoticeable, as is Admiral’s use of an eighteenth-century museum ship in a seventeenth-century sea battle. Therefore, the focus here is on deliberate, even aggressive, anachronism that communicates specific, often problematic, questions or observations. We might think of history as Iain Chambers, writing in Third Text (2018), does, “as a cultural and conceptual construction contaminated by the present and [. . .] continually being rewritten.” As we reassemble the materials of history, we find that we cannot recreate the past, and whatever we do is bound by anachronism. This position of anachronism is interesting in itself; it is not an The Chambers Dictionary (1990): anachronism is “anything out of keeping with chronology”; alternatively, it is “a person, thing, or idea that exists out of its time in history” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2019).

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aberration but rather a constant presence. Anachronism in the historical film has been under-researched to date. The question of where anachronism belongs within the practice—if there is a practice—of historiophoty also needs to be addressed.2 Some films have invited discussion of specific anachronisms, but a larger consideration of anachronic elements in the historical film is still to be written.

Time and History Having a concept of anachronism depends on one’s concept of chronology. In Time in History, G. J. Whitrow claims that in antiquity only the Romans seem to have any notion of anachronism (Whitrow, 1988, 158). Though there is some evidence that the concept was understood during the Renaissance, it did little to restrict, for example, Shakespeare’s history plays or Julius Caesar’s notorious striking of a clock, which is both anachronistic and a key plot point. By the eighteenth century, the notion of anachronism as something to avoid led to the introduction of period costumes in the theater (Whitrow, 1988, 158). As historical painting flourished, artists wanted the material detail as correct as possible (Strong, 2004, 8). There formed a tradition that occupied a large part of the nineteenth century’s arts. As I have argued, the historical film developed very early in cinema history, borrowing from theatrical and painterly conventions already established, with a greater or lesser awareness of anachronism in different productions. Hans Kellner (2014, 237) refers to what he calls a chronoschism, defined as “a split in time, the creation of distance that can be used to make a case.” He also mentions chronochasms, which are huge gaps in time, over which we can look, “in a position to oversee the outcomes of events and thus understand their meaning” (Kellner, 2014, 240). Deliberate anachronism in films, then, tends to operate as a set of chronoschisms—as incidents in the film that manipulate time as they serve the narrative, making the case for the kind of history presented in the film. There is also one big chronoclasm, which is the viewer’s experience of the construction of the past, which we are invited to comprehend and (often) judge. As discussed in the Introduction, Hayden White (1988) and Eleftheria Thanouli (2019, 13) have both advocated for historiophoty (visual “history-ing”) in historical film. In any case, acknowledgment of the creative possibilities and utility of anachronism must be part of the discussion.

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There are always at least three levels of time in any historical film: the time in which the movie is made; the time depicted in the film; and the historical time which existed, which can never be recaptured or recreated, not even by academic historians. The three levels are simultaneously engaged and active. Moreover, all films, always, play with time; it is a time-based medium, capable of flashbacks, flash-forward, repetitions, jump cuts, and other fissures in time. No other art form could ever play with time in quite the same way. While object-based artworks such as paintings and sculptures can change due to time (be altered, decayed, eroded, or just be viewed differently) film can play with time itself in the actual making of the film. We take these anachronic timefissures for granted, but they are potentially in the toolbox of any filmmaker. They appear across all genres of films, even the most apparently realistic, and are part of the basic language of film. Therefore it is necessary to understand how anachronisms can be used in the historical film to manipulate a sense of the past. In the absence of a body of theoretical work on film anachronism, the question arises: Can other approaches relevant to historical representation help to examine anachronism in the historical film?3 I have briefly mentioned the historical novel, mainly as a source text for historical film, but now I want to ask: Can rhetorical studies of the historical novel be helpful if applied to visualrhetoric analysis? In “The Rhetoric of Anachronism” Joseph Luzzi considers the rhetorical frameworks of anachronism in literature, and it is worth thinking about how these might operate in cinema. We can begin with “necessary anachronism” as explained by Goethe, who points out that “the poet cannot report past events without imparting his own moral world view to his characters, even when he purports to distill their essence” (Luzzi, 2009, 71). We see this in all films, try as we might we cannot escape interpreting the past in terms of the present: it is impossible to view—or make—12 Years a Slave (2013, dir. Steve McQueen) in the way that people of the time would have understood it. The necessary anachronism also, according to Goethe, “domesticates the semi-barbaric past” by making it seem familiar (Luzzi, 2009, 71). This familiarization allows us to identify with characters and Although it has limited use in this analysis, a useful philosophical discussion of anachronism in art is “Time out of Joint: Some Reflections on Anachronism,” which suggests that “anachronisms can be virtuous if they serve some clear artistic purpose. However, anachronisms which serve worthwhile artistic purposes may nonetheless be thought vicious if these purposes are seen as subordinate to historical truths” (Barnes and Barnes, 1989, 260).

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situations from the past. However, there is a risk that these kinds of “familiarizing” anachronisms become clichés; one example might be the tendency for characters in historical films to have British accents, even if the film is set in ancient Rome (McGhee and Lerer, 2018). Georg Lukâcs wrote that the “necessary anachronism” could allow the novel’s characters to “express feelings and thoughts about real, historical relationships in a much clearer way than the actual men and women of the time could have done” (Lukács, 1963, 63). To Lukâcs, the protagonists of the historical novel have a kind of self-consciousness that involves an awareness of their place in historical processes. Film rarely does this by engaging the characters’ appreciation of anachronism directly, but sometimes uses a character’s voiceover, as in Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola) or Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1990). More often, it is the viewer to whom the necessary anachronism is directed, not the character, via a period referent that the viewer will relate to as having more meaning than the protagonist would understand. The viewer is invited to comprehend the necessary anachronism through the film’s visuals or soundtrack, offering the opportunity to perceive elements the characters are not aware of as anachronic. Lukâcs points out that “the possibility of ‘necessary anachronism’ is much greater in drama than in the novel” because the drama is more concentrated upon “representing the quintessential moments of a historically authentic collision” (Lukács, 1963, 151). That is, the novel can ruminate, muse, and ponder the details of everyday life and the historical events that intrude on it; the drama has a much more limited scope. Drama focuses on delivering the “historically authentic collision” and has little room for tangents. Moreover, though Lukâcs does not say so, the drama is also delivered through visual means. And although he does not mention cinema, the same is true for historical film. Luzzi’s discussion of Henri Morier’s conceptions of the rhetoric of deliberate anachronism is even more useful.4 The anachronisme progressif is a device that introduces a “temporally impossible element into an otherwise historically verisimilar scene from the past” with the aim of charming or appealing to the audience (Luzzi, 2009, 75). Anachronistic casting, for example, applies modern standards of beauty to historical figures. We have seen in Chapter 5 how the casting and styling of Barry Atsma in Admiral made the character of Johan de Witt more appealing to a modern audience. Drawn from Morier’s Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique,. 5th ed. Paris: PUF, 1961.

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But it is Morier’s notion of anachronisme régressif, which he also calls catachronisme (regressive anachronism), that is particularly intriguing. This “catachronisme” does not “update” the past to the present but rather “situates the problems of the present in the movements of legend or history” (Luzzi, 2009, 75). This is a common approach in historical films, yet it is deeply anachronistic, and Morier explains why. By reframing contemporary problems into “the dustbin of history,” such regressive anachronisms give audiences the “unsettling impression that they are encountering events and crises that have been the same since time immemorial” (Luzzi, 2009, 75). The catachronisme not only triggers a shock of familiarity, but it also often conjures up a false equivalent between the past and present that is fundamentally ahistorical. This is one of the charges against historical films. Yet it can be deeply effective and meaningful. I will examine anachronism in the historical film, with special consideration of how the catachronisme can, when used cleverly, offer a profound link between past and present and achieve the film’s aim of engaging the audience on a political level. Deliberate anachronisms can take many forms in the historical film. They can bring clarity to the audience, get rid of clutter, and cohere the essential aspects of the story or the characters. Peter Webber has spoken about his adjustment of the dress, manners, and body language of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, simplifying the costumes and dispensing with the wigs and formal gestures because he felt that these would not be relatable to the modern audience; perhaps they may even have been rather difficult to incorporate within his film process or budget (Webber and Paterson, 2004). Other aspects of deliberate anachronism are continuity and reliability. As we have seen, Roel Reiné made a choice not to age his characters; despite Admiral covering twenty years of Dutch history, the actors do not age in any appreciable way. Audiences appear to be responsive in a positive way to this approach and it is increasingly common.5 As mentioned, the idea of beauty applied in the representation of historical characters is frequently anachronistic. Film design has to find a midpoint between appealing to the audience’s desire for an attractive character to identify with, and what we know the character actually looked like from T h is is even more noticeable in long-running historical television drama: Versailles (Superchannel, Canal+, 2015–19) covers from 1667 when Louis was twenty-nine, to about 1689 when he was about fifty-one, yet the character (George Blagden) does not age and—crucially—does not wear the distinctive and elaborate wigs Louis devised to cover his premature baldness. The Tudors (Showtime, 2008–2010) made more of an effort to age Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his courtiers.

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portraits, within the performance of attraction within the film’s story (the way the character is meant to appeal within the story, such as Anne Boleyn’s appeal to Henry VIII). Anachronism can be revealed by what is shown in contrast to what is said. For example, in the historical film The Girl King (2015, dir. Mika Kaurismäki, DP Guy Dufaux) about Queen Christina of Sweden, Christina’s lesbianism is not referred to directly within the film’s text but visually it is made quite clear from the way in which the actor Malin Buska presents the character; the same character portrayed by Greta Garbo in Queen Christina is manifested as visibly conforming to heterosexual norms of beauty of the 1930s. Clearly, neither film correctly presents the authentic Christina, but since precise information about the way the queen lived, and the specifics of her personal relationships are not in the historical record, each film adopts the anachronisms which appeal to its intended audience. Some films use deliberate, even aggressive, anachronism in order to highlight something specific. Perhaps surprisingly, Robert Rosenstone is one of the few writers on the historical film that has tried to address deliberate anachronism as a way of doing historiophoty (Rosenstone, 1995, 132–52). In Alex Cox’s Walker (1987; DP David Bridges) Cox wants to make explicit the political connection between the activities of William Walker in nineteenth-century Nicaragua and the policies of Reagan’s government in the 1980s, and employs anachronisms in order to do this. The characters are not aware of the anachronistic nature of the objects which begin to intrude upon the film’s mise-en-scène. These (frankly heavy-handed) anachronisms gradually seep into the film over time. As Walker’s actions become more and more unhinged and everything goes wrong, the twentieth century intrudes upon the film’s nineteenth-century world: characters use Zippo lighters, read Newsweek magazine, and in the penultimate scene a US Army helicopter lands in Managua to evacuate the US citizens. The reference to contemporary American culture and America’s actions in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and threats of action in Central America in the 1980s are anything but subtle. Nevertheless, as Rosenstone has shown, Cox’s film offers a version of Walker’s story that is both factual in its gist—emphasizing the film’s focus on the relationship between Manifest Destiny and violence—and revelatory in its use of anachronism. For Rosenstone, the use of anachronism—or, as Morier would put it, catachronisme—in its depiction of America’s history of violence, ensures that Walker cannot possibly be an easy “window onto history” while at the same

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time, the anachronism points to “the inevitable interpenetration of past and present” (Rosenstone, 1995, 148). More striking is the way that Georgian director Sergei Parajanov employs anachronism in his Legend of the Suram Fortress (1985, DP Yuri Klimenko). Parajanov, a painter and theater director as well as filmmaker, adapted a popular novella by Georgian writer Daniel Chonkadze from a script by Vazha Gigashvili. His eighteenth-century Georgia is a powerfully visual, highly stylized historical world that seems almost devoid of realism.6 The director here affirms his “distinctive tableau style, characterized primarily by long takes and little or no camera movement” (Oeler, 2006, 480). The tableau is a technique Parajanov uses here to “historicize” the film by presenting it almost as successive frames of visual art.7 Durmishkhan the serf leaves his village to seek his fortune to buy the freedom of his lover Vardo. Durmishkhan begins working for the wealthy merchant Osman Agha and becomes like a son to him. As the years pass, he does not return to Vardo and marries another woman, who gives birth to a boy named Zurab. Meanwhile, the abandoned Vardo becomes a mystic and fortune teller. War comes to Georgia and the defensive fortresses are rebuilt, except for the important Suram Fortress which keeps falling. Vardo reveals that the fortress will only hold if a young man agrees to be bricked up in the fortress’s walls. Zurab volunteers, sacrificing himself to save his country. This synopsis does not do even the slightest justice to the strangeness and compelling artistry of the film, which rejects most of the conventions of classical cinema8 and especially the historical film. It presents history as myth, in what Robert Efird has called “Parajanov’s byzantine cinematic style” (Efird, 2018, 467). While Robert Steffen points out that the film “emphasizes the theme of patriotism” (Steffen, 2013, 204) with the introductory titles dedicating the film to “those who have given their lives for their country,” Efird notes that “the viewer immediately senses that the story, though it never completely disappears, T h e visual design of this and his other films must be seen in a context of Russian art and design that adapted folk art and peasant culture, for example Natalia Goncharova’s theater designs. 7 Steffen writes of Parajanov, “Tableaux became his dominant technique. This technique, moreover, is integrally related to the director’s subject matter: the far-reaching history of the Transcaucasian region (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan) is presented in the manner of paintings from diverse epochs, especially miniatures from medieval Christian and Islamic manuscripts. Even when individual elements within the films refer to the present or recent past, the weight of history remains a centering, stabilizing force” [my italics] (Steffen, 2013). 8 As Efird notes, the film does offer “some adherence to the action/reaction patterns of classical narrative cinema” and there is (almost) consistent synchronization of sound with image (Efird, 2018, 466). 6

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is secondary to more intense aesthetic or philosophical concerns” (Efird, 2018, 467). Anachronism intervenes in the mythic world, which otherwise appears to be a dreamscape of rich color and extraordinary imagery. At the edge of this world lies the sea and Parajanov reveals modern Soviet oil tankers anchored offshore. In the foreground, ignoring or oblivious to the ships, performers enact a stylized kind of semaphore with a model of an eighteenth-century ship. This strange, oneiric sequence brings the present crashing into a version of the past that looks like an archaic painting, a violent and aggressive anachronism that is unnoticed by the characters and is as brief as a dream moment. The sea reappears again when Osman Agha and Durmishkhan part, by a bleak misty rainswept seashore dominated by sounds of sea birds. The shore road they walk along with their horses is paved and tarmacked; the sound of the horses’ hooves clacking on the hard surface is amplified. In the misty distance, a modern ship can be discerned at anchor. Again, the characters are not aware of the anachronism, only the audience is. Yet it is not quite catachronisme; the scenes do not update the past into the present; instead “the normal flow of time simply does not exist” (Efird, 2018, 475). This anachronism of present-into-past is part of what Efird describes as Parajanov’s “meaningful discourse on our conceptions of time, perception, and identity” (Efird, 2018, 465). It is not simply that the director draws attention to the Soviet reality of present-day Georgia, it is more that the film dislocates the idea of time itself, through presenting both static and coexistent moments in time and “blurring of the diegetic past and present with the actual time of the viewer breaking any possibility of suspending of disbelief or full immersion in the rich fantasy world of historical Georgia” (Efird, 2018, 469). Moreover, Parajanov’s painterly tableau-vivant style creates every shot as a complete frame, like a painting. There is no sense of a world outside of the frame of the screen, and this applies to every scene. The moment of the oil tankers is complete in itself; the tankers and pavement do not “exist” outside of the point at which they appear. They are joined to the film by the presence of the performers. In Suram Fortress, the real-life object from the present intrudes upon the artistically created aesthetic world that represents the past. Parajanov shows us history and the present as a simultaneous experience: ancient Georgia is modern Georgia, and modern Soviet Georgia is still dynamically engaged within its vibrant, distinctive past. While the Soviet present (represented by the gray pavement, the ships in the misty gray sea, and

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the cacophony of seabirds) is indistinct and bleak, Georgia is colorful, alive. This is the essence of Parajanov’s patriotism to which Steffen refers. It is the furthest thing from the bombastic Soviet-style patriotism of tanks and parades. Suram Fortress is not even really about a man sacrificing himself for his country. It is about the past living in the present, and how one simultaneously experiences the present and the past, living always in one’s national history. Georges Didi-Huberman (2003, 31) has written that “whenever we are before the image, we are before time.” Looking at a painting reshapes both the past and the present for the viewer. And a painting “often has more memory and more future than the being who contemplates it” (Didi-Huberman, 2003, 33). We can certainly see how this operates in those films that invoke actual paintings within the mise-en-scène. It is worth considering how the juxtaposition of art and reality operates within anachronism in the historical film. In Admiral, Belle and Girl with a Pearl Earring the appearance of the real paintings in the film provokes a sense of shock, a sudden awareness of time. In Admiral, a painting of Johan de Witt appears within the film’s diegesis; in Belle and Girl with a Pearl Earring, the reallife paintings of the Girl and Dido Belle appear in the film’s epilogue. In all cases, anachronism breaks the illusion of the film world as a recreation of the past, drawing attention to its artificiality by revealing the real painting. The real Johan de Witt does not look like Barry Atsma and the real Dido Belle does not look like Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Anachronism can be seen in the difference between the actors who appear in the film and the authentic paintings of the people who become characters played by the actors. In Peter Webber’s rendering of The Girl with a Pearl Earring great care is taken to make the actor Scarlett Johansson resemble—as much as is physically possible—the face and costume of the tronie (the painting is not believed to be of any particular person). More than that: she is styled to look like a typical Dutch woman of her social class, based not only upon paintings but also upon inventories and other available information. However, in the case of Admiral and Belle, it is made clear that the casting of the film and the costuming of the characters were very deliberate and anachronic in relation to the existing paintings of the real-life people. The reallife Dido Belle has quite a different story from that of the fictive Belle in the movie. The real Belle was essentially Lord Mansfield’s châtelaine and was not on the marriage market. The dress she wears in Martin’s painting draws attention to her “exoticness” contrasting with the more conventional Elizabeth. Dido Belle’s features have been delineated with a narrow nose and thin lips, unlike the

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fictive portrait which resembles Mbatha-Raw. The fictive painting is therefore significantly different from the real one revealed at the end. While Roel Reiné has done a good job in transforming Frank Lammers into Michiel de Ruyter, Barry Atsma’s golden-haired, charismatic Johan de Witt appeals more to the modern sensibility than the long-faced, dark-haired real politician, who is revealed by a portrait in a late scene when William confronts de Ruyter. We can call these deliberate anachronisms necessary adjustments to win over audiences and help them to understand and empathize more deeply with the characters. However, each of these films (at or near the end of the film) confronts the audience with the real-life painting. This has the effect of destabilizing the viewer, pushing them out of the film world and into an awareness of the true story, which is available through the historical record, just as the paintings are available to view.

Ancient and Modern in Egyptian Cinema Until now I have focused on the relationship between cinema and painting in the visual presentation of history by examining a range of European and American films, and many more could be discussed in the same vein. However, in discussing anachronism in the historical film, and its relation to visual art, it is fruitful to consider films made outside of the Eurosphere of cinema culture. Instead of continuing to study Western cinema, I briefly examine Hussein Kamal’s Chatter on the Nile (1971), which depicts the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, before focusing on al-Mumya’ (The Mummy: The Night of Counting the Years) directed by Shadi Abdel Salam (1969, released in 1975; DP Abdel Aziz Fahmy). Both films examine the Egyptian relationship with the Pharaonic past, making it clear that this relationship is problematic and challenging in the modern world of the filmmakers’ present. Egypt has a cinema history as substantial as that of Europe and America and was historically influenced by Italian cinema. It is not disconnected from European cinema: French and Italian residents were active agents in setting up early Egyptian film making and many Egyptians trained and worked at Cinecittà in Italy.9 By the 1950s neorealism had a strong influence over Egyptian cinema, with the production of films such as Cairo Station (1958, dir. Youseff Chahine). In the absence of a comprehensive study on Egyptian cinema history, see Shafik (2001).

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In the mid-1950s Egypt overthrew British colonial hegemony and fell out with the dominant Western powers following the invasion of Suez in 1956. The period of socialism under Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to reframe postcolonial Egyptian national identity, and the films discussed here critically engage with that challenge (Shafik, 1998, 25–7). For much of Egypt’s colonial history—from the Mamluks to Nasser (1250– 1953)—there was, in Egypt, relatively little popular or artistic expression referring to the ancient Pharaonic culture.10 Europeans dominated the archaeological field of discoveries.11 Not only that, Europeans also appropriated much of Ancient Egypt’s iconography, referencing it in fashion, architecture, and esoteric practices. Invented ideas about Egyptian mummies and curses proliferated in fiction and cinema. This wholesale takeover of Egypt’s past came to be known as Egyptomania, and it has had a lasting impact on the movies in the form of the Mummy film. During the period of postwar independence and the founding of the Republic of Egypt (1952), the ancient past came to be celebrated, especially during the period of the relocation of antiquities during the building of the High Dam (1960–70), which led to a renewed popular consciousness of the ancient world in Egyptian culture. Sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar created, in 1928, Egypt Awakening, a huge granite monument of a woman lifting her veil, standing beside a sphinx, a triumphant representation of Egypt’s past and present. At the same time, easel painting in Egypt, which started around the end of the nineteenth century, saw Egyptian artists move from depictions of rural life12 to incorporating motifs from Pharaonic art into their work.13 Some, like the Egyptologist and mystic Lotfy El Tanbouli (1919–82), did both: in his canvases, peasant life is played out with the Pyramids and Pharaonic temples in the background, much as it does in Shadi Abdel Salam’s film.

T h ree of Naguib Mahfouz’s earliest novels (1939–44) and the late Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth (1985) were set in ancient Egypt but were not adapted into films. 11 Moreover, the image of Egypt in art was created by Europeans like Horace Vernet and Jean-Léon Gérôme. 12 Which included a range of approaches from realism to Impressionism and post-Impressionism and, with the Art and Liberty Group, surrealism (Bardaouil, 2017; Bardaouil and Felrath, 2016). In all cases, the works were not “copies” of European painting but were the result of observation and interpretation of Egypt’s particularities of landscape and visual culture. See Al-Qassemi’s 2017 essay “The Politics of Egyptian Fine Art.” 13 T h is also includes visual compositions that play with the idea of “monumentalism,” for example Kamel el-Telmisany (Bardaouil, 2017, 85) and what painter Ramses Younane called “Subjective Realism” (Bardaouil and Felrath, 2016, 127). 10

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The core of Egyptian modernism is expressed by Elliot Colla (2009, 117) as the foundations for a culture of redeemed origins. The paradox of this claim is that the categories of the rural and the traditional serve to lend authenticity to those of the urban and the modern but only when the traditional has been reminded—by the more developed ejfendiyya [educated class]—of its own true, ancient origins. The result would be a culture in which all differences would be sublimated into unities and continuities. That is to say, in claiming and valuing the distant past as the “true” Egypt, the outward-looking intelligentsia restores to the deracinated, ignorant, and alienated rural peasant his “original culture.” As Youssef Rakha observes, “Colonialism was unjust and humiliating, but it also underwrote a certain degree of cosmopolitanism.” (Rakha, 2020, 103) Alongside the modernizing efforts of the nineteenth-century khedives and the colonial powers, the opportunity to study and work abroad brought different perspectives to the Egyptian upper and middle classes, and this included an appetite for visual art. In Modernism on the Nile, Alex Dika Seggerman describes Egyptian modernism as a “constellation” by which she means that it is founded in, and framed by, a specific, finite, and important set of connections. Within the limits available to Egyptian artists—grounded in culture, tradition, economy, education, politics, and personal relationships—a small but increasingly significant modernism formed between 1879 and 1967, supported by connections within Egypt and with significant elements outside of Egypt (Seggerman, 2019, 6). Artists “not only followed a transnational circuit but also actively incorporated those connections” in their works. Seggerman makes it clear that Egyptian artists’ use of “Western” forms and motifs were neither copying from nor trying to be European. Instead, they adapted, transposed, critiqued, and sometimes rejected the art and ideas with which they came into contact, in order to develop a modernism that spoke to and of the Egyptian experience and experience which included colonialism, war (the two world wars as well as the wars with Israel), liberation, Islam, foreign education, socialism, and the Pharaonic past. One of the most celebrated pictures of the optimistic, Nasserist turn in Egyptian modernism is The High Dam (1964) by Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar (1925– 66), which is unfortunately lost.14 This iconic painting, which was influenced by

Egyptian modernist painting reflected a renewed interest in peasant life and folk culture. Unfortunately, there is no core text on Egyptian modernist art. See Nada Shabout (2007) and Liliane Karnouk (1988; 2005).

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Egyptian Surrealism,15 merges Pharaonic motifs with an oblique representation of Nasser and a paean to the modernization project, or “art in the context of local nationalism and universal modernism,” which “aimed to bridge past traditions and the global-universal aspirations of the time” (Shalem, 2013, 22). According to Avinoam Shalem, al-Gazzar’s painting “illustrates a moment in the Egyptian history of art in which a radical change occurred, as artists, torn between tradition and modernity, adjusted their individual creative language to the culture of the masses, aiming to establish a new ideal image for the nation” (Shalem, 2013, 23). Only a few years later, Egyptian filmmakers would profoundly question this idea. Director Hussein Kamal’s Chatter on the Nile (1971, DP Mostapha Emam) portrays disillusioned former teacher and anti-colonial activist Anis Zaki (Imad Hamdi) adrift in the modern world. A boring bureaucratic job is made barely tolerable by his habit of smoking hashish. Unexpectedly meeting the younger Ragab (Ahmed Ramzy), a former student, now a popular actor, Anis is drawn into the actor’s world of Bohemian intelligentsia, men and women brought together by their cynicism, disconnectedness, and love of hashish. Each night the group convenes on the actor’s Nile houseboat to smoke, seduce, and sneer at the world that has no place for them except as entertainers. After a particularly delirious smoking session the group makes a road trip to Saqqara to see the ancient artifacts. Coming across a fallen Pharaoh statue (Ramses II at Dendera), the stoned group clamber onto it like children, reveling in their disrespect to “the ancestors.” Soon afterward Ragab, driving the car, accidentally runs over and kills a local peasant woman and they flee the scene. Later, Samara, a journalist Ragab hopes to seduce, joins the group in order to write an exposé of the decadence of the Egyptian intelligentsia. She herself is on the point of being drawn into the group’s pleasure-seeking ways, but is shocked by the revelations of the car accident and, worse, the attitude of the group—except Anis—to it. She and Anis visit the ruins of the front at Suez (the film is set just after the 1967 SixDay War, but the characters are oblivious to current events). The film does not resolve the characters: the Bohemian group continues to party even as the boat is cut adrift from its mooring by Ragab’s disgusted servant; sober at last, Anis is last seen as he was in the opening scene: once again a “a lost soul in a concrete See Bardaouil Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (2017) for a full discussion of the Egyptian surrealism movement which was associated with, but distinct from, the European.

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jungle” (Hossam, 2015), wandering the streets of Cairo ranting to himself about the state of the world and repeatedly confessing the crime to the deaf ears of the passersby, Samara wordlessly following him. Chatter on the Nile is not a “historical film” in the sense of the other films addressed in this book, but it deals with a significant recent historical moment, the short period immediately following the end of the Six-Day War. While a historical film is a presentation of past events, Chatter on the Nile not only tells us something of that past (the final stage of Nasser’s Egypt) but uses the ancient past—in the strong imagery of Pharaonic art and the ruins of war—to make points about the present. The film is based on Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Adrift on the Nile16 and follows the story quite faithfully, except the scenes in Saqqara and Suez. This former scene is key to the whole film, and shifts the thematic focus from Mahfouz’s 1966 original themes of nihilism and spiritual emptiness among the present-day intelligentsia to a much more political examination of Egyptians’ sense of national identity and personal responsibility, which is then reinforced by the scene showing the (real) devastation of Suez. The war is referenced by a close-up on a newspaper article early in the film and by Anis and Samara’s visit to the devastated ruins of Suez near the end of the film. The film was released after the death of Nasser in 1970 and was subsequently banned by Sadat as being too critical of the Nasser period (Hossam, 2015). Hussein Kamal17 is an under-recognized filmmaker of remarkable achievement, and his films are marked by complex, elaborate design that leads the plot through striking visuals.18 The Saqqara scene is foreshadowed visually by an early scene where Anis is introduced to the group who are delighted by his expertise in preparing hashish, and he is adopted (and patronized) as a mascot, the “Minister of High.” Because he has found his mother lode of free hashish, Anis subjects himself to the role, striking an immediately recognizable Pharaonic pose: holding the shisha pipe and lighter in front of his body like Confusingly, sometimes the film title is presented as Adrift on the Nile, sometimes as Chitchat on the Nile, and other times as Chatter on the Nile. I have chosen “Chatter” as it expresses the silly, hashishinfused babble of the party. 17 Viola Shafik maintains that Kamal studied in Paris but does not specify what he studied or where (Shafik, 1998, 23). Interestingly, according to the Shadi Abdel Salam Archive Collection at the Biblioteca Alexandrina, Abdel Salam went to study drama in London in 1956—one can only assume that the Suez crisis that same year put paid to that. 18 In 1966’s The Impossible, Egypt’s identity is presented as a dilemma faced by a man who loves or at least desires three very different women: the faithful traditional stultifying wife; the seductive cosmopolitan, and a moral, decent but fragile woman, for whom the protagonist must become a better man than he is. It is not actually as sexist as it sounds; rather it is a rich, complex work of symbolism with a realistic setting and characters. Kamal’s narrative is visually supported by the arrangement of art in each of the women’s homes. 16

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the traditional pose of Osiris: the position of kingship with the arms crossed, holding the crook and the flail. This desecration of a sacred image is comic, but it is also disturbing as we have already seen Anis enthusiastically introduced to the group by Ragab as the one who taught him Egyptian history. The Saqqara scene is fundamental to the film because it forces a confrontation with the past, represented by the fallen Pharaoh. The statue is massive; the whole group climbs upon its head, the women lasciviously writhe upon and kiss the granite lips, the men lie upon the brow and smoke. The despoliation of the statue is not simply the act of ignorant revelers, however; the dialog makes it clear that the group are fully aware of their actions, referring to the Pharaoh as “the ancestor.” It needs to be reiterated that the men in the group at least are educated and important cultural figures: a critic, a writer, an actor, and a famous lawyer. Alienated and egocentric, the group are detached from everyday life and ordinary people and simply drift past it. They are not warned by this confrontation with history, in the form of a gigantic and immobile monument, they simply treat it as children would, as a plaything to clamber upon and act silly. But the monument confronts them with the challenge to their identity, at a time when the wounded nation was struggling to deal with the postwar scars and the place of Egypt in the world. Kamal indicates here that Egypt is a nation that, though inexorably identified with this ancient past, is decadently unable to take any strength from it. Immediately following this idyll, the group casually though accidentally hits a peasant woman, a timeless symbol of Egypt,19 with the car and speed away. Joel Gordon rightfully notes that compared to the book, in the film “the political stakes are higher and the storyline far less compelling than the imagery” (Gordon, 2002, 234). As the revelers sink into their hashish daze, Kamal fills the frame with smoke, dissolving time as each day drifts into the next, no matter the war’s destruction and the slaughter of the army. However, it is the Saqqara scene at the center of the timeline, followed by the Suez scene at the end, that lock in the power of the film, representing two historical moments: the glory days of the Pharaonic past which still has the power to astonish by its colossal monuments and the sheer ruination of the present, with the ignominious loss of the war. While the book is judgmental about a certain type of intellectual Mahfouz no doubt knew well, the film’s judgments are broader, more urgent, and harsher. Prior to the statue scene, the group witness the woman taking part in an ancient fertility rite, which they find fascinating but are not moved by it.

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Still, however, there are no consequences. The boat drifts off down the river and may sink, but it may not. The group refuse to take responsibility for the peasant’s death, even finding it funny. After visiting the (genuinely shocking) scene of the destruction of Suez, Anis leaves the group and in his unending horror shouts in the street “exerting the public at large to sober up and regain consciousness” (Gordon, 2002, 235). However, he looks like a random madman and is ignored. In fairness to the characters, indicating Kamal’s empathy for their condition while at the same time not condoning it, the “weight” of history represented by the statue is not something they asked for. As in Fellini’s Roma, the remnants of past glory are just there, mute and barely understood. How does one even begin to measure up to the past? Easier to drift into oblivion, especially since the world seems to march on, perfectly happy in the mediocrity represented by the bureaucrats at Anis’s Ministry office. Kamal shows us Ragab’s home, full of photographs from when he was a serious and acclaimed actor, then cuts to an extraordinary extended color sequence on his film set, where he dances, luridly dressed as a female belly dancer.20 Anis has flashbacks to his younger self as a keen anti-colonial revolutionist. The group’s nihilism and cynicism are, we see, grounded in their humiliation as “leftover” people.21 In Chatter on the Nile the inclusion of the scene with the giant monument at Saqqara, the sudden, anachronic appearance of the sculpture from the past into the present, moves the story from one of self-indulgent, aimless, nihilistic pleasure-seeking intellectuals to a critical examination of a nation impressed by, but ignorant of, its past, wasting its present and oblivious to its future. Kamal’s portrait of a moment of history is bleak and disturbing, yet as Egyptian film critic Hessen Hossam points out, writing in the aftermath of the failed, “Arab Spring,” it is “shockingly timeless” (Hossam, 2015). The inclusion of the Saqqara scene with the Pharaonic monument is an example of anachronism and visual rhetoric. The monument itself represents many things—the distant past, the mysteries of the ancient world, national honor and pride, and the stark, stylized beauty of ancient art (compared to the T h is cringe-making sequence is a clear reference to the lowbrow popular musical comedies of the day, which were marked by what Viola Shafik refers to as “the absolute determination to entertain and the permanent readiness to compromise, in line with the oft-recited motto al-gumhur ‘ayiz kida (colloquial: the audience wants it like this)” (Shafik, 1998, 26). 21 Even Samara, who is presented in Mahfouz’s book as the “good” intellectual who cares about the dead peasant and the war and has a moral center, is in the film shown to be completely impotent to change anything (what good would her “expose” of the boat parties actually do for anyone, except pander to prurience?). Not only that, at one point she is harangued by her brother, serving at the front, about “women wearing short skirts while soldiers are dying.” 20

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tawdry junk art that we see Ragab making in his film). It is also just itself—a monument leftover from a civilization that disappeared many thousands of years ago. It is the actions of the group upon the monument that drive home to the viewer that something is wrong, these people are damaged and unable/ unwilling to see what they are doing. Made at a time of national humiliation, national collective depression, the story shifts from being Mahfouz’s wake-up call to decadent intellectuals, to an alarm bell to the whole of the Egyptian people. Perhaps because the film does not offer any solutions or resolution, it was banned for a long time.22 Interestingly, though it has been reinstated into the canon of Egyptian cinema, when shown on television the Saqqara scene is excised.23 There are rhetorical similarities between the Saqqara statue and the Roman frescoes in Fellini’s Roma, released a year after Kamal’s film.24 Both ancient artworks represent history—a personal history and an idea of a national past— and they bear the weight of history. The appearance of the artifacts is an act of attempting to communicate this to the characters, but fails. The murals fail because they cannot survive in the chaotic modern air of industrial Rome; they are ultimately ephemeral and transient like time itself. The Pharaonic statue fails to convey the timely urgency of the burden of history to the characters because they are already too addled, too incapable. In short, they are destined to remain as mediocre as the mediocrity they so despise.

Shadi Abdel Salam’s al-Mumya’ In at least four distinct ways you can see how the royal cache discovery summarizes the story of modern Egypt: as a resurrection spell, a lament for the patriarch, a National Liberation slogan and a sentence against taboo-breakers. And as with those four interpretations, so with my four viewings they are a set of

Apparently Nasser considered banning Mahfouz’s book but was advised not to (Mehrez, 1993, 69–70). Mehrez goes on to note that after 1967, all books were heavily censored and Mahfouz changed his approach from realism to fantasy-historical fiction (op. cit. 71). 23 Maspero television broadcast of the film regularly excises the Saqqara scene. An example of a broadcast which has been uploaded to an online platform can be seen at https://ok​.ru​/video​ /299191175917. It is interesting that it is this scene which is cut, reinforcing my contention that it is a crucial scene in the film. 24 In Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972) the past—in the form of Roman frescoes uncovered by workers digging the new Underground—breaks into the present, and the characters are aware of the anachronism but it is the audience who grasps its full impact. 22

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canopic jars in which, when I rise from the dead, I can look for my viscera. That’s why it’s always worth watching The Mummy. Youssef Rakha (2020, 94)

Shadi Abdel Salam’s historical film, ‫ المومياء‬al-Mumya’ (The Mummy: The Night of Counting the Years)25 also uses the artistic legacy of Ancient Egypt to challenge and critique Egypt’s present-day self-image. Abdel Salam (1930–86) was an art director and scenographer who had worked in Italy with Roberto Rossellini (who helped finance al-Mumya’). One of the only Egyptian filmmakers who came to cinema from fine art rather than dramaturgy, Abdel Salam was employed as a designer at Cinecittà on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra and Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaon (1966). However, al-Mumya’ (Abdel Salam’s only completed feature film26) is unlike those films: it demonstrates strongly modernist aesthetics drawn from native Egyptian modern painting. Abdel Salam took his team to the location of the real-life story: the desert of Luxor near the Qarnah village, and the site of the Pharaonic city of Thebes. As critic Amany Ali Shawky notes, cinematographer Abdel Aziz Fahmy made “each frame an artwork.” She points out that the film’s “real feel” was “rare in a time when Egyptian cinema was still figuring out color movies” (Shawki, 2014). The extraordinary soundtrack was created by acclaimed composer Mario Nascimbene. The story is based on history, the dry facts of which are as follows. In 1881 Gaston Maspero, the French Egyptologist and Director-General of excavations in Egypt, noticed the sudden appearance of precious Pharaonic artifacts on the illicit antiquities market. He instructed archaeologists Emile Brugsch and Ahmed Kamal to investigate (Cook, 2019, viii). Their search led to Deir el-Bahari and the arrest of the Abd al-Russul brothers, who confessed (under torture) that a decade ago they had indeed found a cache of mummies and had been dipping into the cache and extracting objects which they then sold to dealers (Dunand and Lichtenberg, 2006, 39). The cache was removed quickly to Cairo and is now part of the collection of the Egyptian Museum. The film opens with a meeting in Cairo in 1881, where Director-General of Antiquities Gaston Maspero charges Ahmed Kamal (“Ahmed Effendi”) with investigating the sudden appearance of rare Pharaonic pieces that have appeared in the black market. He sends the young Egyptologist to the remains of Thebes, near Luxor, by Nile boat. Meanwhile, in a remote village close to the Luxor I will refer to the film by its original title al-Mumya’ (Shafik, 2001, 69). Abdel Salam was working on Akhenaton at the time of his death.

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temple complex, the headman has just died and his sons are about to take on the mantle of leading the tribe. They are shocked when the village elders reveal that the village’s income comes not from animal husbandry, but from exploiting a cache of ancient tombs, which for generations have afforded a basic means of living for the tribe. The brothers are disgusted and express their horror. The older of the two openly defies the elders, who arrange to murder him. Wanis (Ahmed Marei), the younger, evades the elders but struggles with his burden of knowledge. The film follows his Hamlet-like dilemma. To continue what his father before him did, perhaps even enter a better and more lucrative arrangement with the dealer? Or trust his own conscience, which recoils from the idea of grave robbing, and act to stop the ongoing desecration? Wanis learns that the younger men of the tribe have been using some of the artifacts to pay for prostitutes brought by Murad, the dealer Ayoub’s assistant. Bringing Wanis the news of his brother’s murder by the tribal elders, Murad tries to convince him, as the heir to the tribe’s leader, to become his partner in the antiquities trade. Wanis rejects Murat, but confronts Ayoub, who has him severely beaten. Wanis realizes that things can never go back to how they were before his father’s death. He cannot help pondering upon who these mummies are, whether they are his own ancestors. He begins to be aware of, and to think about, the signs (hieroglyphs) on the walls of the tombs and the nearby temples. When he discovers that the archaeologist is not interested in the artifacts as wealth, but seeks instead to understand them, he comes to believe that the best thing is to give the knowledge of the tombs to him. Abdel Salam had the story in mind for some time, before being able to realize the film with the help of Rossellini, saying that “at first it was a traditional realist film that I called Buried Again, and then Wanis. But I wasn’t in a hurry and was searching for the form that would mesh completely with how I expressed myself ” (Johnston, 2013, 169). The form is important, and anachronism plays a key part. Elliot Colla has pointed out that Abdel Salam’s claims and interpretations of “realism” for the film are very different from the social realism of Egyptian cinema (including Hussein Kamal) and indeed the realism of his mentor Roberto Rossellini. In part, this seems to have been because of the film’s status as a historical film. In order to give a sense of time and place Abdel Salam opts for a highly stylized approach: the characters all speak classical Arabic and the camera moves very slowly with “long tracking shots, deep focus [photography] and dense visual compositions” (Colla, 2009, 131). Yet while the sense of a time

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and place unfamiliar to a modern viewer is palpable, the stylized effect this creates does not resemble any “real” Egypt of the 1880s. Instead, Abdel Salam said that “The slow rhythm expresses hypnosis in the film. . . . It tells the story of a young man [Wanis] who thinks, and imagines and suffers from the reality which surrounds him” (Colla, 2009, 130). Therefore the “real” is as much imagined as it is physically experienced. For Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, al-Mumya’ fully expresses the end of the Nasserist project, the Naksa (or “setback” occasioned by the defeat in the 1967 war with Israel).27 He reflects upon the film in terms of place (barra, or outside—meaning the outward-facing preoccupations of Egyptian modernism) and time (zeman, or “the past”) as problematic notions based on a prevailing sense of loss (Rakha, 2020). This sense of loss and being thwarted is splendidly expressed in Hassan Soliman’s 1967 painting The Last Supper, where a group of anguished people, some of them masked, gather around an empty plate. al-Mumya’ is a complex, meditative, and allusive interpretation of the tale of the Abd al-Russul family and the stolen antiquities, blending truth and fiction in a narrative that is, according to Nouri Bouzid, profoundly occupied with “the search for identity and the relationship between heritage and character” (1995, 244). Wanis, Bouzid notes, is the first “new hero” in Egyptian cinema who “feeling lost and deceived, discovers suddenly that his whole life is built upon a lie, a betrayal of his cultural heritage and a sort of liquidation of its history. He is the baffled ‘hero’ who can neither accept his ordained lot—to perpetuate the practices of his forebears—nor truly resist and reject it by any effective means” (Bouzid, 1995, 244). Wanis is not the only protagonist; the role is shared between the fictive Wanis and the real-life Ahmed Kamal, also known as Ahmed Bey or Ahmed Effendi (Mohamed Khairi) the archaeologist with whom Wanis shares the secret of the hidden tomb.28 The connection between Wanis, the uneducated mountain man raised in a deeply secretive traditional culture, and the worldly, educated Ahmed is made explicit by the scene where the men first encounter each other; in the shot where they pass each other, their physical resemblance (similar age,29 similar looks) and difference (dress, demeanor) are made manifest through the use of close-up. Ahmed Kamal says Wanis looks “as if he was a statue come Rakha (2020, 14) writes that the naksa “spelled the end of a 15 year old experiment in post-colonial nation building, and it left writers and artists who have been invested in that experiment equally disoriented. If not born of that disorientation The Mummy definitely reflects it.” 28 Ahmed goes to Thebes alone; there is no Emile Brugsch character. 29 T h e real Ahmed Kamal was thirty-one in 1882; Wanis appears to be in his mid-twenties. 27

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back to life” recognizing Wanis’s connection to the ancient site. The real Ahmed Kamal was the first native Egyptian Egyptologist. Until he was trained by Busch and promoted by Maspero, every Egyptologist working in Egypt’s antiquities was European (Reid, 2002, 186).30 Where do accuracy and authenticity stand here? The meeting at Maspero’s headquarters is realistic and relatively accurate except for the fact that, aside from Ahmed, the attendees were, in reality, Europeans. One major anachronism, then, is that Abdel Salam cast only Egyptians, so Gaby Karraz plays the part of Frenchman Gaston Maspero. No visible distinction between the European and Egyptian is present, nor are France or Europe mentioned. The whole period of European colonialism is effectively brushed aside and made irrelevant. The story of Ahmed Kamal as the first native Egyptologist is secondary to the film’s debate about the relationship of Egyptians to their own history. At the same time, casting Egyptians as Europeans is a brilliant riposte to the familiar casting of Europeans as Egyptians, which has long happened in films from Cleopatra to Exodus: Gods and Kings (dir. Ridley Scott, 2014). Restoring Egyptians to the center of the discourse around antiquities and centering the film’s casting around them was part of the director’s commitment to exploring the relationship between heritage and character. This use of anachronism highlights the racialized history of both the film business and Egyptology. However, al-Mumya’ unlike many Egyptian films is not primarily symbolic. Symbolism is there, but Abdel Salam also wants the audience to take the film’s story and characters at face value. The distinctions instead are social. Kemal represents the “city people.” The “valley people” (fellahin) wear white and are represented by the young stranger Wanis meets at the temple ruins (Mohamed Morshed, who is named only as the Stranger; Figure 7.1). The mountain people of Wanis’s tribe, the Hurabat, dress in black. This black–white dichotomy is not historically accurate, but in terms of the film’s visual rhetoric it rigorously separates the fellahin from the Hurabat. It is the arrival of the city people that disrupts the balance between the valley and the mountain, forcing the two groups together. The film avoids romanticizing traditional culture. Abdel Salam sees Ahmed Kamal as the man of the future, who has stepped out of tradition and offers T h e institutions of Egyptology in Egypt before Nasser were entirely dominated by the French, though German and British archaeologists like Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter were also active. Donald M. Reid quotes Ahmed Kamal in 1923, looking back on his career and responding to a French Egyptologist’s question of why so few Egyptians had gone into Egyptology with the counterquestion, “And what opportunities have you given us” (Reid, 2002, 172)?

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Figure 7.1 Wanis meeting the Stranger among the ruins in al-Mumya’ (The Mummy, 1969). Directed by Shadi Abd El Salaam. Cairo: General Egyptian Cinema Organization.

new possibilities. However, making the change is not going to be easy. When Wanis watches Ahmed Kamal’s ship leave the quay laden with the sarcophagi, he is in anguish at the destruction of his people’s way of life, with no idea how to go forward.31 We last see him stumble alone along the Nile shore, into the unknown. Abdel Salam offers no easy answer to Wanis’s (or Egypt’s) problems but makes us ask the questions from different perspectives. However, he said that he “wanted to express myself and describe the persona of the Egyptian man who, once he regains his ancient origins, will get back up again” (Shawki, 2014). We might ask, why do we learn relatively little about Ahmed Kamal, and why is it the fictional Wanis’s story? But is it? As Lukâcs has said, the great representatives of the age “can never be central figures of the action. . . . The important leading figure, who embodies a historical movement, necessarily does so at a certain level of abstraction” (Lukács, 1963, 39). Ahmed is presented as a new kind of Egyptian, a spirit of his age and an exemplar of the nation. In a sense Joel Gordon points out that, in the film, “the tribespeople are over-all ignorant, stubborn and corrupt. They are also in a wider social-political economy linked to Cairo and abroad, corrupted by a larger overarching authority. Whether they can be brought into the modern world or simply must observe bitterly as their treasure is appropriated remains unanswered” (Gordon, 2002, 185).

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it is his story, but the price paid is Wanis’s story which, Abdel Salam says, cannot be disregarded. The appearance of the art object—in the form of the Pharaonic artifact32— is seen at different times from three different perspectives, and the viewer is invited to consider each. First, Wanis is shown the golden Eye of Horus33 as his uncle rips it out of the mummy’s linen bindings. Next, Wanis shows the Stranger from the valley the ruined temples at Thebes, describing the massive statues as his childhood companions. Lastly, Ahmed enters the secret tomb and sees the beautifully carved and painted sarcophagi he has been hoping to locate. The objects are remnants of the Pharaonic past and are anachronic within the context of the film in different ways. They are not anachronic to Ahmed because he is an archaeologist and expects to find them. They are not “out of time” to him since his training has made him know them. The colossi at Thebes are not anachronic to Wanis because he has grown up there and played among the ruins all his life. However, they are disturbing and anachronic to the Stranger from the valley, just as the golden Eye of Horus is shocking to Wanis. Both Wanis and the Stranger—representing the unlettered, uneducated Egyptian masses of the desert and the valley who have lost their history—are affected by the appearance of the objects “out of time.” Anachronism and awareness of time play a crucial role. The film draws attention to the conundrum of anachronism: that being “out of time” is always relative. How to understand time itself? There have been—and still are—different ways to understand time. The typical Western conception of time is linear, like a film timeline—starting at one point and ending at another. However, just as a film strip can be cut and stuck together, and a video timeline can be digitally manipulated, human conceptions of time are mutable. As Abdel Salam would have known, the ancient Egyptian concept of time was bound up in myth which embodied a cycle of birth, death and rebirth which gave the promise of immortality (Whitrow, 1988, 26). The notion of time as a series of cycles or as a gyre exists in different cultures (Whitrow, 1988, 130–3). It has even persisted in Western culture as a minority view, as we have seen in Cole’s Course of Empire. The cyclical notion of history, where time moves forward but keeps revisiting the same issues, though not from precisely the same points, is at the core of T h e audiovisual compositions of the film are strongly modernist, the artworks that appear are all Pharaonic; the film creates a neat relationship between them. 33 T h e design of the piece makes it clear that it is a Wedjat eye amulet, an Eye of Horus, similar to those recovered from the Tomb of Tutankhamun and now in the Egyptian Museum. 32

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what Shadi Abdel Salam presents. The film asserts that it is important to restore a sense of time and history to Egyptians. To look forward, it is also necessary to look back. As Viola Shafik (2001, 84) notes “the visual allusion to past magnitude does not feed on a shallow glorification, since it is heavily contradicted at the level of the narration by the experience of painful loss of that same past.” The ancient artworks here are all anachronistic: they are objects which are ripped out of their time yet play a role in the actions of the present. In the first case, the appearance of the Eye of Horus is shocking. Wanis and his brother are astonished to see it. Its appearance cues the downfall of the tribe and destabilization of the way of life. In the second case, the fellah from the valley makes his first encounter with the statues of the past, his own past. The camera lingers, through close-ups, on the intricately carved fallen heads, disembodied hands, and walls of hieroglyphs as the two young men wander among the ruins. It is the moment when the rapprochement between two parts of Egyptian tradition come together, the valley and the desert, to acknowledge a shared ancestry, embodied by Wanis and the Stranger. Lastly, after the terror of the cave’s darkness and mystery, the sarcophagi slowly reveal their sheer beauty to Ahmed. In the darkness the Egyptologist’s lamp first illuminates a delicately painted winged figure, then a smooth pearl-like face and the eye, repeated over and over as the ancient painted faces on the sarcophagi are made visible in the shuddering lamplight. Ahmed has fulfilled his personal and professional mission, and in doing so has firmly established the position of the Egyptian as the rightful caregiver of the nation’s ancient civilization (Figure 7.2). Marguerite Helmers’s point that “looking is always framed by past experiences” and learned ideas about how and what to see is in al-Mumya’ both symbolized and actualized by the repetition of the eye as a key motif in the film’s visual communication (Helmers, 2004, 65). The uncle has piercing eyes; the Eye of Horus amulet is, of course, an eye; Wanis and Ahmed eye each other; Wanis and the prostitute also eye one another, as Murad offers Wanis sex and wealth in exchange for the secrets of the tomb. But though they look, they have little understanding of what they are seeing, because they have never learned to look, and this act of looking, the film indicates, is needed now. In a neat device, Ahmed Kamal wears glasses, which allow him to see more clearly than the others; this invokes science as a vehicle for national cohesion. Again, Morier’s rhetorical model of the catachronisme can be referred to here. The eye becomes the visual-rhetorical catachronic motif across the layers of time. The eye as motif is present in the ancient painted eyes of the sarcophagi

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Figure 7.2  Wedjat Eye Amulet, c. 1070–664 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

and in the amulet shown to Wanis and his brother. These objects are not simply valuable things, which are desired by the Hurabat (as a source of wealth) or Ahmed (for their historical importance), they embody Egyptian history and identity. As Morier points out, the eye-artifact as catachronisme situates the problems of the present in history. al-Mumya’ is a fascinating film with which to discuss anachronism because it operates on different yet simultaneous levels of time, Hans Kellner’s “chronoschisms.” As Joel Gordon has pointed out, al-Mumya’ spans three eras: the present, the recent past, and the distant past. It is set in 1881, the year before the occupation of Egypt, and “speaks to the country’s thwarted desires to assert political autonomy in a modernizing context” (Gordon, 2002, 185). Then there is the archaeological past that the artworks belong to, the New Kingdom period (sixteenth–eleventh century BCE) which is introduced right away in the film through an opening recitation from the Book of the Dead. There is the present–historical moment of the film’s making and the “chronicle of the film’s origins” involving the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and the influence of Italian director Roberto Rossellini who assisted in its completion and release at a difficult time in the post-1967 period (Gordon, 2002, 184–5). Moreover, the film remains “an artefact of Nasser-era imaginings of tradition,

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modernity and national identity” (Shawki, 2014).34 As such, it “fits the everambivalent nature of the progress of national discourse” (Gordon, 2002, 185). The ancient artifacts have significance in each era: as sacred objects in the New Kingdom, as a source of wealth to graverobbers in the long centuries that followed and, finally, in the present: a source of national pride and self-identity. However, we can discern a fourth layer: in the tomb Ahmed uncovers yet another layer of time. The last priests of Amun carved a written record explaining that they transported the mummies there to save them from the graverobbing which was already happening. The mummies were already anachronic by this time (probably the era prior to the Christianization of Egypt in 300 CE). And perhaps even a fifth layer of time: the film uses spoken classical Arabic, a ninthcentury literary form that Egyptians understand but do not use in daily life.35 The anachronic language also highlights the disconnection between Egyptians and their origins in a complicated way. Shafik refers to the film, and Abdel Salam’s efforts, as “striving for the development of a specific national film language” (Shafik, 2001, 28). The intensely painterly style of the visuals and the “exceptional sensitivity” of Fahmi’s lighting brought something hitherto not present into Egyptian cinema (Karnouk, 2005, 74). But his attempt “to apply the principles of ancient Egyptian representation in cinema” (Shafik, 2001, 89) had a different result: a film that is sui generis and has not dated; both its audiovisual style and its message are still startling, striking, and emotionally overwhelming. It unsettles the kind of patriotic melding of ancient and modern that al-Gazzar’s painting displays. The film constantly engages in dialog with all other Egyptian films as well as with Egyptian visual arts, in its insistence on examining history and its intertwining of moral questions with emotional and aesthetic ones. Despite never being fully released, it remains “the most outstanding work and art-film of Egyptian cinema” (Shafik, 2001, 89).

Realism, the Sublime, and the Anachronism Simon Morley described the sublime as happening when “something rushes in and we are profoundly altered” (2010b, 13). Anachronism can be that al-Mumya” began shooting three months after the end of the 1967 war. An analogy might be a film about Australian history spoken in Shakespearean English.

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“something.” Considering the films examined here, we can see that each treats the relationship between realism and the sublime differently, including in relationship to anachronism. Instead of conventional realism, The Legend of the Suram Fortress offers an aesthetic, stylized world made sublime by its very artistry and artificiality, a world evoking myth and legend. The drab reality of 1980s Soviet life—its roads and oil tankers—bursts into this mythic world but does not intrude on it. al-Mumya’ presents a stripped-down, almost abstract version of the stark divisions in Egyptian culture. The superb artworks from the distant past intrude violently upon the world the characters inhabit. The uncle rips into the mummy and pulls out the amulet as if he were eviscerating it; the faceless colossi and disembodied hands in Thebes terrify the Stranger and unnerve the viewer; the gorgeous artifacts in the tomb entrance both Ahmed and the viewer. In al-Mumya’ the revelation of the out-of-time object is sublime. As we have seen throughout, artworks in films are loaded with potential meanings: they can indicate culture, erudition, a “passport to the past.” As aesthetic works, they can also connote beauty and therefore the idea that “beauty is truth”—that is, the appearance of the beautiful thing attests to the veracity of what we see. Anachronism disrupts the sense of realism in terms of tearing away the veil of illusion and immersion. At the same time, it also connects the view back into the “real” world. It can also undercut the Mannerism of the film’s mise-en-scène; all the care taken to create a detailed “world” is momentarily shattered by the reminder of time and the nature of illusion. Any aggressive intrusion into the film’s realism has the potential to conjure up the sublime in the form of shock and destabilization. This disturbance offers a potential space in which to think about history, as Rosenstone points out in his discussion of Walker. Since that film was made, filmmakers have developed the tool of deliberate anachronism in more sophisticated and satisfying ways. The historical film is an opportunity to question the notion of time and history in terms of lived experience. The viewer visits the world of the film, experiencing the past vicariously. But the historical film repeatedly shocks the viewer into an awareness of time by the anachronistic nature of the experience. This offers the film many possibilities to carry meaning. But while anachronism is unavoidably present, it can also be a powerful tool. This destabilizing sense of time awakens the viewer’s attention to the notion of history rather than simply being lulled into an escapist past.

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Conclusion

The visual representation of history has a history, one supported by different technologies and contextualized within social and cultural developments. The emergence of historical visual representation in painting and film is part of a broader discussion of history, which is still under-developed. The case studies here offer a framework for reading the visual aspects of historical films, demonstrating how, through the arrangement of images, the visual argument is constructed. Taking as a starting point the notion that cinema is art, or can be art, Hava Aldouby’s description of how cinema is “nourished” by painting has been a guide throughout this book. I sought to take a fresh approach to the cinemapainting relationship first examined in depth by Angela Dalle Vacche and Anne Hollander by focusing on a single film genre, the historical film. The terms “cinematic” and “painterly,” though frequently encountered, are not adequately defined and deserve more precise meanings. “Painterly,” I suggest, implies that the film’s style recalls a painting or paintings, but can do so in a variety of ways. In all cases though, it is about using filmic techniques to create visual elements that “work” to convey the desired mood in a painting: composition, color and tonality, lighting, mise-en-scène, the illusion of stillness, and gesture. I also made it clear that historical films are not bound by their period to use paintings that “match”: though 1840’s-set Meek’s Cutoff does borrow heavily from nineteenthcentury painting, The Baader-Meinhof Complex mines Baroque painting to tell a story set in the 1960s. “Cinematic” is no longer a term meaning “of the cinema” but instead is often used to call attention to a painting’s film-like qualities, involving dynamic composition, color and tonality, lighting, mise-en-scène, gesture, suggestion of sound, and the illusion of movement.1 These qualities are manifested in seventeenth-century art T h e book is primarily focused on cinema, so there is less discussion of the cinematic in painting; see my Art History for Filmmakers (2016) for a detailed discussion of the cinematic across different painting genres.

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and come to the fore in the genre of history painting. They become crucial to the historical paintings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the work of artists like Copley, de Loutherbourg, and Gérôme. These painters demonstrate a thinking about art that is embraced in cinema: commercial, entrepreneurial, innovative, and alert to the public appetite for emotive visual experience as well as to opportunities offered by technology. De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon as an engine of a realistic sublime is one of the hitherto missing links between cinema and painting. The visual rhetoric of images is no less complex and intricate than the rhetoric of words. Concepts such as identification, inventio, dispositio, and elocutio, used in a visual-rhetoric analysis, reveal how filmmakers organize their imagery to build an argument and appeal to the audience. Visual rhetoric proved to be a valuable way to address the historical film because history—in films, paintings, or books—always involves a rhetorical argument, making visual rhetoric a viable model of analysis that can operate across film and painting. The Baader-Meinhof Complex invokes painting as an emotional aid to support a factual, journalistic approach; in Girl with a Pearl Earring, painting embeds the viewer in an empathetic, contained “world” of Vermeer’s Delft. Engaging with new research and thinking about scenography has helped to cohere an understanding of the materiality of mise-en-scène and how these visual arguments are created through design. Acknowledging the oft-ignored craft roles revealed much about the material knowledge contributed by the cinematographer, such as Eduardo Serra’s understanding of light in seventeenthcentury Delft; Rainer Klausmann’s methods for getting inside mass action; or Ben Smithard’s grasp of eighteenth-century portraiture that both echoes and subverts the portraits seen in the film. Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical concept of “identification” is core to cinema in general but is even more critical in the historical film as it is used to persuade the viewer to accept specific attitudes or values about history. Knowing the rhetorical aspects of identification helps in understanding how it persuades the viewer to adopt a particular view of history: for example in Uli Edel’s portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof as a right-thinking person who goes horribly wrong. We saw it too in the dual identification in al-Mumya’ of Wanis and Ahmed, two aspects of the modern Egyptian. The same duality appears in Admiral with de Ruyter and de Witt, the man of action and the man of thought respectively, embodiments of a liberal Dutch spirit. Conversely, we saw how Kelly Reichardt’s deliberate and

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careful rejection of identification in Meek’s Cutoff pushed the viewer to question received ideas about the history of the Oregon Trail. It was surprising to find that the question of realism in the historical film has not been much addressed. However, investigating realism and its problems of historical accuracy and visual authenticity soon led to an awareness of the place of anachronism. The rhetorical concepts catachronisme and “necessary anachronism,” taken from Morier and Lukacs, proved to be relevant to the historical film. For example, the revelation of the real portrait of Dido Belle and the appearance of the de Witt portrait in Admiral both shatter the illusionary “world” of the films, reminding the viewer of manipulated time and drawing attention to the “real” history outside of the film. The book demonstrates the scope for further research on the place of anachronism in film, drawing upon ideas suggested by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. Without necessarily accepting all of the still-controversial claims of Hayden White, a broad consensus of historians, from Robert Rosenstone to Thomas Freeman and Susan Doran, have accepted that the historical film can be considered as a kind of popular history writing. This book takes that position, examining how the realism of the film can be assessed in relation to its accuracy and authenticity. Eleftheria Thanouli’s formalist reinterpretation of White’s relevance to the historical film was invaluable here. At the same time, we saw that, through visual storytelling using art-historical images, historical films are also bound up with ideas about “quality,” “high culture,” erudition, and education. Painterly imagery in a film can rhetorically convey a sense of “high culture” by linking the filmic image to the high-art image, and this works no matter the film, from the arthouse (Meek’s Cutoff) to the mass market (BaaderMeinhof Complex).2 Similarly, historical films use visuals to validate present-day attitudes by linking them to the past (Admiral; Belle). The book contributes new findings to the broad body of research available on the historical film by focusing on the visual aspects and demonstrating how visual storytelling works to convey a sense of the past. I considered the historical research that the film draws upon and the film’s relationship to the known historical record, within a triangulation model that discerned how this was expressed through the film’s visuals. By paying attention to the “history” in historical films, the book demonstrates that researching the historical film is T h e films put out by Hollywood were excluded from this study, which focused on American independent and non-US films; there is already much work on Hollywood’s history films.

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well served by consulting historical scholarship. Whatever the timely message of the film, the visual storytelling owed much to the imagery of painting; the revisionist Belle, for example, features compositions from “conversation piece” paintings, which not only emphasize intimacy and social relations but also indicate hierarchy and gender roles. While the question of realism and the historical film was always important, what emerged from the study was the significance of the sublime, a philosophical and art-historical concept not usually encountered in film studies. By examining older texts on the sublime by Richardson, Baillie, and Burke, the book has proposed the validity of the sublime as an aesthetic concept in cinema studies, demonstrating how the idea of the sublime can elucidate aspects of the film. Meek’s Cutoff examined the sublime landscape; while both Admiral and The Baader-Meinhof Complex explored the sublime as action; al-Mumya’ looked at the sublime as a moment of apprehension, where the chasm between past and present is suddenly, briefly, bridged. The book demonstrates the scope for further work on the sublime as a filmic concept. One of the questions raised in the Introduction referred to the concept of Mannerism, when realism, though seemingly conventional, becomes figuratively excessive. I have argued, based on the research into historical painting and a close reading of many pictures, that an obsession with extravagant detail was a key feature of historical recreation in painting throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historical film, then, inherited its tendency to excess from painting. However, the question suggested by Vidal’s research remained: based on the films examined here, is Mannerism in the historical film still an indicator of a “conservative aestheticizing heritage turn in film”? Given that the most radical films analyzed in this book are the least Manneristic in style (Meek’s Cutoff and al-Mumya’) this may still be true. Even though Belle, Admiral, and Baader-Meinhof Complex all tend toward the promotion of liberal values, the “history” they present is conservative, as is their view of what history is. Girl with a Pearl Earring flirts with Mannerism but then makes the immersion in the past the whole point of the film, which rather undercuts it. There seems to be some awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of excessive period realism. Still, Mannerism appears to be a powerful tool for reinforcing conservative conceptions of the past, and the concept is valuable in analyzing historical films. Conversely, Meek’s Cutoff and al-Mumya’ both radically question received notions of “history” itself.

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In my discussion, I have reviewed and examined a variety of approaches to the historical film across time frames and film cultures, as well as identifying some of its most striking techniques. We saw how, since anachronism cannot be avoided, some films make it a virtue, playing with time. We also saw that films work with the recognizability of artistic images, sometimes subverting them or using them in unexpected ways. Another outcome of the book has been to acknowledge how a visual approach to film analysis has invited a reevaluation of films that are not part of the canon of critical approval, or that may have been overlooked. My study of painterliness in The Baader-Meinhof Complex demonstrates that the films have more to say than critics initially gave it credit for. The book aimed to explore the visual representation of history in film and understand its emotive appeal. Realism frames the quest for historical authenticity, especially when historical accuracy in the “academic” sense is not feasible; while the invocation of the sublime invites intense emotional engagement with the film’s world as well as the characters. Historical films rely upon a tension between realism and the sublime, both drawn from imagery established by painting. These are reciprocal relationships: cinema and painting, realism and the sublime, together creating a dynamism, which constantly offers up new, sometimes surprising, treatments of the painterly within cinema’s constantly evolving practice.

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Index NOTE: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. 4:3 aspect ratio  58 12 Years a Slave (film: McQueen)  195 Abd al-Russul brothers  210, 212 Abdel Salam, Shadi  203, 206 n.17, 210, 218 casting by  213 realism of  211–12 sense of time and history  214–16 abolitionism  167, 172, 176, 177–81 accuracy  9–10, 223, 225 in Admiral  36, 145–6, 152, 162, 164 in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  113, 136–7 in Belle  176, 187–9 in costuming  29 in historical films  17–18 in Meek’s Cutoff  65–7 in al-Mumya’  213 Adam, Robert  184–5 adaptation. See also literary adaptation of art into films  4, 73 fidelity in  17, 106 Adieu Bonaparte (film: Chahine)  168 Admiral (film: Reiné)  13, 50, 139, 163–4 ageless characters in  161–3, 197 casting of  153, 201–2 civilian perspective  152–3 contrast between personality, ideology and morality in  154–8 Dutch Golden Age references  142, 145, 146–9, 160–1, 164, 201 epic genre  145–6 “heritage lesson” film  144, 150–2 “high art” credential of  148–9 murder of de Witt brothers  158–60 Adrift on the Nile (Mahfouz)  206, 207 aesthetics  15 Alberti veil  86

Aldouby, Halva, Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film  3, 221 Alexander the Great  143 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence  41 Altick, Richard, The Shows of London  42–3, 44 ambivalence  70–1 American landscape paintings  58–62 romanticization of  63–4 Amsterdam  95 anachronism in Admiral  154–8, 201–2 in Belle  188–9, 201 in Chatter on River Nile  208–9 deliberate anachronism  196–202 in historical films  18 in literature  18–19 in Meek’s Cutoff  68–70 in al-Mumya’  213, 215–19 notion of  193–4 reality and  201–2 anachronism régressif/regressive anachronism. See catachronisme ancestry  171 ancient Egypt artistic legacy of  210 celebration of  203 confrontation with  206–7, 208–9 eye artifacts of  215, 216–17 grave robbery  210–11, 212 Anderson, Benedict  139–40, 141 n.6 antiquarianism  28 apocalypse  32–4 Apotheosis of Louis XIV (painting: Le Brun)  143 apprehension  22–4 Arnheim, Rudolf  4 art history  3–4 of 18th century  168–9

Index film as  94–101 and film studies  25–6 on Vermeer’s use of camera obscura  88–9 art patronage  95–7 art production, socioeconomic basis of  95–8 Asante, Amma  172–3, 175, 184, 189 Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla  21 Ashford, James  179, 182 Ashford, Oliver  178, 179, 186 Atsma, Barry  153, 155, 196, 201 Aumont, Jacques  15 notion of realism  69, 74 “toolbox technique” of  6 Aust, Stefan  106, 108, 111–12, 129, 133–4, 135, 136 Austen, Jane  166, 167, 168, 176, 187–9 authenticity  47. See also material authenticity; period authenticity; visual authenticity in Admiral  150–1 in The Baader-Meinhof Complex  113–14, 135–6 in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots  40 Axel Springer publishing company  113 mass protest against  116, 117, 119, 129–36 Baader, Andreas  105, 109, 112, 113, 119–20, 121, 134 The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Aust)  104–5 The Baader-Meinhof Complex (film: Edel)  12, 104–5 casting of  109 glamor in  110–11 as historical chronicle  135 huge masses scenes  116–19, 128 narrative structure of  114–18 news media footage in  113–14 painterly references in  107, 123–7 purpose of  111–12 quasi-religious references of  131, 133–4 relevance of history and memory to  109–10

253

reliance on reportage and journalism  105–8, 121, 136 sense of tragedy  122–3 “thriller” aspect of  112, 136–7 visual rhetoric analysis of  118–23 window scene  119 Baillie, John  22, 23, 56 Bailly, Jean Sylvian  128 Barber, Francis  178 Barlow, William  65–6 Barricade at rue Soufflot, 25 June 1848 (painting: Vernet)  131–2 Battle of Camperdown (painting: Loutherbourg)  36 Battle of the Nile (painting: Loutherbourg)  36 Baudelaire, Charles  103, 104, 132, 136 Bazin, Andre “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest”  4 on cinema-painting relationship  26 notion of realism  49 notion of reality  19 Beattie, James  176, 190 beauty and attractiveness  110–11, 155, 196, 197–8 Beckford, William  179 Belle, Dido Elizabeth  166 and Austen connection  176, 189 as educated and accomplished  189 and guardian relationship  171– 3, 177–8 historical accounts on  175–7 identity issues  172 portrait of  169–74, 201–2 Belle (film: Asante)  12, 165–6 abolitionist narrative of  176, 177–8, 179–81 anachronism in  188–9, 201–2 casting of  181–2 Dido narrative  175–7 lighting in  185 marriage sub-plot  178–9 painterly references in  166–8, 201 portraiture and identity in  168–74, 182–3, 185–6 settings of  182–8

254 Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle (Byrne)  176 belonging  171–2 Ben Hur (Wallace)  41 Bentinck, William  157–8, 162 Bible  62–3 Bierstadt, Albert  58, 63–4 Black people, in portraits  165, 170–4, 183–4, 190–1 Blauvelt, Christopher  49, 59 Bodmer, Karl  63 Bol, Ferdinand  153 Bonnie and Clyde (film: Penn)  112–13 Bordwell, David  8 bourgeois progressivism  140, 146, 148, 164 Bouzid, Nouri  212 Bowles, Simon  184–6 British art  11, 38 Brugsch, Emile  210 Brunskill, Ian  110 Bryullov, Karl democratization in  39 empathetic sublime in  31–2 printed reproductions of  45 Burial at Ornans (painting: Courbet)  2 Burke, Edmund  22, 23–4, 57 Burke, Kenneth  70, 146, 222 Byrne, Paula  176, 178 Caligula (film: Brass)  42 camera obscura  75, 84–91 Campbell, Joseph  7 Canby, Vincent  109 n.7 Caravaggio  1, 20, 37, 73, 96 catachronisme  19, 197, 198–9, 200, 216–17, 223 catharsis  129–34 Catlin, George  63, 64 causality  115, 141 Centaur in the Village Blacksmith’s Shop (painting: Böcklin)  15 Chambers, Iain  193 Charles II, King of England  143, 154, 155–7, 162 Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington and a [Black] Servant (painting: Reynolds)  172

Index Chatter on the Nile (film: Kamal)  202, 205–6 national identity and personal responsibility in  206–9 Chevalier, Tracy  13, 88, 93 Chonkadze, Daniel  13, 199 Christiana, Queen of Sweden  198 Christiane F (film: Edel)  109 The Christian Martyr’s Last Prayer (painting: Gérôme)  38 chronicle  8, 135, 217–18 chronochasm  194 chronoclasm  194–5 chronoschism  18, 194–5, 217 Church, Frederic Edwin  58, 63 cinema. See film(s) cinematic painting  26 Le Brun’s  143 Gérôme’s  35 notion of  1–2, 221–2 Rubens’  126 Vermeer’s  98, 100 cinematography in Admiral  151 in Meek’s Cutoff  57 Clair, René  16 classical narrative  74, 82–4, 115, 139 classicism  42, 143 close-up  85, 151, 160 difference between portrait and  169 Cole, Thomas  58 apocalyptic sublime in  32–4 printed reproductions of  45–6 view of history  36–7 view of nature  61 Colla, Elliot  203–4 Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match (painting: Zoffany)  190 Colville, Alex  1 composition Gérôme’s techniques of  39–40 of portraiture  169–70, 185 Connolly, Kate  110 continuity  161–3, 197 contrast anachronism through  198 between personality, ideology and morality in  154–8

Index of black and white  213 of dark and light  150, 154, 170, 173–4 conversation piece  168, 170, 173, 190 Cooley, Eli  66 Copley, John Singleton  43, 45–6, 182–4, 222 The Corpses of the de Witt Brothers (painting: de Baen)  158–60 cosmic sublime  50 costumes and hairstyles in Admiral  150, 154–8, 201 in Belle  174, 201 in Girl with a Pearl Earring  92, 197 in Meek’s Cutoff  54–5 in Ridderzaal of the Binnenhof during the Great Assembly of 1651  149 in Westerns  70 The Course of Empire (paintings: Cole)  28, 32–4, 37 The Savage State  32 The Arcadian or Pastoral State  33 Consummation  33–4, 39 Desolation  34, 37 coverture  188 Crafton, Donald  25–6 Croissant, Klaus  108 crowd/mass of people/mob in film scenes  116–19, 129–30 in paintings  127–8, 130–6 savagery of  158–9 cultural heritage  210–12 culture “high art”  42–3, 99, 130, 148–9 “high culture”  18, 160, 164, 223 Danto, Arthur  22, 58 David, Jacques-Louis  127–9, 135 Davinier, John  176, 178, 187 Death of General Wolfe (painting: West)  29 Death of Major Pierson (painting: Copley)  183–4 De Baen, Jan  154 decadence  34, 38–9, 41–2 of Egyptian intelligentsia  205–9 de Cars, Lawrence  45 deductive visual rhetoric analysis

255

of The Baader-Meinhof Complex  118–23, 136 of Girl with a Pearl Earring  82–4 Defeat of the Spanish Armada (painting: Lotherbourg)  28, 30–1 De Hooch, Pieter  78, 81, 93–4, 95, 97, 100, 101 Delacroix, Eugène  135–6 Delaroche, Paul  11, 35–6, 37, 39, 46 Delft (Netherlands)  78–80, 87, 95– 6, 101–2 deliberate anachronism  196–202 DeMille, Cecil B.  41–2 depth of field  89 De Ruyter, Anna  147–8, 158, 160 De Ruyter, Michiel  144–5, 147 death of  160, 161 Dutchness in the household of  148–9 hair style of  155, 158 idealized Dutch family  162 national mission of  152–3 star text  153 de Vergnette, François  37–8 De Witt, Cornelis  156, 158–60, 161, 162 De Witt, Johan  144–5, 162, 201 call to unity and nationalism  149–50 hair style of  154 murder of  156, 158–60 didacticism/erudition  18, 27–8, 46–7, 137, 191–2, 219, 223 Diderot, Denis  30 Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (painting: Martin)  165, 166, 169–71, 175, 190–1, 201–2 disaster  31–4 disposito The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  120–2 Belle  168 Girl with a Pearl Earring  82, 83 dissemination  45, 46 Dissius, Jacob  95–6 distribution  25 strategies of 18th and 19th century painters  45–6 Domes of the Yosemite (painting: Bierstadt)  58

256 domesticity (Dutch) cleanliness  75–6 in The Milkmaid  148–9 recreation of  17, 81–2, 101 Drury Lane Theatre (London)  30, 43–4 duality  144, 153–4, 155, 212–14, 222 Duffy, Cian and Peter Howell  116 Düsseldorf School  63 Dutch Attack on the Medway, June 1667 (painting: Van Soest)  152 Dutch Golden Age paintings  73 eroticism in  93 lighting in  79 references in Admiral  142, 145, 146–9, 160–2, 164 rhetorical use of  74–7, 81–2, 99–101 Dutch identity/Dutchness  146–9, 162–3 Dutch society (17th cent.)  94–101 Dutschke, Rudi  109, 112, 116, 119, 127, 128, 129, 135 early cinema  42 notion of  2 n.3 Eaton’s Neck, Long Island (painting: Kensett)  60 Edel, Uli  104, 222 art and journalism approaches of  107 attention to authenticity  113– 16, 135–6 compared to Delacroix  135–6 filmography of  109 left-wing sympathies of  109–10 memories of student protests  129 stylistic visual approaches of  105 theological worldview of revolutionist  133–4 unromantic presentation of RAF  111, 134, 135–6 use of painterly references  124– 6, 130–4 Efird, Robert  199–200 Egypt Awakening (sculpture: Mukhtar)  203 Egyptian cinema  202–3 ancient and modern in  203–18 Egyptian modernism  203–4, 212, 217–18

Index Nasserist turn in  204–5 Egyptology  213 Egyptomania  203 Eichinger, Bernd  105, 107, 109–10, 113 Eidophusikon (visual entertainment: Loutherbourg)  43–5, 180, 222 elocutio. See visual style Elsaesser, Thomas  114, 115 El Tanbouli, Lofty  203 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  61 emotions  23–4, 134–7, 141 empathy  31–2, 36, 127 Ensslin, Gudrun  105, 109, 113, 114, 119–20, 121, 129, 130 n.22 epic  7, 145–6, 160 Equiano, Olaudah  177 eroticism in Girl with a Pearl Earring  85, 91–4 and violence  38–9 erudition. See didacticism/erudition escapism  47 Esposito, Scott  62 Evelyn, John  11–12 everyday life  54–5, 75–6, 101–2 eroticism of  91–4 evil  133–4 “evoke” paintings  4 Execution of Mary, the Queen of Scots (film: Clark)  40 exhibitions  43, 45–6 eye  19–20, 216–17 Fahmy, Abdel Aziz  202, 210, 218 Faragher, John  61, 69 fear  4 Fehling, Alexander  120 n.15 Felleman, Susan, Art in the Cinematic Imagination  3, 5 Felton, Tom  182 Ferro, Marc  6, 7 fidelity in adaptation  17, 106 to Dutch painting aesthetic  82–3 film(s). See also historical films adaptation of art into  4 art-history perspective of  5 as historical texts  5 and painting differences  15–16

Index and painting relationship  2–3, 26, 49–50, 103, 221 film aesthetics  3 “extreme aesthetics”  23 filmed representation  7 film studies  25–6 finance  167 precarity of  95–8 Fire Over England (film: Howard)  47 Firth, Colin  80 found cinematic landscapes  68 Fraser, Antonia  17 freedom  149–50, 163 Freeman, Thomas  5, 17 French Revolution  127–8, 131–3 Frey, Matthias  105–6 Frits, Pieter  159–60 frontier myths  67 Frye, Northrop  7 Gainsborough, Thomas  44 Garrick, David  29, 30 Gathering up the Lions in the Circus (painting: Gérôme)  36, 38–9 gender politics  55, 166, 179 genre paintings  73, 75–6, 101–2, 147 Georgia  199–201 German historical films  51 n.2 Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) (film: Kluge et al.)  106 n.1, 133 Gérôme, Jean-Léon  203 n.11, 222 distribution strategies of  45–6 spectacular sublime in  34–42 Gigashvili, Vazha  199 The Girl King (film: Kaurismäki)  198 Girl with a Flute (painting: Vermeer)  92 Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chevalier)  73, 77–8 camera obscura references in  86–7, 89 Girl with a Pearl Earring (film: Webber)  12, 13, 17, 139 camera obscura scene  84–91 eroticism and sensuality in  91–4 exterior scenes  80 feast scene  96–7 learning to see in  101–2 lighting in  79, 88–9

257

painterly references in  80–4, 100, 201 plot differences  77–8 realism in  73–4, 76–7 settings in  78–80, 94 social history in  94–100 Girl with a Pearl Earring (painting: Vermeer)  83–4 Girl with a Red Hat (painting: Vermeer)  89, 90, 92 Girl with a Wineglass (painting: Vermeer)  83, 93 Goltzius, Hendrik  93 Goulder, W. A.  66–7 Goupil, Adolphe  45 Graham-Dixon, Andrew  143 Grand Manner  142, 143–64, 168, 190 grand narratives  139–41 grave robbery  210–12 Greenaway, Peter  90 Grosoli, Marco  19 Guardiano, Nicholas  60–1 Guitar Player (painting: Vermeer)  92 Harper, Graeme  67–8 Hasan Reza Khan (painting: Zoffany)  190 Haskell, Francis  11–12 Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art  98 Haussman, Rainer  115 Hay Harvest at Éragny (painting: Pissarro)  56 Hayward, Susan  139 Héliogabale or L’orgie romaine (film: Feuillade)  42 Hell (painting: Bosch)  130 Hermansson, Casieke  17 Herold, Horst  115 Hetreed, Olivia  78, 87 The High Dam (painting: al-Gazzar)  204–5, 218 historical fallacy  25 historical films  2–5, 223–5 as a genre  6–10 and history paintings compared  46–7 as source of historical “knowledge”  18, 27–8, 46, 137, 141, 144, 150–1, 191–2 and time  194–202

258

Index

historical novel  27 n.4, 46, 195–6 historical paintings development of  13, 25–9 role of British painters  11 techniques of  26 tension between realism and the sublime  27 historical romance  168 historiography  9 historiophoty  9, 194, 198–9 history painting  25 as a genre  46 and historical films  46–7 morality in  37 new research on  10–12 notion of  13, 26–7 shift towards historical painting  27–9 history writing  28, 191 historical film as  7, 8–9, 223 “scientific”  42 Hobbema, Meindert  73, 81, 83, 98, 100 Hogarth, William  170, 173 Hollander, Anne  93–4 Moving Pictures  3 Homann, Peter  106, 121–2, 127–8, 129 homosexuality  156–9 Hudson River School  58 Hughes, Robert  61 Hulzen, Todd van  80 human insignificance  60–2 Hume, David  28–9 Hutchinson, Thomas  176, 179, 181 identification  70, 222–3 with Dutchness  148–9 with nationalism  152–3 with political struggle  118–21 rhetorical theory of  146 through ageless characters  162, 197 through familiarization  195–7 using visuals  142 identity Egyptian  206–9 of mixed-race person  167, 172, 185 ideology  8, 10–11 costume and  154–8 If Not Us, Who? (film: Veiel)  106 n.1, 120 n.15, 121 n.16, 130 n.22

imagination  26, 89 failure of  103–4 immersive realism  39–40 in The Baader-Meinhof Complex  117, 123–4 in Girl with a Peral Earring  80–1 The Impossible (film: Kamal)  206 n.18 inhuman sublime  24 interdisciplinarity  6 interracial marriages  178–9 intertextuality  5 inventio/invention. See visual argument “invoke” paintings  4 Jacobsz, Juriaen  153 James, Clive  110 Johansson, Scarlett  93, 201 Jones, Damian  175 journalism as art  103–4, 105, 137 The Baader-Meinhof Complex and  105–13 painting as  131–3 Jung, Carl  7 jurisprudence  166, 177 Kamal, Ahmed  210, 212–15, 222 Kamal, Hussein  206–7 Kamensky, Jane  183 Kant, Immanuel  29 on apprehension  22, 23–4 Kellner, Hans, notion of chronoschism  18, 194, 217 Kenwood House (London)  166, 171, 182, 184 Kievit, Johan  150, 158, 159, 162 King, Geoff  142 King, Rob  41 Kirwan, James  24–5 Klausmann, Rainer  123–4, 128, 222 Kracauer, Siegfried  51 Lady Jane Grey (painting: Delaroche)  39 Lady with Her Maidservant (painting: Vermeer)  92 Lady Writing a Letter (painting: Vermeer)  92 Lammers, Frank  153

Index landscape and people relationship  52–4 sublime and  55–63 Western tropes  67–8 Landy, Marcia  163 Langford, Barry  8 Last Day of Pompeii (painting: Bryullov)  28, 31–2, 39 Last days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton)  32 Last Exit to Brooklyn (film: Edel)  109 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper)  33 The Last Supper (painting: Soliman)  212 Le Brun, Charles  143, 168 The Legend of Rita (film: Schlöndorff)  111 Legend of the Suram Fortress (film: Parajanov & Abashidze)  13, 50, 199–201, 219 Leone, Segio  69–70 Lepel, Bernd  114 Leslie, Esther  114–15 Liberty Leading the People (painting: Delacroix)  131, 132–3, 135–6 light/lighting  59 in Admiral  154 in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  128 in Belle  185 in Girl with a Pearl Earring  79, 88–9 in Liberty Leading the People  132–3 in al-Mumya’  218 spiritual dimension of  61–2 Vermeer’s use of  92–3 The Lion in Winter (film: Harvey)  12 literary adaptation  13, 17 of The Baader-Meinhof Complex  104–5 of Girl with a Pearl Earring  73 of Quo Vadis  41 Littman, Sam  54 Longinus, Cassius  51–2 looking/seeing/watching  84–91, 94, 100, 101–2, 216–17 Lorrain, Claude  33 Louis XIV, King of France  143, 154–5, 160, 168, 186 Loutherbourg, Philip James de as cinematic  222

259

deviser of Eidophusikon  43–5, 179 empathy and nationalism in  36 realistic sublime in  29–31 Lukâcs, Georg, The Historical Novel  19 Luminism  58–60, 63 Luzzi, Joseph  18–19, 195, 196–7 Lyotard, Jean-François  24, 51 Mahfouz, Naguib  203 n.10, 207, 209 Mahler, Horst  108, 133–4 Malle, Louis  112 Malraux, André  5, 26 Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House (painting: De Hooch)  76, 79 Mannerism  9–10, 114, 224 Mansfield, Elizabeth Finch, Countess of  171–2, 182, 186, 187 Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of  167 and Dido Belle’s relationship  171–3 judgments on slave question  176, 177–8, 179–81 morality  174 portrait commission  182–4 Marie Antoinette (film: Coppola)  17 Martin, David  4, 170 Martyrdom of Saint George (painting: Veronese)  20 Massacre of the Innocents (paintings)  4 Massacre of the Innocents (painting: Breughel the Elder)  124–5 Massacre of the Innocents (painting: Rubens)  126 Massacre of the Innocents (painting: Van Haarlem)  125–6 material acquisition  95 material authenticity  13, 17–18 in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  135 in Girl with a Pearl Earring  80–1 in Meek’s Cutoff  67 Mbatha-Raw, Gugu  181, 201–2 Meek, Stephen  65–6 The Meek Cutoff: Tracing the Oregon Trail’s Lost Wagon Train of 1845 (Ragen)  66 Meek’s Cutoff (film: Reichardt)  12, 49, 139, 222–3 anachronism in  68–70

260

Index

everyday life in  54–5 factual accuracy in  65–7 painterliness in  55–62, 71–2 realism and the sublime in  52– 5, 70–1 spiritual dimension in  61–3 Meinhof, Ulrike  105, 106, 134, 222 “euphoric self-realization” of  129– 30, 133 media image of  113 radicalization of  107–8, 114–15, 116, 117–23, 127–8 screenplay writing by  112 Meins, Holger  112, 120, 133 memoirs of pioneers  61, 65, 66 of women pioneers  69 microhistory  99 The Milkmaid (painting: Vermeer)  4, 148–9, 160 Miller, Alfred Jacob  63 Millet, Jean-François  56 Milovanovic, Nicolas  143 modernism  4 Egyptian  203–9 Montias, Michael  95–6, 97 monumentalism  203 n.13 morality  37 in Admiral  154–8 in Belle  167, 174, 176 Morier, Henri  18–19, 196–7, 198, 216 Morley, Simon  218 al-Mumya’ (The Mummy: The Night of Counting the Years) (film: Abd al-Salam)  12–13, 209–10, 222 accuracy and authenticity in  213 anachronism and time in  215–18 casting in  213 contrast in  213 realism in  211–12 Murphy, Cillian  80 Murray, Elizabeth, Lady  166, 169–71, 175, 189 Music Lesson (painting: Vermeer)  92–3 myth  7 Napoleon (film: Gance)  168

Napoleon at Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814 (painting: Delaroche)  168 Napoleon at the Bridge of the Arcole (painting: Gros)  168 Napoleon Bonaparte  168 narrative  8 Biblical  62–3 classical  74, 82–4, 115, 139 Gérôme’s strategies of  38–9 impact of presentation of paintings on  82–4 postclassical  166–7 spectacle and  146–7 visual rhetoric and  114–18, 167–8 Nascimbene, Mario  210 national identity, Egyptian sense of  206–9 nationalism  141–4, 175 de Witt’s call to  149–50, 163 in Loutherbourg  36 notion of  139–40 visual authenticity  145–6 Native Americans  53, 62, 63, 66–7, 69, 71 nature apprehension of  23 “classical, natural sublime”  49–50 in Meek’s Cutoff  61–2 necessary anachronism  19, 195–6, 223 Nero’s Torches (painting: Siemiradzki)  41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, notion of history  7 nostalgia  38 Novak, Barbara  61 Ohnesorg, Benno  117, 118 Oldham, David  181 Orangeists/House of Orange  150, 155 Oregon Trail  49, 53–4, 57, 65–7, 222–3 Osage Scalp Dance (painting: Stanley)  63 n.9 overt sublime  58 Paden, William D.  12 Païni, Dominique  35–6 painterly/painterliness in Admiral  144–51, 160–1, 164 in The Baader-Meinhof Complex  107, 123

Index in Belle  166–8 in Girl with a Pearl Earring  80– 4, 100 in Meek’s Cutoff  53–62, 71–2 notion of  2, 221 paintings adaptation of  73 belonging and  171–2 and cinema differences  15–16 presentation of, and film narrative  82–4 “realness” delivered by  74–6 reproductions of  45 science and  84–91 panorama painting  58 Parajanov, Sergei  199–201 Paterson, Andy  73–4, 78, 86, 87 patriotism  199–201. See also nationalism Paul, Herman  7 Peace and Plenty (painting: Inness)  60 Pepys, Samuel  152, 155 perception  19–20 and realization of the sublime  22 period authenticity  74–80, 101 in Admiral  148–9 in The Baader-Meinhof Complex  115–16 in Belle  184–5 in nationalist films  141 personality  46 Pharaonic artifacts/motifs  203–9, 215–17 desecration of  210–11 Phillips, Mark Salber, “What is the History in History Painting”  11 photography  64 physical proximity  91–3 Pitt, William, the Elder  182 politics  10–11 in Admiral  144–5, 149–50, 156, 158–60, 161 in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  118–21 in Belle  175 Pollice Verso (painting: Gérôme)  28, 35–42 portraiture in Admiral  161–3

261

in Belle  165, 167–74, 182–3, 185 of women  190 post-colonial narrative  8 Post-Wall German cinema  105–6, 136 poverty  81, 97–8 Princess Henrietta of Lorraine (painting: van Dyck)  172 printed reproductions  45–6 The Procuress (painting: Vermeer)  93 Proll, Astrid  111 psychology  46, 108 Quinet, Edgar  12 Quo Vadis (film: Zecca and Nonguet)  41 Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz)  41 race and class  165, 167, 170–4, 176–9 alternative view of  183–4, 190–1 radicalism in film  116–27, 129–34 in painting  126–8 RAF. See Red Army Faction Rakha, Youssef  212 Raspe, Jan-Carl  106, 113, 120 Raymond, Jon  54, 62–3 Rayner, Jonathan  67–8 real/reality anachronism and  154, 155, 174, 201–2, 223 Bazin’s notion of  19–20 distinction between realism and  15–16 in films  20 “making” the real  78–84 realism  13 anachronism and  219 in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  134 in films  16–18, 50–2, 223 in Girl with a Pearl Earring  76–84, 90, 99–101 in The Legend of the Suram Fortress  219 in Luminism  59–60 in Meek’s Cutoff  52–5, 70–1 notion of  15–16, 49, 69–70, 74 visual rhetoric of  73–7, 81–2, 99–101 realistic sublime  28, 29–31

262

Index

Red Army Faction (RAF)  104–8 arrest of  120–1 association with films  112–13 as “German tragedy”  122–3 glamor quotient of  110–11 news media footage of  113–14 quasi-religious character of  133–4 as spectacle  113 women members  126–7 redemption, rejection of  62–3 Reichardt, Kelly ambivalent ending  70–1 critique of naturalistic aesthetic  61–2 filmography of  54 n.5 rejection of redemption narrative  62–3 rhetorical identification  70, 222–3 use of 4:3 screen  58 use of American painterly qualities  58–60 use of painterly qualities  53–4, 56–8, 67 Reiné, Roel  142, 163–4 use of ageless characters  197 use of lighting  154 use of painterly references  146–7 Reinhardt, Ad  57 religion  61–2, 131, 133–4 Rembrandt  56, 57, 97, 100, 146 Remington, Frederic  64 representational historical painting  40 reproduction  45 The Revenant (film: Iñárritu)  49–50 revisionist films  165 Western films  53, 54–5 Reynolds, Joshua  29, 44, 168, 190 rhetoric  18 rhetorical sublime  23 Richardson, Jonathan, Essay on the Theory of Painting  21, 23, 29 The Ridderzaal of the Binnenhof during the Great Assembly of 1651 (painting: van Bassen)  145, 149 The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (film: Rossellini)  17 Röhl, Bettina  110–11 Roma (film: Fellini)  208, 209 romance  167, 172–3, 175

Rome  21, 41–2. See also Pollice Verso (painting: Gérôme) Roncken, Paul  23 Rosa, Salvatore  55 Rosenstone, Robert  198–9 Rossellini, Roberto  210, 211, 217 Rubens, Peter Paul  93, 100, 126 ruins  189 Sagay, Misan  175–6, 180, 189 Salemy, Mohamed  40 Salmi, Hannu  6, 7 The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild (painting: Rembrandt)  161 Sargent, John Singer  56 scenography  20, 29, 30, 41, 43–4, 45–6, 142, 222 Schama, Simon  75–6, 81, 95, 128 Schleyer, Hanns Martin  108 Schneider, Norbert  92, 96 Schopenhauer, Arthur  23–4 science of art-making  84–91 Scott, Anthony Oliver  54 sea battles  142, 160, 161 accuracy of  145–6 authenticity of  150–2 The Battle of Terheide  147–8 The Chatham raid  152 The Four Days’ Battle  151 Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula (painting: Claude)  166 The Sea Triumph of Charles II (painting: Verrio)  143 secular history painting  27 Seel, Martin  52 Seggerman, Alex Dika  204 Seixas, Peter  6 Serment du Jeu de Paume (Tennis Court Oath) (painting: David)  127–8 Serra, Eduardo  73–4, 94, 98, 222 settler colonialism  70–1 sex  47 in 19th century paintings  41 in Gérôme’s paintings  38–9 sexuality, wig as emblem of  156–8 sexual violence  179 Shapiro, Michael J.  192 n.5

Index Shapsay, Sandra  23–4 Sharp, Granville  177, 178 Shaw, Philip  20–1 Siemiradzki, Henryk, similarity between Gérôme and  41 Sienkiewicz, Henryk  39 sin  92 Six-Day War  206 slavery  165, 167, 171–2, 175, 179–80 Smith, Edward Lucie  15 Smith, Michael  62 Smithard, Ben  185, 222 social history  15, 81, 94–101 Soldier and the Laughing Girl (painting: Vermeer)  93 Somerset vs. Stewart case  180 Sorlin, Pierre, The Film in History: Restaging the Past  11, 17 Soviet Georgia  200–1 Spear, Richard  20 spectacle  23, 28, 34–45, 58 historical representation through  141, 143–4 history and  165 narrative and  146–7 notion of  142 Red Army Faction and  113 terrorism as  110–12 theatrical spectacle  30 Stammheim—The Baader-Meinhof Gang on Trial (film: Hauff)  111 Stanley, John Mix  63 star texts of Admiral  142, 153–4 of The Baader-Meinhof Complex  109–11 of Belle  181–2 Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (film: Lucas)  150 state violence in The Baaden-Meinhof Complex  116–19, 121, 123 in “massacre of innocents” paintings  124–7 Steadman, Philip  88, 90 still life  75, 95 stillness  57

263

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains—Mount Rosalie (painting: Bierstadt)  58 story  8 Strong, Roy, Painting the Past: the Victorian Painter and British History  11, 18, 28 student protests against Shah of Iran visit to Berlin (1967)  116, 118–19, 123–7 at the Technical University in Berlin (1968)  116–17, 119, 127–9 Sturm, Beate  112 sublime  13, 224 anachronism and  218–19 approaches to  49–50 in art  21–4 in Bryullov  31–2 catharsis and  129–34 in Cole  32–4 crowd/mass of people and  116–18 in historical films  24–5, 51 landscape and  55–63 Longinian conception of  51–2 in Loutherbourg  29–31 notion of  20–5, 218 quest for  29 in sea battles  151–2 terror and  123–7 Sullivan, Greg  11 The Surrender of Breda (painting: Velasquez)  10 tableau  199–201 Tashiro, Charles  154 teleology  21 Ter Borch, Gerard  97, 100 terrorism  110–12, 115 Tetherow, Emily (film character: Meek’s Cutoff)  68–9, 70 Tetherow, Solomon  66 Thanouli, Eleftheria, History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines  8–9, 15, 166, 194 n.1 theater 18th century transformation in  29 painting and  42–3 thick sublime  23–4 thin sublime  23–4

264 Thom, Maren  107 The Threatened Swan (painting: Asselijn)  161 Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay (painting: Heade)  59 time/timeline anachronism and  215–18 of Belle  172, 180 history and  194–202 in al-Mumya’  212 role of art in  193 titillation  38–9, 41, 47 tragedy  122–3 history and  130–4 transcendentalism  61 transposition  4 Trifonova, Temenuga  24, 49–50 Tromp, Johan  159, 162, 163 tropes contrast of dark and light  173–4 “massacre of innocents”  124–7 “victimized innocent”  38–9, 40 Western landscape  67–8 turbans  174 Vacche, Angela Dalle  3, 5, 19, 26 Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film  2 Van Haarlem, Cornelius  125 Van Hoogstraten, Samuel  75 Van Hout, Nico  126 vanity  92 Van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni  86–7, 89–90 Van Ruijven, Pieter  83, 90, 92, 95–7 Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (London)  186–8 Velasquez, Diego  96 Vermeer, Catharina  77, 82, 83, 92–4, 97 Vermeer, Johannes  75, 81, 146 eroticism in paintings of  92–3 knowledge of science of artmaking  84–91 paintings of, arrangement in film narrative  82–3 patrons of  95–7 sense of depth of field  89 Vernet, Horace  103, 135, 136, 203 n.11 Versailles (TV series)  197 n.5

Index vicarious  22, 56, 151 Vidal, Belén  9–10, 12, 114 View of Delft (painting: Vermeer)  83 A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon (drawing: Burney)  16 violence  47 in 16th and 17th century paintings  4 of 17th century warfare  151–2 in 19th century paintings  41 aestheticized violence  50 crowd of people and  116–18, 131–3 in Gérôme’s paintings  38–9 in “massacre of the innocents”  124–7 sexual violence  179 visual argument (inventio)  222 The Baader-Meinhof Complex  118–20 Belle  167–8 Girl with a Pearl Earring  82–3 visual authenticity  13 in Admiral  145–6 in The Baader-Meinhof Complex  114, 136 in Belle  175–6, 184–5 realism as  54–5 visual rhetoric  73–7, 81–2, 99–100, 222 belonging and  171–2 deductive analysis of  82–4, 118–23, 136 eye as  216–17 historical novel and  195–6 “history lesson”  150 identification with national mission  152–3 of the “mass of people”  127–9 narrative structure and  114–18 of wigs  154–8 visual style (elocutio) of The Baader-Meinhof Complex  108, 122–34 of Belle  168 of Girl with a Pearl Earring  82, 83–4 visual sublime  54 Viva Maria! (film: Malle)  112 Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey  7 voyeurism  94

Index wagons (“prairie schooners”)  64–5 Walker (film: Cox)  198–9 Walker, William  198 Wanderer, Friedrich  68 Wanderer in the Sea of Fog (painting: Friedrich)  56, 58 Warner, Mary Elizabeth  69 water  55 Watson, Emily  181–2 Watson and the Shark (painting: Copley)  182–3 Webber, Peter  17, 93, 98 deliberate anachronism of  197, 201 insistence on realism  73–4, 77, 79–80, 101 West, Benjamin  10, 11 Western films. See also Meek’s Cutoff anachronism in  69–70 “western” paintings  63 West German student movement  116–36 Westward expansion/migration  52–4 ambivalence of  70–1 privations of  64–5 stoicism of the pioneers  66–7

265

White, Hayden  7–9, 140, 194 n.1 wigs  154–8 Wilkinson, Tom  181 William, Prince of Orange  154–8, 160, 162 Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (painting: Vermeer)  82 Woman Playing a Lute (painting: Vermeer)  92 Woman with a Water Jug (painting: Vermeer)  91 women migration experience of  68–9, 70, 71 position in 18th century England  187–8 state violence and  125–7 as “victimized innocent”  38–9, 40 Wyeth, N. C.  64 Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (painting: Vermeer)  83, 84, 90 Žižek, Slavoj  51 Zola, Émil  45 Zong case  165–6, 167, 176, 177–8, 179–80

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