Phalke, Melies, and Special Effects Today Sean Cubitt Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 115-130 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wan.1999.0001 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/36229 [ Access provided at 10 Apr 2020 09:08 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Fig. 1. Video Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune (dir. George Méliès, 1902). 114 Phalke, Méliès, and Special Effects Today by Sean Cubitt Every age wishes to believe itself exceptional: under advanced capital, every minute wants to be distinguished. No innovation, no matter how trivial, can pass muster unless it can be sold as “revolutionary.” The evolution of the animated image, from shadow games on the cave walls to the obsessive dimensionality of The Mummy (dir. Stephen Sommers, 1999) and Wild Wild West (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999), has scarcely been left five minutes at a stretch for the last hundred years without a new declaration of root-and-branch grubbing out and replanting of the whole history of moving pictures. Digitality is just such a false memory masquerading as historical insurrection: and that specific combination of rememorisation and false radicalism, of ordinary turbulence masquerading as epochal break in a visual domain characterised by hyperbole, ecstasy, and vertigo, brings us face to face with its historical role: digitality has been overwritten with that first enforced repetition of an undigested past which Marx envisaged as tragedy. Lacking an understanding of the origins of pixelisation in the division of light into colors and motion into frames undertaken by the Lumières, we cannot grasp in total the banality of the CGI (computer generated image) effect. Deprived of clarity concerning the achronological and reversed geographical constructions of space and time in the early effects film, we will make unfounded claims for what occurs in the new geometries of millenial filmmaking. In what follows, I want to show that the sales-pitch of originality and of a new beginning made for the CGI industry is not only overstated and misleading, Sean Cubitt (seanc@waikato.ac.nz) is Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Previously at Liverpool John Moores University UK, his most recent books are Digital Aesthetics and Simulation and Social Theory. He is currently working on a book on special effects for MIT Press/ WIDE ANGLE V O L . 2 1 NO. 1 (JANUARY 1999), pp. 114-130. © OHIO U NIVERSITY SCHOOL OF F ILM 115 but provides an alibi for a sloppy, undialectical, and to that extent ahistorical film criticism. In going back to the early work of Méliès and Phalke and isolating the spatial dialectic at work there, we are observing one facet of a larger dialectic, the confrontation of space and time which, in the early “trick” cinema, instigates a new moment in the longer dialectical history of animated images, indeed of geography and history in the Western culture, that reaches a specific accuracy of expression in the history of the cinema of and as special effect. The colonial dialectic pinpoints the nub of both the trick and the effect film: that they rematerialise the narrative temporalities of consumption as the empty space of the commodity itself. The dialectic of space and time constructions must be understood politically as well as historically, and should be faced as essential components of both film style and the experience of movie going.1 This paper opens up the process by investigating some aspects of the temporal dialetic in Méliès and Phalke. Specifically, the presumed chronological relation between European master and Indian disciple must be turned upside down so that the colony precedes the metropolis. But clearly this is itself a moment of a longer and more complex historical movement, from colonial dependency, via imperial imitation, to an emergent nationalism whose legacy still haunts the Hindi mythological movies and Dordarshan’s mythological spectaculars. In short, the cinema’s temporal dialectic of orientalism and myth succeeds only at the expense of a perversion of a globally communicative ideal of cinema which, as myth and orientalism, they have raised as possibility. Crucial to this argument is that orientalism, as a state of the orientalist, not only oppresses its Other, but constructs a repressive and limiting model of the othering Self. That construction is the inheritance of the spectacular subject of special effects cinema today, a subject ripe for the implicit critique of the silent trick film. 1999’s blockbuster effects movie The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski) comes impregnated with the rhetoric of the unprecedented. Here the logic of alienation is worked through in a more accelerated form: the everyday material world becomes banal and simulacral, the object of a subject whose subjectivity is lifted as far above it as the imperialist is above the colony. The “colonisation of everyday life,” in Lefebvre and the Situationists’ slogan, itself produces an orientalist vertigo of disassociation, carried into effect by the film’s vividly spectacular effects cinematography. The climactic chase through the apartment 116 block in steadicam, for example, despite sporting more edits than Katherine Bigelow’s equivalent scenes, functions in precisely the same way as her steadicam sequences in Strange Days (1995), Point Break (1991), and Blue Steel (1990): in Matrix, this climatic chase functions as a means for spatialisng our attention, Fig. 2. Video Frame grab from The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999). driving us from linear narrative towards the exploration of mise-en-scene and diegesis. Constant reframing charact-erises even expository dialogue scenes, and delivers pyrotechnic steadicam and process shots, including a hallmark lightning zoom (derived from the Hong Kong action cinema) on the God-shot (from the ceiling or sky into the floor or roof). The film resolves its story-telling dilemma by composing shot-reverse-shot sequences in which major exposition can be carried out, but now using constantly mobile back-projections, notably in a sequence in a car on the way to visit the Oracle, where acid video colors saturate the windows, sacrificing focus to atmosphere as the reality of the city without is thrown into question, and further disembodied by the lack of street sound. The multi-layered soundtrack again uses a single motif—in this instance the ringing of telephones which signals connection to and escape from the computer simulation of the title—to guide the auditor through the spatialisation of the diegesis as soundscape. Soundtrack over-signalling, like the amplification of window cleaning signalling a possible escape route from a sealed office, clearly refers us to the film’s referential structure: less to the cyberspace of internet than to that of computer games, constantly evoked in the use of mobile phones to guide protagonists through the mazes of the city. This relation between the operator and the protagonist also informs the relation between God-shots and point-of-view shots, notably again in the early sequence which culminates in a composite of a (strongly branded Nokia) cellphone tumbling down the canyon between skyscraper facades. Editing forms a crux in the effects film: how and where is it possible to cut a sequence shot whose motivation lies in its subjectivity? With the addition of an operator driving the protagonist, like a gamer driving his avatar, The Matrix 117 develops the double-vision of the games player. Here the dialectical relation of fetishist and voyeur is no longer at the core of the film, superseded by the position of the narcissist: in its place the dialectical relation between the sucker and the connoisseur is itself doubled in that between the protagonist in the game and their controller, the game-player. Hence the possibility exploited thrice in the film of mapping God-shots into POVs. The use of mobile camera in recessional space places the spectator simultaneously in the fictive space of the film, a space continuous from auditorium to further depths of the screen image, while at the same time emphasising the “trickality,” the spectacular specificity of the shot itself, a doubling of illusion and the enjoyment, even conoisseurship of illusion that typifies the orientalist cinema’s othering of spatial subjectivity as participation and appreciation. While several shots feature strongly foregrounded blocks of shade or color, especially in the opening sequence but also for example in Neo’s first meeting with Mor-pheus and during Morpheus’ torture, compositional devices forcing awareness of the depth of the image such as the backs of chairs, coats, telephones, it is the parallax-inducing movement of the camera which forces us to recognise the continuities between gradations of depth rather than, as in the more obvious use of diopters, their independence from one another. Of course, liquid motifs also help establish this instability and disequilibrium toward which the film’s central theme of all-engulfing illusion tends. The liquid flame that pours out from the lift shaft during the raid to rescue Morpheus, and the rippling glass wall of the skyscraper as the helicopter plunges into it, echo the two crucial moments of the motif, the one in the abstract presentation of the Matrix itself as the space between letters and pixels on the computer screen (a motif which picks up from Blade Runner’s [dir. Ridley Scott, 1982/1991] endlessly enlargeable photograph a dream of the artifact as complex as reality), and the other the moment in which Neo, having realised his powers, flexes the walls around him after assimilating and destroying his quasi-human opponent. The classical system finds beauty in clarity—either in the hyperclarity of the narration or in the documentary clarity of the presentation of a referential and ultimately contingent reality. In this more baroque cinema of effects we move towards an appreciation of the beauty of the indeterminate, in a cinema which 118 has expropriated the deep focus and staging in depth ostensibly characteristic of Bazinian realism, now deployed for quite opposite ends. Freedom to explore the contingent gives way to control of every aspect of diegetic space. In the movement from plane to recession we reduplicate that transition from tactile to visual, from the metaphysics of being to the culture of change, isolated by Wölfflin in his Principles of Art History as the dividing line between classical and baroque culture: “movement is attained only when visual appearance supplants concrete reality.”2 With the vagueness of the new Hollywood, we enter a dialectical territory inaugurated by doubling, encoded as illusion and confronted as crisis: the space between material and immaterial, turbulence and the end of history. And we have been here before. Erotics administer desire into yearning for the attainable. The case has been made that the privileged moment at which this historic shift in the formation of the psyche was achieved lay in the same late nineteenth century France in which the imagination of mechanical vision first gave rise to the moving image.3 In the emergent consumer culture of the Bon Marché , the arcades and the department stores, eroticised fashions and the culture of spectacle, the erotic seeps into public space as a guiding motivation for individuated success, individuated consumption. In the Paris of the arcades, it is endlessly interworked with the spectacle of the new technologies. The magic cinema of Méliès is the canonical origin of special effects movies, of the appropriation of mechanical perception for the purposes of fantasy. The myth of his discovery of stop-motion—the probably apocryphal tale of the camera jamming and restarting, giving an impression that a bus had suddenly turned into a hearse, and men into women4—mythically credits creative contingency to a purely machinic vision. As Michael Chanan has it, “if the first audiences saw Lumière’s train as if it could detach itself from the screen, then in a way, Méliès’s film—in which a cutout of a train flies through the skies and vaults across the ravines of a kind of painted backdrop—was simply the film of a train which had so detached itself.”5 With this act, cinema becomes capable not only of perception but of the enactment of fantasy through symbolisation, through metastatements on the filmic process itself, through the detours of allegory, and through the baroque excesses of its visualisations. Baroque in the rich and 119 splendid detours of the soul as it seeks some way to love without surrendering the keep of self-identity, the terrors of abjection that hold it captive: its yearning drives it to cry out for transformations that it dare not undertake. As the baroque expressed in its petrified organics the conflicts of the yearning for change and the necessity of stillness, so the ephemeral excesses of belle époque cinema, its endlessly ornate decoration, its endlessly displaced desires, rerun the baroque’s architecture of motion in stasis as the movie of stasis in motion: the efflorescence of the absolute state as imperial sensuality, imperial discipline. In 1888, newly ensconced as proprietor of the popular Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the magic stage after which Houdini was to name himself, Méliès began to enliven the already florid late-century stage with new tricks. Like the North American stage described by Eisenstein as the spectacular school in which Griffith acquired his sense of cinematic form,6 the melodramatic theaters of Paris (and London) were majestically devoted to earthquakes, waterfalls, railway crashes, airborn apparitions, imaginary journeys, livestock, crowds, and mythical beasts. The apparatus of traps and projections, prestidigitation, wire acrobats, wrangling, massive mobile sets, lighting, and sound effects put it on a par with the nineteen-nineties music theatre of Andrew Lloyd Weber. Méliès undoubtedly belongs to this tradition, and as a designer of trucages (trick pictures) for the stage already in the eighteen-eighties occupied the key position of technologistengineer-artist which has become central to digital cultures.7 Magic lantern shows and panoramas had achieved a degree of movement and three-dimensionality, unrepeated until the virtual reality experiments of Krueger and Lanier, by the early years of the French republic.8 As the technologisation of spectacle accelerated, its thematics moved bizarrely in the opposite direction: to folklore (giants, féeries), the gothic (ghouls, ruined castles), the melodramatic grotesque (guignol, satanism) and the exotic (tales from the Arabian Nights, “exotic” dances). Only in the theatricalisation of the works of Jules Verne did the fantastic imaginary of technologised consumerism express itself in motifs derived from engineering, and even then only after the massive success of Dennery’s stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days, itself a classic of orientalism. The avant-gardes of the imperial powers evolved their orientalisation of the Bible as a sensualist other, perhaps centrally in the Salomés of Wilde, Beardsley, 120 and Moreau—with whom Méliès studied for a year in 1888—while the popular culture of spectacle evolved the Indian rope trick, Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall (home of conjuring on the London stage), and the pantomime traditions of Ali Baba and Aladdin, then as they are now, enFig. 3. Video Frame grab from Tchin-Chao, during legacies of a love affair that the Chinese Conjurer (Georges Méliès, 1904). dared not speak its name. Europe’s romance with the East was as moving, as always-already tragic, as Tristan und Isolde, a one-sided affair, and all the more poignant for that. Those histories were very much alive in popular culture. Méliès titles like Le Musulman rigolo, Danse au Sérail (1897), Cléopâtre (1899), Les Miracles de Brahman, La Rêve du Rajah ou la Forêt enchantée (1900), Le Brahmane et le Papillon (1901), La Rêve du Pariah (1902), Siva l’Invisible, Le Bourreau turc, Le Thaumaturge chinois (1904), Ali Babouyou et Ali Bouf à l’huile (1907) and Le Fakir de Singapoure (1908)—many of them developed from trucages initially presented at the Robert-Houdin—indicate a career-long involvement with the image of the orient.9 Perhaps what differentiates Méliès’ works from both Ferdinand Zecca’s Pathé orientalist extravaganzas and Wilde’s transvestite performance as Salomé is that, while they place the oriental in the position of object as other, for Méliès the East is what speaks in the unconscious as Other, the constitutive ventriloquism of subjectivity. In his favorite guise of carnivalesque Satan, “he could mobilise a recurring, yet continually shifting bricolage of ‘otherness’—particularly in terms of religion, race and gender—in order to invert the hierarchical values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque.”10 Though Méliès’ sexuality is still anchored in the erotics of a patriarchal administration of desire, his understanding of the orient is always as something inherent in the unconscious of the European order. At the same time as liberating the machinic, he makes it subservient to the needs of his society, even as its negation. The Vernean titles (Voyage dans la lune [1902], Voyage à travers l’impossible [1904]) which most evoke Méliès for audiences a century later draw on this same 121 internalisation of the exotic. The ease of transition between the orient and outer space as icons for the lost object of love is perhaps best seen in the elephant-moon of his 1911 Les Hallucinations du Baron Munchausen, explicitly linked, as indigestion, to the crisis of overconsumption. In Méliès’ films, the absolute exteriority of hallucinations is frequently a product of the internal life, especially the bodily life, of his protagonists. This dialectic of the distant and the internal is carried through into the technical aspects of many of the studioshot films, in which the cinéaste makes up for the slow lenses and emulsions by widening the aperture and so diminishing the depth of field. Against the trompe l’oeil backdrops, the living actors and foreground props are projected with something akin to the projective figure-ground relation of the VDU. In the shallow space of the reflective screen, the collocation of distance and desire, far more than the quaintness of a visual repertoire already démodé when the later films were released, assist a fantastic critique of the everyday which never leaves its parameters. Like the personifications of celestial bodies and the incessant magical transformations, Méliès’ imaginary lives always in an anterior relation to the present. His Other speaks always not only from a distance, but often enough from the postmortem universe of mummies, the afterworld, the vanishing temporal perspectives of “once upon a time.” Desire, as erotic, is constantly confounded with the ridicule of death, the body, eating, sleeping, and disorganisation: whatever is here. In the vision of the orient, as in the projection of space, the occluded alternative to the here and now is constantly othered, not as the object of administered desire, but as loss: a temporal relation. Beneath the futuristic image of space lies constantly the archaism of the unconscious. Sadoul is not the only historian to see in Méliès the realisation of the cinema beyond the purely technical achievements of the Lumières and Edison. Cavalcanti, Richter, and Eisenstein, among many others, see in Méliès the beginnings of the fantasy film.11 It is equally a truism to see in the films of Dadasaheb Phalke, the pioneer of the Indian cinema, an imitator—of genius, but an imitator—of Méliès in the years just after Méliès, bankrupted by sharp practices in the North American marketplace, gave up his cinema business. But chronology can be a liar. Phalke’s nationalist reworkings of stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana draw from the springs which, since Dryden and Racine, had fed the spectacular theaters of the great colonial powers with 122 imagery and techniques gleaned from the orient. Here the drama is palpably cosmic, but the cosmos has both the dignity of ancient belief—Méliès is at his most poetic when at his most debunking—and the scale of an ideal village life associated with the home-industry Swadeshi movement—again, Méliès’ is a tangibly urbane art. Like Méliès, Phalke was a skilled craftsman and trained artist, with a passion for magic tricks, some of which he filmed under the pseudonym Prof. Kelpha. Unlike Méliès, however, he had only a brief visit to London in which to acquaint himself with the state of film technique. “Phalke’s greatness,” notes Firoze Rangoonwalla, “can be realised from the fact that he had to work almost singlehanded, doing the pioneering and innovating in every respect, while his contemporaries abroad had the benefits of resources, equipment and specialised services in studios.”12 Phalke even perforated his own filmstock by hand. This became a strength: “My films are Swadeshi,” he wrote, “in the sense that the capital ownership, employees and the stories are Swadeshi.”13 Despite the foreign technology, in his first experiment, a short on the growth of a pea-plant, Phalke had to reinvent the principles of stop-motion photography. Rajah Harischandra, probably completed late in 1912, like all of Phalke’s features, was a devotional film. Its audience too was new to the cinema: “The people who came were seldom two-rupee customers. Most paid four annas, two annas, or even one anna, and most of them sat on the ground. The weight of the coins, on the homeward trip, could be enormous,” necessitating a bullock cart on at least one occasion.14 His commercial success is also credited with making possible a commercial, indigenous cinema, and he is praised for making it possible for women to appear on screen. Phalke’s effects are not only beautifully achieved, but seem far more integrated with a cultural formation which is already antipathetic to colonialism. Here magic functions not as the unconscious, but as an entirely legible code which not only evades colonial censorship but delights the unwitting coloniser. Lanka Dahan (1917), Shri Krishna Janma (1918), and Kaliya Mardan (1919) propose a viewing pleasure articulated on the immense familiarity of the stories, much as silent film historians have argued of the use of narratives from the Bible, folklore, and the popular stage in European and North American cinemas of the 123 early period. Méliès conforms to this thesis of the cinema of attractions as proposed by Gunning and Gaudreault: narrative taking second place to spectacle, which is enabled, as necessary, by the familiarity of the scenario’s narrative premises.15 In Phalke, however, one has the sense that the narrative, however fragmented by the vagaries of preservation and transmission, occupies a sovereign position, but as metonymic, almost holographic shards of the Hindu epic tradition. This has an important impact on the arguments of, among others, Gaudreault, Mitry, and Jenn,, for whom Méliès’ montage, the often overlooked complexity of the narrative structure of his cutting, is evidence of a spectacular ambition in the films.16 Phalke’s cinema deploys very similar cuts, trimming to circumnavigate the difficulty of in-camera editing in stop-motion action scenes, cutting between shots with similar framing, following characters’ actions from tableau to tableau, and establishing montage within single frames through multiple exposure in camera or in printing. But where Méliès is spectacular in the sense of severing signifier and signified, Phalke’s cinema subordinates the film to its referents, the revealed truth of the Mahabharata. Cinematic indexicality in this instance matches the theology of apparition, of the making-manifest of the Lords Krishna and Rama, whose human forms are always aspects of their being. Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes that Phalke’s “initial influences of art derived from the great painter of kitsch, Raja Ravi Varma. Phalke’s work was a logical successor to Varma, for it actually implemented what Varma merely expressed— an art of the post-industrial, mechanical reproduction age,” adding that, though cinema was seen as an art for the urban middle classes, Phalke moved away from Bombay to distance himself from the Western orientation of urban life.17 At the same time, his acceptance of foreign-made technology (and the necessity of foreign travel) for a fundamentally nationalist appeal to traditional beliefs indicates both a commitment to modernisation and a belief that the new devices are assimilable within an authentically Indian tradition of conjuring and illusion. Two of his greatest successes, Shri Krishna Janma and Kaliya Mardan, are stories of the infant Krishna: that aspect of tradition which is a handing on from father to son, and so an immortality, is joined to a more secular faith in the possibility of a future in reach of the child—Krishna as played by Phalke’s own son and daughter. Phalke’s theological modernity animates 124 Fig. 4. Video Frame grab from a fragment of Kaliya Marden (1919) by Dadasaheb Phalke. the devotional past in the colonial present as the promise of a future guided by the twin principles of democratic nationalism and the centrality of the rural.18 In an analysis of the Indian rope trick, Lee Siegel all but discovers, in the rigidification of the rope, the defiance of gravity, the dismemberment, and reconstitution of the boy who climbs the rope, a celebration of the generative power of masculinity in which women have no place.19 Phalke’s Swadeshi readings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata come very close to this masculinist ideology. Anand Patwardham’s documentary analysis of Indian masculinity in the communal violence of the late eighties and early nineties, Father Son and Holy War (1994) traces the crisis of Indian machismo to the Raj’s sneering disregard for an imagined effeminacy among Indian men. The stunt spectaculars which so dominate contemporary Bombay cinema can trace their histories, albeit turned to the factional fury of Shiv Senna, to Phalke’s male magic which itself can be read as a response to colonialist discourses of masculinity. At the 125 same time, it is important to understand that the films denote an effort to assume a kind of leadership over a massive groundswell of popular resistance, most clearly demonstrated in the anti-Rowlatt movements of 1919, in the name of a rising bourgeoisie.20 Moreover, the Extremist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s influence on the swadeshi movement, as much as the success of the Tata iron and steel mills which financed it, led to a gradual reorientation towards a more radically Hindu nationalism, rather than a simple anti-colonialism. From its birth in 1905, swadeshi tended to adsorb an increasingly bitter anti-Muslim element.21 If Phalke’s films work in a theological time in which the past subsists in the present as the gateway for the future, it is as a function of their attempt to legitimate and administer a specific post-colonial future in the name of an educated, nationalist, Hindu, and male elite. By contrast, Méliès is not theological but teleological: his apparitions are always falsifiable, even in their own terms. On the other hand, where Zecca’s Aladdin et sa lampe merveilleuse and Ali Baba are completely devoted to spectacle in the mode of the department store, a kind of commodity orientalism, Méliès’ diegeses are always palpably impalpable. They are themselves the vanishing of the commodity form, the disappearance at the heart of consumerism. Collapsing, in common with Zecca’s films, distant past and distant future into the illusory double of the present, they go a step beyond to watch the present implode in the moment of its consumption. Inviting the audience’s projections, they provide transformations whose only logic is change, and which invariably end in the disappearance of desire into its own projected objects as they, in turn, disappear from the screen. In this sense, Méliès learns from Phalke the necessity, the unavoidable nature of illusion, but in the orientalist frame, he transmutes the administration of the future into the critique of the present. The move from imagery of the exotic East to an iconography of space is then simply to submit the future to the logic of its consumption in the present. The magician and his creations disappear along with the audience they illuminate in a single puff of smoke: Méliès’ love is all-consuming. Despite Méliès’ canonical place in the history of special effects, his cataclysmically negative evacuation of the consumer carnivalesque has had less “influence” on contemporary film than the obscured administrations of Phalke, albeit 126 a Phalke seen from the position of orientalism. As Other, Phalke speaks from the place of an internalised outside, an exotic space which only appears to negate the colonial-universal imagination. The London Bioscope for the 4th of June 1914: “one feels, therefore that Mr. Phalke is directing his energies in the best and most profitable direction in specialising upon the presentation by film of Indian mythological dramas… in which, if they are to be fully understood and sympathised with by foreigners, vivid realism of atmosphere and setting are essential considerations.”22 Deliberately or unconsciously blind to the anticolonialism of the films, the Bioscope orientalises the films. It is the first step in the domestication of the alien which is the legacy of the modern space fiction special effects extravaganza. In Phalke’s movies, devotion becomes myth. In that mythological arena, the tribulations of the present, seen from the vantage of divine temporality, the past, present, and future are conjoint as they inhabit the here and now. Mythological time in Phalke is his greatest legacy: in it the dead walk among the living, the living among the spirits, and the future emerges as destiny. The love that Phalke’s divinities evoke, as befits constructions of a folkloric nationalism, is love of a father for his children. Elided from the dialectic of reason and the erotic in the colonial situation, love is remade in Phalke as a cinema that functions as a male autogenerative machine. His wife Saraswatibai figures constantly in his biography as making extreme sacrifices to enable him to continue, but her contribution is always subordinated to the parthenogenesis of the male line. Such magic poses itself as the obverse of European enlightenment reason, but retains from it the patriarchal right of rule, figured in the feudal garb of the god-king. For Phalke, this is the fruit of his sharing in the political-intellectual vanguard of turn-of-the-century anti-imperialism. In recent Hollywood science fiction, it is the trace of an orient-alism in which the love of father for child becomes the autoerotics of cloning. Phalke’s cinema in its own time falls outside the spectacular largely because the India of the first quarter of this century was only incompletely colonised. The conservative ethic of self-help in the swadeshi movement was enabled less by the efforts of British reformers than by the persistence of precolonial consumption evaluated by purity and pollution, rather than by the fetish form 127 of the commodity.23 In the absence of full-blown commodity fetishism, the autonomous signifier has no place to become material culture. It is only when swadeshi products, Phalke’s films as much as village homespun cloths, began to circulate in the West as commodities that it is possible to see them commoditised, a process speeded by the very ignorance of the source stories which the films were credited with dispelling. Like the magic of the nineteenth century, the commodified and orientalised cinema of Phalke could become the very type of a cinema of pure effect, much in the way that African statuary could become the icon of pure form for Clive Bell. This is not to argue for influence: quite the contrary. Phalke’s films have rarely been seen in Europe and North America; he scarcely figures in non-Indian histories; and the films themselves exist only in fragments now. But in his work we can see the ghost of another cinema: and in the orientalist movies of the twenties, thirties, and forties, the commodification of that otherness as an internal resistance to the global ambition of capital’s reasons. In some ways the orient as autonomous signifier became for Western culture the purest of commodities, since its use-value was entirely undetermined by its producers in the East. The fascination of the French for India and the English for Egypt might even indicate that there is not even rule at stake here. The popular orient might stand in for the Other of love rather than the other of consumption. In the emptiness of its signification, there hung, robed in indefinite sensuality, a returned image of the vacuum at the heart of the society of the spectacle. The mystique of the East dominated the fantastic cinemas of Hollywood, Pinewood, Neu Babelsberg, and Billancourt for thirty years, and only in the aftermath of WW II, when so many had had reason to experience the exotic places figured in the films, did the glamor begin to wear off. Moreover, the settlement of the last great commercial conflict for commercial control of the Pacific instigated the true globalisation for which capitalism had been waiting. Henceforth there was no terrestrial paradise, no earthly space, where the rule of the commodity no longer held. The function of Other passed to the potential endlessness of outer space: from global to universal Other. Some film criticism attributes the transition from time towards an aesthetic of space to a certain postmodern liberation from narrative, though it is unclear 128 why this is a gain. The division of space from time is not concluded by the ostensible triumph of one over the other, anymore than a fad for map-collecting would indicate the demise of depiction. The two stand in dialectical relation with one another, their struggle an open-ended contradiction at the heart of modernism’s visual regimes. More guarded critics posit a new norm: Long lenses for picturesque landscapes, for traffic and urban crowds, for stunts, for chases, for point-of-view shots of distant events, for inserted close-ups of hands and other details; wide-angle lenses for interior dialogue scenes, staged in moderate depth and often with racking focus; camera movements that plunge into crowds and arc around central elements to establish depth; everything held together by rapid cutting—if there is a current professional norm of 35mm commercial film style around the world, this synthesis is probably it.24 Bordwell’s familiar strategy here is to establish as normative the practices of the North American film industry, and to derive all other filmic styles from that norm. In fact, such normative criticism is as ahistorical as the celebration of space over history: erecting a genral model in place of the specificity of each film, it cannot grasp the inherent instability of every film, the dialectical imbalance that found and finds such intensity of expression in the evolving doubles of the orient. Notes 1. See Sean Cubitt, “Introduction: Le réel c’est l’impossible—The sublime time of Special Effects,” Screen 40, no. 2: 123-30. 2. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (Dover: New York, 1950) and Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Katherine Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966). 3. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973); Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 4. Georges Sadoul, Les pionniers du cinèma 1987-1909, t. 2 of Histoire Generale du cinèma, 2nd ed. (Paris: Denoll, 1948), 390-1. 5. Michael Chanan, The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1980), 32. 129 6. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1949), 195-255. 7. See Pierre Arias, “Méliès mécanicien,” in Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinémtographique, ed. Madeline Malthête-Méliès (Paris: Klincksiek, 1984), 37-79. 8. See Hassan El Nouty, Théâtre pré-cinéma: Essai sur le problématique du spectacle au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions Nizet, 1978), 49-58; and Françoise Levie, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson: La vie d’un fantasmagore (Le Préambule, Bruxelles, 1990). 9. See John Frazer, Artifically Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979); and Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma a l’Epoque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1963), 33-49. 10. Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 65. 11. See Alberto Cavalcanti, “Foreword,” in Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes.; Hans Richter, The Struggle for the Film, ed. Jürgen Römhild, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); and Sergei Eisenstein, “George Méliès’s Mistake,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 of Writings, 1922-1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), 258-60. 12. Firoze Rangoonwalla, Indian Cinema Past and Present (New Delhi: Clarion Books, 1983), 35. 13. Cited in B. V. Dharap, “Dadasaheb Phalke—Father of Indian Cinema,” in 70 Years of Indian Cinema 1913-1983, ed. T. N. Ramachandran (Bombay: Cinema-Indian International, 1985), 40. 14. Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1980), 15. 15. See Thomas Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4: 63-70; and André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity and ‘Trickality’: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (Fall): 110-19. 16. See Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity and ‘Trickality’: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès”; Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinéma, art et industrie: I: 1985-1914 (Paris: Editions Universitaire, 1968); and Pierre Jenn, Georges Méliès cinèaste: Le Montage cinématographique chez George Méliès (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1984). 17. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Art in Indian Cinema,” in 70 Years of Indian Cinema 19131983, ed. T. M. Ramachandran (Bombay: Cinema-India International, 1985), 230. 18. See Mahatma Gandhi, Cent per Cent Swadeshi; or, The Economics of Village Industries, 3rd ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948). 19. Lee Siegel, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 218-20. 20. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40-1. Reprinted from Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies 1: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1-7. 21. Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (London: Pimlico, 1998), 89-91. 22. Reproduced in Barnouw and Krishnaswami, 21. 23. See C. A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700-1930,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Culture Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 24. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard Unviersity Press, 1997), 259-60. 130