The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

University. All rights reserved.

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THE OFF-SCREEN

An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame

Eyal Peretz

Stanford University Press

Stanford California

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

Editor

Contents

Illustrations

THRESHOLD

The Unframing Image

PART 1: THE OFF-SCREEN: SHAKESPEARE, BRUEGEL, TARKOVSKY

PART 2: THE ORIGIN OF FILM

1. On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance

2. The Actor of the Crowd—The Great Dictator: Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang

PART 3: ON FILM GENRE

3. Howard Hawks’s Idea of Genre

4. What Is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1635.

Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558.

Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.

The cradle rocks. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916.

Triangle Film Corporation.

Workers going into the factory. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916.

Triangle Film Corporation.

The miracle at Cana. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916.

Triangle Film Corporation.

The cradle rocks. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916.

Triangle Film Corporation.

The shadow of the off-screen. Fritz Lang, M, 1931.

Nero Film AG.

The petrifying leader. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935.

NSDAP Reichspropagandaleitung Hauptabt.

The camera/weapon. Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940.

Charles Chaplin Productions.

The Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Warner Brothers.

On the road. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936.

Charles Chaplin Productions.

Chaplin, one of the crowd, apart from the crowd.

Henry Lehrman, Kid Auto Races at Venice, 1914. Keystone Film.

A playful interruption of work. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936.

Charles Chaplin Productions.

The experimenting monkey. Howard Hawks, Monkey Business, 1952.

Twentieth Century Fox.

Diving from the sky. Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia, 1938.

Olympia Film GMBH.

THRESHOLD

The Unframing Image

What’s in a frame? What’s in the frame of a work of art? It is in the gap or the distance opening between these two questions, between the frames, that this book tries to find its place.

While we will mostly pay attention to the cinematic frame, cinema stands as a culminating and to an extent revolutionary moment of what we will try to understand as a general logic of framing that preoccupies the work of art in modernity, that is, the work of art as it has developed from the Renaissance to the present. The question regarding the modern work of art, the question indeed of its modernity and novelty, is to a large extent one of exploring, investigating, and experimenting or playing with a new kind of frame, a frame that unframes.

What does the frame of the modern work of art, the framing operation that is the modern work of art, unframe? This concern implicitly and explicitly guides my analysis. I will open by taking a look not at a film but rather a painting that strikes me as a remarkable allegorical reflection on this question of the frame. The painting is Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (1635).

The Interrupting Angel

All artists are escape artists. Because Rembrandt is a painter, he tries to paint his way out. If what one tries to escape is always a prison of sorts, then what is the prison here, and what are the means of escape? An inscription of a prison as well as an indication of the way out, the painting itself gives us the answers.¹

Looking at the painting, we can say that on the most literal level, that of representation, what we seem to have escaped, or more accurately, avoided at the last minute, is the killing of a son by his father, and what enables that escape is an interrupting angel. But what precisely does this mean? What is the nature of the killing, or sacrifice, of a son by his father? Why can we describe such a sacrificial scene as a prison? And what kind of escape does the interrupting angel offer? The key to all this can be found in the operation of the pictorial frame. By pictorial frame, I mean not simply the physical limitation of the painting’s borders, but also the way in which what we see in the painting functions as the inside of a framing operation, an inside that organizes itself in relation to what we do not see, an outside of the frame.

The painting’s theme, the angelic interruption of the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, is intimately tied here to the way Rembrandt understands the pictorial frame. In fact, this angelic interruption functions as an allegorical reflection on the activity of the painterly medium itself as structured by a new kind of framing operation, of a framing that unframes. I suggest that Rembrandt shows this new kind of frame to be a saving or interrupting angel. In other words, the angel is the painting: the modern medium of painting is an angelic interruption (of the sacrifice of a son by his father).

But what then, more precisely, is the angel? In the most immediate way, we can say that the angel is a messenger coming from the outside. In the case of the painting at hand, this outside is indicated, at the most obvious and basic level, as whatever is beyond the frame’s borders, for it is quite clear that the angel has just entered into the painting from a zone invisible to us. In fact, the tip of its wing is cut by the painting’s frame, as if making explicit that it has just arrived from across the painting’s border.

This outside, to begin with, is thus outside the frame. Yet things are not so simple, for this outside from which the angel comes is different from, say, the spatial outside, such as the wall on which the painting hangs or the outside that the painting’s observers occupy. Rather, this outside of the frame seems to be a (nonspatial) part of the painting, belonging to something we might call the fictional realm of the painting (a realm that is larger or more than what the painting makes visible), an outside only made possible by, and in fact to a certain extent co-extensive with, the painting itself. It is the outside of the painting, both in the sense that it belongs to the painting and in the sense that it is outside any actual, visible part of the painting. Thus, while it belongs to the painting, it has no actual presence, only a presence we can understand, for lack of a better term, as virtual, and thus as a nonexistence that is nevertheless in effect. We can name such being-in-effect of what does not actually exist a haunting, a term that will play a prominent role in our discussions.

The achievement of this fictional realm of the painting depends on yet another aspect of the operation of the painting’s frame besides its functioning as the marker of the borders of visibility. This other aspect is that of the frame as the mark of a separation or cut between the painting and its spatial and temporal surroundings, a separation emphasized by the painting’s movability, by the fact that it can always be taken out of its present context and hung elsewhere. It is only because the painting is framed, in the sense of being cut out or separated from any specific surrounding, that it can create its own fictional realm, a realm in which a visible inside and an invisible outside, one that comes with the painting, wherever it moves, are copresent. It is this invisible outside belonging to the fictional realm that I shall designate as the dimension of the off.

We can see, then, that the painting’s interruption of visibility and separation from its surroundings through its borders or frame are what allows the haunting invisible outside, the off, to become manifest: to appear as what is not actually present and visible in the painting yet is still part of it. Consequently, the appearance of the angel from the outside (an outside emphasized as being the outside of the frame) offers an allegory for the way the medium of painting, by creating a frame that cuts visibility, allows for an invisibility belonging to the painting to appear. The angel is the appearance of the medium itself, which makes ghostly invisibility visible; in other words, the angel stands for the being of the painterly image, which we can understand as the appearance of invisibility that belongs to the visible.

But why does the angel, the appearance of an invisible outside as a presence within the borders of a frame—and thus the appearance of a modern pictorial image, broadly defined²—interrupt the sacrifice of a son by his father, and perhaps, even more particularly, this father and this son, Abraham and Isaac? To understand the matter we need to examine Rembrandt’s procedure vis-à-vis the biblical story. The painting, I suggest, should be treated as offering a profound reflection—no less weighty than other famous reflections (say, those of Kierkegaard or Kafka)—on Genesis 22 and the Abraham cycle in general.

Rembrandt’s painting, I submit, seeks to stage an intervention at the moment of sacrifice, which is similar to but not the same thing as the biblical divine intervention. Painting the interruption of sacrifice does not mean for Rembrandt simply depicting a significant biblical episode but recognizing a potential for escape within it that it is the task of the painter to actualize. What needs to be escaped is not simply this specific act of sacrifice but an entire system within which the scene takes place, and even more than that, an entire system of which this scene is the logical center. The Abraham cycle qualifies as a system in the sense that the figures and events it presents are structurally interrelated, forming a coherent whole; and this system is the heart of a cultural logic whose consequences resonate throughout the history of the monotheistic religions. The story of Abraham is thus the scriptural center of an enormously consequential system. Rembrandt seeks to interrupt and escape this system, and painting is his means to do so.

That said, it is only by using a potential for the interruption of the system found within this same system, a potential serving as a source for a new kind of activity, namely, modern painting, that escape may be achieved.³ In this sense, Rembrandt’s painting functions as the site where a scene within the Abrahamic system is repeated to allow for its own transformation and dismantling. The medium of painting, then, has the task of realizing the potential for escape that the biblical account of interrupted sacrifice already suggests.

In a sense, the hermeneutic required may be found in the opening lines of the Abraham cycle:

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:1–3, KJV)

A call out of nowhere is suddenly heard. Its addressee, Abram (only later to be called Abraham), suffers complete disorientation and dispossession: loss of name, land, place, and belonging. The call empties everything out, reducing Abram to nothing—or to nothing determinate—and stripping him of all identity.⁴ The utterance of such a call may designate the most radical limit of the biblical text; here, in contrast to relations between mortals and higher powers in other ancient cultures, no markers of identity are affirmed. The call does not come from a specific place or time, nor does it belong anywhere or announce the existence of a standing order of things: it is a pure disruption, a stark taking away of all recognizable limits.

This moment does not last, however. A series of delimiting and identifying markers immediately follows, producing what we may call the Abrahamic system. Abraham will be given a land, a territory with defined borders, a realm through which one can distinguish between those who belong and those who do not—insiders and outsiders. He will become a father—that is, the originator of identity—to successive generations of a nation, a particular people and political entity marked as belonging to this specific land. Furthermore, he will be given a signature, circumcision, to mark those who belong; those who do not bear this mark are to be cast out of his house.⁵

Finally, a relation is established between a divinity (increasingly understood as the giver of territory and order) and a specific sacred place (in contrast to the principle of nowhere that was first announced). This site will become the locus of sacrifice that, in keeping with the practices of other ancient cultures, functions as a privileged site for communicating with the divine—the center for organizing the territorial community, the people of a land. As such, it is no accident that Jewish tradition understands Mount Moriah, the place assigned for sacrifice, as the locus of the future Temple Mount, around which the political community comes to be organized.⁶

The coming-to-be of this sacred place marks the culminating moment of a theological-political logic, whereby a privileged place of communicating with the higher powers, divinities, or the divine (thus an activity we might understand as religious) becomes a center around which a community is organized (thus an activity we might understand as political). I would like to emphasize the interconnection, within this theological-political system, of three figures: the father, the son, and sacrifice. The father establishes a privileged communication with the divine, in whose name he speaks and whom he therefore mediates; in so doing, he comes to stand as a centralizing political power as well, a center around which a community, a people, is established as occupying a delimited territory.

The activity of sacrifice is presented as the linking element in this communication between the father and the divine, and the paradigmatic figure of such sacrificial communication between the two is the son. Even though Isaac is not ultimately sacrificed in the biblical narrative, we can nevertheless say that the ram taking his place is a symbolic son—as is perhaps the case for any sacrifice within this system.

In this context, then, being a son means being the sacrificial means of communication between the father and the divine. The divine itself seems to be the product of the transformation of an empty call that strips away all identity into a transcendent principle of ordering territories. As a consequence of all of the above we can define sacrifice within this system as the activity of bringing something that did not yet have a determined identity under this divine power of territorial ordering (a bringing under achieved through the mediation of the father) so as to establish an identitarian community or perpetuate it. Sacrifice can thus be understood as the ritual of eliminating the excess of the empty call in order to establish a territory, or as a mechanism by which excess (the disorienting power of the empty call to strip away any identity and place) is transformed into territory.⁷ The son, within this system of relationships, is the general name for everyone and everything that falls under the jurisdiction of this transformative mechanism.

Territory here amounts to a framing mechanism, a means of creating borders by introducing a division between, on the one hand, those who are assigned an identity as belonging to a sacrificial community under the power of the paternal mediation of divine orders and, on the other hand, those who do not belong and therefore have no true identity. The creation of borders through territorial framing, then, is what manages to introduce a division into the excessive call, splitting it into an inside, which possesses real identity, and an outside, which lacks real identity (yet is not a disorienting excess, for this division is what enabled the elimination of excess).

This complex theological-political configuration thus establishes a relation between the centralizing figure of the father and the territorial community. Communication with the divine, which underwrites this relation, occurs through the sacrifice of the son. The medium of painting—and by extension all other modern artistic media—comes to interrupt, or unframe, this configuration. For what is at stake in the pictorial frame is a different way of thinking about the relations between the excessive call and a certain delimitation, in such a way that a different configuration of the relations between excess and identity emerges.

Rembrandt repeats the biblical scene of interrupted sacrifice in order to develop a response to the empty call—a call to which the Abrahamic system bears witness while at the same time functioning as a defensive repression—that differs from the biblical one. Through this repetition, the interruption of sacrifice will no longer have the same meaning as in the biblical context, at least in part. In the Bible, the son functions as the paradigmatic sacrificial figure for establishing relations between the paternal principle, the divine as transcendent ordering, and the creation of a territorial community. Only after this has been established can the sacrifice of the actual son, Isaac, be interrupted by symbolic substitution—as if to indicate that the first injunction of sacrifice (sacrifice of the son!) serves as a fundamental and haunting reminder, at the heart of all acts of sacrifice to follow, that they stand under its sign. The interruption of sacrifice takes the form of a symbolic substitution, while the real sacrificial object on which the whole system rests remains the son. Interrupting sacrifice by means of painting, however, through a frame that unframes, is more than just the interruption of actual sacrifice through symbolic substitution; it constitutes the unraveling and transformation of the sacrificial theological-political system in its entirety—a defensive system that both keeps alive and at the same time represses the event of the pure call that stands at its origin.

As such, the pictorial image opens a different way of responding to the event of the pure call from the one guiding the Abrahamic system, and the task of the artist—in this instance Rembrandt—is to serve as a non-divine (or ghostly, as we will see later on) interrupter of sacrifice. How does the pictorial image, qua a frame that unframes, manage to achieve this transformation of the response to the pure call?

Rembrandt’s angel offers an allegory for painting as the medium that brings into appearance—and into the frame—a ghostly, invisible outside that belongs to the painting, yet in a way that cannot be seen. Paradoxically, it seems that what belongs to the painting is something that can never belong, inasmuch as it is nothing determinate and occupies no specific time or place. Such indeterminacy, such emptiness, lies at the heart of the framed painting’s mobility, its capacity to transfer to any-space-whatsoever.⁸ It is as if what the painting makes appear and activates—what the angel is announcing—is the capacity to be anywhere equally, to defy framed territory. Such nonbelonging—and this is the heart of the paradox—emerges within a framing operation of delimitation. The painting gives us the pure call as simultaneously delimited, unterritorial, and unterritorializing: infinity that is contained and accessible, yet disappropriating.⁹ The pictorial frame therefore leaves a certain emptiness alive, the mark of the pure call, yet nevertheless lends this emptiness a certain determinacy, a certain identity, without canceling it sacrificially and transforming it into a territory.

In Rembrandt’s angel, one can see how this is worked out as a reflection about the painting’s frame. Two major features characterize the angel’s relation to the frame. First, based on the position of Abraham and his reaction to the angel’s interrupting gesture, it seems clear that just a moment earlier he, the sacrificing father, occupied the center of the frame. The angel—that is, the painterly image—is what decenters Abraham / the father, dislodging him from the frame’s center and the control it represents. The father, within what we have called the Abrahamic system, is in principle a sacrificing father occupying the center of a territorial frame inasmuch as he is the one in charge of the production of the territorial frame and the one by whom all decisions concerning who fits inside the frame and who is relegated to its outside are made. To be dislodged from such a position means no longer being the father, at least in an Abrahamic sense.¹⁰

Second, the angel—as indicated by wings that are cut at the edges of the pictorial frame—comes from the outside.¹¹ Understood allegorically, the angel is a messenger of the off-frame. Given the painting’s theme, of course, we might have said that the outside of which the angel is the messenger is what lies outside the world, that is, the divine realm. In this light, and as it has often been interpreted, Rembrandt’s painting is a religious work that seeks to make the divine manifest.

That said, the dimension of the off is precisely not the dimension of the divine outside (i.e., a transcendence in relation to which the world is territorially organized). Instead—and put in negative terms, to begin with—it is the dismantling of such an outside and, as a corollary, the dismantling of the entire framing-territorial system whose center the divine occupies. The angel of the painting might thus in fact be seen as betraying the principle in whose name it was at first sent—the principle of the divine—undermining it and causing it to dissolve. From a certain perspective, the angel is actually a diabolical rebel who dreams of unseating the father.¹²

As a messenger from the outside, then, the angel is not a messenger of the divine but a messenger of a pure outside—an outside that achieves appearance and activation through a new mechanism, namely, a frame that unframes. This mechanism opens us, through the creation of a fictional space, to what I am calling the off, the invisible outside of a fictional space. The off can therefore be defined as the appearance of the pure outside, of the pure call, by means of fictional space. We can understand this fictional off as the product of an attempt to develop a strategy for responding to the pure call, or the pure outside, that differs from the biblical response.

The principle of the off, then, aims to reactivate the pure call before divine territorialization takes it over. The painting shows this inasmuch as the angel exercises a decentering force, that is, interrupts the mechanism of territorial framing represented by the father, who occupies the heart of the system of the transcendent divine. It is also evident inasmuch as the angel/image serves to dissolve the very practice of sacrifice. In contrast to Caravaggio’s famous depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance, Rembrandt’s painting in no way allows for the victim’s symbolic replacement, the ram; instead, it eliminates all sacrificial figures. This is also why (again in contrast to Caravaggio) Rembrandt has Abraham drop his knife altogether. While the heart of Caravaggio’s painting, we might say, is the scream of the son, expressing a horror of paternal authority, Rembrandt’s painting aims to dissolve the system within which this authority takes shape to begin with.

For Rembrandt, the painting itself—the modern image (allegorically appearing as the angel)—functions as a replacement for paternal sacrifice. This does not mean that the painting is substituted for the original victim in the manner of the ram—as if humanity (having advanced even beyond animal sacrifice) had learned to transfer violence away from a living being onto an inanimate object. Instead, it means that the modern image aims to replace sacrificial logic with another logic altogether.

This logic of the off, which replaces filial sacrifice, is a new type of experience that allows excess to remain excess; we can understand this experience as the pleasure the artistic image offers beyond the paternal capacity to frame and territorialize. Such pleasure in and of the image concerns a transformation in and of our capacity to relate to excess, to the pure call. The artistic image brings to a halt, as it were, the sacrificial machine that transforms excess; it enables a nondestructive relation to the excessive call—in other words, a relation that does not involve complete emptying, disorientation, and loss.

The pure call implies the complete elimination of identity and belonging; as such, one needs to protect against it—hence the rise of divine territorial logic, that is, of the elimination of the emptiness of the pure call. Through the invention of an open frame, a frame that unframes, the work of art manages to construct a delimitation, and thus brings about the accessibility and availability of something determined; yet at the same time this delimitation, which makes the off present, allows for the emptiness of the call as such to continue resonating. This resonance is the experience of pleasure qua a suspended space of emptiness, which eliminates the need for the call to be transformed into sacrifice. A space that is simultaneously determinate (this painting) and indeterminate (in the sense that what this painting makes appear is an off) allows for the miracle of an excess that is not destructive and, as such, does not need to be eliminated—which is precisely what the sacrificial system had to do, as it were. Now the pure call can become part of life.

The decentering of the sacrificing father, the angel’s message of the new principle of the off, therefore concerns a new pleasurable object that allows for for the replacement of territorializing sacrificial logic. It merits emphasizing, however, that the delimitation at work in the pictorial frame is nonterritorial: territory does not make room for excess but rather divides excess between the real identity of those inside and the nonreal identity of those outside. In contrast, the painting allows for excess qua excess (and therefore pleasure: the experience of an accessible excess) without excess operating in the manner of the originary pure call, as a total emptying dispossession, or its being transformed, in the manner of the biblical defensive move, into a territory with the means of sacrifice.

The logic governing relations between hearing the pure call and creating territory through paternal sacrifice, I suggest, provides one solution to the problematic formation of self-identity. By its nature, the human being is first exposed to a principle of pure emptiness out of which she or he emerges into who she or he is; identity is formed out of complete nonidentity and indeterminacy. In the Abrahamic system, the relations between identity and pure excess are formulated as an opposition.

Within this system identity—having a recognizable place within the general context of existence—means occupying a territory, a delimited realm achieved through a sacrificial cancellation of excess. The angelic interruption of sacrifice that the modern work of art seeks to effect involves the transformation of relations between identity and excess. Henceforth, identity will no longer stand opposed to excess; it will no longer take the form of gaining territory through sacrifice that is charged with canceling out excess. Rather, identity—coming to have a place in the world—will prove to be a matter of remaining open to excess. The work of art will enable this by allowing us to relate to pure excess not as an all-consuming indeterminacy to be eliminated in order that we may be (i.e., have an identity), but as a source of containable pleasure to be used as a resource for relating to identity as a work of self-formation and self-transformation, rather than a territory.

The modern work of art, then, allows for a new relation to excess, inasmuch as it is a work of delimitation that nevertheless leaves room open for the pure call. Such openness, as we have seen, is made possible through the creation of fictional space, which makes the dimension I am calling off—a dimension of nonbelonging—accessible (i.e., a point of potential belonging). This revolutionary transformation in relations between identity and excess made possible by the work of art—as a frame that unframes, or gives a place to what has no place—also dissolves the theological-political synthesis, that is, the series of connections that found a community by claiming territory through sacrificial communication with a transcendent principle of ordering. What replaces the theological-political is the artistic//political,¹³ which is not the aestheticization of the political; the aestheticization of the political still belongs to the system of sacrifice (though at the moment of its nihilistic demise). By making place in life for the pleasurable accessibility of excess, the work of art enables the coming together of those who share a world in a nonterritorial manner.

This book is dedicated to the investigation of various implications of this new thinking of the off: a new thinking that the modern work of art activates by creating frames that unframe, thereby letting the dimension of the pure call resonate and become present in our life, allowing us to have something in common (an emptying of identity that we paradoxically share, since it is something that deterritorializes us all equally) without establishing sacred communities.

PART 1

The Off-Screen

Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky

Who’s there?

With this question that opens Hamlet—perhaps the paradigmatic work of art in the age we have come to call modernity—something new is announced: the haunting of the world—the apparition of a ghost searching for a place, seeking to be heard—at the heart of the work of art. What is the nature of this ghost, and what does it want from us? What is the nature of its connection to the modern work of art—and to film in particular?

Staging Ghosts

Who’s there? is perhaps the most fundamental question of what we can call the modern condition. The question itself is already a response to something that precedes it, to a disturbance that might or might not—and this is its constitutive ambiguity—address, that is, mean to call, intentionally draw the attention of the one who responds. The reason for the ambiguity of the disturbance is the unrecognizability of its source. Who, or what, brings disturbance—where does it come from, and for what reason? It is unknown, unseen. But precisely this unrecognizability, which produces a lack of certainty regarding for whom it is meant, constitutes such disturbance as a new kind of address—if we now understand being addressed as becoming implicated in the question of one’s identity. Those who are thus addressed are disturbed in their very identity; they do not know whether the disturbance was meant for them or not. They are no longer sure who they themselves are, what their own place in a world of meaning is.

If one reads Hamlet’s opening allegorically, interpreting it not just as the opening of this specific play but as making a general claim about the very mode of utterance of the modern work of art, then one can say that the modern work of art activates a disturbing address, or to use a proximate term, a call. This call puts one—and by extension puts all of us, if we take our position as readers or audience to be that of the one who asks Who’s there?—in question. Facing the modern work, we no longer know by whom or