DEAD OF NIGHT (CAVALCANTI 1945)art3idea.psu.edu/metalepsis/pages/dead_of_night.pdf · One of the...
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DEAD OF NIGHT (CAVALCANTI 1945) Ealing Studio played a central role in the development of the British film industry before and after World War II. It drew its actors from the London stage and connected to audiences with a middle-class populism that combined comedy with political acumen. Most famous for its films of the 50s (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949; Passport to Pimlico, 1949; The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951; The Ladykillers, 1955), Dead of Night (1945) celebrated the end of the war with a portmanteau project that offered four of its directors the opportunity to construct independent narratives com- bined into a single spooky tale about a recurrant nightmare of an architect who visits a country house. Arturo Cavalcanti came to Britain from Brazil, where he had begun as a failed law student (he had an argument with a professor) and was sent to Switzerland where he began to study architecture. After a visit back home, Cavalcanti took up a position at the Brizilian consulate in Liverpool, but he continued his interests in the arts, corresponding wiht Marcel L’Herbier, a promoter of the avant- garde film movement in France. L’Herbier offered Cavalcanti a job as a set designer. He returned to England to work on several projects, and joined Ealing in 1940, where he worked on a number of propaganda films for the war effort. As if to celebrate the end of the war, Ealing enlisted Cavalcanti and three other of its directors (Basil Deardon, Charles Chrichton, and Robert Hamer) to develop a horror film in the form of an anthology. Guests are in the midst of a “house party” at the rural estate of Eliot Foley. Foley wants to make improvements to his farm and house and has enlisted an architect, Walter Craig, to join them for a few days. Even as he drives up to the house, however, Craig has the feeling that he’s been there before. When he sees the guests, the feeling intensifies, and he tells each of them that they are playing a role in a circular dream that ends in tragedy. One of the guests, Dr. van Straaten, an immigrant psychiatrist (from Holland rather than Vienna, to avoid audience anti-war sentiment), explains Craig’s dream as a psychosis without significance, but the other guests defend Craig by revealing their own experiences with the uncanny. All of the stories involve exchanges between life and death. A race-car drive who barely survives a racing accident is given a premonition of a bus accident and avoids a “second death.” A young girl discovers a ghost at a children’s Twelfth Night celebration in an 18c. manor house. A Chippendale mirror continues to reflect the bedroom in which its former owner had strangled his wife out of jealousy. A cheated golfer commits suicide but haunts the victor in a comic-relief tale that allows the audience to prepare for the longest story, the psychiatrists own, about a ven- triloquist whose dummy gains the upper hand. Omens along the way lead the audience to the climax of the film, where Craig confronts van Straaten literally and the film “recycles” again to its innocent beginning. *WHY THIS FILM?: I saw this film for the first time in 1984, when Marco Fra- scari and I, attending a meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, hap- pened upon a presen- tation by an engineer working for IBM who had plotted out the timing of the Dead of Night sequences. Marco and I were, however, more fascinated with the film’s seemingly complete com- pendium of virtuality, using space and time as the medium of transactions of life and death’s overlaps. Marco did not write much about Dead of Night later, but I included it in a number of essays, both to develop the idea of “detached virtualities” based on Borges’ idea of the fantastic’s four primary forms (travel through time, story in a story, contami- nation of reality, and the double) as well as to study the way the film used mul- tiple registers of narrative. Like Hitch- cock, Cavalcanti wished to engage the audience not on an intellectual but an emotional level. He pushed anxiety to fear and fear to fright (the three Freud- ian levels) with perfect timing (as the IBM engineer had shown). But, he had also covered all of the possibilities of the “Freudian-Jentschian uncanny,” as generated from the primary states of AD and DA (the living person drawn to death and the dead person who has “forgotten how to die”). These poles and their expansion also seemed to predict Lacan’s use of the extimate to develop his own “detached virtuality” based on the part-object as the focus of the drives (oral, anal, phallic, vision, and sound). Anyone wanting to “illustrate” Lacan’s interest in the imaginary and only one example to use would be happy with Dead of Night. The Master Trope: the Story in the Story In the story in the story, the audience forgets where it is; it is hypnotized by this simple act by which the initial entry into the fictive world encounters another entry into another fictive world: < … <. This is the interval used by hypnotists; when you are preparing to be hypnotized (or preparing to resist hypnotism) you are already hypnotized. Your “first encounter” is really your second, and the equalization of the first and second entry point allows for the ambiguity of the interval you occupy. A “square-wave condition” develops, which is anamorphosis at its purest. Between the levels of φ and -φ, the audience allows for the detachment of virtual spaces and creation of “poché spaces” into which anything may disappear and re- appear. In this liberated space-time, the audience advances from anxiety (Angst) to fear (Furcht) to fright (Schreck) — the ideal route carefully constructed by any director wishing to be a “master of suspense.” The key is the psychiatrist, Dr. van Straaten. Thanks to his resistance to the belief in the supernatural, the audience abandons the function of belief altogether. Siding with van Straaten’s realist criteria, they read- ily accept the evidence presented by the supporters who have, as “eye witnesses,” been forced to admit the multiple folds of reality. This literary form, known as the “Gingrich tale,” is like the magic performer who relies on the audience’s skepticism rather than its belief in magic. Without skepticism, the transition from anxiety to fear to fright cannot occur. This film shows how!
Transcript of DEAD OF NIGHT (CAVALCANTI 1945)art3idea.psu.edu/metalepsis/pages/dead_of_night.pdf · One of the...
DEAD OF NIGHT (CAVALCANTI 1945)Ealing Studio played a central role in the development of the British film industry before and after World War II. It drew its actors from the London stage and connected to audiences with a middle-class populism that combined comedy with political acumen. Most famous for its films of the 50s (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949; Passport to Pimlico, 1949; The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951; The Ladykillers, 1955), Dead of Night (1945) celebrated the end of the war with a portmanteau project that offered four of its directors the opportunity to construct independent narratives com-bined into a single spooky tale about a recurrant nightmare of an architect who visits a country house.Arturo Cavalcanti came to Britain from Brazil, where he had begun as a failed law student (he had an argument with a professor) and was sent to Switzerland where he began to study architecture. After a visit back home, Cavalcanti took up a position at the Brizilian consulate in Liverpool, but he continued his interests in the arts, corresponding wiht Marcel L’Herbier, a promoter of the avant-garde film movement in France. L’Herbier offered Cavalcanti a job as a set designer. He returned to England to work on several projects, and joined Ealing in 1940, where he worked on a number of propaganda films for the war effort. As if to celebrate the end of the war, Ealing enlisted Cavalcanti and three other of its directors (Basil Deardon, Charles Chrichton, and Robert Hamer) to develop a horror film in the form of an anthology.Guests are in the midst of a “house party” at the rural estate of Eliot Foley. Foley wants to make
improvements to his farm and house and has enlisted an architect, Walter Craig, to join them for a few days. Even as he drives up to the house, however, Craig has the feeling that he’s been there before. When he sees the guests, the feeling intensifies, and he tells each of them that they are playing a role in a circular dream that ends in tragedy. One of the guests, Dr. van Straaten, an immigrant psychiatrist (from Holland rather than Vienna, to avoid audience anti-war sentiment), explains Craig’s dream as a psychosis without significance, but the other guests defend Craig by revealing their own experiences with the uncanny. All of the stories involve exchanges between life and death. A race-car drive who barely survives a racing accident is given a premonition of a bus accident and avoids a “second death.” A young girl discovers a ghost at a children’s Twelfth Night celebration in an 18c. manor house. A Chippendale mirror continues to reflect the bedroom in which its former owner had strangled his wife out of jealousy. A cheated golfer commits suicide but haunts the victor in a comic-relief tale that allows the audience to prepare for the longest story, the psychiatrists own, about a ven-triloquist whose dummy gains the upper hand. Omens along the way lead the audience to the climax of the film, where Craig confronts van Straaten literally and the film “recycles” again to its innocent beginning.
*WHY THIS FILM?: I saw this film for the first time in 1984, when Marco Fra-scari and I, attending a meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, hap-pened upon a presen-tation by an engineer working for IBM who had plotted out the timing of
the Dead of Night sequences. Marco and I were, however, more fascinated with the film’s seemingly complete com-pendium of virtuality, using space and time as the medium of transactions of life and death’s overlaps. Marco did not write much about Dead of Night later, but I included it in a number of essays, both to develop the idea of “detached virtualities” based on Borges’ idea of the fantastic’s four primary forms (travel through time, story in a story, contami-nation of reality, and the double) as well as to study the way the film used mul-tiple registers of narrative. Like Hitch-cock, Cavalcanti wished to engage the audience not on an intellectual but an emotional level. He pushed anxiety to fear and fear to fright (the three Freud-ian levels) with perfect timing (as the IBM engineer had shown). But, he had also covered all of the possibilities of the “Freudian-Jentschian uncanny,” as generated from the primary states of AD and DA (the living person drawn to death and the dead person who has “forgotten how to die”). These poles and their expansion also seemed to predict Lacan’s use of the extimate to develop his own “detached virtuality” based on the part-object as the focus of the drives (oral, anal, phallic, vision, and sound). Anyone wanting to “illustrate” Lacan’s interest in the imaginary and only one example to use would be happy with Dead of Night.
The Master Trope: the Story in the Story
In the story in the story, the audience forgets where it is; it is hypnotized by this simple act by which the initial entry into the fictive world encounters another entry into another fictive world: < … <. This is the interval used by hypnotists; when you are preparing to be hypnotized (or preparing to resist hypnotism) you are already hypnotized. Your “first encounter” is really your second, and the equalization of the first and second entry point allows for the ambiguity of the interval you occupy. A “square-wave condition” develops, which is anamorphosis at its purest. Between the levels of φ and -φ, the audience allows for the detachment of virtual spaces and creation of “poché spaces” into which anything may disappear and re-appear. In this liberated space-time, the audience advances from anxiety (Angst) to fear (Furcht) to fright (Schreck) — the ideal route carefully constructed by any director wishing to be a “master of suspense.” The key is the psychiatrist, Dr. van Straaten. Thanks to his resistance to the belief in the supernatural, the audience abandons the function of belief altogether. Siding with van Straaten’s realist criteria, they read-ily accept the evidence presented by the supporters who have, as “eye witnesses,” been forced to admit the multiple folds of reality. This literary form, known as the “Gingrich tale,” is like the magic performer who relies on the audience’s skepticism rather than its belief in magic. Without skepticism, the transition from anxiety to fear to fright cannot occur. This film shows how!
The Double
Everyone experiences the double in the form of inner voices, the function of the Idealich, or ego-ideal that regulates the ego by speaking from the inside. In the final tale, van Straaten tells the story of a ventriloquist whose ego has been taken over by his own construction, the voice of the dummy, Hugo. This amounts to an ex-change of the Idealich with the Ich-Ideal, the external “ideal ego” to which the sub-ject looks as a model. The model in this case is the “dead” Hugo, and the circular drive begin by the substitution of the ideal ego by the ego-ideal leads directly to the GAP — an impasse that can be resolved only by the destruction of Hugo. But, in this story’s surprise ending, that’s not ex-actly what happens. This is a psychoana-lytic version of transubstantiation turned upside down! Because the psychiatrist is narrating this story, the audience accepts it as a veridical account; indeed, the facts of the story support the idea that the “magi-cal exchange” is in fact a possibility in the construction of the psychotic personality.
The Omen (travel through time)
Presented with an image of impending doom, subjectivity has a choice. “Will I escape this predicted death, or will I in fact not do precisely those things that will guarantee my ‘appointment in Samar-rah’?” The race-car driver sees a hearse from his hospital window and recognizes the driver as a bus conductor. The double sign persuades him not to take the bus, which crashes just after its stop. Yet, the problem of to follow or escape the pre-diction persists with Craig’s observation that every realization of his dream further obliges him to live it out. This “double lock” enlists the audience’s sympathy for Craig over van Straaten, and we realize that the doctor’s realism was there to pull us in that direction. All along, we have been pulling for Craig because van Straaten’s explana-tions were simply not interesting enough. We were compelled by our own curiosity to go from anxiety to fear to fright; our own “death” (confrontation with the unpleas-ant ending of the film) was self-driven and self-engineered by interpreting omens as “inevitable.”
Contamination of Reality
A well-to-do bachelor is given a mirror by his fiancée but soon discovers that the mir-ror refuses to reflect reality. Instead, it is a portal on to the bedroom of its former 19c. owner, whose confinement following a riding injury compelled him to strangle his wife in a jealous rage. The same feel-ings overcome the modern owner, as he interprets his new wife’s harmless absenc-es as liaisons with a rival. Note that travel through time and the double are involved in this optical contamination of reality. Such is the case with detached virtuality — one form will involve the others. The tricky mirror reminds us of Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced, where the mirror reflects the back, not the front, of its gentleman client. Here, the mirror reflects more than an im-age: it also projects the feelings and condi-tions of the past, making the optics of the present into a time-travel device able to shatter the distances of centuries. Watch to see how, in the climax of this scene, how the wife is finally “enlisted” by the fantasy.
cause 1 effect 2< … <
the omen as a cause with the “wrong effect”
< → >< → <
the normal reflective function is reversed
< → >< → <
the servant becomes the master, ambiguously
The omen predicts a future and in a real sense is a “pre-effect” of something yet to happen. This premature temporal location turns the predicate of the effect around, making it “turn” in a causal direction; in this reversed position, it is one of many causes of a single effect (cf. the usual re-lation of one cause to many effects). The cause-effect reversal simultaneously re-verses the temporal arrow.
The mirror usually just reflects the space in front of it, but in this sequence the mirror “remembers” a past scene, which it repro-duces while at the same time it interpo-lates the modern user so that he becomes “predicated” by his own mirror. Reversed predication is equivalent to cross-inscrip-tion: the past with its future-durable mir-ror is symmetrical with the future and its mirror stuck in the past
The ventriloquist’s dummy is the servant/automaton that entertains by seeming to be autonomous. The joke turns serious when the ventriloquist’s mind of subject to schizo-phrenia, and the voice created as an ideal ego becomes the ego–ideal. The dummy is material with a small element of life (DA), while the ventriloquist is almost normal, but with a small element of the “dead thing” in-side, drawing him toward death (AD).
super-ego as Real(maternal/paternal)
REAL(traumatic/phallic)
φ/-φ“dæmon”
“askesis”home/unhome
Unheimlich
ideal ego(imaginary)
“gaze”
ego–ideal(symbolic)
“voice”
clinamen
tesseræ
apophrades
kenosis
FROM THE BORROMEO KNOT TO BLOOM’S REVISIONARY RATIOS
Lacan’s system is notably divided into three main parts: the imaginary (where the subject encounter its own mirror image as an “ideal ego” that casts its own bodily reality into abjection); the symbolic (networks of symbolic rela-tionships, where the subject is interpelated by an “inner voice” of conscious that regulates its behavior); and the Real, taken over by the super-ego func-tion derived from the child’s relation to the mother and father. Because the upshot of the three drives (oral, anal, phallic) is that the subject is left with a reserve of “negative space,” home is ambiguously a place and non-place, dominated by the phallic logic of appearance and disappearance — in short, the uncanny (Unheimlich). Where the imaginary is regulated by the gaze, and the symbolic by the inner voice of the ego-ideal, the traumatic–Real of the super-ego is radically dæmonic. This is an over-presence that collapses the dimensonalities constructed by the subject to accommodate symbolic and imaginary relationships, and the only defense against this collapse is Bloom’s category of askesis: retreat. Yet, this retreat is subject to reversed predica-tion, also known as cross-inscription. The manor house in the 12th Night story is haunted by the ghost of the murdered child (HC), a version of AD. But the child himself has “forgotten how to die,” DA, and the CH expression is equally valid. The house and boy alternately predicate each other.
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