In this blog I hope to grapple with ways of seeing and feeling matter, and the matter of seeing and feeling: through the abstract and overfull economies of film pleasures, and of non-filmic pleasures that may reverberate as inherently (or experimentally) cinematic. Its objects may be promiscuous, and are inspired by two general, if not definitive or related, “things:” film and scent.
Thus, I begin with an image of Hedy Lamarr smoking in Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty, 1933), an ode to the dissipation of smoke as the filmic materialization of post-coital reverie. There is perhaps no better image to express the ways that cinema moves the viewer and moves within itself, the contingent wending of evanescent particles and profilmic particulars together in a chiasmic logic of desire: the desire for a world beyond the screen and one intrinsically animated by the world placed in front of the camera.
In the course of teaching a seminar called “The Carnal Screen” I've been struck with the recursive trope of smoking that appears in proximity to, or as metonym for, the unseen sex act. This is a place where material representability (as well as its limits) is bookmarked by immaterial experience, in which the puffs and cloudy, sinuous slivers of cigarette smoke make visible forms of pleasure and modes of feeling that evade the gravitational heft of the body, while simultaneously passing through its enfoldings. Smoke rises up and away from Lamarr’s horizontally reclining face, profiled in its stillness, framing it in unpredictable curlicues. Her arm creates a triangular frame that gesture upward, mirroring a previous shot in which her face, seen in close up and upside down, in her evinced moment of pleasure, is partially concealed by the diamond frame of her elbows. The smoke in the air is the frangible archive of Lamarr’s breathing, inhalation and exhalation itself an index of cinematic arousal (no one heaves her chest and breathes more dramatically than Lamarr!) Ingestion, consumption, possession, swallowing are all inflected by Lamarr’s intense performance-as-portraiture, her relative stillness and statuesque nature only highlighting rustling moments, slight reverberations. The smoke emanates, drifts upwards, the inverted residue of that which has been represented seconds prior in terms of falling and rending – the descent of the new lovers bodies onto the settee, the pearls tumbling to the floor, Lamarr’s porcelain hand grasping at the fur of the sheepskin rug below her, the draped fabric which falls to the ground.
Images like this speak of the relation between bodies and cinema, and that, which lies sometimes mutely, in between – at the cusp of form and formlessness. The smoke signal that permeates through the prison wall in Jean Genet's Un Chant D'Amour (1950), orally received on the other side through the ingestion of its threnodic fumes, partakes in this rich interplay between material and immaterial. The gesture of eroticism is abstracted through the limits and perverse extensions of the embodied self into matter, into the very objectness which the architecture of the prison itself enacts and signifies - yet in the punitive register of a disciplining subjection. What is transmitted in this erotic gesture, in the absence of physical contact, but the ephemerality, the impossibility of the gesture itself? Smoke here operates, gains flight as figurative expressivity. It instantiates a liminal symbolic order that aestheticizes eros, showing desire to be purely aesthetic, emitting from the creasing folds between bodies and things.
Lesley Stern, the poet of smoke’s ineffable cinematic “thingness,” invokes the nature of its contingency,
“Yet if every passion, as Benjamin remarks, borders on the chaotic, cigarette smoke surely evinces the waviness of the border…it is often cited as one of the simplest examples of chaos – the smoke rises in a spiral from the cigarette, then suddenly it breaks up, it’s trajectory becomes chaotic, random. This moment, when laminar flow dissolves into nonlaminar flow can’t be predicted, and neither can the pattern of dispersal be foretold.” (The Smoking Book, 109.)
Cinema best narrates this path of desire’s meandering contingency and dissolute directionality, like the smoke that breaks up the field of the image, creating curtains of translucency and shadowy phantoms which snake and tease, the pulsion of enchantment. We are dispersed into forms that evaporate, leaving only memorial residues - smell, taste, breath, feeling, sense that involutes language.
So, what kind of smoke gets in your eyes? There is much left to say, but I have run out of breath.
11 comments:
This is some sexy writing. Itself enchanting. Just exciting to read, don't stop breathing it out, I love this blog already! -CM
E. ~ First, for selfish reasons (because I wanted to read you on a regular basis about cinema), I have LONG hoped that you would start a blog. So: thank you for doing so!
Second, just as film grain is an integral part of (a certain) cinephilic pleasure, so for me is smoke. Some of my early and primal proto-cinephilic experiences occurred in "tent cinemas" in India, especially in Tamil Nadu. Sitting on back-less wooden benches or crossed-legged on the ground, we looked up at the screen (usually a white bed-sheet) through an ever-shifting and transforming cloud of smoke rising from cigarettes and "bidis" all around us. This cone-shaped cloud of smoke was illuminated and held up aloft by the force of the projector beam. It was like watching cinema through a translucent, ever-changing sculpture of light and smoke.
I've never seen it, but reading your post makes me want to watch Un Chant D'Amour right away...!
CM, thanks for the lovely compliment, woman, so happy that you are enjoying.
Girish! Thanks for commenting. I do have you to sincerely thank as one of my key inspirations for the blog. Thank you also for sharing your smoke memories. What a great story about the tent cinemas, it sounds breathtaking, & I see why formative! And yes, you must see Un Chant D'Amour - it is essential, and I think one of, if not the most, erotic film ever made. It is viewable here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2191169673913401693# and on UbuWeb as well, though needless to say, on film in a dark room is always best.
EG, beautiful writing, even to the point of your clever parting line. Thanks for generously sharing your work and inviting me (us).
Girish, did the sheet itself move with the air that also moved the smoke? How ethereal I'm imagining this scenario to have been.
In reading these elegant descriptions, E, I'm reminded of so many films...for one, _In the Mood for Love_'s ever graceful cinematographic tilts/cuts to rising smoke, its evocation of all the movement that those stilled bodies cannot or will not enjoy before the camera. Repeated and overdetermined to the verge of parody!, especially in tandem with the waltz refrain. But the smoke *and* the steam (of the noodle house) so elegantly and sensuously sets that diegesis afire, it seems, and convincingly supplants on-screen sexual consummation with stylistic flourish. I love your sentences that describe how smoke can work in these ways. I hope the course has proven to be as rewarding as your ideas are good.
"desire’s meandering contingency and dissolute directionality..."
hot work EG.
I also think of fog - for machines, drizzle, scrim. You set the scene for considerations of blur, sinuous and tendriled, thick and cold moving in, that is so much the (unmaterial) stuff of cinema. In fact, HD is anathema to this, and thus not a tool of the same enchantment. It's more mausoleum than wormy earth, if you know what I mean.
E., thank you! I've had a DVD of the Genet film for a while, with no good reason why I haven't watched it yet! Classes end next week, after which I can catch up on all the movie-watching I've put on hold for these last few weeks.
Indeed, Kristi! A gust of wind would catch the bed-sheet every now and then and it might wave, flap, or, in one instance, rip violently: we watched the rest of the film in literal split screen!
Thanks Kristi! There are indeed *so* many examples to think of, but IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is certainly an exceptional one - the combination between movement and stillness, between smoke and sound. I love how you suggest that the "diegesis is set afire" by stylistic gesture, so true. It's so interesting too how air's invisibility becomes the carrier for ineffability - "the wind in the trees" etc.
And Marina, thanks for commenting, it's great to read your thoughts here. I am so with you on the earthy worminess of film, and a fascinating comparison to HD. The HD image seems to me very antiseptic and stripped, flattened of depth, made too shiny & graphical. Maybe it's also a quality of dryness (v. moist organicism) too as you suggest. Rather than hot and cold mediums, maybe we also have liquid & dry ones! ;)
Very interesting post! Whenever I think of smoke in movies, I think of the famous scene at the ned of NOW VOYAGER, when the cigarettes shared by Henreid and Daivs stand in for unsublimated Eros in a most direct way. It would be interesting to compile a list of all of the uses of smoke to signal erotic desire, either post-nuptial or unconsummated. There is something so illicit about smoke used in this way, especially in the examples you mention. I think too of the gauzes used by Von Sternberg as layers against the luminous skin of Marlene Dietrich, of veils and nets of all kinds, of stockings and vaseline, and even of eye lights and hair lights. All tropes that belong to cinema and that are indeed so linked to the possibilities of the film medium and how it captures ephemera and illusion.
You know, just as I started reading this wonderful post I couldn't help but think to myself, "I bet Anna Biller is going to say something about Now Voyager. I just know it". And that was an excellent idea.
Elena, my love, with whom I've shared many a cigarette and many a pornographic fantasy - Lovely column. What strikes me is that smoking in movies is not only fetishistically sexy, but it creates for me an intense mimetic desire. If I watch a film in which people are smoking, I get a deep craving in my lungs to inhale a deep drag from a cigarette. It strikes me that this is the most intense kind of mimetic identification I have with cinema, and I've never even been addicted to smoking! What your column also suggests to me is the peculiarity of that desire and the ways that the cinema can represent some senses but not others. For me, at least, that urge I feel in my lungs when I watch smoking on screen is a sensation that is abstracted from the smell of smoke or the ways a smoky bar makes my eyes burn. The ways that light plays off lilting smoke is so cinematic in capturing its elusive tangibility. It is a visual and phenomenological representation. But for the life of me, I never experience the scent of smoke on screen; thus it's a delight and a curiosity that your blog on scent and the screen begins with such a distinctive and penetrating smell that, for me at least, cannot be cinematically reproduced--except, as Girish suggests, in contexts of smoky theatrical spaces of reception, which is off-screen. I need a cigarette...
Anna, thanks so much for commenting. Yes I was thinking of NOW VOYAGER too, I love how their two respective and simultaneous clouds of exhaled smoke meet and collide between them as they take the first puff, and then the bordering of Davis' eyes with tears, another formless form, and the final flourish of the camera movement out the window towards the flickering stars: bliss! An archive of smoking scenes like this in films would be a great idea - would that we had the time...
And Lucas, thanks my dear for noting this peculiarity in the way that smoke on screen doesn't relay its scent - but perhaps that is its fascination after all, that smell cannot be reproduced, but can only be evoked as an absence. The impossibility of this translation between senses is what interests me actually, the limit of what cinema can provide us in terms of other forms of sensual experience, and the horizon of embodiment it gestures towards, but cannot truly meet.
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