Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jete, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour - Softcover

Mavor, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822352710 ISBN 13: 9780822352716

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.

Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, all also published by Duke University Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Black and Blue

The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amourBy CAROL MAVOR

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5271-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................................................................................................................xiiiABBREVIATIONS...........................................................................................................................................xvINTRODUCTION First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts..................................................................................................1AUTHOR'S NOTE 1 A Sewing Needle inside a Plastic and Rubber Suction Cup Sitting on a Watch Spring; or, An Object for Seeing Nothing.....................17CHAPTER 1 Elegy of Milk, in Black and Blue: The Bruising of La Chambre Claire...........................................................................22CHAPTER 2 "A" Is for Alice, for Amnesia, for Anamnesis: A Fairy Tale (Almost Blue) Called La Jetée.................................................53CHAPTER 3 Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.......................................................................77AUTHOR'S NOTE II She Wrote Me...........................................................................................................................111CHAPTER 4 "Summer Was inside the Marble": Alain Resnais's and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour......................................................114LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...................................................................................................................................161NOTES...................................................................................................................................................169INDEX...................................................................................................................................................191

Chapter One

Elegy of Milk, in Black and Blue: The Bruising of La Chambre claire

A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me ...)

Le punctum d'une photo, c'est ce hazard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meutrit ...) —Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire

An open armpit of "marten and beechnut" and "Midsummer night / Of privet and the nests of angel fish" (Plate 4) gives way to fingers of "chance and the ace of hearts," which clench a muscular breast, a molehill "under the sea" (André Breton,). A second frame, smaller and even darker, shows the same man's head asleep or dead, with lips like a "rosette bouquet of stars of the highest magnitude." The exuberant darkness of his skin sinks so deep that it becomes, at times, violet-marine blue. His veins show through, also blue: turquoise blue. His "sex is swordily / Is placer and platypus / Algae and sweets of yore / Is mirror." (It matters, and it does not matter, that the artist, Esther Teichmann, is German, is white, has loved this man.) The diptych (Untitled, 2006) is from Teichmann's series Stillend Gespiegelt. The German word stillend means both breastfeeding and quieting or making still. (Every photograph is a moment held still, not unlike a mother quieting her infant, holding her child still.) The German word gespiegelt means mirrored, and it suggests the physical stillness of both mother and child in the act of nursing, as the two become one another.

Photography was once referred to as Daguerre's mirror.

This picture has the "sex" of a "mirror."

Also within the series of seven photographs that make up Stillend Gespiegelt is a photograph of the torso of an older white woman in the bathtub. (It matters, and it does not matter, that Teichmann is daughter to this woman.) Every image in Stillend Gespiegelt is either of the loved man or loved mother. The bathtub is a fitting place for "mother": for, it is the womb of the house. She holds a washcloth that is the color of the veins of her white breasts: the milky blue of a Polaroid picture (Plate 5). Her nipples give way to the hues of a faint bruise. We are seeing the breasts that nourished the artist.

The black man of Stillend Gespiegelt, he, too, holds an essence of nursing by clenching his own breast. The image, with its strong-tender-sad-male erotics, pierces with a Saint Sebastian arrow doused in a little black milk.

The darkness that holds this man of color (asleep or dead) resonates, quietly and dramatically, with Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue," 1945): "Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night / we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening / we drink and we drink." The first page of Roland Barthes's sorrowful La Chambre claire (1980) is a color Polaroid, entitled Polaroïd (1979), by Daniel Boudinet. The colors are limited: mostly cyan and black. Daylight leaks in around a peek at a fraction of a bed, crowned with a fluffy pillow. The curtains are closed, but daylight shines through the weave of the fabric and the gap where the curtains do not quite meet.

Barthes's mourning-glory book, written as an elegy to his recently deceased mother, is seen not through rose-colored glasses but rather through "the photographic trace of a color, the blue-green of her pupils" (H, 66; S, 104). (A point movingly highlighted by Diana Knight.) Barthes and his mother were like old, Russian nesting dolls: one inside the other, inside the other, inside the other. Each one the other's child. Each one the other's mother. "I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child" (H, 72; S, 113).

Polaroïd starts Barthes's photo-book and takes flight in the medium's "'throw away' spirit" (Helmet Newton).

Polaroïd is blue mother, blue lover, blue birth, thin blue wartime milk, blue death, blue sex (pornographic films are sometimes called blue films).

Polaroïd suggests day sex. To have sex in the day, when children are playing outside, birds are singing, people are working, when you can hear all the sounds of waking life, is a reversal of the order of things. Likewise, Polaroids are at odds with the traditional photograph developed from a negative. Polaroids develop illegitimately before our eyes in broad daylight.

There is a raw erotics to the particularly startling, exciting, cheap blues of the Polaroid picture. (When Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin turn to the instant gratification of the negativeless, less-focused, pocket-sized Polaroid, their high-fashion erotics are coated in shoddy, if appealing, blueness.) Polaroid film cools white skin porno-blue. Polaroid film coats true blues in dishonorable cyan. (Think swimming pools and satin sheets.)

Boudinet's bed is sheathed with the illicit Pola-blues (Plate 6).

Polaroïd is the condensed sum of Proust's very blue Recherche (from the eyes of Albertine to the sea at Balbec to the sky of an unalloyed blue to a love of Giotto's Arena Chapel). The Recherche is a blue book, written almost entirely during the night in bed.: "For a long time, I would go to bed early," reads the book's famous first line, (K, I, 1; S, I, 3).

Polaroïd is the blue of staying in bed and not getting up, not going out. (I used to nurse my children in bed, for long hours of near force-feeding. A slightly monstrous mother, I did not want to leave the comfort of my pillows and blankets. I engorged children and time, like a photograph. In Barthes's words: "In the Photograph, Time's immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged" (H, 87; S, 142).

Those of you who know my work well may bemoan: "When will she wean herself from Barthes?" It seems, at least, not yet. As Barthes writes in A Lover's Discourse: "I behave as a well-weaned subject. I can feed myself, meanwhile, on other things besides the maternal breast." Nevertheless, I am not a well-weaned subject. His texts fill me with satisfying pleasure (bliss, even). He feeds me his milk, his white ink.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes aligns the language of the unpleasurable text with the suckles of the infant who feeds in his sleep in the absence of the breast. "The writer of this text takes the language of the nursing infant: imperative, automatic, ineffectual, little rout clicks (those milky phonemes of the marvelous Jesuit, [Jacques] van Ginneken, placed between writing and language: sucking movements without an object, cut from the pleasures of the gastronomy of language)." As van Ginneken notes, in regards to this archaic language of infants: "In the absence of the mother, every normal child, in the second or third month of his existence, feels the desire to suck and begins to have imaginary meals." "Milky phonemes," then, are dry, fantastical phonemes, indifferent speech.

La Chambre claire is wet with "the pleasures of the gastronomy of language."

To reverse the gender (from female to male) of the famed words of Hélène Cixous: "There is always within him at least a little of that good mother's milk. He writes in white ink."

With him, I am unweaned.

Barthes's story of looking for his recently deceased maman in boxes of old photographs is famously told in La Chambre claire. In the sheets between the covers of his book, Barthes's stumbles upon his lost mother in a photograph from 1898 that he famously calls the Winter Garden Photograph. In the glass house, the winter garden, his maman, his Henriette, is pictured in all of her essence, at the tender age of five. Although a smaller version of what she would become, maman is there. Gone she is here. Fort/da. So precious. Barthes, in fear of our indifference to this cherished photograph, never reproduces this image that he talks most about. It remains an empty (but full) illustration, not unlike Sterne's bare page in Tristam Shandy ("here's paper ready to your hand ... paint her to your own mind"), or Monique Wittig's empty page written in white ink for Sappho, or the unstained bed sheet in Isak Dinesen's story "The Blank Page," or the unmarked Ocean-Chart of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark." Barthes was, of course, not the first to play the trick of the power of non-representation.

Barthes soaks the Winter Garden Photograph in so much white milk, because its punctum wounds him, stings him, pricks him, bruises him. (Inversely, Barthes reproduces but never says a word about Boudinet's blue Polaroïd.)

Punctum is Latin for point. According to the Oxford Eng lish Dictionary, punctum is "a very small division of time, an instant"; "a point used as a punctuation mark"; and, under the anatomical term lacrimal punctum, the "tiny circular orifice" from which tears emerge. With Barthesian precision, brevity, and style, punctum is at once a second of time, a non-alphabetical mark in writing, and the tiny place from which tears come into view.

Punctum awakens Barthes. Punctum is not unlike the Proustian chance of a bit of madeleine, or a spoon knocking on a plate, or a trip upon uneven paving stones. Such a taste, such a sound, and such a stumble: all are sensations that aroused Barthes's beloved Proust with involuntary memory. As Barthes writes: "A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me ...)" (H, 27; S, 49).

But it is not only the Winter Garden Photograph that is a significant keeper and feeder of what Barthes famously names as punctum, that detail (often a part- object) that gets him all stirred up.

Barthes is also taken by a 1926 family portrait, by the famed Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van der Zee (1886-1983).

Between the wars, Van der Zee took thousands of studio portraits of the black community, including pictures of children, celebrities, brides, grooms, and leaders, and memorial images of the dead. Barthes's chosen family portrait (or the one that chose to wound him) is an image of some members of of Van der Zee's own family: "Marie, Estelle and David Osterhout—the maternal aunts and uncle" of the photographer. This "black" photo, like the Winter Garden Photograph, cuts Barthes's heart with punctum.

Van der Zee's rich images were, as Deborah Willis notes, "originally intended as gifts to intimates or for personal reflection" adorning "fireplace mantels in parlors and dressing tables and vanities in bedrooms." His work gained a new reputation when it was exhibited in 1969 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition, Harlem on My Mind. But Barthes sidesteps the complex history of Van der Zee and his subjects and goes intimate.

In Barthes's hands (stained with white ink), the standing "auntie" in the Van der Zee portrait finds herself bumping up against the famed Winter Garden Photograph. In fact, Barthes sings a little song, splashed with a little volatile milk, to this auntie who stands, hailing her as "ô négresse nourricière" (S, 74).

Both mother and blackness nourish La Chambre claire. For a long time, I dwelt on the studium of Barthes's reading of the Van der

Zee portrait—his seemingly obvious, erroneous readings of race:

Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good" photograph): it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naïveté). The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter)—the "solacing Mammy"—whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and above all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes—why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?) This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness.

[Voici une famille noire américaine, photographiée en 1926 par James Van der Zee. Le studium est clair: je m'intéresse avec sympathie, en bon sujet culturel, à ce que dit la photo, car elle parle (c'est une "bonne" photo): elle dit la respectabilité, le familialisme, le conformisme, l'endimanchement, un effort de promotion sociale pour se parer des attributes du Blanc (effort touchant, tant il est naïf). Le spectacle m'intéresse, mais il ne me "point" pas. Ce qui me point, chose curieuse à dire, c'est la large ceinture de la soeur (ou de la fille)—ô négresse nourricière—ses bras croisés derrière le dos, à la façon d'une écolière, et surtout ses souliers à brides (pourquoi un démodé aussi daté me touche-t-il? Je veux dire: à quelle date me renvoie-t-il?) Ce punctum-là remue en moi une grande bienveillance, presque un attendrissement. (H, 43; S, 73-74)

Barthes's claims that the photograph "utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naïveté)" makes it easy enough to "out" what, at first, reads like patronizing racism. And, in translation, I, especially, cannot get past that "solacing Mammy." My mouth falls open.

Barthes's friend and expert translator Richard Howard has rendered "ô négresse nourricière" as "the 'solacing Mammy,'" with the careful addition of scare quotes so as to pad it with irony and sympathy. But "Mammy" (solacing or not) is dirtied with American racist connotations. The extra punctuation hardly softens the blow, but it does secure Howard's own bafflement. Missing, however, is the sense of honor, surprise, and emotion of the old French ô that begins Barthes's odelet. Barthes's ô is held there in a bluesy song: its little mouth, too, is wide open. The reader cannot help but stumble and fall into the little song hole, into that little tear hole.

Fallen and inside, one can hear the tender-aggressive snipping of the contemporary African American artist Kara Walker. In Untitled (1996-98), a disturbing literalism of the birth of the blues, Walker scissors a life-size black silhouette that pictures a squatting woman giving birth to a trumpet: the instrument dangles from between her legs, like a baby being born. Mouths open (in shock or hunger, it is hard to say which), we wait for the blue note, the worried note, the slurred note, the cutting of the chord. No music is heard, save for the click-click of scissors. "She's a black hole."

One definition in the Oxford English Dictionary for race is "a cut, mark, scratch." Race was once (and still is) muddled with "raze" (the fact of being scratched or cut). Walker shears race as raze.

Walker, who looks a bit like Mary Poppins in her self-portrait, Cut, uses the silhouette (an early form of photography, of shadow play) to give us a baleful of sugar to make the medicine go down. In the words of Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: "she kicks up her heels while dressed as a high-style servant. She becomes a latter-day Mary Poppins [just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go away], part artist/magician and part nanny/mammy." The effect is at first sweet, and then violent. Walker embraces the fairy tale as sugary violence. She draws us in with sweet desirable images and punches back. She makes viewers black and blue, no matter what the color of their skin. Fairy- tale- like, Walker's cut-outs evoke the silhouettes of Arthur Rackham, the children's book illustrator; but, on closer look (to quote Shaw), they make us "see the unspeakable."

In Walker's black and blue-grey panorama entitled No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lovely state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical ruin and earthly Demise (1999), Hans Christian Andersenesque swans, "dazzling white, with long, supple necks," sport, carry, and drop decapitated black cotton- wool heads, as if retelling "The Ugly Duckling" in a whole new scene: the dusky shadows of the antebellum South. Abused for what people perceived as his unattractiveness, Andersen wrote fairy tales of beauty and ugliness that share an intimacy with Walker's own cut-outs: both cut out the "happily ever after" part. (Andersen's "Little Match Girl" freezes to death on New Year's Day; the "Little Mermaid" throws herself into the sea and her body turns to foam.)

In keeping with the magical qualities of Andersen, Rackham, and Walker, William Henry Fox Talbot called the images thrown upon paper by his little camera obscuras "fairy pictures," an enchantment that led him to photography, what he would call "the art of fixing a shadow." Likewise, the silhouette's history is associated with shadows of racism, magic, and the invention of photography. John Caspar Lavater's late eighteenth-century silhouette machine (used for physiognomy) was a seed of the evils of the racing of photography.

The fact that Andersen made his own Walkeresque paper silhouettes brings a smile to the historian's face. Both Andersen and Walker cut with words and paper. Andersen's self-portrait with a broad Pinocchio nose plays (like Walker) with physiognomy. In another cut-out, Andersen scissors a clown (his alter-ego) holding the heaviness of the world on his paper head. Andersen "always cut with an enormous pair of paper scissors—and it was a mystery ... how he could cut such dainty delicate things with those big hands and those enormous scissors."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Black and Blueby CAROL MAVOR Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822352710
• ISBN 13: 9780822352716
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216