For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

Baroque and Cinema

The French film critic André Bazin wrote in 1945 about a comparison between photography and film:

The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.^23(*)

Bazin saw an ontological link between baroque and cinema, the latter bringing in the movement the former was striving for. The effects the baroque developed to create illusions, such as trompe l'oeil or other artifices, were not without similarities with those of cinema, as the art historian Rudolf Wittkower described:

There is, however, on a different level an important connection between the theatre and the art of the baroque age. In the theatre we live in a fictitious reality, and the stronger the illusion the more readily we are prepared to surrender to it. At this period the most powerful effects were used to eliminate the borderline between fiction and reality. The fire which Bernini arranged on the stage during the performance of one of his comedies and which provoked a stampede of the audience is a well-known example.^24(*)

While the search for movement and illusion already established a link between baroque and cinema, it is in 1955 that the baroque made his entrance as a new form of cinema in the film critics' vocabulary. In his essay on the relationship between critique and baroque: `Du concept au fétiche: penser un nouvel âge du cinéma,'^25(*) Antoine De Baecque explains how the term was imported from literary debates.

In France in the early 1950s, with the publication of such essays as La Literature de l'âge baroque en France^26(*) by Jean Rousset, was raised the question of a baroque literature. The literary developments of the baroque led to a set of definitions detached from its art historical context.

The baroque became, from then on, a tool to examine a work with, a tool which is setting out its specificities as a style (hyperbolic, complex, accumulative, decorative), a state of mind (mix of genres, taste for contrasts, antithesis, paradoxes, for surprises and the singular, for the obscure and mysterious), and a dynamic (preeminence given to movement, ellipsis and helices).^27(*)

Thus defined the baroque became an easily applicable term to most artistic forms. It entered the discourse on cinema during the controversy over Max Ophuls' film: Lola Montes (1955); which will become the first film to be qualified as a `masterpiece of the baroque art'.^28(*) However, the term baroque was also used by those that vilipended the film, as synonymous of extravagant, pretentious or pompous, thus perpetuating the ambiguous nature of the term.

The critics who saw the film as the revelation of a new form of cinema developed the idea further and extended the term baroque to the films of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Robert Aldrich or George Cukor. They hailed the baroque as a new age of the cinema:

It is another age in cinema, which in the same movement, makes and reveals the baroque expression, that of the directors of the accomplished and complex form, multiple and virtuoso, symbolic and singular, an age which would start with the Wellesiens manifesto, would be realized by Ophuls and would drain a whole block of modern cinema: Bergman, Hitchcock, Aldrich, Fellini, Kurosawa, Astruc...An age which, by the ceaseless metamorphosis of forms, would succeed in the history of cinema to Hollywood classicism with its dry, simple, pure, ordained, efficient style.^29(*)

Thus a new form of cinematic expression was prophesized; unfortunately the young cinema of the 1960s such as the New Wave was more interested with a direct confrontation with `reality' than by the sophisticated forms of the baroque. Thus leaving the baroque manifesto hanging.

The notion will return during the 1970s with the apparition of a darker and self-reflexive cinema. However it is the term mannerism that will be retained to describe this cinema more inclined toward citations and parody.^30(*)

The term baroque has remained a regular feature in the film critics' vocabulary ever since, but often without an explicit context, as remarked Hervé Aubron in his essay on baroque and cinema, A Rebours:

The term baroque may be one of the most un-thought of the cinematographic critic. Burgeoning very frequently in film reviews, it is almost always used in its archaic acceptation: bizarre, unusual, exuberant...^31(*)

He warns against the uses of a term, which, if often applied is at the risk of losing all specificity and, ultimately, all interest.^32(*) But the relationship between baroque and cinema is persistent and may not have yet yielded all its potential. To the question as to what cinema looks for in the baroque, Aubron suggests that it may be a return to the world. To the cynics who said that all has been done, the baroque offers a world whose very fabric is all that has been done, the world is made of these multiple images: `Whence, obviously, the baroque's obsession for illusion, but assuredly not as a joking or cynical trap.'^33(*)

Thus, the notion of the baroque that has been so far developed in film critic is mostly issue from its literary associations and has suffered from a tendency to expand indefinitely. To approach the relationship between baroque and cinema, it may be necessary, on the one hand, to go back to the definitions of the baroque as a style in the history of art, and on the other hand, to avoid too much generalization in remaining focused on a specific set of films.

Wölfflin had identified three general phases of development in art: the primitive, the classic and the baroque. As it happens the first two terms are applied by David Bordwell and his collaborators in their study of cinema, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, so that we may draw parallels between their respective evolutions.^34(*) The authors identify a primitive phase in cinema going from its invention in 1895 to circa 1917. This was a period during which a system of representation was progressively established in Hollywood. This system aims to ensure a smooth narrative continuity:

The number of possible narratives is unlimited. Historically, however, the cinema has tended to be dominated by a single mode of narrative form. In the course of this book we shall refer to this dominant mode as the «classical Hollywood cinema» - «classical» because of its wide and long history, «Hollywood» because the mode assumed its definite shape in American studio films.^35(*)

The authors believe that by 1917 the classical system was fully developed and continued to reign over cinematic representation up to circa 1940. If, then, other systems of representation were to appear, the classical system would remain the reference from which the others would demarcate themselves.

Following the course of art history, after the classicism of the Renaissance, there is a mannerist and then a baroque period. These two terms have appeared, sometimes rather confusedly in film theory to qualify films made since Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).^36(*) It is important however to differentiate the two styles, which while they have many common features are, at core, fundamentally different. They both emerge from the classical system of representation but mannerism is more of a sophisticated ending to the Renaissance than a new style, as Erwin Panofsky has described:

The style freezes, crystallizes, adorns itself of the smoothness and hardness of a glaze, while its movements, which tend to an excess of grace, are at the same time, constrained and stifled. The whole of the composition become a battlefield where contradictory forces confront each other, tangled up within an infinite tension.^37(*)

The cinematic equivalent would be found in a sophisticated and reflexive cinema, for which formal variations over the classical system has become the goal. The baroque shares this dependence from the classical system but absorbs it into another view of the world and takes it into another realm of representation.

Any given work of art is always larger than the label trying to contain it. Thus the only interest in approaching a film as baroque is to suggest new possibilities that will enrich the experience of the film. It is to this end that this study will investigate the films of David Lynch as possibly resonant with a baroque aesthetic.

* ²³ André Bazin, What is Cinema? 2 vols., trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, p. 14-15. `Le film ne se contente plus de nous conserver l'objet enrobé dans son instant comme, dans l'ambre, le corps intact des insectes d'une ère révolue, il délivre l'art baroque de sa catalepsie convulsive. Pour la première fois, l'image des choses est aussi celle de leur durée et comme la momie du changement.' André Bazin, Qu'est ce que le cinéma? Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2002, p. 14.

* ²⁴ Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini, The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, London: Phaidon, 1997, p. 159.

* ²⁵ Antoine De Baecque, `Du concept au fétiche: Penser un nouvel âge du cinéma, la critique et le baroque', Vertigo, Projections Baroque, Hors Série, 2000,pp. 23-30.

* ²⁶ Rousset, Jean, La Littérature de l'Age Baroque en France, Circé et la Paon, Paris: José Corti, 1954.

* ²⁷ De Baecque, op. cit., p. 25-26, my translation: `Le baroque, dès lors, devient un outil pour questionner la création, outil qui trouve ses marques, recouvrant un certain style (hyperbolique, complexe, accumulatif, décoratif), un esprit (mélange des genres, goût des contrastes, des antithèses, des paradoxes, des surprises et du singulier, de l'obscur et du mystérieux), et une dynamique (rôle prépondérant du mouvement, de l'ellipse, de l'hélice).'

* ²⁸ By the film critic France Roche writing for France Soir in 1956, Ibid., p. 27.

* ²⁹ Ibid., p. 29, my translation: `C'est un autre age du cinéma que, dans le même mouvement, façonne et révèle ainsi l'expression du baroque, celui des metteurs en scène de la forme accomplie et complexe, foisonnante et virtuose, symbolique et singulière, un age qui commencerait avec les manifestes wellesiens, s'accomplirait avec Ophuls, et entraînerait tout un pan du moderne: Bergman, Hitchcock, Aldrich, Fellini, Kurosawa, Astruc...Un âge qui par les métamorphoses incessantes des formes, succéderait dans l'histoire du cinéma au classicisme hollywoodien de style sec, simple, pur, ordonne, efficace.' The theoretical background of the cinematic baroque was laid out in 1960 in the first issue of, Etudes Cinématographiques on `Baroque and Cinema'.

* ³⁰ Ibid., p. 30. The April 1985 issue of the Cahiers du Cinema, dedicated to mannerism, will settle on this term to qualify this new trend in cinema

* ³¹ Hervé Aubron, `A Rebours', Vertigo, Projections Baroques, Hors série, 2000, p. 7, my translation: `Le terme de baroque est peut-être l'un des plus im-pensés de la critique cinématographique. Bourgeonnant très fréquemment dans les articles de presse, il est quasiment toujours utilisé dans son acceptation archaïque: bizarre, insolite, exubérant...'

* ³² The latest example I have come across is a review of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill 2 in Le Monde; 18.05.2004, p. 29: `Jeu de chat et de souris entre une mariée et sa victime'. The reviewer, Florence Colombani, speaks of the baroque profusion of the film there to adorn the bitterness of the story: `Toute la profusion baroque du film est là pour rehausser l'amertume de cette histoire.' No more is said about the relevance of the term, it is assumed to be self-explanatory.

* ³³ Hervé Aubron, op.cit., p. 9, my translation: `D'où, évidemment, l'obsession du baroque pour l'illusion, mais surtout pas en tant que piège ludique ou cynique.'

* ³⁴ David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge, 1996.

* ³⁵ David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art An Introduction, (3^rd ed.), New York: Mac Graw-Hill publishing, 1990 p. 70.

* ³⁶ Citizen Kane is usually recognized as one of the marker of the end of the classic cinema as will be developed further in this work.

* ³⁷ Erwin Panofsky quoted in Hervé Aubron, `A Rebours', p. 8, my translation: `Le style se fige, se cristallise, se pare d'un lisse et d'une dureté d'émail, tandis que les mouvements, qui tendent à l'excès de grâce, sont en même temps, contraints et retenus. L'ensemble de la composition devient un champ de bataille où s'affrontent des forces contradictoires, emmêlés dans une tension infinie'.