Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC Television, 1954) originally created shockwaves and has since achieved legendary status. Its proximity to a cinematic version – 1984 (Dir. Michael Anderson, Holiday Film Productions Ltd, 1956) – offers the unusual opportunity to compare almost contemporaneous adaptations in different media.  Consideration of technical, cultural, and ideological determinants reveals much about their context, both generally and specific to their production histories, including their place in the unfolding chronicle of responses to George Orwell’s work.

Deadly serious drama

Twice broadcast live, Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates the aesthetic assumptions and technical constraints of its time. These included multi-camera studio practices that shaped play production for another decade until replaced by single-camera location shooting. Nevertheless, director Rudolph Cartier (credited “producer”) and screenwriter Nigel Kneale challenged television’s limitations. For example, filmed inserts provided exterior establishing shots, bridged scenes, facilitated special effects, covered costume changes, and accelerated pacing (Jacobs 2000, 109, 135-6).

The play featured on BBC Sunday Night Theatre on 12 December 1954. Accolades and notoriety prompted 35mm telerecording of the Thursday live “repeat”, which is the earliest television drama in Britain’s National Film and TV Archive. “Horrific” and “subversive”, Nineteen Eighty-Four attracted numerous complaints. The Daily Express even linked it to a viewer’s demise during the broadcast. The BBC assigned Cartier a bodyguard following death threats to prevent a repeat (Cooke 2003, 27; Duguid no date). Parliamentary motions and amendments accused the BBC of pandering to “sexual and sadistic tastes”, yet praised  its “plays and programmes capable of appreciation by adult minds”, and celebrated the “freedom of the individual … to switch off” and “soon [to] switch over … to more appropriate programmes.”

The latter reference to “more appropriate programmes” refers to the forthcoming Independent Television (ITV), an advertising-financed commercial service that would break the BBC’s monopoly over both funding and representation. The Corporation was, and continues to be, paid for by a compulsory fee levied upon viewers. This intermittently exposes it – despite official independence – to charges of being a mouthpiece for Government propaganda, particularly as Parliament sets the licence fee and therefore can apply pressure if programmes step too far out of line.

ITV was intended to be distinctly different. It would fulfil ambitions for more advertising: an industry constrained, despite economic boom, by newsprint restrictions caused by use of timber for post-war building reconstruction rather than to make paper. Also, not unconnected, ITV would appeal to less refined tastes than the BBC’s somewhat patrician programming generally allowed. In this case, popularisation fed fears about cultural debasement. These extended back at least as far as Victorian anxieties about working-class youths reading lurid novels, through concerns expressed by the grammar school educated gamekeeper, Mellors, in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1929) about cinemas and jazz causing moral decadence, to “prolefeed” in Orwell’s satirical Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): sentimental songs and machine-generated pornography to keep the masses subdued.

The BBC had been established for Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) in the 1920s on the grounds that spectrum scarcity meant the airwaves were a resource to be held in trust on behalf of the people – as opposed to exploitation for commercial profit, as in the United States. The Corporation’s first Director-General, John (later Lord) Reith established guidelines about taste and impartiality. His vision embraced a broadly educational function which – against a global background of revolution and proletarian unrest, including in Britain the General Strike and Irish independence – would assert nationhood through common culture. This was predicated partly on arts and entertainment that audience members might not necessarily have chosen themselves, but were deemed socially healthy. Life-affirming experiences might be encountered between more accessible offerings in a mixed schedule rather than one intended to maximise ratings.

The BBC addressed a nation of households comprised of families united by common viewing events, many organised around annual rituals such as sporting and cultural occasions and the monarch’s Christmas broadcast. During the early days of radio, broadcasting was suspended for an hour to allow listeners to dress for dinner: an indication of the Corporation’s pervasive class assumptions, which insisted on radio announcers, like performers, wearing evening dress until 1939 (BBC no date). Following television’s post-war resumption (1946), a “toddlers’ truce” similarly suspended broadcasting to get children to bed. This lasted eleven years until challenged by ITV, which was then also required to comply. The legacy of such traditions, conflated with the term “nanny state”, a pejorative right-wing concept itself conflating perceived authoritarianism with the British post-war Welfare system, led BBC presenter and comedian Kenny Everett in the 1960s to personify his employer as “Auntie Beeb”, a name that stuck.

The Nineteen Eighty-Four broadcasts, then, coincided with uncertainty and change in broadcasting and politics alike. The Parliamentary speeches thanked the BBC for warning Britons about “logical and soul-destroying consequences of their freedom” and that “inhuman practices depicted in the play … are already in common use under totalitarian régimes.” Prince Philip revealed that the Queen and he had enjoyed the play. The Corporation’s Head of Drama defended it on the current affairs programme Panorama and introduced the repeat personally after BBC Governors narrowly endorsed it. The real issue, arguably, was the idealised conception of the Nation as Family (Jacobs 2000, 133). The teleplay’s perceived threats to the sanctity of the home (and Sundays) tangled with appreciation for rigorous drama’s ability to address challenging issues. Unofficial sources claim seven million watched the repeat: the most since the Coronation (Duguid no date).

Nineteen Eighty-Four as adaptation

Controversy and sensationalism suggest Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was not yet an established classic. While it has sold millions of copies globally and become set reading for generations of students, it was then little-known; The Times considered its “impact”, pre-transmission, “only marginal” (16 December 1954; quoted in Jacobs 2000, 154), although Crick reports 49,917 British and 170,000 US sales by 1950, plus 190,000 through the Book of the Month Club (1982, 563). While recognition of Orwell’s dystopia was aided by interests pursuing a Cold War agenda, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s epoch-defining status as a television event rapidly introduced the public to the concept of totalitarianism, enhanced awareness of propaganda and brainwashing practices, and popularised now-familiar terms including “Big Brother”, “Room 101”, “Newspeak”, and “Thought Police”.

The novel tells of government official Winston Smith, who rewrites archived articles from The Times to accord with current circumstances, destroying previous versions so that the State’s predictions and policies prove infallible. Like all Outer Party members, he undergoes constant surveillance from two-way telescreens. Apart from ensuring conformity, these measures unite the Party behind Big Brother, a silent, ever-watchful personification of the State, which is engaged in perpetual warfare against other superpowers, continually shifting its allegiance. Winston secretly hates Big Brother, suspecting that his superior, O’Brien, shares this “thoughtcrime”, a capital offence. Winston and fellow Party member, Julia, initiate an illicit sexual relationship and are recruited by O’Brien into what they believe is an underground resistance movement – only to learn that this is a trap. After the lovers’ arrest, anticipated by both as inevitable although they swear they will never betray each other, O’Brien tortures and interrogates Winston over many weeks. Winston’s reprogramming concludes when he encounters his deepest phobia in Room 101 and screams for the atrocity to be committed on Julia instead. Broken and exhausted, he is released into low-level community work while awaiting assassination. Winston and Julia meet and confess their mutual betrayal – apparently all they now have in common. Telescreens report yet another victory, electrifying crowds in the surrounding streets while Winston overflows with adoration of Big Brother.

The BBC version conveys the novel’s squalid mood, pessimism, and inexorable narrative logic. It retains key characters and events while omitting, eliding, or amalgamating peripheral elements to reduce complexity and scale to a two-hour, emphatically verbal performance from one studio – albeit with 22 sets, 28 actors, and closed-circuit video feeding to a large orchestra providing live accompaniment.

Within realist conventions that enhance credibility and persuasiveness, the adaptation cannot replicate the book’s internal focalisation. Winston’s thoughts and perceptions include childhood and recent memories, free association, and fantasies – “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull” (1983, 24).  Nevertheless the dramatisation retains the paranoia, suspense, fascination with O’Brien (André Morell), and identification with the underdog that makes Winston’s (Peter Cushing) defeat, and the annihilation of his humanity, all the more devastating. Recorded voice-overs reveal Winston’s true thoughts, reinforcing alignment with him while he performs impassivity, remaining watchful in the presence of telescreens, or chants with the crowd during Hate Sessions: centrally orchestrated, ritualised, compulsory demonstrations in the workplace. The indoctrination sequence privileges Winston’s perception of O’Brien, punctuated with fade-outs indicating unconsciousness, time passing, and systematic repetition of torture. One of the longest of these is followed by a long speech that keeps Winston off screen, permitting make-up and costume changes before the mirror scene in which neither Winston nor the viewer is prepared for his degradation.

Fig. 1: Winston’s degradation: the mirror scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

No free-standing production could realistically hope to address the subtle political arguments contained in the rebel leader Goldstein’s book, given to Winston by O’Brien, debated during Winston’s re-education, and explained in the Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”; nevertheless, the play deftly incorporates its rudiments into the dialogue to orient the majority of viewers encountering the story for the first time.

The play thus exploits its limitations (although some changes, such as Winston’s number from 6079 to 6090, seem inexplicable). On a modern large screen, the bare production values, budget-determined (despite this being the most costly television drama then made), do not detract dramatically. In fact, dark expressionistic shadows serve both to minimise set construction and evoke the values of cinematic film noir (to be discussed further in relation to 1984).

Fig. 2: Nineteen Eighty-Four as film noir.

Furthermore, occasionally, infelicities were probably imperceptible to original audiences: they include microphone shadows, glitches in the electronic image (whether in production, transmission or reception), and mismatches in picture and sound quality between studio scenes and the fourteen film inserts. Viewers were accustomed to such anomalies in their brief experience of television, watched on 9-inch, 405-line sets. Such aberrations conceivably enhanced realism, positioning Orwell’s fantasy with television’s immediacy before video recording.

Multi-camera shooting created theatrical, two-dimensional scenes, albeit from different positions and with intimate close-ups, which was different from mainstream cinema’s simultaneous construction and dissection of three-dimensional space. Inserts also broaden the production.  They show Winston in the streets; writing his secret diary (a point-of-view difficult to achieve live), and with Julia (Yvonne Mitchell) near their woodland tryst; and contextualising information including past nuclear wars and communal Hate Week preparations. They also buy time for costume and set changes and make-up adjustments and reduce set construction costs. At the start, Winston passes co-workers in cubicles, before sitting at his identical desk; the sequence ingeniously conveys the Ministry’s uniformity and size by preceding Cushing’s live performance with clips showing individual actors occupying one modest set (Jacobs 2000).

Fig. 3: Economic production design in Nineteen Eighty-Four: cutaways allow one set to serve as three identical cubicles.

A commonplace observation holds that audio-visual science fiction resembles its year of production, not the future when it is set. This version came out only five years after Orwell’s book. Sharing cultural assumptions and concerns, its pervasive mood represents an era embracing both texts. For contemporary students of Orwell, the play offers fascinating re-historicism. The government had changed in 1951. Winston Churchill, returning as Conservative prime minister, replaced the nationalising Labour Party, founders of the Welfare State. Orwell satirises their bureaucratic controls, propagandising, and target-setting as “English socialism”, precursor to the novel’s Ingsoc – although he was concerned with international tendencies, not, he insisted, attacking the Labour party (Bowker 2004, 401). Churchill’s association with victory and famous two-fingered salute resonate in Orwell’s ironic use of Victory as ubiquitous branding for second-rate Party products – something the dramatisation downplays.

On-screen rationing and shortages corresponded to post-war austerity. Bombsites scarred British cities. Anti-communism was rife, stoked by Churchill, who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in 1946 to emphasise the Soviet Union’s otherness (although he had joined with Stalin to defeat Hitler). Opportunistic alliances and altering loyalties, together with personification of nation-states by media-promoted charismatic leaders (epitomised by Big Brother), prefigure interchangeability of enemies and friendly powers in continuing world wars that Orwell’s Oceania wages. They involve doublethink, highlighted in aphorisms like “War is Peace”. The Two Minute Hate Sessions are efficient, mediated, localised, and routinised versions of Nazi rallies, familiar from newsreels; Goldstein’s name and other Jewish allusions reinforce this. Purges, secret police, show trials, and bullets in the neck, recalling Stalin’s pogroms (with Goldstein representing Trotsky), played to continuing Cold War fears. Slogans and mistrust of acquaintances chimed with the wartime campaign: “Careless Talk Costs Lives”. Mass Observation, ostensibly beneficial, preceded Nineteen Eighty-Four’s menacing surveillance. Nuclear weaponry (the play begins with atomic explosions) was an ever-present threat.

Grounding in social realism equally made Nineteen Eighty-Four’s elements of science fiction pertinent and convincing. This tendency in British film and television involves essentially sympathetic, although not uncritical, representation of ordinary (typically working-class) lives in contemporary industrial society. The broadcast sits alongside a 1950s cycle of characteristically sensational “social problem” films that were to feed into and complement the more politically motivated British New Wave and thereby inaugurate a defining trait of British television and cinema (Hill 1986). (Its producer and writer had made the first adult science-fiction television, The Quatermass Experiment (BBC Television, 1953), which set the agenda for reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four as horrific; Kneale was later to adapt Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), a key British New Wave film.) Characteristic of Orwell’s writing, social realism literally becomes “kitchen sink drama”, with Winston in both novel and play clearing Mrs Parsons’ drainpipe. The term, often opprobrious to avoid engagement with politically troubling content, derived from David Sylvester’s 1954 article about contemporary English art, which referred to a canvas featuring a sink.

Elements of Winston’s grubby existence inform image structures and mythic patterns in Orwell’s prose that would, however, be hard to adapt. Orwell worked with T. S. Eliot on BBC programmes during wartime and they corresponded about his novel, Animal Farm (1945). Although the play introduces Winston after a shot of the dried-up Thames, Orwell’s allusions to Eliot’s poetry, particularly “The Waste Land” (1922), are less discernible when tangibly literalised. Orwell’s imagery and motifs include bleak hopelessness; dust; squalor; scuttling rats; hollow-eyed chess players; London’s indistinguishable masses; snatches of popular song; disjointed proletarian barroom conversations; time (a clock, ominously, strikes thirteen in April: Eliot’s “cruellest month”); partly remembered nursery rhymes and names of churches; elusive sense of lost history and culture; desire for redeeming mythology and return to a golden time; mistrust of mass media; and epigrammatic figures (Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” matched by Orwell’s future as “a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1983, 250)).

Fig. 4: “The Waste Land”: London after nuclear attack in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Some remain evident, however, separated from Winston’s memories and anxieties, and subsumed to narrative and art direction, they become naturalised, dissipating symbolic force accumulated throughout the novel.

Genre and self-reflexivity

Garrett Stewart observes that the typical mise-en-scène of science fiction films “is replete with viewing screens that function not only as tools in the narrative but as icons of continuity with the present-day science of communication or surveillance” (1998, 196). While this enhances cinematic spectacle, especially when asserting special effects against earlier achievements, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s self-reflexivity looks forward rather than back. The broadcast occurred during television’s rapid take-up amid passionate contestation in Britain over its future. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth – supplying “every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment” and “concerned … with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts” (1983, 39, 4) – recalls Reith’s PSB mission to entertain, educate and inform. (Orwell named Room 101 after a BBC boardroom where he endured tedious meetings; by circular serendipity, the play’s greasy cafeteria, setting for important encounters, in the novel accurately described the BBC canteen (Bowker 2004, 285-6), while officials leaving the Ministry were filmed at the studio exit.) Given Reith’s vision of Nation as Family, there is irony in Oceania’s media-constructed “Saviour” being a Big Brother rather than a patriarch more immediately identifiable with a prime minister, president, king, or dictator (Orwell 1983, 15): presumably Orwell’s inspiration was mass-media figures “Uncle Joe” Stalin and Uncle Sam. “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” in Newspeak is “B-B SEE”.

Despite huge sales of receivers for the Coronation, the screen remained an alien presence to the British public. Fears about direct effects, such as radiation sickness or becoming cross-eyed through excessive watching, paralleled anxieties about behavioural influences, including Americanisation; yet qualms about cultural and psychological invasion incorporated American examples and arguments. Orwell’s novel anticipates such worries, combining media manipulation with state surveillance and presenting mass collusion in preserving a sense of order, as well as rooting out the “enemy within”: ideas with continued currency. In situating media satire within television drama, such concerns acquire an additional meta-textual relevance. As Jacobs emphasises, Nineteen Eighty-Four frames telescreens, similar to 1950s televisions, to fill the broadcast screen: Big Brother stares equally into viewers’ and Party members’ dwellings (2000, 138).

Fig. 5: “B-B SEE”: Big Brother embodied in, and as embodiment of, the screen medium in Nineteen Eighty-Four surveys the play’s viewers alongside Oceania’s inhabitants.

Plans for ITV were nearing completion, amid concerns that advertising constitutes brainwashing (the expression originated in print in 1950, in a Korean War context). Conversely, fears about the BBC peddling government messages had not been allayed by its role during the General Strike (1926) and World War II, or by the continuing legacy of Reith’s attitude generally. ITV promised consumer heaven amid rationing yet posed dangers of commercialism and cultural degradation. These debates echoed within the BBC and presumably among some of the novel’s existing readers. Orwell’s denigration of “prolefeed” and the telescreens’ endless good news about production anticipate such concerns, using science fiction to exaggerate television’s potential to penetrate homes and influence minds.

Modern classic

The play’s legacy has been prolific. BBC2 broadcast a new production (1965), updating Kneale’s script. (No recording exists.) The original has been aired since, including on BBC2 to represent 1954 in a festival marking the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (1977); Orwell’s quintessential anti-Establishment vision had become thoroughly assimilated ideologically. For all the controversy accompanying initial broadcast, Nineteen Eighty-Four is highly respected, admired for its innovation and daring, with relevance that withstands the passage of time.

Uncertain ending, uncertain origin

Orwell’s novel, Cartier’s adaptation, and Michael Radford’s 1984 film conclude with Winston and Julia’s mutual betrayal and capitulation to Big Brother. Outcast, alone, each awaits execution. Anderson’s film, some maintain, distorts Orwell’s vision. The “pessimistic conclusion”, Bowker insists, was “replaced by the optimistic message that the individual is uncrushable, and Winston dies with the cry of ‘Down with Big Brother!’ on his lips” (2003, 423).

This is not so in the UK DVD release, which proclaims itself on the cover as “The Original” (Orbital Media/ Blackhorse Entertainment, 2006). However, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) notes “reportedly” different endings for the UK and the US. The only evidence is TV Guide, whose website states: “The American version has [Winston] betraying [Julia] and so successfully brainwashed that he shouts for the love of Big Brother rather than “down with Big Brother,” the words he screams as his last epithet in England.” Lucas claims “the US film version” has the “happy ending … with Winston and Julia overcoming their conditioning and defying the “State/Party” as they are gunned down” (2003, 104).

Such alteration, even in this self-declared “freely adapted” rendering (opening credits), would be momentous. Bowker and TV Guide possibly report third-party mishearing, from a scratchy print and Winston’s (Edmund O’Brien) initially silent mouthing, of “Long live…” as “Down with Big Brother!” Investigation reveals no first-hand account of the heroic climax or of alternative versions. It does expose enmeshment in Cold War paranoia at official and secret quasi-governmental levels, and cultural concerns which suggest how this apocryphal account gained purchase.

The British Film Instituteand the IMDb deem 1984 British. Most crew and cast were British – including Anderson and Michael Redgrave, collaborators on the patriotic World War 2 classic, The Dambusters (1955). The source was British, filming occurred in England, and the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the score. Yet $100,000 funding came from the US Information Agency (Saunders 1999, 295).

Many 1950s British films involved American investment, following Hollywood studios’ breakup and increasing independent production. Creative talent gained greater freedom by shouldering some monetary risk. Major companies reduced overheads, ensured a film supply for their chains and, as attendances declined, backed “original and unusual subjects of international importance” for US and overseas distribution (Michael Balcon, quoted in Hill 1986, 40). Also common, to maximise US box office, were American leading actors – Winston and Julia (Jan Sterling) here. Sometimes, however, business obscured other involvement. The US Information Agency wanted 1984 to be “the most devastating anti-Communist film of all time” (quoted in Saunders 1999, 295 n55).

Behind the scenes

It is no secret that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acquired rights to Animal Farm. Their website links to a review of Saunders’ book, acknowledging (without comment) her claim that it funded filming of Animal Farm (1954) and 1984 (Troy 2007). The “independent” American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), a CIA front, influenced 1984’s screenplay and ensured distribution, appreciative editorials, and attendance by discounting tickets (Lucas 2003, 116; Saunders 1999, 296, 298). It belonged to a network of bodies with, as will be seen, euphemistic, vague titles and abbreviations as obfuscating as any assault on language in Orwell’s satire.

This era saw the “Second Red Scare”. The Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb weeks after publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, set in the aftermath of global nuclear conflict. Mao Zedong gained control of China the same year, despite American-backed opposition. The Korean War started in June 1950. Simultaneously, “more than a hundred European and American writers and intellectuals met in Berlin and established the Congress for Cultural Freedom [of which the ACCF was an offshoot] to resist the Kremlin’s sustained assault on liberal democratic values”; they comprised, according to a member of the connected Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, artists and thinkers “who shared many common attitudes, particularly their opposition to totalitarianism”, but had “no agreed position” (Coleman 1989, xi, 52). In the same year Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed 205 communists were shaping State Department policy. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated over a hundred alleged infiltrations. Top officials and scientists were convicted of espionage or related crimes; Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were executed in 1953 for stealing atomic secrets.

As Lucas notes, vagueness in Orwell’s philosophy means “he can be stretched across a wide spectrum of political opinion” (2003, 135). Unsurprisingly, various interests exploited Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguity strategically (the author having died shortly after publication). Although the novel condemns all totalitarianism, commentators including V. S. Pritchett and Lionel Trilling highlighted anti-communism, downplaying and marginalising Orwell’s socialism (Lucas 2003, 118). His publisher Fredric Warburg, one of “the English associates of the Congress” (Coleman 1989, 61), steered screen rights towards interests able to maximise propaganda value (Bowker 2004, 422).

A clandestine operative for the CIA, Carleton Alsop, a long-time Paramount and MGM producer and agent, reported Hollywood Communists and sympathisers while operating a covert pressure group to influence movies’ content (Saunders 1999, 290-3). He served in the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a “dirty tricks department” associated with the State Department, which cultivated overseas support for foreign policy without being traceable to Washington (40). He and Finis Farr, both members of the OPC’s Psychological Warfare Workshop, visited Britain after Orwell’s death to secure Animal Farm, which became Batchelor and Halas’s animation financed and distributed worldwide by the CIA (294).

Knowingly or not, Orwell had assisted by introducing Arthur Koestler to the International Relief and Rescue Committee (IRRC), a trade union entwined with US officials and CIA funded; Koestler met anti- and ex-communist intellectuals during an IRRC American lecture tour and co-founded the CIA-financed CCF in 1949, having in wartime given US intelligence his proposals for psychological warfare (Lucas 2003, 91-2; Cesarani 1998, 305-10). The CCF bankrolled a startling array of international art and culture, including a thirty-day Festival of Paris in 1952 and hundreds of seminars worldwide until 1967, when its legitimacy was undermined by revelations of the Agency’s involvement at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War. Particularly noteworthy is its success in using leading intellectuals to help promote foreign policy, while denying such a programme existed. The Congress’s five Honorary Presidents were Benedetto Croce, an Italian freethinker who opposed Mussolini and whose writings were on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books; John Dewey, the American liberal educationist and leader of an official inquiry into Stalin’s trials of Trotsky and other revolutionaries; the German Karl Jaspers, a pioneering existentialist and scourge of the Third Reich; Jacques Maritain, a liberal Catholic humanist and holder of the Medal of French Resistance; and the English philosopher and winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, Bertrand Russell. Coleman points out that these names exemplify “almost all the participants,” who “were liberals or social democrats, critical of capitalism and opposed to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, racism, and dictatorship. They supported freedom of thought and the extension of the welfare state” (1989, 21). That last sentence especially highlights deliberate US efforts to conflate democratic socialism with Stalinist communism – as the movie 1984 demonstrates – and, ironically, the doublethink this entailed.

Against this backdrop, Warburg helped modify Animal Farm’s script, following doubts from the Psychological Strategy Board (a very different PSB!) about “clarity of message” (quoted in Saunders 1999, 294). The PSB (1951-53), successor to the wartime State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, “was composed of the Undersecretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence” (Truman Papers, no date). Top-level intervention, then, prompted the solution: alteration of Orwell’s ending, in which pigs (communist leaders) and farmers (capitalists) become interchangeable. Instead, the pigs’ decadence spurred other animals to counter-revolution.

Confusion with this travesty, and knowledge of Sonia Orwell’s dissatisfaction and blocking of the cartoon from schools (Bowker 2004, 423), possibly explain rumours of 1984’s alternative endings. So might misidentification of Anderson’s with Cartier’s adaptation. These arrived close together, were for decades almost unobtainable, were both monochrome and featured Donald Pleasence in similar secondary roles.

Fig. 6: Nineteen Eighty-Four: Donald Pleasence as Syme.

Fig. 7: 1984: Donald Pleasence (R) as Parsons with Edmund O’Brien as Winston.

Nevertheless, Saunders insists: “The film actually concluded with two different endings” (1999, 97).

Producer Peter Rathvon was a former RKO president involved in the Motion Picture Service (MPS). This propaganda organisation financed and distributed films in 87 countries, including Eastern Europe, via 135 US Information Service offices. It targeted projects toward specified audiences, and recommended titles to international festivals (Saunders 1999, 295, 289). Rathvon consulted Sol Stein, ACCF Executive Director, throughout scripting. Stein advised that an actor should play Big Brother, as a cartoon resembling the deceased Stalin would weaken the menace of dictatorship. Stein replaced Anti-Sex League sashes, different from any real totalitarian uniform, with armbands, and eliminated trumpets from telescreen announcements because Americans associated them with pageantry. In light of the persistent rumours, it is notable that Stein suggested a sentimental ending, not adopted, to replace Winston’s submission – which, he thought, denied “human nature,” which “cannot be changed by totalitarianism” (quoted in Saunders 1999, 297).

Orwell was not entirely innocently wronged. He was prominent among anti-communist intellectuals collaborating with Koestler who, ostensibly “maintaining an independent position for freedom … was soon working with the [British] state, referring anti-communist exiles to US intelligence” (Lucas 2003, 91). Orwell in 1949 named, to the (British) Information Research Department, thirty-eight suspected sympathisers including Paul Robeson, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck – and, remarkably (given his later role in 1984), Redgrave, who like many Leftists had followed the Communist Party of Great Britain in supporting the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.

Warburg proposed that 1984 as “a horror film … might secure all countries threatened by communism for 1000 years to come” (quoted in Bowker 2004, 384). Conscious that adaptations increase book sales, Warburg supported “the Cold War offensive” (Bowker 2004, 422). (Later, “fully aware” of CIA covert funding, he distributed Encounter, a leading Anglo-American literary journal supported by the CCF (422)). Orwell’s American publisher sent Nineteen Eighty-Four to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, imploring him to publicise its warnings. Hoover did not issue endorsements, but the novel was with “one of the most powerful people backing the war in the US against ‘Un-American Activities’” (Bowker 2004, 398). It became PSB “required reading” (Saunders 1999, 295).

1984 as adaptation

Winston’s and Julia’s American accents are notable because the Inner Party and Thought Police are British. The voice-over is also American: “This is a story of the future. It could be the story of our children if we fail to preserve their heritage of Freedom.” “We” are American; telescreens use British Received Pronunciation. Winston buys his paperweight with shillings – not dollars, as in the novel. Such details exceed commercial necessity for American stars. They dissociate 1984 from American politics. Its distinctly London setting downplays Britain’s subservience to the superpower Oceania (which Orwell associated with US imperialism; he likened wartime Britain to “Occupied Territory” (1968)). Instead Ingsoc represents “English Socialism” – the 1945-51 Government. Responding to an American review describing the novel as anti-Government, Orwell insisted it “is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter).” However, that reading took purchase in America (Bowker 2004, 401). As Saunders observes, Orwell’s “target was less specific than universal: the abuse of language and logic … was imputed to Us as well as Them” – a “distinction” the film “obscured” (1999, 296).

Other changes are routine; seemingly unimportant. O’Brien becomes O’Connor (Redgrave) presumably because of the star’s surname. Winston’s number again undergoes inexplicable alteration (6079 to 6748). The Times becomes The Gazette. Yet befittingly for a representative of the American Way in a simplistic adaptation, Edmund O’Brien’s Winston is portly and robust in his well-tailored suit, unlike the BBC’s gaunt Peter Cushing or John Hurt in Radford’s adaptation. The mirror scene, revealing Winston’s broken body, outward sign of abject surrender, fails totally: the only difference after “days, weeks, months” of brutality is unkemptness and facial stubble.

Fig. 8: Winston’s degradation: the mirror scene in 1984.

Moments before arrest, Julia, frocked and made up like a 1950s Good Housekeeping model, observes a sunlit washerwoman bathing her baby; she confesses desire for motherhood before remarking, “There must be others like us in love – who will rebel.”

Fig. 9: 1984: Julia as ideal 1950s woman.

Thus family values are affronted when “You are the dead!” grates from the telescreen after the couple express love of life. Orwell’s Winston and Julia, who has slept with numerous Party members for “a good time” (1983, 121) – instinctive, not politicised, rebellion – iterate “We are the dead”, aware that their relationship dooms them and perhaps that maintaining it against inevitability involves doublethink, before the telescreen echoes them (206).

Moreover, the film’s individualism, opposed to collective action, brackets out class. O’Connor has a palatial apartment, a butler, wine, and a controllable telescreen, and Julia obtains Inner Party coffee and sugar; but the closest view of a prole (a word the film avoids) is the singing washerwoman in long shot from the couple’s hideaway. Safely distant, she becomes another idealised housewife, symbolising desired normality – rather than representative of the oppressed, “a solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing … [o]ut of [w]hose mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come” (206). Remarkably, too, Goldstein becomes Kalador, and of the book’s traitors, Jones, Rutherford and Aaronson, the third is dropped. Perhaps associating Jewish names with “liquidation”, Winston’s term for punishment, seemed distasteful so soon after the Holocaust, or dissociation from Nazism was to heighten anti-Communism.

Location sequences concretise Orwell’s descriptions of rubble-strewn streets and terraced houses bombed by rockets. They incorporate authentic landmarks, recalling British social realist films, which positioned fiction within contemporary society as implicit commentary. In the “Golden Country” where Winston meets Julia (1983, 114), landscape and dappled shadows relieve the claustrophobia of Winston’s workplace, the city, and – a different formal and thematic discourse – the film noir mood of chiaroscuro lighting, night shooting, and omnipresent menace.

Fig. 10: 1984 as film noir: Winston fears arrest by the Thought Police.

The noir element relates 1984 to broader Cold War paranoia and oppression, apparent in a cycle then unrecognised by filmmakers, audiences, and critics alike. “When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor,” Schrader wrote about lighting that places noir protagonists in shadow, “it of course creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood” (1986: 175). Schrader’s observation applies figuratively to emphasis on the society Winston inhabits. “Corruption and despair” (181), antitheses of the American Dream, point less to a sense of what the Free World has become than assert what, under Communism, it threatens to be.

Indeed, 1984’s noir characteristics are both pertinent to the film’s specific project and symptomatic of its ordinariness and conventionality, even while its shadowy, confused production history confirms disturbingly mysterious, powerful, unaccountable forces already close to home. The centrality of the cycle of crime and transgressive desire manifests in Winston and Julia’s rebellion. So too the “strange and compelling absence of ‘normal’ family relations” (Harvey 1978: 25) in noir is apparent in the couple’s quasi-domestic liaisons, and Julia’s initial presentation accords with its typical “foregrounding of woman as enigma, mystery” (Kaplan 1983: 62).

Fig. 11: 1984: Winston returns “home” to mock domesticity after a hard day at the office.

This arises from the focus on Winston’s perspective – we learn about Oceania gradually through him: “Most classic films operate the view from behind, in that the spectator is placed in a privileged position of knowledge in comparison with the characters in the film about what is going on in the story. Some films, however, speak “with” their characters – this is a defining feature, for instance, of the film noir” (Kuhn 1994: 49-51). The noir influence accordingly pervades Winston’s interrogation, with angled and subjective shots expressing disorientation. The art direction overall is impressive, especially the grandiose Party towers and futuristic Ministry of Truth interiors with branching wall girders; these create expressionistically fractured mise-en-scene while recalling wartime V for Victory images (emphasised on posters and in a composition that foregrounds Victory Gin in Winston’s apartment). Especially inventive is Winston’s office space as a panopticon: ranked, backlit cubicles keep each functionary prominently visible.

Fig. 12: 1984: The Ministry of Truth as panopticon.

The film is accessible, and recognisable as typical of the era, by its genre hybridisation. Marketing prioritised its melodrama and science fiction over political drama. Taglines included: “Will Ecstasy Be a Crime … In the Terrifying World of the Future?”, “Amazing wonders of tomorrow! Nothing like it ever filmed!” and “SEX OUTLAWED … in the terrifying world of tomorrow!” Julia as catalyst for rebellion conforms to classical narrative’s combination of romance with goal-oriented plot. Her initially threatening presence as she apparently spies on Winston, subsequent embodiment and liberation of his desires, and eventual punishment alongside his, structurally parallel noir’s femme fatale although, as victim and would-be mother, she equally represents the genre’s idealised wife. Uniforms, emphasising conformity, and telescreens’ spiralling patterns, implying mass hypnosis, relate 1984 to other 1950s’ science fiction, of which critics commonly interpret alien attack as figuring Communism and/or the Bomb. Telescreens’ flashing constantly distracts from foreground action, creating empathy with subjection to constant surveillance.

Subtle directions include Winston frisking himself automatically before his telescreen; O’Connor’s near-swoon when Big Brother replaces Goldstein during the Hate Session, economically implying desire sublimated into political fanaticism (called by the novel’s Julia “simply sex gone sour” (123)); and O’Connor humanised by taking a tablet and becoming literally hot under the collar, drying his neck with a towel, while torturing Winston. The latter suggest residual decency – a germ of hope – contrary to the ruthless efficiency of Orwell’s O’Brien.

Nearly erased from history

Data about reception and profitability, seemingly impenetrable as information about the film’s provenance, would merit further investigation. Box office appears meagre in that it took £80,073 in Britain; the same source conversely reports “total gross billings” as £32,274 and places 1984 among “Failures” which “grossed less than £100,000 between 1946 and 1957” (Porter 2000, 510, 476, 471). Either figure is disproportionate against the three million dollars (just over a million pounds at 1956 rates) taken in North America by the high-budget science-fiction hit Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) or the £419,528 domestic gross that made The Dam Busters the previous years’ most successful film in Britain. Circulation ended as distribution agreements expired. These apparently included broadcast rights, as it remained  unseen for years.

Conclusion

Despite its brisk pace, 1984 remains unconvincing to modern eyes. Romance becomes excessive; the score is over-emphatic (and during love scenes hardly surpasses the telescreens’ muzak); and Goldstein’s book is reduced to a brief opening voiceover and “The Principles of Newspeak” to a curt dialogue exchange. These latter originated in what The Times considered Orwell’s “best pieces of satirical writing” – yet “obviously unfilmable” – while the romance and torture were, the reviewer suggested, the novel’s “most attractive” elements for conventional filmmaking. For Cartier, interviewed by Films and Filming (September 1958), presumably unaware of interests behind the film, failure resulted from the medium and viewing conditions:

[A]ll the directional skill of Michael Anderson could not recapture the impact of the TV transmission …. [T]he subject could only frighten spectators who were “conditioned” to experience fear by sitting alone in the darkness, and unable to find help or comfort by looking around the mass audience in a modern cinema – where they would feel safe from “Big Brother”. It was decidedly different in the TV viewer’s own home, where cold eyes stared from the small screen straight at him, casting into the viewer’s heart the same chill that the characters in the play experienced whenever they heard his voice coming from their watching TV screens.  (Quoted in Jacobs 2000)

Fig. 13: 1984: Big Brother one step removed from the spectator: embedded in the mise-en-scène.

Here Cartier intuitively anticipates psychoanalytic film theory: the cinematic apparatus, while immersing the spectator in the action and diegesis, nevertheless creates a sense of mastery. The scene presented, however persuasive, is unconsciously known to be illusionary; it unfolds elsewhere despite the impression of presence; and ultimately, in that conventional narrative guarantees satisfactory closure, it does not threaten. 1984 fails partly because Winston’s evident joy at embracing Big Brother in the final moments elides one version of conformity – American individualism and family values, which O’Connor brainwashes him out of – with another, so that at a formal level at least he appears to be assimilated into the community, his alienation from which was previously the source of narrative conflict. Gin-soaked tears of love and constant anticipation of an assassin’s bullet that make Orwell’s ending poignant are forgotten. The BBC version alternatively mobilised fears not about a specific ideology but rather the little-understood question of media influence precisely as television transitioned from fascinating novelty to familiar household furniture. Ritualistic, fully attentive viewing of a provocative mass event, experienced domestically, embodied the concerns of the drama and facilitated identification with the protagonist’s plight.

Notwithstanding some fine talent and intellectual resources of the world’s wealthiest propaganda machine, Orwell’s fears about the power of persuasion proved premature in the case of Anderson’s movie. Little over a year previously, the hegemony that Orwell satirised and aspects of which he despised – and which for the political interests behind the film provided a convenient target – perversely spawned a programme that is a landmark both of Public Service Broadcasting and the notion of freedom from vested interests to which it aspires.

Filmography

Bibliography

Anon. 1956. “1984: A Review by The Times” (1 March). Reproduced at The Man With the Hypnotic Eye: A Tribute to Donald Pleasence. Accessed 4 October 2012. http://www.pleasence.com/1984/1984-1.html

Bowker, Gordon. 2004. George Orwell. London: Abacus.

British Broadcasting Corporation. No date. “1932: The rise of the news announcer” and “1939: Broadcasting and listening to the world.” About BBC News: 1930s. Accessed 27 September 2012. http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/spl/hi/history/noflash/html/1930s.stm

Cesarani, David. 1998. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. London: William Heinemann.

Coleman, Peter. 1989. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York and London: The Free Press and Collier Macmillan.

Cooke, Lez. 2003. British Television Drama: A History. London: British Film Institute.

Crick, Bernard. 1982. George Orwell: A Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Duguid, Mark. No date.  “Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954).” BFI Screenonline. Accessed 25 July 2012. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/438460/

Eliot, T.S. 1954. Selected Poems. London: Faber & Faber.

Hill, John. 1986. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963. London: British Film Institute.

Harry S. Truman Papers. No date. “Staff Member and Office Files: Psychological Strategy Board Files.” Accessed 4 October 2012. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/physc.htm

Harvey, Sylvia. 1978. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute.

Internet Movie Database. No date. “Alternate Versions for 1984 (1956).” Accessed 25 July 2012. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048918/alternateversions

Jacobs, Jason. 2000. The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, E. Ann. 1983. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. Methuen: New York and London.

Kuhn, Annette. 1994. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London and New York: Verso.

Lawrence, D. H. 1960. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Lucas, Scott. 2003. Orwell. London: Haus Publishing.

Orwell, George. 1968. “As I Please.” In As I Please: 1943-45, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Vol. 3 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. London: Secker & Warburg.Originally published in Tribune, December 3, 1943.

Orwell, George. 1983. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harlow: Longman.

Porter, Vincent. 2000. “The Robert Clark Account: films released in Britain by Associated British Pictures, British Lion, MGM, and Warner Bros., 1946-1957.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20 (4): 469-511.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta.

Schrader, Paul. 1986. “Notes on Film Noir.” In Film Genre Reader, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Stewart, Garrett. 1998. “The Photographic Ontology of Science Fiction Film.” Iris 25 (Spring): 99-132.

Sylvester, David. 1954. “The Kitchen Sink.” Encounter (December): 61-63.

Troy, Thomas M. Jr. 2007. “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.” Intelligence in Recent Public Literature. Accessed 25 July 2012. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no1/article08.html

TV Guide. No date. “1984.” Accessed 25 July 2012. http://movies.tvguide.com/1984/review/126313

Nigel Morris is principal lecturer in media theory at the University of Lincoln. His publications include The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (Wallflower Press, 2007). His current research explores media representations of science and technology.

Frames # 2 BAFTSS 21-11-2012. This article © Nigel Morris. This article has been blind peer-reviewed.

In his book, A Passion for Cultural Studies (2009), Ben Highmore uses the word “passion” to describe the variety of ways in which culture can be experienced as something that is both felt, that “gets under our skin”, and as something that effects us emotionally.[1] Indeed, as he says, the haptic nature of the language used to describe this passionate experience is indicative of our relationship to it: “we are moved by a sentiment, our feelings are hurt, I am touched by your generosity” (author’s emphasis).[2] Highmore argues that as a consequence of attempting to address a phenomenon which straddles this boundary between the physical and the emotional, “writings about the passions … have always recognised the impossibility of treating [them] as exclusively or even primarily mental or ideational”.[3] Unfortunately, this has not always been the case in Film Studies where, as Vivian Sobchack says, there has been a tendency to regard the notion of affect as “a soft, mushy term, a hangover from a sloppy liberal humanism”.[4] Considering the almost universal acceptance of the power of cinema to “move” its audience, however, understanding how this process works is a crucial aspect of film theory.

In the following analysis of affect in Nil by Mouth (1997, Gary Oldman), I want to resituate this “visceral dimension” of spectatorship as central to our engagement with cinema.[5] I will begin by returning to the earliest period in film history, exploring the relationship between affect and spectacle in what Tom Gunning has called the “cinema of attractions”.[6] I want to suggest that the cinematic spectacle is affective by nature, and that there is thus a definite continuity between the affective responses of early spectators and the affect experienced by contemporary viewers. Turning to the ideas of Christian Metz,[7] I will argue that this continuity has largely been possible due to the nature of our relationship with the cinematic image. Characterised by a dualistic tension between intimacy and distance, this relationship has remained unchanged throughout the century or so of cinema’s existence. Nevertheless, such continuity has been masked by the drastic transition between the exhibitionist “cinema of attractions” and the voyeuristic narrative cinema that predominates today. Taking my lead from Gunning’s argument, I will show that spectacle is as present in Nil by Mouth as it was in the pre-narrative era, with the difference being that in the former, spectacle is buried in the melodramatic tropes of realism.[8] With reference to the film’s use of the close-up, I will demonstrate the relation of distance and proximity in producing affective spectacle, before pointing out the variety of elements that situate this intensely realist film as a melodrama. Lastly, focusing on the presence of spectacle in the melodramatic mise-en-scene, I will show how affect emerges through the film’s use of colour and lighting, setting, and finally, voice.[9]

Briefly, I want to preface my argument with a few definitional parameters. It is the aim of this essay to identify the more subtle examples of cinematic spectacle than the explosions and excess these words are usually used to describe. Therefore, in anticipation of the charge that I see spectacle where there is none, I point my reader to the Oxford English Dictionary, wherein the definition of the word ranges from “a person or thing exhibited to […] the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration”, to simply “the sight or view of something”.[10] (their emphasis, OED, 2009). I want to make a similar argument for affect, although this is a more complex term which requires a slightly more detailed explanation. Explaining the concept, Eric Shouse distinguishes between feelings, emotions, and affects.[11] Feelings, he says, are personal, referring to the prior experiences or sensations of a person which have then been labelled accordingly. Emotion is the expression of these labelled feelings.[12] Affect, on the other hand, is “pre-personal”, in that it is always “prior to and/or outside of consciousness”.[13] This is an important point because it describes how affect is involuntary or instinctive, how it is registered on the body before it can be engaged by the intellect. In this way, affect behaves like pain, in that it can be described as “the body’s way of preparing itself for action […] by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience”.[14] As with spectacle, then, affective intensity refers to level or degree rather than to something that is necessarily extreme. However, as we shall see, the affective experiences of the medium’s earliest audiences tended to be at the more intense end of this spectrum.

Gunning argues that the cinema’s early period should be understood as operating according to impulses very different to the predominantly narrative oriented medium it is today. According to Gunning, prior to 1906 (the year marking the influence of D. W. Griffith and his pioneering narrative techniques), it was the affective experience of perceiving moving images that drew audiences to the cinematic apparatus, rather than the content of those images or any meaning gleaned from the order in which they appeared.[15] In this respect, the cinema functioned primarily by explicitly offering its audience the visual spectacle of the medium itself. It is a common myth in film studies that the audience at the first public exhibition of cinema ran screaming from the auditorium, terrified that the train in the film Arrival of a Train at the Station (1896/Louis Lumière) would burst through the screen and smash them all to bits. I am inclined to agree with Gunning when he says this myth underestimates the “basic intelligence and reality-testing abilities” of the average viewer.[16] Nevertheless, it is of use for the way in which it helps us conceive of the intense affective response caused by seeing the spectacle of photography spring into life for the first time.[17] These early spectators did not mistake image for reality to the extent that they fled the screen. They did, however, bear witness to a spectacle that caused them to have an affective experience: feeling – excitement, fear, apprehension, terror – at an embodied, pre-personal level.[18]

In The Cinematic Signifier, Christian Metz explains how this process of affect operates in the cinema.[19] It derives, he says, from a dualism between the spectator’s consciousness of the cinema as a representational medium and yet the very real, indeed embodied, experience of affect. Describing this experience of the viewer, he says:

I know I am perceiving something imaginary (and that is why its absurdities, even if they are extreme, do not seriously disturb me), and I know that it is I who am perceiving it. This second knowledge divides in turn: I know that I am really perceiving, that my sense organs are physically affected, that I am not phantasising, that the fourth wall of the auditorium (the screen) is really different from the other three, that there is a projector facing it (and thus it is not I who is projecting, or at least not all alone), and I also know that it is I who am perceiving all this, that this perceived-imaginary material is deposited in me as if on a second screen, that it is in me that it forms up into an organised sequence, and therefore I am myself the place where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic.[20]

Metz is concerned primarily with the psychoanalytic effects of the cinema and thus the term “imaginary” is being used in both its Freudian sense (as the stage preceding the symbolic) as well as to describe the spectator’s awareness of the difference between representation and reality. Nonetheless, this passage contains a profound insight into the nature of cinematic affect. Metz is describing the way in which even an intensely unpleasant or terrifying image can be tolerably experienced in the cinema because of the spectator’s feeling of safety through distance: we understand the image onscreen as a representation whose referent necessarily occupies an entirely different time and space to our own. However, this knowledge is contradicted by the physical affects of viewing such representations. The fact that these images are made sense of inside ourselves and then become physically manifest upon our bodies appears to transcend this position of safety: our bodies tell us that we are within reach of the image.[21] Thus we can see how the affecting cinematic scenario is constituted by this dual sensation of intimacy and distance with the spectacle onscreen.

The close-up shot is an ideal example of this sensation, and is as evident in early cinema as it is in Nil by Mouth. Gunning offers the close-up of the countess’ ankle in The Bride Retires (1902, unknown) as an example of spectacle in the “cinema of attractions”. Despite working to arouse different sensations, affect in this spectacle operates in the same manner asin the opening sequence in Nil by Mouth. The frame cuts from black into a close-up of Ray’s (Ray Winstone) face as he stands at a bar. His face fills half the frame, and is in sharp focus, centring our attention, yet the bustle of bodies surrounding him at the bar draws the eye away, at one point even breaking our vision of Ray as someone leans across the bar in the foreground. However, the excitement created by this initial shot lasts only eight seconds before the scene cuts back to the black screen displaying the credits – though the music and dialogue remain. That the film is denying visual access to the image having already stimulated the audience’s attention intensifies our curiosity, an affective response which escalates as this edit sequence recurs throughout the credits. In both The Bride Retires and Nil by Mouth, then, it is the spectacle of the image that causes the embodied emotions of the spectator. The desire and arousal created by the spectacle in the earlier film is immediate, but the object of desire is entirely unavailable. Likewise, the mixture of uncertainty, suspense, curiosity and intrigue contained in the image of Ray at the bar cannot be satisfied. Of course Raymond gets served and returns to his friends, but we can never know or experience the image to the extent that is demanded by the embodied sensations it produces. In this respect, we can see that the close-up demonstrates, in Alison Young’s phrase, [22] how affect in the cinema emerges from the “paradoxical proximity” that characterises our relationship with the cinematic image, from our “investment in an experience which is both distant … and proximate”. [23]

Clearly then, the affective spectacle does not disappear in the wake of Griffith’s influence and the cinema’s subsequent drive towards more traditional storytelling modes. Instead, as Gunning says, the “cinema of attractions” was incorporated respectively into both avant-garde practises and as a component of narrative cinema. Being beyond the remit of his article, Gunning’s argument understandably does not venture any further into this issue other than to suggest its spectacle is more visible in some genres than others, offering up the musical and what he calls the “Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects” as some of the more blatant examples.[24] As my readings of the close-up suggest, I want to unearth a more subtle genealogy of the cinema of attraction, following its route into narrative realism as melodrama. Mapping out this generally unacknowledged course of spectacle will, I hope, lead to an understanding of how affect is manifest in contemporary realist cinema.

Realism and melodrama played a dual role in the development of modern narrative cinema.[25] However, in both general and academic usage the melodrama has traditionally been situated into oppositional and subordinate relationships with realism. Despite the notable attempts of some critics to redress this situation, melodrama remains widely used today as a pejorative term to denote sensationalism and sentimentality in works deemed absent of artistic merit. Contrary to this misleading reputation, melodrama in fact refers to “a form of exciting, sensational and, above all, moving story”.[26] Accordingly, it is the pervasive mode of almost all forms of realist narrative cinema, Nil by Mouth included. For instance, a classic trope of the melodrama is the depiction of protagonists suffering undeservedly. This role is arguably inhabited by all the female characters in the film, although it is of course most clearly manifested in the intense suffering of Valerie (Kathy Burke), wife to Ray’s abusive husband. These characters then become objects of pathos (sources of extreme pity or tenderness), immediately evident in Valerie’s case although perhaps most devastatingly so during the moment of Ray’s brutal attack. After a night out together in which Valerie plays pool with one of her male friends, Ray accuses her of infidelity. Waking her in the middle of the night, he drags her downstairs, head-butts her to the ground and punches, kicks and stamps on her repeatedly – a beating so ferocious that she miscarries their baby.

Peripeteia (suddenness) and aporia (doubt how to proceed) often appear alongside pathos, again evident in the explosive violence in the film and the question of how it should be engaged by the characters.[27] Nil by Mouth also fits Michael Walker’s categories of the melodrama of passion and family melodrama, concerning respectively the internal traumas of the characters emotions and the constraints of gender, social position and psychological make-up.[28] However, the ubiquity of melodramatic tropes in narrative realism is one of the primary reasons why melodrama is so hard to spot. Rather than be thought of as a genre in and of itself, then, Christine Gledhill has argued that melodrama is best conceived as a “rhetoric” or style which is capable of informing a range of genres, “westerns, gangster and horror films, psychological thrillers and family melodramas alike”.[29]

Thomas Elsaesser has argued that a primary characteristic of the melodramatic rhetoric is the way in which mise-en-scene becomes a repository of meaning, to the extent that one must give “critical importance to the mise-en-scene over intellectual content or story-value”.[30] For the purposes of my argument I want to focus on this element of the melodrama since it is here, in the mise-en-scene, that we can see most clearly the melodramatic rhetoric creating affect through spectacle.[31] Illustrating his point, Elsaesser uses an example from the master of Hollywood melodrama, Douglas Sirk. Asked about his use of colour in Written on the Wind (1956/Douglas Sirk), Sirk replied: “Almost throughout the picture I used deep-focus lenses which have the effect of giving a kind of enamelled, hard surface to the colours. I wanted this to bring out the inner violence, the energy of the characters which is inside them and can’t break through”.[32] This is a delicate technique, certainly, but one which indicates how Sirk used the spectacle of colour to generate an affective response, to give “resonance to dramatic situations”.[33] Set designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski used an even more understated technique in Nil by Mouth to generate affect through colour. Describing the colour palette for the film, he says: “I used mid-tone real colours with a few bright colours, I didn’t want to enforce the colour of the set onto the look of the film. If it looks like there was no art direction at all, then that’s how it should be … You can include subtle colour changes without apparently making a huge statement”.[34] His use of the word “apparently” is suggestive of how this self-effacing style is, paradoxically, a manifestation of spectacle: an artificial visual style which powerfully connotes the everyday, yet in a way that creates particular embodied sensations in the viewer prior to their cognition. A case in point is the scene in which Billy, a heroin addict in withdrawal, seeks help at his mother’s flat. The dark, early morning greys and blues in the exterior shots are an affront to the eye, evoking the cold, harsh reality of the environment. Inside the flat, the colour tones are much softer, relieving the threatening atmosphere outside, although the bright white of the fridge and phone mask this affect and make the scene appear unconstructed. Even in this more welcoming environment, however, objects are soaked in washed-out greens, browns and yellows, affecting a sense of gloom and sadness. When Billy enters this space, the stronger colour of his jacket is invasive, lending these sensations a sense of inevitability. As the scene ends, however, the characters’ emotional interactions are filmed in a closer shot. Bringing out a tenderness and warmth in the skin tones of their faces, these underlying feelings of inescapable sadness and despair are laced with impressions of courage and indomitability.

Of course, mise-en-scene refers to everything that features in the frame, not just colour and light. Accordingly, spectacle can be found at work everywhere from setting, dialogue, and the placement and movement of the camera and actors, to focus, props, sound, and music. For instance, in his article, “Space, Place, Spectacle”, Andrew Higson describes how “place becomes a signifier for the state of mind of the protagonists” which can also “be read as spectacle, as a visually pleasurable lure to the spectator’s eye” (his emphasis).[35] He notes this is most apparent in the films of the British New Wave and their common use of what became known as “That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill”.[36] Nil by Mouth also features this multi-functioning shot, though it appears in a two-shot sequence (and is updated for the inner-city, non-working class of the 1990s, being positioned from their tower block rather than a hilltop). Following an interior scene of Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) making a joint, the scene functions narratively as an establishing shot, placing his location. Psychologically, the shot functions as a metaphor for the alienation of the characters from the rest of the community, with the grim architecture of the top three flats, crammed upon one another, standing out in the foreground in contrast to the large, semi-detached houses in the far distance. This metaphor continues in the next frame, which is filled by a long-shot of the high-rise estate. Here, the screen dissected by the harsh lines of the buildings, the spatial isolation of the first shot is replaced with its consequent claustrophobic intensity, and yet is depicted in a spectacle reminiscent of a Cubist world war one painting.[37] Viewing these images, it is the “unbeautiful” spectacle that is manifest affectively. Before we can ponder their meaning, desolation and loneliness have taken root in our stomachs; they have, as Lindsay Waters would say, already “dropped anchor in our souls”.[38]

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure Voice is also used as a spectacular vehicle of affect in Nil by Mouth, although the range of embodied sensation it gives rise to differs greatly. At Ray’s flat, for instance, when Ray is engaged in a friendly dialogue with Mark (Jamie Foreman), with Billy and Dan (Steve Sweeney) as their audience, Ray and Mark’s speech is almost harmonised. Mark reminds Ray of an amusing experience they shared, which Ray introduces to the others before Mark then tells the story. Their language is like that of a double act, in which they finish each other’s sentences and tell the punch lines to each other’s jokes.[39] This calm yet upbeat tempo of the dialogue, punctuated with laughter, ingratiates the audience into their social circle; we are included in the scene and experience on a physical, embodied level the same cheerful delight that radiates from the two men as they tell their stories. At other times, however, a very different kind of affect is created from the spectacle of Ray’s language, such as when he visits Valerie’s mother’s flat demanding to see his wife and daughter. In a rage, Ray’s words are shouted or even screamed. His language is repeated, eventually becoming nonsensical as sentences become meaningless jumbles of expletives. Combined with the blunt, harsh timbre of his accent, previously so amiable, these qualities produce an affect that is deeply unsettling and frightening – embodied in the quickening of my heartbeat and knot in my stomach.

Investigating the ways in which the melodramatic rhetoric is articulated in Nil by Mouth’s mise-en-scene reveals the centrality of spectacle to the melodramatic mode more generally. Using the examples of the close-up, colour, setting, and dialogue, I have tried to show how it is the spectacular quality in these elements of mise-en-scene that gives rise to affect. Picking out the movement of the affective spectacle from its place in early cinema to its presence in a contemporary text like Nil by Mouth is an attempt to reinstate the notion of affect as central to film spectatorship. Indeed, being one of the most recognisable aspects of the film viewing experience, researching affect is an important project that constitutes a fundamental part of understanding our relationship with audio-visual images. As I have found in the writing of this essay, analysing affect, particularly its most subtle manifestations, helps us reflect more carefully on our own viewing experiences: we become more conscious of our relationship to the medium and hence more literate spectators. Laura Mulvey noted in her famous essay that “it is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it”.[40] That may have been the intention of her essay but, as I have been arguing, it can never be the case with affect which, by its very nature, exists in and on the body before it can be grasped by the mind. This indestructible quality of affect is useful for thinking about how cinema has come to be one of the most powerful forms of mass communication in existence. In his history of the idea of communication, John Durham Peters argues that “all action, especially all communicative action aimed at coming into connection with another soul, is action at a distance”.[41] This argument clearly applies to communication in the cinema, in which, as we have seen, distance is an integral part of the film viewing experience. I have tried to show that affect is a fundamental process in “bridging the chasm” of this distance, to borrow Peters’ phrase. A process that brings us back neatly to the theorist with which we began and Highmore’s interest in “the ability of media to touch across time and space but to touch without bodies”.[42] In the cinema this ability comes, in part at least, from the affective quality of the spectacle.

Fig. 1. Sergeant Lenearo Ashford using the “Virtual Iraq” programme at the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.

In 2008, the United States military implemented a therapeutic virtual reality video game, developed at the University of Southern California, called Virtual Iraq, a simulation program used to treat Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans suffering from PTSD, a condition documented in nearly 20% of returning veterans at the time of the study.[1] The program was modeled on the landscapes and gameplay of popular war video games, such as America’s Army and the Call of Duty series, but rather than presenting a subjective panoramic vision of the battlefield, a feature which made these games popular, Virtual Iraq provides the player with optical illusions and a series of randomly generated images and scenarios which are tailored to the specific case history of the patient. The participant dons 3D glasses and headphones and is transported to Iraq by the therapist to confront specific elements of the Iraq War experience in order to master his traumatic experience.

The experience Virtual Iraq highlights has a distinct presence in both Iraq War films and Vietnam War films, where the condition of the traumatized soldier is discernible as a narrative device. This is expressed in numerous scenes which detail the imprinting of war on the human psyche, scenes that convey the hallucinatory and subjective experience of war through a variety of visual strategies. Two films that are especially significant in this regard are Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (United Artists, 1979) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War film The Hurt Locker (Lions Gate, 2009). Both films render this remapping of the human psyche through expressive visual design. Each, however, employs a distinct mode of subjective representation that can be linked to specific thematic concerns.

“The Vietnam War”, according to William Hagen, “was an intimate, loosely framed, on-the-run cinéma vérité experience”, and a similar point could be made about the Iraq War. Representations of both wars can be seen as a competition of “war narrators”, challenging the mainstream media’s account of the war in more viscerally compelling ways (Hagen, 1983, 230). Both Apocalypse Now and The Hurt Locker broach audience expectations of war already shaped by documentary films, photo journalism, embedded print and television journalism, and (in the case of the Iraq War) Internet videos. Such media set the stage for Coppola and Bigelow to craft their films in a style which de-familiarized the war landscape viewers were accustomed to. At the time of Apocalypse Now’s production, “any film about Vietnam that followed the traditions of realistic narrative filmmaking (especially of war films) would be working against a collective sensibility that had arrived at different preconceptions of what was authentic”, and as similar preconceptions about the Iraq War experience became evident, The Hurt Locker followed the same rhetorical project as Apocalypse Now (Hagen, 1983, 231). The styles of both films are intended to encourage the progression away from previous memories of the war experience and towards deeper moral and philosophical debates.

Although Coppola’s and Bigelow’s film employ different visual styles, the intentions of their authors are similar. In this essay, I will show how The Hurt Locker borrows the narrative structure and the trope of battlefield haunting from Apocalypse Now in order to provide a critique on the way that war rewrites the human psyche. Battlefield haunting in The Hurt Locker and Apocalypse Now is expressed through uncanny repetition and a constant return to the scene of trauma through an episodic narrative structure. I will also show how both films render the traumatic, interior space of battle through the rewriting of war film genre codes. Both films incorporate the influence of pre-cinematic spectacle forms into their visual languages. Apocalypse Now radically departs from the influence of the panorama painting, a form with a strong presence in earlier war films, instead using phantasmagorical imagery of a haunted battle zone. By contrast, The Hurt Locker translates the new logistics of perception to the traditional panoramic vision of the battlefield, and in doing so offers a new visual mode, the moving panorama war film.

Fig. 2. “Pickett’s Charge”, depicted in Paul Philippoteaux’s panoramic Gettysburg Cyclorama (1883), Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania.

Fig. 3. Antonio Gattorno’s Hitler’s Portrait (1942), a phantasmagorical interpretation of war-torn Europe.

Geoff King characterized Apocalypse Now as a spectacle of “authenticity” and “artistic imagination” (King, 2006, 288). The key word here is spectacle, as war representations have been a form of spectacle since early cinema—as evidenced by the marketing of D. W. Griffith’s American Civil War film The Birth of a Nation (1914)—and in pre-cinema art as well. One such pre-cinema spectacle was the panorama, an attraction which attempted to transport the viewer into the thick of battle. Panoramic war depictions invited the eye to navigate the equally focused foreground and background action, an experience which attempted to mimic actual combat participation and one which war films would attempt to recreate (Fig. 2). Sweeping wide shots of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan (Dreamworks, 1998) and The Longest Day (Twentieth Century, 1962) and trench warfare in Paths of Glory (United Artists, 1957) are but a few examples that exhibit the influence of the panorama on war cinema.

The Hurt Locker presents a new approach to the panoramic war vision, one which presents the battlefield through a 360-degree view from a series of identifiable and unidentifiable spectators; The Hurt Locker is what I will call a “moving panorama” war film, one in which the panoramic vision of battle is all encompassing and unrestrained. I am using the term “moving panorama” to signify a particular type of panoramic vision—one in which the viewer is surrounded on all sides by a 360-degree panorama field, and experiences the event depicted as a montage of different perspectives. This experience not only exceeds the verisimilitude promised by the traditional panorama, but also offers the illusion of being transported into the event. Like the Virtual Iraq video game, the war experience of The Hurt Locker re-enacts a particular form of battlefield experience through this style, providing a new visual language for war. Beginning with the immediacy of observation-based material, Bigelow “experientializes” the rendering of war in a way which is “raw, immediate, and visceral” (Thompson, 2009). Starting from a cinéma vérité approach reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (Warner Brothers, 1987), The Hurt Locker creates a montage of multiple perspectives—achieved through multiple cameras, varying film stock and camera speed, inconsistent angling, et cetera—in order to mimic the manner in which the human brain records traumatic battlefield events.

Apocalypse Now, by contrast, radically departs from panoramic vision and instead draws upon another pre-cinema spectacle art form: phantasmagoria, the use of optical illusions and juxtaposition of images to produce a distinctly haunting rendering of time, space, and events. Developed in Paris during the late eighteenth century, phantasmagoria was a spectacle form in which a lantern, placed behind a screen and mounted with a shutter containing painted slides, projected ghostly images upon the screen (Christie, 1994, 111). The lantern-projector would often be mounted on rails behind the screen, so that these images appeared to move about the screen, perceived by the audience as revenants (Burgoyne, 2010, 3). This form appears to have influenced subsequent movements in art, and war has often found itself to be the subject of these paintings, in particular those of the surrealists—Dalí, Gattorno, and others (Fig. 3). But the aim of phantasmagoria is not authentic recreation but rather to suggest something ghostly, or unearthly, about the subject represented. By invoking this form, Coppola’s film transports the Vietnam War itself to a haunted realm at the dark side of human nature. This is achieved through editor Walter Murch’s use of double exposure and partial dissolves, and through cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s use of colour.

 Phantasmagoria and panorama: Apocalypse Now and phantasmagoria

Fig. 4. Etienne-Gaspard “Robertson” Robert displaying his phantasmagorical spectacle “The Skeleton” in Paris, 1797.

Fig. 5. An ‘in-camera’ optical illusion, or phantasmagoria, shot from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, Columbia Pictures, 1992)

Originating in Europe during the late eighteenth century, the phantasmagoria was a theatrical visual art form which relied on images projected from the magic lantern device over landscape art to suggest ghostly hauntings and to evoke the gothic (Fig. 4). This effect was achieved, literally, through smoke and mirrors, but also with the projection of images over paintings of a landscape or people—an optical illusion in which the uncanny clashes with the rational. This is what Tom Gunning describes as “the summoning of phantoms…while displaying the triumphs of the new sciences” (Gunning, 2004, 5). This form was adopted into cinema by the likes of George Melies and the German Expressionists, generating a visual style which Coppola drew upon for Apocalypse Now and much of his other work (Fig. 5). Apocalypse Now can be characterized as a phantasmagorical war film based on its presentation of the battlezone as a place of haunting memories, incoherency, and, most importantly, psychological degradation stemming from PTSD. Coppola himself even characterized the increasing surrealism during the film’s progression as “phantasmagoric imagery”.[2] This is achieved in two distinct ways: editor Walter Murch’s use of dissolves and juxtaposition, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s philosophy and use of colour.

Fig. 6 Willard’s two-thousand-yard-stare in Apocalypse Now (United Artists, 1979).

Let us use, for example, the image of Willard’s two-thousand-yard stare (Fig. 6). This shot is established through a partial-dissolve transition, starting with a shot of a burning jungle, then dissolving to a stationary shot of Willard looking upwards, then partially (not completely) dissolving back to the burning jungle so that the juxtaposed shot of Willard is in the foreground, and then bringing the burning jungle shot more into focus and Willard less into focus. The flaming jungle shot is a tracking shot which moves the images of flying helicopters and burning palm trees across Willard’s face like an image from phantasmagoria theatre (Christie, 2010). This shot in the opening sequence sets the expectation for the film’s thematic content and visual rendering of war. The aim here is to establish a doubling between Willard and Kurtz which Coppola will revisit in the film’s closing; Garrett Stewart notes that the film closes “upon its opening image”, as if Willard’s story is, by phantasmagoria, grafted onto Kurtz’s story, both stories underlining the dark side of neo-colonialism (Stewart, 1981, 468). As Willard proceeds upriver to Kurtz’s compound, the technique of dissolve and juxtaposition continues with increasing intensity until the film’s ending, a scene of Willard leaving Kurtz’s compound upon completion of his mission, a shot composition which echoes the phantasmagoria in the opening scene.[3]

In Coppola’s film, “a luminous presence is superimposed on a dark past”, offering a link between Storaro’s use of colour and the presence of phantasmagoria in the film (Storaro, 2001, 270). In a study of chromophobia—fear and anxiety aroused by the use of particular colours—David Batchelor writes: “Figuratively, colour has always meant less-than-true and the not-quite-real” (Batchelor, 2000, 52). Storaro’s colours are designed to achieve precisely this. The use of orange, green, blue, and cloudy off-white colours pierce shadows and darkness to establish onscreen an otherness from the battlezone. The dark-light contrasts contribute to the film’s thematic context. One of the few explicit appearances of the colour white occurs when Kurtz’s Montagnard guards are revealed: “whitewashed, spectral natives who seem to travesty the pale Anglo villain come among them” (Stewart, 1981, 458). In an interview with The Guardian, Storaro cites the illustrations from Burn Hogarth’s Tarzan as an inspiration for the choice of colours in Apocalypse Now: “[Francis and I] didn’t want to do anything naturalistic….I didn’t want it to look like reportage. I put artificial colour [and] artificial light next to real colour [and] real light—to have the explosion of napalm next to a green palm tree; to have the fire of an explosion next to a sunset in order to represent the conflict between the cultural and the irrational” (Jones, 2003). Storaro additionally characterizes the film’s cinematography as representing “a discourse on the senses of civilizations”; the notion that light represents the civilized world and darkness represents the uncivilized (primeval) world is presented through “technological colour’s abuse of natural colour forms…in cinematic terms, this is the conflict central to the film…it is the way artificial colour violates natural colour” (Storaro, 2001, 280).

The Hurt Locker and the tradition of the moving panorama

By contrast, the visual rendering of the battlezone in The Hurt Locker can be compared to the nineteenth century tradition of the moving panorama, a form which was specifically developed as an alternative to the nineteenth century European static panoramas. The moving panoramic vision is expressed in Bigelow’s film through the cinematography and use of fast montage with varying points of view. In contrast to the static panorama, in which the audience is “in control of the spectacle” and “the visual experience of battle [is organized through]…several vantage points” (Bronfen, 2012, 193), the visuals work in conjunction with the war trauma and battlefield haunting central to the film’s narration. The influence of the panorama paintings on war films is re-written in The Hurt Locker to introduce a unique visual code, one chiefly inspired by the American tradition of the moving panorama. As great battles were often the subjects of nineteenth century panorama paintings, a link can be drawn between the historical developments of the panorama painting and the war films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one which includes the moving panorama and the visual approach taken in The Hurt Locker.

Fig. 7. The October War Panorama in Cairo, Egypt.

The nineteenth century battle panorama has long been recognized as an influence on war films. To better understand this influence, first consider the impact of a late twentieth century battle panorama. The October War Panorama (Fig. 7), housed in a museum located at the spot of Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination, depicts an Egyptian victory over Israeli forces during the October War (Yom Kippur War) of 1973. Built in 1989 by North Korean artists, on Kim Jong Il’s suggestion to then president Hosni Mubarak, the museum fails to mention the successful Israeli counteroffensives which followed, as well as the U.N. brokered ceasefire.[4] Additionally, a similar work—the Tishreen Panorama—exists in Damascus, Syria, also built by North Koreans, depicting Syria’s participation in the same war much to the same effect. These panoramas essentially rewrite history for Egyptian and Syrian nationalist sensibilities. They both function in a way similar to Paul Phillipoteaux’s Gettysburg Cyclorama (Fig. 4.2). Both old and new war panoramas promise (a selective) verisimilitude based on what Paul Virilio identifies as the link between optics and warfare. “The advance of panoramic telemetry”, Virilio writes, “resulted in widescreen cinema” (Virilio, 1984, 69).[5] The influence of nineteenth century panorama vision is present in early war films, such as Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) (in which the American Civil War battle sequences seems as if they could have been lifted straight from Phillipoteux’s painting) (Fig. 8). The panoramic vision is present in the World War II combat film—in films produced during World War II and in later films about that conflict, such as The Longest Day (Twentieth Century Fox, 1962) or Saving Private Ryan (Dreamworks, 1998)—and thus, through the resulting visual codes, helped to define the “panoramic war film”.

Fig. 8. Phillipteaux’s Gettysburg Cyclorama (first), Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (second), The Longest Day (third), and Saving Private Ryan (fourth).

Fig. 9. Mathew Brady’s photograph “The Dead of Antietam”, displayed in a New York gallery in October 1862, one month after the battle.

In his study of panorama paintings, Stephan Oettermann argues that panoramas were the products of the nineteenth century with no precursors. The development of the panorama was not based on previous developments in the arts but rather on changes in culture (Oettermann, 1997, 5). Though a dubious claim, as the first panoramas appeared in the late eighteenth century and had antecedents in large-scale paintings (Christie, 2011), cultural changes did inform the development of the panoramic form throughout the nineteenth century. For Americans in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the traditional, static, circular panoramas were “visually inadequate to the situation in which they found themselves”, as the onset of railroad travel and the end of a war documented through haunting photographs (Fig. 9), and as such, the moving panoramas “anticipated, in art, the speed of travel” (Oettermann, 1997, 323). The static panoramas seemed distinctly European to the American viewer and were primarily focused on cities and pastoral landscapes that were familiar to the European viewer. The moving panorama paintings, by contrast, often depicted the rugged landscapes of the American West, still the primitive unknown in the minds of many eastern city-dwellers. These paintings, moving around a circular rotunda, contained vague or elusive vanishing points, the spectator’s vision brought to focus on different points as if an invisible director and editor were present. If the moving panorama was a response to the increasingly irrelevant form of the static panorama, the moving panoramic vision of The Hurt Locker can be seen as a similar response to previous war films and changes in visual culture. If the panorama could not have developed without the Industrial Revolution, as Oettermann contends, then the development of Bigelow and Barry Ackroyd’s approach to The Hurt Locker may be linked to the digital revolution.

Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd addresses the digital revolution, ironically almost, through non-digital means (the use of 16mm cameras). The role which documentaries and Internet videos play in the contemporary audience’s relationship with the Iraq War informs this approach. This is due in part to the variety of methods by which we experience the moving image—the multitude of screens we encounter on a daily basis. Writing about large-scale paitings, Ian Christie asks whether “our ability to contemplate such vast acres of canvas with more equanimity [has] something to do with our expanded sense of image scale—from proliferating IMAX cinemas and giant plasma to the miniature screens of our smartphones” (Christie, 2011). The approach taken in The Hurt Locker can be described as a moving panorama, the merging of two different cinematic traditions: montage and the moving frame. The moving panorama that is The Hurt Locker is a montage of competing gazes through multiple cameras that express their own consciousness, a point to which I shall return later. This new formulation of panoramic vision offers a novel way to analyze the visual score of The Hurt Locker, and it extends our understanding of the new logistics of perception in contemporary war films.

Impressed with Barry Ackroyd’s near-documentary approach in Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (Fig. 10), Bigelow remarked in an article for Exposure International that “[he] is a master at evoking the ‘you-are-there’ immediacy that [The Hurt Locker] demanded”.[6] Hand-held tracking shots and low-angle shots (Figs. 10 and 11) are used in both Bigelow and Greengrass’s films. Ackroyd, operating four Super 16mm cameras simultaneously, constantly crossing the 180-degree line, and “providing multiple points of view”, intended to “make you feel like a participant” while providing the space for the actors to “do long takes with continuous action”.[7] A single scene could be captured through a combination of close shots, aerial shots, long shots, and medium shots—few of which are static. The images produce what Gilles Deleuze refers to as “camera consciousness”: “we are no longer faced with subjective and objective images” but rather a free-floating perception that amounts to an “emancipation of the viewpoint” (Deleuze, 1986, 26). The copious footage from four 16mm cameras provided ample material for editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski to use in a montage in the creation of the Iraq War zone as a moving panorama.

Fig. 10. A low-angle shot from United 93 (Universal, 2006) by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd.

Fig. 11. A low-angle shot from The Hurt Locker (Lions Gate, 2009) by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd.

As discussed earlier, Walter Murch’s editing in Apocalypse Now makes extensive use of partial dissolves, juxtaposed frames, and double exposure. By contrast, the editing of The Hurt Locker, particularly the bomb-disposal mission scenes, can be characterised as an overtonal or associational montage: the combination of tonal (cutting based on emotional or thematic content), metric (cutting based on time), and rhythmic (cutting based on both time and image) montage creates a psychologically complex narration—in the case of The Hurt Locker, a narrative flow not restricted to the perspective of the protagonists. Consider a series of shots in a sequence described earlier, in which James disposes of a bomb in the trunk of a car at the U.N. building (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12 A series of twelve shots (read from left to right) from the “U.N. building bomb disposal” sequence (29:38–30:05) in The Hurt Locker (Lions Gate, 2009).

This series of twelve shots lasts approximately twenty-five seconds, covering several different angles and assuming multiple points of view (some of which are unidentified). Each shot is shaky and hand-held, whether it acts as a tracking shot or a static shot. The traditional editing technique of matching on action is abandoned here, as is fidelity to the 180-degree-line rule. The scene proceeds in this manner: the mission is interrupted by a terrorist’s sniper bullet from a balcony across the street and behind the EOD team, witnessed from the sniper’s point of view, the soldiers’ points of view, and undetermined points of view, the frequency of the cuts and the variety of angles and compositions increasing as the tension rises. After the terrorist is killed, tension grows again when it is revealed that the unidentified viewpoint from across the street (third shot from the left in the second row in Fig. 12) is from a young Iraqi with a video camera, and the logic (or illogic) which determines the presentation and combination of shots and angles is again applied further in the sequence (series of shots in Fig. 13 below).

Fig. 13. A series of twelve successive shots from the scene (35:40–36:05) in The Hurt Locker (Lions Gate, 2009).

The visual approach in The Hurt Locker suggests a break with the conventional influence of the panorama on war films, just as the visual approach in Apocalypse Now was also a departure from conventional form. Just as Coppola and Storaro wanted to take Apocalypse Now beyond the war journalism which invaded American television screens during the Vietnam War, Bigelow sought to distinguish her film from an even broader range of war coverage available to the Iraq War generation. The use of multiple cameras and montage suggests a competition of perspectives, which, in some respects, comments on the contending video and photo journalism of the war itself (Internet videos from soldiers and Iraqi civilians, documentary films, and cable news coverage, both American and other). This is achieved through the editing scheme of The Hurt Locker, which can be compared more effectively to the nineteenth century American tradition of the moving panorama than to the static panorama: the Iraq War battlezone, no matter how familiar it has become to us through other films and media, is rendered uncanny by editing which draws attention to undefined witnesses.

War as a way of thinking

Coppola’s exaggerated portrayal of the battlezone as a haunting, phantasmagorical state and Bigelow’s hyper-realistic battlezone, where the camera is a free-floating witness not restricted to the traditionally orchestrated war film experience, mark distinctly different visual approaches to the war film. The phantasmagorical imagery of Apocalypse Now offers an original visual representation of war. The otherworldliness of Coppola’s Vietnam becomes a haunting hall-of-mirrors for the Western spectator, and the metaphysical journey to the cause of this haunting is aided by Storaro’s non-naturalistic colours and Walter Murch’s juxtaposed frames, mimicking the magic lantern images of eighteenth and nineteenth century phantasmagoria. The film’s narrative running along “the river, the liquid track that keeps the story moving despite [its] episodic interludes”, according to Murch, allows the space for the “characters to break the frame” and, by extension, the ghosts of Vietnam as well (Ondaatje, 2002, 56, 70). The result is a Vietnam never seen by the likes of Walter Cronkite or the audiences of Hearts and Minds (Peter Davies, 1974), but rather a Vietnam which may only exist in the minds of its traumatized veterans.

Fig. 14. A scene from the Call of Duty series (above) and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (Dreamworks, 1998) (below).

The Hurt Locker is a war film whose style can be compared to the therapeutic video game Virtual Iraq mentioned at the start of this chapter. Unlike other popular war video games, like the Call of Duty series, Virtual Iraq and The Hurt Locker are devoid of the panoramic battlefield landscapes which are manifest in twentieth century war films (Fig. 14), nor does Virtual Iraq or Bigelow’s film make use of the panoramic pathos formula; the spectator of The Hurt Locker, and the player of Virtual Iraq, are no longer in control of the spectacle. The visual approach in The Hurt Locker acts in counterpoint to James’s acting-out as a form of self-defence. The theatrical escapism promised by the rush of battle is a motivation for James, but the cinematography and editing are not in conjunction with this view, and as such, we, the spectators, are dragged along by James through the Iraq War experience with no relief from the encroaching war trauma.

Elizabeth Bronfen notes that in war films “we implicitly take part in cultural haunting” (Bronfen, 2011, 7). Many of the films discussed in previous chapters engage with this cultural haunting, the Vietnam films confronting the ghosts of Vietnam and the Iraq War films anticipating the ghosts of that war which have yet to enact their haunting on American culture. Apocalypse Now and The Hurt Locker are exceptional cases in this regard, as they offer up the battlezones of American wars as some of the most haunted sites in American history. It is in this approach that the uncanny functions as part of Bigelow and Coppola’s “aesthetic formalization” of this cultural haunting. Rational human logic is subsumed by the otherworldliness of the combat zone (Bronfen, 2011, 7). Where The Hurt Locker and Apocalypse Now also converge in this respect is in their presentation of warfare, not as a place of battlefields (a series of towns to be conquered, fortresses to be overtaken, beaches to be stormed, etc.), but rather a state of mind (or battlezone) in which the mind is invaded by a primitive warrior code. If the evolution of the war film is marked by addressing “war as a way of seeing”, as Virilio remarked, then Apocalypse Now and The Hurt Locker delve deeper in their search for new modes of analyzing the impact of war: war, in these films, is a way of thinking, and the cultural haunting produced by war plays a formative role in shaping this way of thinking.

Notes

Introduction

This paper focuses on three films featuring traditional-style hotels that back on to natural surroundings: Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) ¹, [ Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) ², and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel (2004).

Although approaches to these films, particularly Marienbad, have tended to focus on questions of temporality, my interest here is spatial. I shall examine the relationship between built interior and natural exterior through the thresholds that link and separate them. I shall look at the ways in which the hotel compound depends on an appropriation of the exterior that raises the issue of rightful ownership and establishes a tension between nature and architecture. This I shall tie to Jacques Derrida’s work on the threshold in the context of hospitality in order to posit their doorways as fluid portals across which hostile relationships between the natural and built environments are enacted. I shall extend his interpretation of the host-guest relationship by applying it beyond the purely social context to the spaces of architecture and nature. Through close analysis of selected scenes, I shall explore the potential – and limitations – of the hospitality approach to assess how architecture and nature might navigate the threshold in each case to lay claim to the status of host. On identifying its limitations, I shall raise the validity of applying an alternative concept of threshold space deriving from Michel Foucault, in which he posits the mirror as an interface that simultaneously embodies real and virtual spaces.

The hospitality paradigm

As part of the hospitality industry, the hotel has at base a clear contractual relation: what Derrida (drawing on Kant) has termed conditional hospitality (2000: 4). For an agreed fee, guests receive a “restricted right of temporary sojourn” (Friese, 2009: 58). Yet the concept of hospitality is fraught with ambiguity. Etymologically, the term is linked to hostility and the hostage. Moreover, in the original French, Derrida’s division between host and guest is blurred by the fact that the same word, hôte, is used for both. A conflict thus underpins the concept; one that Derrida acknowledges by describing it in terms of the threshold. The host accords the guest a “right of asylum by authorizing him to cross a threshold […] the line of which can be traced” (2000: 6). Yet at the same time, “if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality. […] Hospitality thus becomes the threshold or the door” (ibid.: 14). Consequently, “the question of limits is never far from the scene” (Dikeç, Clark and Barnett, 2009: 5).

Derrida’s hospitality is profoundly embedded in social relationships played out in specific locations, whereby guests and hosts are either individuals, communities or state structures. However, the juxtaposition in these films of the natural and built environments suggests that we may be dealing with a different kind of host-guest dynamic: that of nature versus architecture. At base, the hotel precinct – like the stately home and gardens before it – is underpinned by an aggressive appropriation of natural space (Williams, 1973: 106) that pits the human concept of land ownership and entitlement (Morgan, 2009: 113) against the fluid, ungraspable force of rurality (Murdoch and Pratt, 1997: 58).

There is a powerful sense in the stern, vertical lines that govern the outdoors in these films that the exterior – and its history – have been forcibly appropriated and shaped in order to provide commercialised leisure. In Marienbad, the amalgam of Baroque exteriors (drafted in from a variety of palaces around Munich) offers an image of nature that has been trimmed and channelled in the services of “pure convention”, in the words of M (Sacha Pitoëff), rather than those of historical accuracy (Fig. 1) ³.

Figure 1

The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, filled with photographic reminders of its illustrious past, features a similarly sculpted hedge maze that echoes the labyrinthine interior of the hotel (Fig. 2). There is a strong intimation that the appropriation of the site – formerly an Indian burial ground – was itself an act of violence.

Figure 2

Hotel’s neighbouring wood with its legend-laden cave, meanwhile, has written the rural exterior into its own history; its tourist literature capitalises on its myths (the woodland witch, the mysterious disappearance of a group of hikers in 1962). The institution even derives its name, Waldhaus, from the forest, which dominates its rear façade (Fig. 3).

Figure 3

I would therefore like to raise the possibility that these films engage with a broader application of the hospitality paradigm, whereby the threshold is not one of a conditional relationship between people, but of uneasy tolerance between forces: an interface between two opposing hosts (the primal force of nature and the rigid force of architecture), and two opposing guests (verdant settings forcibly subsumed into the hotel environs and the built structure whose continued presence depends on the cooperation of the natural environment). To explore this, I shall look more closely at the thresholds featured in these films in order to illustrate how each can be viewed as the axis across which a battle between nature and architecture is fought.

 Threatening thresholds

Marienbad’s central threshold is the window in A’s (Delphine Seyrig) room that, we are told, offers access to the garden (Fig. 4).

Figure 4

However, we never actually witness her accessing the exterior through it; indeed, at one point, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) suggests it may be jammed. The dangers of passing through a door to be exposed to the “other side” are nonetheless illustrated when A exits the ground-floor lounge and steps onto the balcony, only to be almost blinded by natural light, blending into the wall in an overexposed blur of white (Fig. 5). Here, exposure leads to over-exposure and the loss of the clear contours of the body.

Figure 5

Significantly, the only other site of overexposure in the film is A’s bedroom – the receptacle for the window threshold (Fig. 6).

Figure 6

The window is thus an ambivalent access point: it is functional in principle, but unreliable in practice, and proximity to it has the potential to blind and obliterate.

In The Shining, meanwhile, double doors offer an escape route to the exterior. They also allow Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) to enter the hotel to help Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Wendy (Shelley Duvall). However, they are simultaneously a breach in the architectural fabric that leads almost directly to the treacherous maze, and one that lets the outside in. Furthermore, it is perennially unclear who – or what – is able to open them. As Hallorann approaches, they stand ajar, as if anticipating his arrival (Fig. 7).

Figure 7

We witness the difficulty that this powerfully-built man experiences in opening the doors any further, impeded by snowdrifts. Yet when it comes to the final chase, as Jack (Jack Nicholson) pursues his son, they stand wide open to facilitate Jack’s passage (Fig. 8).

Figure 8

As the only person who has preceded him is Danny – a slip of a boy – we are left with the impression that if there is no “someone” who can have forced them open, it must have been a “something”.

Hausner’s Hotel has a similarly eerie set of double doors leading from the basement to the neck of the woods (Fig. 9).

Figure 9

When receptionist Irene (Franziska Weisz) is initiated into her duties, the manager emphasises that she must keep them locked at all times, as “the devil never sleeps”. She ignores him, leaving them open on three occasions when she slips out for a cigarette (Fig. 10) ⁴. On the first occasion, nothing happens; the doors behind her remain reassuringly ajar. On the second, she turns to find that the doors have inexplicably swung shut but can still be opened. On the third, however, she finds them not only closed but locked against her.

Figure 10

These are ambivalent thresholds indeed. It is this idea of the fluid, unsettling delimitation that I should like to consider here as a means of exploring whether the relationship between nature and architecture may always be one of competition – and of hostility and hostage-taking – whereby both vie to occupy the position of host. I shall look here at the surfaces, both natural and constructed, in each of these films to examine how they act as a portal between inside and out, and how they are the source of a number of uncanny (dis)appearances.

Absorbent surfaces: uncanny (dis)appearances

The Shining

 Jeff Smith has described The Shining beautifully as a “disarrangement of surfaces” (1981: 64). I should like to focus here on the surfaces of the maze to the rear of the Overlook. From the outset, the towering hedge walls exude a leafy menace. Undaunted, Danny and Wendy head off to explore them (Fig. 11). The camera pans to the right: an ambiguous motion, as in doing so it reveals a maze map that indicates that its structure is relatively easy to navigate, but which simultaneously blocks the entrance. The camera cuts to Danny and Wendy. Suddenly, they are interrupted by one of the slow, mobile dissolves that permeate the film and establish a symbiosis between exterior and interior. We find ourselves following Jack across the hotel lobby.

Figure 11

Jack stops in front of a maze model that is an exact replica of the one outside (Fig. 12). A cut emphasises his god’s-eye view. This only serves to underscore the incongruity of the next shot, which requires us to reorient ourselves on two planes, vertical and horizontal. We find ourselves looking straight down on the model from an entirely different angle. Moreover, the maze has expanded in size and complexity, with a series of potentially endless passages on the peripheries that extend beyond the limits of the frame and thus our visual field. As the camera zooms in, we see two tiny figures – Danny and Wendy – moving in what we had assumed to be the model. Not only are they trapped in the maze, it seems, they are doubly trapped, as the maze itself is contained within the hotel. Moreover, the shift from assuming that Jack’s view is all-encompassing to an overhead vantage point that indicates a still-higher force at work that is invisible to him (and us) is extremely unsettling. From believing that the labyrinth is the domain of the outdoors, we are forced to consider that the omniscient viewpoint has shifted to the interior, and that the controlling force is the hotel itself.

Figure 12

The degree to which the hotel has co-opted this structure is again visible in its tortuous corridor structure, which is uncannily reminiscent of the twists and turns of the outdoor maze, compounded by the garish carpeting favoured by Kubrick throughout. In the scene in which Danny is lured into Room 237, these parallels are taken to the extreme (Fig. 13). We see Danny in close-up playing with his toy cars. In a reversal of the maze-model sequence, the camera gradually zooms out to reveal the boy at the centre of a geometric, maze-like pattern. A ball rolls down one of the lines on the carpet, coming to a halt just in front of him. The camera cuts to display the empty, tapering corridor.

Figure 13

In a shot/reverse-shot sequence, we accompany Danny to find the source of the mysterious ball, ending outside Room 237. All we can glimpse through the door is a closet clad in full-length mirrors. The scene that we had hoped might provide insight has ended with a surface that can only reflect our gaze back on itself.

However, it is the final sequence that reveals the absolute dominance of the hotel structure over the natural exterior. Danny rushes into the maze with his father in hot pursuit. He survives; Jack, meanwhile, is done for. Visibly weakening, Jack collapses against a hedge wall (Fig. 14). As day breaks, we see his frozen body, still in the maze. The camera switches to the interior, slowly approaching a set of old photographs lining the corridor outside the Gold Room. Their pattern recalls the maze model. As we hone in on a single figure in one of the photographs, dated 4th July, 1921, we realise it is Jack. His death in the maze has resulted in his complete absorption into the hotel’s history – through the hedge-lined exterior and onto the plastered walls of the interior. The final dissolve to an extreme close-up of Jack’s face offers further confirmation of this ultimate assimilation.

Figure 14

In The Shining, therefore, it is the hotel as host that co-opts the surfaces of nature as a means of incorporating the “guest” – and it does so to embellish its own past, literally sucking its residents into the photographs that document its history. Architecture here has mastered nature.

Hotel

In Hotel, we swiftly realise that interior surfaces are less solid than they seem. It is a film replete with images of disappearances as we see Irene – shot predominantly from behind – repeatedly subsumed into darkness (Fig. 15). Indeed, the film’s final image shows her, locked out of the hotel, being swallowed up by the forest.

Figure 15

Absorbency, however, is not a noted feature of functional architectural structures, valued for their impermeability. Yet in Hotel,it becomes increasingly apparent that anything physically located within the hotel is susceptible to being swallowed up by the structural fabric and “regurgitated” in the surrounding woods. Where we expect to come up against solid brickwork, we find instead a softness and penetrability more in keeping with foliage. Unlike The Shining, however, the exterior appears to be the dominant force. I would like to look here at two examples of seemingly literal interior absorption and external regurgitation. The first of these involves Irene’s “lucky charm”, her necklace. Before taking a swim, she places it carefully on a shelf in the changing cubicle. When she returns, it has vanished (Fig. 16).

Figure 16

It is only a few days later that the manageress announces that the necklace has been found – in the woods. The suggestion is that the interior acts as a conduit to the exterior. Foliage and brickwork have literally swapped surface characteristics, opening up a penetrability within the interior while positing the exterior not only as threatening, but potentially also as in control. Nature, it seems, may be capable of commanding and ensnaring the features of the interior.

This gives rise to what must be the most astonishing sequence in a film that otherwise plays out a tale of understated paranoia. Irene finds herself alone in one of the hotel corridors (Fig. 17). She looks to one side and the camera cuts to her from behind, receding into the darkness at the end of the corridor. But then we shift unexpectedly back to her, still in the corridor, apparently watching herself walk away. The “second Irene” follows in the footsteps of the first. The camera breaks the 180-degree rule repeatedly as we witness her progress into complete darkness, creating a proliferation of Irenes, each looking at another embodiment of herself outside our visual range. A change in the quality of the diegetic sound suggests that she has moved to the woods; moments later, trees emerge from the darkness. Irene again looks to her right, mirroring the gaze that initiated the sequence. A further 180-degree cut shows her from behind. Suddenly, a mysterious, faceless “third person” enters the scene as the camera rushes towards her. Irene turns and screams in terror.

Figure 17

It is feasible to argue, of course, that we are witnessing a dream sequence. Yet the subsequent scene shows us Irene settling down in a common-room armchair and falling asleep. If anything, then, the previous sequence predates any dream that Irene might have. Ultimately, our overriding impression is that the corridors of the hotel are inextricably linked to the exterior, that the exterior is capable of transporting its objects outdoors at will, and that it is only a matter of time before the forest will absorb Irene entirely, as it may well have done her predecessor, Eve, whose unexplained disappearance is still under investigation.

Hence, Hotel offers us a study in liminality that is the precise opposite of the one explored in The Shining. Whereas Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel swallows up its residents, in Hausner’s film, it is the exterior that invades and transforms the surfaces of the interior into a shadowy portal between indoors and outdoors. Here, the forest is the host, and the built environment very much in its thrall.

Marienbad

With its hypnotic narrative of repetition and disjunction, its endless corridors and insistent organ soundtrack, Marienbad is a profoundly unsettling filmic experience. I should like to focus here on A’s bedroom as an interior marked by external intrusions that is also a recurring site in which X and A’s competing versions of the previous year’s events play out. From the outset, it exudes a mystery all of its own, glimpsed in flashback as a dazzlingly white space decorated with a delicate pattern of foliage, full of light yet sparsely furnished (Fig. 18).

Figure 18

Over time, the furniture multiplies strangely (Fig. 19).

Figure 19

As X embellishes and imposes his story – apparently one of sexual conquest – the stucco foliage becomes visibly denser and more suffocating as natural light is blocked out (Fig. 20).

Figure 20

There is a suggestion here that there has been a return to nature, albeit a highly stylised and peculiarly unnatural one. Even A is ultimately forced into a costume parody of the natural, her feathered negligée transforming her into “part animal, part languishing fetish” (Wilson, 2006: 79). We seem to be witnessing a double battle between the “civilised” interior and the parasitic exterior: the attempt to subjugate the woman by cloaking her in appropriated nature that also serves to allow nature to enter the inner scene and slowly but surely take it over. Superficially, therefore, we might argue that, as in Hotel, nature is imposing its mark by evolving within the architectural space and taking over its contents, setting itself up as what initially appears to be a willing guest, only to reveal itself as a parasite.

However, there is a major difference between Marienbad and the other films treated here. Whereas we assume that the spaces in The Shining and Hotel are real, in Marienbad, the struggle for control centres on a virtual domain: the mind. This greatly problematises any attempt to position the film in terms of an encounter between architecture and the natural world, for nothing here can be deemed natural. The changes in furnishings are prompted by embellishments to the spoken narrative, whose hypnotic quality, in turn, attempts to overwrite the subconscious. Hence, at root, Marienbad is a story of the battle to control a shared memory rather than physical space. It is consequently difficult to justify applying even an extended version of the Derridean host-guest relation. Although hospitality is premised on social contracts that are as such intangible (cultural mores, laws, religious precepts, a sense of responsibility, etc.), the very fact that they are social means that they centre on the precise location of the human subject within the social structure. Marienbad’s pervading virtuality, however, means that non-locational interiority dictates the filmic narrative throughout, whereby the concept of the exterior and integrity of the architectural structure are both equally unreliable and, ultimately, irrelevant.

Marienbad is thus a film that never shifts beyond the liminality of the threshold. I would like to suggest here that there is an approach other than that of the hospitality paradigm that enables us to analyse it more effectively. I turn here to Foucault’s essay, Of Other Spaces, whose central premise is the definition of an alternative to social and state contractuality: states outside the norm, spaces of exception. He refers briefly to utopias – “sites with no real place” (1986: 24) – before moving on to discuss at length the spaces he calls heterotopias of deviation, defined as “outside of all places” (ibid.), subject to a constant “system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (ibid.: 26). The rooms and gardens in Marienbad fit both categories: as “no real place”, they are utopian, yet, as Foucault expressly notes, both gardens and historical hotels (as archival and commercialised institutions) are heterotopian. What interests me in particular is Foucault’s explicit reference to a further and enduringly liminal “other” that similarly combines these two forms of space, namely the mirror that acts as a further threshold, but one that links virtual and real. As a site of virtual space, the mirror is classified as a utopia; however, its physical reality as a tangible object also qualifies it as a heterotopia (ibid.: 24). Hence, this mirror transforms the space occupied by the beholder, making it both “absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (ibid.). Positing the threshold as a semi-real, semi-virtual “mirror” that acts as an axis between two heterotopias of deviation that are dependent on processes of “opening and closing” seems a promising approach to a film in which both nature and architecture are secondary to the endeavour to craft a shared memory.

I should like to look briefly at the mirrors that feature in Marienbad. The very first of these are introduced in the opening sequence that takes us through a collage of rooms and corridors, multiplied almost to infinity by the narrator’s monologue (Fig. 21). They are adorned with stucco foliage and reflect still more leafy plaster motifs in the interior. These palimpsests of greenery introduce layer upon layer of natural elements that have been transplanted and translated to the civilised interior.

Figure 21

Yet mirrors are ultimately deceptive. We see X listening intently to a conversation that we assume is being held by two hotel residents captured in the mirror by his head (Fig. 22).

Figure 22

Shortly afterwards, however, we discover that the dialogue is being carried out by another couple altogether. Mirrors, it seems, do not always reflect our expectations.

During the exchanges between X and A as they struggle for control of the narrative, A describes the mirror in her room in a sudden exuberance of detail (Fig. 23). It appears, containing a proliferation of self-images as we see A – and multiple reflections of her in yet another mirror – reproduced in its surface.

Figure 23

X immediately intervenes to deny that such a feature ever existed, describing a painting of a snowbound landscape in its place, which then literally supplants the mirror (Fig. 24). The mirror image is suddenly revealed to us as artifice as A’s multiple selves are overwritten by a historical representation that has little to do with either A or her Baroque surroundings.

Figure 24

Marienbad thus offers us a threshold that remains eternally uncrossed and that appears to contain traces of its architectural and natural settings without ever confirming the reality or supremacy of either. Its non-contiguous, unsubstantiated virtual spaces fall outside the logic of continuity editing or topographical coherence. They are never anything more than reflections and virtual projections. The threshold in Marienbad is hence not a portal; it is only ever a mirror, a space of exception that precludes hospitality.

Conclusion

I would like to end by reassessing the expanded interpretation of Derridean hospitality that I put forward as a means of exploring the tensions between natural and built environments mediated by a physical threshold. As my analysis suggests, this approach offers rich readings of films in which these environments are clearly (and contractually) delineated and posited as real. The Shining offers a compelling portrayal of a pre-eminent hotel space bending the forces of nature to its will via the threshold. In Hotel, meanwhile, the supremacy of the natural setting imposes itself by absorbing the interior through the architectural fabric of the Waldhaus. However, in Marienbad, the pervading virtuality of the space and the actions that take place within it indicate that we are witnessing a different battle – not one between nature and architecture centred on navigating the threshold to gain the status of “host”, but one to shape a shared memory. A contract of hospitality is thus still in the process of being drawn up. Consequently, the threshold can never be anything more than a threshold, a mirror that captures intangible pasts and unsubstantiated spaces. My suggestion here is that it cannot be theorised in the framework of the social and contractual relations that underpin the hospitality approach. Instead, it must be explored through a concept such as Foucault’s framework of the mirror that favours “other space” and allows for spaces of exception.

I started by positing my approach as spatial; as a potential avenue for further research, I would like to suggest how this paper might be extended by reintroducing the temporal – specifically with regard to history and collective memory. I have indicated how the spaces in each film can be viewed as a forcible appropriation of history: The Shining offers an indexical trace of the past in the form of its photographic archive; Hotel presents us with tourist literature that enables its residents to retrace the myths and mysteries of the neighbouring woods; Marienbad sets up a narrative battle whose aim is to situate and specify the events of the previous year. While the first two films absorb their inhabitants to supplement their archives, the latter offers a meditation on the actual – and artificial – process of creating a shared memory. As such, all three can be posited as meditations on collective memory. I would like to suggest that they explore our assumption that memory is a place – an indexical recollection that we can call upon to access and re-enact specific moments of time past. We assume also that our institutions – museums, archives, historical places, even our traditional hotels – are memory palaces that encapsulate these concrete moments so that we can visit them by paying the requisite “entry fee”. But what if the memory has no true basis in the past, is merely a figment of our present desire – or indeed, someone else’s? These seem to be the questions underpinning all three films. Where they overlap entirely is in their agreement that both the habitation and the creation of this memory site is a perilous process. Perhaps the site of collective memory is in fact the musealised “space” in which both the hospitality paradigm and Foucault’s alternative spaces can take up residence. As the ultimate “host”, it takes its inhabitants hostage; and as the mirror that simultaneously occupies real and virtual space, it has the power to inhabit – and take over – not only the body, but also the mind. And perhaps these films can thus be viewed not only in terms of the threshold battle between architecture and nature, but also as essays on the dangers of the attempted or enacted musealisation of memory ⁵.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques, “Hostipitality”, trans. by Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5 (December 2000), 3-18.

Dikeç, Mustafa, Nigel Clark and Clive Barnett, “Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time”, Paragraph, 32 (March 2009), 1-14.

Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces”, trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 22-27.

Friese, Heidrun, “The Limits of Hospitality”, Paragraph, 32 (March 2009), 51-68.

Morgan, Diane, “Trading Hospitality: Kant, Cosmopolitics and Commercium”, Paragraph, 32 (March, 2009), 105-122.

Murdoch, Jonathan and Andy C. Pratt, “From the Power of Topography to the Topography of Power: A Discourse on Strange Ruralities”, in Cloke, Paul, and Little, Jo (eds), Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, pp. 51-69 (London: Routledge, 1997).

Smith, Jeff, “Careening through Kubrick’s Space”, Chicago Review, 33 (Summer, 1981), 62-74.

Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Wilson, Emma, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

Filmography

 L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad, dir. by Alain Resnais (Optimum Home Entertainment, 2005) [on DVD].

The Shining, dir. by Stanley Kubrick (Warner Home Video, 2007) [on DVD].

Hotel, dir. by Jessica Hausner (Artificial Eye, 2010) [on DVD].

Hannah Mowat is a PhD student in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge. After an undergraduate degree in French and Spanish, she spent 12 years working in Germany before returning to full-time education. Her research focuses on the role of gesture in contemporary Francophone film. Contact e-mail: hm201@cam.ac.uk.

Frames # 2 BAFTSS 21-11-2012. This article © Hannah Mowat. This article has been blind peer-reviewed.

Mutability is the epitaph of worlds
Change alone is changeless
People drop out of the history of a life as of a land
Though their work or their influence remains

Isabella Banks, The Manchester Man (1876)

“Everything [except Joy Division’s music] is merchandising. Merchandising of memory.”
Peter Saville (2007)

Isabella Banks’ 1876 novel The Manchester Man irrevocably ties the fortunes of its Mancunian protagonist Jabez Clegg to those of his native city during the first half of the nineteenth century, the rags-to-riches journey personifying Manchester’s own rapid transformation from manorial township into what Peter Hall notes was “without a challenge, the first and greatest industrial city in the world”.[1] The passage from The Manchester Man cited above, in which Banks reflects upon the legacies of both individuals and wider historical forces, can also be found on the headstone of the Manchester-based “broadcaster and cultural catalyst”[2] Anthony H. “Tony” Wilson (1950-2007). Against a backdrop of “absolute [socioeconomic] decline” in the city wrought by large-scale deindustrialisation,[3]  Wilson became an active champion of local creative talent, co-founding both the Factory Records music label and The Haҫienda nightclub: Manchester institutions which would form key focal points for the development of British popular culture between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Given that subsequent urban regeneration efforts in the city have often sought to seize upon the prestige of Manchester’s “vibrant contributions to popular music”,[4] it is perhaps unsurprising to find that by the time of his death, the association between Wilson and the transformation of his beloved city seemed cemented by obituaries which mourned the loss of “Mr Manchester”.[5] The excerpt from The Manchester Man is appropriate then, as, in threading together the themes of socioeconomic mutability and the legacy of influential figures, it captures the sense in which regional accounts of upheaval and transformation continue to be understood through the memorialised and mythologised lives of specific individuals. Moreover, as contemporary pressures exerted upon post-industrial cities like Manchester to maintain global economic competitiveness[6] lead to the valorisation of local and regional heritage, these “epitaphs of worlds” become rife with tensions, their narratives not just functioning as urban myth, but fuel for –and products of– the neo-liberal cultural industries: the “merchandising of memory”, as Peter Saville, former graphic designer for Factory Records and current Creative Director for the city of Manchester, puts it.[7]

“Mutability is our Tragedy, but it’s also our Hope”

Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, a comic re-telling of the Factory Records story, constitutes one such potential site of tension. Like Jabez Clegg in The Manchester Man, the professional and personal fortunes of Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) become the lens through which Manchester’s recent history is refracted and distorted. Unlike The Manchester Man, however, the placement of Wilson as protagonist and narrator ironically comments upon the credit often solely attributed to “Mr. Manchester” with regards to the city’s regeneration, and nods towards the affectionate hostility that was traditionally directed towards “wanker” Wilson by his fellow Mancunians.[8]  Alongside an account of Wilson’s tumultuous television career and strained personal relationships, the film depicts his early championing of the Sex Pistols in 1976; the creation of Factory Records and signing of post-punk band Joy Division in 1978; the suicide of their lead singer Ian Curtis and subsequent transformation into New Order in 1980; the success of the Haçienda and Happy Mondays at the height of the “Madchester” acid-house boom in the late 1980s; and Factory’s financial implosion in 1992.

Indeed, the well-worn narrative device of channelling historical mutability though the life of the individual is explicitly acknowledged in the film when Wilson encounters a homeless man (Christopher Eccleston) claiming to be the medieval philosopher Boethius. Expanding on his concept of the Wheel of Fortune (in a thick Salford accent, nonetheless) the vagrant philosopher opines “It is my belief that history is a wheel […] good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope”. Appropriately, given the film’s exaggerated portrayal of Wilson as pretentious intellectual, he responds to this philosophical advice with a nonchalant “I know”. Of course, Wilson’s riposte is also directed at the audience, trashing the symbolism of the scene in order to establish that the film’s creators are fully aware of the pitfalls of this very narrative device, but are choosing to use it anyway.

This article is concerned with these tensions between cinematic fiction, urban legend and historical fact. Moreover, in establishing a sense of 24 Hour Party People’s overall contribution to the ever-expanding Factory mythos, this article aims to place the film in relation to what Steve Quilley has termed the “Manchester script”: the PR narrative, espoused by local authorities and property developers alike, that “the city has been reborn as a postmodern, post-industrial and cosmopolitan city, standing in Europe’s ‘premier league’”.[9] To do this, the article will firstly explore the issues surrounding Manchester’s culture-led regeneration in more detail, with particular interest in both how the Factory legacy has, willingly or otherwise, been implicated in such schemes. In exploring the promotion ofthe film and its relationship with some of Factory’s key figures, the article will then consider the ways in which the film appears to reinforce the Manchester script. However, in interrogating the film’s reflexive, playful dealing with historical fact and personal account, the article will also aim to highlight the ways in which 24 Hour Party People can be read as a sardonic subversion of this script and its attendant top-down, neo-liberal narratives, in keeping with the anarchic tradition of Factory Records and the Haҫienda.

“Excess of Civic Pride”

For those sympathetic to the spirit of the city’s sub-cultural heritage, the half-complete image painted by the Manchester script raises pivotal concerns, as it obscures the very socioeconomic issues which played a key role in fuelling Manchester’s now mythologized creative achievements. As former Haҫienda DJ and Manchester historian Dave Haslam argues, much of the spectacular creativity of Factory and its creative contemporaries consisted of cathartic and transcendent ways of dealing with the city’s “disintegration” during the period of Thatcherite restructuring.[10] Indeed, this notion of a holding out against wider economic forces informs the 1976 film essay Joy Division: a Film by Malcolm Whitehead; a riposte to neo-liberalism which figures footage of the band rehearsing in a disused factory as a symbolic form of “resistance through art and culture”.[11]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXYsu4do3Go&t=24m10s

Joy Division: a Film by Malcolm Whitehead

The neo-liberal landscape of Manchester in the early 2000s, however, would make such acts of resistance appear futile. At the same time as acid house, the collectivist hedonism with which the Haҫienda sought to counter the “individualistic thrust of Thatcherism”, reached its creative peak in the late 1980s, Manchester City Council had confirmed its abandonment of municipal socialism in favour of a “pragmatic strand of interventionist neo-liberalism” which Peck and Ward summarise as “talking up, making over and trickling down”. [12] While they argue that this approach meant that Manchester city centre “has been comprehensively reconstructed, both physically and culturally, in ways that would have been hardly imaginable 15 or 20 years ago”, it remains the case that, for all of the visible fruits of regeneration, “many of the city’s underlying social and economic problems have been displaced rather than solved”.[13]

As Matthew Wilson notes in his account of the city’s transformation, these concerns prove even more pressing when one considers how “once marginal cultural entrepreneurs” such as Peter Saville “have become central in the regeneration process, many now holding significant positions of authority within the governing structures of the city”. [14] As local authorities grew increasingly wise as to how the efforts of bottom-up enterprise had revalorised inner city property, and created a network of jobs in the creative and night time economies, they “began to see the benefit in co-opting wider cultural forms” and their progenitors into public-private regeneration schemes like Marketing Manchester. When describing the motivation behind transforming the Factory offices depicted in 24 Hour Party People into the nightclub FAC251, for example, former Joy Division and New Order bassist and Haҫienda co-owner Peter Hook echoes this official line, arguing that such projects use “the past as a stepping stone into the future”.[15]

Irony, heritage, and the contemporary night time economy at Peter Hook’s FAC251

Not all commentators share this optimistic interpretation of the role of Factory in Manchester’s culture-led regeneration. For Owen Hatherley, the Factory-themed cocktails on offer in the luxury bar of the Beetham Tower, and Urban Splash’s transformation of the working-class Salford terraces razed by the New Labour Pathfinder Initiative into homes for affluent first-time buyers, are indicators of the gentrifying demands of private capital which shape planning policy in the neo-liberal era.[16] Indeed, Hatherley might have added the transformation of the Haҫienda into “iconic office space”, which forced 24 Hour Party People’s producers to build a facsimile nightclub interior on the other side of the city, even if they did manage to shoot exterior shots at the original Whitworth Street location (see Fig. 1). Revealingly, the film’s simulacra dance floor appears to contradict Wilson’s claim, made in 1998 when the Haҫienda was sold to property developers, that he did not care for “museum culture”.[17] With this in mind, it is worth taking seriously Hatherley’s charge that 24 Hour Party People is mere “Mancunian auto-hagiography” which, like culture-led urban regeneration more generally, duly empties cultural products of their oppositional content.[18]

Figure 1: The former site of the Haҫienda night club in Manchester, April 2011. Photograph taken by the author.

Evoking “heritage” when discussing British cinema does, of course, require some qualification. The focus of this article is the relationship between 24 Hour Party People and the very specific narratives at work within the cultural industries of contemporary Manchester, and while the notion of cinema evoking, reiterating, and deconstructing a particular local heritage is central to this focus, that is not the same to claim that 24 Hour Party People is to be considered “heritage cinema”. As Claire Monk notes, “heritage cinema” is a deeply problematic term which can only be “most usefully understood as a critical construct rather than as a description of any concrete film cycle or genre”, [19]  and as such, this article will refrain from mapping such a potentially unproductive label onto 24 Hour Party People. In the same essay, however, Monk points towards Moya Luckett’s work on an “‘alternative canon’” of British cinema which includes Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979) and Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971); work which is perhaps more relevant in its concern for bottom-up appraisals of cinematic cites of regional identities. [20] Pivotally, Luckett locates the construction of identities in these films in the context of New Labour’s own attempts to construct an entrepreneurial national identity which, as Tony Blair outlined in a Design Council report, should “use the strengths of our history and our character, and built on them for the future”.[21] As Toby Miller notes, New Labour’s “modernisation” of the British film industry shared the same “commerce-culture relationship” dilemma that characterised much of its Third Way policies.[22] Of course, it is this same tension, between supply-side imperative and cultural credibility, which define both Manchester’s own culture-led regeneration and 24 Hour Party People.

As a production, the filmis marked by these tensions. On the one hand, it is an independent labour of love (“modern history existing for its own sake” [23]); funded by director Michael Winterbottom’s own company, Revolution Films, in association with Coogan’s Baby Cow, Film Four, the Film Consortium and the Film Council, and which, according to IMDb.com, failed to gross more than a £1 million in the UK between April and December 2002.[24] However, the film is also an unabashed vehicle for a plethora of recognisable Mancunian and British comic actors, going some way to confirm Miller’s notion of how cinematic treatments of cultural heritage can also be opportunities for contemporary British image making. In addition to Manchester-native Coogan, the film features Smug Roberts, Peter Kay, Ralf Little, John Tompson, and Fiona Allen, all from the Greater Manchester area; Coronation Street’s Elizabeth Dawn; and prominent roles for well known British character actors and comedians Paddy Considine, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Rob Brydon, Keith Allen, and Dave Gorman. The cumulative effect of this rapid succession of famous faces is that of an advert for regional and national comedy talent, mapping an image of Manchester’s entrepreneurial present onto a depiction of the entrepreneurial efforts of figures from Manchester’s recent past.

At a superficial textual level, 24 Hour Party People appears to display similar moments of tourist-friendly nostalgia. In one sequence, Wilson moves through a sea of clubbers, and, as they rave in slow motion, he turns to the camera to provide some historical context for the proceedings:

Manchester. The birthplace of the railways, the computer, the bouncing bomb. But tonight, something equally epoch-making is taking place. They’re applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it: the birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The Dance Age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester.

Even if scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce pushes the portentous overtones of the speech towards absurdity, the scene nevertheless exudes the tone of tour-guide, one which is duly accompanied by illustrative footage and stills of the bouncing bomb and the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the first stored-program computer built at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1948, nicknamed ‘the Baby’ (see Fig. 2). Just as 24 Hour Party People built its own Haçienda, so too was a replica Baby built for Manchester’s “Digital Summer” 1998, the multimedia festival devised by Marketing Manchester to celebrate the creative and scientific heritage of the city.[25] Furthermore, interviews with figures like Haslam, Saville, Shaun Ryder and Bez, included as extras on the DVD release of the film, are characterised by a similar tension between demotic pluralism and authoritative lecture: do the talking heads offer contradictory accounts to further complicate the attempt to reduce Factory to tourist-friendly myth, or do they reinforce the process? While, in the case of these interviews, it is much closer to the former, the same cannot always be said for the film’s account itself. Towards the end of the film, when Wilson reflects on Factory’s financial woes, the tone of his monologue approaches the elegiac. Accompanying an aerial shot of Manchester by night, Wilson’s voiceover intones:

Most of all, I love Manchester. The crumbling warehouses, the railway arches, the cheap abundant drugs. That’s what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride.

Underscored by the solemn plainchant of Paul Oakenfold’s remix of the Happy Mondays’ “Hallelujah”, Cottrell Boyce’s script wavers from playful irony to a tone of spiritual reverence appropriate for an alleged auto-hagiography. Furthermore, the speech appears to compound several of the clichéd Manchester narratives observed by commentators. The monologue itself returns to two familiar media images of the city: dilapidated Victoriana and “Gunchester” gang warfare,[26] while the contrast between these twin images of material and social urban decay and the fiery red lights of nocturnal Manchester, suggest a “Phoenix from the Ashes” metaphor of economic and technological progress which echoes the triumphalism of the Manchester script. In such instances, it becomes difficult to entertain film-critic Xan Brooks’ suggestion that Cottrell Boyce is ‘just honouring its narrator’s self-mythologising tendencies’; in these moments, the film appears to suspend ironic distance to actively make its own contribution to the myth.[27] Taken together, the Oakenfold soundtrack and knowing-yet-reverent comments become an example of what Urbis[28] co-founder Justin O’Connor terms the “moral and political bankruptcy of the post-rave urban growth coalition”, for whom Wilson “represents its saddest failures”.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Of course, it would be mistaken not to acknowledge the self-awareness that underpins, and perhaps even undermines, the instructional, promotional and triumphalist tendencies of 24 Hour Party People. However, as the promotional material for the film suggests, this rubbishing humour can also be seen as making this heritage more palatable and attractive: not merely neo-liberal “talking up”, but reassuringly ironic “talking down”. The theatrical poster for the film is indicative of this portentous-yet-coy approach to selling cultural heritage. The poster consists of a triptych featuring the Happy Mondays vocalist Shaun Ryder (Danny Cummingham), Ian Curtis (Sean Harris), and Wilson, the respective captions for the three Mancunian figures reading: “Poet. Genius. Twat” (see Fig. 4). Again, the crux of this punch line returns to the film’s self-aware refraction of Manchester’s history through the life of an individual. “Poet” and “Genius” are epithets attributed to the unreliable narrator (the “Twat”), and as such, are to be dismissed as pretentious indulgence. Suggestions for beatification, instead, are deferred to an abstract, chaotic notion of the Manchester cultural scene as a whole: the eponymous 24 Hour Party People of the film’s title. That the film was issued with a prestigious Factory Records categorisation number (FAC 451), and starred many real life Mancunian musical figures[29] further conveys the sense in which these cinematic subjects tacitly offer their blessing of the film’s account, enabling a kind of self-perpetuating reinforcement of the text’s authority and authenticity. Indeed, the real-life Wilson himself appears in a cameo as a television producer (an appearance immediately pointed out to the audience by Coogan-as-Wilson) Despairing at the pretentious fictional Wilson for regurgitating Boethius’s sage words on individual fate while presenting the aptly titled game show, Wheel of Fortune, the real-Wilson’s appearance as “a minor character in my own story” simultaneously rubbishes and authenticates 24 Hour Party People’s account.

Figure 4: Poster. Image used with the kind permission of http://www.cerysmaticfactory.info.

“Have You Never Heard of Situationism, or Postmodernism?”

The reflexivity of 24 Hour Party People and its implications for the Factory myth, however, cannot be overlooked. Indeed, in the existing scholarly work which makes reference to 24 Hour Party People, it is this very reflexivity that is most frequently commented on, particularly with a general gesture towards the tropes of literary postmodernism. James Leggott notes how the film draws “satirical energy” from the collision between Wilson the “self-conscious intellectual” and the “working-class authenticity” usually associated with popular culture (and, one could extrapolate, its on-screen depictions),[30] while Alan Kirby finds a historical location for the film in the “halcyon days of high postmodernism”.[31] Indeed, postmodernism, Situationism, and “the free play of signs and signifiers” are all name-checked in the film itself when Wilson is forced to defend Joy Division’s Nazi-inspired name, while later in the film, he addresses the camera to confirm that he is “being postmodern. Before it was fashionable”. 24 Hour Party People’s propensity towards such tropes, however, can also be understood more specifically as stemming from its relationship with the Factory mythology.

Rather than the readings of Leggott and Kirby, then, 24 Hour Party People can be seen as using the very same postmodern devices which informed the syndicalist spirit of Factory to undermine the sense of “icy authority” often attributed to its public aesthetic.[32] Indeed, the real Wilson is keen to locate Factory’s soul as firmly opposed to both the dirigiste urban planning of post-war Labourism,[33] and the monetarist economics of neo-liberal champion and Conservative minister Sir Keith Joseph,[34] a war on two fronts against top-down politics of the mainstream centre left and right which Haslam similarly identifies in the creative communities of the period.[35] As such, the film’s historical unreliability becomes its source of vitality. Only when the Manchester script is scrawled with postmodern graffiti –the extra diegetic captions, the freeze frames, the computer generated UFOs– does it become the 24 Hour Party People script. These considerations of oppositional narratives become all the more relevant when considered in relation to Winterbottom’s subsequent film projects. In an interview about his film adaptation of The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s 2009 critique of neo-liberalism as political project, Winterbottom explained:

Naomi’s argument is against what she perceives as the dominant narrative, the dominant idea. The events she picks out span my adult life. For me it was about making people see them in a different light […] Milton Friedman seemed extreme at the time of Thatcher’s election, but the last Labour government seemed to be living under the same ideology as Thatcher. It is important to show alternatives.[36]

While it would be conjecture to suggest that this notion of showing alternative narratives to neo-liberalism informed 24 Hour Party People, it is nevertheless important to note that Winterbottom is more generally concerned with challenging political orthodoxy by offering contentious counter-narratives (consider the controversial The Road to Guantanamo, 2006, for example). With this in mind, it is worth considering 24 Hour Party People’s narrative and stylistic techniques in more detail.

The comic intercutting of archive footage allows 24 Hour Party People to maintain an ironic distance from the history it depicts. When Wilson attends the influential Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June, 1976, the scene is constructed from a combination of re-enactment and actual concert footage. Journalist Ryan Letts (Rob Brydon) wields a Super 8 camera (see Fig. 5), and as he turns to film the stage, the camera pulls away and cuts to a long shot of actors portraying the Sex Pistols. For the inevitable close- up, however, actual footage is inserted. While this flourish of editing adds a sense of historical spontaneity (the real concert footage is particularly shaky) and perhaps even a sense of documentary authority, it also proves something of an in-joke for aficionados of pop music lore, given that the number of individuals who have claimed to have been at the concert has steadily and implausibly grown over the years.[37] Rather than make a similarly compromised claim at historical accuracy, the film instead frames concert footage within the diegesis: as Letts’ Super 8 camera suggests, this is history through the deliberately twisted eyes of 24 Hour Party People.

 A flurry of real concert footage ensues, with Coogan’s flustered Wilson comically inserted into the pogoing audiences of Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jam, and The Stranglers. This is, of course, a cinematic device perhaps most notably deployed in Forest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), whereby Gump, the narrator-protagonist, is digitally integrated into historical footage of twentieth century US icons like JFK and Richard Nixon. As Tiso Giovanni notes, the act of viewing these moments is marked by an “ontological paradox whereby the seamlessness of the insertion from the point of view of its photographic realism should be – but isn’t – negated by the fact that spectator is fully aware of the deception. Or, to put it another way: we admire how real those images look precisely because we know that they have been forged, and the manner in which they have been forged.”[38]

This paradox is constructed in a much less sophisticated manner in 24 Hour Party People. Coogan is not pasted into the same frame as Iggy Pop, nor is John Lydon digitally manipulated to speak Cotttrell Boyce’s script; part of the comic appeal of these scenes is their crude construction, and the notion that anyone would accept their ontological veracity is deliberately risible. Indeed, just as Wilson-the-Narrator is the postmodern prophet to Gump’s ignorant messiah, self-consciously commentating on pop culture history rather than unwittingly inspiring it, so too does 24 Hour Party People represent the ambiguous, sarcastic riposte to Forest Gump’s assured, deeply reactionary negation of popular struggle in America.[39]

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

 While linear plot exposition is not necessarily a prerequisite of the authoritative biopic, neither is anachronism a typically desired feature of the historical account. Again, 24 Hour Party People willingly exploits the distancing effects of chronological play, having Ian Curtis and Martin Hannett appear at the final night at the Haçienda when it had already depicted both of their funerals, and leaving its supposedly 1970s mise en scène littered with anachronistic satellite dishes and car registration plates. When Wilson is depicted filming a filler interview with an elderly former canal worker for Granada news in the late 1980s, these themes of memory, wilful anachronism, and postmodern historicising become subtly intertwined. Hoping to tease out a series of nostalgic Victorian images which, as this article has previously explored, typically litter media coverage of the city, Wilson asks his interviewee “what do you remember about the canals in those days?”. Unexpectedly, the man replies: “Very little”. His hopes for stereotypical recollection shattered, Wilson asks his camera man whether any of the footage is salvageable. As 24 Hour Party People’s own camera operator pans to show the diegetic Granada camera man, with Wilson declaring that “I don’t think we’re going to be able to use much of this”, the Merchants Bridge, built in 1995 and thus jarringly anachronistic, becomes clearly visible. The apparent contrast in the standards of Wilson’s diegetic film project and those of 24 Hour Party People again initiates an ironic dialectic with its audience, warning them not to take the film’s truth claims too seriously, given that they apparently cannot even be bothered to check for basic continuity errors.

Figure 8

These deliberate conflations of urban myth, retrospective accounts, obscure in-jokes and wilful invention reach their alienating zenith following the depiction of a sexual encounter between Buzzcocks/Magazine vocalist Howard Devoto and Wilson’s wife in the toilets of the Russell Club, the site of the inaugural Factory gig. As the camera tracks away from the toilet cubicle, the real Howard Devoto, dressed as a janitor, addresses the camera to admit “I definitely don’t remember that happening.” (see Fig. 7). A freeze frame occurs, as Wilson, via a voice-over, explains to the audience what has just happened, and relays Devoto’s insistence that the affair is a work of fiction; at this juncture, the text undermines both its portentous narrator and itself, warning the audience that no detail in its account of the past can be completely trusted.

Figure 9

In drawing his history of Manchester’s contribution to popular culture to a close, Haslam argues for the “urgent need to find a less glamorous but more profound definition of ‘regeneration’” centred around the needs of social groups that have been typically air-brushed out of most PR-friendly urban renewal initiatives.[40] While a commercial endeavour like 24 Hour Party People shares little of this bottom-up imperative –the cinematic resistance in the radical tradition of Malcolm Whitehead’s Joy Division, perhaps– it nevertheless displays an ambivalence towards the triumphalist Manchester script to the extent that it does not quite meet Hatherley’s charge of “egregious” auto-hagiography.[41] Instead, 24 Hour Party People is marked by a contradiction between its affection for Factory’s oppositional ingenuity, and its own contribution to the on-going culture-led regeneration of Manchester which ultimately acquiesces to the neo-liberal forces that Wilson originally attempted to resist. 24 Hour Party People’s depiction of drug-related violence in what is implicitly understood to be the Moss Side district of the city perhaps captures this tension most saliently. As Haslam has noted, Moss Side and areas like it are conspicuously absent from accounts of Manchester’s regeneration; when they do receive media attention, it is invariably in the form sensationalist and reductive accounts of gang violence.[42]

Indeed, when 24 Hour Party People engages with these issues, they remain marginal: drug gangs as comic irritant for Wilson and the Haҫienda, and as such, South Manchester council estates and their residents are only gleaned as part of a brief montage of drive-by shootings and late night drug buys, before the film’s gaze returns to Wilson’s ramshackle regeneration. The blurred, obscured cinematography of these fleeting shots proves unintentionally symbolic, capturing the sense in which 24 Hour Party People ultimately shies away from a truly critical representation of Manchester’s culture-led regeneration. Whether it follows that the film is a hagiography is debatable. However, what is certain is that, while the film’s ironic distance from Mancunian myth-making goes some way to distinguish it as an artefact set apart from neo-liberalism’s crassest eviscerations of local heritage, this same aloofness ultimately finds 24 Hour Party People silent on exactly the subject matter that Wilson and his contemporaries would no doubt be very loud.

Bibliography:

Anon. “Peter Hook’s Guided Tour of Manchester”, Manchester Evening News.co.uk  28 January 2011, accessed 20 August 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPXABHKA8es&feature=related

Anon. “Box Office/Business for 24 Hour Party People”, accessed 13 August 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/business.

Brooks, Xan. “24 Hour Party People” Sight and Sound, May 2002, 55-56.

 Byers, Thomas B.. “History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture”, Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996): 419-444.

Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilisation: Culture, Information and Urban Order. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998.

Haslam, Dave. Manchester, England. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.

Hatherley, Owen. “From Rock to Rubble: How Manchester Lost its Music”, The Guardian Online, 9 August 2010, accessed 12 August 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc3-1U1ZxHA

Jones, Martin. and Gordon Macleod, “Regional Tensions: Constructing Institutional Cohesion?, City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, ed. Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, 276-189. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, London: Continuum, 2009.

Leggott, James. Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror. London: Wallflower, 2008.

Luckett, Moya. “Image and Nation in 1990s British Cinema”, British Cinema of the 90s, ed. Robert Murphy, 88-99. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

Miller, Toby. “The Film Industry and the Government: ‘Endless Mr Beans and Mr Bonds’?”, British Cinema of the 90s, ed. Robert Murphy, 37-47. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

Monk, Claire. “The Heritage Film Debate Revisited”, British Historical Cinema, ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant, 176-198. London: Routledge, 2002.

Peck, Jamie. and Kevin Ward, “Placing Manchester,”, City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, ed. Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, 1-8. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Quilley, Steve. “Entrepreneurial Turns: Municipal Socialism and After”, City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, ed. Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, 76-94. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Robson, Brian. “Mancunian Ways: the Politics of Regeneration,”, City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, ed. Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, 34-49. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Tiso, Giovanni. “How to be a Retronaut”, Bat, Beam, Bean, 7 November 2011, accessed 13 August 2012, http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/how-to-be-retronaut.html.

Trilling, Daniel. “The Film Interview: Michael Winterbottom”, New Statesman, 18 June 2010, accessed 13 August 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/06/michael-winterbottom-killer-violenc.

Wilson, Matthew. Pills, Thrills, and Property Development: the Role of Pop-Cultural Entrepreneurs in the Regeneration of Manchester City Centre (Slide Rule Press, 2012) Kindle DX version.

Filmography:

24 Hour Party People DVD. Directed by Michael Winterbottom (2002; London: Pathé, 2003)

Joy Division: a Film by Malcolm Whitehead. Footage reproduced in Joy Division: Their Own Story in Their Own Words DVD. Directed by Malcolm Whitehead (1979; Universal City, California: Universal, 2007)

Joy Division: Their Own Story in Their Own Words DVD. Directed by Grant Gee (2007; Universal City, California: Universal, 2007).