- 1 Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), 6.
- 2 Anger’s introduction thus takes his place amongst numerous texts by historians and critiques who di (...)
- 3 In view of its budget and the length and difficulty of its production, the film was a relative comm (...)
1“The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood, a serpent spell in code cuneiform”.1 Kenneth Anger’s history of the rise and fall of Hollywood starts with a description of the colossal sets built for the scenes of Belshazzar's feast in David W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).2 Located at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, the massive structures, including towering gates and colossal elephant statues, were left to decay for years, a spectacular reminder of the extravagant scale of the project.3 Whereas Griffith’s ambition with this film had been to offer a broad historical panorama of the evils brought about by bigotry and biased socio-political systems, in Anger’s belated account, its decomposing set stood at the heart of Hollywood-land like the very allegory of decadence and corruption.
- 4 Not forgetting that Hollywood was also a key inspiration to Anger’s radical and prolific filmmaking
- 5 Inspired by Anger’s account, Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon (2022) was, somewhat expectedly, noted (...)
2A classic amongst the 1970s underground literature, Anger’s Hollywood Babylon offers itself as a gleeful immersion in the murky side of the dream factory.4 In a savvy fusion of form and content, it both plunders and imitates the style of tabloid reports, recounting scandal-filled trials and sensationalist gossip with a plethora of exclamation points, bold headlines, capitalized words, and sardonic asides.5 Abundantly illustrated with a mix of studio portraits and press snapshots, Anger’s text describes a milieu corrupt through and through, ruled by ambition, greed and lust. Like particles trapped in an aggressive chemical solution, those who dwelt in it became irremediably tainted, in the image of those hopeful wannabes and ageing stars whose decline he recounts with sarcastic delight.
3A first inkling of the more intricate meanings of corruption, however, the reference to code, in Anger’s citation, wittingly or unwittingly points to the social, cultural and technological dimensions of the term. On the one hand, in his depictions of the excess and depravity of Hollywood’s early years, Anger mocks the then prevailing, formulaic tropes of exoticism, evoked here in abbreviated fashion as “code cuneiform.” In a similar vein, mention of the code cannot fail to bring to mind the regime of biased moral conventions and censorship that first applied to Hollywood in the 1930s. At the same time, an anachronistic twenty-first century reading would associate the term code with the advent of the digital—a development that Anger could not anticipate, but which carries a wealth of implications and metaphors in relation to the material corruption of film.
4Hence, although at first glance Anger’s book seems to rely on a narrow definition of corruption (focusing on Hollywood’s ecosystem and the lure of stardom rather than on their raison d’être: the films, and more broadly, the medium of the cinema), Hollywood Babylon implicitly refers to a more extensive and intricate understanding of the term. While mention of the decaying set of Griffith’s film gestures towards the physical basis of the practice of filmmaking, it is well known that some of the scandals Anger evokes contributed to strengthen the demand for regulation. The lobbying resulted in the Don’ts and Be Carefuls and ultimately the infamous Hays Code, and the spelling out of strict moral guidelines regarding the content and form of the films themselves.
- 6 “The Motion Production Code of 1930”, in Thomas Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood (New York: Columbia Uni (...)
- 7 As is well known, the code Hays rehashes concerns that had been those of the powers-that-be from th (...)
5Though he points repeatedly to the public’s hunger for the dross circulated by tabloids, it is evident that, for Anger, the exposure of Hollywood’s scandals simply fed into a natural human inclination and fascination for the corrupt. In Hays’s code on the other hand, corruption was explicitly associated with contagion and the threat to what was seen as the foundation of the nation’s identity as a unified entity: the ideal of US-American wholesomeness and moral uprightness.6 Not only was the unhealthy state of the filmmaking community viewed as a model that risked contaminating the ordinary citizen, but crucially, as expounded in the text, it could not be dissociated from the content, form and circulation of the films themselves—for the advocates of censorship, thanks to cinema’s mass distribution and exhibition, corruption could spread to the public with fearsome efficacy.7 Though rooted in specific historical contexts, both the wording of Hays’ code, and Anger’s belated, satirical account of a corrupt milieu, thus point to a conception of corruption that extends beyond its representation in diegetic film worlds or as part of cinema’s ecosystem.
- 8 Régis Debray and Louise Merzeau, “Mediasphere”, Médium 4, no. 3 (2005): 162-169.
- 9 Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Manifestes médiologiques; Medi (...)
- 10 Mediology has been criticized for being a mere reprisal of existing approaches, in particular of Ma (...)
- 11 Régis Debray, Critique de la raison politique ou l’inconscient religieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
6To a certain extent, therefore, the diagnosis proposed by the advocates of the Motion Production Code was already founded on a view of Hollywood, and more generally the cinema, as a kind of “mediasphere.”8 Indeed, the emphasis on contamination through exposure and circulation suggests a form of “mediology”-inflected understanding of the cinema. Although these terms were coined at the end of the twentieth century, in retrospect, Régis Debray’s attempt to designate specific milieux comprising of a set of co-determining attitudes, techniques and forms of transmissions, aptly describes the process feared by cinema’s censors, and couched, in their case, in terms of “contamination.” In Debray’s definition of mediology, technique and culture are co-constituted and entertain a complex relationship, based on technical modes of memorizing, producing and circulating cultural knowledge with predictable (the dominance of certain forms and ideologies) and unpredictable results (as when backwash or reactionary ideas are brought about by, or in response to, technical changes or “advances” for instance).9 As such, mediology’s consideration of the technical conditioning of the symbolic, as forms of belief, worldviews or modes of political organization, foregrounds the role of the material form or support in the process of transmission. It also stresses the need to incorporate communication (of already symbolically coded and normative messages) in the broader field of transmission (where the combination of technique and content is determined by practice both at the level of production and reception).10 In this view, therefore, the capacity of an idea to “modify the balance of a field of power or to induce this or that behavior is not dependent on its truth-value. It is rather a function of the (historically and socially determined) mode of transmission on the one hand and the type of investment or adhesion to it on the other hand.”11
7From a retrospective viewpoint however, the intervention of Hollywood’s censors can itself be seen as the result of a broader system of ideas: when it relates to corruption, the logic of cultural and technical co-constitution encompasses meanings and tropes inherited from long-lasting traditions of thought that combine the material and the metaphysical. A mediology-inflected account of the polysemic manifestations of corruption in cinema thus needs to consider the notion in its expansive sense, not merely in terms of its anthropological dimensions, as a socio-political phenomenon that supplies directors with storylines and diegetic contexts, but as a simultaneously destructive and productive process that affects the physics, the semiotics as well as the cultural status of the medium.
8In linguistic terms, corruption can be described as a “dynamic” substantive, one that involves not merely a state of impurity or decay, but a process and a becoming. The implications are obvious in relation to a mass medium like cinema, susceptible to reinforce or, on the contrary, question notions of unified, national identities. But equally, thanks to its temporal and material basis, the unfolding in time of the films we watch on the one hand, and the exposure of film stock to the effects of time on the other, the cinema proves a particularly suitable vehicle to set in motion, express, and represent, processes of physical alteration or corruption.
- 12 Bruce Buchan, “Changing Contours of Corruption in Western Political Thought, c. 1200–1700,” in Corr (...)
9Such plural apprehension of corruption as a corporeal and moral process is rooted in early theorizations of the notion that considered physics and politics jointly. Aristotelian philosophy in particular has remained a key reference: of particular relevance to the present discussion, is the dual approach adopted by Aristotle, as the philosopher who addressed the question of corruption in both his writing on physics and on ethics.12
- 13 Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione, in The Works of Aristotle, Book 1: 10, , Vol II, ed. Davi (...)
- 14 Aristotle, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. James Alexander Kerr Thomson (Lo (...)
10In the treatise On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle focuses on corruption as a process of material change. Though associated with decay and degrowth, corruption is also understood as that which allows for the “coming into being” of other forms (as when one sculpts a piece of stone or molds a piece of wax, altering or corrupting the material’s original form).13 In the Ethics, corruption acquires a moral dimension, without losing, however, its material basis; Aristotle likens moral decay to physical decay, and while corruption is addressed in its common association with vices such as greed and sloth, the philosopher remains similarly concerned with corruption as a process of alteration—one that is likely to spread from the individual to the society as a whole.14
- 15 Buchan, “Changing Contours of Corruption,” 75.
- 16 Marivonne Génaux, “Early Modern Corruption in English and French Fields of Vision,” in Political Co (...)
- 17 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 13 (...)
- 18 Although they do not focus on corruption per se, George Bataille and Julia Kristeva’s conceptualiza (...)
11But corruption was never as prominent a topic in Western culture as when Aristotelian thought fused with Christian theology.15 In Medieval thinking, the structured community of men was seen as an organic unit, where, as with gangrene, a corrupt member would eventually lead to the disintegration of the whole body.16 At the same time, the decomposition of the human corpse and the eventual disappearance of the putrefied flesh were necessary stages towards resurrection. Conversely, the lack of physical alteration seen in the remains of the bodies of saints was interpreted as a sign of their holiness, their victory over death and corruption.17 A sign of the durability of such allegories in early Christian theology as in critiques of today’s consumer society, one finds echoes of two of the cinema’s enduring figures: the cinematic zombie on the one hand—its shuffling, decomposing body a literal illustration of the corruption of the flesh—and its opposite—the ageless, otherworldly star on the other hand, whose status demands that their appearance remain impervious to the effects of time. Hence, notions and metaphors of corruption prove persistent, even as they are being reconsidered in the context of a secular, technologized and capitalist Western world dominated by a logic of productivity, consumption, and the denial of finitude.18
12In what follows, I wish to evoke the process whereby corruption in film manifests itself, at one and the same time, through the material and the symbolic, the micro and macro levels. To this end, my mediology-inspired study takes the form of a progressive or scalar development: starting from the corruption of micro constituents (cellulose and pixels) to that of the human figure (the filmed body or macro level of representation), and concluding with the meta-level and the aesthetic impurity of the medium of film itself. Corruption thus emerges unexpectedly as a connecting principle that runs through the entire spectrum of film production, from the most experimental to commercial and genre cinema. What transpires, in such an outlook, is the extent of the transgressive and productive power unleashed by forms of corruption that affect film at all levels of its existence and appearance.
- 19 As theorized in particular by Laura Mulvey in Death 24x a second: stillness and the moving image. ( (...)
- 20 Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Durham and London: Du (...)
13For a brief moment, as digitization promised to protect the film archive from all threats of corruption, it seemed analog film, as a material base, would be definitely consigned to obsolescence. Yet, as film scholars observed, not only did its proclaimed death grant the medium in its analog form a new lease of life,19 but it also fueled a novel interest in early cinema in all its states. A vibrant trend of found-footage film came into being, based on the exploitation of the often-spectacular visual effects created by the corruption of film reels stored in humid spaces or in insufficient darkness. From Catherine Russell’s Benjamin-inflected “archiveology” to André Habib’s “esthetic of the ruin” and Kim Knowles theorization of film’s “materialist agency”20 the appeal exercised by the disintegrating nitrate or celluloid film has been theorized at length, along with the metaphors for the destructive power of time that such film practices evoke. Where digital filmmaking arguably ushered in an era of precision aided by postproduction’s increased correcting capacity, the chance effects of chemical decay offered themselves as an alternative, yielding incomparable affective power: there is no denying the poignancy of compilation films based on salvaged footage, a subgenre of found-footage film of which Bill Morrison is one the foremost practitioners. Inspired by Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son (1969) and Peter Delpeuts’s 1992 feature Lyrical Nitrate among others, for Decasia (2002), Morrison mined the collections of various film archives, including the University of South Carolina Newsfilm Library’s and the Library of Congress’ archives, looking for film stock corroded as a result of inadequate storage conditions. Favoring images shot in the early years of the cinema on nitrate-based stock, but completing his final selection with footage dating up to 1954, he chose his material based on the quality of the emulsion’s deterioration. Set to an industrial music score by Michael Gordon, the result offers itself as a veritable typology of the effects of decay on film.
14Endlessly variable forms of corruption affect the images that compose Decasia, from swarms of black specks to distorted lines and contours to organic-looking blotches taking over the frame, obscuring the content to the point where the image evokes live cell cultures caught on a microscope. Buried under layers of chemical alterations, the photographic imprint of their outlines eaten up by mold, the silhouettes of people long dead appear and disappear like memories fading through time. For filmmakers and spectators alike, nostalgia and sentimentality are unavoidable temptations in such trend of found-footage: like ghosts trying to connect from the realm of the dead, figures salute us and look back at the camera, their gaze seemingly connecting with ours from behind strata of dissolved silver salts.
- 21 Allan Cameron, “Facing the glitch: Abstraction, abjection and the digital image,” in Indefinite Vis (...)
15Decasia evinces a conception of corruption where, in Aristotelian terms, material alteration creates the conditions for the “coming into being” of a new form. Indeed, as Allan Cameron has suggested in relation to such experimental practices, the effects of corruption become full-fledged film artefacts, as much elements of the image’s appearance as the original profilmic content.21 In the tradition of materialist cinema (where artists intervene directly onto the images’ material basis), certain filmmakers are exploring this vein, deliberately creating the conditions of corruption that will produce new images through partly controlled or chance audiovisual effects.
16Much has been made of the practice of burying films, for instance, which emerged at the beginning of the 21st century, when analog technologies were becoming a thing of the past, and discourses on the “death of the cinema” were rife.22 In Jennifer Reeves’ work, rather than a merely allegorical dimension (the body of analog film being symbolically laid to rest and left to rot away), such technique takes on an ecocritical facet. For Landfill 16, for instance, she recuperated and buried spools of 16 mm film that remained as out-takes after the completion of another work. This surplus stayed in the ground long enough for “the enzymes in the soil (to) begin to decompose the image.”23 Reeves hand-painted the unearthed reels to enhance the effects of chemical decomposition. The result presents a somewhat ambiguous commentary on the environmental disaster: though the violently pulsating images are intended as a warning against nature’s growing incapacity to absorb contemporary man-made waste, they also offer themselves as an esthetically striking form of abstract painting in movement.
- 24 In La dépense and La part maudite, George Bataille first describes the role and functions of non-pr (...)
- 25 Such practices are much in evidence today, where big budget super-hero productions generating massi (...)
- 26 Anger, Hollywood Babylon, 6.
17Compared with the spectacular feature film with which we started, Griffith’s extravagantly costly Intolerance, Jennifer Reeves’ low-cost experimental Landfill 16 belongs to the other end of the cinema spectrum. Hence, both projects speak to concepts of expenditure and waste in very different ways.24 Reeves engages with a form of recycling that, in spite of her environmentally conscious critical stance, revels in the beauty of waste and decomposition. The set of Griffith’s film, however, stood as a perfect expression of the “accursed share”: on the one hand, it testified to the failure of the system to fully capitalize on its outflow; on the other, in its decaying grandeur, the set’s monumental presence bore witness to the system’s power, both an indictment and a celebration of the excesses of the socio-economic milieu that gave rise to Hollywood.25 And yet, as with Landfill 16, the remains of Griffith’s structures were partly reclaimed by nature: Anger describes the set as “sprouting weeds” while its walls, he says, “had started to peel and warp.”26 Hence, even in this case, productive decomposition is at work, that may be seen as a portent of the film’s later resurrection and rehabilitation as one the master pieces of silent cinema.
- 27 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” E-Flux Journal, no. 10 (2009),
- 28 Jacobs Bidham, Esthétique du signal : Hacking filmique et invention formelle radicale, (Paris : Mim (...)
18The advent of the digital was initially heralded as an advance towards an era of no-waste in the production and circulation of moving images: green screens and CGI would replace expensive sets; repeated takes were no longer a problem; and images could be stored and copied at will. However, the costly technology, energetic expenditure, and the limits of the new imaging regime in avoiding surplus as well as protecting images from the corruption of time and technical obsolescence, were soon in evidence. While the progressive alteration of the circulated image through recurrent compression was celebrated by some as part of a new esthetic of the “poor image,”27 video artists were quick to seize the formal potential of corrupt software.28 The technique of data moshing in particular, systematizes what was initially a random dysfunction: the loss of “key frames” in a compressed video file, that is, of frames that contain the complete set of image data, and serve as a reference for specific sequences. Their removal, accidental or deliberate, renders the image susceptible to glitches that may be enhanced by tampering further with the encoding of the files. The result is an image affected by pixelization as well as remanence effects, where fragments of different compositions surface and fuse, where color bleeds in painterly streaks, contours disintegrate and figure and ground merge, where sound becomes distorted and muddled. More than any other type of visuals, the glitched image is an image of impurity.
- 29 Cameron, “Facing the Glitch,” 338. Mark Nunes, “Introduction: Error, Noise and Glitch: the Outside (...)
19For Mark Nunes and Allan Cameron, the art of data moshing plays on a double effect of abjection: that of technical failure, inadmissible in a context dominated by an ideology of immediate and lossless communication, and that of a graphic form born of the inability to evacuate the non-meaningful debris that corrupt its appearance.29 Nicolas Provost’s Long Live the New Flesh (2009) has become something of a classic in data moshing video thanks to the arresting, grotesque quality of its images, and the reflexive nature of the process applied to North American horror films. Provost’s remix borrows its name as well as some of its material from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Hence the corruption already at work in the original feature by Cronenberg—that is, the corruption of the spectator’s mind and body by predatory powers that operate through television—is reworked through the corruption of the digitized footage’s encoding. Formlessness lurks as the process of dis-figuration radically alters the images’ content. While the photographic subject matter seemingly struggles against the pull of the un-formed, the soundtrack becomes increasingly colonized by parasitic noises, thus foregrounding through the audio as well as visual track the images’ technological underpinning.
- 30 Cameron, “Facing the Glitch,” 338.
20Although the glitched image is often brought to the brink of abstraction, there is nothing that invokes a purity of form in that particular pull of the abstract: the compressed film image, already an impure derivative of the original, presents itself as a garish fusion of exogenic elements transformed into what amounts to—in Cameron’ words—a “faecal aesthetic.”30 As the corrupting effect of the glitch spreads to the representational content as well as the surface appearance of the image, the filmed human body turns into a macabre vision, at the cross between the écorché and the zombie.
- 31 Knowles, “(Re)visioning Celluloid,” 258.
- 32 Peter Gidal, “Theory and definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” in Structural Film Anthology, (...)
21In film and video art’s materialist experimentations, two modes of corruption are thus amalgamated or set against each other: deliberately or unwittingly, artistic practices that rely on material corruption result in the exposure of hidden forms of ideological corruption. Simply summed, for the exponents of experimental film’s critical value, to destroy the unity of the image’s appearance, and confront the spectator with the physical basis of the medium, is to undermine the impact of the corrupt ideology that infuses most of mainstream narrative cinema (corrupt in that it lures the spectator into the superficial logic of the story-telling, hiding behind realist aesthetics to naturalize, promote, and glamourize a system of systemic inequalities and discrimination).31 Although the key theorist of materialist filmmaking, Peter Gidal, might take issue with Bill Morrison’s exploitation of spectatorial identification, all in all, the privileging of decay and the glitch in evidence in the works discussed so far continues the long tradition of anti-illusionistic aesthetics that Gidal and others contributed to theorize.32 At the same time, because materialist filmmaking practices do not merely engage in narrative deconstruction but in formal experimentation, the definition of corruption, in this context, is essentially a productive one: monstruous, formless or semi-abstract, its productions do not simply deconstruct mainstream aesthetics, but foster the emergence or “coming into being” of alternative forms.
22As Provost’s choice of film material reminds us, however, within the narrative format, commercial cinema itself has proved capable of harnessing the effects of corruption to generate counter-discourses. The figure of the zombie, so naturally conjured up in Provost’s data moshing video, is both an emanation of horror cinema and one of US-American cinema’s most accomplished allegories of the ingrained corruption that affects our late capitalist society. A rotting, walking corpse, the zombie thus materializes as the diegetic counterpart to experimental cinema’s intentionally corrupted film image, which includes the results of burying and unearthing spools of films.
- 33 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 93.
- 34 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13.
- 35 Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 94.
23The depictions of George Romero’s hordes of living dead, wandering the corridors of shopping malls as indictment of the twin principle of consumerist frenzy and the denial of human finitude, has become something of a truism. Zombies are not, Steven Shaviro reminds us, “an exception to, but a positive expression of, consumerist desire.” The difference is that the desire that moves them is for fresh flesh to feed their own, decomposing bodies, rather than the commodities advertised in the media.33 Furthermore, as part of the “genres of excess,”34 horror cinema’s visceral esthetics appears particularly apposite to metaphors of contamination. This was one dimension of the cinema that the Hays Code specifically sought to counter: cinema’s direct appeal to the sensory rather than to the intellect, combined with its unmatched realism as a photographic medium, was seen as a threat to viewers’ discernment, and therefore the basis for the medium’s potentially corrupting powers. Such beliefs are acknowledged ironically as part of the diegesis of Romero’s and other zombie films, where the spectatorial fascination for the putrefying effects of bodily corruption finds its match in the compulsive watching of the slowly advancing horde of walking corpses, by characters in a state of rapt fascination, who seem to be “waiting” to be devoured and turned into zombies.35
- 36 More recent cinematic and serial fiction however, have made space for the individuation of the zomb (...)
- 37 Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 94.
24Yet not only do Romero’s lurid aesthetics and tongue-in-cheek dramatization encourage critical distance and reflexive—as well as gleefully disgusted—spectatorial pleasures, but the typical treatment of the zombies as a pack of stumbling shapes leaves little room for identification with the corrupt figure.36 As Shaviro sums it, “The zombie’s lack of charisma seems to drain all the surrounding circumstances of their nobility.”37 As such, as cinematic figures go, zombies stand as the star’s—or, more precisely, the star of the so-called Hollywood Golden era—natural opposite.
- 38 An observation reprised in the expansive star-studies literature. Amongst others: Edgar Morin, Les (...)
- 39 On the topic of Hollywood, stars and found footage, see Marie-Pierre Burquier’s analytical survey, (...)
- 40 Gordon covers the portrait with a mix of sugar and egg white before subjecting them to the flame. F (...)
25Caught on film, the seemingly incorruptible, ageless body of the star of the classic Hollywood period supposedly works to harness the enduring faith of film viewers as well as affirm the timeless relevance of the films’ message.38 However, as the cinema and its particular historicity became increasingly challenged by other media (television and its live time, video with its replay and pause interfaces), the unique qualities associated with the stars of the 1940s and 50s in particular, turned them into a prime target as well as an object of fascination for artists. They held a specific sway on the generation born in the 60s. Artists like Douglas Gordon grew up watching Hollywood films at a time when television’s ascendency peaked, and they were trained in the context of the anti-illusionistic, deconstructive discourses carried out by film and media theorists in the 1970s and 80s.39 Against this backdrop, Gordon’s iconoclastic project Self Portraits of You + Me (2006-) represents a characteristic mix of captivation and destruction, a compulsive attempt at exposing the corruption at work behind the pristine appearance of the star’s image. Gordon’s prime material is the iconic studio portrait, whose reproductions he brutally defaces.40 Although the vandalizing of the impeccably lit and composed photographs recalls the fate of those advertising film posters pasted on street walls and tampered with by facetious passers-by, there is little room for lightheartedness in Gordon’s intervention. In Self Portraits of You + Me, the idealized picture of glamour is wrecked: eyes, mouths, and sometimes the whole of the features are burnt, leaving only the contours of grotesquely mutilated faces. In some cases, the gaping holes are sealed with mirrors, the gaze of the viewer thus matched with the marks of destruction, in a violent gesture of artistic and spectatorial appropriation.
- 41 Jacques, Aumont, Du visage au cinéma (Paris : Cahiers du cinéma, 1992), 62, and “The Face in Close-(...)
- 42 In place of the socio-cultural process of “faciality”, Deleuze and Guattari advocate a “dismantling (...)
26There is always something specifically shocking about the attack on the pictured face. Not merely because the face stands as the locus of identification, but because, as observed by theorists, from Bela Balázs to Jacques Aumont, the face is perceived as an entity, a signifying whole whose unity is here shattered by defacement.41 Gordon’s gesture of disfiguration thus undoes the process of the social construction of the face (the “faciality” critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari),42 instead reconnecting the image with the easily corrupted material basis of the photographic medium.
27Although Gordon’s series includes pictures of male as well as female stars, the latter largely dominate the series, thus reflecting the more general sense that, where the representation of corruption in cinema is concerned, traditional gender divides apply. In classical narrative cinema, male actors typically perform characters who hold social positions of power (politicians, entrepreneurs, gangsters, policemen, etc.). Given women have long been excluded and are still marginalized from such functions, it should come as no surprise that corruption emanating from or exercising its hold on the female figure has not been expressed primarily through social signifiers but in naturalized, corporeal or iconic form. The fallen woman, the femme fatale, the ageing woman, all stand first and foremost as incarnations of corruption that often is implicitly pathologized.
- 43 Vanessa Schwartz, “Film and History,” Histoire et Politique 19, no. 1 (2013): 176-198, 191.
- 44 Schwartz, “Film and History,”192.
- 45 Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen. Old Age and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toron (...)
- 46 Starting with Molly Haskell’s classic study, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the (...)
28As the embodiment of the combination of invisible, internal change and visible, corporeal decay, the figure of the ageing star is typically cast so as to produce a particular mix of fascination and repulsion. Analyzing how the unsustainable function of the female star testifies to “Hollywood’s bizarre and delusional resistance to the passage of time,” Vanessa Schwartz points to Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) reflexive treatment of cinema’s relation to the destructive power of historical time.43 In denial of the effect of the years on her looks and career (newspapers describe her as the “forgotten star of yesterday,” an “aging actress,” “yesterday’s glamour queen”), Norma Desmond clings to a logic of unchanging present (as she reminds her lover, “The stars are ageless”).44 In her study of ageing stars, Sally Chivers observes that, while film narratives rely on the audience making connections between external “defects” and character motivation, physical and mental signs of ageing, read as the abbreviation of decline and death, feed into broader social anxieties about identity and mortality.45 Given the transgressive, symbolic weight of the topic, Hollywood initially dealt with the corrupting power of time and its effect on stars through troubled, often convoluted narratives, where backstage dramas held prime of place. In turn, together with Sunset Boulevard, films like All about Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962) have been deconstructed by film scholars, using feminist, psychoanalytical as well as socio-analytical frameworks.46 More recently, they have also been revisited by contemporary video artists in the form of critical remixes.
29For instance, as part of a project entitled Séance Fictions (2008-), the artist duo Soda Jerk created a series of video and installation works that stage encounters between the past and future selves of stars of the classic Hollywood period. Completed in 2012, The Time that Remains is a split-screen remix that gives form to a gothic melodrama, where famous actresses become haunted by apparitions of their younger selves. In one particularly striking sequence, Bette Davis is seen asleep in one half of the frame, while in the other half, the artists use inpainting to bring an old and a younger incarnation of the actress face to face. At the end of the remix, the anxious dream turns into a nightmare, and a glitch fleetingly defaces Davies, turning her into a zombie-like version of herself. In After the Rainbow (2009), Soda Jerk use similar inpainting techniques to stage an encounter between a youthful Judy Garland and her older, dejected self. After the Rainbow (2009) combines film clips from The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) with extracts from a 1962 television special where Garland sings The Man that Got Away (Harold Arlen, and Ira Gershwin, 1954). In this version, the Wizard of Oz’s famous flying-house sequence is set to the sound of Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and against a backdrop of decomposing film stock. While the teenage Garland still lands in front of a mysterious a door, instead of stepping into a bright Technicolor world, she ends up watching an adult incarnation of herself, singing on a dimly lit stage, lyrics that evoke the end of love and growing old in loneliness. The remix thus stands as a melancholy response to Anger’s awful description of Judy Garland’s downfall and death (which Hollywood Babylon illustrates with a particularly cruel press photo).
- 47 From exotic seductress to contemporary ‘vamp’, the versatility of the screen personas of early star (...)
- 48 Doane, Femme Fatales, 132.
30But as Anger reminds us, cinema’s gendered allegories of corruption were not limited to ageing and corporeal decay: they also struck at the very heart of the fantasied ideal of all-American wholesomeness assumed to be a defining feature of national identity. In the first chapter of Hollywood Babylon, he thus draws a comparison between Theda Bara and Olive Thomas, two actresses whom the studios promoted in strikingly diverse fashion. Marketed as an exotic “French-Arab” and a “demon of depravity,” Theda Bara was known for her roles in historical dramas (amongst others, The Galley Slave (1915) and Cleopatra (1917), for which she was made to wear extravagant, revealing costumes), and as the first actress to be called a “vamp” for her parts as a femme fatale.47 Drawing on Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of writings the relation between the female figure and the cinema, in Bara’s case, the association appears to be one of “analogy”: “The woman does not have to be corrupted by the cinema because in her essence – in the abstract – she is the corruption of the image, her hypnotic effect on the male comparable to that of the cinema.”48 Yet, Anger argues, Theodosia Burr Goodman, aka Bara, was a “little Goodie-two-shoes,” the daughter of a Jewish tailor from small-town Ohio. Her contemporary, actress Olive Thomas, came from a poor family and first established her performing career at the Ziegfeld Folies. As a Hollywood star, however, her screen persona was manufactured as the incarnation of the innocent all-American girl, and she was cast as the main role for Everybody’s Sweetheart in 1920. Anger hastens to recount the drug-scandal that involved Thomas and her husband, “the ideal American boy” Jack Pickford, shortly after the film was completed—a tragedy which cost the actress her life at the age of twenty. Theda Bara, on the other hand, died of illness in her seventieth year, a respectable spouse and mother.
- 49 Elizabeth L. Krause, “‘The Bead of Raw Sweat in a Field of Dainty Perspirers’: Nationalism, Whitene (...)
- 50 Doane, Femme Fatales, 212.
- 51 Krause, “The Bead of Raw Sweat,” 33.
31As anthropologist Elizabeth L. Krause points out, the kind of stereotypical and xenophobic categorizations that feed into the manufacture of stardom are characteristic of “the ongoing ideological struggles over moral regulation and reproduction of the nation and its subjects.”49 In line with Doane’s psychoanalytical study of racial and sexual difference in the cinema, Krause’s argument involves the racialization of “whiteness.” Both Doane and Krause take to task the ideology that defines whiteness in relation to principles of purity. Strongly associated with gender and knowledge, such notions foster anxieties that crystalize around issues of visibility and detection.50 Whiteness, Krause points out, “becomes a problematic category when a particular marked type of whiteness […] threatens to make the category heterogeneous and hence contaminate its imagined purity.”51 She additionally stresses the double standards that apply to men and women, with a much stricter set of qualifications defining to the latter’s capacity to embody the ideal US-American (white) subject.
32Based on Doane and Krause, the notion of corruption thus speaks to the threat to (a constructed and naturalized state of) “purity.” Emerging not only as a key dimension of plot and characterization, but also in relation to film genre and medium specificity, corruption as (creative) ‘impurity’, however, eventually brings us back full circle to the question of the image’s material basis. While Janet Staiger’s critique of the notion of “pure classical cinema” proves particularly useful in this context, within mediology’s loose, transdisciplinary framework, Krause’s interest in the articulation of the social, the symbolic, and media, remains an equally, if differently, pertinent viewpoint. Although her choice of case study is particularly apt, and her argument applies to performers and stars, her field is not film studies, but anthropology applied to sports.
- 52 Krause, “The Bead of Raw Sweat,” 41.
33Krause’s focus is the 1994 figure-skating scandal which involved an attack on national champion Nancy Kerrigan, and led to the indictment and public shaming of her competitor Tonya Harding (though Harding’s involvement was never proved, her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly was embroiled in the assault on Kerrigan where the latter sustained serious injuries). Writing two years after the events, Krause offers a scrupulous study of the affair’s media coverage, showing how, prior to the event already, Harding was cast as “white trash,” a threat to the spirit of fair-play and clean sportsmanship, and an unbecoming presence in the midst of the “ladies” of the respectable skating milieu. Krause points to the telling use of pronouns, as well as the particular vocabulary associated with Harding: “Tonya wasn’t one of “us,” where the “us” was the corpus of mostly white, and mostly male, sports reporters. Characteristics attached to Tonya Harding made her expendable, like so much unrecyclable household trash.”52 Krause’s sources are journalistic: she refers to the written press as well as television broadcasts. In addition, however, a number of documentaries were shot about the Kerrigan/Harding case, and in 2017, Craig Gillepsie completed I, Tonya, the first feature film dedicated to the event that shook the world of sport competition.
- 53 Such a strategy resonates with what Doane describes as the entrapping power of visualization and th (...)
34Heralded by the film’s title, with its shifting signifiers of identity,53 the introductory sequence is a typical exercise of mockumentary filmmaking. It begins with a reframed image, evoking the screen of a computer or a television. Each of the characters in turn, starting with Harding (played by Maggie Robbie), is designated by a caption. Except for Shawn Eckard (Gillooly’s accomplice), who appears on the screen of an old-fashioned video K7 player, in footage recorded while giving evidence as a suspect in Kerrigan’s attack, the protagonists are being interviewed in domestic settings and they address the camera directly. While Harding’s coach, who features amongst the interviewees, insists on the fact that Tonya was “totally American,” Harding herself defiantly reminds us how, in an ice-skating world where the ideal is the “tiny virgin,” she, the first woman to turn a triple axel, “never apologized for growing up poor and being a red neck.”
- 54 “The Motion Production Code”, 350.
- 55 “The Motion Production Code”, 348. The text of the code draws a parallel with sports, hailing the b (...)
35Watching I, Tonya’s introduction in fake documentary style, we are reminded of the insistence, in the Hays Code, on the need to monitor cinema’s mimetic power. To the advocates of the Code, it was of utmost import to keep in check the medium’s capacity to emulate the appearance of reality: cinema’s “emotional appeal” and “vividness” may induce an audience particularly receptive to the “ideals portrayed and presented by their favorite stars” to “confuse actor and character.”54 According to the Code’s recommendations, therefore, there should be no confusion between facts and fiction, no adaptation or alteration, no corruption of reality by the fictional, except in the service of unambivalent, morally uplifting stories and narratives promoting an ideal of unadulterated, wholesome, US-American genus: “correct entertainment raises the whole standards of a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideals of a race.”55
- 56 And yet, even the comedy aspect and its attendant viewer connivance proves slippery: the film inclu (...)
36Hence the socio-cultural prejudices that Krause analyzes, and that I, Tonya satirizes and critiques in the diegetic context of the 1990s, are the very same that were upheld by the writers of the Code in the 1930s. However, in the kind of twenty-first century mockumentary composed by Gillepsie, both the staging and the visual treatment of the content involve a proliferation of interpretations and a deliberate, tongue in cheek, blurring of the frontiers of truth and fabrication, good and evil, reality and fiction. The confusion is relative, of course; starting with the pseudo-interviews and direct address, the comedic format overtly seeks to co-opt the complicity of a knowing audience.56
37A bit like figure skating (a mix of ice-skating, dance, and gymnastic with a musical sound-track), narrative cinema always was a combinative form, torn between mass appeal and artistic ambitions. The comparison is evidently limited, in particular since, in contrast with other competitive sports such as boxing that have featured prominently on the big screen, ice-skating is a televisual rather than a cinematic phenomenon. In addition, its practice is set by strict, set rules. In contrast, although cinematic genres follow established conventions, these evolve in accordance with technological as well as cultural developments. At the intersection between the pastiche and the satire, the mockumentary occupies a particular function however, marked by the pursuit of equivocality and the hybridization of genres and formats. Accordingly, Gillepsie blatantly exploits a whole gamut of media cross breeding, using diegetic and extra diegetic reframing devices to combine the cinematographic and the televisual. Reminiscences about Harding’s childhood, a supplement to her mother’s introductory cameo appearance, perfectly illustrates such stylistic hybridizing. The image shifts from the interview setting, with its mock televisual aesthetics, to the washed-out, slightly hazy quality of a super 8 recording, showing Harding as a toddler, running and falling about in front of the family trailer. Only when the initial series of interviews concludes, and the flashback narrative starts in earnest, does the frame finally align with the conventional film ratio.
38I, Tonya thus partly corroborates Jim Collins’ description of the evolution of US-American genre cinema, and in particular the kind of “ironic hybridization” that Collins opposed to the “new sincerity” associated with the advocates of genre purity:
- 57 Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” in Film Theory Goe (...)
One is founded on dissonance, on eclectic juxtapositions of elements that very obviously don’t belong together, while the other is obsessed with recovering some sort of missing harmony, where everything works in unison. Where the former involves an ironic hybridization of pure classical genres (…) the latter epitomizes a “new sincerity” that rejects any form of irony in its sanctimonious pursuit of lost purity.57
Janet Staiger disagrees with Collins’ use of the term “hybrid,” arguing that, for one thing, even the most classical of narrative films have never amounted to “pure” creations. Furthermore, if we were to imagine there once was such a thing as a “pure classical genre,” Staiger adds, then, at best, hybridity would amount to a form of “inbreeding.”
39However, in the case of I, Tonya, heterogeneity is not merely a question of genre. As evidenced in the opening sequence already, the film demonstrates a strong intermedial and esthetic engagement, arguably turning itself into an example of what could be called a “minor cinema,” that is, the result of the deliberate, critical alteration or corruption of dominant forms of genre cinema and more generally, of narrative, fiction film.
- 58 Réda Bensmaïa, “Foreword: the Kafka Effect,” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze an (...)
40In her foreword to the English translation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Toward a Minor Literature, Réda Bensmai points to speed as one of the effects of the deterritorialization that a major language might be subjected to, through the productively corrupting power of a minor language. A “major” language, she notes, can thus be “sent it into a panic, unfolding at a vertiginous pace,” or it “may be slowed down to a crawl”.58 Curiously, I, Tonya is not the first instance of the figure of Tonya Harding materializing in relation to such stylistic issues.
41The notion of “Minor Cinema,” speed, and productive corruption, are all conjured up and crystallized by Harding’s fleeting appearance in my last example—an analysis of the opening sequence of Harmony Korine’s Julian Donkey Boy”, shot in New York and released in 1999. Similar to Gillepsie’s I, Tonya, Korine’s film focuses on a family that could be described as belonging to the so-called “white-trash.” Furthermore, Julian, the central character, is a young man who suffers from schizophrenia, and throughout the film, the quality of the image reflects his perception of the world. In the low-definition digital image—unselective and unstable, oversensitive to light and motion—external and internal perception appear to contaminate each other as through a terrifying process of unfiltered affect. The lens—of the then still new mini DV camera—seems unable to hierarchise the information that reaches its digital sensors, so that its focus is constantly challenged and the image corrupted by parasitic events and artefacts: contours and colours dissolve, the foreground and the background appear alternately blurred or defined, or they seem to merge, the human figure caught in the turbulence of an unstable visual field. Though the film was shot on Digital Video, it was later transferred on to 16mm film before being blown up to 35mm film for the master print, emphasizing the image’s grainy quality.
- 59 The source of the footage, and the context of its screening, are not immediately identifiable, but (...)
42Korine’s film belongs to the Dogma 95 movement. As is well known, Dogma’s manifesto and its “vows of chastity” advocated the return to a cinema uncorrupted by superfluous effects. The idea was to go back to basic tools, both in term of scripting and acting, technology and technique (shooting on location, with a handheld camera and no artificial light or added props). Interestingly, though Korine overtly abided by those rules, Julian Donkey Boy starts with a sequence of re-filmed televised images. Julian is fascinated by figure skating, and the film opens with a striking sequence of slowed down images shot from a television screen.59 The images are heavily degraded and pixelated, the main figure rendered as a hazy, impressionistic form, the backdrop of spectator-filled terraces a mere mass of blotches. The silhouette of the ice-skater appears first in medium, then in medium long shot. Although the image is very blurred, it is possible to identify Tonya Harding as she completes her signature triple axel. With eerie slowness, her silhouette rises from the ice and twirls in the dreamlike, suspended time of the decelerated flow of images.
43Contrary to the fluid effect of slow motion (based on over-cranking or fast recording), Korine chooses to play back the images at a lower cadence than their recording mode—hence the irregular pace of the unfolding series of images. While this halting effect recalls the technique of video instant replay favoured in the broadcasting of sports events, as with the experimental films considered earlier, the slowed down sequence also calls attention to the easily altered and corrupted material basis of its images. And yet, for all the sequence’s derivative origin and treatment, Korine does not shy from saturating this enigmatic spectacle with a strong sense of pathos, setting its shaky, precarious-looking images to the music of Puccini’s famous aria Gianni Schicchi (1918).
44A polysemic and versatile phenomenon, corruption in the cinema is a shifting force, at once destructive and productive, harnessed to the most reactionary ideologies as well as the most radical discourses and forms of expressions. Convincingly or not, Korine and Gillepsie’s films offer themselves as critiques of an ideology of national identity that continues to feed over anxieties of social and cultural “corruption.” The kind of enduring systems of belief that the films evoke attempt to cover over systemic inequalities with a merit-based ethos, thus casting the socio-economic fringes of the US-American society as a potential zone of corruption. At the same time, stylistically as well as in their choice of subject, both films can be described as examples of “minor cinema,” based on the productive undermining of established styles and genres of narrative cinema. The fusion of different regimes of imaging—television, video, cinema—initially reads as an indictment of our over-mediatised world, where reality is increasingly challenged and contaminated by its electronic and digital doubles. However, the impurity of the form is also the result of a deliberate, creative form of corruption, a denial of the integrity of the film image that reminds us that, while cinema was always singularly apt in accounting for the endless variability of the visible, it is also uniquely able to absorb and remediate other forms of media and artistic expressions. As such, it remains the most impure and, therefore, the most operatic of all mediums.