Alex Turner 2010 Discuss to what extent and in what ways the practices and products of cinema can

be said to be symptoms and reflections of both modernity and post-modernity.

This essay will attempt to understand the various ways in which cinema could be seen as both a product of and contributor to modern and post-modern experience. Given the large amount of ambiguity surrounding these two terms, the essay will focus only on certain supposed elements of them, namely the issue of the unpresentable.

In order to do this, it will begin with a brief introduction to both modernity and postmodernity, looking at various definitions of these terms and their relationship with cinema. Secondly, it will introduce the issue of the unpresentable, exploring the ways in which this term can be defined through key authors such as Lyotard and Denzin. Using this theme as a base, the essay will then discuss how it can be applied to cinema by using the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais 1959 FR) to examine the unpresentable nature of history, and then Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986 US) to examine the unpresentable nature of the unconscious and obscene.

Through these filters of modernity, post-modernity and the unpresentable the essay will seek to look at how these films choose to interact with their audience and how the viewer understands the presence of the unpresentable. Ultimately, the aim of the essay will be to illustrate a discourse between cinema, history and the nature of contemporary life. It will conclude that film, though originally a child of the modern era, continues to react to the postmodern world of which it is a part.

Alex Turner 2010 The definition of modernity has long been subject to discussion regarding its exact place in history. Ben Singer notes that modernity is ostensibly a temporal concept and that it demarcates the period coming after the premodern or traditional age and before the putative postmodern era (Singer 2001: 17). Though the debate that searches for a beginning to this era has never been definitively settled, there is a general agreement that it was at least present at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that accomplishments in both science and technology are hallmarks of the era (Singer 2001: 18).

However, modernity cannot be discussed as a temporal concept alone; we must also take into account the socioeconomic and cultural effects of this period. Through the widespread use of steam power and electricity in the 19th century, the rise of Fordism and inventions which allowed greater geographical and socioeconomic mobility than ever before, the Western world experienced what Ben Singer refers to as:

[...] the most profound and striking explosion of industrialization, urbanization, migration, transportation, economic rationalization,

bureaucratization, military mechanization, mass communication, mass amusement and mass consumerism. (Singer 2001: 19)

It seems no coincidence, then, that both the creation and rise of cinema also took place during this period, or that its very nature its ability to compress time and space, to alter and perhaps even craft our perceptions could be said to reflect the modern era itself.

Alex Turner 2010 If modernity could be said to be partially defined by the rational, scientific and technological accomplishments that took place during the 19th and 20th century, as well as their impact on society, then what are the hallmark features of postmodernity? Temporally, if we accept Singers statement of modernity as the period of time between the traditional and postmodern age, then it seems logical to assume that we are already in the throes of postmodernity. However, as Anne Friedberg notes:

Post implies historical sequence, a moment of rupture when the post succeeds the past. But, as historiographers remind us, history is not only a discourse but a product of discourses. (Friedberg 1993: 161; her emphasis)

It seems that when attempting to identify the emergence of postmodernity, history should not be looked upon as a series of unrelated fragments placed over a linear temporal framework, but as an interweaving series of events, each bleeding into one another, each involved in the construction of the next. If anything, it seems logical to assume that, as a temporal concept, the emergence of postmodernity as an event in history came after the emergence of modernity. However, even this is thrown into question, as Lyotard declares:

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. (Lyotard 1984: 79)

Alex Turner 2010 As a temporal concept, then, postmodernity not only seems difficult to locate in history, but also seems ubiquitous to the point of effecting periods of history that would logically precede it.

If postmodernity as a temporal concept is difficult to define, its nature outside of historiography seems to have become so polysemic as to be rendered almost useless in theoretical discourse. As Singer notes (quoted above) a multiplicity of effects and consequences of modernity, Friedman comments on the difficulty of simply wading through a list of definitions for postmodernity that is equally as long and includes:

[...]the end of Enlightenment [or] the site of the Enlightenments completion, [] radical pluralism, multiculturalism, centralized marginality [and] a culture of decentered subjectivity. (Friedman 1993: 167)

For the purpose of this essay, however, several of these features are worth noting. Firstly, Jennifer Barker observes a haptic visuality which favours the tactile over the optic. Optical images, she comments, separate the viewer from the subject by making the subject a distinct form in its own space, whereas haptic images remove this space to favour the material presence of the image (Barker 2009: 58, 61). Secondly, Lyotard notes a distrust of metanarratives (Berger 1999: 36) and, perhaps by extension, Jameson indicates a collapse of history that is characterised by nostalgia (Friedberg 1993: 168). It could be argued that, between the aforementioned features, there is a common theme of subjectivity; at the core of all three, something that once was considered unquestionable and definitive becomes, all of a sudden, open to interpretation.

Alex Turner 2010

It is within this realm of subjectivity that the unpresentable may be found, though its place within this space - like postmodernity itself - is difficult to define. In this essay, however, the term will be defined in two ways. Firstly, Denzin discusses it in context with what he refers to as late-postmodern nostalgia films, noting that such works:

[...]bring the unpresentable (rotting, cut-off ears, sexual violence, brutality, insanity, homosexuality, [] sado-masochistic rituals) in front of the viewer in ways that challenge the boundaries that ordinarily separate private and public life. (Denzin 1991: 68)

Here, by linking the unpresentable to the obscene, Denzin has also made assumptions concerning the nature of obscenity; firstly that there is a set of values in place which regards certain acts and images as obscene and, then, that these values transcend things such as cultural or personal belief and geographical location, at least within the Occident. Here, Denzin links the unpresentable not just to obscenity but also to a set of pre-established assumptions about the world which may be more in keeping with modernity than postmodernity.

Secondly, Lyotard uses the term in context with a war on totality and defines the unpresentable simply as that which cannot be seen (Lyotard 1984: 82, 80). He also uses the unpresentable to distinguish between modernity and postmodernity, appearing in the latter as a defining feature, but the former only as the missing contents of an aesthetic of the sublime (Lyotard 1984: 81). This explanation differs to Denzins in that the unpresentable seems, here, to be defined as that which cannot be seen, as opposed to

Alex Turner 2010 that which should not be seen. Lyotards unpresentable, then, seems more concerned with artistic representation and subjectivity, and Denzins with the presentation of that which, in modern society, has been widely accepted as obscene.

What, then, is the relationship between modernity, postmodernity, the unpresentable and cinema? These arguments will be explored through the films Hiroshima Mon Amour and Blue Velvet. At first glance, it seems difficult to place a film such as Hiroshima Mon Amour in the context of postmodernity. Set some fifteen years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the film focuses on a French actress and a Japanese architect (referred to only as Elle, or she, and Lui, or him, respectively) who begin a brief affair after meeting in the city. During their time together, Elle tells the architect of her past, including her love for a German soldier who was killed back in occupied France. Given its release some two decades before discourse on postmodernity came to the fore, it could be argued that any attempt to understand the film as postmodern would simply be too retrospective of an analysis to be useful. However, it is precisely the presence of the unpresentable in Resnais film that allows it to be seen in a postmodern light.

Firstly, if we are to take Lyotards definition of the term, the bombing of Hiroshima is an event which, like all history, no matter how well documented, can never be seen outside of the moment in which it took place. This notion is addressed at the beginning of the film, as, during a voiced-over flashback, the camera wanders through a museum and Elle notes the films and reconstructions to be as authentic as possible. The artefacts, encased in glass boxes, remind us of the fact that history is not only distant and inaccessible, but also inarticulately precious to us. Museums, as Huyssen notes, could be seen as an expression of this obsession with the past, a way to counteract [a] fear

Alex Turner 2010 and danger of forgetting with survival strategies of public and private memorialization (Huyssen 2000:28).

However, the architect continues to insist that, despite her vivid memory of the event, she was not there and saw nothing. We, too, see these reconstructions and artefacts, but as the camera tracks past at a deliberate, slow pace, we feel distanced. Jennifer Barker notes the effect of this manoeuvre:

The slowly tracking camera allows an event to unfold over time that originally occurred with horrible suddenness, [] the reflective glass cases and distant cameras keep us from coming face-to-face and skin-to-skin with the traces of that disaster. (2009: 59).

Here, then, Resnais seems to be implying that history, as moments in time which we can never see for ourselves, cannot be fully understood through the intellectual tools available to us, that chronicling and reconstructing history is not always the same as understanding it.

If, then, in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is an unpresentable which fails to be accessed or understood through conventional methods, Resnais attempts to access that which cannot be seen not through our intellectual faculties but through our emotional or sensory ones; essentially, Resnais takes the audience through the glass cases of the museum. For example, the opening shot of the film shows the two lovers embraced. In a shot close enough to appear almost abstract, the audiences eye is kept at the surface of the image by making the objects they

Alex Turner 2010 present indecipherable to us (Barker 2009: 60). The limbs and bodies we see are covered in what appears to be a layer of ash, which slowly fades as we are shown documentary and re-enacted footage of the bombing of Hiroshima. This footage seems almost in direct contrast with the extreme close-ups of the two lovers; distancing mechanisms such as the slow tracking camera and the walls of glass serve only to emphasise the ash-covered bodies and suggest that, for these two lovers, Hiroshima is quite literally on their skin. It is here that Resnais seems to be offering up his own presentation of Lyotards unpresentable: that which we can never see nor experience can still be felt and it is in this capacity for feeling, not understanding, that we can bring ourselves closer to it.

By extension, our ability to empathise is also a key element in the film. For example, the relationship between Lui and Elle allows Elle to recall her own past in Nevers and the death of her love, something which she seems to have been unwilling to talk about for some time. It is not by looking at the artefacts or the reconstructions of the museums, but, as Barker puts it:

[...] by recalling her own tragic past [...] [that] the actress comes to feel and understand the tragedy and pain of Hiroshimas past, which she did not witness herself. (Barker 2009: 62)

Unlike modernitys handling of the unpresentable as missing contents, Hiroshima Mon Amour takes us away from the artefacts and memory traces of a history which we can never witness and suggests that the most effective way of understanding history is to feel it. By placing this tactile relationship between the two lovers at the centre of the

Alex Turner 2010 film, it could be argued that Resnais has created a piece which not only presents the unpresentable but does so in a postmodern context.

If Hiroshima Mon Amour attempts to present something which cannot be seen, David Lynchs Blue Velvet draws on both Lyotards and Denzins interpretations of the term. Set in Lumberton, USA, Blue Velvet follows a young man named Jeffrey through a down-the-rabbit-hole journey which takes us beneath the surface of small-town American life in a way which, as critics have noted, exposes the gruesome monsters lurking behind the white picket fences of the American Dream (Anon. 2008: 19).

Lynch himself has described Blue Velvet as a probing of the subconscious (Denzin 1991: 73). If so, the film could be seen as a kind of expos on the darker side of human nature and an attempt to find, within everyday life, all the terrors and simulated realities that Lyotard, and Baudrillard see operating in the late postmodern period (Denzin 1991: 67). These terrors and simulated realities manifest themselves in several ways, not least in the pastiche of small-town American life and the compression of time and space found within the film.

From the very beginning, Blue Velvet presents a space which, when broken down to its individual elements, seems a perfectly believable representation of the real world: lawns are tended to on sunny afternoons, youths attend school while their parents work as store owners and policemen. Within this normal life, however, nothing can be taken at face value. From the onset, as Denzin notes, the film shows :

Alex Turner 2010 cars from the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s, [] sophisticated 1980s computerized medical equipment [in] a late forties hospital room [and] highschool students [in] dress which spans three decades. (Denzin 1991: 75)

When merged together, these elements begin to break the boundaries between past and present, entering a hyperreal space where we are unable to distinguish between the authentic and the fake, nor the dream world and the real one.

It is within this dream world that Blue Velvet finds the unpresentable. From the moment the viewer enters the severed ear discovered by Jeffrey, much of the film plays on our fears of the unknowns which lie beneath the tip of Freuds iceberg. The foreshadowing of this entrance into the realm of the unpresentable is visualised in a sequence at the beginning of the film, which sees Jeffreys father suffering from a stroke whilst watering his garden. As Mr. Beaumont clutches his neck and falls to the floor, the hose remains in his hand, still spurting water, and the camera seems more concerned with this climactic, phallic symbol than of Mr. Beaumonts stroke. As he continues to struggle, a dog begins to play with the water spurting from his hose as a small child watches from afar in what appears to be a strange re-enactment of the primal scene. As if to reinforce the setup of a focus on Freudian psychoanalysis, the camera then travels through the shining green grass to reveal a mass of heaving cockroaches in its underbelly. It seems apparent, then, that from the very beginning of the film, Blue Velvet is intent on exploring the repressed events, desires and fears which are locked deep in our unconscious.

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Alex Turner 2010 Clearly, the realm of the unconscious falls into Lyotards unpresentable; the area of our mind which contains our deepest desires and fears is, by definition, directly inaccessible. Nevertheless, Lynch does attempt to access it and it is here that the film adopts the unpresentable as both unseen and obscene. For example, our journey into the unconscious begins near the beginning of the film when Jeffrey discovers a severed ear in a field. As we go into and, later, come out of this ear, it becomes clear that the world located within this space could be seen as the unconscious that Lynch discusses. Here, however, it is not what the ear represents that disturbs us, but the ear itself. If, as discussed earlier, Denzin uses the term unpresentable to refer to the obscene, then a rotting, detached ear can surely be placed in this category. As the camera begins to travel into the dark void of the ear in an extreme close-up, it could be argued that this is not simply a repetition of the opening sequence but an opportunity for Lynch to suggest that, within the unconscious mind, both unseen and obscene are inherently linked. In the journey that follows, we are witness to sexual violence, drug and alcohol abuse, murder and a host of other activities which are related to the life and death instincts located in the drives of the id; they are, in a sense, both objects of repulsion and part of who we are.

Although Hiroshima Mon Amour and Blue Velvet may appear to be very different films, focusing on very different subject matters, it is possible to see connections. For example, both films adopt a haptic visuality focusing on the tactile over the optic and this could be seen as an effect of both films being strongly focused on processes of the mind. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais not only seems to be suggesting mistrust of history as a metanarrative, but also of memory. Throughout the film, the narrative becomes increasingly fragmented as Elle begins to delve into her own personal history.

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Alex Turner 2010 Though it is her past that allows her to understand her relationship with Hiroshima, her past seems to be felt and not remembered. As Barker notes:

We and the actress are continually exposed to and engaged in both ways of seeing and experiencing the relationship of the past to the present. By the end of the film, though, she and we will have learned the value of haptic visuality, because it alone reveals to us the profound connections between past and present. (Barker 2009: 61)

Similarly, in Blue Velvet, as we begin to explore the realm of the unconscious, Jeffreys world changes from an optic visuality where subjects are traditionally seen from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space (Barker 2009: 58) to a haptic one, where extreme close-ups of cockroaches and detached ears occupy a space which seems wholly different from that found in the small town of Lumberton. These images appear obscene, perhaps, because there is no context for them and, as an audience, we are forced into such close proximity with them that, for a brief moment, nothing outside of the frame exists and nothing inside of it makes sense to us.

Ultimately, it seems as though, within Hiroshima Mon Amour and Blue Velvet, the unpresentable appears as both the unseeable (history, the unconscious) and the obscene (war, deformity, sexual violence, drug abuse). Certainly, both films could be said to adopt Lyotards notion of the unpresentable in postmodernity as part of a war on totality (Lyotard 1984: 82), emphasising the need to look beyond what is traditionally accepted. Perhaps, at the core of both films, there is an emphasis on haptic visuality as a method of presenting the unpresentable. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, it is used delicately

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Alex Turner 2010 as a tool for emphasising the unreliable nature of memory and history, as well as a focus on emotion over intellect. In Blue Velvet, the unpresentable is forced upon us in extreme close-ups in a way which, by the very nature of the subject, is both repulsive and intriguing to us. The emphasis on tactile over optic, feeling over thought and the breaking down of metanarratives that these films portray can all be seen as aspects of postmodern cinema and, perhaps by extension, of postmodernity itself.

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Alex Turner 2010 Bibliography

Anon. (2008) 42; Blue Velvet David Lynch, 1986.(Features) The Times (London, England) April 26 p.19

Barker, J. (2009) History, Mon Amour in The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience Los Angeles: University of California Press

Baudrillard, J. (1988) The Ecstasy of Communication New York: Semiotext(e) and (1994) Simulacra and Simulation USA: University of Michigan Press

Berger, J. (1999) Postmodern Catastrophe and Post-Apocalyptic Desire: Until the End of the World After the End: Representation of Post-Apocalypse Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota

Denzin, N. K. (1991) Wild about Lynch: Beyond Blue Velvet Images of Postmodern Society London: Sage

Friedberg, A. (1993) Looking Backward An Introduction to the Concept of Post Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press

Lyotard, J. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Manchester: Manchester UP

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Alex Turner 2010 Singer, B. (2001) Meanings of Modernity Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contents New York: Columbia University Press

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Alex Turner 2010 Filmography

Blue Velvet David Lynch (1986) USA

Hiroshima Mon Amour Alan Resnais (1959) France/Japan

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