THE INSISTENT FRINGE:

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

ABSTRACT

Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of both
showing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argues
with Roland Barthess critique of the duplicity of the insistent fringes that supposedly
reduce and naturalize Roman-ness to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes presumes a certainty in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it mythologicalthat is,
it goes without saying. Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue that
the insistent fringe is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a dialectical image: a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it concretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showing
are privileged in medias resin a culture saturated in images and textuality, in competing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparked
and constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the insistent fringe is precisely
not clear-cutand, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as a
limit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domains
which it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood
cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They coexist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratio
thus constituting the rationality of contemporary historical consciousness.
History decomposes into images, not into narratives.
Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk
[W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements below which nothing more
canbe done except display, and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possible to showing.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

IN MEDIAS RES

In his 1954 essay on The Romans in Films, Roland Barthes points to and glosses the insistent fringes that repetitively mark the foreheads of all the Roman
men in Joseph Mankiewiczs Julius Caesar (1953). What does Barthes make of
this hirsute cinematic generalization?

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Quite simply the label of Roman-ness. We therefore see here the mainspring of the
Spectaclethe signoperating in the open. The frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent: the
actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate questions of universal import, without losing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean
and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where
Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.1

In our experience of visual media, it is the image of things that first occupies the center of our consciousness, that mediates between the world and our
understanding of it. Borrowed, to be turned with purpose against his condemnation of it, the insistent fringe of my title thus refers not only to the reduction of
complex historical temporalization Barthes locates at the supposed naturalized
siteand sightof a Roman hairstyle in an American film. Here, I mean it also
to trouble and critique this view: a view that far too quickly judges the iconic and
synchronic signification of moving, yet fixed, images in popular films (and
popular consciousness) as mythological, ahistorical, and bourgeois, and
the spectators who watch them as downright dumb, historically befuddled, and
ideologically suspect. This seems to me too easy, dismissive, and elitist a perspectiveparticularly if we want to understand how historical consciousness
emerges in a culture in which we are all completely immersed in images (if also
surrounded by print), and what this might mean not only to the historical future,
but also to the relevance and function of what is legitimated as proper (that is,
academic) historiography.
In the context of the American culture in which both filmgoers and historians
currently live, the historians traditional iconomachy seems feeble in its injunctions, its hostility to images irrelevant to the life-world of both filmgoers and historians alike. Indeed, filmgoers and historians have become one and the same.
Immersed in a culture in which the proliferation of visual representations has
accelerated and understanding of textuality has become pervasive, perpetually
confronted with contestation between competing representational claims and
forms, filmgoers have become unprecedentedly savvy about (mis)representation
and have learned the lessons of Hayden Whites MetaHistory even if theyve
never read it. That is, filmgoers know that histories are rhetorically constructed
narratives, that events and facts are open to various uses and multiple interpretations. And, as filmgoers have not been able to escape the lessons of historiography, so, on their side (and try as they might), historians have not been able
to escape the lessons of the movies and television. Similarly caught up in the
acceleration of medias res and visual representation, immersed in the middle
of the things of moving images, perpetually confronted with and overwhelmed by screen evidence, even historians have succumbedoften against

1. Roland Barthes, The Romans in Films, in Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York,
1972), 26.

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

both their injunction and willto the seemingly immediate presence and power
of the moving image to, at least in the moment, naturally persuade one of its
cause. Which is to say, historians are often moved by movieseven historically
inaccurate ones. Today, then, in our culture, the binary oppositions commonly
posited between the transparency of the image and the opacity of the word,
between mythology and history, between filmgoers and historians no
longer hold.
ESTABLISHING SHOT

The mise-en-scne is a screen, in this instance the site of a scholarly electronic

discussion group called H-Film (the H standing for History), one of a large
number of such groups subsumed under H-Net based at the University of
Chicago (and endorsed by the American Historical Association, the Organization
of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association). No images
here: just written texteven if its subject matter is the cinema.
What follows is a true historical accountperhaps, more appositely, an
authentic historical account. That is, even though I shall elide the specific dates,
names, and places that might identify the participants, it is an account that, I
daresay, will ring true and resonate in many of my readers as it did for me. The
event at its center not only provoked this present meditation, but also demonstrated that, although they may be differentiated to some degree, there is no
future in opposing mythology to history, filmgoer to historian.
Not so very long ago, someone (it could have been a professor, an independent
scholar, a student) posted a short inquiry to H-Film asking for recommendations
of films that realistically depicted the Middle Ages. Edited for brevity, these
were some of the responses (also from professors, independent posters, and students):
Im afraid that period is a little before my time, so I cant speak to it personally. Ill ask
one of my friends if he can recall what it was like. But seriously, three films stand out in
my mind that are generally regarded as successfully conveying the atmosphere of the
Middle Ages: The Return of Martin Guerre (Vigne, 1982), Beatrice (Tavernier, 1988), and
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966).
Maybe The Lion in Winter (Harvey, 1968)at least what reading Ive done about the
main characters suggests they got them right as people (although not as historical
eventsthere was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year). There seems enough muck
and dirt and rushes on the floors to suggest something of the twelfth century.
Orson Welles Chimes at Midnight (1966) has the most realistic medieval battle that
Ive ever seen (not that Ive seen very many...;-) Id also suggest Robin and Marian
(Lester, 1976), The Advocate (Megahey, 1994), The Name of the Rose (Annaud, 1986),
Flowers of St. Francis (Rossellini, 1950), and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam,
1975) and Ingmar Bergmans The Seventh Seal (1956) and The Virgin Spring (1958)if
you equate realism with graphic depictions of squalor.
I think Gilliams Jabberwocky (1977) and New Zealands The Navigator: A Medieval
Odyssey (Ward, 1988) both contain quite realistic depictions of medieval life.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

See the essay on this topic by Lorraine Attreed and James Powers in the January 1997
issue of the American Historical Associations Perspectives. Many suggestions.
Without much thinking, a quick comparison would be between Braveheart (Gibson,
1995) and First Knight (Zucker, 1995). Braveheart for the most part had the feel in terms
of language, behavior, attitudes. In close ups, you could see dirt on their hands, since they
didnt wash their hands as often. Food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl, eaten without utensils but by dipping bread in it. Lots of mud, dirt, rain. They had poorer shelters
then unless they were wealthy. First Knight, by comparison, seems glossed-over and
shiny modern day. Everyone was sparkling clean, the set was elaborate, and hardly anyone got dirty. Even the torture scene in Braveheart seemed accurate; the torture implements look dull and dirty, which would have been more painful, and the dwarfs came out
to entertain the crowd before the events began. This all seems historically accurate.
I am not an expert on Scottish history, but a pile of distortions occurred in Braveheart
to make Wallace appear like a typical hero of an action film. Correspondingly, Robert the
Bruce was made to look like a petty crook who implausibly defeats the English army at
Bannockburn thus gaining recognition for Scotlands independence without any merit of
his own. Some degree of surface authenticity apart, the film made little attempt to render
a genuine account of the historical events. I would suggest that this kind of adventure film,
historical or otherwise, has no such ambitions nor does it seriously pretend to. In this
sense, they are not lies. They are just entertainment.
I would add Sorceress (Schiffman, 1987). What distinguishes that film and Martin
Guerre from the others thus cited, which have few redeeming values as realistic depictions of medieval life (unless you define medieval life in terms of squalor, knights in
armor, and the like) is the active participation of historians in their making. Films such as
Flowers of St. Francis and The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) also are reasonably
faithful to the history and lives they depict. Other films (biopics) like Becket (Glenville,
1964), The Lion in Winter, or the Bergman Joan of Arc (Fleming, 1948) and Seberg Saint
Joan (Preminger, 1957) are a melange of cinematic (or in these cases playwright) invention and intermittent historical fidelity.
I want to second Taverniers Beatrice and add Herzogs Heart of Glass (1976), for
which he purportedly hypnotized his actors to get them thinking outside twentieth century culture, progress, etc. Both films concentrate on the idea of difference, making strange,
in order to put forth the idea that another, disconnected time is being framed. By doing so,
they make the representation of a past we cannot possibly know (except through its documents) as much the focus as is the realistic depiction of that past.
I suggest a television source: the Brother Cadfael series on the PBS show Mystery
a little less dirt than reality, but artifacts and terms are in correct context.

After this, the postings on depictions of medieval life petered out as such a
round of postings usually do, and the issues of historical realism, historical accuracy, and historical authenticity were displaced onto yet another set of screenings
of the past.
SUPERIMPOSITION

This historiographic heteroglossia, this dialogic layering of various voices from

the more or less historically informed, might well be expected in an electronic

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

discussion group. H-Film serves as a reasonably open and democratic screen site
that displays the competitions, coincidences, and slippage of various languages
and discourses that constitute our perceived and expressed experience of both
popular films and academic historynot only on the movie screen, or in our
classrooms as both professors and students, but also in our waking lives. These
languages and discourses may work according to quite different (and often
incommensurable) logics, and when they engage each other, as Mikhail Bakhtin
puts it: [T]hey all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one
another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. As such, they
encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people.2 This
certainly seems the case with the discussion above. Yet what emerges cannot be
said to exist merely as a hodgepodge of voices or only as symptomatic of an
irreconcilable argument between two incommensurable logics. Indeed, insofar as
they do not simply coexist, but significantly intersect each other in a variety of
ways within this electronic conversation, I would argue that these seemingly
contradictory and oppositional discourses form what Bakhtin calls a new
socially typifying language or discourse.3
Indeed, I will go further and suggest that the new socially typifying discourse that emerges on H-Film is not all that different in its heteroglossic dynamics from similar discourses in the culture at large as it constitutes and engages
what we might call the historical field. Contradictions and oppositions are not
really resolved or synthesized in the debate over what might constitute realistic historiographic representation of the Middle Ages in the cinema or in the
larger arguments about the conditions under which cinematic representation can
enter the historical field to do proper historiography at all. Rather, the discussion on H-Film presents a new socially typifying discourse that dramatizes
and reveals contemporary historical consciousnessand consequently contemporary historiographic discourseas palimpsestic. One discourse does not
undo another: the acquisition of what counts as legitimate historical knowledge does not replace that historical knowledge which is deemed illegitimate, mythological. Indeed, as indicated both within and across the postings
above, our encounters with a variety of historicized images and narratives from
a variety of textual sources both layer themselves and sit beside each other as the
historical fieldand none of them can be completely erased. In the H-Film dialogue, for example, the posting on The Lion in Winter indicates the writers
sophisticated historical knowledge and awareness of the films misrepresentation
of specific events (there was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year), yet we
are also told that the film got the main historical figures right as people which
is an extremely peculiar (and vaguely grounded) assessment for a proper historian to make; furthermore, the writer falls, almost unself-consciously, into the persuasive materiality of the mise-en-scene, finding the muck and dirt and rushes
2. M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M.
Bakhtin, transl. M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist and C. Emerson (Austin, 1981), 292.
3. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, 291.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

on the floors evocative of the twelfth century. What is noteworthy is that this
palimpsest of ways of knowing the past is less sedimented than it is effluvial,
unstable, and shifting. Thus, however knowledgeable and ironically self-aware,
even the academic historian is susceptible to being overwhelmed by Barthess
insistentand mythologicalfringe. This is what we learn by entertaining
seriously the H-Film dialogue as both a microcosm of the contemporary historical field at large and a macrocosm of the historical consciousness of both the contemporary historian and filmgoer.
Consider, for example, how the naivet of the initial inquiry evokes in respondents a playful reflexivity and awareness vis--vis the problematic status of any
claims to realism that might be made by the cinematic representation of a historical period pre-existing cinema. Indeed, in one instance using the newly-generated markers of computer diacritics to indicate an ironic wink about what is
to follow, the play extends so as to privilegeas the only test or text of realismexistential presence and its discursive corollaries: witnessing and testifying: Chimes at Midnight. . .has the most realistic medieval battle that Ive ever
seen (not that Ive seen that many...;-). Despite these self-aware disclaimers,
however, everyone enters the history gamerecommending films about the
Middle Ages from the ridiculous to the sublime (which is which is not at all
clear). These litanies of films includemost often without remark on their generic differencesthose cinematic texts that dramatize actual historical events
(however or not accurately or authentically), those that dramatize mythological
history, and those that dramatize historical fantasy. Here and there, the chiding
voices of academic historians emerge: The facts are inaccurate. Read this
article in the American Historical Associations journal for a real gloss on these
films as history.
There is, however, a theme that runs throughout. Much like Barthess insistent fringe that signifies and fixes Roman-ness, a general and generalizing
image comes to signify and fix the real Middle Ages: the image of what we
might call insistent dirt and squalor. Evoking a particular and concrete image
that condenses historic event, historical narrative, historiographic account into
something more general, more mythological, this image underlies (even when
made explicit) yet also overwhelms with evidence the heteroglossic discourses of H-Films historical field. Here, then, we find the mainspring of the
Spectaclethe signoperating in the open. The muck and dirt and rushes on
the floor, the graphic depictions of squalor, the dirt on their hands, the
mud, dirt, rain, overwhelms the participants in H-Film with what apparently does count as historical evidence. That is, no one can doubt (even as they
do) that such descriptions place us in the Middle Ages. And, to slightly paraphrase Barthes (whose argument, for the moment, we are following here), this
certainty seems permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate
questions of universal import, without losing, thanks to the dirt displayed on their
grubby faces and hands, the squalor of their houses and surroundings, any of
their historical plausibility. Thus, as Barthes would have it: [N]o matter, every-

10

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

one is reassured. Whatever their differences, even in the midst of debate, contradictions, competing narratives and intentions, scholars and students, academic historians or historically-interested film goers alike, all are installed in the
quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where and when the Middle Ages
are the Middle Ages thanks to the most legible of signs: insistent dirt and
squalor. And this signs self-evidence, its insistence, like the fringes of Roman
hair, would seem to synthesize and fix the heteroglossic flux of the contemporary historical field into a solid, reductive, and concrete massthat is, into an
iconic image which, through its repetition, overwhelms contingency and destroys
the specific meaning of time across time. In medias res, is this what has become
of history? Or worse (from the view of historians), is this what has become of
historiography?
MONTAGE

In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss asks parallel questions that

address not only the specific values of academic historiography, but also the
unexplored historiographic value of popular cultural objects and, indeed, of
materiality itself:
Can academicians . . . , for whom scholarly meticulousness is all that is required of intellectual responsibility, be trusted as the guardians and transmitters of the cultural heritage?
And more, can we view seriously, with reverence, the discarded material objects of mass
culture as monuments to the utopian hope of past generations, and to its betrayal? Who
will teach us these truths, and in what form shall they be passed on to those who come
after us?4

Consider the following. On New Years Eve, at the end of nearly every
evening television news broadcast, the historic events of the year are gathered
together and presented in a series of moving images underscored by sound bites
and music. On December 31, 1996 in Los Angeles, for example, the local NBC
affiliate offered the following litany of unidentified images that marked the year
and made it sacred:
A scene of flood waters and partially-immersed homes (presumably in the mid-West)
A scene of wreckage from an airplane (presumably TWA Flight 800)
A scene showing a massive blizzard (presumably in the mid-West)
A scene of (presumably) hostages walking out of a building (presumably the
Japanese embassy in Peru)
Bill Clinton at a podium
Bob Dole shaking hands
O.J. Simpson in a courtroom
A scene of a raging fire (presumably in Southern California)
Michael Jackson smiling with his new wife
Michael Jackson smiling with his new baby
4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 336.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

11

Madonna dressed in 1940s clothing (presumably a shot from the movie Evita)
Madonna smiling with her new baby
Princess Diana looking grim (presumably after her divorce from Prince Charles)
Boris Yeltsin dancing (presumably after recovery from his recent heart surgery)
A mass of people dancing the macarena
A shot of a rooftop with people looking upward at a giant spaceship (definitely from
Independence Day)
A scene of Yankee ballplayers hugging each other (presumably after winning the
World Series)

There seems very little reasonif some rhymein this montage of images
meant to evoke both the years history and its remembrance. History here is
not even offered as acausal chronicle: no linear temporality dictates the editorial
order of these images that mark historic events. Emplotment, too, seems
vague, sporadicbriefly organized around catastrophe at one point, then around
celebrity at another, neither strong enough to render narrative comprehension of
the year as a whole. Furthermore, the abstraction of each image makes of it
both something hermetic and temporally general (any fire, some moment of
Madonnas life)yet it also insists upon evoking other forms of knowledge
external to it to inform it with a historical specificity that, given its abstraction,
can never be quite fixed or certain. (That is, the crash site and wreckage I see is
not definitely, but only presumably, TWA Flight 800, any of my certainty about
it coming from the insistent repetition of that scene not in my experience, but in
previous televisual mediations.) In some ways, what emerges here seems precisely an expression and evocation of what Claude Lvi-Strauss has identified as
primitive thought, whose peculiarity is that its object is to grasp the world as
both a synchronic and a diachronic totality.5 And, yet, the organizing schema for
creating order and making meaning here is neither totalizing nor analogic (as
Lvi-Strauss characterizes the savage mind). Instead of making meaning from
the worldly correspondences and continuities found by those deeply embedded
in the middle of things, we who live in the mass-mediated and virtual culture
of images like the New Years Eve montage make meaning from the iconic correspondences found analytically abstracted in medias res. While the montage as
a whole does seem to grasp the past year as both a synchronic and diachronic totality, each of its images is complete, hermetic, and encryptedtemporally
discontinuous, if contiguous, with those that surround it. Thus, both the parts and
the whole of the montage call forth a temporalizing hermeneutic, one bent less
on understanding its analogical correspondences than on unpacking the meaning
of its iconic abstraction and density.
In a work that considers the significance of visual iconicity to political culture
in medias res, S. Paige Baty makes a distinction relevant to understanding the
complex constitution and operations of both the insistent fringe and the New
Years Eve montage in provoking popular historical consciousness:

5. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), 263.

12

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

For stories, figures, and identities to be transmissible as icons, they must first be compressed into units able to quickly circulate through the channels of mass mediation. I call
these units mediaphemes. The mediapheme is the most common unit of communication
in mass- mediated iconographic modes of remembering. . . . Mediaphemes are quick
encapsulations; once a story, person, or event is translated into mediapheme form, it ricochets through the channels of mass mediation with ease. Mediaphemes may become
icons, but they rarely do; they tend to last as long as a story, issue, or person is hot.
Icons, in contrast, outlast single, short-lived versions of an event, character, or history:
they are the sites for repeated stagings of narratives, the sites on which the past, present,
and future may be written. The mass-mediated mode of iconographic remembering relies
on both icons and mediaphemes in the construction of the remembered world.6

Barthess insistent fringe is clearly an icon: in its repeated stagings (not only
on the screen, but also art historically), it has become a site forand the sight
ofRoman-ness of a particular (if generalized) period. The New Years Eve
montage, however, mixes mediaphemespeople dancing the macarena, Bob
Dole shaking handswith icons: on the one hand, unidentifiable and generalizing floods and fires standing for specific and various natural disasters, on the
other, Madonna and Michael Jackson in further stagings of themselves.
What is evidenced on my television set (both on New Years Eve and all year
long) is a faith in the communicative and affective power of the visual icon as a
historiographic form: on the one hand, its power to condense the diachrony of a
historical narrative into an abstracted, synchronically denseand thus moving
fixity of a historical moment and, on the other, its power to evoke from this
momentous density and monumental concretion a sense not only of general
historical temporality and narrative, but also of a certain (yet unfixed) historical
specificity. As a historiographic (rather than a merely poetic) form, the mediapheme and visual icon here aggregate and constitute as concrete a whole historical field: they mobilize both specific historic instants and general historical
eventfulness; they paradigmatically offer up a siteand the sightof multiple
possible narratives for the syntagmatic unfolding of various historiographic trajectories. They also evoke the very contexts and forms of historiographic expression they themselves lack: a specific historical narrative, an elaboration and interpretation that demands more determinate language. Thus, as a sign of history,
in its attempts at overdetermination, the visual icon (as differentiated from the
mediapheme) is always insistent (like the fringe) upon its underdetermination;
that is, within its field, we are truly trans-fixedalways also led elsewhere: to
other images, to other narratives, to words.
The iconicity of this New Years montage and its historiographic operations
would seem to stand, then, less as a clear-cut expression of a mythic or primitive collapse of history into the totalizing or analogic presence of the things
themselves than as some new and highly complex mutation of thought
immersed and grounded in a pervasive (if unself-conscious) awareness of representation and intertextuality. Each iconic historical image (and the insistent

6. S. Paige Baty, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (Berkeley, 1995), 60.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

13

fringe is one) operates only tangentially as an index of its referent; rather, as in

the case of highly abstracted religious icons, its primary function is to constitute
an abstract and contemplative site, a historical field. This mode of thought, I
would argue, has become the dominant model of popular historical consciousness in contemporary Americas over-textualized and ever-accelerating mediascape, and it embraces visual imagery not analogically, but pre-analyticallyor,
to put it in more precise phenomenological terms, in a synoptic operation of preconscious analysis. Insofar as we have become a culture completely familiar with
the practices and manipulations of mediation, the visual icon has become less
and less secure and trustworthy as denotation, as an image of, and more and
more the historical and historicizing circumscription of a spatial site that bounds
and condenses without necessarily synthesizing a set of variously related, possible narratives. It is this iconic historical logic that underlies not only the
insistent fringe and the New Years Eve montage, but also the new socially
typifying language or discourse found on H-Film.
Thus, although it may sound hereticalindeed perverse in relation to the
academys general disdain not only for mass culture, but also for the massesI am arguing that we at least entertain the thought that the iconic power
possessed by this New Years Eve montage might be read not merely as a manifestation of bourgeois nostalgia generalizing the past, but also as a calling up of,
and provocation to, historical consciousness. If we were to follow Benjamin
rather than Barthes, these fragments of the past year offer, perhaps, less a
degraded spectacle7 than a dialectical image.8 Indeed, Benjamin suggests that
to understand the past in its relation to the present, historians would do better to
use a visual, not a linear logicwith concepts. . . imagistically constructed,
according to the cognitive principles of montage.9 Montage generates intellectual and critical meaning by the juxtaposition and collisionnot continuityof
abstracted images. Thus, Benjamin believed: Historical objects are first constituted by being blasted out of the historical continuum. They have a monadological structure, into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a
reduced scale.10 These forces and interests are circumscribed and concreted in the dialectical imagethat historical field which contains without resolving the contradictions of the image-object as fossil (the visible remains of the past
as ur-phenomena), as fetish (constituting mythic phantasmagoria, the arrested
form of history), as wish image (a transitory, dream form of the potential for
the dialectic of awakening), and as ruin (the rubble of past wish images
which sit as loosened building blocks . . . out of which a new order can be constructed).11 However crude, the New Year Eves montage (its own narrative con-

7. Barthes, The Romans in Film, 28.

8. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 210-212.
9. Ibid., 218. My emphasis.
10. Ibid., 219.
11. Ibid., 211-212.

14

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

stituting a wish image) seems to strive not merely for the nostalgia of auld
lang syne, but also for a dialectic of awakening.
FLASHBACK

Raising the challenge that the cinema poses to traditional historiography, historian Robert Rosenstone writes:
Surely I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large really
know or care about history. . . . Or to wonder if our historyscholarly, scientific, measuredfulfills the need for that larger History, that web of connections to the past that
holds a culture together. . . . Or to worry if our history really relates us to our own cultural sources. . . . 12

These are significant concerns, indeed.

As a child born into American culture a decade before the last half of the twentieth century, I have a great (and self-defensive) investment in the palimpsestic
relationat times, the contradictions and, at times, the conflationof mythological and historical consciousness. Like most of my cultural consociates, at an
early age, I was overtaken by moving imagesby their ability to tell me things
by showing them to me, by their spectacular narratives of display. It is hardly
surprising, then, that, although I read a good deal of historical fiction, was frequently (and happily) taken to art museums to look at paintings of people and
events in the past, and greatly enjoyed historical documentaries on television, I
admit to not having really known or cared much about academic and expository history until rather late in my life.
In grade school, we had to memorize dates and remember who had fought
what battles and signed which treaties; uninterested in what seemed to me hollow and timeless historical acts and figures, I was more curious about real people back then and wondered whether they laughed and what they ate and wore
and if they used forks. So, forgetting the substance or import of some such historical activity as colonization or moral imperative as Manifest Destiny, I
went off to the movies to watch a past unfold in which people drank wine from
jeweled goblets, ripped apart roasted meats with their hands or swords, and
sopped huge rounds of bread in the ambiguous contents of rough wooden bowls.
(This particular visual marking of material interest is hardly uncommon or merely generational for a culture in medias res: hence, the studentmore than forty
years later on H-Filmnoting Bravehearts historical accuracy because it
showed that, in the Middle Ages, food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl
eaten without utensils but by dipping bread in it.) At any rate, Benjamin, while
dead right about the age of mechanical reproduction, was dead wrong when,
stirred by an antique spoon in a shop window, he wrote: One thing is reserved
to the greatest epic writers: the capacity to feed their heroes.13 The movies do it
all the time.
12. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 23.
13. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, transl. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 1 (19131926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.,
1996), 466.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

15

I also watched those Romans with insistent fringes, the ones who wore togas
and gave speeches in the Forum. I encountered people who once lived in castles,
who were encased in armor and chain mail, who killed and conquered natives
(not yet described as indigenous peoples), who opened the Northwest Passage,
who had their heads put on the block, who sailed and/or pirated trade and war
ships (often hard to tell apart) in the Indies and Caribbean (also hard to tell apart),
and who lived history in extravagant clothes andparticularly if they were
womenspent a good deal of history changing them. In those formative years,
the history that fired my imagination (as distinct from the history that dulled it)
came in concrete and spatialized imagesimages that moved and moved me. I
confronted the colonization of the New World through The Captain from
Castille (King, 1947) and Plymouth Adventure (Brown, 1952), medieval Italy
through The Flame and the Arrow (Tourneur, 1950), and came to really care
about Henry VIIIs England by identifying with the political (as well as romantic) education of headstrong and adolescent Young Bess (Sidney, 1953).
In college, I was an English major and, through the imperatives of scheduling,
continued my historical education according to no principled chronology. I took
a course in Shakespeare before I took one in Chaucer, took Chaucer before I took
Milton; I had no inclination nor charge to put them in temporal order (let alone
temporal relation). The history classes I was required to attend I regarded as quite
separate from those in literature and, again, found my mind wandering amid an
irrelevant and very arid field of dates and facts and causal narratives about which
I did not care. My lack of historical consciousness in the classroom, however,
was again offset by my historical experience at the movies. This was the time of,
among other great foreign directors, Ingmar Bergman; the strangeness and power
of his The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring allowed me (paradoxically, of
course) to feel and comprehend the otherness and incomprehensibility of
medieval existence in a world of flagellants, plague, dark and dank interiors,
dancing bears, real superstition, real religious belief.
Did I believe all these images? Did I think these narratives were the most accurate accounts of past events? Did they ruin me? Now that I read history and teach
historiography, am I cured? Has real history replaced the false history of my
formative years? Not really. As a child in medias res (that is, cinematically competent), I dont think I ever believed the image as a historical record. How could
one, with iconic stars like Greta Garbo or Errol Flynn or Charlton Heston figured
on the screen, with pirate ships and palaces that were spic and span (no insistent
squalor here), with gold lam push-up bras? In this regard, I find it rather funny
that Hollywood historical film is so often castigated not merely for its historical
errors, its melodrama, and its bourgeois ideology, but also for the seductive
transparency of its supposed seamless construction. One could be perverse
and make a counter argument, enumerating all the distancing and reflexive
devices that point to such films as highly stylized, opaque, and meta-historical
productionsnot least among them the presence of stars who represent not
real historical personages, but, rather, their historical magnitude.14
14. Vivian Sobchack, Surge and Splendor: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical
Epic, Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 36.

16

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

As a child, then, I believed the image as image, a real image of real things:
hence my intense material interest in it. I also didnt believe in the narratives as
accurate accounts of past lives and timesor, for that matter, as the only
accounts. However, in my experience, they were the most compelling accounts.
That is to say, in moving and showing human bodies disposed and active in
space, they moved me in time. Indeed, so much so that they eventually led me
elsewhere: first to art histories and film histories, and then to what is legitimated
as academic, nonfictional, and accurate history. This movement is not, however, to be taken as progressive. For, these images and narratives have not been
erased from my adult historical consciousness, nor would my sense of history be
somehow purified by their disappearance. Indeed, all those insistent fringes, all
that medieval squalor, all those Christians dying and buffalo stampeding, all that
clanking armor and swordplay, do not merely haunt the sophistication of my present sense of history; they also, dare I say, quicken it, flesh it out, nourish it (even
if with rounds of bread dipped into wooden bowls of ambiguous stew). If they
do not quite constitute (and they just might) Benjamins notion of the dialectical image, then, they at least, through their material means and the concrete purchase they give us on an absent past, make us care.
Rather than fixing and reducing history to things, they just might be
moving us through time. Amidst competing narratives, contradictions, fragments, and discontinuities, the massive authority of institutions and the small
compass of personal experience, sometimes the representation of phenomenal
things like dirt and hair are, in medias res, all we have to hold on toare where
our purchase on temporality and its phenomenological possibilities as history
are solidly grasped and allow us a place, a general premise, a ground (however
base) from which to transcend our phenomenal present and imagine the past as
once having real existential presence and value. And, acknowledging that the
past once was existentially valuable to real people who movedlike movie
imagesin space and time, creates a present in which we might care enough to
educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade.15
SPECIAL EFFECTS

Whatever its historiographic objective and however it is semiologically emplotted in ideologically suspect or politically correct narratives, for most historians
the cinematic image is inherently mythological in relation to its objects. Here,
Barthes is apposite: Myth, he writes, is a pure ideographic system, where the
forms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by a
long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation.16 Thus, most
academic historians would, in all likelihood, be embarrassed by and critical of
15. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 292.
16. Roland Barthes, Myth Today, in Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 127.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

17

the insistent squalor that has made its mythological mark on H-Film; they
would also, like Barthes, find those Roman fringes problematic: that is, a dangerous showing that reduced all the things that could be said or written about
the Romans of a given time to a single attribute that smugly named them and
contained their motivations, their actions, and their history in the triviality of an
overwhelmingly visible, showy yet natural, condensation. Thus, in passing
itself off as both sign and natureindeed, as the sign of naturethe fringe operates mythologically. In this regard, Barthes writes:
In passing from history to nature, myth. . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives
them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back
beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions
because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.17

That is, things go without saying. Indeed, this is the special effect of myth: To
transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is a language robbery.18
For Barthes, the language robbery effected by the fringe seems to lie (pun
intended) with the material and concrete nature of the cinematic sign, particularly as it is aggregated and mobilized to signify a generalization while simultaneouslyand reversibly displaying itself in the guise of the particular. For
Barthes, this mobilization is pernicious, duplicitous. Indeed, the fringes insistent
ambiguity seems to bear no relation toor, indeed, seems the opposite ofthe
privileged obtuse or third meaning Barthes was to write about in 1970 as that
level at which the filmic finally emerges in the contingent and unspeakable
concretion of an image which outruns and is in excess of its denotative and connotative signification.19 For Barthes, the unethical semiotic power of the fringe
lies not in an unspeakable excess or underdetermination of meaning, but rather
in an overspoken insistence on what, through repetition and multiplication,
emerges as a concreted pervasion and overdetermination of meaning: it makes
not just a general historical claim, but a universal one. Thus:
[T]he intermediate sign, the fringe of Roman-ness. . . reveals a degraded spectacle,
which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice. For although it is a good thing
if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both reprehensible and
deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified. And it is a duplicity which is peculiar
to bourgeois art: between the intellectual and the visceral sign is hypocritically inserted a
hybrid, at once elliptical and pretentious, which is pompously christened nature.20

But, we might ask, just who is it who has confused the sign with what it signifies? Certainly not Frenchmen who, Barthes suggests, find the little Roman
fringe on American foreheads comic, who recognize that the sign in this case
overshoots the target and discredits itself by letting its aim appear clearly.21
17. Ibid., 143.
18. Ibid., 131. Emphasis mine.
19. Roland Barthes, The Third Meaning, in Image, Music, Text, transl. Stephen Heath (New
York, 1977), 64.
20. Barthes, The Romans in Film, 28.
21. Ibid., 26.

18

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

Barthes too quickly refuses the fact of a spectator (even a bourgeois American
spectator) who understands not the cinematic sign and narrative as nature, but the
nature and possibility of the cinematic sign and narrative to move from the realm
of the concrete and dramatic to the conceptual, from showing to sayingthat is,
a spectator who understands the fringe as it functions intellectually as well as
viscerally. Taken up as it is insisted uponthat is, doubled, repeated, even
fetishizedthe visceral and particular sign of the fringe is mobilized to make
and concretely comprehend an attributive proposition based on an aspect of an
entire subject class (All Roman men wear fringes)and this yields the intellectual generalization (Roman-ness). Furthermore, it is important to note here
that to generalize is not necessarily to universalizesince this attributive proposition would be understood by almost all competent cinema spectators as a generalization inclusive only of that class of Roman men who lived during a certain
and finite historical period (even if the typical spectator would not be able to
specifically name and date it). In this way, the fringe does not go without saying. Rather, it says as it goes.22
FINAL CUT

If one still insists that the insistent fringe of the cinematic image instantiates in
the historical film a clear-cut language robbery in which things go without
saying, we might also point to the limitations of written historiography. For historiography has a comparable mythological grounding in its duplicitous insistence on elements that instantiate an image robbery, that repeat and naturalize
words so that they seem to go without showing. Here, de Certeau is apposite.
In the epigram that opens this essay, he tells us: [W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements below which nothing more can be done except display, and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possible to showing.
He refers particularly to the historiographers multiplication of proper names
(personages, localities, coins, etc.), and their duplication in the Index of Proper
Names. And, he notes:
With these proper names the signifying system is grossly expanded on its extreme deictic
border, as if the very absence it studied made it turn in the direction where showing
tended to stand for signifying. But there are many other indications: the role of maps,
of figures, or of graphics; the importance of panoramic views and recapitulative conclusions, of countrysides which the book stakes out, etc.23

This argument is a significant one. The word seeks the image of the thing and
never quite fulfills its desire for discretion and specificity. In some ways, then,
every proper noun in historiographic writing is an assertion that disguises what
it lacks as a representation: not the thing itself, but its image.
22. For further elaboration on how the visual image means, and how it effects less a language
robbery than a mode of visual typification (what I argue here as generalization), I would direct the
reader to Hayden White, AHR Forum: Historiography and Historiophoty, American Historical
Review 93 (December 1988), 1193-1199.
23. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), 100.

MOVING IMAGES AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

19

In this regard, as a concrete and always specific image, the insistent fringe
of cinematic historiography interrogates the general privilege accorded to professional historiographic writing as a non-mythological saying able to go back
beyond what is immediately visible. For it is here, at the fringe, where the conceptual and interpretive discourses of professional history run concretely
agroundforestalled, as de Certeau suggests, by the resistance, opacity, and
just there-ness of such signs as proper names (personages, localities, coins,
etc.), whose linguistic presence signifies an absent concreteness and specificity
below which nothing more can be done except display. In written historiography, one could argue, the proper noun is precisely mythological.
However, in its concretion as a conceptual abstraction, in its iconic condensation through repetition, the insistent fringe also interrogates the historians perception of popular historical film as a debased showing of the immediately visible in which saying reaches its limit and things appear to mean something by
themselves. For it is here, at the fringe, where the presentational and performative discourses of popular historical cinema are also stopped short and both
immediacy and visual display reach their limitas the multiplication and visibility of particular and concrete things (personages, localities, coins, and so on)
come to signify neither a naturalized past world nor to manifest an elemental
showing, but rather to aggregate as a set of material generalizations that seek any
further expression in the conceptual rather than the concrete, in historiographic
saying and writing. Here, a picture is not worth a thousand words.
Despite the certainty that Barthes accords it, then, the fringe, after all, is precisely not clear-cutand, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated or broken
nature as a border, a margin; it is an articulated limit that differs from but is constituted by the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates and
connects: those of visual historiography and written historiography. Indeed, there
is a dynamic and functional coexistence between the mythological histories
wrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories
written by my institutional peers, a co-existence and co-operation that contingently plays itself out in a constantly varying ratioor historical rationality.
This ratio or rationality emerges from a palimpsestic, heteroglossic, sometimes
dialectical, and always shifting historical field and constitutes the particular value
and affect of history to real people highly invested in their present, and actively located in medias res. Thus, the insistent fringe insists itself across a broader canvas than Roman foreheads in the cinema, and both covers and lays bare the
liminal place where the discourses of historiography and mythology meet and
cooperatefinding their necessity, value, and affect each in the other in an interrogative and imbricated relation that is less hierarchical than it is reversible.
Buck-Morss asks: How are we to understand the dialectical image as a form
of philosophical representation? Was dust such an image? fashion? the prostitute? expositions? commodities? (Sounds like a movie.) And she continues:
The cognitive experience of history, no less than that of the empirical world, require[s] the
active intervention of the thinking subject. And yet Benjamin insisted, in accordance with

20

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

the method of literary montage: I have nothing to say, only to show. Here . . . is the
source of a dilemma of interpretation. Are dialectical images too subjective in their formulation? Or, are they not subjective enough?24

COMING ATTRACTION

Guadalupe, Calif.An ancient Egyptian eye, unblinking in the sandy wind, stared up at
Peter Brosnan. And Peter Brosnan, a bearded Angelino with $10,000, a borrowed groundpenetrating radar system and a crazy dream, stared back. Take a look at this guy, said
Brosnan. Thats the Pharaoh.
And thats why Brosnan, 38, a screenwriter, teacher and documentary filmmaker, started digging in the dunes near this Santa Barbara County city of 5,500 in 1983. This is
where Cecil B. DeMille filmed the silent movie version of The Ten Commandments in
1923, and where DeMille buried and abandoned one of the largest sets in feature film historythe City of the Pharaoh, with walls that rose 110 feet and sprawled 750 feet in
width, its entrance flanked by 21 sphinxes and four 35-foot Pharaoh statues.25

What is needed here is an archeology of the dialectical image in medias res.

The goal is to bring to consciousness those repressed elements of the past (its
realized barbarisms and its unrealized dreams) which place the present in a critical position.26 Contemplating the prospects of the dig in 1990 (when he was
interviewed for The Los Angeles Times article above), the executive director of
the Santa Barbara Trust for Historical Preservation said: This is utterly unique,
and it gives you a sense of time having passedthat movies are now a part of
history.27 Fossil, Fetish, Wish Image, Ruin. As of this writing, the site has not
yet been excavated.
Department of Film & Television
University of California, Los Angeles

24. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 221-222.

25. Christopher Reynolds, An Archeology Spectacular: Unearthing the Set of DeMilles 1923
Ten Commandments, Los Angeles Times (20 November 1990), F1.
26. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 338.
27. Reynolds, An Archeology Spectacular, F1.