The Material
Image: Art and the Real in Film
by Brigitte
Peucker
Stanford University Press (Cultural
Memory in the Present), Stanford, CA,
2007
272 pp. Trade, $65; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8047-5431-6; ISBN: 0808754306.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Brigitte Peuckers essay on "intermediality"
in cinema is an important contribution
to film studies, more precisely to that
branch that focuses on the production
of meaning by and embodied spectator,
a sector occupying a strategic crossroad
position between cognitive and phenomenological
approaches that have been completing the
modernist and postmodernist readings inspired
by psychoanalysis and formalist semiotics.
"Intermediality" is defined
by Brigitte Peucker is a highly stimulating
and complex way, which exceeds by far
the mechanical combination of sound and
vision. Peucker stresses instead both
the more general blurring of time and
space, of 2D and 3D, of literature and
painting, of writing and cinema, as well
as the spectatorial effects of this type
of intermediality (one of the most thought-provoking
hypotheses of this study is that intermediality
is exactly the place where these effects
most easily and most directly occur).
As far as the internal description of
the phenomenon is concerned, Peuckers
book gives a key role to the notion of
"tableau", which she borrows
and rereads form the 18th Century
bourgeois drama and its fostering of decisive
meanings in frozen moments. This encounter
of different medialities for the
"tableau" bridges the gap between
2D painting and 3D narrative is
then provocatively broadened by the author
into a wide range of intermedial techniques
and features in film that all tend to
elicit specific (and bodily) reactions.
As far as these reactions are concerned,
The Material Image does much more
than just give a description of the specific
feelings and emotions as triggered by
these textual manipulations, but elaborates
on these reactions in order to construct
a theory of the collapse at the boundaries
between the fictional and the real, between
the work and world. On the one hand, Peucker
scrutinizes how the ontological difference
between the fictional world on screen
and the real world of the signs the fiction
is referring to is being questioned. On
the other hand, she also interrogates
the vanishing of the comparable distinction
between the "unreality" of the
film and the "reality" of the
spectators body.
One of the great merits of Peuckers
book is that it avoids any reduction of
intermediality and its implications for
the study of embodied spectatorship to
one single grand narrative or master theory
(these narratives and theories are present
in the book, which discusses Lacan, Zizek,
Bazin and Kracauer, for instance, often
in a very illuminating way, but they are
never present to the extent that they
replace the authors personal thinking).
Elegantly combining elements and insights
from very different disciplinary and linguistic
traditions, The Material Image
uses as its main references a number of
broad cultural frameworks that allow for
a very supple and open interpretation
of close-read movies (the book is divided
in nine chapters which are all devoted
to one or a very limited set of pictures).
Besides the notion of "tableau"
(Diderot) and its variant the "tableau
vivant", both linked here to the
more encompassing and richly illustrated
genre of the melodrama, Peucker cleverly
reuses Michael Frieds global antinomy
of absorption versus realism, emphasizing
of course the tendency towards the transgression
of the fourth wall and the realist inclusion
of the spectator into the fictional world.
Peuckers demonstration illustrates
very convincingly the extreme usefulness
of this approach, even outside the field
in which it had been originally theorized.
One may regret however that the author
leaves aside the whole line of thinking
on the cinema of attraction, which could
have established a dialogue with a more
directly cinematographic approach of spectatorship.
Second major advantages of The Material
Image are the exceptional qualities
of Peuckers close readings. The
author is not only able to produce clear
and original interpretations of very different
movies (from Martin Scorsese to Wim Wenders,
from Peter Greenaway to Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, not to forget Stanley Kubrick
and Tobe Hooper, of course), but on Hitchcock
and Haneke she succeeds in offering but
an excellent overview of the relevant
literature and many interesting new observations
that illustration the very strength of
the chosen viewpoint. And that Peucker
is developing and discussing her ideas
without falling into the trap of easy
abstractions and fashionable jargon is
also a feature that will also be appreciated
by more than one student and scholar.
In short, great writing and great reading,
whose impact should not remain confined
to the sole field of film studies, but
considered very carefully by all those
who, in literary theory for instance,
want to better understand why and how
texts matter.