Haptical Cinema Author(s): Antonia Lant Source: October, Vol. 74 (Autumn, 1995), pp.

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Haptical Cinema*

ANTONIA LANT

In the fourth scene of Georges Melies's ThePalace of theArabianNights (1905) the Prince, Blue Dwarf, and their entourage enter the Magic Forest on a treasure quest-but their entry is of a special kind. At first, while they are still absent from the shot, their way is utterly blocked by painted jungle flats, pressed against the camera. Gradually layer upon layer of flat, shaped, palms and vines glide to the frame's four edges, invisibly operated by studio hands, each lifting and parting, adding, almost foot by foot, depth for the arriving characters to occupy. Each removed foliage plane accommodates further their volume, their contrasting roundness as human figures. The flats' opaque material, the allover density of their drawn designs (some leafy, some calligraphic, pseudo-Koranic), and their position precisely at right angles to the camera, as if held in the plane of the screen, conceal all clues as to what, or how much of it, lies beyond as the travelers progress. A surprised monkey backflips offstage, a vine-strangled sculpture sinks out of sight, a roaming lion-Douanier-like-exposed as one flat shifts, slinks After five or six almost total changes of scene within this one shot, each at a away. plane deeper in the set, the party reaches a sphinx-guarded terrace and divides, half leaving rear left, the others foreground right, with the jungle slowly closing behind them, section by section, in the order in which it had opened. The surfaces of forest seem to reconstitute the plane of the screen, the film briefly declaring itself the decorated canvas it always is-before moving to scene five, the epiglottal
cave.

This sequence is the most systematic of Melies's repeated engagements with the novel spatiality of cinema, an utterly flat medium of presentation, insubstantial, without texture or material, and yet evoking, in a wafer, a fuller illusion of the physicality and exactness of human beings than any prior art. In other films, such as The Spiritualistic No (1903) and The Inn Where Man Rests (1903), he Photographer makes paintings come to life. In Delirium in a Studio (1907), another film that
* I would like to thank Donald Crafton for early conversations on this topic, Isabelle Frank for more recent discussions, Annette Michelson for suggesting Worringer's EgyptianArt, and Ingrid Periz for her encouragement. OCTOBER Fall 1995, pp. 45-73. ? 1995 October Instituteof Technology. 74, Magazine,Ltd. and Massachusetts

The Palaceof the ArabianNights.

1905.

Operating theflats for the Magic Forest.

entwines designed surface, illusion of spatial penetration, and an oriental set, a painting engorges an artist: the artist Ali struggles to pull his head from a bucket as a woman climbs into an ornately framed picture nearby, takes up the pose of the odalisque, and, through trick photography, freezes into the painted linen; Ali, now freed from the bucket, frustratedly bashes the frozen woman, waking the irritated Ali Bouf, who, after decapitation and other abuses, chases the first Ali after her, and eventually also into the art.1 Mdlies's fondness for giggling skeletons (a stock-in-trade from his life as a magician) belongs here too. Relatively flat and linear in form-also when painted as white bars on a black cat suit (as in The Palace of the Arabian Nights)-these ex-humans transform, through cinematic dissolves, into plump bodies of flesh; in Le Monstre(1903) a lively bone skelly, swaying before a sphinx, morphs into an undulating, veiled belly dancer, irresistible to the watching Egyptian. By interleaving painted flats with moving actors; by animating or constituting paintings through trick effects of stop motion, splicing, and double exposure; by creating a giant magic lantern that produces both still and animated projections, and then bursts open with dancing girls (in The Magic Lantern [1903]), Melies chose motifs that probed or highlighted the alluring yet illusory depths of the cinema, the impossible compressions and expansions of far and near, the unclear identities of figure and ground. But this was a quality also noted by
1. The film is also known as Ali Barbouyou Ali Bouf I'Huile. et

Haptical Cinema

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cinema's first public. One reviewer of a Biograph film shot from a moving train described the peculiar effect of "an unseen energy swallow[ing] space and fling[ing] itself into the distances."2 Maxim Gorky, at a Russian 1896 Lumiere screening, wrote of the apparent opposite motion toward himself: "A train appears on the screen ... [and] seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit."3 Such spectators record the engulfment of space threatened, but not delivered by cinema, a motion into or out of the screen, forward and back, the motion slowed and dissected on the Magic Forestjourney. Scholarship on early film has thoroughly examined its spatial life; space figures prominently in Thomas Elsaesser's collection Early Cinema:Space, Frame, Narrative,in which authors compare the spatial properties of one-shot and multishot films, uncovering their avant-garde or narrative potential.4 For some writers the less strictly spatially coded arrangements of early cinema, by comparison with the later classical style, have suggested that a wider range of spectatorial responses was possible and indeed existed.5 Just as for the Biograph and Lumiere reviewers, cinematic spatiality for most of these writers entails both the illusory one of the film and the psychosocial one of viewers. But the era of early cinema had its own specialized theorists on this point; the spatial properties of representation and their relation to an observer, indeed as defined by the observer's perception, was a formulation of art theory coincident with cinema's appearance. In fact, mulling over spatial traits in art-fine and decorative-was at its most intense in this period, constituting crucial groundwork in the emerging discipline of art history. Adolf Hildebrand's The Problem Formin Painting and Sculpture(1893) and Alois of Riegl's Problems Style (1893) and subsequent Late Roman Art Industry (1901)of foundational texts for Heinrich W6lfflin, Wilhelm Worringer, and Walter and caressed the aesthetic scope of spatial Benjamin, among others-sifted evocation across the ages and across media.6 Riegl established his notion of the
2. Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film," in Film BeforeGriffith,ed. John Fell (Berkeley: University of California Mail and Express,first cited in Robert C. Press, 1983), p. 363, quoting a reviewer from the New York and Allen, Vaudeville Film, 1895-1915: A Studyin MediaInteraction(Ph.D diss., University of Iowa, 1977), p. 131. 3. Maxim Gorky, "A Review of the Lumiere Program at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair,"July 4, 1896, trans. Leda Swan, in Kino:A Historyof Russian and SovietFilm, ed. Jay Leyda (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 408. 4. Early Cinema:Space,Frame,Narrative,ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990). 5. See, for example, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorshipin American Silent Film Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Judith Mayne, The Womanat the Keyhole: and Women's Cinema(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 6. Adolf Hildebrand, The Problemof Form in Painting and Sculpture[1893], trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1932; reprint, New York: Garland, 1978); Alois Riegl, Problems Style:Foundations a Historyof Ornament[1893], trans. Evelyn Kain with an introducof for tion by David Castriota and preface by Henri Zerner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Riegl, Late RomanArt Industry[1901], trans. RolfWinkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985). Wilhelm Worringer writes that "it is to Riegl that the greatest incentives to the work are due," while

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Kunstwollen,the "definite and purposeful" trend or taste characteristic of an age, largely through the analysis of the degree to which works of art of an era were shaped by the constraint of needing to be perceived as more planar or spatial in essence.7 Changes in artistic style were the result of changes in the Kunstwollen that corresponded above all to cultural changes in spatial perception.8 And while Riegl's formulations were to transform over the years, the beholder remained of critical importance in his mapping of differences of style and intent. As he put it, "everywork of art does after all presuppose the existence of a perceiving subject."9 These authors' objects of study were usually historically remote (late Roman, Dutch seventeenth century for Riegl, classical and Renaissance for Hildebrand, Egyptian for Worringer), but they all cited the state of contemporary representation, if not modern life itself as an impetus for their enquiries. Hildebrand noted the threat of industrialization to art and artists, "the technical progress and factory work of our day"which disengages our understanding of things from the ways in which they have been made, causing us to "value a product more for itself than as a result of some mental activity."10For Riegl (who criticized Hildebrand for insufficient sensitivity to differences between ancient and modern Kunstwollen), the understanding and analysis of past art (here specifically late Roman art) had been both necessitated and enabled by "a fundamental breach" that had set in since "the beginning of the twentieth century... an emancipation of the faculty of feeling in modern man" that permitted him to recognize such culturally motivating forces in other eras.11Worringer, though not a specialist in Egyptian art, was nevertheless compelled to interrogate it because of its value as "the pronounced counterpart of our view of space."12His work was necessary, he claimed, because

to Benjamin described him as "a decisive influence," applying his theory of the Kunstwollen his failed A to and Ph.D thesis on German tragic drama (Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction Empathy: Contribution the of Psychology Style[1908], trans. Michael Bullock [New York: Meridian, 1948], p. 137). See Thomas Y. 47 Levin, "Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History," October (Winter 1988), pp. 77-83. Walter des (Berlin: Ernst Rowolt Verlag, 1928). Trauerspiels Benjamin, Ursprung deutschen 7. Riegl, LateRomanArt Industry,p. 9. 8. See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984) for further discussion. 9. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" [1902], in German Essays on Art History: Winckelmann, Burckhardt,Panofsky, and Others, ed. Gert Schiff, The German Library Series, vol. 79 (New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 181. Riegl's essay, written as a polemic against another art historian, Josef and originally Strzygowski,summarizes the broad arguments of his earlier book LateRomanArt Industry Zeitung(Munich, April 23, 1902). appeared in BeilagezurAllgemeinen 10. Hildebrand, TheProblem Form,reprint edition, p. 15. of 11. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 174. He seems to refer, therefore, to just two years before. See also LateRomanArt Industry,p. 88. 12. Worringer, Egyptian Art, trans. Bernard Rackham (London: Putnam's, 1928), p. 82; originally ihrer Wertung(Munich: Piper, 1927). This book is marked by published as AgyptischeKunst: Probleme extremely complex and often racist arguments mobilized both to explain ancient Egyptian architecture and art, and to associate it with contemporary culture in the United States. One of Worringer's conclusions is that there is a discontinuity between Egyptian art and the culture that made it. I take up these issues in a forthcoming essay.

Haptical Cinema

49

"the problem of the history of the genesis of space" was "a truly modern one. Only for men of today could the question of the essence of spatiality become one of such actuality for the history of the spirit. We moderns were the first who could find in this any problem at all."13Worringer concluded his book with the same sentiment: "I have a strong conviction that the rise of this ideal figure [the desire for realization of full space-expression in culture] in me is no accident, but the hidden consequence of general transformations which our historical outlook and judgment are undergoing at this moment in evolution-and which urge one to put the question to which an answer is here attempted," the question of the transformation of spatial expression in culture.14 The impulse for taxonomies of form, or what Worringer will call "morphologies of culture," derived from the impact of modernist images, the proliferation of mass-cultural materials, the explosion of new "cultures of import," and shifts in urban experience that immersed filmmakers, sculptors, and museum curators alike.15 As Worringer insists, these changes put spatiality at "the center of our perceptual interest."16 In this essay I bring early cinema into contact with adjacent theories of art that analyze space, to illuminate that stage of the history of cinema when its processes of description were found so strikingly odd, new, or unfamiliar. When Gorky, comments that "Everything there-the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air-is dipped in monotonous gray,"what disturbs him in part is the democratizing effect of cinema, that all elements, dead or alive, human or not, inhabit one metaphorical and literal plane.17 "The ashen-gray foliage of the trees swaysin the wind, and the gray silhouettes of the people ... glide noiselessly on the gray ground," as if oblivious to one another, their relative significance unclear.18 Later, Virginia Woolf fuses (or confuses) fluff caught in the projection gate with the representation of a tadpole, and that with novel evocation of emotional states; and she describes her attention wandering, like Gorky's, moving across the surface of the screen, but also probing into depth, selecting for interest the gardener mowing the lawn beyond (or above) Anna Karenina and her lover.19And then
13. Ibid., pp. 73, 81. 14. Ibid., p. 91. 15. By "cultures of import" Worringer is probably referring to, among other arts, African art. He continues, the "cultures of import" in Europe no longer "allow us to adhere calmly and obstinately to the old accentuations of essential values"; these "wider possibilites of comparison" have "potentially open[ed] up an entirely new field of vision," and have made us "revis[e] ... our habits of judgment" (ibid., pp. 81, 91). One might also see the outcrop of grammars of art and design of the second half of the nineteenth century (by Walter Crane, Owen Jones, William Goodyear, an unpublished one by Riegl, and others) as part of the wider practice of classification in the sciences and social sciences. 16. Ibid., p. 73. 17. Gorky, "Lumiere Program," p. 407. 18. Ibid. 19. Virginia Woolf, "Movies and Reality," The Nation, 1926; reprinted as "The Cinema" in The Captain'sDeath Bed and Other Essays,ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950). I am indebted to Ingrid Periz for her analysis of this passage.

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there is the spatial swallowingand rushing already described. Reconnecting cinema with concurrent analyses of art gives us purchase on whatJacques Aumont recently insisted was the distinctive, initial primitiveness of cinema, its value as "a deposit of figurative invention," as the period of densest, most intense questioning of cinematic design.20 Within this territory I follow two related paths: Riegl's distinction between haptical and optical properties of art-a distinction referring to knowledge of artistic space through the senses of touch and vision-and the role of Egyptian art in making this distinction. As the conditions of modern life fueled activity in re-visioning the past, Egypt played a particular role-in Worringer's view, a study of its art provided the most profitable example for arriving at modern selfknowledge.21 Its objects could do this for a complex of reasons. Through them theorists planted an anchoring pole in their (often teleological) models of decipherment, grasped one end of a representational range; ancient Egyptian style embodied a distinct, earlier system of representation. Crudely put, this was the flat, hieratic, archaic, planar end of things, not the linear perspective and complex volume of Renaissance art. Repeatedly, Riegl dynamized his argument for evolution of the Kunstwollenby opposing modern and ancient Egyptian wills (this practically in the teeth of Cubism), using the term "modern art" largely to refer to Renaissance production onward, and sometimes explicitly to Impressionism.22 "Ancient architecture [was] hostile to space, and modern architecture ... space searching." Of Egyptian reliefs he says, "space relations are avoided, or, as far as they had to be considered, are cunningly transformed into relations on the plane. In this respect our present-day expectations are contrary to the intent of the Egyptians."In a final example he writes, "Because our modern art appeals to a high degree to experience (and is even in danger of seeing the material deformed through the conceptual), it is understandable that we prefer the subjective perception of the Greek over the objective one of the Egyptians."23 Expanding this point in a note, he continues: "every Egyptian artist worked painstakingly suppressing any subjective infiltration. The diametrical opposition to this constitutes our modern art of so-called individualism, where each artist creates painstakingly in accordance with his subjective ideals which leads to the result that there cannot be made a work of art which would be considered by all, or at least by a larger part of the public, as 'good' and that especially the most celebrated works of art have found the most vehement opposition."24 One hears in this opposition instability on both the Egyptian and modem
20. Jacques Aumont, "When Is Primitive Cinema?" (lecture given at "Cinema Turns 100," the Third International Conference of Domitor, Society for the Study of Early Cinema, New York University,June 1994). My reference to Gorky here was prompted by Aumont's discussion. 21. Worringer, EgyptianArt, p. 82. See Riegl, LateRomanArt Industry,p. 27, for one of several references to Impressionism. 22. 23. Ibid., pp. 57, 59, 63. 24. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

Haptical Cinema

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sides, and this, through a kind of undertow, brought them into another relation. On the one hand, ruptures in the current Kunstwollenstare Riegl in the face (he worries about deformation through extreme subjective content), and modern changes in general, as I have already noted, consciously motivate the wave of investigation into spatial vocabulary in both art and theory.25 On the other hand, already embedded within Egyptian sculptures and icons, as described by Riegl, Hildebrand, and others, was the germ of expansion into variegated possibility. Egypt could not help but stand for ideas of emergence and evolution in style itself because of its place within their chronologies as the initial or primitive form, from which there could only be a progression. Riegl writes, "It is obvious that the isolation of the individual figures connected to the plane, as it was principally intended by the Egyptians, could not be done with absolute strictness. .. .The slightest necessity to bring two figures into a closer and more evident relation to one another had to lead to ... the connection of the individual shapes not just with the plane (which was already the aim of ancient Egyptian art), but with one another." He describes this state of affairs as "a contrast, and therefore a problem." He continues: "furthermore, space relations-foreshortenings, overlaps, and shadows-could not all possibly be suppressed as soon as plane relations were admitted.... The suppression of space in ancient Egyptian art meant thus another latent contradiction, in which, again, was contained a problem for reconciliation and thus the seed for future development."26 This leaky structure grows in a particular ideological nexus: it is consonant with the gestures of historical (and sometimes imperial) vantage in expressing the dual desire to locate ancient Egypt both as the powerful but limited source from which modern culture has traveled an enormous and valuable distance, and as a stable, weighted, touchstone, the eternal beacon from the past, reassuring in the grip of modernity's fluctuations. We witness a collapse of the structure, the fusing of the Egyptian and the modern, when Picasso and Braque, in a reference to their radical reordering of artistic planes and spaces in 1908, are said to be working "in the Egyptian style."27But here must be mentioned one other, contrasting facet of the signification of Egypt within discourses on art (although there is no room to discuss its full implications)-its possession of "stylistic perfection."28
25. In fact Riegl will argue that it is in Dutch seventeenth-century art that the most ideal balance between objective and subjective elements is achieved. See Margaret Iverson's discussion of this "delicate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 147 and elsewhere. equipoise" in AloisRiegl:ArtHistoryand Theory 26. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, p. 60. Riegl earlier refers to this "latent contradiction" in his chapter on architecture: "In ancient artistic creation there existed from the very beginning a latent inner controversy; one was not able to avoid a subjective blend in spite of the intended basically objective perception of objects. This latent controversy was the seed for all later development." (See pp. 22, 24.) 27. See Arthur Danto, "Georges Braque," TheNation (August 27, 1988), pp. 174-76, for a discussion of this theme. Louis Vauxcelles and Le Douanier Rousseau both apparently made the connection to Egypt, although only the Vauxcelles reference is clearly documented. 28. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, p. 63. Riegl here refers to Egyptian accomplishment "in the conquering of raw materials," in which they have been "superior to all their successors until the present day,"although he is only impressed by this within certain limits.

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By 1891 Owen Jones's The Grammarof Ornamenthad become "a veritable bible of reference ... to English and American decorators, the decorative artist, the cultivated amateur in aesthetic matters, and the professional architect."29 Published in 1856, afterJones had participated in designing the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the volume illustrated decorative art from around the world.30 Jones began his one-hundred-plate selection with three plates from "Savage Tribes," followed by nine of Egyptian ornament and three Assyrian and Persian examples. His message, shared by others, was that European design was sorely in need of renewal, but-and here he differed from other commentators-he proposed that the sources of greatest accomplishment in design were outside Europe, where, in Savage Tribes, "the principles of the very highest ornamental art are manifest," even in "the very barbarous practice" of tattooing the face.31 In Egyptian design the same high value was to be found, via "inspiration direct from nature." But rather than naturalistic copying, in Egyptian design the "lawswhich the works of nature display" are observed so "that Egyptian ornament, however conventionalized, is always true."32Jones concludes: "We venture, therefore, to claim for the Egyptian style, that though the oldest, it is, in all that is requisite to constitute a true style of art, the most perfect. The language in which it reveals itself to us may seem foreign, peculiar, formal, and rigid, but the ideas and the teachings it conveys to us are of the soundest. As we proceed with other styles, we shall see that they approached perfection only so far as they followed, in common with the Egyptians, the true principles to be observed in every flower that In grows."33 other words, in another influential strand of assessment of visual culture, overlapping with Riegl's in its focus on decoration but divergent in its setting store by nature rather than the cultural engine of the Kunstwollen, Egyptian accomplishment represented the apogee of decoding and understanding, a source of immediate value and interest rather than an ancient historical mooring. To this brief survey of Egypt's variable ratings within the flurry of late-nineteenth-century grammars of art we may now relate the cinema. I have argued elsewhere for the immense range of attractions of Egypt for early cinema, from the
as William H. Goodyear, The Grammar theLotus:A New Historyof ClassicOrnament a Development 29. of (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1891), p. 3. of Sun Worship Owen Jones, The Grammarof Ornament (1856; reprint, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold 30. Company, 1982).Jones's personal forte was in Arabic design: he wrote a reference text on the Alhambra in Spain, was commissioned to ornament the Khedive's Palace in Cairo, and posed against a backdrop A of Moorish motifs for a formal portrait in 1857. See Ernst Gombrich, The Senseof Order: Studyin the Art of Psychology Decorative (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), p. 51 and elsewhere. 31. Jones, The Grammar Ornament, 13. p. of 32. Ibid., p. 22. 33. Ibid., p. 24. Goodyear answered Jones's tome with his own grammar, this time of the lotus, in which he placed Egypt at the source of all stylistic evolution, not only for Greek egg-and-dart molding, as Jones had done, but also for "Ancient American" design or Mayan culture, and all others: "the lotus was a fetich [sic] of immemorial antiquity . . . worshipped . . . from Japan to the Straits of Gibraltar" (Grammarof the Lotus, p. 4). And it was through Goodyear's publication that Riegl could, in his own Problems Style,link eons of development of style of the acanthus, starting as early as the Egyptian. of

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parallel between filmic animation and the raising of mummies to the theorization of movies as hieroglyphic texts for pictorial reading.34 I now want to suggest that this prevalence may be as central to cinema's desire to signal an evolving spatial language as it was to the contemporary Riegl. The illusion of moving photographic pictures on a plane, and the cutting of diverse spaces against one another in multishot films suggested, in its early reception, a pressing out into and back into space, a claiming of new space, a movement between haptical and optical, entailing specific interactions with a viewer. If we could document concrete contiguities between filmmakers and art theorists on this point, the place to look would be Vienna during the early decades of this century. But in the absence of these we can still say that filmmaking cultures were, like audiences and critics, steeped in Egypt's association with striking spatiality, be it of flatness, of strangeness, of layers, of emergence. In the cinema, as in art theory, Egyptian spatiality was fertile and (1917) cluttered, ornamenproductive, lending to Theda Bara's world in Cleopatra tal planarity, to Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932) giantism and depth, while in other films it seemed to be able to trace out the shift from a cinema of frontal presentation to a cinema of articulated depth. In this realm where cinematic material and nascent principles of art history intersected lay another reason for filming pharaohs, for both cinema and Egypt spoke of a world on the verge of spatial transformation-their combined effect was to be intoxicating, and enduring.

Depressed by "the poverty of sculptural art" and short of opportunity for bas-relief, Hildebrand wrote a treatise whose force would be amplified by his own experience as a working sculptor.35 Here he proposed "our general spatial ideas and the perception of spatial form as the most important facts in our conception of the reality of things."36But he noted that the eye perceives space in two modes, visually and kinesthetically, corresponding to distant and near encounters.37 In distant perception we grasp the image as a whole, as a spatial unity that tends toward flatness, or at least has clear, comprehensible spatial relations between parts; this is a "visual projection," Fernbildor distance picture.38 By contrast, the nearer an object is in our field of view, the more eye movement is required to perceive it as coherent and spatially unified, but through this motion we can piece together disparate views, using a combination of the visual and kinetic modes.39
34. Antonia Lant, "The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania," October59 in (Winter 1992), pp. 86-112; reprinted in East of Suez:Orientalism Film, ed. Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 35. Hildebrand, TheProblem ofForm,p. 116. 36. Ibid., p. 17 (from the foreword to the third edition). 37. Ibid., p. 21. 38. Ibid., p. 28. 39. In his later foreword Hildebrand allies these two modes to the faculties of sight and touch: "These two means of perceiving the same phenomenon not only have separate existences in our faculties

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Successful art brought these two operations into balance, striving toward a "general law of unity in space" best represented by the sculptural work of Michelangelo, woefully lacking in the memorial groups of Canova with their diagonals and proudly jutting figures, and crassly flouted in modern panoramas.40 Panoramas, in combining deep, distant, painted scenes with real foreground objects, brought "forth an unpleasant feeling, a sort of dizziness" in the "sensitive observer" trying to reconcile multiple, incommensurate clues to coded depth as he or she scanned from the near to the distant and back.41 Ultimately, the panorama "presuppose[d] in the spectator a coarseness and vulgarity of vision" and encouraged the same "lack of culture in perception, just as wax figures do, by
means of perverse sensations and a false feeling of reality."42

Hildebrand's account of visiting this mass-cultural, precinematic entertainment clarifies his ultimate preference for the bas-relief, a mode of representation with particular metaphoric power for evoking the aesthetics of cinema. His model for explaining the "conception of relief" is reminiscent of Melis's Forest dissection, for in forming three-dimensional objects, artists should consider volume as simply "a plane continuing into the distance." As he instructs, "think of two planes of glass standing parallel, and between them a figure whose position is such that its outer points touch them." (His sandwich formulation alternates planar and volumetric elements-like Melies's foliage flats and actors.) The zone between the glass sheets forms a "uniform depth measurement" and when the figure is viewed through the front glass "it becomes unified into a unitary pictorial surface. ... The figure lives, we may say, in one layer of uniform depth. Each form tends to make of itself a flat picture within the visible two dimensions of this layer, and to be understood as such a flat picture."43Hildebrand adds that when sculpting from the block one moves from the visual to the kinetic, imagining depth relations in planes, slowly emerging as if through a series of bas-reliefs, or as if the sculpture were in a bath, the water gradually draining away.44 Hildebrand's account becomes suggestively cinematic as he traces bas-relief evolution from the Egyptian. A low-relief figure of a pharaoh, partially incised and partially worked into forward planes, "illustrates the evolution of sculpture from drawing,"45while another, cuboid Egyptian figure "illustrates the evolution of sculpture from drawing carved into a block."46 Still referring to the Egyptian
for sightand touch,but are unitedin the eye .... The twofunctionsof seeingand touchingexisthere ... in intimateunion [and] an artistictalent consistsin havingthese two functionspreciselyand harmoniouslyrelated"(ibid.,p. 14). 40. Ibid.,pp. 113, 135. 41. Ibid.,p. 56. 42. Ibid.,p. 58;and see p. 113. 43. Ibid.,p. 80. 44. Ibid., pp. 128-29, 134-35. He contraststhis method to sculptingin clay,whichproceedsfrom the attributes bathimageto Michelangelo. the kineticto the visual.Hildebrand 45. Ibid.,p. 98.
46. Ibid., p. 103. Michelangelo's sculptures retained the ghosts of their original blocks-but not as

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example, he writes: "Sculpture has undoubtedly evolved from drawing; by giving depth to a drawing we make of it a relief, and this relief may be regarded as the animation of a surface."47 Emergence into volume is animation of a plane, illustrated by an Egyptian incised/relief drawing on the way to sculpture, emblematic both of origin and the onset of development, and its form both protrudes from and retreats into the surface, moves forward and backward. By "animation" Hildebrand meant both increased modulation in the plane, and increased activity by the viewer, who would move, or imagine he moved, to perceive the object. In this context he reminds his reader that "all our knowledge concerning the plastic nature of objects is derived originally from movements which we make either with eyes or with hands. And it is through a complex of such movements, or by so-called kinesthetic ideas of them, that we are able to or solid form."48 Riegl also identified a trend toward imagine three-dimensional animation in the development from Egyptian to classically antique Kunstwollen (a trend favored by modern taste).49 Let us now shift over from Hildebrand and Riegl's animation to films that have showcased cinema's power to animate a surface by adapting the vocabulary of Egypt. Even though this is surely not what Noel Burch meant when he wrote that early cinema "began again" the journey toward Renaissance perspective and "only fully rejoined the 'classical' representation of space between 1910 and 1915," several films of the teens do indeed present spatial amplification as a passage from the Egyptian to animation, sometimes marking the journey by the drawing of a curtain, itself reminiscent of the onset of motion picture projection.50 In Death of Saul, for example, arrayed in the foreground is a counter of representational options: Saul's rotund body in semi-Assyrian garb contrasts with painted hieroglyphics, a bas-relief, and curtain and parapet ornaments of flat chevrons and lotuses.51 Angry and jealous at David's popularity, Saul holds back the curtain inviting us into the more potent, intensely spatial cinema beyond where the crowds are lionizing their hero. It is as if by displaying a wide range of artistic modes, each associated with its own special thickness, the film better flaunts its new property in the center-the dramatic presentation of illusion free from demarcated, planar zones. deep spatial In Ramses, King of Egypt (1912) landscape shots of shepherding alternate with
much as the Egyptian-making them the most spatially unified and successful of works for Hildebrand. Illustrative plates were not included in the first three German editions of TheProblem Formin Painting of and Sculpture and may first have been added, as far as I have been able to establish, in the 1932 English edition. 47. Ibid., p. 125. 48. Ibid., p. 24. 49. Riegl, Late RomanArt Industry,p. 77. This discussion occurs in a section where Riegl is establishing the "inanimation" of the later Constantinian relief art in which there is a "latent schism felt by the modern beholder between Fernsicht and Nahsicht,far and near positions of viewing." 50. Noel Burch, Life to ThoseShadows,trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 162. 51. Fragment of a film viewed at the Library of Congress, FAB 1703, also known as David and Saul and Mortde Saiil (Pathe, 1912).

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Mort de Saul. 1912. scenes of Ramses' court, the sets patterned to suggest a similar cinematic lineage. At one point a servant leaves the palace, parting curtains between two massive Antinous figures. A wall incised with birds, an oar, and feathers fills right frame; behind him is the flattest lotus pattern, while on the stele by his side are cartouche strips. The full volume of his live body is heightened by its motion the curtains, and by its juxtaposition with slimmer, static, or totally flat, through nonperspectival representational forms. In a second scene, the woman Rameses loves flings open drapes to reveal the gleaming statue of Isis in depth; she heads toward it, forsaking the hieratic, film-strip borders of the frame for the more three-dimensional world of gods and godesses beyond.52 In a later film, She based on H. Rider Haggard's novel, the same elements occur, but highly (1925), eroticized. The curtain is transparent, printed with a life-sized, Egyptianate human frieze. Behind it glows a light, illuminating a huge statue, a fountain playing, and She moving. Suddenly the curtain is torn open by the moving volume of her body passing through it, her head backlit and veiled as she prowls toward Holly, more fully revealing as she goes the luxury of the hidden space behind her. The curtain itself, with its figures, slight folds, and undulations, slight thickness, not quite one with the skin of the screen, portends this spatial rending. Even the many mummy cases of silent cinema, painted and designed, sometimes in relief, and containing bound actors who will come to life, proffer spatial forms in the
52. There are similar scenes in Josephand His Brethren (Cines, 1911).

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Aboveand below: Ramses, King of Egypt. 1912.

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She. 1925.

Ancient Temples of Egypt. 1912.

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evolutionary sequence. Their Chinese-doll quality, and the self-unbinding of the mummies (often a critical moment in their animation), brings together in one figure the journey from bas-relief (the case) to sculpture in the round (the living mummy), the wrapped mummy being a sort of haptical staging post on the way, stuck to the plane of the back of the case. Egypt spoke to silent cinema's spatiality in other ways besides those suggested Hildebrand's model of animated drawing via the bas-relief, and I will briefly by review them here as further evidence of the general relevance of the Egyptianate in making tangible cinema's promised volume.53 At the simplest level, viewers recognized, in the stationary zoetrope or spiral kinetograph (in which sequences of slightly varying printed, drawn, or photographed images are arranged as a frieze), formal similarities to the banded design of tomb decoration. Certainly the flat, strip form of exposed celluloid echoed this art for some commentators.54 A second association lay in the radical juxtapositions of scale made possible through cinema-through the projection of close-ups, editing, double exposure, split screen, and so on-but already familiar from the daunting scale shifts of nineteenth-century photographs of Egypt. By the 1890s images of giant Egyptian statuary, above all the sphinx at Giza, had been widely circulated through lantern shows, weekly magazines, and books. The placement of human figures alongside the monuments enhanced their immensity and hence the images' fascination of staggering discontinuities of scale without tricks or editing.55 Nile valley locations later provided settings for silent films, for Kalem's Ancient Temples Egypt of (1912) for example, in which, in the opening shot, writer and actress Gene Gauntier and the Kalem troop stride past a fallen head of Ramses. These were, as it were, naturally occurring, immobile instances of one of cinema's eeriest early properties-giantism of the moving face. Double exposure also enabled new scale relations within the same shot. In Cabiria(Italy, 1914) the decoration of the court of Cirta (a town meant to evoke North African Carthage) blends Assyrian, Persian, and particularly Egyptian design with its sun-disk scarabs, Horus figures with guarding wings, and Anubislike monoliths. As Queen Sofinisba dreams that she will lose this wealth if she does
Points in the next two paragraphs appear in my contribution to Cinima sans Frontieres/Images 53. across Borders, 1895-1918, ed. Roland Cosandey and Francois Albera (Lausanne/Quebec: PayotLausanne/Nuit blanche editeur, 1995). 54. See, above all, Vachel Lindsay's discussion of this in TheArt of theMovingPicture[1915] (New York: Liveright, 1970) where, among other references, he recommends TheBookof theDead as a blueprint for screenwriters. Charles Urban's film Egypt surely demonstrates this relation: one scene, shot in the British Museum, compounds three layers of serial frames, in three separate planes: the casket decoration at greatest depth, with its regular, recurring pilasters; the glass case, also segmented into frames, and the unseen film stock itself, passing before the lens behind the viewer. See Charles Urban, Urban Movie Chats, Egypt,circa 1921. 55. See Julia Ballerini, "The In Visibility of Hadji-Ishmael: Maxime Du Camps's 1850 Photographs of Egypt," in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual CultureSince the Renaissance,ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 147-60, for an expanded discussion of this point.

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(GretaGarbo. Publicity photo. 1 930s.

"O.,I

In I

not sacrifice the girl Cabiria, Moloch's three monstrous, isolated eyes blink and hover over her chaise while a huge hand reaches from frame left as if to grab her. The double exposure creates a shocking, gruesome scale disruption to express her fear and horror. Even a film such as Melies's The Man with a Rubber Head, with no Oriental content, might have called up Egypt's now widespread cultural library of monumentalism sans editing (which it was Melies's trick to conceal). In Blackmail's chase scene in th'e British Museum (Hitchcock's last, more-or-less silent film), a massive Egyptian head looms behind the escaping man, memorializing, I would suggest, the link to the opening chapters of cinema. The central point here is that radical juxtapostions of scale, particularly those accomplished within the same frame, could not help but summon Egypt, whose visual impact of massiveness was produced via figures whose scale persisted without the aid of projection. These were the largest faces in the world, but for cinema, "surpass[ing] in the gigantic and monstrous all that antiquity has left us."56Surely the urge to superimpose Greta Garbo's face on a sphinx lay in its power to express so succinctly the combined impacts of her close-up, overwhelming in its scale, silence, and enigmatic sensibility. But the act of superimposition also produced a kind of bas-relief. The accu56. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy History (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 198. Of of course, Mayan, Easter Islander, and other sculptural traditions produced gigantic figures, but none were as widely reproduced or discussed in this period as the Egyptian.

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rate registration of the photomontage, combined with the retention of the sphinx's characteristic nemes silhouette, suggested that Garbo's head did not replace the sphinx's but rather covered it in a new, film-star skin, one layer over the other. And it is not only the unimaginable sliver of space between one layer and the next that points to the bas-relief genre, but also the very embeddedness of the sphinx itself. Over the centuries it had become, through erosion, no longer fully modeled but, bodily, clearly of the rock strata, while sand had in addition hidden its lower quarters. The promise of spatial emergence, which I have been arguing was acutely associated with early cinema, adhered to both the collage technique and the location's geography. In fact, for Hegel, a constrained emergence characterized ancient Egyptian culture in general, but the Sphinx in particular: "The human head looking out from the brute body exhibits Spirit as it begins to emerge from the merely Natural-to tear itself loose therefrom and already to look more freely around it; without, however, entirely freeing itself from the fetters Nature had imposed."57 Because of its extensive underground chambers, as much as because of time's sand burial, Hegel seemed to perceive Egypt as one gigantic bas-relief.58The gradual freeing of above-ground structures, under way through excavations of the second half of the nineteenth century, would then parallel through metonymy Hildebrand's sculpture from the block; only now sand instead of water seeped away.59 Garbo's sphinx was not unique but followed Theda Bara's, Asta Nielsen's, and several other publicity images which built up thin spatial layers of visual illusion. In one for Cleopatra(1917) these layers included Bara's face floating off the sphinxy surface, her name painted as if in shallow, protruding relief, and the film title seemingly chiseled in below.60Even in a second, collage-free photograph, Bara seems both fused with and emergent from the Egyptianate-painted lotuses sprout from her head and bud from her shoulders, enhancing the bas-relief effect, while she stands upon a parabolic ledge, measuring just the kind of shallow slice Hildebrand prescribed. Art work for Edith Storey's The Dust of Egypt (1915) also bonds a princess to a decorated plane, sections here too painted to look both incised and protruding.61 It is especially significant that all these images are promotional materials, invitations to the show. They hint at the departure from the static flatness of the photograph, the frieze, the painting, that cinema will perform, pointing to the sensuality of emergence from two dimensions into "living"
57. Ibid., p. 199; see also p. 213. Philip Kuberski refers to this passage, although more to draw on its negative evaluations of the culture, in his very interesting essay on Egypt in The Persistence Memory: of Organism,Myth, Text(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 58. "The inummerable edifices of the Egyptians are half below the ground and half rise above it into the air" (Hegel, ThePhilosophy History,p. 199). of 59. Another type of bas-relief was associated with Egypt in this period: travelers and scholars made "squeezes" from incised hieroglyphic texts, usually papier mache impressions, dried, and then studied later, or perhaps kept as souvenirs. Gradually, photography took over this role. 60. See illustration in Lant, "The Curse of the Pharaoh," p. 86. 61. See illustration in ibid., p. 102.

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Publicity stillfor Cleopatra with Theda Bara. 1917. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

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forms, initially held frozen but in screenings proferred in motion and potential volume. Bara's Cleopatraspeaks this impossible incursion as she looms forward from the stone surface to challenge the clean boundaries and contained design of haptic form. Egyptiana calibrated the impact of this spatial complexity, cuing both cinema's actual flatness (the screen and film stock) and the moving human body somehow contained within it. And the bas-relief offered an especially powerful shorthand for this, living as it did between two kingdoms, drawing and sculpture, the flat and the full; connoting as it did the idea of transition and emergence; and operating as it did in a zone where background and foreground were rarely fully distinguishable, and often interchangeable.62 Hildebrand's distinction of the near and distant, to be reconciled in the basrelief, was important for Riegl, whose discussion of spatial form not only further illuminates the role the Egyptianate might play in film, but itself filtered into film theory at the hand of Walter Benjamin. Riegl honed his ideas on the decorative arts, plying his way between the Ring and Sch6nbrunn, where half the Austrian carpet collection was still royally housed. From his research he concluded that there had been a "decisive shift [in art's history] from the striving after objectivity in the tactile appearance (haptic objectivism) to the objectivity of the visual appearance (optical objectivism)."63 In art of the former camp "depth and delimitation" of the object spoke primarily to the viewer's tactile sense, while "optical (visible) qualities, like color and light" made optic art known to the observer.64 Hinged to this was the question of where the viewer stood (in either Nahsicht, Fernsicht,or Normalsicht positions-near, far, or somewhere in between), and whether, among other elements, shadows in the art work appeared to have endless depth or were perceived more as clearly delimited, defining graphic marks. All this was tied to the matter of how much subjective participation was demanded, allowed, or invited on the part of the viewer, and whether the object appeared to belong to the same space as the viewer or not. Riegl explained that a

The bas-relief as a figure for cinema, or a fixture in cinema, is a richer motif than space permits 62. me to examine here. Mention should, however, be made of Freud's analysis of Jensen's story of Gradiva, in which the young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, weaves his desires into a copy of an antique relief of a girl "who steps along." He fantasizes from this relief that she comes to life, "animating the past with his imagination," repressing his love for a local girl, Zoe Bertang, his emotions locked instead into "being in love with something past and lifeless" (Freud, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"[1906], in The StandardEdition of the Complete Works SigmundFreud,vol. 9, trans. Psychological of and ed. James Strachey [London: The Hogarth Press, 1959], pp. 16, 22). Also relevant is Hugo Mfinsterberg's discussion of the impression of depth in cinema, referring to Vachel Lindsay's proposition that we experience cinema like sculpture in motion, with the foreground "full of dumb giants. The bodies of these giants are in high sculptural relief" (Mfinsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study [1916] [New York: Dover, 1970], pp. 22-23). Andre Bazin's discussion of the indexicality of cinematography, in which its operations resemble forming a mold, a death mask, or a (new) Shroud of Turin, resonates with the bas-relief theme (Bazin, WhatIs Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 63. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 185. 64. Ibid., p. 181.

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haptic work could be almost fully understood in the dark, through touch, because of its clear outline or boundary, establishing a tangible sense of surface, and a separation of the object from the viewer. In the optical mode, visual style "unite[d] objects in an open spatial continuum and increasingly appeal[ed] to the spectator's recognition of shared realities."65This insight enabled Riegl to speak of the "inevitable admixtures of subjective vision" in art since the Middle Ages66-optical qualities were more subjective in that they "depend[ed] to a greater degree on those chance circumstances in which the perceiving subject [found] itself."67 Riegl's schema is suggestive for a discussion of early cinema in several respects. First, the subtle relationships of surface, plane, and depth through which his Kunstwollen expressed itself were most clearly revealed in the nonfigurative arts, above all in architecture and the crafts (though they applied across all media); hence Riegl's lifelong interest in the spatial grammar of decoration. In other words, Riegl's understanding of the relation of viewer to art work is not derived from his or her identification with a represented human figure, but rather operates at the level of design, suggesting an additional avenue for discussing film figuration besides via narrative and plot. Further, reflecting on spatiality was central to Riegl's thesis, an endeavor that immediately led him to discuss a viewer and the linkage of spatial perception to spatial presentation in art. Film constituted yet another arena of spatial articulation, and one might make the historical parallel between Riegl's argument for the increasing imbrication of subjectivity in optic art-that not cleanly set apart from the viewer-and the broad shift in filmmaking styles from a cinema of presentation, of attractions, to one of representation, in which a diegetic mooring for the viewer is increasingly offered.68 Lastly, Riegl's "dialectical terminology" (as he puts it in a nod to Hegel) installs ancient Egyptian art as emblematic of the haptic, the seed of an evolving spatial language.69 The discussion of tactility that accompanies this distinction, and that was developed by Benjamin, might be productively related to current questioning of the optical's dominant role in culture, such as Linda Williams'srecent argument for the haptical consumption of pornographic film, for example-for Riegl tackled both the "the sensual act of seeing"and the sense of touch as components of perception, and pondered their modern atrophism.70
65. Holly, Panofsky, 73. p. 66. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 177. 67. Ibid., p. 181. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde" 68. [1981] in Early Cinema, pp. 56-67. The term "cinema of attractions" was formulated by Andre Gaudreault and Tom Gunning. 69. Riegl, "LateRoman or Oriental?" p. 186. 70. Linda Williams, "Corporeal Observers: Visual Pornographies and the 'Carnal Density of Vision,"' in FugitiveImages,ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 3-41; for anothin On er view, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques the Observer: Visionand Modernity the NineteenthCentury of (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 59-64, 122-24. Riegl, "LateRoman or Oriental?"p. 180.

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Riegl annointed ancient Egyptian art the "strictest plane-art in the world"; with its emphasis on "mass and surface"71 it was least encumbered by subjective The ancient Egyptian temple was "an isolated formal unit" not tendencies. "delimited... in depth" but in height and width72; it necessarily deemphasized any relation to its beholder in attempting "the clearest possible delineation of the individual figure."73 Going into detail about Egypt's hapticity, Riegl explained that the pyramid was the "architectural ideal of the ancient Egyptians" because "any of the four sides permits the beholder's eye to observe an always unified plane of an isoceles triangle, the sharply rising sides of which by no means reveal the connecting space behind."74 Further, windows, those "means of communication between inside and outside" that would readily convey depth, are small and in Egyptian temples.75 For similar reasons Egyptian architecture concealed exhibited "space fright." Huge interiors such as the hypostyle hall at Karnak had to be packed with columns; in other halls "the viewer is more aware of the delimiting flat walls than of the empty space between them."76 Ancient Egyptian art placed "the sharpest possible emphasis on the outline within the plane" and accorded access only "in the most limited way to depth-designating shadow, admitting just enough of it to allow recognition of depth in the modeling of the surface"-hence the very shallow relief of much Egyptian art.77 Furthermore, the representation of figures as "striding... types ... with their profile positioning of head and legs and their frontal view of eyes and shoulders"78 avoided foreshortto the greatest extent possible, ening, or overlapping again minimizing suggestions of depth. Riegl found this art lacking in aerial and linear perspective "insofar as it extends beyond the individual figure,"79 an effect supported by the use of the "strictest polychromy"-the application of "single, unbroken color" only within the "tactile limits of an object"80 or drawing-instead of indefinite coloristic application that would confuse figure and ground.8s By contrast, Riegl notes in Greek art an increase of shadows and an attempt in the relief figure "to more and more free itself from the ground," both leading to a greater "plastic effect." It still provokes the "tactile organs of the viewer," but there is a less sharp delineation of height and width than in ancient Egyptian art.82 Riegl then describes the gradual hollowing out around relief figures, such as
71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. Riegl as discussed by Worringer, EgyptianArt, pp. 82, 87. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 178. Ibid., p. 181. Riegl, Late RomanArt Industry,p. 27. Riegl, "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 179; see also LateRomanArt Industry,p. 28. "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 179 and LateRomanArt Industry,p. 28. "Late Roman or Oriental?" p. 182. Ibid. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 183.

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in fourth century A.D. works, and the "gulf that separates them ... torn open by the

Greek development" from ancient Egyptian reliefs.83 For Riegl it is late Roman art, previously dismissed as a culture of decline, that most interestingly documents, if in faltering ways, the uneven journey of artistic invention from haptic to optical forms. To appreciate this it wasjust a question, he argued, of seeing it through its own Kunstwollen, and not that of the modern period, although modernity's changes now made that possible. Riegl's schema, delineating relations of planimetric to volumetric space, and space within an object versus space around it, has been heavily criticized for its teleological linearity, and for the porousness of its categories, which caused even Riegl trouble. However, it is that very porousness, and the critical importance of Egypt within it, in a theory contemporaneous with cinema's birth, that tells us more of what celluloid Egyptianizing meant, both historically and aesthetically. One final example will support my case: a film bulging with formal comparisons, of the moving with the still, the silent with the noisy, the flat with the volumetric, the photographic with the cinematic-in a massive memorial to the silent cinemawhich adds for good measure a director and central character from Riegl's hometown.84 Karl Freund's TheMummy(1932) begins on an archaeological dig in 1921, a resonant date for viewers of the early 1930s-Tutankhamen's tomb was to be opened the following year, as Ardeth Bey (Boris Karloff) will remark. But it is already in the elaborately crafted introductory sequence, naming studio, producer, star, and picture title, that The Mummyuses the spatial incipience of Egypt to unlock cinema's promise, spinning it through a complex of motions. At first the familiar plane orbits the Universal globe, counterclockwise, with the globe's motion, noisily passing round the back and out of sight, leaving a trail of letters: "A Universal Picture." The screen fades to black, and then, as harsh trumpet notes sound, a shot of a model landscape with raked lighting fades in, a pyramid at left, sphinx at right, both nestled in sand dunes and starkly lit; "Carl Laemmle presents Boris Karloff" fades in across them. Almost immediately the model begins to spin in front of the camera, while instead the impression is of the camera arcing horizontally around the model, passing rightward in front of the sphinx, causing the pyramid to seem to move behind the sphinx in a parallax motion. This pyramid is then eclipsed by a second, whose two faces almost fill the screenand we briefly catch sight of a third pyramid in the left background, beyond the sphinx as it were. The camera comes to rest on this second pyramid, on its furthermost, shadowed face, where the words "The Mummy" are mounted, as if cut in deep stone relief, casting long trailing shadows over the stone blocks. The swiveling and spinning motions, not just of globe and plane, standard
83. Ibid., p. 184. Karl Freund was working in film for Alexander "Sascha"Kolowrat in Vienna from 1912, before 84. moving to Berlin and then to the United States.

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for Universal, but of the icons and even (apparently) the camera, have now rotated the spectator too, making him or her seem to change places with the sphinx and pyramids-in fact, the rotation ceases just as the viewer would come into sight of him- or herself, as it were. The motion through almost 180 degrees, prizes open a volume within which the story will unfold-the extravagant opening pan marks out and invents that volume, dramatizing it by forcing it out of the stone remains of Egypt. We have, in effect, traveled behind the haptic, around it, to its reverse side, or inside-the side that, according to Riegl, cannot be known from the outer surface. The cinema offers us that possibilty, and TheMummyhere both knows it and flaunts it, in the process narratively reorienting the spectator to the darker, hidden, other side of Egypt, the occultic over the scientific, and then, later in the film, nostalgically remembering the overthrown silent past of film in an entirely mute pharaonic sequence. TheMummylooks both ways, being formally innovative in its use of sound, scale models, and back projection, but mournful both for silent cinema and for Egypt, "the real Egypt" in the words of the heroine, Helen, the one with "nothing dreadfully modern." This fulcrul position is expressed thematically in the figure of the mummy, suspended between life and death; in the heroine, who is half-European and half-Egyptian, part new woman, part ancient princess, speaking both English and an ancient Egyptian language; in the political discussion of the fate of excavated remains, whether they should be in Europe or Egypt; and in the presentation of two approaches to archaeology, the scientific and psychic, represented by doctors Whemple and Muller, from London and Vienna. And it is also implied that Helen is a psychoanalytic patient of Dr. Muller, but that's another story.

Riegl's theories combined power of insight with sufficiently abstract and malleable terms to invite wide application.85 From the account I have given we would expect that when film theorists adopted his categories it would be to describe cinema as an optic art, one that could not be known at all through touch and that possessed a strong subjective component. The haptic, if present, would be an imagined point of departure, perhaps a memory of early film culture. However, both Benjamin and Burch make the opposite case, the former through a perverse, inventive brilliance, the latter through a projective twist on the possibility of touching cinematic space. For both, mature cinema is a haptical form. Riegl's importance for Benjamin lay in his argument that changes in style were a registration of changes in human sense perception-and that this
85. For example, Heinrich Wolfflin reinterpreted the terms as "linearly"and "painterly"in his study of High Renaissance and Baroque art in Principlesof Art History:TheProblem theDevelopment Stylein of of LaterArt [1915], trans. M. D. Hottinger (NewYork: Dover, 1971).

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altered according to historical events and the Kunstwollen,and particularly at times of social or artistic crisis.86Benjamin, of course, was to argue that in the age of mechanical reproduction there had been such a change in the "medium of contemporary perception."87 Although Benjamin criticized Riegl (and Wickoff) for not attempting "to show the social transformations expressed by these changes in perception," he granted that "the conditions for an analogous insight [were] more favorable in the present," given the widespread power of the medium of film.88 In extending Riegl's categories to the cinema, however, Benjamin inverted Riegl's dialectic: in cinema, although it had no actual tactile properties of its own (in the dark the screen offered no modulated surface to feel), the shock effect of the bombardment of spectators by images was physical, quite unlike the contemplative relation of the viewer to a work of art that relied on distance for its aura and effect. Cinema was not fernsichtigbut rather nahsichtig.In modern life, wrote Benjamin, "the desire of the contemporary masses [is] to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly. . .. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction."89Cinema does this, "detach[ing] the reproduced object from the domain of tradition," bringing it nearer.90Benjamin's evocation of the haptical/optical distinction (Hildebrand's near and distant can also be heard) is most vivid when he compares the painter to a magician, but the cameraman to a surgeon: "The magician heals a sick person through the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient's body. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the patient; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hands move among the organs.... The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law"-the kind Hildebrand, visiting the panorama, abhorred.91The tactile quality of new representation appears again in Benjamin's discussion of Dada art, which,
See Levin, "Walter Benjamin" for a discussion of Riegl's influence on Benjamin; Iversen refers 86. to Benjamin's association with Riegl and Benjamin's deployment of the haptic/optic schema (Alois Riegl,pp. 15-16). Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, 87. ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken Books, 1969), p. 222. 88. Ibid. As Isabelle Frank has pointed out to me, this criticism is not fully warranted, since in his book on Dutch group portraiture Riegl does connect shifts in artistic style to cultural habits of Dutch seventeenth-century life and particularly religious and mercantile practices (Das hollandische Kaiserhauses Vienna, 1902, reprinted in 1931). in 22, Gruppenportrdt, Jahrbuchdes allerhichsten 89. Benjamin, "The Work of Art,"p. 223. 90. Ibid., p. 221. 91. Ibid., p. 233-34.

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hitting the spectator like a bullet, "happen [s] to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality." Dada promoted "a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator."92Benjamin concludes that "by means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect."93Cinema is haptic both because of the cameraman's profilmic penetration of the world, like the surgeon's internal handling of the body, and because of film's physical impact on the viewer, especially through its startling juxtapositions of scale, time, and space created in rapid editing. So, while Riegl's terms are inversely applied, now describing more the art maker and perceiver than the object, his distinction between physical touch and distant sight still sustains illuminating results. When turning to Burch we find the terms differently instrumentalized. In Life to Those ShadowsBurch traces the emergence and consolidation of cinema in the first three decades of this century. In his genealogy cinema moved from having no "language" to constituting "an Institutional Mode of Representation," his vocabulary redolent of the Althusserian Marxist context.94 His aim is to show this change as, even if inevitable, not natural. It was "a product of History," with delays, sidetracks, and detours in "an otherwise ineluctable historical movement" toward the reconsititution of reality through perspectival systems and mechanical means.95 Placing cinema within a broadly construed history of representation, Burch sees film's first twenty years as "in a sense a recapitulation of the decades of work which went into the constitution of monocular perspective in painting" in the fifteenth century.96 In other words, the installation of perspective in the cinema-the fulfullment of its "three-dimensional vocation"was not immediate and obvious, despite the physics of the photographic lens, but was striven for and awkward, producing discontinuity in the spatial worlds early cinema offered spectators: "as a whole this cinema is deeply split where the representation of space and volume is concerned."97 Burch stresses cinema's predominant inheritance from flat modelschromolithographs, strip cartoons, images d'epinal-which encouraged a preRenaissance, planar life in the image. In addition, evenness of lighting from an overhead source, the fixity of the camera and its placement at right angles to the plane of the profilmic scene, the preference for painted backdrops, and "the
92. Benjamin continues: "Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed" (ibid., p. 238). 93. Ibid. 94. Burch, Life to ThoseShadows,p. 2. He studies Britain, France, and America, which he groups as "the capitalist and imperialist West"on p. 3. 95. Ibid., pp. 2, 7-8, 96. Ibid., p. 163. 97. Ibid., pp. 163, 164.

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placing of the actors, always a long way from the camera, often spread out in a tableau vivant, all [facing] front, without axial movement of any kind," all contributed to the effect of flatness, or what Burch terms the "autarchy"of films of the first decade.98 This set of characteristics shaped a particular, constricted range of relations between spectator and screen, an "externality of the spectator-subject" so that the viewer saw him- or herself as "sitting in a fixed position in front of a flat screen."99Burch singles out Melies's work as exemplary in this respect; his use of clearly two-dimensional props, grisaille sets, "almost systematic refusal" of Renaissance perspective, preclusion of depth clues, even in tracking shots, and narrow, lateral space of action between camera and flat, painted backdrop, all set viewers apart from the projected image in front of them. However, and Burch suggests this, there was after all not a complete flatness of the illusion but a "composite picture" in which two modes of representation cohabited: smoke effects created atmospheric depth, and axial movements of actors claimed some space.10 Further, the "opposition between the 'Meliesian' affirmation of the surface and the affirmation of depth" characterizing the visual history of cinema before World War I was "already implicit in In Arrive d'un train a La Ciotat."101 addition, as I have suggested, chiaroscuro over the human body moving against painted flats and props, as in the playing Magic Forest sequence, stressed the coexistence of two- and three-dimensional forms. Burch's approach invites comparison with Riegl on at least two points despite its different, political roots. First, he discusses the beginnings of cinema as a repetition of the trajectory of Western representation: "If ever there was a phenomenon with causes as unconscious as they were conscious, it is the way the cinema in some sense recapitulated the history of the pictorial representation of Riegl would surely have sympathized with Burch's convicspace in the West."102 tion that spatial articulation in film is a critical element of its history. And But second, there is Burch's chapter heading, "Building a Haptic Space."103 what does haptic mean for Burch? He describes the evolution of early cinema style awayfrom the "visualflatness of interior tableaux" into a form of interior staging as if in a three-dimensional geometrical box in which actors are used "to show that none of the space visibly represented is on a painted backdrop, that it can all be entered and touched."104 Building a haptic space means moving toward the "gradual 'conquest of space."' It
98. Ibid., p. 164. 99. Ibid., p. 165. 100. Ibid., pp. 167-73. 101. Ibid., p. 173. 102. Ibid., p. 168. 103. Burch gives no particular reference for his haptic, calling it "the technical term psychologists of perception have derived from the Greek word for touch andjuncture" (ibid., p. 173). 104. Ibid., p. 172.

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entails, besides the direction of actors into every nook and cranny of a box, the development of dramatic, artificial lighting to "give the image relief," destroying the boundaries of the frame through dark shadow, implying off-screen space through cast shadow, and employing photographic angles that avoid frontality.105 Oblique camera angles make visible many more surfaces of tables, floors, and so on, and thus "multiply the signs of linear perspective across the visual field: a profusion of convergent lines [is] to be presented to the eye to prove that what confronts us really is a haptic space." Burch makes the final step of his argument when he states that camera movement may be "the main guarantor of this 'hapticity."''06 Camera movement provides "at one go . . . both an analogue of the 'motionless voyage' [of the spectator] in diegetic space and the tangibleproof of the three-dimensionality of 'haptic' space."107 For Burch the haptic is clearly tied to conviction of spatial illusion, such that a viewer believes he or she could touch the photographed objects and actors, as if they existed in real space. Arrival at a haptic space marks the end of the "contradiction of surface and depth that had divided primitive cinema," now only occasionally self-consciously revisited, as in The Cabinetof Dr. Caligari.l08Burch's haptic grows from the increased use of varied shadow and the idea of an invitation into believable room, into boundless space. All of this not only runs counter to Riegl's meanings for the term, but in fact defines the optical mode. Within Burch's own frame haptic makes sense, but it has lost both the objective, self-contained, clearly bordered meaning of Riegl's (for an art that did not rely on deep shadow and illusion and that could frequently be almost as well known through touch), and the visceral, crowding, physical, dislocating impact of Benjamin's as he adapts the concept to modernity. The resulting confusion, as one tries to follow the uses, is a cautionary tale against too loosely allying the historiography of one field with the emerging historiography of another. And one cannot help regretting that Burch was unaware of a paradox that Riegl took great pains to explain, in terms we might now associate with film theory: that with an increased space and three-dimensionality the figure in a work of art is also increasingly dematerialized. The period which was most materialistic in art was the ancient Egyptian which represented the individual object whenever possible in the two dimensions of height and width but also touchable to the beholder. From the point when Greek art consciously tried to express the individual shape also with the third dimension of depth there was not, as one might assume, the impression of increased materiality for the beholder but rather a decreased one as a consequence of the increasing importance which now the intellectual consciousness (experience) gained for the perception of a work of art.
105. 106. 107. 108. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 183, 184.

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This again was based on the increasing elimination of the sense of touch in order to favor the sense of sight.109 But the "backward"fallout of haptical and optical on their journey to film theory has its own, instructive logic, for surely both cases can be argued, even though the optical character of film has typically been stressed. In Riegl's haptical or Hildebrand's Nahbild (and especially in art in which there is a combination of modes, as in the panorama) the viewer must move to perceive the art fully, and Riegl's writing is replete with descriptions of such voyages of the beholder: ancient Egyptian statues, when one looks at them from a distance, "make a flat and absolutely lifeless impression and then gradually, from greater proximity, the planes become increasingly lively, until eventually the fine modeling can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over them."ll0 On the other hand, in optical art (even optical objective art as opposed to optical subjective) it becomes quite important not to move: "Engravedpupils [characteristic of Roman and later art] only make sense from a fernsichtig point of view, where they appear as colorful effects, while in the nahsichtigthe beholder would not like to see purely on the eyeball an alteration of depth which in reality does not exist."'11In cinema, in its perplexing combinations of far and near, and despite its optical immaterialty, both the profilmic material and the viewer are haptically engaged, as Benjamin argues. But the early screen was also utterly haptic, a surface of clearly delimited height and width with no visual suggestion of an inside, of any depth. Only in projection was its spatiality transformed. In another context I have argued that Egypt functioned as a gateway to fantasy in the auditorium, a role stemming in part from its geographical placement at the junction of East and West.112The association of the hieroglyph with film had a similar value, connoting the inbetweenness of the medium, its duality as both writing and image making, requiring new skills of observation and decipherment. Turn-of-the-century discourse in art history tells us that Egyptianizing motifs gave cultural life to another aspect of cinematic passage, from the still and planar to the moving, jarring, intruding, and voluminous, and specifically invoked its experimental refashioning of spatial language. The bas-relief above all intimated the potential embellishment of flatness that was cinema, and, particularly in alliance with the photographed body, its peculiar spatial ambiguity. Such themes and images expressed the idea of a mode of representation in the process of transformationthe photograph, moved by projection, the drawing, swelled into relief, the boundary of frontal space about to be crossed in the use of angled camera positions, moving camera work, the editing of different shots into multishot film. Egypt's

109. 110. 111. 112.

Riegl, LateRomanArt Industry,p. 74. Ibid., p. 24, n. 2. Ibid., p. 80. Lant, "The Curse of the Pharaoh," p. 98.

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iconography and techniques were emblematic of the changed perceptions the beginnings of cinema entailed, and even, for Riegl and Worringer, of the massive upheavals of modernity itself. It was for this paradoxical reason, and not just through stylistic similarity, that the modernity of Picasso's and Braque's art was said to be pharaonic. In my survey of film's place in contemporary accounts of artistic perception it is Hildebrand who leaves the most negative view of the consumption of a modern spectacle, describing the back and forthness of panoramic viewing as a crude, perverse sensation, in which the heretofore upright citizen becomes too involved, physically, literally, with the actual volume and falseness of that entertainment. In such a setting, bourgeois bodies become part of a mass, need to sway and bend, are carried away from their known, social niche, and lose integrity and refinement as they are no longer able or required to make familiar, nice distinctions of near and far. In Benjamin's giddy, often triumphant account, bodies, now at the cinema, lie and lounge, have their entrails rummaged, are bombarded and physiologically massaged by the radicality of film's spatial and temporal propositions; no lean-cut, stream-lined, International-style notion of modern art is here. The idea of film as a metaphorical and literal ride has been thoroughly examined, both narratologically, and historically, in the phenomenon of Hales' Tours for example. But in recalling commentators such as Riegl and Hildebrand we are sensitized to another of its facets, to the eye's pleasure flickering over a surface, perceiving layered space without being able to move closer to run fingers on a stone, or see the gouging of the eye. Recognizing implied, subtle depths over a decorated plane was a delight heightened, dynamized, and enlarged through cinema, an engagement badly displayed in the artful juxtaposition of different representational modes-drawing, bas-reliefs, incised images, printed textile undulation, moving human figures-or in the stunning dissections of Meli&s's films. Including the Egyptianate activated this attention, even taught it to us, for it maximaized the range of forms to hand, and set the stage for the thrill of depth, our plunge outward or into deep space.ll3

113. In a doomed endeavor, Bruce Bryan assessed Egyptian filmic representation in a 1924 essay, "Movie Realism and Archaeological Fact." He determined that DeMille's The Ten Commandments was "the greatest picture that has ever been made," despite many archaeological errors. Particularly bothersome was that, "contrary to all other Egyptian pylons, the hieroglyphic carvings ... and the not cut in, on the sculptured horses [were] in bas-relief.... Try and read the hieroglyphics sculptured, walls," he complains, including a production still to illustrate the problematic protrusions Art and The Archaeology: Arts ThroughouttheAges, vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1924), pp. 139-40, 144.