M Is For Merging Media

Tomorrow, Saturday February 1^st 2014, the University of Kent will host the one-day conference Merging Media, an interdisciplinary approach to hybridity in the arts. Looking at the overlap and convergence between different art-forms – such as live performances that utilise filmic projection, music composed to accompany paintings, the intertwining of written word and images on the page, and so on – the conference was co-organised by Keeley Saunders, Frances Kamm, Emre Caglayan, and myself. ( http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/mergingmedia/ ) To mark the event this post will explore one such phenomenon of artistic hybridity in M Is For Man, Music And Mozart, a film directed by Peter Greenaway, and its relationship to the tradition of illuminated texts. This is in some part intended as a response to the surprising lack of papers on the filmmaker, well known for his explorations of the limitations of the cinematic medium and its relationship to other art-forms.

Greenaway has been vocal on the subject of cinema’s limitations for many years, most overtly in his insistence that cinema has never developed into its own visual medium, and that it’s reliance upon the written word (in the form of screenplays) makes it a slave to the earlier traditions of literature and the theatre. He believes that cinema, in order to free itself from the constraints of text, should become an entirely audiovisual medium, closer to a moving painting than a performed story. Despite this attitude, Greenaway himself has produced little work in this vein, instead choosing to produce work that critiques existing cinematic conventions rather than providing alternative ones.

Not to say that he has produced nothing that moves beyond the parameters of standard film; there is the multi-screen VJ performances of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, where he edits the film ‘live’ on stage, or the installation work Peopling The Palaces, that projects film on to all of the walls and even ceiling of a particular venue, providing an immersive cinematic experience, or his projection of light onto Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in order to make the painting appear to move and transform. But his most well known works (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Pillow Book, Drowning By Numbers or Nightwatching) are feature-length narrative films that began life as screenplays. These films often provide alternative ways of presenting story information other than through traditional narrative; Drowning By Numbers is structured numerically, with the numbers 1-100 littered through the film counting down to the conclusion, Cook/Thief/Wife/Lover structures its characters and events around the conceit of Newtonian colour theory, with each set designed around a different colour and its apparent associated meanings. But most frequently, Greenaway’s favourite alternative structure to narrative is that of lists and categories.

M Is For Man, Music And Mozart is a 30 minute short film (part of the series Not Mozart where famous directors and composers deconstruct the works of Mozart) that demonstrates Greenaway’s obsession with the cinematic image, its relationship to text and theatre, its potential to replicate painting and become a chapter in the history of Visual Arts, and the use of categories, lists and associations as alternative devices to narrative. Ostensibly, the film is a meditation on Mozart and his music through a series of short segments, each building upon the last and providing a slightly different structuring device. It opens with a list of words, written and sung in largely alphabetical order, presenting a variety of concepts related to man, his body (B is for bile, blood and bones) and beliefs (A is for Adam, E is for Eve). As these words appear across the screen, two female dancers (who might be muses, fates, furies, or stage-hands) communicate the ideas through their bodily movements in a blacked-out space, filled in by sketches and words superimposed on screen.

Once the alphabet has reached the middle letter, ‘M’, an allegorical tale begins, showing the gods creating man. The gods, a shifty looking crowd of corpse-white individuals wearing rags and holding various signs marked with single words, proceed to try and make a ‘man’, going through various possible source materials. Now the film utilises a ‘theme and variation’ structure: a Man of Letters is a human outline created from the gods’ signs, a Man of Meat is cobbled together from a butcher’s wares, a Man of Metal is comprised of various utensils, and so on. These proto-men are Acrimbaldo-like figures, simultaneously a human-like entity and a collection of objects.

Eventually, Man as we know him is finished and a new sequence begins where the gods teach man movement. An extended dance sequence functions as a demonstration, as Man slowly at first moves his arms and legs, eventually getting up and dancing about the auditorium where the action takes place. In the next sequence, the gods teach Man music, and another dance sequence sees the two maybe-muses manipulate Man like a mannequin, moving him in rhythmic actions and placing various instruments in his hands. Finally, having created man and music, the gods find it necessary to create Mozart and another sequence mirroring the first sees Man in a blacked-out space embellished with hand-drawn sketches and notes.

Throughout all of these sequences, words and letters dominate the screen. Laid over the images, superimposed or held by figures within the frame, the text threatens to overcrowd the visuals with their numerous meanings and implications. William Van Wert has written an intriguing analysis of the multitude of meanings inherent in the words and images of the film on the Senses Of Cinema site ( http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/cteq/man/ ). Greenaway’s common complaint – that film is slave to the text rather than free to be an entirely visual medium – would appear to be quite explicitly at work here.

But Greenaway twists this relationship in order to give visuals the upper-hand. Long fascinated with calligraphy, the art of penmanship where the craft is in the very specific visual flourishes of letters, Greenaway transforms text into images, the words do not overcrowd or block out the visual composition, but instead become a part of it. Though there remain layers and layers of complex word-games and associations going on within the words on screen, our attention instead is pulled towards the visual qualities of the words, their aesthetic worth within the overall framed composition.

M is not only the first letter in Mozart’s name, it is also a symmetrical letter, sitting in the centre of the frame (as it sits in the centre of the alphabet), it calls attention to and aids the balance of the composition, further emphasised through the similarity of the two muses/stage-hands that cavort throughout the film. Likewise, the scroll of writing that runs along the top of the screen, like a news report, simply reiterates words that have been sung earlier. These words are included because of how they look and what they add to the film’s visuals rather than as communication of new information.

As stated above, we can find these sorts of text-image relationships in an earlier tradition, that of the illuminated manuscript. One can find a plethora of illuminated books from the 13th century onwards that augment the written words of the Bible with ornate images that do more that simply illustrate the story, but I wish to focus on two much later examples. William Blake, famous for providing illustrations to the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, produced his own Illuminated Books that utilised the same principal of the classical illuminated texts, intertwining text and image on the page so that the two become united both in textual meaning and aesthetic composition. But these works did not celebrate Christianity as much as they propagated his own personal spiritual mythology that denounced the oppressive nature of orthodox religion. The mythic tales not only blur distinctions between art and literature but also fascinatingly present complex spiritual concepts that blur people with places, humans with the cosmic.

Linking in with the previous month’s post on Wunderkammer’s, the illuminated work The Model Book Of Calligraphy belonged to the eccentric Emperor Rudolph II. Initially a book consisting entirely of calligraphy by Georg Bocksay, Rudolph II commissioned artist Joris Hoefnagel to provide paintings to accentuate the visual beauty of the words. Hoefnagel not only provided images that related to the words already on the page but also composed them in such a way as to create apparent spatial relationships between word and image. The text, originally laying flat on the page, now seems to float in the air, hovering above the flora and fauna that appear grounded on an ambiguous surface. New images, depicting specific objects, transform the nature of the images of text. Not simply illustration, where the images are limited to the content and meaning of the words, but a visual response to the text, Hoefnagel’s illuminations prefigure Greenaway in their combination of text and image in service of aesthetic rather than informative purposes. These images have been taken from three volumes published Thames & Hudson, annotated by Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg. Unfortunately, there are few images available online and so these are photos of the books taken by my own fair hand – hence the slightly poor quality.

The latter portion of the same book allows Hoefnagel to take this even further, producing an ‘Abecedarium’, an artistic guide to the letters of the alphabet. Here, the letters form the central focus of each image, but they are also the foundation of a visual work, it is their artistic qualities that are emphasised. Both the ‘majuscules’ (capitals) and ‘miniscules’ (lower-case) are presented to us in glorious elaboration, the symmetrical composition and rich detail of the depicted objects again creating a sense that we are seeing a three-dimensional construct in space rather than a flat image on a page.

This is the same effect that Greenaway achieves, though through the exact opposite means. While Hoefnagel takes the flattened words and letters of text and places them within a fictional space through the application of artistic depictions, Greenaway takes the actual space of the pro-filmic action – the auditorium and space where the figures move, create and dance – and uses overlaid text to flatten the images on screen. The images and text are united in a conceptual middle-ground; in Hoefnagel’s work, they do not meet on the page but the space depicted within it, and in Greenaway’s film the diegetic space of the action seems to collapse into the non-diegetic superimposed text to create a composition that exists on the screen.  In both cases different artistic media have been merged in the creation of something new.

                                                                                                                                     - P.S.