Of course, whatever you feel, whatever you do or do not do, however you respond to the name, your reaction testifies to the crossing of a threshold, to the recognition of a powerful Shakespeareme (minimal unit of Shakespeare) that turns you on or off. Romeo and Juliet? How do we, can we, hear those names and not activate the installed potentiality that they designate? How do we unstitch the bio/biblio/graphical collation of lives, living, and book that causes them to live on by and as an in our lives? In this chapter is to respond to the power of this especially proper name, Romeo and Juliet, with an eye to the kinds of quasi-machine-like cuttings, crossings, diversions, switches, redirects, as these names find themselves translated to other media. The title of the play, “survives them,” Jacques Derrida writes, “but they also survive thanks to it.” And, “would such a double survival,” he asks, “have been possible “‘without the title,’” as Juliet puts it, a title that offers itself in order to go unread, in order to disappear, as if it merely designates or refers, decoupling into two persons that appear single, but which it connects, couples, kills, revives, keeps fresh, forces to play out the story, again and again. We begin by describing the strategic articulation of the crux / crossroads posed by the play’s title and briefly surveying the way in which it programs the action and our responses to it. We then consider how translations of Romeo and Juliet to film serve as an occasion for the winking in and out of focus of the framing device or parerga of the media platform that now hosts the play, recalling the way Nashe’s tomb-raiding defense of theater in the 1590s proceeds as a discussion of how theater handles the dead and their remainders. We then offer a reading of a small, almost impossibly small, film that abuts on to the play, runs athwart its trajectory, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo? (2007), that proceeds as a series of reaction shots of women in a cinema audience responding to Juliet’s suicide as rendered in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). Kiarostami’s film offers a strategic series of refusals to read or to engage with Shakespeare’s play.

We join Juliet not quite where we left her at the end of the last chapter, waking up inside the Capulet tomb, surrounded by the remainders of those whose name she may not out run, remaining Capulet even as she once attempted to sort Romeo, the historical person, from his name, to separate his forename from his Montague, but in her bedroom thinking ahead to what that waking may entail. . Or, rather, we join the play by not quite joining it, but instead by watching the effect of the scene on a cinema audience courtesy of

Actors were instructed to stare at a blank piece of paper and respond to what they remembered of a Persian story that bears some resemblance to the plot of the play. These reaction shots were then edited in series and synchronized to the soundtrack of Zefferelli’s film, but at no point in Where is My Romeo? does Zeferrelli’s film appear on screen, and much of the spoken dialogue of Juliet’s scene is muffled or unavailable. In thinking through the way Kiarostami’s film addresses itself to cinema-going audiences in an age of digital media, and the variously announced and on-going deaths of cinema and

print media, we… offering an instance of what adapting the phraseology of Bruno Latour, we name bardoclash. AbbasWith iconoclasm, one knows what the act of breaking represents, and what the motivations of apparent destruction are. For iconoclash, one does not know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.

Bruno Latour, “What is Iconoclash?”1

Oh, but we’re forgetting something. At the end of the last chapter we left Juliet awake in Nashe’s grave world, in the Capulet tomb (or was it her bedroom?), her head doing somersaults as she imagines herself among the dead, among the Tybalts rather than the Talbots. We need to get back to her—but not in order to parse out the story so that it comes out differently, to un-write the sentences that generate “Romeo and Juliet” as aphorism or to transform their story into something else, but instead order to try to understand what might be happening in this small film by Abbas Kiarostami “Where is My Romeo?” that revives only one half of the couple, leaving the other one dead, even if freshly so.

FRIAR LAURENCEHold, daughter: I do spy a kind of hopeWhich craves as desperate an execution.As that is desperate which we would prevent.If, rather than to marry County Paris,Thou hast the strength of will to slay thyself,Then is it likely thou wilt undertakeA thing like death to chide away this shame,That cop’st with death himself to scape from it:And, if thou dar’st, I'll give thee remedy (4. 1. 68-76).

JULIETO, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,From off the battlements of yonder tower;Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurkWhere serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;Or bid me go into a new-made graveAnd hide me with a dead man in his shroud;

1 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 68.

Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;And I will do it without fear or doubt,To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love.FRIAR LAURENCEHold, then; go home, be merry, give consentTo marry Paris: Wednesday is to-morrow:To-morrow night look that thou lie alone;Let not thy nurse lie with thee in thy chamber:Take thou this vial, being then in bed,And this distilled liquor drink thou off;When presently through all thy veins shall runA cold and drowsy humour, for no pulseShall keep his native progress, but surcease:No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fadeTo paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall,Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;Each part, deprived of supple government,Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk deathThou shalt continue two and forty hours,And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.Now, when the bridegroom in the morning comesTo rouse thee from thy bed, there art thou dead:Then, as the manner of our country is,In thy best robes uncover'd on the bierThou shalt be borne to that same ancient vaultWhere all the kindred of the Capulets lie.In the mean time, against thou shalt awake,Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift,And hither shall he come: and he and IWill watch thy waking, and that very nightShall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua.And this shall free thee from this present shame;If no inconstant toy, nor womanish fear,Abate thy valour in the acting it.JULIETGive me, give me! O, tell not me of fear!FRIAR LAURENCEHold; get you gone, be strong and prosperousIn this resolve: I'll send a friar with speedTo Mantua, with my letters to thy lord.JULIETLove give me strength! and strength shall help afford.Farewell, dear father!Exeunt

4. 2. 68-125

How oft when men are at the point of deathHave they been merry! which their keepers callA lightning before death: O, how may ICall this a lightning? O my love! my wife!Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yetIs crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,And death's pale flag is not advanced there.Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?O, what more favour can I do to thee,Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twainTo sunder his that was thine enemy?Forgive me, cousin! Ah, dear Juliet,Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believeThat unsubstantial death is amorous,And that the lean abhorred monster keepsThee here in dark to be his paramour?For fear of that, I still will stay with thee;And never from this palace of dim nightDepart again: here, here will I remainWith worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, hereWill I set up my everlasting rest,And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O youThe doors of breath, seal with a righteous kissA dateless bargain to engrossing death!Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!Thou desperate pilot, now at once run onThe dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!Here's to my love!Drinks

O true apothecary!Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.Dies

5. 3. 74-120

Enters the tomb

Romeo! O, pale! Who else? what, Paris too?And steep'd in blood? Ah, what an unkind hour

Is guilty of this lamentable chance!The lady stirs.JULIET wakes

JULIETO comfortable friar! where is my lord?I do remember well where I should be,And there I am. Where is my Romeo?Noise within

FRIAR LAURENCEI hear some noise. Lady, come from that nestOf death, contagion, and unnatural sleep:A greater power than we can contradictHath thwarted our intents. Come, come away.Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead;And Paris too. Come, I'll dispose of theeAmong a sisterhood of holy nuns:Stay not to question, for the watch is coming;Come, go, good Juliet,Noise again

I dare no longer stay.JULIETGo, get thee hence, for I will not away.Exit FRIAR LAURENCE

What's here? a cup, closed in my true love's hand?Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end:O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly dropTo help me after? I will kiss thy lips;Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,To make die with a restorative.Kisses him

Thy lips are warm.First Watchman[Within] Lead, boy: which way?JULIETYea, noise? then I'll be brief. O happy dagger!Snatching ROMEO's dagger

This is thy sheath;Stabs herself

there rust, and let me die.Falls on ROMEO's body, and dies

Enter Watch, with the Page of PARIS

PAGE

R c rd B rt

Sh es e re Cin-Offs Beyond Wreckognition:Film Philology and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo2

Add Godard le oi lear—destruction offilm cn-off. Question of cn off in Contempt.And add Leters from Juliet—the Taylor Swift videomusic is the trailer sountrack.

The connection here is so insistently obvious that we would be amazed if it had not insistently forced itself upon the attention of philosophy from time immemorial. . . In spite of this, we must pose the question of whether this connection between logic and metaphysics, which has utterly ossified into self-evidence for us, is justified . . . whether or not the usual way of asking metaphysical questions orients itself toward logic . . . because insight into the peculiar character of world has hitherto been obstructed.--Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, p. 289

What kind of distinction is this: being of beings? Being and beings. Let us freely concede that it is obscure and cannot straightforwardly be made like that between black and white, house and garden. . . . This distinction as a whole is in its essence a completely obscure distinction. Only if we endure this obscurity until we become sensitive to what is problematic, and thereby reach a position from which we can develop the central problem inherent in this distinction . . . .--Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 356

No doubt the darkened room and the screen bordered like a letter of condolence already privileged conditions of effectiveness—no exchange, no circulation, no communication with any outside. Projection and reflection take place in a closed space, and those whoremain there, whether they know or it or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated. . . . In any case, this 'reality' comes from behind the spectator's head, and if he looked at directly he would see nothing except moving beams from an already veiled light source. --Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” (1970, 263)

Through digital processing, we were able to produce a clearer three-strip Technicolor process than was struck on the original master print.--Martin Scorcese, in his filmed introduction on the Criterion blu-ray edition of Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes3 (2011)

Whereas [for some archivists] curatorial value is linked to the original apparatus (e.g. a film projection for a film-born film), it can be argued that a proper digital restoration and exhibition can recreate much more thoroughly the experience of an archival film, especially those made with a now obsolete format, which is the vast majority (e.g. long gone aspect ratios [rate speeds] and color or sound systems).--Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transitionp. 144

In its laminated application of an “aging” filter, can simulate the death of filmic cinema because it is that death. . . . What is the specific place of narrratographic attention during a transitional period when the graphic basis itself is the medium in question mutating beyond, as they say, recognition? . . . What happens, in other words, when the imperceptible ingredient (and gradient) of motion is located not in the photogram’s continual disappearance across the frame of the aperture but in an internal remaking of the digital frame itself? And how much cultural rather than technological context is necessary to approximate any kind of satisfaction in one’s answers? P. 534

How Obvious . . . One day while walking down one of my timber trails, I stumbled upon the following questions staring me in the face: why has no one thought to ask why no one has film

productions of Shakespeare plays that have multiple editions? Why has no one thought to film the two quartos, Folio, and “Complete” text of Hamlet? Why not film the Quarto, Folio, and combined King Lears? And why not include alternate endings, like Nathum Tate’s King Lear? And why not film alternate scenes of speeches in plays that have significantly different variants such as “hint” and “heat” and “sighs” and “kisses” in Othello’s defense of his marriage to Desdemona made to the Duke and Senators of Venice or scenes of similar kinds of variants in Romeo and Juliet? In short, why make films informed by textual criticism and the new philology of past three decades? Given the current technology, couldn’t different cuts and alternate scenes fairly easily be delivered on a single blu-ray disc much the way a garden-variety, high budget action film like Salt (2010) is delivered, the menu presenting the viewer with three different cuts, the menu options horizontally lined up all and a “special features” option below them that folds out into in a separate menu that includes alternate scenes? These questions have not been asked in part, I think, because Shakespeare on film, like film adaptation studies generally, has left the text behind, regarding it as an original literary source to which the film need not be compared. While this move has been salutary in many ways, it was made possible by the adoption of a pre-critical, pre-philological notion of film: Shakespeare film criticism has by and large ignored the DVDs and blu-rays of films, Shakespeare related or not, that include alternate endings, alternate prologues, deleted scenes, and multiple cuts of the same film, on the one hand, and, on the other, ignored the textual criticism and new editing practices of Shakespeare (and literature more generally) of the past three decades. Furthermore, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, adopted with modifications by Stephen Greenblatt for the Norton edition of the complete works, and the Arden Third Series editions have moved significantly away from any sense that Shakespeare’s many of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently filmed plays has textual stability even while compromising with past practices in certain cases (Greenblatt did not have facing page versions of the Quarto and Folio Lears, as does the Oxford), and Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor released their co-edited two volume Hamlets, making the second quarto the default and including the Folio passages in an appendix, and referring the reader of the Folio and First Quarto volume, entitled Hamlet: 1603 and 1623 to the footnotes in the second quarto volume, entitled Hamlet. Bardoclash The uncritically held idealist assumption that Shakespeare’s texts are essentially stable, singular rather than multiple, has largely shaped the field of Shakespeare film by allowing for textually based distinctions between adaptation and spin-offs. Crudely put, adaptations use Shakespeare’s language and spin-offs don’t. Moreover, spin-offs have been defined in relation to a Shakespeare play through parallels between titles, plot, character, and theme. The science-fiction film Forbidden Planet, to take another well-known example, is often regarded as a retelling of The Tempest. Nevertheless, providing a taxonomy of the various ways in which Shakespeare circulates in film has proven to be surprisingly resistant to the seemingly obvious distinction between adaptations and spin-offs. Where, to take a well-known example, does a film like Last Action Hero, with a trailer length adaptation of Hamlet, keeping some original lines and adding new ones,

fit?5 What about

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Hamlet. The three audience members are seen in silhouette from behind only, their generally silly audio commentary interrupt the film’s soundtrack. The present collection productively invites us to reconsider what counts as a spin-off, however, and I want to suggest that we might think of the spin-off as lacking in integrity rather than a well-defined category. Instead of simply opposing spin-offs to supposedly stable literary texts and film adaptations, or collapsing the opposition entirely so that multiple editions of a play like Hamlet might be considered spin-offs of Shakespeare’s sources, I want to use the neologism Shakespeare “cin-off” both to expand the range of the spin-off by tentatively differentiating more finely between kinds of spin-offs and to call into question the apparently self-evident distinction between Shakespeare film adaptation and Shakespeare film spin-off. The cin-off, paradoxically almost omnipresent in film and yet unnoticed as a phenomenon, allows us to ask questions that have answers are so obvious and self-evident that it makes it almost impossible to ask questions: What does it mean to recognize Shakespeare on film? What are the criteria by which a film may be recognized as a Shakespeare spin-off? Generally, the answers to these questions would turn on the definition of a Shakespeareme, a minimal unit of significant Shakespeare or Shakespearegram that makes the seme visible beyond which Shakespeare would no longer be recognizable. By questioning the self-evident distinction textual editions and adaptations as spin-offs, I want to pose the question of recognition of what I am calling, and variously spelling, as “wreckognition” (wrecognition, wrekognition). My admittedly bad pun on “wreck” and “re” signals a dynamic with the spin-off I have called “Bardoclash.” Following Bruno Latour’s account of “iconoclash” as a deconstruction of idolatry and iconoclasm, Bardoclash deconstructs stable source text (or film adaptation) and spin-off.6 By “wreckognition,” I mean that editions, adaptations, and spin-offs all reface and deface the

text or film they reproduce “faithfully” or not, wholly or in part. The resistance of Bardoclash to critical scrutiny is better understood as a prolonged questioning of the seemingly self-evident and obvious than as a taxonomy that distinguishes the recognizably Shakespearean from the unrecognizably Shakespearean. If Shakespeare film criticism is not simply about the limits of recognition, then the critical task is no longer to assemble as many examples of Shakespeare in film as one can or to police boundaries between what is or is not recognizably Shakespeare on film. The task is rather to stay with the question of wreckognition as it posed in the relatively specific case about “Bardoclash” in order to show how it raises larger questions about a kind of cinematic dynamic I call “cine-clash.” My aim is a rather modest one, then. I want to raise questions about cinema, even about what counts as a question about it, by deconstructive critical pressure on what may appear to be obvious and analogous distinctions between adaptation and spin-off, celluloid and digital film, old and new cinephilia, among others. Film and media studies have serialized difference within cinema by describing it as the repetition of integral units, whether that unit be the semiotic film frame or the pre-semiotic black bars, or photograms, that separate each film frame in order to make the film print recognizably mimetic when projected on the screen for viewers.7 This serialization of difference within film is at the same time a linearization of media: photography comes first, then film; analogue media come first, then digital; the real comes first, then its mechanical reproduction. And this linearization is film is rendered metaphorically as a biography: cinema decays; cinema is dead; there are “digital-born films” and “film-born-films”; films have a “lifetime” and a “second life” when restored; a virtual life when digitized; photography embalms; film is “change mummified.” My questioning of the obvious proceeds by following out the logic of this serialization and linearization of difference to its il/logical conclusions. If photography and film no longer exist apart from digital media and remediation in the forms of digital editing, transfers, copying, and restoration, however, and if the cinephile watching a projected celluloid film in a movie theater is therefore necessarily accessing only a cinematic “aura” effect, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, does it any no longer makes to define film as film even at a given past time? What is it we are doing now when we say we are watching a movie? Is it adequate to distinguish between film and virtual film?8 Is “cinema” now a misnomer, a dysfunctional skeuomorph that can no longer suppress the linear history of technological difference on which it depends? What a neologism like “cinem,” the absent “a” signifying that cinema is almost (or already) no longer what we thought it was? Maybe, after Derrida’s archive fever, cinemald’archive? cinemaura? Cinewhora? If the remediation of film means filmic difference can no longer be limited by serialization, what happens to the film theory and film theory that depend on it? Are these questions primarily historical, a matter of technological changes and transitions within a history defined as a succession of empty, homogenous moments of time, and the “culture” in which they occur? Or is primarily a question of film’s theory in/ability to think cinematic difference except through serialization of photograms and analogies between media successive media rather than as a “cinegrammatology” which would not, among other things, take biographical metaphors for film at face value?9 Are we asking the right questions?

In what follows, I pursue these high-pressure, low-stakes questions about the obscure obviousness of cinephilic wrecognition by turning, after several necessary and perhaps excessively long detours into theoretical fields involving the image, the archive, and narratology along the timber trail I will be talk/walk/ing you through, to a three minute film short directed by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Where is My Romeo, screened at Cannes in 2007 as one of thirty three films edited together as a “Cannes-pilation” film entitled Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema), and then released on DVD in a one disc edition and a two disc French edition. Both editions are out-of-print, though still for sale on various websites. However, Kiarostami’s three minute film has been extracted, compressed into streaming video, and uploaded by multiple versions onto youtube.com. Kiarostammi’s film is part of world cinema in a film addressed to cinephiles, but the “worldness” of the world cinema it enters is not easily circumscribed by the words “global” or “universal.”10

We may begin to see how the migration of the film from DVD to youtube, itself a commonplace practice, begins to complicate our sense of what an adaptation, spin-off, and even edition are as well as what cinephilia is. The youtube “editions” might be regarded as adaptations of it insofar as they isolates the film from its cinematic source, the youtube versions make no reference to the DVD edition of the film from which they extracted. They provide text in the form of viewer’s comments and a vertically arranged series what are, in the meta-language of youtube urls, “related” links with of thumbnails and titles for each. Some versions have subtitles in different languages for the English audio. Of course, the uploaders are anonymous and do not critically reflect on what they are doing. One can always watch it by itself on the DVD, but the youtube versions in some sense re-edit and adapt it by extracting it from an unreferenced source. In order to understand point, however, one must become a kind of comparative philologist, searching the web to track down, perhaps accidentally, the source, and related links. Yet one will never be able to produce an edition that includes the film watched, say, on a DVD in the same computer, to the streamed video extract and its related links online. And would such an edition be cinephilic? Is there (a need for) such a thing as cinephilic textual criticism? In complicating our sense of what an edition or film adaptation is, the practice of youtube extraction highlights a complexity Viewed on either of the two Chacun son cinema DVD or on alone youtube, Kiarostami’s film is a kind of “film with and without the film”: it differs from other films with cin-offs that show movie theater audiences watching a scene from a film in two ways: it never shows the film the audience is watching, in this case, the last minutes of Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation Romeo and Juliet, beginning with Juliet’s suicide; and second, instead of being a cin-off scene in a film, Where is My Romeo is a cin-off that is also a film adaptation.11 If one knows Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet fairly well, one will immediately recognize Olivia Hussey’s voice on the soundtrack. And even if one doesn’t know the Zeffreilli very well at all, one will probably recognize the famous “Where is Love?” theme turned pop song as it plays at the end of the Zeffirelli film and which Kiarostami’s ends his own film with end a two shot title sequence. The aesthetic value of Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo (2007), its status as a work of art, depends on its resistance both to the mimetic economies of cinephilic viewing in particular and film theory in general that enable recognition: when viewed on youtube, Kiarostami’s film can be seen in a variety of

screen sizes and split into one of two computer screens in two browsers, one showing the film and the other showing the scene cited but not shown from Zeffirelli’s film. (See figure 1)

Figure 1. Split computer screens showing Kiarostami and Zeffirelli at the same moment, “Where is My Romeo”Even when viewed by itself in a single browser, the delivery of Kiarostami’s film by streaming video on youtube invites us to read its paradoxical exploration of cinephilia as emotional reaction shots to an emotional film we don’t see ourselves from a deconstructive perspective as a breakdown of the mimesis of cinema ordinarily assumed by cinephiles: Where is My Romeo, as its title suggests, artfully invites us to question how we mis/w/rec/k/ecognize cinema through metaphor and analogy, including in this case, live theater and the movie theater, particularly in the case of film adaptations.12 Where is My Romeo’s remediation via streaming video makes possible, perhaps even necessary, a kind of philological comparative criticism of Kiarostami’s “film with and without the film” and its perhaps unintended status as a film that is not a film but streamed video both to the film it cites and adapts and its freely associative, somewhat random links to other kinds of Shakespeare spin-offs on youtube. By attending to the varied dynamics of cine-clash through the limiting lens of the cin-off, we may also make possible a philological film and media practice alert to the obscurity of the obvious: a given digital transfer of a film is not merely a new artifact to be reinterpreted, as Giovanni Fossati says, like a different cut of the same film, but a new edition and is even, to press my point even further, an adaptation much the way a cin-off is. Like a critical edition of a work of literature, DVDs and blu-rays come with paratextual extras that constitute something like the equivalent of a scholarly apparatus and often include documentaries on the restoration of the material artifact as well as programmed extras allowing for the simulated viewing of a film when it was originally released.

There [in theater], the handicap we suffer from is due especially to the disappearance of the race of traditional tragedians of the old school, the Mounet-Sullys and the Sarah Bernhardts, that is, who disappeared at the beginning of the century like prehistoric

creatures of the secondary period. By a stroke of irony, it is that film that has preserved their bones, fossilized in the films d’art.Andre Bazin, “Theater and Cinema, Part Two,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, p.122

The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life. Susan Sontag, (“The Decay of Cinema”)(1996)

Behind what film gives us to see, it is not the existence of atoms that we are led to seek, but rather the existence of an “other world” of phenomena, of a soul or of other spiritual principles.  It is this revelation, above all, of a spiritual presence, that I propose we seekIn poetry.” --Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? 358

Cinemaura: Cin-Offs and Photography as the Limit of Cinema Before turning to the specific ways in which Kiarostami explores cinephilic wreckognition in Where is My Romeo, I need to take you on our first detour and back up to raise some preliminary questions. What is a cin-off? And why do I think it is worth talking about? On the one is, the cin-off is necessarily recognizable, at least potentially; it is an unreferenced citation that the cinephilic viewer will already know, if the film being referenced is a real film, or not know because it is film made only for the movie in which it is shown. Recognition of a cin-off is also always its wreckcogniton in that it transforms the question of the ontology of film from an indexical one into an iconic or, better yet, cryonic one, calling it up from the archiving and, in some cases, the viewer’s memory of watching its earlier reanimation in a theater. The cin-off is a kind of cine-clash in that it calls up shots from a previously shot film and reediting them, preserving the film by breaking it up into fragments rather than by restoring it into a whole.13 The cin-off is worth taking about because it puts into questions and even counter-intuitively suggests that what may seem visible is actually invisible, that invisibility is not merely a matter of hiding or concealing something on the screen. In this way, the cin-off extends and I think complicates Garrett Stewart’s extremely valuable reorientation of the film apparatus, everything that enables the image to be projected but it is then forgotten, to the analysis is of narrative film, particularly the period and science-fiction film. Jean Louis Baudry’s account of the apparatus is indifferent to the content of the film being projected, Stewart’s reduction of the apparatus to the photogram allows him to read its recovery in narrative film in scenes with photographs and of photographs being taken or developed. The cinematic freeze frame, or “frieze-frame” when photography is “thematerilaized” in cinema. These thematic scenes and freeze-frames may show up at any point in a narrative film, Stewart observes, but they often show up at the end of the film, the last shot turning into a kind of photography as the film “freezes,” making visible what film’s otherwise invisible photogrammic “undertext.”14 Following Andre Bazin’s increasingly central account of photography to film theorists of all kinds, Stewart says

that film’s origins in photography spill over into the plots and themes as well, often linking photography to death.15 Yet Stewart almost never takes up the cin-off, or film within the film, even though he apparently wants to do. The one time he does talk about a film within a film in Fritz Lang’s Fury, Stewart focuses on the film in the film’s freeze frames, effectively rendering the film as a series of projected slides. Because Stewart views film, reasonably enough, as a differentially serialized medium, its most basic unit the photogram, he necessarily “backslides” into an analogy he cannot see in order to make the photograph and freeze frame analogous. The perfect match between the two hides an imperfect metaphorical media mismatch between film and slides. Cin-offs show the patch, or show it by concealing it. Since Stewart focuses on the Victorian period film, I would like to turn briefly to the final scene in a Victorian period film involving photography he does not discuss, The Governess, even though it has nothing to do with Shakespeare, because the plot turns on who gets recognition and credit for the accidental discovery of a fixing solution for developing photographs, an impoverished Jewish woman forced to masquerade as a gentile in order to be employed by a Scottish aristocrat who becomes her lover or the Scottish aristocrat. The film ends with the former governess turned commercial London photographer photographing herself in a quite conventional shot reverse shot of a camera and of her sitting in front of it. After she pulls off the camera lens with a chain she has attached to it, the film camera mimes the photographic camera lens by holding the take for the sixty seconds it required for her to sit for her self-portrait. Unlike a freeze frame, however, the same shot makes the photographic camera cinematic by moving slowly toward the former governess stopping when it reaches a close up, otherwise remaining stationary.

15 Film editing in Blow Up, Final Cut, Simone, Gime Shelter, F for Fake. Issue of journal

on photographs in film, but Stweart points out that no taxonomy would exist the ways

phots and photographing appear.

The analogy between photography and film is “thematerilaized” through the woman’s voice-over and through a disjunction between her statement that she doesn’t think of the Lord any more just when the film cuts to a box of her precious objects and a photograph she took of the Lord after she left him. The photograph supplies the pathos and loss the film wants the viewer to register. Yet it does so by withholding the image of the black and white self-portrait and by substituting the photograph of her former lover clothed, now tinted sepia to suggest it is old, for the photograph she took of him nude that precipitated their split, which also partly covers a photograph with twin sisters separated by their father below it. This scene suggests that the narrative placement of older media in a period film are not the visible opposite of their invisible opposite but seem to show by concealing in a number of different ways that work by analogy and by inversion and that further texture the plot and characters, in this case inviting us to read the Scottish lord as a dark mystery much the way she has said she herself is a dark mystery to the Lord’s son, who is also her lover.16 Overhastily generalizing from this single example, I maintain that the narrative framing or embedding of one discrete medium in another apparently presented by the concretization of photography in film or freeze frames is actually only a secondary effect of the forged simulation of one by the other. Media can be sequenced only if they have first been put into a mimetic relation (one kind of camera resembles another, later kind) that occludes the differences it seems to establish between them. By the same token, a spatialization of media that figuratively places one inside the other or film within film depends on a confused conflation of the material film frame, or photogram with a metaphorical narrative frame: on the one hand, cinema departs from other media because it is not based on resemblance but instead transfers reality; on the other hand, the film apparatus can only be read narratologically if it is understood in mimetic terms, by way of analogy that never breaks down. Film theory and criticsm, cinephilic and otherwise, rests on the shaky foundation of a Bazinian theory that restores, or fails to restore, resemblance after first divorcing from photomechemical film from it through some kind of perservation. This failure be may be grasped in the way the cin-off is not analogous to the photograph in a film or freeze frame that may be “thematerialized,” or perhaps more accurately, “themaspectrazlied,” read, and inventoried. As a variation of “cine-clash,” the cin-off offers significant resistance to thematization: instances in which film narratives register cin-offs, however unpredictably, film and other media cannot be tracked down as if the cin-off were always recognizable, one closed narrative event among others in atypical narrative sequence. By questioning the opposed terms in which

thematic recognition is thought—off-screen and off-screen; framed and unframed; visibility or visibility; chance or planned occurrence; preservation and destruction; the cin-off implicitly recast the question of the ontology of cinema as a question of its hauntology, to use Derrida’s word, lacking the presumed integrity of cinematic time, space, and spectatorship: the temporality of it repetitions are not reducible to an exclusively mimetic mirroring installed and secured by a linear temporality of successive moments, however malleable their time may said to be; the space of the cin-offs un/framing of the movie screen are not reducible to analogous spaces from the screen, presumed to be the macro-unit of film, or the film strip cell or photogram, presumed to be the micro-units of film; and its reception or reading is not reducible to the spectator’s “mind,” thought to be “all there” when watching film.17

“What I call the archival life of film indicates the life of film once it has entered the archive, from selection to preservation, from restoration to exhibition and digitization. [Unlike museums and cinematechques] film archives usually do not take the exhibition of their collection to the public.” --Giovanni Fossati, From Grain to Pixel (23)

The dominant archival practice of preserving “’film as original’ framework can lead to opposite archival practices, one where the original artifact is considered so precious that it becomes untouchable, and another where access to the original artifact puts its preservation in jeopardy. --Giovanni Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 249

Projecting a film will become first a special circumstance, then a rare occurrence, and finally an exceptional event. Eventually nothing at all will be projected, either because nothing at all surviving copies will be worn to a frazzle or decomposed, or because somebody decides to stop showing them in order to save them for future duplication onto another format the few prints that remains. --Paolo Usai, Death of Cinema (123-24)

Cinemald’archive: A Derridaean Impression I ask the reader to be patient and walk with me slowly on yet another preliminary and somewhat lengthy but nevertheless necessary detour down my timber trail trial. These detours are necessary because we are not proceeding down the familiar path recognized by film theory. Instead we are wandering off / the beaten / track and wondering what questions to ask because we can no longer recognize what seems obvious about cinema. Once cinematic difference cannot completely be serialized, unified units that unfolds from invisibility into visibility and back, on forward, reverse, and pause, the coherence of the concepts on which depends becomes readable as symptomatic incoherence, the symptoms turning up both at the peripheral vision and centered vision of cinema, above all what seems most easily recognizable in film, the face in close up or the face turned away, withheld from view, as different analogy or a new set of oppositions are introduced into what is a constantly jerry-rigged practice of film theory.18 To understand the dynamics of cin-off and cine-clash fully enough to read Where is My Romeo, we cannot move directly to it but must reroute our GPS through the archive on which the cin-off

depends or the effect of which the cin-off produces. This detour will not be very long. I promise. By depending on or producing archive effects, the film, existing separately from the film or made for it, being cited in the cin-off bears puts into question what we assume to be the conditions of film’s visibility in the most basic question of whether the archive allows for its exhibition or not.19 Just as the cin-off puts pressure the opposition between visible and invisible, so it puts pressure on the opposition between exhibiting or not exhibiting and the cryonic default of the archive as preservation storage unit (a film is frozen until it can be preserved or until it is thawed out and projected).20 Insofar as it calls into question the mimeticism that underlies accounts the archive held by film theorists and film restorers alike (it is a place that preserves the film print that preserves and embalms the real it reanimates as “change mummified” when projected) the cin-off makes un/readable the anarchivity of the film archive, to use Jacque Derrida’s terms. In Archive Fever, Derrida maintains that there is an irreducible ash of archive, a “anarchivic” remainder that can never be archived, inventoried, dated, stored, and retrieved: difference cannot be entirely serialized. Although film is not among the various media Derrida discusses, the same metaphors and genres drawn from biology such as the autobiography that attempt to cover over the archive’s anarchitivity by sequencing life and death are the same ones that underwrite film theory (you can only die once, according to Bazin). 21 To be sure, the cin-off is not exactly the ash of the cinematic archive. Yet the iterative temporality of the cin-off, its citation of a real or fictive film that (seems to) pre-exist the film that cites it, does disclose the limits of the biological metaphors that are so

commonly superimposed onto film recording (embalming, death mask), film projection (reanimation) and then read off thematically in film narrative viewing. The cin-off makes the indexing of the archive not just a set of practical problem (sufficient storage space, ease of search and retrieval, and so on) but a question of wreckcognition by showing in various ways how the projection of the film image necessarily involves loss, error, temporary breakdowns (the film goes off the projector reel or the reel goes off the projector), complete breakdowns (the audience watching the film walks out), and sometimes complete destruction (the cited film burns up). All sorts of iconoclastic moments in which photographs, films, or movie theaters are burned may be found in narrative films and even in studio logos and DVD menus that reorient the viewer through a straightforward opposition between the film’s transfer onto DVD as alternately its restoration and its destruction.

Restoration and Iconoclasm on the DVD menu of Inglourious BasterdsDigital transfers also remediate this destruction and sort out iconoclasm from restoration. For example, footage of a the Nazi villain burns up in the DVD menu loop of Inglourious Basterds while on the bonus menu page, the complete cin-off, Pride of the Nation as film appears as an extra. Similarly, the DVD of The Majestic (dir. Frank Darabont, 2001) includes its cin-off as a special feature that restores the “MOVIE WITHIN THE MOVIE: SAND PIRATES OF THE SAHARA—The Complete Sequence.” Similarly, the DVD menu for TCM Pre-Code Double Feature: The Song of Songs and This is the Night is preceded by an eleven second logo sequence which begins burning film and ends as the TCM comes into focus; here we have digital transfer remediated as iconoclasm in reverse—we move from a destroyed illegible image to restored image of legible white text on a black background.

Similar moments of iconoclasm may be found in many films. For example, Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1966) begins with the film projector lighting up and projecting an animated cartoon we see upside down, and nearly stops as we hear the whir of the film projector slowing down, then burns up film image and returns to some of the brief opening shots in the middle, this time taking up the entire frame instead of part of it, and goes off track at the end. Film rushes in Alain Resnais’s Muriel: the Time of a Return stop and burn out. Quentin Tarentin burns up a film screen and explodes a movie theater full of Nazis spectators in Inglourious Basterds (2009), and an audience watching a 3D film in the 3D film The Final Destination 3D (dir. David R. Ellis, 2009) are killed by an explosion just behind the screen.

PersonaLow-budget horror films like The Tingler (dir. William castle, 1959) and The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958) have similar scenes in which the projectionist of the film in the film fails to transfer from the end of one reel to the beginning of another.

Cinemoa: Simulating Cine-Clash Though film theorists and critics openly borrowed much of the technical terms and critical concepts form literary theory and literary criticism, more recent film criticism hasnot yet caught up to the philological dimensions of digital remediation. DVDs and blu-rays are new editions of films released theatrically not only because they have various kinds of cinematic paratexts that resemble a scholarly apparatus of a book but because they old adopt an old, impossible philology: some DVDs want to restore not just the film, providing before and after comparisons as extras, but the original theatrical viewing. For example, Warner Night at the Movies DVDs include the trailers, short film, and cartoon shown before the feature Public Enemy when first released in 1931 and a forward to its release in 1954.

Abandon in / g Cinema: Give Me My Sin-Off Again At last, I turn to Abbas Kiorastami’s Where is My Romeo. But before I do so, let me offer two contradictory propositions: first, examples of cin-offs may be found in a countless number of films, including the silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor during which an audience is shot “listening” to a “talkie” at a movie theater; second, there is no such

thing as a cin-off; the cin-off may only be mis/wreckgcognized.22 As “example” illustrating both propositions, I turn to the film Chacun son Cinema of which Kiorastami’s Where is My Romeo is one of thirty-three three-minute narrative films. The title Chacun son Cinema is an exercise in ontological damage control. The film is offered as a cinephilic celebration of world cinema: rather than ask “what is world cinema?,” Chacun son Cinema assumes that we already know what cinema has been and still is, dividing cinema up into discrete units of narrative films directed by single persons from single nations: each person, whether a director, cast or crew member of a film, or spectator gets his or her own singular cinema. And that cinema is available, if not at Cannes, then on DVD. The “universality” of “world” cinema celebrated in Chacun son Cinema is composed of a nationally bounded geopolitics, each film exchangeable in the same universal currency. One could reasonably say that the entire film is a compilation of cin-offs since each film is in some way about film. All have scenes in movie theaters, though one of the thirty films stops at the ticket window and another ends at a bar after the film is over. One film actually shows clips from the cin-off in Vivre sa Vie in which Nana (Anna Karina) and her john go to the cinema to see Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (a.k.a The Passion of Jon of Arc, 1928), shifting the narrative focus to the Antonin Artaud playing a priest away from Maria Falconetti playing Joan. Yet the narrative films Cannes-piled in Chacun son Cinema are cin-off-wrecks or cinemauras in that they are merely narrative films in which films in the film are part of the theme, and the only kind of film they show is celluloid. Moreover, Chacun son cinema arranges the thirty films in an order that neither quite serial and random nor successive and logical. The DVD has a paratextual problem remediating the film’s narrative structure, however. On the DVD menu, the last film is entitled Happy Ending. If you choose this option, you do to a comedy by Ken Loach about a father and son standing in line deciding which film to see only to change their minutes at the last second and to go to a football match instead. The last fade to black shot of Loach’s carries over a roar of soccer fans from the last shot, with credits in white type. Yet the Happy Ending title on the DVD menu does not appear in Loach’s film with a happy ending. The happy ending arrives in the form of a short clip from the end of Rene Clair’s Le Silence est d'Or (a.k.a. Silence is Golden, Many About Town, 1948) and shows Emile (Charles Boyer) asking his young date, Lucette (Dany Robin) while they are watching a hand-cranked projection of a silent film, if she likes happy endings. She replies “yes,” and he says “so do I.” Play music, fade to black, followed by a thank you to Rene Clair and then by a citation of the film’s French title. Why does the DVD menu not properly index the contents of the film.? Among the many possible reasons, I suggest that the Epilogue remains concealed on the DVD because it is not integrated into the film itself. The epilogue is a cin-off from a film, not a film in its own right. It is in excess of the thirty films of the films that cannot be recognized on the paratexts of the DVD or peritexts of the film. The referent of the dislocated “happy ending” goes missing. Where is My Romeo significantly contributes to the cine-“wreckage” of Chacun son cinema by interrogating the ontology of the film medium, what we might now call “cinenoma,” instead of telling a story about film that takes it for granted that cinema--still-- has an ontology. The title of Kiarostami’s film is conspicuously missing the question mark that follows Juliet’s question in the play. By improperly re-citing a

question from Romeo and Juliet as an unpunctuated and non-sensical declarative sentence, Kiarostami pressures the viewer to hallucinate the question mark and hear the silent title as a question. The French subtitle underneath the film’s title on the two disc DVD edition succumbs to this pressure and supplies the missing question mark, as if emending the film, repairing and correcting its unwitting error.

This correction is itself something of an error, however. For Kiarostami’s film puts cinema’s ontology into question by reproducing yet disturbing the citation practices that underwrite its apparently specular economy. Much the way Jean-Luc Godard cuts from Dreyer’s close-ups of Falconetti in Vivre sa vie (1964 ) to Anna Karina watching her in a movie theater, both of whom shed tears, Where is My Romeo lets us identify with the anonymous women in the audience who are identifying with Juliet, as in a hall of mirrors. Kiarostammi follows Godard in making film spectatorship into an archival and auratic effect. In Vivre sa vie, no music (live accompaniment) plays during Dreyer’s (silent) film, nor does any extra-deigetic music sound play on the soundtrack as Nana watches it. The theater showing Dreyer’s film seems to be in disrepair. Only the neon letters “cine” of “cinema” to the left of the marquee are lit. Only three people are watching Dreyer’s film (one woman walks out just as Nana and her john sit down). Godard represents the specularity of two beautiful, young women actresses in two different films as a cinpehilic effect, a fantasy of auratic immediacy that is no longer, perhaps never was available, and that is grounded in the total silence of the soundtrack of Vivre sa vie. Godard was not in a position to say that cinema was dead until the 1980s when he filmed his four part l’histoire du cinema, but he already seized on a kind of cinematic death in Vivre sa Vie, adding the title “Le mort” a second time to his redition of Dreyer’s film (it appears only once in Jeanne d’Arc). A different analogue medium, which Godard deployed in l’histoire, may it possible to keep cinema intact, something that had a history that began and ended even if what cinema was remained an open question. In Where is My Romeo, Kiaorstami stages spectatorship as an archive effect by turning a con-off into a narrative film. Like Vivre sa Vie, Where is My Romeo shows a number of women in a movie audience are shot successive in close-ups of approximately the same length while

they watch a woman committing suicide near the ending of Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation Romeo and Juliet (1966). The crucial difference is that Kiraostami never shows the film the women are watching, intensifying the auratic immediacy of the emotional responses we see on the screen by withholding the image of the film they are reacting too.23 Let me back up a moment. Even before Where Is My Romeo begins with a shot of the audience, the title of the film--its missing question mark—disturbs what it seems to recite. Romeo and Juliet is of course deeply engaged in citation: not only the (always already anti-) Petrarchan sonnet tradition enacting a sonnet when Romeo and Juliet first speak to each other at the Capulet ball. Kissing by the book, Romeo and Juliet play out the tropes of a literary sonnet tradition as the actors playing them recite lines from a prompt-book. The play’s iterations complicate from the story an economy of love between pilgrims through which sin and redeemed through repetition: “give me my sin again.”24 Kiarostammi’s Where is My Romeo deep-en-d-s the play’s own concerns with citation and media. The film is both a narrative and a non-narrative film: the soundtrack is of course a narrative, but the reaction shots of the spectators are randomly ordered. One might consider the film as a compilation of reaction shots. The close ups of women Romeo are differentiated in two respects: first, the last women we see is quite old, in contrast to the other women, all of whom are young, we see before her; moreover, this actress turns her head to her right as if looking at the person seated next to her, but we can’t tell what she sees, or if she is seeing anything; this actress also gets a line of text at

the bottom of the frame thanking her by name, Mrs. Keradmand.

Second, most of the women begin to cry as the film gets more dramatic, especially at Juliet’s line, “O happy dagger.” These shifts from many young women to one old woman, from women sad to women sad enough to cry, may be interpreted in a number of ways (for example, even a very old woman may still young be enough identify with a fourteen year old teenager; women may be deeply moved by a film about a woman; the film is really a tribute to the Iranian actress it names and appears to accept by turning and nodding her heard; and so on). Yet these shifts nevertheless do not constitute a narrative shift: their multiplicity and heterogenity prevent one either from totalizing Where is My Romeo as a random series or as a narrative film. The film’s last shot is not an ending (no one gets up to leave), and the music from Zeffirelli’s film plays over the two credits that end Kiarosotami’s film. The initially diegetic soundtrack of the film becomes extradeigetic during the end title sequence.

By redividing Where Is My Romeo’s cuts in their relation to the content of their images and its film soundtrack, Kiarostami invites his film to read philologically. Whoever added the question mark after Romeo in the French subtitle was not merely resisting the film. Philology is essentially a reparative operation, emending texts, preserving and saving them, making sense of them, rendering them readable. Yet the kinds of comparative film philology made possible through DVDs and youtube prevents one from achieving a restored, corrected edition of the film that might include an audiocommentary made by a person who uploaded the film or added to latter DVD or blu-ray edition of the film. As I mentioned earlier, Youtube.com allows one to restore the unseen Zeffirelli film: one only has to opening up two browsers and place them side, almost as if the film had been shot in split screen, to see the one clip and the other at the same time.

The scene from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet we hear in Where is My Romeo begins with Juliet’s lines “where is my lord? / I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am. Where is my Romeo?” The scene ends with ends with the Prince’s lines, reassigned by Zeffirelli to the voice-over narrator who delivered the prologue and serving as the film’s epilogue:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head . . . .For never was a story of more woeThan this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Zeffirelli cut these two lines from the Prince’s speech: “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; / Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished.” Where is my Romeo offers an opportunity to re-read the Romeo and Juliet passages and see what Zeffirelli did with them. Yet to do so is to return to a philosophical question about philology focused on violence25: what did Zeffirelli cut from the text and why? Why did Kiarostami cut the suicide scene from that film and use it in his own film?

What happens when you cite a film by cutting its sound from its image, when you reroute a visual mirror stage that allows for the identification of faces through a sonic mirror stage--what Kaja Silverman calls the acoustic mirror? To pursue these questions through new media means that a film philology begins with the assumption of cinewreckage, or something we might (not) call what we still refer to as cinema. The ontological status of Kioarostami’s own film becomes next to impossible to convert into philological terms. If one does the most basic google searches with the words “Where is My Romeo,” one may very quickly discover that the women in the film are not actually watching Romeo and Juliet but staring at a piece of blank A4 paper. Kiarostami says he shot the women looking the paper first, then added the soundtrack from Zeffrelli’s film later.26 Though the production of film may be sequenced into image and sound, the meshing of the one and the other produces a problem at the center of cinephilia, namely, the relation between readability, mourning. As Anselm Haverkamp writes in “Error in Mourning,” “The death of Mnemosyne exhausts the possibilities of lyric in that it grounds the impossibility of reading in the inability of mourning . . . Without memory and the defensive abilities of understanding (“to re-collect”), there is no possibility left for a future hermeneutics.”27 Where is my Romeo might be read as a kind of funeral procession, anticipating the mourning of the Mrs. Kammamerkand who perhaps already mourning her death as she watches Juliet end hers, but any such thematic reading of Kiarostammi’s film runs aground on the fact that Where is My Romeo has already serialized mourning: Kiraostammi returns to a film that ends with mourning, but the shots of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet’s funeral are registered only through music and hence cannot be registered in Where is My Romeo. The referent of mourning, whether that referent is alive or already dead, fictional or real, all forestall a thematic, linearization of Where is My Romeo. Let me go further. In refusing to make mourning a narratable sequence with a single object, Kiarostammi’s film deconstructs the presumed ontological integrity of cinema, the central issue being whether or not film is indexical. Where is My Romeo ex-poses the question “What is cinema” as a questioning of cinenoma, cinemaura, and cinemarchive as that turns on the screen and the frame. What matters is how the screen produces referent effects based both on what we see and hear on the screen and what we don’t. The clarity of Where is My Romeo that allows us to mis/recognize is predicated both on deafness (the film we watch has no soundtrack) and blindness (the film we hear has no image track). Yet blindness and clarity, deafness and hearing do not map exactly to what is on or off screen since the soundtrack of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is also the soundtrack of Where is My Romeo. The multiple and seemingly obvious s-ways in which Kiarostammi divides hand redivides Where is My Romeo defer the authority of any single set of opposed terms to operate as the opposition that masters all the other. Nevertheless, Where is my Romeo calls into question the limits of the screen, its relation to the frame, and hence is not yet another garden variety example of a deconstructive mise-en-abyme, yet another frame of reference.28 Most cin-offs, the film in the film is shown diegetically on a screen that is a prop, in effect, on the set. It is a film within-a film, a self-reflexive moment in which film reflects on its medium by framing it. However, there are almost many cin-offs in which the film cuts to the film in it by showing it without a screen. All of the shots in Vivre sa vie from Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc take up the entire screen; they are

directly cut into Godard’s film. Godard does the same thing with the rushes of Fritz Lang’s Odyssey in Contempt and Alain Resnais does the same thing with 8mm rushes shown in Muriel: The Time of a Return. In films like Hitchock’s Sabotage (1936), David R. Ellis’s The Final Destination: 3D (2009), and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), the proscenium arch over the movie theater screen image appears in the cin-offs and, more importantly, the film in the film is shot from a space behind it.   Seemingly recognizable cin-offs, when collected and compared philologically, show that the capacity of film to reflect itself on screen through a screen image of film on screen in the shot is merely an effect, a distorted way of rendering cinema’s self-reflexivity. In Where is My Romeo, the questioning of cinematic mis/wrekcognition and of mourning a “decayed” or “dead” cinema derives from a more local questioning of the movie theater, perhaps the one constant in all cin-offs, though the “theater” takes a wide variety of forms. By withholding Romeo and Juliet from view, Kiraostmami collapses the movie theater into the screen they are watching, directing our attention by using the film soundtrack of a film adaptation of a play to a difference between theater and movie theater audiences we ordinarily cannot see. Yet as the screen collapses into the frame. Yet phantom effects of a frame return. If one assumes (mistakenly yet correctly) that the audience in Where is My Romeo are watching Romeo and Juliet, one may wonder where the camera has been placed even though one knows it has obviously been placed in front of them. It may appear to have been a hidden camera partly because the film refuses to obey the convention of the shot reverse shot that it mis/uses. Whereas the shot reverse shot convention would put prevent the camera’s location from ever being a question, the fact that we never get the reverse shot puts more and more pressure on our understanding of the shots we are watching: since women never look at the camera or acknowledge it in any way, it is clear we are not watching a documentary of a live performance, on the one hand, yet, on the other, it is clear that the immediacy of the women responses depends on the (hallucinated) mediation of the camera and the women, on something like a phantom fourth wall, an invisible proscenium arch between the camera and the women shown on screen that women cannot see, just as we cannot see what they are (not) watching. Kiarostammi’s Where is My Romeo puts the ontology of cinema by undoing the presumably evident opposition between screen and frame. In his essay “Painting and Cinema,” Andre Bazin contrasts the two media in relation to the frame. Paintings, of course are framed, but not the screen: “The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. . . A frame is centripetal, the screen centrigual.” Anticipating the moves made in Shakespeare and film adaptation studies in the 1990s to liberate films from a fidelity model centered on original, complete texts, Bazin disagrees with critics who feel that the film s not true to the painting wants to save films about paintings as “works in their own right. They are their own justification. . . . The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence” (168). Bazin saves film adaptations of theater in a similar way, dialectically arguing that just as bad theater saved theater, so bad films of theater, save film adaptations of theater.29 Bazin’s brilliant and laudatory attempt to save cinema as something about which one can ask “What is?” depends on an intractable structuralist account of film and other media. Film and painting are both indivisible media insofar as paintings and films are complete: films

about paintings paradoxically “use an already completed work sufficient unto itself. But it is precisely because it substitutes a work one degree removed form it. . . that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the extent that film is a complete work and as such, seem s therefore to betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater survive” (169). The importance of Where is My Romeo and of the Shakespeare cin-off in generally in part in making us see the central limits of Bazin’s theory of film adaptation, namely, it uncritically assumes that film and works of film are indivisible units and it forgets the movie theater. Viewed in relation to new media, Bazin’s still dominant film theory also works against any attention either to remediation as a philological practice of editing or to what a new film philology would look like or whether it is even possible.30 From a deconstructive point of view, it is naïve to think that any film or a work of literature is complete and completely readable. As Derrida writes, “we are no longer credulous enough to believe we are setting out from things themselves by avoiding ‘texts” simply by avoiding quotation or the appearance of ‘commentary.’ The most apparently direct writing, the most directly concrete, personal writing which is supposedly in direct contact with the ‘thing itself,’ this writing is ‘on credit’: subjected to the authority of a commentary or a re-editing that is not even capable of reading.31

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130).

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle

voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132Derrida then proceeds to outline what he takes to be the two options for the disposal of corpses now available: inhumation and cremation. (132-33). He then returns to Robinson

Crusoe to discuss Crusoe’s fear of being buried alive. At p. 143 Derrida then returns to inhumation and cremation and finishes the Fifth Session with that topic (146). Derrida returns to the topic in pp. 162-71 of the Sixth Session.

Not revived (see again) but revised? Revision as cancellation in current readings. But Kiarostami (not revising it—we don’t see it) / prologue imagines reception as meaning, or as lack, or as death. Unseeability like unreadability. We watch through, but we don’t see.

Add sur-vivance to end of first chapter—transition from unreadability to survivanceUnreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-vivance.

Move chapter descriptions to preface—add King Lear Cliff Notes—worst and worse—engage undergrad readers—Shakespeare we can do without doing it.

Cinephilia—what does it mean for a medium—film—to do—Kirostami is ac crossroads between Shakespeare and film—film interrupts the reception of R and J that allows something else that has to happen—that something has to do with the prologue.

Frames come in and out—last two lines of prologue, a sonnet, are maddeningly different to read—al about the insufficiency of the story—performance on the stage mending that insufficiency. Becomes aphoristic—prologue is almost like a dumb that provides a plot summary that isn’t—sets up a series of equivalencies that may or may not be aligned, mended. What happens in the playR and J are idealized—Edleman—say no to everyf future that gets imagined fo rhtemOr a radical freedomfor them—Jlia Lupton and Kotman—in SQ—audbade is all about not wanting to put the phone down—parahrasing what they are saying in italicized—.

R and J is rally aobut the death drive or true articlualtion of freedom, not what it seems to be about—the hteromnormative plot is cancelled.

R and J gets stuck—can only be replayed—accessoried with gold statues, not revised.Nashe wants to say that the past can be revived.Theat can produce stunt armadas. 2 Henry VI Cade and Co get vanquished by the name Hrnrvy V.

“Where is my Romeo” is an ubi sund—it’s a formula, it’s a misreading. It’s an instruction to go to the balcony scne, but they’re watching a different one. Balcony scenes and crypt scenes dominate and the rest of the play is read through them-those scenes dominate. The title of the film playing as testing the dominance of those scenes. The actresses are not even responding to the film. Suggests a radical identification of viewer and Juliet—where is my Romeo—takes out of the film—into reception. We’re

invited not to identify with R and J but with the movie-goer. Seriality of response is both individuating (separate audience members) but not.

Equipment for dying (Kenneth Burke’s equipment for living).

Filmis getting read as an alleogy of biopolitics of Iran—situation of women in audience, generalized for all Iranians.Prologue creates a story in which R and J names are aphoristic.Events happening in the theater keyed to a medium that can give an afterlife to these names. Sovereignty accorded to the state accorded to the medium—applause sedating effect on terror.

Were we ever watching.

The work of the film is to rezone and short-circuit work on the play.

Ennganegemnt of cinephilia

Juliet is getting married (again!) and so the Capulets are making pie—date and quince for starters, maybe mincemeat, given that in 4. 4 Lady Capulet gives the Nurse her keys so that she can “fetch more spices” (4. 4. 1-2). “Look to the bak’d meats, good Angelica: / Spare not for cost” (4. 4. 5-6) she instructs. They’ve hired “twenty cunning cooks” already (4. 2. 1-2) as so many guests have been invited—and they’re good cooks, the kind who “lick their fingers” (4. 2. 3)—unable to resist the allure of their own food. Such then the bustle of the house as its daily rhythms recalibrate in order to host the event, the occasion of Juliet’s marriage to Paris. Unfortunately, courtesy of Friar Lawrence, Juliet has undertaken “a thing like death…that cop’st with death himself” (4. 1. 74-75), entering into a simulacrum of death, a becoming dead, that feels like dying but which will end, forty two hours later, when she will wake not from sleep, but “as from a pleasant sleep” (4. 1. 105-106). She pops upstairs to her bedroom in 4. 3 to “pop” the pill—to drink the “remedy” that will enable her to fake her death and wake to another future which will make good on her past clandestine marriage to Romeo. She toasts Romeo as she does so, narrating her “becoming dead,” and worrying a future in which she wakes in the family vault, inhabiting what it’s like to be dead, to wake with the dead, to become a sentient monument, living on. Juliet pauses to speak before drinking her draught—a figure of stillness. Everyone else in the house is in motion, busily catching themselves and each other up in the happy havoc of the wedding preparations.

The Nurse finds her. “You slug-abed!” (4. 5. 2). Always late! Always somewhere else even when she’s here—“Sleep for a week,” the Nurse smirks, “for the next night, I warrant, / The County Paris hath set up his rest / that you shall rest but little” (4. 5. 5-7). But things are different today. She’s not moving. “Alas, alas! Help, help! My lady’s dead!” (4. 5. 14). Nothing prepares for such a reversal—Lord and Lady Capulet, Paris, the Nurse, and Friar Lawrence’s out-pouring of monumentalizing language aims to

register the impossibility of the inversion. “All things that we ordained festival / Turn from their office to black funeral” says Capulet (4. 5. 84-85)—

Our instruments to melancholy bells,Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change, Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, And all things change them to the contrary”

(4. 5. 86-90). The “bak’t meats” still serve—but the cooks do not one lick their fingers. Capulet registers the literal catastrophe or overturning of all, the growing trauma or the entering of a time and temporality of incipient horror, of horror that grows, that surprises itself, whose essence lies in that which could not be predicted, may not be normalized, cannot be healed. The double meaning condensed in “cheer”—food that is happy, that is akin or part of happiness, fractures into two words, “sad feast.” Luxuriating within this fractured temporality, Hamlet remarks the force of such generic recoding when he chides the recently arrived Horatio that he came not “to see his father’s funeral…but to [see] my mother’s wedding” (1. 2. 176-177). “Thrift, thrift, Horatio,” he goes on, “the funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1. 2. 180-181). The quick succession of the events with the change in script or routines stands as a correlative to the play’s spiraling dis-ease with bad thrift, too quick recycling, re-use, and its draw to un usable remainders, expenditure, waste.

But Romeo and Juliet plays differently. The generic recoding of the wedding feast registers the prior purchase of still other scripts than those of comedy. Juliet is married once already, and by that hasty, hidden marriage, the play has been marked or has inscribed within itself an impossible other time, a frenzied passionate temporality, which Verona, constituted by “two houses both alike in diginity” (1. 1. 1) and enmity, may not sustain or permit. Embedded within the play like some thorn that cannot be dug out, is an impossible, accelerated Romeo and Juliet thing that, despite all, bears repeating, and repeating, or replaying endlessly, and headily, and horribly. Capulet asks for Montague’s hand at the end of the play—offering him it as his “daughter’s jointure” (5. 3. 295-296). But Montague offers more—to “raise her statue in pure gold” (5. 3. 298)—which Capulet accepts and returns with one “as rich” for Romeo (5. 3. 302). Accepting their coupling in enmity to which Romeo and Juliet were “poor sacrifices,” the Capulets and Montagues enter into a closed circuit of mourning whose objects accessorize the tragedy, replaying it as an irremediable loss.

Coded by scenes of anonymous sonnet coupling / co-writing (1. 5); parallel play soliloquies become dialogue (2. 2); clock watching, “The clock struck nine…” (2. 5); anticipatory star-fucking, “and when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will have a face so fine / That all the world will be in love with night” (3. 2. 21-24); resigned but imploring temporal refusal, “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day” (3. 5. 1); solo acts of extreme ingestion (4. 3 and 5. 3); and a stabbing (5. 3)—the play archives or records the “ash” of Friar Lawrence’s hope that “thou [Romeo] shalt live till we can find a time / To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends” (3. 3. 149-150). It’s that “ash” that Montague and Capulet register even as they may not understand what has in fact happened, as their story is literally and figuratively “encrypted.” Instead, the impossibility of Romeo and Juliet, even as we saw and heard them, supped up by their

extreme ingestion of magico-pharmacological superlatives—foods that simulate death, relieving the body from the need to eat, in one case, and killing, in an other—immunizes their ratcheted up auto-affectivity against the regularizing of everyday life, the rituals of a household or the clichés of wedding night sleeplessness and couples humor that pale as the Nurse registers Juliet’s seeming death.

Death simply is, the tragedy tells us—no happy ecological holism of recycling, just static. On the upside, however, their story may be replayed without loss but also without gain. Inhabiting a sonnet-world of heightened affect, of quasi-automatic or autopoeitic loving, we may find ourselves, much like Juliet, “kiss[ed] by th’book” (1. 5. 109) and liking it; affectively engaged by the technology of Shakespeare’s stage, sin/cinephiliacs in the making, begging, as does Romeo in 2.2 for that “sin” again. Plus, there’s all that pie going to waste.

2 Film History Vol. 7, No. 3, Autumn, 1995 Special Issue on Film Preservation and Film

Scholarship

William D.Routt Textual criticism in the study of film (1)

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/firjul/wdr.html

3 July 1997

Tom Cohen, Anti-Mimesis From Plato to Hitchcock cambridge1994 “post-humanist

reading” coda 260-64

On the archive and film, see pp. 90-109 Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies Vol 1. Secret Agents

UMinn 2005

Part two of volume two “War Machines” is entitled the “Prehistory of the Afterlife of

Cinema”

Mary Ann Doane, ed. Speical issue of differences. Indexicality: Trace and Sign (18:1)

'The indexical and the concept of medium specificity', Differences: a Journal of Feminist

Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no 1, pp. 1-6

Boris Groys “The Aura of Profane Enlightenment, “ 2002

http://cgi.eigen-art.com/user-cgi-bin/files/fischer_elsani_bgroys.pdf

Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam University

Press - Film Culture in Transition) by Marijke de Valck. Amsterdam University Press

(July 15, 2008).

Geographical Place works like film artifact for cinephile, a holding places. Obvious, self-

evident empiricism.

3 In Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Philip Rosen discusses historic

building preservation in similar terms, but he does not consider film preservation.

4 Cinematic and electrographic Garret Stewart p. 17

Optical unconscious and digital unconscious, Stewart p. 14

Superimposable versus reversible p. 15

Again: photo/slide/pixel—in this case with the digital incursion built into the cinematic

erosion it simulates. P. 51

Beyond the narratological mise-en-abyme of a film-within-the film at the end of The

Golden Bowl, it is by further texturing of these internal projections that a more specific

narratography is called for—and called forth—in closure. P. 52

Time versus time space (127)

5 I address these taxonomic problems in Shakespeares after Shakespeare.

Romeo + Juliet menu—I wrote about as mourning in Shakespeare the Movie II.

6 Latour and Wiebel Iconoclash.

7 See Garret Stewart: “Well below the level of the seme or shot cell, well before screen

representation in its least divisible segments, this chapter has in mind—in mind, because

never quite ins separate view on-screen—the fragment upon whose suppression the

cinema’s whole visual system depends. In familiar enough film terminology , this is of

course, the photogram, rendered imperceptible in order to make cinema visible. 119

Stewart maintains , briefly,. “The supposed integral structure of the word, like the

supposed integral structure of the screen image, is thus deconstructed from within by its

own habitual functioning , which typically masks the work of supplementation as mere

succession.” Stewart does not question the integral structure of the photogram, however,

so that deconstruction is set to damage control: habitual functioning is the remedy that

screens out error, breakdowns, misrecognitions.

8 In one view, cinema is over. Lev Manovich and David Rodowick have both rewritten

the history of film as the prehistory of new media, for which film screen is the default

computer interface. For Rodowick, we have to deal with the ontological “uncertainty” of

what he calls “virtual,” or remediated film. Along somewhat similar lines, Garret Stewart

has written about the different temporalities of film and “post-filmic” cinema. In another

view, film has been since it began. For archivist Paolo Usai, film is auto-destructive and

hence has suffered a number of “deaths.” Tom Gunning has pointed out that film has

always been undergoing mutations. And archivist Giovanni Fossati deconstructs the

opposition between old and new film and media by saying that film has always been in

transition, concluding that “film is inherently transitional” (145).

9 Garret Stewart, endnote on Derrida. Trying to extend the application of a

grammatological rather htan a strictly linguistic model to the iamge track itself. After

citing Screen / Play: Derrida and Film Thoery endnote 8, p. 348. But he never mentions

or reads a single work by Derrida.

10 On worldness and world, see Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of

Metaphysics: World, Finitude, SOlitude. On “universal,” see text for Chacun. Criterion

Eclipse mission statement: "...a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in

simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the

adventurous home viewer." Maria Ambrovich is dead: A Biogrpahy / her MOMA self-

exhibit a kind of analogue—just staring at you, the sitter, saying nothing, not blinking, as

it were.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVrpp_TLY50

For the trailer of Kings and Queens.

Un extrait du film mythique d'Arnaud Desplechin sorti en salles en décembre

2004http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Rs8Ao89kM

Rois et reine ( Kings and Queen) ... Added to queue Rois et Reine -extrait-by

awon7824558 views

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mQoHaaloE

This extract is in French. A commenter summarizes the dialogue in English.

Film becomes more foreign. No English subtitles for a film that, on DVD< has English

subtitles.

So extracts require translations and other kinds of philological / editing work. World

cinema is also multi-lingual / foreign-er cinema)

The uploaders have pseudonyms / code names. 2 min - Mar 29, 2007 - Uploaded by

charllotte84 French is “extact,” not clip.

There are of course diffrnece sin image nad audio quality, between projection and digital

at home, eventhough the digital projectorsand digital prints are decreasing (Myexperience

watching Jane Eyre in a theater —that’ a rally great transfer). The point is htat hter eis

now no original against which to measure all others. Viewing the “original” invoves

other contrasts between transfers of transfers—from DVD tocomputer. Form computer

(a website trailer) to you tube. Trailers can be accessed in different sizes and different

densities, btw. So comparative film philology is demanded / invited / enabled by Dvd

and computer, esp. youtube.

One scene can function as an annotaiton. Like Beyond Good and Evil / Genealogy of

Morals clip from A Christmas Tale from the Criterion DVD. There's a sequence with

three scenes from William Dieterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream on TV in

A Christmas Tale: The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray] (2008)Catherine Deneuve

(Actor), Jean-Paul Roussillon (Actor), Arnaud Desplechin (Director)

http://www.amazon.com/Christmas-Tale-Criterion-Collection-Blu-ray/dp/

B002PHVGYA/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1309265513&sr=1-2

(Btw, the blu-ray tansfer is grogeous!)

No dialogue is audible because extra-diegtic music on the film soundtrack overrides it. 

All three scenes involve Oberon and Titania(awaking from her slumber with Bottom)

The play is referenced three times later in the film via sound clips from

Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream

used in Dieterle's film and also later by Woody Allen in A

Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

The charrater who opens the film also ends it, concluding her final voice-over comments

with the first part of Puck's epilogue:

” If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

She compresses the last three lines of hte six above a bit.  The English subtitles do not

translate the French back into Shakespeare's verse, however; I assume the translators did

not recognize the citation.

There is also an interestingly enigmatic Jewish thread in the film.  One character is

Jewish and she leaves the family get together before the gift giving celebration.  Cecil B.

Demille's remake of The Ten Comandments (theone wiht Charlton heston) is also hearin

French before we see him on  TV parting the Red Sea. The randmother ) Deneveuve)

calls theson she dislikes "my little Jew," though in an endearing rather than insulting

way.  He tells her she can keep her anti-Semitism.  His girlfriend is the Jewish character

(she wears a necklace with a star too).

And there is reading of the Preface to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (seen in

German--"Vorede"- with handwritten French notes, some trnslating the German,

surrounding it.  The text is not identified until the rader lays it down on the table andwe

see that it is an edition of Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. 

Someone uploaded the clip to youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jg8jsbRP84If you own the DVD the extract is taken

form, like Joan of Arc, Criterion, you can recognize the clip. Ditto for Criterion Vivre sa

vie. And you can go back and watch it on DVD player or blu-ray player. You watch the

“same” thing differently in order to interpret “the” film even though “the” film no longer

is equivalent to eh film print, celluloid of digital. Slow reading (Mulvey) by video or by

DVD is no longer still seemed to be watching the “same” film (on TV too), just a

different way, even though it arguably was not. The “don’t steal DVDs” tailers have

disappeared. Questions of intellectual property, unlike music, seem moot.

11 The one exception is A Cottage on Dartmoor, in which we neeither see nor hear the

talkie film the audience sis watching. For a discussion of a much more conventional cin-

off of Zeffreilli’s Romeo and Juliet, film, see Qing ren jie / A Time to Love Dir. Jianqi

Huo, 2005. China. Beijing Film Studio, Starlight Intl. Media Co. Sound, col., 113 mins.

A love story set in China’s Cultural evolution, with the romantic relationship between

Qu Ran (Vicki Zhao) and Hou Jia (Yi Lu) opposed by both their families includes a cin-

off of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

12 See Tom Cohen. I don’t think an anti-mimetic cinema is possible. A para-mimetic

cinema is possible, however, that attends to the seldom scenes and oscillations of

peripheries and centers.

13 In earlier film theory and criticism, differences between film prints, some pristine,

some extremely damaged, and film restoration did not even rise to a level of significance

to be acknowledged. Noel Carroll writes, for example, that “films are publicly accessible;

they can be viewed by more than one person. Moreover, they can be repeated; we can

see the same film again and again, and we can fall back on all sorts of evidence-

production and distribution records, the testimony of other viewers and of the

filmmakers, the existence of similar prints, and so on—to warrant the claim that the film

we just saw, say Captain Blood, is the same film we saw in the past” (233).

14 Stewart,betenFilma ndScreen

18 Debate over metaphors in Bazin. Sometimes useful. But reading is always slavational

—an attempt to make bazin more coherent and therefore less powerful, I think, than his

writing really is.

16 Stewart’s model of the photogram addresses film and literature but keeps them parallel

and he does not discuss film adaptation even when discussing The Secret Agent or The

Andromeda Strain. “adjacent inscriptive media of film and literature” (266)

17 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical

On Derrida on cinema, see Ghost Dance, the film and the interview in Public. See also

the interview n Cahiers du Cinema, Phantomes du Cinema.”

19 Baudry has been revived, but tension around ontology, which is confused with essence

and identity of thing. So a confusion of idealism and materialism as artifactual is defined

as a thing, a container, in effect. The film. SO the disinction between those who see a

gulf between analog and digital and those who do not, and those who think of Bazin as

materialist and those who think he is about a way of watching films, the same assumption

that the film artifact is a discrete thing; moreover; it is assembled form discrete,

ontologically distinct elements. But this is to misunderstand ontology and the Being of

being as the quesiotn of metaphysics.See Heidegger, Intorudciton to Metaphysics.

20 See Wim Wenders Lisbon Story for an exploration of this problem of the movie theater

turned archive in terms of sound and image. Assumption is that the archive is also

reduible to unit of any micropscopi csort. Exhibition

Stanley Kubrick

March 23, 2011 - July 31, 2011

Cinémathèque Française - 51 rue de Bercy 75012 Paris - Tél : +33 (0) 1 71 19 33 33,

France

La Cinémathèque française accueille du 23 mars au 31 juillet 2011 pour la première fois

une exposition itinérante, non pas initiée par ses équipes, mais par celles d'une autre

institution, le Deutsches Filmmuseum de Francfort. Le fonds du Stanley Kubrick Archive

renferme de nombreux et précieux documents sur le travail préparatoire du réalisateur:

scénarios, correspondances, documents de recherche, photographies de tournage,

costumes et accessoires, ainsi qu'une minutieuse documentation sur les projets non

réalisés, et par ailleurs cultes, comme son "Napoléon" (1968-1973).

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/community/events/3533.htm Also the book, Kubrick’s

archive (Taschen), a sampling.

21 due to the impossibility of ever archiving the moment of impression such as a foot

leaving a print behind in volcanic ash, Derrida is particularly concerned with the impact

of writing media such as the fax, invented after Freud, have forced us to reconceptualize

the archive and to reread Freud such that the space of the archive cannot be entirely

mapped, metaphorically. Reading the archive in relation to Sigmund Freud’s account of

repetition compulsion and the death drive, Derrida concludes that an “anarchivity” of the

archive produces inevitable breakdowns that compromise the archive’s appears of

complete storage, preservation, retrieval and recall thus opens for the future to the

possibility of what Derrida calls after Kant and Arendt, “radical evil.” Moreover, the

anarchivity of the archive shatters all attempts to configure the archive either

topographically as if it were a building with archive in its address, or temporally as a

linear chronology of entirely reduced to successive dates.

22 Sound and silent cinema. Silent cinema has musical accompaniment in the Spiral

Staircase (dir., Robert Siodmak, ) and in The Fall Tarseem).

23 Kiarostammi is not the first director to introduce a cin-off that does not show the screen

image of the film in the film. A Cottage on Dartmoor does not show the talkie” his

audience is watching, just the orchestra for the silents, and that stops when the sound film

comes on, and various members of the audience adapting to the talkie. Some of the films

in Chacun son cinema besides Where is My Romeo do not show the screened image

either.

24 on the book topos see E. R. Curtius, “European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.”

25 Violence of reading versus philology, see Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of

Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight (1971; U Minn, 1983), 246-66. See Derrida, Given

Time: This violence appears to be irreducible, within the circle or outside it, whether it

repeats the circle or interrupts it. (147)

as well as modern technical processes (study of paper and writing with the aid, I am told

of slides of enlargements of the manuscript) Beissner has produced the irreproachable

critical edition (248). In the case of Hölderlin, this margin of indeterminacy is especially

large, for the material condition of the manuscripts is frequently such that it is

impossible to choose between two possible lessons in the very places where explication is

most necessary. The editor finds himself obliged to rely upon the principle that he

follows; as a result, scientific philology attempts to find objective and quantitative

criteria, while Heidegger decides in the name of the internal logic of his own

commentary. 248

A rational decision between these two criteria is obviously difficult. The quantitative

method does have in its favor a certain positive probability, but its final choice remains

nevertheless arbitrary for it is most unlikely that Hölderlin chose his term on the basis of

statistical distribution. Philology knows this well and proceeds in the honest and sensible

way; in a note, the editor draws attention to the problem and leaves he question open. But

it cannot be denied that he exegete capable of providing a coherent and responsible

interpretation has the right, indeed, the obligation, to decide according to the conclusion

of his interpretation; that is, after all, one of the goals of all exegesis. Everything rests,

then, on the intrinsic value of the interpretation. (249)

There’s a kind of infra-reading in de Man—an internal split whereby one kind of internal

philological reading (cruxes are left open, unresolved) is forever at odds with an other

internal reading that has to go far beyond the philological. Yet the criteria for the value of

this ”intrinsic interpretation” is difficult to establish, even if we posit that Being becomes

the editor, and de Man shortly ironizes Heidegger’s interpetation when de Man says that

Heidegger makes Hölderlin say the opposite of what Holderlin actually says. Resolving

the split rationally is made even more difficult, de Man notes, by Heidegger’s violent

rejection of philology. Heidegger chooses one over the other in polemical fashion in

order to distinguish himself as a thinker from a philosopher. p. 249 With Hölderlin,

there is never any critical dialogue. There is nothing in his work, not an erasure, no

obscurity, no ambiguity, that is not absolutely and totally willed by Being itself. Only

one who has truly grasped this can become the “editor” of being and impose commas that

spring forth “from the necessity of thought.” We are far from scientific philology. 254

Heidegger’s need for a witness is understandable, then, but why must it be Hölderlin? . . .

it is the fact that Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Hiedegger makes him say.

Such an assertion is paradoxical only in appearance. With Hölderlin, Heidegger cannot

take refuge in the ambiguity that constitutes at once his positive contribution and his

defense strategy; he cannot say, as in the case of the metaphysician, that they proclaim

both the true and the false, that they are greater the more they are in error, that he closer

they are to Being, the more they are possessed by the absconding movement. For the

promise of Heidegger’s ontology to be realized, Hölderlin must be Icarus returned from

his flight: he must state directly and positively the presence Being as well as the

possibility of maintaining it in time. Heidegger has staked this entire “system” on the

possibility of this experience. (254-55. Ronell's brilliant essay “Andenken” PMLA in a

new light, since she totally forgets de Man's essay (the way Weber forgets the translation

essay). De Man's question is more fundamental than Ronell's. His question is not why

does philosophy need poetry (this is her question) but why Heidegger turns in particular

to the poetry of Hölderlin (rather than Rilke, who seems more Heideggerian). De Man

poses the question twice within two pages. His answer is that Hölderlin is a witness, and

this what Heidegger needs, namely, a witness, someone who has gone out and seen Being

and returned show us what he has collected and to talk about it (de Man makes the poet

sound like a sci-fi astronaut angel). Heidegger couldn’t make the trip himself because all

he knew was that Being is concealed; he didn’t know where to find it. Very much not

excuses confessions since the witness of Hölderlin would presumably testify that

Heidegger was not a Nazi, that the Nazi thing was just a bad connection, and

misunderstood the call because he didn’t have called I.D., he thought he was talking to

someone else, etc.

The unreadability of the book is linked linked to the impossibility of mourning.

See de Man “Anthropomorphism and Lyric.”

26 Kiarostami used the same device when making his next film Shirin (2008). He added

the soundtrack in post-production.

27 YFS No 69 (1985), 246

28 See Barbara Johnosn on Derrida nad Lacan The frame of reference.

30 Opening bazin: postwar Film Theory and Its afterlife

31 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, (100)

29 “ Theater and Cinema, Part Two, section two “The Cinema Will Save the Theater.”

117-120 .