Zusammenfassung
Obwohl sie in total anderen historischen und kulturellen Kontexten eingebettet sind, bieten die spektakelhaften Theaterproduktionen der englischen Restauration und die heutige digitale Filmindustrie ein fruchtbares Versuchsgelände um die Verflechtungen von visuellen Kunstgriffen und Begriffen des Heroischen zu sondieren.
Mein Beitrag legt dar, wie diese Konfigurationen von Medien, Technologien und Publika mit (affektiven) Moden von Verbundenheit interagieren, die heroischen Figurationen sowie kulturellen Begriffen des Heroischen zugrunde liegen. Mit Drydens Conquest of Granada (1669) und Settles Empress of Morocco (1673) als Fallstudien wird im ersten Teil analysiert, wie (konkurrierende) Muster von heroischem Effekt und Publikumsreaktion vermittelt werden und wie affektive Reaktionen mit Zuerkennungen von Macht vernetzt sind. Die Filmindustrie des 21. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere digitale 3D-Filme, ist auf ähnliche Weise gekennzeichnet von Paradigmenwechseln in Medienkulturen und Wahrnehmungsmustern und arbeitet mit den Grenzen von Sinnestäuschung.
In einer close reading von Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) werde ich analysieren, wie die fotorealistische und stereoskopische Ausdehnung des Raums und die Verflechtung von Bild und Geschichte die Zuschauersposition aus dem Gleichgewicht bringen und etablierte Tropen heroischer Exzeptionalität umformen.
Abstract
Although embedded in radically different historical and cultural contexts, the spectacular theatrical productions of the English Restoration and the present-day digital film industry provide a rich testing ground to explore the intersections of visual artifice with negotiations of the heroic. My paper analyses how these configurations of media, technologies and audiences interact with the (affective) modes of relatedness which determine heroic figurations as well as cultural concepts of the heroic. Using Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (1669) and Settle’s Empress of Morocco (1673) as case studies, the first part sets out to analyse how (competing) modes of heroic effect and audience response are negotiated, and how affective responses are tied to allocations of power. 21st-century cinema, and digital 3D in particular, is similarly characterized by paradigmatic shifts in media cultures and perceptual habits, and constantly operates on the boundaries of illusion. In a close reading of Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), I will analyse how the photorealistic and stereoscopic expansion of space as well as the intersection of image and narrative comes to unhinge the spectators’ position and inflects established tropes of heroic exceptionality.
Christiane H
ansen(Un)Fading the Hero in Pre- and Postmodern Cultures of Visual Artifice
To quote this article:
Christiane Hansen «(Un)Fading of the Hero in Pre- and Postmodern Cultures of Visual Artifice», in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 22, « Un-Fading the Hero.
Reconfiguring Ancient and Premodern Heroic Templates in Modern and Contemporary
Sascha bRu (Ku leuven) Geneviève FabRy (UCL)
Agnès GuideRdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de GRaeF (Ku leuven) Jan HeRman (KU Leuven) Guido latRé (UCL) Nadia lie (KU Leuven)
Michel lisse (FNRS – UCL) Anneleen masscHelein (KU Leuven) Christophe meuRée (FNRS – UCL) Reine meylaeRts (KU Leuven) Stéphanie Vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Bart Vanden boscHe (KU Leuven) Marc Van VaecK (KU Leuven)
Olivier ammouR-mayeuR (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–
Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo beRensmeyeR (Universität Giessen)
Lars beRnaeRts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith bincKes (Worcester College – Oxford)
Philiep bossieR (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bRueRa (Università di Torino)
Àlvaro ceballos ViRo (Université de Liège) Christian cHelebouRG (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo costaduRa (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola cReiGHton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decKeR (Oklahoma State University) Ben de bRuyn (Maastricht University) Dirk delabastita (Université de Namur) Michel delVille (Université de Liège)
César dominGuez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella
& King’s College)
Gillis doRleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)
Klaus H. KieFeR (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael KolHaueR (Université de Savoie)
Isabelle KRzywKowsKi (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Mathilde labbé (Université Paris Sorbonne)
Sofiane laGHouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François leceRcle (Université Paris Sorbonne) Ilse loGie (Universiteit Gent)
Marc mauFoRt (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuRet (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina moRin (University of Limerick) Miguel noRbaRtubaRRi (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa obeRHubeR (Université de Montréal)
Jan oosteRHolt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaeRt (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter VeRstRaeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
ConseilderédaCtion – redaCtieraad
Anke Gilleir (KU Leuven) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur
Beatrijs Vanacker (KU Leuven) – Secrétaire de rédaction - Redactiesecretaris Elke d’HoKeR (KU Leuven)
Lieven d’Hulst (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) david maRtens (Ku leuven)
Hubert Roland (FNRS – UCL)
Matthieu seRGieR ((UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) Myriam wattHee-delmotte (FNRS – UCL)
Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331
B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)
ComitésCientifique – WetensCHappelijkComité
(Un)Fading the Hero in Pre- and Postmodern Cultures of Visual Artifice
In a 2010 Newsweek article, blatantly titled Why I hate 3-D (And You Should Too), Roger Ebert, one of the most prolific American film critics, rejects digital 3D technology as a cleverly marketed rip-off without any particular aesthetic merits:
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. […] It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness.1
While clearly targeting very specific developments in the 21st century mediascape, Ebert’s verdict symptomatically echoes longstanding reservations against visual spectacle. In the 1670s, critics of the newly opened London stage drew on similar, well-established anti-spectacular tropes that had become particularly virulent with the Reformation. A case in point is a 1673 pamphlet by Dryden, Crowne and Shadwell that was lanced against Elkanah Settle’s Empress of Morocco, a salient example of the Restoration spectacular. Dismissing the play as “a Rhapsody of non-sense”,2 they claimed it was luring audiences into the playhouse by promising spectacular exotic settings and characters just as foolish as their author.3 At the same time, the pamphlet aimed to discredit the play’s audience by making a pronouncedly social differentiation regarding theatrical impact: “the common Audience are much of his levell, and both the great Vulgar and the small [...] are apt to admire what they do not understand; (omne ignotum habent pro magnifico) and think all which rumbles is Heroick.”4 Although both paradigms in their historical context could hardly be more different, this verdict is revealingly close to Ebert’s polemic recourse to alleged levels of intellectual maturity (“grown-up films of any seriousness”).
It will, of course, seem bold to compare the late 17th century spectacular theatre to the present-day digital film industry – and one hardly needs to point out the historical, cultural and aesthetic differences of both phenomena. Both, however, provide a rich testing ground to explore the intersections of visual artifice with negotiations of the heroic, and more generally, the embeddedness of heroic
1. Roger ebeRt, “Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)”, in: Newsweek 9 May 2010 [online],
<http://europe.newsweek.com/roger-ebert-why-i-hate-3d-movies-70247?rm=eu>.
2. John dRyden, “Notes and Observations on ‘The Empress of Morocco’”, in: The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 17: Prose 1668-1691, Berkeley, Calif. [et al.], U of Calif. P, 1971, 83.
3. “He has a heavy hand at Fools, and a great felicity in writing Non-sense for them. Fools they will be in spight of him. His King, his two Empresses, his Villain and his Sub-villain, nay his Heroe have all a certain natural cast of the Father”, ibid., 85.
4. Ibidem.
constructions in specific frameworks of media, institutions and genre distinctions.
Following Frank Kessler’s pragmatic approach to the dispositive of cinema,5 I will assume that a medium can, in given historical contexts, produce a specific, and possibly dominating configuration of text, technology and spectatorship, and that these configurations will decisively influence or interact with the relational dynamics of the heroic. I will focus first on English Restoration stage before turning to the 21st century screen, paying special attention to the digitisation of popular cinema and the ongoing proliferation of stereoscopic images. Given the scope of this paper, my conclusions will of course remain tentative, not rushing into essentialism but emphasising the potential of an intermedial or media archaeological approach to the heroic and its cultural negotiations. In particular, I would like to show how fading and unfading hero(in)es in spectacular dispositives, or dispositives of the spectacular come to redefine the position of the audience, and the affective relationality which is characteristic of heroic figurations.
Spectacles of Admiration on the Heroic Stage
Hardly any study of the Restoration period has failed to note the simultaneous proliferation and erosion of heroic models in the aftermath of the English Civil War.6 Because the heroic prismatically refracted a range of more encompassing cultural issues that were entangled in the crises of memory and oblivion as well as rapid social change, the Restoration shows a distinctive pattern of directing conflicts at the heroic. The heroic play as the period’s signature genre7 pronouncedly includes explorations of the mechanisms and modes of operation that were assumed to underlie heroic figurations. Humanist poetics were thus intersected with a Corneillean redefinition of the tragic, which posited admiration against an Aristotelian concept of affective catharsis. Notably, this re-evaluation of admiration, departing from a neutral Cartesian idea of admiratio as well as a poetics based strictly on verisimilitude, takes place in a distinctly aesthetic framework.8 This potenza ammirativa, as Patrizi called it, is echoed in Dryden’s preface to the Indian Emperour, in which he proposes a poetics of enhanced imitation: “Tis true that to imitate well is a Poets work;
but to affect the Soul, and excite the Passions, and above all to move admiration
5. Frank KessleR, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif“, in: Wanda stRauVen (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, 57-69.
6. See, among others, John sPuRR, England in the 1670s. ‘This Masquerading Age’, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000; Matthew jenKinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660-1685, Woodbridge [et al.], Boydell & Brewer, 2010; and Ronald G. ascH, Herbst des Helden. Modelle des Heroischen und heroische Lebensentwürfe in England und Frankreich von den Religionskriegen bis zum Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Ein Essay, Würzburg, Ergon, 2016.
7. Studies of the heroic play include Elaine mcGiRR, Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660- 1745. Newark, DE, U of Delaware P, 2009; Susan staVes, Players’ Scepters. Fictions of Authority in the Restoration. Lincoln [et al.], U of Nebraska P, 1979; Derek HuGHes, English Drama, 1660-1700, Oxford, Clarendon, 1996; Susan J. owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, Oxford, OUP, 1996; John Douglas canField, Heroes and states. On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy, Lexington, UP of Kentucky, 2000; and Brandon cHua, Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660-1690. Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell UP, 2014.
8. See, in more detail, Stefan matuscHeK, Über das Staunen: eine ideengeschichtliche Analyse, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1991; Nicola Gess, “Staunen als ästhetische Emotion. Zu einer Affektpoetik des Wunderbaren”, in: Martin baiscH, Andreas deGen and Jana lüdtKe (eds.), Wie gebannt.
Ästhetische Verfahren der affektiven Bindung von Aufmerksamkeit, Freiburg, Rombach, 2013, 115-132, 128- 130); Rüdiger camPe, “Die Einstellung des Zuschauers. ‘Admiratio’ in den Gärten von Versailles und in der Royal Society zwischen 1660 und 1690“, in: Erika FiscHeR-licHte (ed.), Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation, Stuttgart and Weimar, Metzler, 2001, 337-354; on Corneille Bradley RubidGe,
“Catharsis through Admiration: Corneille, Le Moyne, and the Social Uses of Emotion”, in: Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature, 1998, 95, 3, 316-333.
(which is the delight of serious Play) a bare imitation will not serve”.9 This re- assessment of the marvelous is crucial to cultural negotiations of the heroic. In particular, the poetics of astonishment, mediating between reason and emotion, emerges distinctively as apoetics of boundaries, entailing – as Schnyder argues – an unsettling reflection to the astonished subject.10
While parsing competing modes of impact and response, the Restoration saw a crystallisation of heroic figurations and spectacular visual artifice. The playhouses were characterised by landmark inventions in lighting, changeable scenery and stage engines and machines, thus transposing the technologies of the court masque onto the public stage. As Nikola Roßbach points out, this led to an aesthetic focus on impact and reception as well as on the effects of surprise, wonder, delight and terror.11 Most importantly, however, the effect of perspectival scenery, as first schematised by Alberti in 1435, relocated the audience spatially:
Unified perspective entailed, ideally, perfect control of the gaze of the spectator.
The perspective scene was to amaze, to enrapture, to conquer. [...] Rather than the spectator creating the scene (focusing on one house or another), the scene created the position of the ‘astonished and entranced’ spectator. The ideal of controlling the spectator’s gaze reinforced the sense that the spectacle ought to take place in a space apart […] there was a general aspiration towards scenic magnificence protected from audience incursion, an aspiration reflected in visual representations of the auditorium, in the images of spectators massed in the hall, an indistinguishable block, faceless and turned motionless towards the imposingly framed stage.12
As Maaike Bleeker’s seminal study Visuality in the Theatre has demonstrated, the “institution of perspective theatricalizes the field of vision”,13 creating a
“scenographic space” in which the “viewer is offered a position from where the image produces an “‘eternal moment of disclosed presence’”.14 Similarly, Ulrike Haß argues that the perspective offered by the prospect view created an illusionary totality of the scenic image, allowing for maximal insight while forcing everything on stage to appear as images within the illusionary totality of the scenic space, interlocking configurations of seeing with being seen.15 The repositioning of the
9. John dRyden, The Indian Emperour, in: The Works of John Dryden,Vol. 9: Plays: The Indian Emperour. Secret Love. Sir Martin Mar-All. Berkeley, CA, U of Calif. P, 1966, 5f. On Patrizi, see Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished. Shakespeare and the Marvelous. Lincoln and London, U of Nebraska Press, 1997, 12-18.
10. Mireille scHnydeR, “Überlegungen zu einer Poetik des Staunens im Mittelalter”, in: Martin baiscH, Andreas deGen and Jana lüdtKe (eds.), Wie gebannt, 95-114, 96, 112f.
11. Nikola RossbacH, Poiesis der Maschine: Barocke Konfigurationen von Technik, Literatur und Theater. Berlin/ New York, de Gruyter, 2013, 24. On the cultural productivity of stage machinery, including epistemological concerns, see Jan lazaRdziG, Theatermaschine und Festungsbau: Paradoxien der Wissensproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2007, 27-86; Nicola Gess and Tina HaRtmann, “Barocktheater als Spektakel. Eine Einführung”, in: N.B. and T.H. (eds.), Barocktheater als Spektakel. Maschine, Blick und Bewegung auf der Opernbühne des Ancien Régime. Paderborn, Fink, 2015, 9-40.
12. Julie Stone PeteRs, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880. Print, Text, and Performance in Europe.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 187. See Elizabeth Maddock dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, Durham [et al.], Duke University Press, 2014, 78f.
13. Maaike bleeKeR, Visuality in the Theatre. The Locus of Looking, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 15.
14. Ibid., 12.
15. Ulrike Hass, “Zur Bildwerdung des Körpers. Ein Streifzug durch die Theatergeschichte als Mediengeschichte”, in: Henri scHoenmaKeRs et al. (eds): Theater und Medien. Grundlagen – Analysen – Perspektiven. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2008, 43-56, 48. See also Ulrike Hass, Das Drama des Sehens, Auge, Blick und Bühnenform. München, Fink, 2005; Alexander jacKob, Theater und Bilderfahrung : In den Augen der Zuschauer, Bielefeld, Aisthesis, 2014.
theatrical audience also had profound effects on the early modern “practices of evidence”, which – as Rößler shows – operated on fundamentally aesthetic and theatrical terms.16 By attempting to gloss over the epistemic gap between sensual perception and factual cognition, concepts of admiratio in a Cartesian or later Spinozistic framework not only tied in with poetic concepts of admiration; they also structurally imply a theatrical positioning of the (aesthetic) spectator and (epistemic) observer.17
This redefinition of the stage resonated not only with ideas of evidentiality and anti-spectacular prejudice, but also with reassertions of the heroic. In the 1650s, William Davenant’s plans for the public stage specifically tried to justify visual splendour as a means of exercising influence on, or ‘civilising’, the common people through “some Entertainment, where their Eyes might be subdu’d with Heroicall Pictures and change of Scenes, their Eares civiliz’d with Musick and wholsome discourses”.18 By suggesting the use of heroic spectaculars as instruments of moral instruction that would ensure political obedience, Davenant emphatically aligns the effect of the audiovisual spectacle with heroic virtue. Indeed, the early heroic plays provided spectacular visions of conquest and Empire, with settings ranging from the Mughal court to Montezuma’s Mexico. Heroic figurations were set in theatrical arrangements of exploration, ‘exotic’ cultures and radical novelty. It is in the New World plays, such as Dryden’s Indian Emperour, that wonder and astonishment were most clearly negotiated as crucial modes of reception – in line with Stephen Greenblatt’s argument that the discovery of the Americas served as a catalyst for a fuller articulation of theoretical approaches to the marvellous.19
A striking example of associating heroic impact with distinct theatrical settings is the opening scene of John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (1669), a bombastic ten act enterprise usually considered to be the defining example of the heroic play. It begins with nobles of the Moorish court of Granada discussing Almanzor, the hero of the play, who had previously appeared as an unknown stranger at a bullfight. It is revealing that this essential first appearance is not staged as an entrance as such, but as its narrative reconstruction, which highlights both the immense impact and the perplexing otherness of the hero. The (affective) immediacy of his impact is associated with a lack of analytic access and is framed as a distinctly theatrical space of radical asymmetry. Singled out against a crowd of spectators, the hero draws the attention of his onlookers, while apparently detached from their response:
boabdelin. –– I marked him, when alone (Observ’d by all, himself observing none) He enter’d first; and with a graceful pride His fiery Arab, dextrously did guide:
16. Hole RössleR, Die Kunst des Augenscheins: Praktiken der Evidenz im 17. Jahrhundert, Münster, LIT Verlag, 2012; see Helmar scHRamm, Karneval des Denkens: Theatralität im Spiegel philosophischer Texte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1996.
17. Rüdiger camPe, “Einstellung des Zuschauers”.
18. William daVenant, “A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie”, ed. and comm. in James R. jacob and Timothy RayloR, “Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and ‘A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie’ by Sir William Davenant“, in: Seventeenth Century, 1991, 6, 2, 205-250, quote 245; see Elizabeth dillon, New World Drama; Brandon CHua, Ravishment.
19. Stephen GReenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford, Clarendon, 1991. In particular, Greenblatt points out the “ease with which the very words marvel and wonder shift between the designation of a material object and the designation of a response to the object” (22), a configuration which proved highly productive in later discussions of the astonishing.
Who, while his Rider every stand survay’d, Sprung loose, and flew, into an Escapade;
Not moving forward, yet, with every bound, Pressing, and seeming still to quit his ground.20
The entrance of the stranger eludes culturally productive patterns of interpretation: His enhanced visibility is not supported by, and even seems to preclude, hermeneutic access. The opposition of the observers’ gaze and his own complete neglect thereof clearly parallels the entrance of the theatrical figure, distinguishing the agent from the audience, and thereby constituting both:21 a heroic ‘totality’ that demands maximal attention is demonstrated as coinciding with the theatrical arrangement of the audience, thus specifically interlocking agency with passivity. Accordingly, the audience’s reaction oscillates between physical presence, affective immediacy and epistemic distance, between fear and admiration, during which (as is clear in the political undertones of “observing none”) the hero’s fraught relation to authority is revealed. That the audience’s position is implied in a specific heroic arrangement is thus inseparably linked to the functional potential of the heroic, and precarious allocations of power.
On the Restoration stage, plays experimentally juxtaposed the admirative paradigm with a growing unease with spectacle and theatricality, not least because the latter were perceived as increasingly perplexing constituents of political culture.22 Therefore, theatrical experiences of presence as well as their narrative resolution are reflected as interfering modes of filtration and processing that not only explore the semantic attributes of the hero, but more importantly lay bare modes of relating and responding to the hero – that is, the affective and epistemic rapport between heroic figure and audience. Supported by the new layout of the Restoration stage, (theatrical) visuality and spectacle emerged as key focuses within these negotiations.
Visual Horror and the Paradigms of Fascination
Both the spectacular mode and the analyses of heroic impact are radicalised in the Restoration horror play.23 Providing graphically violent scenes of murder, torture and executions, these departed markedly from the grand heroic spectacles championed in the 1660s and used excessive violence on stage to enquire into the epistemic and aesthetic productivity of the spectacular. The horror play thus emerged as the most radically deconstructive, but also most significant challenge for the heroic play’s aesthetic strategy. The marked transition is not from positive to negative evaluations of human agency, that is, from hero to villain, but a
20. John dRyden, The Conquest of Granada, in: The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 11: Plays: The Conquest of Granada. Marriage à-la-mode. The Assignation, Berkeley, CA, U of Calif. P, 1978, I.i, 66-72.
21. I rely here on the definition of the theatrical entrance outlined by Annemarie matzKe, Ulf otto and Jens Roselt, who emphasise the reciprocal constitution of both theatrical figure and audience, involving processes of detachment, transfiguration, and the control of audience attention (“Einleitung. K(l)eine Theorie des Auftritts”, in: A.M., U.O. and J.R. (eds.), Auftritte. Strategien des In- Erscheinung-Tretens in Künsten und Medien, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2015, 7-16.
22. See Paula R. bacKscHeideR, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins UP, 1993; John sPuRR, Masquerading Age;
Owen, Restoration Theatre, 110-156.
23. See Anne HeRmanson, The Horror Plays of the English Restoration. Farnham [et al.], Ashgate, 2014; Jean I. maRsden, “Spectacle, horror, and pathos”, in: Deborah Payne FisK (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, Cambridge [et al.], CUP, 2000, 174-190.
reassessment of admiration and fascination, which points to a decidedly modern modulation of charismatic power.
As Brigitte Weingart has shown, fascination, as a reaction to the unexpected implies a moment of epistemic rupture or crisis, but unlike wonder it is “rarely credited with initiating the advancement of knowledge”.24 Instead, instances of fascination tend to come to a deadlock at the surface of a phenomenon. Fascination, in the early modern transitive sense, appears as aspecifically aesthetic reformulation of imaginative stupor, radicalising the poetics of astonishment and placing the observer in a distinctly passive, recipient mode. Moreover, the early modern concept of fascination as relying on visual transmission fuelled prevailing concerns about the power of visual spectacle and paradigms of (affective) contagiousness.25 In the later 17th century, the association of fascination with visual modes of impact became particularly productive, most distinctly in the horror play’s emphasis on demonic and erotic agency and its preoccupation with visual illusion and deceit.
The defining example of the horror play is usually held to be Settle’s aforementioned Empress of Morocco (1673), a play which foregrounds spectacular violence and the fascinating impact of the protagonist. Often considered “the greatest blockbuster theater event of the period”26 it entertained audiences with courtly intrigue, sex, crime and grandiose panoramic effects. It is claimed that the play ran for an entire month, which if true is exceptional for the later 17th century.
stage27 The printed publication featured costly illustrations of some of the most sensational scenes, providing rare evidence not only of the visual details, but also of the importance that these scenes must have held in the eyes of the original audience.28
Studies of the horror plays have been quick to state that they do not present any true heroes, and the Empress of Morocco is no exception. Indeed, the critical reception of the play – including the pamphlet quoted above, as well as a popular farce version – strongly emphasises the lack of heroic models. Driven by their unscrupulous greed for power, the eponymous Empress and her secret lover Crimalhaz conspire to poison the Emperor, and successfully incriminate Muly Hamet, a popular military hero, who they claim wanted to have the throne for himself. After he is exiled, the new young Empress Morena is tricked into stabbing
24. Brigitte weinGaRt, “Contact at a Distance. The Topology of Fascination”, in: Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (eds.), Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary thought, Berlin [et al.], de Gruyter, 2014, 72-100, 73. See also Brigitte weinGaRt, “Blick zurück: Faszination als ‘Augenzauber’”, in: Kenneth caloon [et al.] (eds.), ‘Es trübt mein Auge sich in Glück und Licht’. Über den Blick in der Literatur, Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2009, 188-205; Sibylle baumbacH, Literature and Fascination, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
25. See Andreas deGen, “Concepts of Fascination, from Democritus to Kant”, in: Journal of the History of Ideas, 2012, 73, 3, 371-393. Brigitte weinGaRt (“Contact”) similarly highlights the challenge posed by the concept of fascination for early modern negotiations of interiority and subjectivity.
26. William J. bulman, “Publicity and Popery on the Restoration Stage: Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco in Context”, in: Journal of British Studies, 2012, 51, 2, 308-339, 309.
27. Don-John duGas, “Elkanah Settle, John Crowne and Nahum Tate”, in: Susan J. Owen (ed.), A Companion to Restoration Drama, Oxford, Blackwell, 2008, 378-39, 379f.
28. maRsden, “Spectacle”, 176; see Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, London [et al.], Routledge & Kegan, 1984, 42-46; Susan B. iwanisziw, “Tortured Bodies, Factionalism, and Unsettled Loyalties in Settle’s Morocco Plays”, in: James Robert allaRd and Mathew R. maRtin
(eds.), Staging Pain, 1580-1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009, 111- 136.
her husband (the successor of the dead Emperor) and is then sent to her execution.
Muly Hamet, meanwhile, joins forces with a foreign army, enters the city without resistance and is proclaimed king. The old Empress dies in a rage, while her lover is executed in a public spectacle of jurisdiction. Although Muly Hamet, who at the end becomes king, seems to share at least some characteristics of Restoration heroes, his agency is limited at best, obviously fading against the demonic attraction of the evil Empress. By disjointing the cohesion between attraction and virtue, Settle’s play dissolves the admirative paradigm into modes of demonic fascination, also by drawing on the salient gendering and latent eroticisation of the theatrical figuration. It is precisely this effect that the aforementioned criticism of the characters’ foolishness targets.
The play, however, not only demands maximal attention for its villain, as she transgresses virtually every moral boundary, but also insists on spectatorship. The play’s lavish visual effects are thus balanced with a meta-theatrical focus on the materiality and evidential status of the spectacular, floodlighted by panoramic views and courtly performances that alternate with scenes of extreme privacy (as in the discovery of the Empress and her lover on a couch). The spectacle on-stage ranges from a stately dance in the second act, to the play-in-the-play situation in which Morena inadvertently kills her own husband, all the way to the final execution of Crimalhaz. His death on the “gaunches”, or Algiers hook,29 is the final image the theatre audience is left with as the ultimate proof of the character’s guilt. However, the fatal illusion of the play-in-the-play and especially the Empress’ plans for executing Morena weigh this assertion of evidentiality against the manipulability of visual evidence: The Empress orders Morena to be burned as a mad woman, announcing to distort “her Face with some deep Poys’nous Paint,/ Discolour’d to a horrid black”, claiming this will be a heavenly “mark of Vengeance”.30 Therefore, the horror play suspends the heroic within the framework of visual spectacle, but in doing so zooms in on those mechanisms of processing that were assumed to sustain heroic impact in spectacular representations. As the plays shift focus to paradigms of fascination, these plays decisively contribute to renegotiations of admirative response, and in doing so lay bare the position of the audience and the visual regimes implicit in a theatrical dispositif.
“Still in Search of Wonder?” Heroic Spectacle on the 21
stCentury Screen
31Intersections of visual artifice and heroic figurations are characteristic for the late 17th century stage, but no less for the late 20th and 21st century cinematic screen, which has repeatedly been analysed in terms of its spectacularly visual
29. See Bridget oRR, Empire on the English Stage 1660-1714, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 101.
30. Elkanah settle, The Empress of Morocco: a Tragedy, London: Printed for E. Cademan, and are to be sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1687, 52.
31. Thus the subtitle of Michele PieRson’s study: Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder, New York et al., Columbia UP, 2002. Cf. also Stephen PRince, Digital Visual Effects: The Seduction of Reality, New Brunswick, NJ and London, Rutgers UP, 2012; Bruce isaacs, The Orientation of Future Cinema:
Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle. London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2013.
aesthetics. Following Ndalianis’ concept of the ‘neo-baroque’,32 one can establish that both periods of cultural, economic and technological transition share some aesthetic tendencies – including, ‘magical’ special effects, a ‘spiritual’ presence of technology, inter- and hypertextuality – while nonetheless insisting on the fundamental historicity of both cultures.
Superficially, as for instance Vivian Sobchack points out, these cinematic arrangements aim for maximal audience effect: “The raison d’être of such films is to thrill, shock, stun, astonish, assault, or ravish an audience, now less interested in ‘developing situations’ than in the ‘immediate’ gratification offered by a series of momentous – and sensually experienced – ‘instants’ to which narrative is subordinated.”33 The status of visual artifice employed in these movies however remains ambiguous, as in photorealistic images special effects are both camouflaged and displayed as effects – corresponding to the “refusal to respect the limits of the frame that contains the illusion”34 which Ndalinanis has drawn attention to. In Kessler’s terms: cinematography emerges both as a spectacular apparatus, in which the capacity to take and reproduce movement is central, and as an apparatus of the spectacular, in which the key attraction is the spectacle thus conveyed.35 This intersection, as I would like to argue, is crucially important to cultural representations and negotiations of the heroic.
In recent cinema, the availability of computer-generated imagery is accompanied by resurging modes of ‘epic’ storytelling, lending imaginary or distant worlds visual reality, and in doing so – as Elliott shows – creating a new cinematic vocabulary and visual clichés, such as battle scenes sustained by crowd-building software,36 or emblems of verticality.37 Examples range from the Star Wars franchise to fantasy and generic hybrids such as James Cameron’s vastly influential Avatar (2009). Similarly, a range of “super-scale ancient-world films”38 from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) to Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) or Timur Bekmambetov’s recent 3D-version of Ben Hur (2016), provide audiences with maximally conventional heroes that are presented in the plain light of digital recreation. Unsurprisingly,
32. Angela ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge, MA [et al.], MIT Press, 2004; see also Nicola Gess and Tina HaRtmann, “Barocktheater” and from a slightly different perspective Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
33. Vivian sobcHacK, “Cutting to the Quick: ‘Techne’, ‘Physis’ and ‘Poiesis’ and the Attraction of Slow Motion”, in: Wanda stRauVen (ed.), The Cinema of Attraction Reloaded, Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 2006, 337-351, 339.
34. Angela ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics, 25.
35. Frank KessleR: “La cinématographie comme dispositif (du) spectaculaire”, in: Cinémas, 2003, 14, 1, 21-34. This double-faced disposition also invokes the early “Cinema of Attraction”, which Tom Gunning describes as relying primarily on the spectacular capacities of the apparatus:
“[f]ar from credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion itself that renders the viewer speechless.
What is displayed before the audience is less the impending speed of the train [in the earliest Lumière exhibitions] than the force of the cinematic apparatus.” Tom GunninG, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator” [1989], repr. in: Philip simPson, Andrew utteRson and Karen J. sHePHeRdson (ed.), Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. III, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 78-95, 82. See also Tom GunninG, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, The Spectator and The Avantgarde”, in: Wide Angle, 1986, 8, 3/4; Andrew B. R. elliott, “Special Effects, Reality and the New Epic Film“, in: A.B.R.E. (ed.), The Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century, Edinburgh, EUP, 2014, 129-144.
36. Andrew elliott, “Special Effects”, 129.
37. Kristen wHissel, Spectacular Digital Effects. CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2014, 25.
38. Thus Joanna Paul, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, Oxford: OUP, 2013, 133.
these figurations of the heroic have been evaluated with scepticism, ranging from allegations of plain silliness to the inference that visual spectacle makes audiences passive, uncritical and even open to totalitarian ideologies.39 The heated debate about Zack Snyder’s movie 300 (2006) is a case in point that ultimately correlates with Davenant’s concept of how theatrical, visual spectacle could be used to foster obedience, and its sceptical reception on the early modern stage. Essentially, such perspectives stipulate that the “audiovisual inflation” dominating present-day cinema would deprive audiences of agency, producing a “gigantic cobweb which keeps the captive spectator in its center, eyes wide open”.40
When it comes to questions of audience positioning and immersion, recent debates have focused on digital 3D, which is regarded as symptomatic of not only an alleged craving of sensual overstimulation, but also of a paradigmatic change in viewing habits. Beyond polemic evaluations, recent studies have enquired into its implications not only for cinema, but also for concepts of the (digital) image in general. Holly Willis asserts that “we are witnessing the most extensive reworking of the role of images since the inauguration of cinema”;41 similarly, Thomas Elsaesser claims that 3D should not so much be regarded as a special effect but a new default setting, symptomatic of a much broader change in perceptual and sensual habits: “Embedding in layered spaces, navigating multiple temporalities, and interacting with data-rich, simulated, and hybrid environments probably requires redefining what we mean by seeing, by images, and how to differentiate the latter from pictures.”42 Evidently, digital stereoscopy reformulates questions of audience position and audience relatedness in a re-arrangement of the sensual experience provided by cinema. The illusionary diffusion of the flat screen in negative and positive parallax seems to foster immersion, enabling the viewer’s body to be positioned and present “in a sensory arena that is material and immaterial at the same time”.43 Yet at the same time, the physical act of spectatorship is again laid bare: In particular, when wearing 3D-glasses, the viewer does not only enter the diegetic world, but is also physically positioned as its observer, or as Sandifer puts it,
“bound up in an act of spectatorship whereby the theater, instead of disappearing, is even more conspicuously visible”.44 This arrangement seems to parallel the layout of the baroque stage and its regime of seeing, recently described by Gess and Hartmann as an act of spectatorshop where visual perception “decomposes into
39. See Mark jancoVicH, “’There’s Nothing So Wrong with a Hollywood Script That a Bunch of Giant CGI Scorpions Can’t Solve’: Politics, Computer Generated Images and Camp in the Critical Reception of the Post-Gladiator Historical Epics”, in: Andrew elliott, Return of the Epic, 57-73, 70.
40. Dick tomasoVic, “The Hollywood Cobweb: New Laws of Attraction (The Spectacular Mechanics of Blockbusters)”, in: Wanda stRauVen, Cinema of Attractions, 309-320, 312, 318.
41. Holly willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, London/New York, Wallflower, 2005, 4. On D3D, see also Markus sPöHReR (ed.), Die ästhetisch-narrativen Dimensionen des 3D-Films: neue Perspektiven der Stereoskopie, Wiesbaden, Springer, 2016; Sarah atKinson, “Stereoscopic- 3D storytelling: Rethinking the conventions, grammar and aesthetics of a new medium”, in: Journal of Media Practice, 2011, 12, 2, 139-156; Jesko jocKenHöVel, Der digitale 3D-Film: Narration, Stereoskopie, Filmstil, Wiesbaden, Springer, 2014; Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences, Basingstoke [et al.], Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
42. Thomas elsaesseR, “The ‘return’ of 3-D: On some of the logics and genealogies of the image in the twenty-first century”, in: Critical Inquiry, 2013, 39, 217–246, 235.
43. Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema, 2, 7.
44. Philip sandiFeR, “Out of the Screen and Into the Theatre: 3D Film as Demo”, in: Cinema Journal, 2011, 50, 3, 62–78, 69.
a noninvolved, bare seeing, arresting the spectator, and the actual gaze, which co- produces visual spectacle and can thus come to destabilise its effects.”45
I will zoom in on these modes of audience positioning, imaging and narration by looking at Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), which has been widely acclaimed as
“restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences”.46 Gravity is a distinct enterprise of visual artifice, four and a half years were spent developing the new technology necessary for the project alone. Nevertheless, it differs from other large-scale diegetic (re)constructions of CGI-supported cinema rather substantially. In what Sarah Atkinson has termed an “expanded economy of scale”,47 the stereoscopic exploration of space both radicalises and transcends these modes of narration. This clearly resonates with the aspect of the heroic, although, or more precisely because, the heroic structure of the film is rather conventional. The focus increasingly narrows on its heroine, mission specialist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), who after her spacecraft has been destroyed by space debris tries to find a way back to earth.
Mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), in a rather familiar motif, rescues her from drifting into space, then sacrifices his own life in order to give her a chance of saving hers. Even after they separate, he continues to provide the necessary clues she needs for her return to earth, and even re-appears in a dream sequence. An emphatically masculine hero of duty and self-sacrifice is thus complemented by a heroine who, in what may safely be labelled an extreme situation, ultimately overcomes her victim status by proving her skill and perseverance.
Values and narrative patterns that are culturally associated with the heroic are, however, asserted against the absolute photorealistic and stereoscopic expansion of space, such that the heroine is whirled around, trying to find something to hold onto, and to establish contact with the planet. Long and extreme long shots, indicating the vastness of dark space, alternate with close-ups of the human face.
In addition, and throughout the film, the (heroic) body weightlessly drifting in space is paralleled by a seemingly random selection of pictures and figurines, including two-dimensional photographs and religious icons as well as three-dimensional, tangible objects, such as a Rubik’s cube, a toy version of Marvin the Martian, chess pieces, and the miniature Buddha mounted above the control panel in the Chinese landing pod. Apart from aligning the body of the potential hero(ine) with set pieces, both religious and ludic, of an absent culture, these shots directly seem to link to representational practices of cinema, and the dimensionality and tangibility of (moving and immobile) images most specifically.
Moreover, the film comes to address the paradigm of movement in space – and its implications for conventional representations of the heroic. As Kristen Whissel demonstrates, since the early 1990s, Hollywood blockbusters have
45. Nicola Gess and Tina HaRtmann, “Barocktheater”: “nicht nur Theater wird als ein
‘Gemachtes’ ausgestellt, sondern der Betrachter erfährt sich selbst als der Macher des visuellen Spektakels. Die Tätigkeit seines Auges zerfällt quasi in ein unbeteiligtes bloßes Sehen, das den Betrachter still-legt, und in den tatsächlichen Blick, der das visuelle Spektakel mitproduziert und seine Effekte damit auch destabilisieren kann”, 10, my translation.
46. Thus Scott Foundas, “Why ‘Gravity’ Could Be the World’s Biggest Avant-Garde Movie”, in Variety 8 October 2013, [online], <http://variety.com/2013/film/columns/why-gravity-could- be-the-worlds-biggest-avant-garde-movie-1200702228/>.
47. Sarah atKinson, “Gravity – Towards a Stereoscopic Poetics of Deep Space”, in: Spöhrer, Die ästhetisch-narrativen Dimensionen, 71-85, 74.
increasingly used the screen’s vertical axis, taking advantage of new digital effects to map opposing forces onto ever more extreme heights and depths. This “technique for activating polarized extremes”48 places the (potentially heroic) individual in relation to powerful historical forces of an ‘epic’ dimension. Therefore, “the new verticality joins the plasticity of the digital image (its radical malleability) to the fungibility of the emblem (its ability to produce an intellectual concept from an image, story, and dialogue) in order to represent a violent struggle over the course of history”.49 In the weightless setting of Gravity, this vertical axis is suspended.
Thus by invalidating clear-cut emblematic meanings, the film diffuses rise-and-fall- patterns of heroisation, indicated by Stone’s initial rapid spin into darkness, or by Kowalski’s prolonged drifting towards his death. The visual trope of extreme height and the positioning of characters on the edge of a precipice, it seems, is substituted with images of momentary hold and the loss thereof. Again, this inflection of established tropes unhinges the spectator’s position. The film therefore not only seeks to simulate a weightless perspective; it continually plays with proximity and distance, aiming to generate a spatial and sensory displacement of the spectator. In the seamless, 13-minute opening sequence50 showing how a routine spacewalk turns into a disaster, the virtual camera glides through space without stabilising the viewer’s position. As the positioning of the audience – as audience – is suspended, there is no fixed point from which the heroine – in Dryden’s terms – can be “observ’d”.
Spectacularly sublime views of the distant planet alternate with the characters’
desperate attempts to see and gain diegetic orientation. Thus, we have long and extreme long shots of space, but also frequent tight shots of the eyes, often elastically shifting into one another. In addition to point-of-view shots, the film works with reflections on helmets or window panels, at times in multiple layers.51 Clearly, the distant views of the planet are meant to evoke astonishment, evoking a sense of heroic pathos, while also pointing to the technological artifice employed in the creation of these images: Following the characters’ gaze, the audience is simultaneously “prompted and guided to marvel at the spectacle created through a combination of VFX and stereoscopic design”52 – even more so because images of the planet from above are, to an overwhelming majority of viewers, only available as images, not as un-mediated visual experience. Moreover, the film’s focus on visual perception is repeatedly juxtaposed with narrative modes – analytically exposing ways of relating of, and to, the hero(ine). Because there are no visual flashbacks or instances of cross-cutting to the planet, the narrative develops in almost real-time representation, a reduction which is complemented by an emphasis on channels of receiving and transmitting information. In inhabitable space, as the movie’s opening text indicates, there is “nothing to carry sound”.53 During the opening
48. wHissel, Spectacular Digital Effects, 25.
49. Ibid., 53.
50. Bruce isaacs gives a more detailed account: “Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuarón”, in: Shane denson and Julia leyda (eds.), Post-Cinema:
Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016), [online], <http://reframe.sussex.
ac.uk/post-cinema/4-3-isaacs/>, 25–34.
51. See Benjamin B., “Facing the Void. Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC and his collaborators detail their work on Gravity, a technically ambitious drama set in outer space”, in:
The American Cinematographer, November 2013, [online], <https://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/
November2013/Gravity/page1.php>, and Bruce isaacs, “Reality Effects”, 28f.
52. Thus Sarah atKinson, “Gravity”, 74.
53. Alfonso cuaRón (director), Gravity, Blu-ray 2014, 0:22.
sequence, Stone tries to boot a transmission card for her scanning system which, however, fails to communicate its data to Houston. Kowalski, at the same time, is insistently presented as a storyteller,54 causing mild annoyance with the redundancy of his anecdotes that seem strangely displaced several hundred kilometres above earth – mostly stories of unfaithful women that rather epitomise the more typical Hollywood fare Gravity departs from. After the spacecraft is hit and contact with the planet is lost, Kowalski, in a reductive narrative role, continues to provide information. Addressing Houston, he repeatedly tries to confirm their identity and to communicate their situation and position in space. In addition, one might note how Kowalski repeatedly alludes to Stone’s role as a narrator herself, envisaging how, after her return, she will have “a hell of a story to tell”55 – a promise of survival that may also express his concerns for his own story of self-sacrifice as depending on a surviving witness. This technique again foregrounds the modes and failing modes of communicating and relating to a potential audience – as in, for example, Stone’s bewilderment at the indecipherable Chinese signs on the control panel of the Shenzhou, or her ineffective mayday call.
As Kowalski drifts towards his death and Stone acknowledges she has to continue her journey alone, her increasing assertion of a heroic status is paralleled by her gradual appropriation of his narrative role. Her realisation that all contact to Kowalski is lost and that she is the only survivor of the mission is phrased as a radio message to Houston, sent while showing the protagonist looking at her own reflection in the window panel with the distant planet in the background. When re- entering the atmosphere and re-establishing a partially functional radio connection, Stone mimics her former commander’s mode of storytelling, saying that if she is able to return alive, she will have “one hell of a story to tell”.56 Thus, while the film generally works with a very reduced narrative, the act of narrating is brought into focus. However, Gravity refrains from providing images of this narrative re- integration (and possibly, heroisation), concluding instead with a long shot of Stone crawling to the shore and slowly pushing herself into an upright position – the assertion of terrestrial gravity seeming to re-naturalise a code of heroic pathos organised along a vertical axis., and corresponding to a re-establishment of a more conventional position of the cinematic audience.
Conclusion
The above case studies have sampled two periods which are characterised by paradigmatic shifts in media cultures and perceptual habits, examining how these are intersected with conceptual negotiations of the heroic. It need hardly be stated that both cultures, and their use of visual artifice more specifically, differ substantially.
While essentialist conclusions should thus by all means be avoided, it could be shown how cultural negotiations of the heroic need to be read as entangled with historically specific cultural configurations of media, institutional contexts, genre distinctions and technology, and with the positioning of the (theatrical or cinematic) spectator these configurations imply. At the very core of cultural practices of
54. See Jan distelmeyeR, “Über- und Einsichten. Fragen zum D3D-Dispositiv”, in: sPöHReR, Die ästhetisch-narrativen Dimensionen, 195–208; on narrativity and digital spectacle, see also William bRown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013, 82–95.
55. Gravity, 34:35.
56. Gravity, 1:16:16.
heroisation, this decisively influences the modes of relating to a given hero(ine), and the cultural conceptualisations of heroic relatedness, as they change over time.
This can include the visual, performative and narrative channelling of heroisation practices as well as attributions of power and agency. In particular, paradigms of fascination – both in the early modern transitive sense and a contemporary one, denoting as an intensified mode of attention and attraction – point to a dimension of affective contagion that characterises spectacular arrangements of effervescent co-presence as well as figurations of charismatic power. In addition, cultures of visual artifice may align concerns about the impact of spectacular illusion with questions concerning the evidential status, or ethical productivity, of the heroic as represented in such settings: Astonishment, admiration or fascination as modes of responding to a hero(ine) can thus interact with the astonishing, fascinating, admirable effects of their respective mediatisation itself. In that vein, fading and unfading the hero or heroine in spectacular visual arrangements points to an affective ‘boundary work’ which implies a self-reflexive turn from the hero(ine) to the spectator.
Christiane Hansen University of Koblenz-Landau
