Abstract
On 25 January 1896, Le Monde illustré reported on the success of ‘un appareil récent’ [a new machine], the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe. ‘Cinématographe’, science columnist Dr Servet de Bonnières explained, ‘is a Greek compound word which means recorder of movements. The idea of the machine is, indeed, to reproduce life and movement in all their visual elements’. With the advent of the motion picture film, projected commercially for the first time in Paris in late December 1895, animation was no longer the prerogative of imagination but entered the realm of perception. In the newspaper’s assessment, the genius of the Lumière brothers’ invention is to ‘finally give a living portrait, instead of those cold and tired images which never resemble their objects of representation when they attempt to reproduce the charms and grace one finds in the movement of certain living beings’. In her engaging study of the generative and reproductive imperatives of French literary modernity, Christina Parker-Flynn looks to this history of the moving image and visual technologies to locate a ‘photogenic aesthetic’ (p. 3) at the heart of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural production. Examining the mutually informative relationship between proto-modernist currents (Aestheticism, Symbolism) and early cinema, Artificial Generation reads the re-emergent figure of the mobile ‘artificial woman’ (in the form of ‘female automatons, animated statues, excavated mummies and dancing bodies’ (p. 12)) as the vehicle for a ‘wide-scale reconditioning’ (p. 3) of masculine artistic agency. Pygmalionism, the book suggests, ‘doubles for the cinema as an artistic medium predicated on the illusion of movement and life’ (p. 15). Writers’ and filmmakers’ habitual returns to the ‘Pygmalionesque paradigm’ (p. 5), then, speak not only to parthenogenetic fantasies, but to a possible means of negotiating the ‘confrontation’ (p. 11) between the cultural heritage of antiquity and the ‘techno-feminine’ (p. 151) constructions of a fleeting modernity.
The study’s point of departure is the term photogénie, coined in the 1830s by scientist and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot and productively reworked in a specifically cinematic context by early theorists such as Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein. In Parker-Flynn’s account, it spans film theory and literary history to connote the potential of art not only to copy life, but to replace it – ‘a virtual reality, in essence’ (p. 11). In tracing what she terms a ‘shared DNA sequence’ (p. 124) of the moving artificial woman across media, Parker-Flynn draws on an eclectic corpus to uncover the proto-cinematic imperatives of nineteenth-century cultural objects. Following Jonathan Crary and Andrea Goulet, Chapter 1 posits the 1830s as a transitional moment in both the mechanisation of vision and the new, ‘optically oriented’ (p. 22) epistemology of France’s literary models. Published concurrently with the arrival of the earliest daguerreotypes, Théophile Gautier’s ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (1836), it is suggested, elaborates an ‘aesthetic of resurrection’ (p. 24) in which portraits of women and the fantastic irruption of the supernatural operate as a means of switching between frames in an ‘early screen text’ (p. 27). Gautier’s Egyptological fictions – supplemented with reference to ‘Arria Marcella’ (1852) and Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) – are theorised as pointing towards the ‘mummy complex’ of André Bazin’s seminal essay on photographic ontology. In marrying attention to thematics with specificity of media, Parker-Flynn makes a compelling case for an ‘unconscious ciné-optics’ (p. 37) structuring these spaces of Egyptian eroticism.
Chapter 2 turns to ‘modernity’s book of genesis’ (p. 46) and mainstay of prehistories of the cinema, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886). Invoking Annette Michelson, for whom the novel’s danse macabre stages the female body as the substratum of cinema itself, Parker-Flynn’s reading of ‘modernity’s indexical Eve’ (p. 75) locates Villiers’ work as a ‘cornerstone text in the representation of artificial generation’ (p. 47). Chapters 3 and 4 centre on the ‘Salomania’ (p. 82) of French Symbolism, with reference to Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (first published in textual edition in 1893) and the ‘inexhaustibly endless, aesthetic regeneration’ (p. 81) of its adaptive afterlives. The Decadent embrace of artificiality is, unsurprisingly, particularly fertile ground for Parker-Flynn’s analysis. In a playful take on the generational reference of the study’s title, the third chapter marshals an intermedial assembly of fin-de-siècle figures (Gustave Moreau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Aubrey Beardsley) to argue for Wilde’s play as ‘an important traverse between ekphratic literature and film’ (p. 93). Producing ‘life’ where there is none, the Decadent privileging of the artificial over the natural both engenders a ‘replication crisis’ (p. 96) and intimates the landscape of cinema. If the intriguing gesture towards the ‘queerer possibilities of ekphrasis’ (p. 97) would merit further unpacking, the chapter makes a conceptually sophisticated case for the cinematic premonitions at play in the repetitive-cum-regenerative work of adaptation. Chapter 4 further traces a ‘generational through line’ (p. 126) of gendered fantasies of reproductive mastery in a heterogeneous collection of early twentieth-century works, encompassing Thomas Edison, George Méliès, actress Sarah Bernhardt, stage performer Loie Fuller, female auteur Alla Nazimova, Fritz Lang’s Expressionist masterpiece Metropolis (1927) and perhaps least expectedly of all, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Anticipating the obvious criticism that Chapter 5, on Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), might be said to stretch the descriptive capacities of her study’s title, Parker-Flynn insists that ‘as Hitchcock’s only film adapted directly from a French work [Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1954 novel D’entre les morts], Vertigo stands as the most French of his films’ (pp. 156–157). Sensitive to the crucial way misrecognition and the ‘necessary deconstruction of fantasy’ (p. 161) are built into its very structure, the chapter reads Vertigo as a ‘visual reproduction of the same Pygmalionesque delusions that largely overwhelmed nineteenth-century Aestheticism and Symbolism’ (pp. 156–157). Like Gautier, Villiers and Wilde before him, the fetishistic investments of Hitchcock’s protagonist, it shows, capitulate to the ‘magnetism of the artificial woman’ (p. 171) and the ‘reproductive delusion’ (p. 180) she engenders. While the suggestion that the French twist of a character’s hair ‘further implicates the French aesthetic and Symbolist heritage’ (p. 167) of the film feels less persuasive, the chapter sets forth a series of particularly inspired close readings. Parker-Flynn details the photogenic prehistory of what Hillel Schwartz has described as the film’s ‘seductive spirals’ and ‘menacing torque’ (1992: 101), teasing out its determining impulse as the desire to be ‘possessed (stilled) by representation’ (p. 16). The final chapter (in epilogue form) takes its cue from Christian Metz in its reading of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) as mythopoetic reworking of the book of Genesis. (Parker-Flynn wisely avoids trying to argue for the film’s ‘utter “Frenchness”’, simply noting paratextually that the ‘replication crisis [she has] been charting since the 1830s has now become something else’ [n. 6 220, original emphasis].) Ultimately, she suggests, the metacinematic apparatus takes on ‘the role of mechanical mother’ (p. 187) in this postmodern procreation narrative. In looking to technological reproducibility to convert absence into presence, Villeneuve’s film provides the study’s closing, contemporary echo of ‘the animated dreams of nineteenth-century French literature’ (p. 159) As a bridge between the analysis and the concluding hypothesis, the ‘perhaps’ of the book’s brief final paragraph (‘we realise that it will be women who lead the promised resistance, both of the replicants in 2049 and, perhaps, of cinematic re-presentation’ (p. 192)) doesn’t quite carry the weight of the insights that precede it. This minor tic of academic prose should not, however, detract from the achievements of this insightful, cross-disciplinary study.
Artificial Generation, then, is a wide-ranging and ambitious discussion, with much to contribute to intermedial aesthetics, film and literary history, and the study of cultural constructions of gender and subjectivity. If the playful use of parentheses and hyphens (‘en-gender’, ‘art-ificial’, ‘photo-genic’, ‘homo-geneous’, ‘ill-logic’, ‘villi-fication’, ‘reori-gene-ating’, ‘re-presentation’, to name just a few) can, on occasion, detract from the otherwise lucid prose, Parker-Flynn displays an enviable grasp of her material and its theoretical and historical contexts. Avoiding the temptation to pin her narrative to our present moment of ‘deepfakes’ and other forms of artificial intelligence, she allows her corpus to speak on its own terms. The result is a valuable intervention in debates around the relationship between technological shifts and modes of representation, which provides a fresh perspective on the stakes of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.