Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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freely in the streets, intent solely on pursuing [a] seemingly unique and individual experience of reality” (“Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flaneur,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997], 55). Certainly, there is a history of the flaneuse, but it seems to me much more literally “grounded”; see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). A more postmodern and still male form of flânerie is expressed in a line used in not one but two contemporary science fiction films—The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai: Across the 8th Dimension (W. D. Richter, 1984); and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, 1985): “Wherever you go, there you are.”
6. Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
7. James Barry Jr., “The Technical Body: Incorporating Technology and Flesh,” Philosophy Today (winter 1991): 399.
8. Ibid. Barry is translating and quoting from the French edition of Merleau-Ponty's “Eye and Mind,” in L'Oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 51.
9. Perceptual shifts such as Heelan points to are precisely solicited by artist James Turrell's extraordinary earthwork, Roden Crater. For discussion of this work and excellent photos of the spatial phenomena see Calvin Tomkins, “Flying into the Light,” New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2003, 62-71.
10. Tuan, Space and Place, 36. For another—and visual—version of such spatial and bodily disorientation in a forest see Tamás Waliczky's video The Forest (Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 1993), in which there is no flickering light to stabilize space and orient the viewer.
11. Michael Asher, Impossible Journey: Two against the Sahara (London: Viking, 1988), 164-65. (The epigraph for this section is located on 169.)
12. Ibid., 165.
13. Ibid., 166.
14. Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau-Ponty's Freudianism: From the Body of Consciousness to the Body of Flesh,” Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry 18, nos. 1-3 (1982-83): 111. Olkowski's interior quotation comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 210.
15. See also, in relation to the child's non-Cartesian spatial perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Expression and the Child's Drawing,” in The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 147-52. A wonderful and precise visual expression of the child's non-Cartesian spatial perception can be found in Tamás Waliczky's video The Garden (Karlsruhe: Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, 1992).
16. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965).
17. I thank all those colleagues on H-Film who responded to my query. Many films suggested were relevant (directly or indirectly), although most veered off into science fiction allegory, many into less concrete and spatial modes of being lost, and several were not American (my focus here). Two not mentioned in the text that are resonant in relation to my discussion are The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984), an SF film but one in which there's a scene of two tourists from Indiana literally lost in Harlem; and Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989), which deals with being lost both literally and metaphorically. If one begins to speculate as to why there are fewer scenes of people literally getting lost in cinema than one might expect and why such scenes tend to be displaced into the fantastic space of SF, a primary reason might be that since the cinema, itself, is made up of bits and pieces of discontinuous and discontiguous time and space, the goal of both the cinematic apparatus and the traditional narrative is to make these fragments cohere into a coordinated geography the viewer can navigate. Evoking literal disorientation reminds cinema and the spectator to varying degrees of the cinema's initial premises, which are incoherent. Thus, unless displaced into allegory or metaphor, long sequences of being lost in a narrative might well threaten to undo narrative and take us into the realm of a more materially reflexive, nonnarrative, “experimental” cinema. “Getting lost” in narrative cinema, then, tends to be a rare occurrence, marked out against our—and the character's—“familiar”—orientation as “unusual.”
18. Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 42. (The epigraph for this section can be found on 42-43.)
19. There is an illuminating bit of text that gives us a “mirror image” of Freud's recurrent—and unwanted—return to the street of painted women and also involves spatial directions, brothels, and famous men. In his essay “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), Walter Benjamin reveals not only his ostensible subject but also himself when, discussing Proust's “love of ceremony” and his resourcefulness in “creating complications,” he writes:
Once, late at night, he dropped in on Princess Clermont-Tonnerre and made his staying dependent on someone bringing him his medicine from his house. He sent a valet for it, giving him a lengthy description of the neighborhood and of the house. Finally, he said: “You cannot miss it. It is the only window on the Boulevard Haussmann in which there still is a light burning!” Everything but the house number! Anyone who has tried to get the address of a brothel in a strange city and has received the most long-winded directions, everything but the name of the street and the house number, will understand what is meant here. (207)
My gratitude to Marc Siegel for bringing this passage to my attention.
20. Also informed by male desire and its frustration in the comic mode, a provocative companion film relating the spatial disorientation of going round in circles to its literal counterpart in temporal disorientation is Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993).
21. Graziella Magherini, La sindrome di Stendhal (Firenze: Ponte Alle Grazie, 1989). For brief accounts in English of Stendhal's Syndrome see “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21, 1987, sec. 1, pp. 1-2; and “Tourists Turn Up Artsick in Florence,” Los Angeles Times (Orange County edition), Sep. 15, 1988, sec. 6, p. 6.
22. “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, 2.
23. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fugue” (emphasis added).
24. The film was given limited release in the United States in 1999 under the English title The Stendhal Syndrome.
25. Marc Savlov, review of The Stendhal Syndrome, dir. Dario Argento, Austin Chronicle, Oct. 25 999.
26. “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, 1.
27. This triadic relation of being lost, being male, and being white played out in terms of race appears earlier in a sequence in the comedy/satire National Lampoon's Vacation (Harold Ramis, 1983; the film is also known as National Lampoon's Summer Vacation); here, the bumbling father of a vacationing family driving across country gets lost in the inner city of St. Louis and pays a “racial other” five dollars for directions but is given for his money only directions to another “racial other” who will supposedly give him directions.
28. Not a satire, Judgment Night attempts to be “politically correct” about urban terrors. It displaces and inverts its barely latent fear of the racial other by providing a manifest racial mix of four suburban buddies who get lost in a “tough” section of Chicago, where, in their fancy RV, they accidentally run over the victim of a shooting and are chased by a racial mix of gangbangers, the film's real heavies foregrounded as Caucasian.
29. Roger Ebert, review of Quick Change, dir. Howard Franklin and Bill Murray, Cinemania ‘94, CD-ROM (Microsoft, 1993) (emphasis added).
30. There is a subfield of geography called “behavioral geography” that uses cognitive psychology to explicate and understand human orientation in worldly space. Although many of its experiments are useful in tracing “cognitive maps” of space and the strategies and choice making used in human navigation, as