Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Peter Greenaway's Mediatic Journey through History |
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Author: Heidi Peeters Abstract (E): This article investigates Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases as the creation of a synergetic new media discourse, questioning the boundaries between hypermediacy and immediacy, history and fiction. In the encyclopedic and mythological project, the mediacy of history and the history of media become entangled, so that, more than ever, the medium is the message, again. Abstract (F): Cet article analyse le projet "Tulse Luper Suitcases" de Peter Greenaway comme une tentative de cration d'un nouveau mdia discursif qui interroge les frontires entre structures "immdiates" et "hypermdies" et entre histoire et fiction. Dans ce projet encyclopdique et mythologique, la mdiation discursive de l'histoire et l'histoire des mdias se chevauchent, de sorte que, plus que jamais, le mdium redevient le message keywords: new media, hypermediacy, immediacy, New Historicism, crossovers |
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The Tulse Luper Suitcases is Peter Greenaway's most recent work, [1] but, at the same time, it is still very much in progress, ever under construction, ever expanding to new domains and new corners of media. The center and carrier of the suitcase-project is Henry Purcell Tulse Luper, a (fictitious) geologist, journalist, traveler, archivist and writer, who has already appeared in earlier Greenaway projects. Due to his strange aptitude to get himself imprisoned, he has become convinced that imprisonment is indeed the human condition, so, deciding he'd better get the most out of it, Luper has elevated imprisonment to an art form. In the project he has not only become the center of interest of many jailers from all over the world and of viewers' curiosity alike, but he has also become the center of the geographical, political and artistic 20 th century history, at least in Greenaway's version of it. The project is ambitious, so large even that I have been reluctant as to where to start my exploration of the labyrinth. Two concepts, like Ariadne's threads, have become my guidelines through the project: namely history on the one side and media on the other. However, my threads turned out to belong to a cardiovascular network, pumping through the Luper Tissue, feeding it and making it grow in unexpected directions. Instead of finding a way out, I became more and more entangled.
Media
Peter Greenaway, generally known as a film director, but actually more of an artisto universalis , claimed in his Cinema Militans Lecture that film is now an old dinosaur-like medium, with its 108 years in age having reached its expiration date decades ago. The dictatorship of actors, camera, frame, and text has tired out the medium's artistic possibilities, which, however, is no reason for mourning, since digital new media technologies and aesthetics from television and webdesign are able to breathe life into the film medium again, leading to its rebirth at both an aesthetic as well as at a production and distribution level. The old gospel of film language has to make way for a new mediatic diction.[2]
The creation of a new media language in The Tulse Luper Suitcases takes shape at different levels, leading to a case of macro-micro-mirroring. At a macro-level, Greenaway has chosen to expand the project over a network of different media, from three DVD feature films exhibiting Luper's story to different websites explaining the project and developing the myth further, tracking the changes, reworking footage and even incorporating earlier Greenaway projects such as the The Falls documentaries. The project also encompasses visual workshops, TV-programmes, CD-roms and CD-rom-like guided tours on the internet (the Weblers-site),[3] exhibitions, an online game, stories written by Luper, an opera, and a book.[4] In its structure, the project mirrors Scheherazade' s network of stories - a reference that is made obvious by the 1001 days that the Luper Network Site will be under construction. Somewhat like the tales, all media refer to the others, overlapping in their use of material, reworking it or taking over a thread that has been left dangling somewhere else. What is most striking is thus not the sheer diversity of media involved in the project, but their compatibility in turning the Luper myth taking shape through the network into a coherent yet dispersed whole.
At a micro-level, each medium is marked by crossovers and hybridity to such an extent that the validity of the concept medium specificity seems further away than ever. The Tulse Luper Suitcases ' The Moab Story - the first part of the feature film trilogy - carries not only the fictitious story of Luper in Moab in images and sounds, but consists of a patchwork of materials. The adventures and travels of Luper (reminiscent of the picaresque novel) are interwoven with documentary footage from First World War food drops in Antwerp, 3D-digital reconstructions of ancient Mormon cities in the Utah desert, and minute examinations of the material within the 92 suitcases Luper has collected. Nevertheless, more important than the syntagmatic juxtaposition of different media traditions is the paradigmatic superimposition of techniques and aesthetics, making the Luper language itself thicken into a choir of mediatic discourses.
Props and scenery in the film acquire meaning beyond their functional status, turning the actors into compositional elements, mirroring the stage-like aesthetics of 19 th century tableaux vivants. This minute attention to composition, colour and light also calls to mind associations with painting from different masters in different ages. Especially in the copious Antwerp boudoir of Martino Nockavelli's mistress, Rubens is not far away, nor are the rest of the baroque, renaissance and even pre-modern masters of the European National Museums. Calligraphic attention for the textual signifier comes to the foreground when words and texts appear on the screen surface, at the same time or after having been uttered by the characters. There are some references to musicals and to opera, with a group of characters bursting into a song about the Flemish fox Reynaert and the farm being a model of agriculture, a strange mix of Heimat marches and school rhymes.
The most prominent references, however, are theatrical in nature. The fourth-wall illusion and other scenic arrangements are obviously borrowed from this tradition, just like the eminently dramatic acting in which the actors recite their lines while addressing the audience. Inclusion of try-outs and auditioning tapes add a Brechtian touch to the whole, just like the echoing voice-track, by which the same lines are repeated in different tempers and tones. The absence of, or construction on the spot of, décor is a Brechtian, theatrical element as well, and just like Lars Von Trier's Dogville , The Moab Story could be said to question the so-called "ontological" Difference between film and theatre.[5]
The combination of the attributes "Brechtian" and "theatrical" together with the project opposing the ontological Difference, however, is contradictory in nature and reveals the ambiguous position of the Suitcases in the media landscape. On the one hand, the possibility of schematic construction in film opposes the Difference thesis. On the other hand, schematicity turns out to be still a marked device in a film, turning The Moab Story into a "theatrical" specimen of the film type. The use of so many "theatrical" devices, together with aesthetics from other mediatic traditions, contributes to the perception of Greenaway's project not so much as an intertextual film anymore, but as a true hybrid, indeed disturbing all the conventions of the old film language.
The Brechtian dimensions in this respect are most revealing of Greenaway's intentions. Brecht wanted his audience to take distance from the bourgeois ideology that was inherent in theatre, through revealing the mechanism of construction, in this way turning actors and audience into critical observers. Nevertheless, in today's theatre, Brechtian devices have almost become the norm, so that their effect has worn out. In the filmic context, however, where realism is still the dominant ontological paradigm, the mechanism still has the desired effect. For Greenaway's agenda of disturbing the old film language, a Brechtian absence of décor (for example, people driving a car, when there is no car) is thus a most effective tool.
More than anything, the Tulse Luper Suitcases explicit use of new (and old) media languages is self-reflexive, focusing attention on its construction and on its explicitly being digital. Next to being a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk , The Tulse Luper Suitcases seems an investigation, even a mediatic essay, into the nature of immediacy , transparency and hypermediacy .[6]
Immediacy and transparency are modalities that could be attributed to the dominant film language (the classical model as described by David Bordwell, but also the more recent discourse of the Neo-baroque Hollywood films as defined by Sean Cubitt,) [7] which Peter Greenaway is so explicitly bored with and against which he so eagerly fights.[8] When defined by these attributes, mediatic languages are designed to maintain an illusion of direct access to the reality they (re)present, in order for the confronted subjects to forget mediation altogether and to be mentally absorbed by content instead of surface (i.e. mentally equating content with surface). Films as analog photographic media are taken to gradually become more and more transparent and immediate, referring indexically to a filmed reality, but also providing a seemingly perfect iconic copy of that reality in real time. Strangely enough, digital technologies do not seem to counter this teleological move towards ever more reality, but push the medium even further towards what could be termed the "hyperreal".
Transparency and immediacy in film are of course not absolute, since the medium is not devoid of semiotic material and symbolic dimensions. The cracks in the filmic transparency come to the surface when viewers are confronted with old or foreign movies, in which out-dated or bizarre conventions lay bare the filmic apparatus. Nevertheless, generally, the symbolic and semiotic nature of film will remain masked. Lisa Cartwright, in this respect, observes that virtuality is more connected with the reality of the experience than it is inherent within the object, and to my view, it is only because viewers mistake their experience for the mediatic object itself that immediacy becomes possible.[9] It is the experiential absorption into the constructed but naturalized reality of the medium that enables the Hollywood film language to get its viewers hooked and, as Marxist or feminist critics observe, injected with its dominant ideology.[10]
Hypermediacy , as opposed to transparency and immediacy, is a mechanism by which signs focus attention on themselves, hence on the medium's reality as being a construction. Typical examples of hypermediacy can be detected in web design, with its flickering patterns and its multiple windows and frames, but also in TV-aesthetics such as featured on CNN, with text bars and index notations scrolling by, correspondents communicating from two different frames and logo's appearing on the surface of the screen. The illusion of one coherent virtuality in this way is given up for a feast of signifiers and mediation. The viewers of a hypermediate screen will be less inclined to be absorbed into the coherent virtuality of the framed worlds, since they are constantly being reminded of the existence of other flickering virtualities, whose juxtaposition makes them lose their absolute status. In this way, viewers will more easily shift attention from one text to the other, zapping between the different windows in the screen.
It is not difficult to decide which side Greenaway envisions his new media language to evolve toward, since The Tulse Luper Suitcases with its multitude of overlapping media and frames is a landmark of hypermediacy, at least relative to film as we know it. The project is "windowed" almost in the Microsoft-sense of the word and indulges in its own being-layered, its own being-digital. Different windows are opened at the same time and become superimposed, so that it is no exception to see actions in a "stage frame" against a calligraphic background, while in two symmetrical frames, a guide, angled from the right or the left side respectively, provides the viewer with further information. Footage material of all sorts is collaged together and props appear, disappear, or are even being constructed on the spot. The construction of the medium is stressed to such an extent that viewers can see the contours of a schematic car change into a real one or a focal square scan over a scene of soldiers, in this way "revealing" a similar but different reality underneath. Sequences are shot from different angles, mirrored, mosaically juxtaposed and repeated over and over again.
Behind the self-reflexivity of Greenaway's hypermediate new-media language stands a strongly emancipatory agenda, and it is in this respect that Brecht's approach comes to mind again. Whenever viewers risk being absorbed into the reality of the staged events, the medium will throw them back to the surface, distancing them emotionally from the storyworld through comical music, through providing encyclopedic information and exhibitory material, through numbering and indexing physical actions, or through drowning the viewers in a multiplication of frames. In this way it becomes quite impossible to forget that what one is looking at is a mediated series of events and a mediated exhibition of so-called historical material. This mechanism could obviously be interpreted as a critique on the reign of Hollywood aesthetics by which viewers are absorbed into a universe of dominant, often reactionary, fiction.[11]
Next to its self-critical dimension, the emancipatory dimension of the project has a truly educational CD-rom touch to it, and in this respect develops a Neo-Enlightenment obsession with the filing and mapping out of 20 th century knowledge and art. Rather than inducing a feature film experience, the Luper DVD resembles more of a CD-rom in its structure, guiding the user through stories, art, geography and history.
This knowledge throws a new light on the Tulse Luper Suitcases project. Is Peter Greenaway, in his emancipatory project of leading us away from the illusions of media, actually leading us towards more cunning illusions about the reality of encyclopedic history?
History
The Tulse Luper Suitcases , next to its use of new media languages, provides an investigation into the relation between history and media. Rather than limiting the mediatic focus to the signifier-side of the project and the historical focus to the side of the signified, Greenaway proves the two to be intrinsically intertwined in a more complicated way. His engagement with the depiction of the history of the 20 th century seems a highly contradictory enterprise at first, given the fact that the Suitcases project is presented as largely fictional, while at the same time being an explicit construction of hypermediacy. There are seemingly irreconcilable binarisms at stake, such as the opposition between the reality of history on the one hand and the fiction of the Luper project on the other, the truth and stability of what really happened and the playful construction presented by Greenaway, the unincarnated omniscience of reality and the awkward contextualization provided by the Luper point-of-view. The fact that the whole project is centered around a fictitious figure and around the arbitrary number 92 seem to turn The Tulse Luper Suitcases into an extremely inept enterprise for the reproduction of the history of the 20 th century. Figures should be contextualized by history, not the other way round.
Nevertheless, the apparent contradictions and aporias lay bare the inherent contradictions in all representations of history: immediate, transparent and hypermediate. The Tulse Luper Suitcases does not so much position its own mediacy against the absolute stability of history, but on the contrary dissects history as itself a mediated construct, while at the same time stressing the self-legitimizing truth value of art. According to the artist, history does not exist in an absolute, unmediated form, but always will be filtered through the perceptions, interpretations, and values of subjects as experiencers, filing instances, historians and readers.[12] The original truth does not exist, not so much because it gets lost in mediation, but because there is no truth prior to mediation and experience. The event "as it was" thus can never be recovered in an absolute form.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases poses an indirect accusation towards so-called historical films, that claim to provide the historical truth "as it was" in an immediate way (e.g. Mel Gibson about this Passion of the Christ ,) [13] but are no less constructed and mediated than the Luper project itself. Also the truth claims of hypermediate history books, documentaries, educational CD-roms or news-reports cannot be absolute, and even historical material that is exposed in museums is mediated. Nevertheless, the historical conscience of 21 st century citizens is largely defined by what has been featured in films, mixed with history lessons, documentaries, websites, CD-roms, and visits to the museum. Greenaway's explicit mixing of fiction and facts in the media through which we have come to know history, puts our knowledge in a new light. In its use of these chanels, The Tulse Luper Suitcases mirrors the way we think about history, while also destabilizing our certainty about it.
Greenaway's game with history poses The Tulse Luper project as an interesting perspective toward both the New Historicist paradigm and the Historizismus paradigm as described by Fredric Jameson, although it cannot be situated in either of these camps.[14] It is the New Historicist paradigm that has been particularly valuable in stressing the importance of historical context in the appreciation of texts and objects, thus in stressing the changeability of their interpretation. The human condition in this view is, just like Luper's, one of imprisonment; everything is determined and colored by the epistemic discourse in which it is situated. In this view, Luper, next to being imprisoned by the brick walls of his cells, is of course also imprisoned by the epistemic power in which he finds himself positioned. To the German-American Mormon masculine power in Utah , for example, he is a British underdog, an enemy at war and a rival in wooing women, but at the same time a messiah on a white horse. The difference between Greenaway's and the New Historicist approach, however, is that the latter still searches for interpretations that come closest to the way "it really was," trying to read objects through the epistemic lenses of their originating period.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases celebrates the archeological search of New Historicism through history (Luper as well searches for lost cities) and the importance of archiving seemingly unimportant objects as traces that possess the energy of the period (Luper's obsession with collecting), but at the same time, the Luper project (as well as the Luper persona) nostalgically and ironically abandon this search and turn history into a toy for creativity and imagination. To the great disappointment of his German jailers, Luper's documents written during his WWII stay in Belgium do not contain political and historical evidence, but mere creative scribbling. Also, the project itself does not rebuild history as it was, but takes it as a stepping stone for something else: an artistic network. The main imprisonment Greenaway talks about is not physical, discursive and historical in nature, but mediatic and personal. Contrary to the New Historicist conviction, he stresses not so much how discourse is shaped by its historical period, or how a historical period is shaped through its discourse, but how our perception of history is shaped through the discourses of our media. According to the highly arbitrary and bizarre personal profile that is provided of Luper, it also becomes clear that every person is imprisoned within their own subjectivity as well.
Luper is defined as a man with extremely bizarre, personal and most of all arbitrary convictions, such as "drank himself insensible every night," "drew breasts on the back of envelopes" and "had a gross prejudice against Muslims, Japanese, Belgians and women who made mouth to mouth contact with dogs." [15] These convictions become even more haphazard when it turns out that Luper's values have been intermingled with those of other filmic characters (the most obvious ones being those where the first person is indicated with "she") so that we cannot form a consistent filter through which to view the events. The framed "guides" that address the viewers and provide extra information from their side seem completely detached and objective teachers, since they are not presented as belonging to any historical reality, but even their validity is mocked by the fact that they mix historical information with trivia about the fictive Luper. Another element laying bare the arbitrary and constructed nature of history is the disproportionate importance that is attributed to the banal, unimportant, and seemingly arbitrary number 92. Nevertheless, there is logic in Greenaway's madness, since 92 turns out to be the atomic number of uranium and uranium could be elevated to the central element in the 20 th century. After all, the 20 th century was the "atomic century", with Nagasaki , Hiroshima , Tsjernobyl, the race to arms, and the Cold War. The logic behind what seems at first pure haphazardness, reveals the haphazardness behind the logic we use to date historical events. If the birth of Jesus Christ is a valid event to start a new era, why could the atomic number of uranium not be a valid number to build a historical recount of the 20 th century? Where does the seeming naturalness of our decimal system come from? How is it that 10, 100, 1.000.000, have become legitimate numbers for counting, collecting, assembling and filing, and not 92, p , or the binary system?
Greenaway's appropriation of history to his own artistic desires and creative whims could also be taken to be exactly the opposite of the New Historical approach as well and in this way be reminiscent of historicism as described and criticized by Fredric Jameson. An historicist approach allows to borrow freely from history, without bothering about the original truth or context (a practice present in literature and film, but even more so in fashion and design). It is true that Greenaway indeed uses history as his playground, but, on the other hand, he is far less irreverent than may seem at first. Although the project abandons the search for the always already lost truth, it shows a great passion for the artistic and sociological history of humanity, for its works of art, its stories and its architectural gems. The project radiates encyclopedic ambitions despite its mythomania and in this way, Greenaway resembles a humanist rather than a postmodern hysteric.
Nevertheless, the postmodern paradigm remains useful to the project. Next to positioning history as a construct, it focuses attention on the reality of media. Not only, as stated above, do films and other media create our opinions about the past or about reality, but they also shape a reality in and of themselves. If something has not been processed by the media, it almost has not taken place; if something cannot be found on the Internet, it does not exist. In this way, the Internet, incorporating other media, is becoming the new library and encyclopedia. In the logic of Jean Baudrillard, the Internet could be defined as a map that indicates what happens on the terrain, how to interpret the information, and which logic and laws to position behind it. Just as the map of Baudrillard eventually may become a simulacrum, operating on itself without reference to the original terrain, so the Internet library may come to function in, of, and on itself. In this way, the Internet hovers between map and simulacrum, on the one hand pointing towards events in the external world, on the other hand constituting a reality of its own. The Tulse Luper Network could be situated exactly at the intersection of these two poles, self-consciously hovering between fact and fiction, between mythomania and history.
Literature
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations" in Selected Writings (ed. Mark Poster), Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1988, pp. 166-184.
Jean-Louis Baudry (1987/ 1970), "Ideological Effect on the Basis of Cinematographic Apparatus," Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (ed. Phillip Rosen), Columbia University Press, New York , 1986, pp.286-298.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media , MIT University Press, Cambridge , Mass. , 1999.
David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (ed. Philip Rosen), Columbia University Press, New York , 1986, pp. 15-34.
Lisa Cartwright, "Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in an Era of Convergence" in Journal of Visual Culture , vol. 1, nr.1, pp. 7-22, 2002.
Sean Cubitt, The Cinema-Effect , MIT University Press, Cambridge Mass, 2004.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late- Capitalism , Dupe Up, Durham ,1991.
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (ed Philip Rosen), Columbia University Press, New York , pp 198-209.
Robert Stam, "The Theory and Practice of Adaptation" in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation , (ed. Robert Stam and Allessandra Raengo), Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Oxford, Carlton, 2004, pp. 1-52
Websites
http://www.tulseluper.net/index.html
http://www.kasanderfilm.nl/tulseluperproduction/
http://www.bolzanogold.com/y35.htm
http://www.digiscreen.ca/weblers/tulse .
Notes
[1] The next Greenaway project will be a film on the life of Dutch painter Rembrandt Van Rijn, to come out in june 2006 and be entitled Nightwatching . http://www.cinema.nl/cinema/magazines/news/index.jsp [2]< http://petergreenaway.co.uk/tulse.htm > Cinema Militans Lecture (2003) [3] < http://www.digiscreen.ca/weblers/tulse > [4] I surely have not read or seen everything, but I content myself with the fact that maybe only Greenaway himself has done so, although it might be even his ultimate goal to eventually lose track of his expanding project. I also have to add that I am still slightly suspicious as to whether all the evidence Greenaway talks about truly exists, considering his reputation for mythomania and artistic embezzlement. [5]The Ontological Difference between film and theatre indicates that whereas in the theatre, non-realistic or schematic devises can be used in the construction of a reality (e.g. a card-board box to represent a castle, a broomstick to represent a horse), such usages in film are considered to be ridiculous. Ed Wood's depiction of plastic ufo's dangling against a cardboard sky can therefore not count on the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief. [6] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media , Cambridge , MA , The MIT Press, 1999. [7] David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader , ed. Philip Rosen, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, pp.15-34; Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect , The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. [8] It must be observed that media do not necessarily have to be either one-dimensionally transparent and immediate or hypermediate. Practically all media reconcile both modalities so that the classification of a certain media product can only happen relative to the tradition from which it stems or against which it is positioned. In comparison to the average feature film at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century, The Moab Story is more hypermediate and less transparent and immediate. Compared to a 16 th century emblem book, it is more transparent and immediate to us, but it would maybe not be so to a time-traveling 16-the century monk. [9] Lisa Cartwright, "Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in an era of convergence" in Journal of Visual Culture , vol. 1, nr. 1, pp. 7-22, 2002. In this context I take virtuality as a synonym of the duo transparency and immediacy. [10] Theorists that fight against such implicit dominant ideologies want to reveal the systems and the signs by which these are constructed. Laura Mulvey's dissection of the triple cinematic male gaze (in character, apparatus and viewer) is a case in point, but also Jean-Louis Baudry's analyses film as inherently conformist and reactionary in essence, even when it features black lesbian terrorists burning down the pentagon. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (ed Philip Rosen), Columbia University Press, New York , pp. 198-209. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects on the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (ed. Philip Rosen), Columbia University Press, New York, p 281-285. [11] See Jean-Louis Baudry. [12]http://petergreenaway.co.uk/tulse.htm [13] Quoted in Robert Stam, "The Theory and Practice of Adaptation" in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation , (ed. Robert Stam and Allessandra Raengo), Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Oxford, Carlton, 2004, p.6 [14] Fredrik Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism |
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