Incorporating images: film and the rival arts

Abstract

Peucker, Brigitte. Incorporating Images. Film and Rival Arts. Princeton: Princeton UP 1995. 227 pp. $52.00 hardcover. In this study Peucker examines place that occupies between traditional of painting and literature. As such, essence of her book speaks little of incorporating images as stated in main title; antagonistic subtitle of film and rival arts points more to core of her argument. Filmmaking is to author a rather co-opting and usurping medium. As latecomer at turn of twentieth century, cinema, in her judgment, only alludes to, absorbs, and undermines all other discourses of art (55). Film is seen as a kind of parasitic artistic endeavor, struggling for self-- legitimization through appropriation, revision, and subversion of its sisterly arts. While cinema was haunted for a long time by this specter of usurper, Peucker's thought process seems somewhat arrested in a biased nostalgia for traditional aesthetics. In addition, by claiming that human body is focal point in cinematic articulation, Peucker frames her interpretative explanations exclusively in universal terms of psychology. While this may be a very prevalent American approach to interpret artistic process, it seems a rather alien modus operandi for many of social-historically-grounded European art productions she discusses in her book. In first chapter Peucker dismisses filmic introduction of movement into visual representation; it amounts, in her opinion, to nothing more than the of heterogeneity and fragmentation as an Oedipal problem (44). In her analyses of Fritz Lang's films she detects throughout a threatening disassemblage, a fissured structure, that represents itself as a wounded, mutilated, or castrated body, a body that simultaneously aspires to and denies possibility of organic wholeness (41). Likewise she interprets Hitchcock's films as preoccupied with body of woman that is sadistically fragmented or dismembered in a multiplicity of images, and a camera that functions as sexual penetration and murder via scopic drive. Social forces and epochal problems are not recognized as reflective factors. In chapter two Peucker explores another psychological manifestation in which models itself upon body, analyzing relation of literary and pictorial frequently figured by as sexual relations gone awry. Film, seen as crossing traditional boundaries of aesthetic form, abandons any formal or generic unity and turns into trope of a hybrid monster. Peucker points to a variety of texts that, in her view, gender and sexualize encounter of image and narrative as they vampirize more traditional arts (4). The collision of these two textual systems in cinema is, according to author, repeatedly represented by suggestions of adultery, incest, miscegenation, and bisexuality. …

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