Reality is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the 16th Century1

William Egginton The past several years has seen a surge in the number of films that call into question the nature of the reality represented within the diagetic borders of the screen. In some cases this is a result of the blending of the diagetic reality into other represented realities, and in one extreme caselike The Blair Witch Project of 1999reality broke out of the very borders that define it as fictional and was perceived as real by its viewers. In this essay I argue that this thematic convergence is not new, but is rather the logical extension of a narrative trope whose history predates the invention of film and, in fact, reaches back to the invention of theater in the 16th century. This trope, which I refer to as bleeding, has been the obsessive concern of writers ever since spectacle began to be organized in such a way as to presuppose an ontological distinction between the space of the viewer and the space of the character. Moreover, the splitting central to this organization of space, this rending of experienced space into reality and some other dimension that represents it, is foundational for a good deal of cultural production in the modern western world, particularly that involving narrative, theater, television, and film. What film, and particularly film at the end of this century, has brought into the picture is the possibility that the circle will become complete, that the represented reality will cross the threshold that constitutes it, thereby contaminating our reality, reality per se. In this way, The Blair Witch Project fulfilled the fears of Renaissance theorists as they contemplated the products of the modern stage for the first time, the fear that the imitation of reality might become indistinguishable from reality itself. Realism versus illusionism In the summer of 1999, The Blair Witch Project was released amidst an internet-enhanced media blitz that ensuredin many casesprecisely the reception its makers had hoped it would have: terrified viewers believed that what they were seeing was real. It is worthwhile asking, however, in what exact sense viewers flocking to see Blair Witch perceived it as real. They did not merely take it to be historically real, as in based on a true story. On the other hand, they obviously did not experience what was occurring on the screen as immediate reality, a misperception associated with at least some

The thoughts presented here were inspired by a talk given by Scott Bukatman at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in May of 1999, and by further discussions with Bernadette Wegenstein. They are intended merely as contributions to the more extensive work of these two scholars.

fictionalized versions of psychosis.2 The Blair Witch experience of reality was somewhere in between these two extremes: viewers believed that the moving images they were perceiving were in fact reproductions of images recorded by and about the protagonists of the story they were engaged with. They experienced, in other words, the images as a kind of testament, a synthetic eye witness to a real event. Given this distinction, it seems uncontroversial to deduce that the sense in which viewers accepted Blair Witch as real is determined by a set of specific historical and technological circumstances, that, in other words, this particular kind of reality-effectin which the spectator experiences the spectacle as if it were the actual reproduction of some real eventis the logical outcome of progressing technologies of visual and audio reproduction. What stymies such a theory, however, is the simple fact that Blair Witch created this effect with only the most basic equipment, technology that has been widely available for years (apart from the hand-held video recorder, technology available since the invention of film itself). In fact, more or less the same stunt was performed with audio technology already in 1936 when Orson Wells convinced thousands of panicked listeners that Earth was being attacked by Mars. The key to understanding the independence of the Blair Witch realityeffect from todays increasingly sophisticated technologies of audio and visual reproduction lies in a tension apparently inherent to the medium of film, a tension between two tendencies that we will call illusionism and realism. Both terms need to be defined within the parameters of a representational schema. Let us symbolize this schema as V M[O]

where V stands for the viewer, M for the medium, and [O] for the object, content, or reality that is framed by the medium. The statement then reads: the viewer perceives the object as framed by the medium. The function of the frame, as analyzed by Goffman, is to key the represented reality, such that the viewer implicitly understands that a new set of rules are involved in interacting with it (e.g., suspension of disbelief as an enabling rule of fiction). 3 With this basic, more or less nave schema, we can now differentiate between the respective structures of realism and illusionism. Both tendencies have, on the surface, similar aims. These aims could be stated as the desire to reduce, and ultimately to eliminate, the distinction for the viewer between M and O, to present, in other words, the mediated representation of reality as immediate perception of reality. Each of the tendencies has, however, a radically opposed means of attaining this aim, in that illusionism attempts to erase the distinction by presenting the medium as
2

See Charles Palliser, Betrayals, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), in which a charming, homicidal maniac is portrayed as being incapable of distinguishing lived reality from that, for instance, represented on television. 3 See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974) 40-47.

the object, and realism attempts to erase the distinction by presenting the object as the medium. Illusionism, the filmic technique of presenting the mediumthe filmic imageas if it were the object reality itselfis the impetus behind most technological advances in film. It is the tendency that drives, for example, the great special effects studios like Dreamworks, and that led George Lucas to declare that with The Phantom Menace the last barriers to creating the perfect illusion had been swept away. What he meant was that with the near perfection of techniques of computer animation, there is no longer any scene that a director could desire to portray in a film that the special effects studio could not deliver and make look real. Whether this claim remains to some extent hyperbolic is not important. The point is that this desire and tendency exist in film and to a certain extent have always existed in it. The extraordinary authority granted to photography and then motion picture at the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century was due to the special feature of these visual media that they objectively reproduced a given state of things at a given time. The subjectivity of the photographer or film maker was always perceived to be secondary to the force and presence of the objective content of film. For this reason photography remained for much of the 20th century an implicitly lower form of artistic expression. Photography and the cinematic arts could only make inroads against this prejudice to the extent that their practitioners mastered techniques of distortion, techniques that allowed them to imprint their subjectivity on the original, objective contents of the shot. What has occurred in recent years, however, is that the subjectively manipulable content of the cinematic image is no longer distinguishable from the original object that once granted it its special authority, that endowed it with its aura of truth.4 This is what I mean when I define illusionism as the technique of presenting the medium as object: any inherent limitation of objective reality fades away as the filmmaker develops the technology to impose his subjective vision on the original objective content of film. In the end, entire scenes and eventually entire films are still experienced by viewers as remaining within the representational framework defined as V M[O], when in fact Othe original object filmed by the camerais no longer there. Nevertheless the truth aura attached to the original objective content of film anchors the viewers belief and guarantees that instead of apprehending the film as

This aura of truth has a correlate Barthes notion of the punctum, that aspect of a photograph that is there despite the intention of the photographer, and that quite possibly could not not have been there. Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980) 80.

M,

as, for instance, an exercise in the medium akin to abstract painting, viewer apprehends the cinematic image as V [O], as being realistic, or true to life. Such an experience of realism, however, never threatens the borders of the viewers own reality. The viewer still experiences the images as comfortably framed [O], which guarantees that while in some sense realistic, these special effects are never taken as real. The second tendency, realism, we defined as the erasure of the medium/object distinction by presenting the object as if it were the medium. Although the realistic tendency has also been present throughout the history of film (as we shall see further on), unlike illusionism, it is more or less independent of technological progress. Lets take the most terrifying and extreme example of cinematic realism, the snuff film. The snuff film is realistic in our sense of the word because when presented with it, the viewer takes what is in fact the objectimages of a human beings deathas a mediumas a trace of a further, real death, a mysterious and terrifying (or titillating, depending on the viewer) event. In this case, V M[O] becomes V O[O], in which the second O now stands for a further reality, a reality that naturally impacts on our own because what in the first case was perceived as a relatively innocuous medium framing the represented reality is now perceived as part of the objective, represented reality itself, a trace of some real act of violence. This is, of course, exactly the logic of The Blair Witch Project: a snuff film adapted for popular consumption. The result of having distinguished the representational structures of illusionism and realism is the following thesis: whereas illusionism reinforces the viewers sense of his or her own space as ontologically distinct from the diagetic space of the screen, realism does the opposite, undermining this ontological security. The reason for this is that, as we noticed above, by presenting the medium as object, illusionism retains and even reinforces the original framing function of the medium, and the viewer continues to key the medium just as he or she had keyed the object via the medium before. In realism, however, in which the object is presented as medium, the framing function ceases to distinguish the viewers dimension of being from that of the object. The frame now serves solely to indicate a temporal or spatial

distance between two objects, that which is present at hand and some other to which it refers. No ontological distinction is produced. Why is it, however, that with realism the object is so easily accepted as a medium? What is it about the cinematic presentation of, for example, Blair Witch, that tempts us to step over the frame that normally protects our reality from the intrusion of fictional objects? If we return to our original representational schema V M[O], and to our definition of realism as M=O, then we might ask the question: can we ever have an immediate knowledge of the object against which to measure the accuracy of its representation via medium M? The answer, it seems, is that while an object might be perceived free of the effects of medium M, it will never be perceived free of all effects of mediation. When we judge a representation as realistic, then, what we are actually saying is that M=O where O stands for our context-dependent expectation of some experience Q. V M[O] becomes, therefore V M[M{Q}], and so forth, with no logical limit to the number of interior mediations. The cinematic object, to put it simply, is always already mediated. What enables cinematic realism to undermine the framing function supporting the viewers sense of reality is a technique I will call bleeding,5 in which the frame separating two or more levels of represented reality fails. In the language of speech act theory, one keys a frame by rendering its signifying contents non-performative. The trick of bleeding, therefore, is first to create within the primary frame of the film another frame that mimics the performative/non-performative relation of the original frame distinction, and then to suddenly deactivate the newly keyed frame. The result is that the spectator, who is fully expecting the interior reality to remain fictional with respect to base reality, is caught off guard when these rules are no longer followed. While this technique does not always lead to the reality-effect produced by Blair Witch, Blair Witch can nevertheless be understood as the result of the technique pushed to its logical extreme. In the next section, I present some recent examples of bleeding, as well as a brief history of the trope in film, and then proceed to show how, far from being a technique inherent to film, bleeding has its origins in the 16th century, with the birth of the modern theater.

Reality bleed comes from Cronenbergs eXistenZ (1999), and refers to a phenomenon in virtual reality gaming in which elements of the real world begin to invade the created world of the game.

A history of bleeding This section begins by considering a curious though perhaps coincidental thematic convergence among a group of films released from 1997 to 1999. All of these films, The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998), The Matrix (1999), and eXistenZ (1999), feature as their principal narrative trope the bleeding between what we will call base reality and a representation of that reality within the already representational reality of the film. While in some cases the impulse behind the narrative seems to be the new possibilities offered by computer-enhanced special effects (The Matrix, Pleasantville), this is certainly not the case for the relatively simple visual effects of eXistenZ and The Truman Show. Indeed, in principle, the presentation of a virtual reality in film requires no special effects, since the better the illusion represented the more that reality should resemble the base reality of the film and the less need for technological fireworks to pull it off (a fact that the makers of some films dealing with VR seem not to have considered, e.g., Johnny Mnemonic [1995]). In order for bleeding to be successfulto be cinematic, aesthetic, desirablethe distinction between the realities to be bled must be established. In Pleasantville this is the distinction between violent, jaded, contemporary American culture, and the bland, sexless utopia of family values represented by the reruns of the 1950s television show Pleasantville, watched obsessively by the sensitive and nerdy David Parker. The blackand-white world of Pleasantville is clearly metaphoric of the sort of moral stability and certainty the young Davidbrought up with his sex-pot sister Jennifer by his divorced mother, and abandoned by his dead-beat dadso earnestly desires. When an unsolicited television repair man (played rather disturbingly by Don Knotts) replaces their remote control with one that might have been designed by Jules Vernes, David and his sister are transported into Pleasantville, where their nineties personalities play havoc on its innocent and isolated citizens for the remainder of the film. Once Pleasantville itself has become the films base reality, the bleeding is experienced quite literally as a color bleed. As the characters and their simple world are gradually introduced to the complexities and attractions of a more modern world, this infection appears to us and them as the transformation from a black-and-white to a Technicolor reality. In The Truman Show, Truman himself is presented as the embodiment of a sort of pervasive media bleed emblematicthe film appears to be telling usof contemporary life. Truman is the starring character of a television show that has aired continuously since the day he was born. The problem is hes also the starring actor. Whereas all the other actors on the show exist as normal people, i.e., have a split existence as actors (who conceivably have another life, a life in which they can give interviews about their involvement with the show) and characters (who exist in real world for Truman, on the Truman Show for everone else), only Truman exists exclusively in one world. For Truman, reality is

representation; or, at least, our representation is his reality. Trumans world also has representation, in the form of 1950s black-and-white television shows basically indistinguishable from Pleasantville, whose purpose in his world is to quell his desire to venture out from his own, hermetically sealed pleasantville. Both films, then, thematize the desire of a modern, profligate world for the unattainable innocence of simpler, happier times, as well as the irresistibility of the modern world to the denizens of the naive utopias we create. But whereas for Pleasantville bleeding is a narrative trick intended as a vehicle for this cultural exchange, The Truman Show presents bleeding as part of the problem: we are so jaded and so medialized that we run the risk of bowling over the distinction between reality and representation, between real life and mere entertainment. Bleeding, for the Truman Show, is a symptom of contemporary society, and Truman himself the emblem of its newest form of victimage. If Pleasantville and The Truman Show emphasize the distinction before the bleed, the brilliance of The Matrix and eXistenZ is how they follow the logic of bleeding to its extreme, asking, if the realities are so close that bleeding is a potentiality, then how are we to know that our reality is the real one? Both films trap the viewer into believing, as a viewer is trained to believe, that the films initial, diagetic space is in fact reality, and then go on to subvert that acceptance in the most surprising ways. In The Matrix, we are led to experience a truth that, according to the character Morpheus and paraphrasing the early Wittgenstein,6 cant be talked about but can only be shown. This truth is that the mysterious Matrix is, in fact, this, here, now. Everything we (since we have accepted the films version of reality) are experiencing is in fact an illusion, the effects on our consciousnesses of a powerful computer program; we are, in essence, living in a virtual reality program run by artificial intelligences who are keeping our bodies alive for the purposes of their own energy consumption (the fact that this is a scientific non-sequitur doesnt detract from the effect of the revelation). When the hero Neo swallows the pill proffered by Morpheus containing a drug that inhibits the programs effect on his actual, physical brain, he, and we, are ripped out of the old real worldnow revealed to be an illusionand plunged into the new real world of enslavement to machines and covert revolutionary activity. If The Matrix presents us with one of the most radical possible examples of bleeding, it does so by implicating us, unavoidably (if you werent warned in advance, there was no way of avoiding the trap), in the trope: when Neos reality is questioned, so is ours; the Matrix took over reality, and we bought it hook, line and sinker. Cronenbergs eXistenZ is the lower-budget, gross, slimy-thing version of The Matrix. Like in The Matrix, we are introduced into a world that we
6

This mention is not entirely gratuitous. The fact that the Matrix is itself the product of a language (albeit digital) and hence in some quite literal sense has been put into words (or symbols) belies Morpheuss claim and provides support for the later Wittgensteins contention that one probably cant get outside of language in order to point to reality. I am grateful to my student Kenji Arai for this insightful argument.

have no choice but to accept as base reality, despite ample evidence that it is not our world (the gross, slimy things in question are game pods that plug into bio-ports drilled into the base of ones spine.) It is also the most narratively complex version of reality bleeding, in that the films characters game characters also play VR games, games within the games that themselves thematize the original game, as well as the very notion of virtual gaming and its foundational distinction from reality. The film begins in a reality that we the viewers will only recognize as virtual at the end of the film; but by the time we come to that recognition, Cronenberg has succeeded in entirely undermining the viewers trust in any notion of a stable or base reality. When the world of the game dissolves into the final scene, we are confronted with a product testing contact group similar but not identical to the one with which the film started. Gone, however, are the slimy game pods, and in their place are suitably high-tech, but nevertheless entirely unbiodegradable, blue-plastic helmets and hand controls. The entire story, from the first moment on, was part of this game; none of the characters were who we were led to believe they were. Nevertheless, the normally relieving reality effect of returning to some ground is sabotaged by the frame shifting we have just endured, and when the leads characters themselves turn out to be terrorists, and turn their guns on an innocent bystander, we can empathize completely with the last words of the film: Wait, isnt this still a game? Perhaps the first thing to note about this new trend in cinema is that it is not entirely new. In recent years viewers have been treated to not a few films whose principal trope revolved around the keying of the external or base frame, and hence a shifting of the ground the viewer could call home. One such example is The Game (1997), in which a rich man learns that the purpose behind a mysterious game he has been given as a birthday gift was in fact a ruse designed to swindle him of all his wealth, only later to discover that this discovery itself was merely part of the original game, intended to put in him the midst of a life and death struggle that he would really believe, that he could not, in other words, dismiss as a mere game. Another is Jacobs Ladder (1990), which tells the story of a Vietnam veteran suffering from what could be a demon possession, paranoid delusions about a government experiment with noxious chemical agents, paranoid delusions resulting from such experiments, or all of the above. Only in the last scene do we realize that, like the Civil War soldier in Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,7 the entire story has been the hallucination of a dying soldier who has never left Vietnam. Given that the loss of reality is a priori one of the most unsettling feelings one can have, it should come as no surprise to learn that bleeding came into its own as a technique peculiar to horror films. While Wes Cravens recent popularity is due to the autoreflexive kitsch of such Clearasil horror films as Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997) (the sequel about sequels), he honed his special aptitude for irony with the classic Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), an original that spawned its own sequence of sequels,
7

In Ambrose Bierce, Civil War Stories (New York:Dover Press 1994).

until Craven returned and capped it off with one of the great bleeders of all, Wes Cravens New Nightmare (1994). Whereas the original Nightmare fluidly shuttled the viewer back and forth between dreamed and real life, the New Nightmare did so between the story line of a Freddy Krueger film and the base reality of the movie crew making the movie. In a scene indebted in equal parts to Borges and Julio Cortazar, Craven himself is interviewed about the movie in progress, after which the camera pans to his typewriter where we see typed out the last words of the very interrogation we have just witnessed. Shortly thereafter, John Carpenter joined the fray with In the Mouth of Madness (1995), about the release of a book so frightening that as people read it they go mad. In the final sequence, we learn that not only is the hero, John Trent, himself living out master horror writer Sutter Canes last novel, it is in fact this novel that we are experiencing; the book has been released as a movie, the very movie that we are in the midst of watching (which presumably then justifies any inconsistencies in the plot as possible results of the insanity weve fallen into by watching the film). What Craven and Carpenter realized was that cinema had a heightened capacity for frightening the viewer owing to its tendency to coerce him or her (without his or her noticing) to adopt a certain point of view, to accept, in other words, new coordinates for the experience of what we are calling base reality.8 Film has this capacity first because the moving image is such an (apparently) close correlate to the visual phenomenal experience of everyday life, and second because the flexibility of camera movement and montage allows the dircetor to get into, as it were, the viewers head (subjective camera, or POV shots), by approximating the closest possible point to the apex of the angle of his or her (again, visual) perception. Both of these remain valuable observations despite the fact that the second reason in some striking ways contradicts the first (we tend not to visually perceive the world in cuts, fades, and rapid close-ups, at least until our viewing practices and conventions have taught us to do so). Once a viewer has accepted the directors coordinates, it becomes quite easy to bleed that constructed reality into a new one, or vice versa, be it the reality of a dream or hallucination, a paranoid fantasy, a holodeck,9 a virtual reality program, a television show or, indeed, another film.
8

Emphasis on the coercive nature of this positioning of the viewer is, of course, where the Laura Mulvey-Louis Althusser-Jacques Lacan family of film criticism enters the picture. For a summary of these ideas see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Psychoanalysis in Film and Television, in Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, 170-210. 9 The innovation of the holodeck in Star Trek: the Next Generation paved the way for a series of episodes heavily concerned with bleeding. See, most importantly, Ship in a Bottle, in which the brilliant holodeck character Dr. Moriarty convinces the crew that he has taken over the ship by constructing a simulacrum of the ship within the holodeck. Picard finally trumps him by constructing another version of the ship, and indeed of the entire universe, within Moriartys already constructed world. In the end, Moriarty is allowed to believe that he has escaped the holodeck and the Enterprise when in fact he has merely entered a computer program with, as the captain says, enough memory to give him adventures for a lifetime. The question then becomes, whats the difference?

But certainly this capacity, the ability film appears to wield to construct the perfect illusion, is itself not a phenomenon new to the last two decades. Already in its earliest moments, at the end of the 19th century in France, the experience of the moving picture was marked by a fascination with the possibility of complete illusion. While the anecdote of people fleeing from the projected image of a train approaching the Gare de Lyon may have been mere hyperbole, there is plenty of truth to the notion that what the invention of cinema engendered was a fear that reality could in some way be manufactured, that even the most real and irrevocable realities of existence, the death of another human being, for example, could be falsified.10 The crime of cinema, then, was that it could actually reproduce reality while at the same time erasing any trace of its forgery, convince us, in other words, that there was no simulation involved. On the other hand, perhaps it would be wise to sound a note of caution here. Cinema does not, in fact, (any more then landscape painting or the realist novel before it) perfectly render reality. This should be even more clearly evident when we consider early black-and-white silent pictures with their jerky movements. How could viewers ever worry that such a rendering of the train at the Gare de Lyon would actually run them over? Well, it seems that humans have a remarkable ability to adapt their sensoryperceptual mechanism to what I earlier called new and different coordinates for a base reality.11 This does not mean that we are so readily able to reject the experience of our own lived existence in favor of a new, competing one offered by the first passing artist. It does mean, however, that much of aesthetic experience is grounded on a process of projecting oneself into the frame of an alternate, but viable, imaginary reality. When I say that a director or artist offers us new coordinates, the coordinates in question are those determining the dimensions and nature of that frame. It is for this reason that not only is the threat of the simulacrum and of reality bleeding not new, neither is it exclusive to cinema. The avant-garde playwright Luigi Pirandello, for example, made use of similar techniques so frequently and effectively that in literary circles one simply calls a work in which reality is bleeding Pirandellian. The trope appears to a greater or lesser extent in all of his works, but the classic example of Pirandellianism in Pirandello is Six Characters in Search of an Author,12 in which the characters of a theater production come to life and make existential proclamations about their inability to be other than as they were drawn. The point for our purposes is to note that, even without the technological support of the
10 11

Goldman, The Crime of Cinema, more info. Hugo Mnsterberg argues that film provokes a different psychological experience to that of the theater because it projects what normally goes on in ones mind and memory onto the screen, hence breaking down the boundaries between reality and the soul (The Film: A Psychological Study (New York, Dover,1970) 41. I would argue that while each and every medium provokes a different type of psychological reaction, no one is per se more apt than others to break down the barriers of reality; as I argued earlier, realism regards the perception of an object relative to a context of expectations. 12 Luigi Pirandello, Sei personaggi in cerca d autore (Milano: A. Mondadori , 1936).

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moving image, the theater can produce such an illusion quite seamlessly. Why? Because the base reality the audience has accepted is that of the theater itself; in order to key the interior frame, the audience temporarily forgets to key the primary frame. If we have already stipulated that the actors we watch moving about on the stage are in reality the characters actors moving about on the stage, then we are somewhat forced to take at their word the characters who suddenly inform us that, unlike the others we see, they are in fact characters per se, characters devoid of a real world analog. Already in the 17th century, Cervantes saw and ridiculed the tendency among his countrymen to uncritically adopt the base reality proposed by Spains new national pastime, the theater. In his masterful one-act play, The Stage of Wonders,13 he portrays the institution of the theater in the form of a traveling confidence-game, in which the director and his assistant take an entire town for all its worth with a completely imaginary spectacle. By telling the gathering crowds that the stage before them is magical, and that they will only be able to see the wonders that appear on it if they are pure of blood and of unstained honorthe most important attributes of Spanish social life at the timethey thus ensure that the spectators, cowed by what their fellows will think of them, will behave as if everything the director narrates to them were absolutely real, despite the fact that the stage remains, throughout the performance, utterly empty. Cervantess point seems to be that the spectator is the ultimate mark; so long as the conventions framing a spectacle conform to some degree with a set of social prejudices or expectations on the part of the audienceprejudices whose own relation to the real is no less arbitrary than is that of the representationthe spectator is happy to put aside a lifetime of learned experience to claim that spectacles reality as his own. That the spectator might not actually perceive what he claims to be perceiving (what he appears to be perceiving, what his behavior would indicate he was perceiving, etc.) is beside the point. When the show is over weve paid our money, jumped when we were expected to jump, and, so long as the reviewer accepts the same rules we have, the show is a critical success.14 The necessary, and perhaps sufficient, condition, then, for reality to bleed, is the existence of what I have called an alternate, yet viable, imaginary reality. This reality is, to begin with, alternate because it is verifiably not the one in which we are, in the course of our daily existence, living. Different things occur in this reality than we would expect to occur in our own. However, the things occurring therein are not so different that we would not recognize it as a possible reality, a reality in which we might very well exist as characters ourselves. Hence the alternate reality is also viable. Finally, the alternate but viable reality is imaginary in two senses: first, whether we encounter it via printed symbols (written text), audible phonemes
13 14

Cervantes, Retablo de las maravillas, in Entremeses (Mexico: Austral, 1947) 99-116. See Egginton and Castillo, The Rules of Chanfallas Game, Romance Languages Annual 6 (1994): 444-49.

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(spoken words), projected scenes, living bodies, or some combination of the above, the basic unit of the reality is some form of mental image, or more broadly, of sensory-perceptual duration (image or sound, or, less frequently, odor, taste, or touch); secondly, in the more popular sense of the word, it is imaginary quite simply insofar as we distinguish it from what is real. The very energy with which this distinction is at times defended bears witness to the viability of certain alternate realities, and with this I am not merely or even principally referring to debates concerning film. Already intellectuals in 16th century Italy and 17th century France, engaged in interpreting Aristotles Poetics and deriving from it rules for the composition of theater pieces, were driven in some of their considerations by the assumption that the audience might not realize that what was being represented on the stage was not actually happening before their eyes. For Ludovico Castelvetro, for instance, the 12 hours that Aristotle recommended as an outside limit for the time frame a tragedy should represent were to be taken literally, not, however, merely because Aristotle had said so, but rather because 12 hours was the longest amount of time an audience could reasonably be expected to remain in a theater without attending to the necessities of the body, such as eating, drinking, excreting the superfluous burdens of the belly and bladder, sleeping and other necessities.15 This is not to say that such a strict correlation was always accepted; on the contrary, even during the Classical period in which the unities enjoyed such preeminence there were those who would criticize overly strict adherence to them. At the time of Castelvetro, for example, Alessandro Picolomini argued against his position, claiming that audiences knew perfectly well that what they were seeing was not truth, that were it truth there would be no need for imitation and that, therefore, exact temporal correspondence was not necessary.16 The occurrence of such debates in the 16th century demonstrates that the viability of alternate realities is not necessarily or solely determined by the technological capacity of the medium of reproduction at hand. Theoretically, not only bodies moving around on a minimally appointed stage but also the printed word can be marshaled for the creation of a viable alternate reality. The trick is to persuade the spectator to accept, even if only momentarily, the proffered coordinates as being those framing his own reality. But how? How does one convince spectators to alter even in the slightest degree a set of coordinates that have been serving them pretty well for as long as they can remember? It turns out, surprisingly and perhaps a bit circularly considering where this argument began, that the answer to this question might well be: by causing two represented realities to bleed into one another. Circular indeed! If, as I have apparently argued, a precondition for bleeding is the
15

Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Basel, 1596) 109; Quoted and translated in Marvin Carleson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1984) 49. 16 Carleson 54.

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establishment of an alternate, but viable, imaginary reality, how can I now proceed to claim that the viability of this reality hinges in part on the technique of bleeding? The only way I can make this claim is historically: first, by suggesting that it is through the practices and conventions of the theater that western culture first learned how to construct and experience alternate, but viable, imaginary realities; and second, that a fundamental aspect of this historical apprenticeship, a pivotal step in the acquisition of the skills and conventions involved in learning how to see theater was learning how to bleed. The argument concerning the novelty of alternate realities to early Modernity is too detailed to rehearse in its entirety.17 For the purposes of the present discussion, let me simply state that what was a structural impossibility prior to the 16th century, becomes, with the rise of the modern theater in the 16th and 17th centuries, the structural essence of what we could call the experience of fiction. The main idea to grasp here is that prior to the early modern period (in western European culture, that is; what the ancients might or might not have experienced through their stories and stages is moot for our purposes), the frame distinction constitutive of film, fiction, and theater, the distinction that creates the alternate, but viable, imaginary reality we have been discussing, simply didnt exist. For the Middle Ages, a story told or performed was fundamentally and ontologically part of the world, the only world. Distinctions could be and were commonly made between the corruptible, ephemeral world and the incorruptible eternal world of heaven. But such a distinction in no way marked the boundary of a reality that we could call either alternate (heaven and earth were poles of existence, not alternatives to one another) nor, consequently, viable. Such a distinction emerges first with the practices and conventions of the theater, with, more specifically, the barrier or screenvaguely alluded to in theater architecture by the stagedividing the space of real bodies (the bodies of the actors as well as the bodies of the audience members observing them) from the space of the imaginary characters they portrayed. The moment the space inhabited by characters is finally experienced as being potentially viable, that is, the moment it becomes a space in which we could also exist, is marked in the history of spectacle by the first time a character whom the audience is observing sits down, simultaneously with the audience itself, to watch another character put on a play for him or her. At that moment, the representational reality has succeeded in representing all of the original reality, including that very aspect of reality that is the condition of its own existence: the screen or barrier marking the original separation. But there are immediate, striking ramifications to the creation of this second screen. By creating a screen on the other side of an already existing screen, by keying the newly framed reality within the primary frame, one effectively
17

For an earlier, but concise version of this argument, see my Epistemology of the Stage: Theatricality and Subjectivity in Early Modern Spain. New Literary History 27 (1996): 391414. For its full development, see Theatricality and Presence: a Phenomenology of Space and Spectacle in Early Modern France and Spain, Dissertation, Stanford University, 1999.

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suspends the keyed status of the original frame. In other words, the audience forgets, if only momentarily, that they are watching a representation, and the represented world becomes viable in a radical sense. For this reason, the alternate, but viable, imaginary reality of the theater is always and the same time a potentially metatheatrical space, in that it always contains within it the power to reproduce the very distinction that engendered it. And, in fact, the technique of the stage within the stage, and with it, the bleeding of the staged realities, has been around ever since the earliest stirrings of the modern theater in the 16th century, and achieved its greatest popularity in the mass spectacles of the great baroque theatrical institutions of 17th century Spain, England and France.18 From the outset playwrights grasped the insight the metatheatrical essence of the theater had into their characters psychology and hence into that of their public. Think of Shakespeares deservedly famous use of the trope in Hamlet, the play within the play, a mousetrap, set to catch the conscience of the King.19 Hamlet directs a theater piece, the Murder of Gonzaga, in such a way as to represent for an audience that includes his uncle the murder of his father by his uncle. As he intends, his uncles conscience is sorely pricked by this spectacle, suggesting that, in some subtle way, the screen separating reality and representation within the reality of the play has been breached. Other canonical examples include Calderns La vida es sueo (1635), in which the violent prince Segismundo is convinced that the few moments of freedom he has experienced in a lifetime of captivity were merely the workings of a dream. In this case, we are treated to a sort of reverse bleeding, since the main character has been deceived into perceiving the existence of a screenthe one separating his real reality as a lonely prisoner and his dreamed reality as a powerful princewhere there is in fact none. Segismundo is never disabused of this fantasy, and is left believing that his two realities have decisivelyif not permanentlybled into one another; the final, skeptical moral being that life is a dream, and we can never be too confident of our identity or of our power.20 In the French theater, Corneille used the technique in his short play, Lillusion comique (1636), and Rotrou in his retelling of the Genesius tale, Le vritable Saint Genest (1647); but bleeding was probably most effectively adapted by Lope de Vega, in his version of the same story, Lo fingido verdadero, or True Pretence, staged several decades before Rotrous in 1608. Realism functions at a level I have called ontological because it involves the human beings apprehension of reality at the most basic,
18

For more details regarding the history of this technique, see Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play. The Dramatists Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), and Georges Forestier, Le Thtre dans le Thtre sur la Scne Franaise du XVIIe Sicle (Genve: Librarie Droz, 1981). 19 See Stephen Orgels discussion in The Play of Conscience, in Performativity and Performance, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York/London: Routledge, 1995) 133-151. 20 For a more detailed reading, see my Psychoanalysis and the Comedia: Skepticism and the Paternal Function in La vida es sueo, forthcoming, Bulletin of the Comediantes.

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phenomenological level. It is in this sense that I claim, only half-facetiously in the title that with this article I am presenting a history of film from the 16th century. For the organization of spatiality that undergirds the age of film has its origins in the change of spatiality ushering in the early modern age. In this form of spatiality, a viewer experiences the act of spectatorship as organized around a fundamental division between various dimensions of being: the spectator exists as a body engaged in the physical act of viewing, but also as a potential character projected onto the other side of a spatial border, be it the edge of a stage or the screen. It is precisely this ontological distinction that enabled the emergence of the very representational schema with which we began our analysis of realism and illusionism, for the body of the actor is a medium for a characters reality in exactly the same way that the cinematic image mediates the cinematic object. From its inception theater carried with it the possibility of metatheater in that the characters who was originally an object could at any moment become a medium/actor representing a further, interior object/character, causing the spectator to, if only temporarily, key an interior set of frames and thereby let fall his or her vigilance with regard to the exterior frame.

Which Reality is bleeding? To sum up my argument: realismthat tendency in film to present the object or content of a cinematic representation as a medium of a further realityis a tendency not merely of film, but of any form of representationstarting with theaterthat has as its most basic element a screen, an ontological separation between realities. This means that realism has existed for as long as realities have existed. To push this formulation one step further, we might add that the very notion of Reality has only existed in its present sense since theatrical spectacle allowed for the proliferation of realities. For why insist on the notion of Reality if there is nothing to defend it against? It should not, therefore, surprise us that the concept reality did not enter the vernaculars of western Europe until the 16th and in some cases 17th centuries.21 Although the concept of real certainly existed in philosophical discourse prior to the Early modern periodfor Aquinas what was real was that which existed as an expression and representation of the word of Godit is only in the 16th century that the idea begins to emerge of reality as existing in contradistinction to intellectual fictions.22 For it is only when what is real become a question to be brought from the conflict-ridden world of the senses to the tribunal of the mind that Reality begins to take form as a place, a dimension, a value, or a quality.

21

Reality is first recorded in English in 1550; and realidad in Spanish in 1607, only two years after the publication of Cervantess great bleeder, Don Quijote. 22 Realitt/Idealitt, in Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Grnder, eds., Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, 10 vols. (Basel: Schwabe & Co. Verlag, 1992) 8, 186.

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The big claim of this essay, then, is that this Reality that is the core of epistemology is itself a product of the viewing practices developed in the 16th century, viewing practices that required participants to organize perceptual space into compartmentalized realities whose ultimate value was determined only in relation to those other realities that framed them and that were in turned framed by them. That these realities started to bleed into one another almost immediately should also not surprise us, since the very path that led us to question our knowledge of Reality guaranteed that we would never find a definitive answer, because, like the phantom object at the end of a series of mediations, that Reality was never there. It is a structurally necessary element of onepeculiarly modernway of organizing experience; it had a beginning, it has had a history; and perhaps it will come to an end. In the meantime, when we see reality bleed in fiction and in film, and at times bleed into that reality we like to call our own, we can read it as a sign: a sign of its mortality.

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