Stendhal Syndrome

Why is this lecture called Stendhal Syndrome?

In 1817, a French author named Marie-Henri Beyle described his experience visiting the Basilica of
Santa Croce in Florence. Beyle, who wrote using the pseudonym Stendhal, felt overwhelmed by all
the beauty and rich history surrounding him. Stendhal Syndrome is similar to Paris Syndrome, in
which tourists who visit Paris for. In 1979, Dr. Graziella Magherini – the Chief of Psychiatry at the
Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence – observed more than 100 tourists hospitalised after
looking at art in Florence. In 1989, she published a book called Stendhal Syndrome about these
tourists who experienced a range of symptoms that included anxiety, panic attacks, hallucinations,
and even psychotic episodes—all after seeing renowned artwork.
This odd psychological quirk is adjacent to the symptoms attributed to fan hysteria. In 1841, the poet
and critic Heinrich Heine coined the term Lisztomania to describe the intense hysteria among young
women at recitals given by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, a phenomenon that has continued
over subsequent centuries and was expertly documented in Jessica Leski’s 2018 documentary, I
Used to Be Normal.
For our purposes, we are thinking about Stendhal Syndrome as a eureka moment.
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What do we mean by film art?

We can mean arthouse cinema. We know what this means but it can be hard to define. Films that play
in major film festivals like Cannes and Venice are more likely to be arthouse. But that’s not always the
case. Films that defy narrative or formal conventions are likely to be arthouse, but Everything
Everywhere All At Once is temporally and narratively playful while still being mainstream and
conventional.

Any film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is arthouse cinema. Frederick Wiseman’s studies of various
institutions - the National Gallery in London, The New York Public Library in Ex Libris, the Bridgewater
State Hospital in Titicut Follies - is arthouse cinema. But they are also complicated in status as
documentaries coming from the Direct Cinema movement.

is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive arthouse? Is it arthouse in conversation with genre? Or is it a genre
film? As blockbusters have become more expensive and occupy more space and screens, arthouse
has come to mean anything with subtitles and anything emerging from the independent circuit,
regardless of whether that film is a horror (Hereditary, Midsommar) or a family comedy (The Farewell).
Hence, new marketing terminology e.g. elevated or art horror.

Film Art can mean film in a gallery or installation setting.

Sam Taylor-Wood - later Taylor-Johnson - is an example of a filmmaker who started in the Tate
Gallery and ended up in the multiplex. Steve McQueen won the Turner Prize in 1999 and won the
Academy Award for Best Picture with 12 Years a Slave in 2014. The Desperate Optimists - Joe Lawlor
and Christine Malloy – make feature films that feel like they belong in a gallery. Marcel Dzama is a
visual artist who makes films and illustrations that are very cinematic because they are invariably in
media res -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kAfSPOjr9M
Experimental film has been around since the beginning of the form and there was no clear boundary
between the great experimenters and great cinema. Abel Gance, Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein. Early in
cinema history, certain practitioners used the medium for artistic expression. From Germaine Dulac’s
The Seashell and the Clergyman to Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet to Man With a Movie Camera,
this is a rich seam of material.

And then - at a certain moment - there is a demarcation. Bu the time Len Lye shoots Rainbow Dance
in 1932, it’s an experimental film - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHN9IHGQxk8

Or Maya Derren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=dWQcJyn981M

Stan Brakhage whose most famous and influential works: "Window Water Baby Moving" (1959), a
document of Brakhage's daughter's birth "Mothlight" (1963), which was made by pasting leaves and
pieces of moth wings directly onto the film; "The Text of Light" (1974), a visual tone poem of fractured
light; and "I . . . Dreaming" (1988), a film that incorporates text scratched onto the film's emulsion, are
experimental explorations of the filmmaker’s primary preoccupations - Birth, death, nature, marriage,
sex. Brakhage never liked the term "abstract" or "experimental" to describe his work. He preferred the
term "poetic”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3nDgnC7M8

What caused this rupture between experimental cinema and cinema?

Early cinema, which for technical reasons, was often one-reel and novel, looks very similar to the film
art that today is exhibited in galleries -

https://archive.org/details/silent-la-grenouille-aka-the-frog

A useful way to differentiate between experimental film and theatrical film is to look at Noel Burch’s
1969 examination of the IMR and the PMR. This is the moment of rupture.

What do these letters mean?

Institutional Mode of Representation - In the realm of film theory, the institutional mode of
representation (IMR) emerged as the prevailing method of film creation in the years following the turn
of the century, ultimately establishing itself as the standard around 1914. Most contemporary films
adhere to the IMR, it's important to recognise that it isn't the sole approach to representation.
Alternative modes include the primitive representation mode, which held sway before the IMR's
dominance, avant-garde films that present a "deconstructionist" critique of the IMR, and diverse non-
Western representation methods e.g. the Benshi, pillow shots.

These concepts were developed by Noël Burch in his 1969 book Praxis du cinéma. Burch's goal is to
show that the IMR was a class-determined practice, developed out of the bourgeois desire for
totalising illusionistic representation. André Bazin had identified the “myth of total cinema,” or a
constant desire to represent reality as completely as possible, which he claimed as the root of cinema
innovations (both technology such as sound, colour, and widescreen as well as techniques such as
more elaborate editing). Burch, on the other hand, argues that IMR: "spectatorial identification with a
ubiquitous camera”.

IMR -

Films are constructed out of a sequence of shots. We take contemporary film grammar for granted. As
if it’s innate. It’s not. It’s merely a convention.

James Williamson’s 5-minute British film, Fire! (1901), was one of the very first films to edit multiple
shots together chronologically to create a cohesive narrative sequence. Although Fire! used editing to
heighten the emotional tension of firefighters racing to rescue a family with a baby from a burning
house fire, it’s challenging to piece the plot together: Edwyn S Porter watched it, made his version and
developed the editing techniques he saw in Williamson’s film.

IMR uses 3D space

Characters are psychologically individuated, through close-ups of faces and acting methods borrowed
from (bourgeois) arts, notably theatre.

But away from avant-garde and conceptual cinema, away from the semantically unstable business of
arthouse cinema, there’s another intersection between film and art.

Just as a writer responds to film by writing, there is a huge spectrum of artwork inspired by film and
cinema.

Christian Marclay: The Clock.

https://tinyurl.com/b2mdkk29

Film Title Poem from 2016 by the Los Angeles artist and collagist Jennifer West, who scratches and
distresses celluloid film stock and then makes digital files of the results.

https://vimeo.com/174901994

Ode to Patrick Swayze

BY TISHANI DOSHI
At fourteen I wanted to devour you,
the twang, the strut, the perfect proletarian
butt in the black pants of you. I wanted a man
like you to sashay into town and teach me
how to be an aeroplane in water. I didn't want
to be a baby. I wanted to be your baby.
I wanted revenge. I wanted to sue my breasts
for not living up to potential. I wanted Jennifer Grey
to meet with an unfortunate end and not have a love affair
with a ghost. At fourteen, I believed you'd given birth
to the word preternatural, and when Mother came
home one day, waving her walking shoe, saying,
I lost my soul in the Theosophical Society,
I wanted to dance as recklessly as the underside
of that shoe. I wanted to be a pebble in the soft
heel of you. To horse-whisper and live on a ranch
in Texas and love my blonde wife forever and have
creases around my eyes and experience at least one
goddamn summer where I could be like the wind—
sexy and untrammelled and dirty. And it was only
after I found my own Johnny (and got rid of him),
only yesterday, when I rescued a northern shoveler
from crows on the beach, his broken wing
squished against the crockery of my ribs,
only after setting him down at the edge
of a canal, where he sank in to the long patient
task of dying, that I realized what I'd wanted
most was to be held by someone determined
to save me, someone against whom I could press
my unflourishing chest, who'd offer me
not just the time of my life, but who'd tear
out reams of his yellowing pancreas,
and say, Here, baby, eat.
Tishani Doshi, "Ode to Patrick Swayze" from Girls Are Coming out of the Woods. Copyright © 2017 by
Tishani Doshi. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
.

Frank O'Hara's "Ava Maria"

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you

for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn’t upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
 and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won’t know the difference
and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy
and they’ll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it’s unforgivable the latter
so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young

Frank O’Hara, “Ave Maria” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the
permission of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com/CLpub.html.
Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

Jack Kerouac's "To Harpo Marx"

O Harpo! When did you seem like an angel

the last time?
and played the gray harp of gold?

When did you steal the silverware

and bug-spray the guests?

When did your brother find rain

in your sunny courtyard?

When did you chase your last blonde

across the Millionaires' lawn
with a bait hook on a line
protruding from your bicycle?

Or when last you powderpuffed

your white flour face
with fishbarrel cover?

Harpo! Who was that Lion

I saw you with?

How did you treat the midget

and Konk the Giant?

Harpo, in your recent nightclub appearance

in New Orleans were you old?
were you still chiding with your horn
in the cane at your golden belt?

Did you still emerge from your pockets

another Harpo, or screw on
new wrists?

Was your vow of silence an Indian Harp?

Margaret Atwood's "Update on Werewolves"

In the old days, all werewolves were male.

They burst through their bluejean clothing
as well as their own split skins,
exposed themselves in parks,
howled at the moonshine.
Those things frat boys do.

Went too far with the pigtail yanking—

growled down into the pink and wriggling
females, who cried Wee wee
wee all the way to the bone.
Heck, it was only flirting,
plus a canid sense of fun:
See Jane run!

But now it’s different:

No longer gender specific.
Now it’s a global threat.
Long-legged women sprint through ravines
in furry warmups, a pack of kinky
models in sado-French Vogue getups
and airbrushed short-term memories,
bent on no-penalties rampage.

Look at their red-rimmed paws!

Look at their gnashing eyeballs!
Look at the backlit gauze
of their full-moon subversive halos!
Hairy all over, this belle dame,
and it’s not a sweater.

O freedom, freedom and power!

they sing as they lope over bridges,
bums to the wind, ripping out throats
on footpaths, pissing off brokers.

Tomorrow they’ll be back

in their middle-management black
and Jimmy Choos
with hours they can’t account for
and first dates’ blood on the stairs.
They’ll make some calls: Good-bye.
It isn’t you, it’s me. I can’t say why.
They’ll dream of sprouting tails
at sales meetings,
right in the audiovisuals.
They’ll have addictive hangovers
and ruined nails.

Kendrick Lamar's "Die Hard" and The Weeknd's "Escape from LA" are very interesting departures
from the movies that inspired the titles.

David Bowie's Space Oddity

A dialogue with Kubrick's 2001 - Bowie: In England, it was always presumed that it was written about
the space landing, because it kind of came to prominence around the same time. But it actually
wasn’t. It was written because of going to see the film 2001, which I found amazing. I was out of my
gourd anyway, I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times, and it was really a revelation to
me. It got the song flowing.”

Geoff Dyer's Zona (for Stalker) - Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room 2012.

The book is an expansive discussion by Dyer of the film Stalker directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979.
The title is taken from the mysterious Zone which is a mystery and strange force within the film itself.
The work comprises a close scene-by-scene reading, but that scene-by-scene equally includes
autobiographical discussions such as the time and place where Dyer watched the film and how his
views on various scenes have shifted over the years.

Ander Monson's Predator

Film as memoir. Ander Monson explores Predator scene-by-scene, a 1987 film he has watched 146
times. Analysing at the level of the frame, he juxtaposes his adolescence in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula, grief, fandom, cosplay and first-person shooters, mass violence, masculinity, and fandom,
and the poet and memoirist Paul Monette, who wrote the novelisation of the movie Predator while his
partner was dying of AIDS.

Ian Penman’s Fassbender

Fassbender had already made 40 films and countless theatrical productions in June 1982, when he
was found dead in a Munich apartment, , he was 37 but he smoked 60 to 80 cigarettes a day, ate only
Bavarian sausages and cabbage, and heroin and cocaine.Written quickly under a self-imposed
deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or
months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is fragmented and zigzags between Fassbender details -
Roger Ebert’s review of Veronika Voss, the last film he watches - 20,000 Years in Sing Sing - Michael
Curtis (1932) and intersections with the author’s life.