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On Magic Realism in Film Author(s): Fredric Jameson Source: Critical Inquiry , Winter, 1986, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Winter, 1986), pp. 301-325 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms On Magic Realism in Film Fredric Jameson The concept of "magic realism" raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angel Flores published an influential article (in English) in which the term was applied to the work of Borges;' but Alejo Carpentier's conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself-not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived (my own discussion, below, will retain some affiliations with this acceptation). In Garcia Marquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis-a transfigured object world in which fantastic events Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986) 0 1986 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/86/1202-0004$01.00. All rights reserved. 301 This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 302 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthro- pological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth. (At this point, the stronger affiliations of the mode would be with texts like those of Tutuola in Nigeria or the Macunaima [1928] of the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade.) Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we owe to overtly left-wing or revolutionary writers (Asturias, Carpentier, Marquez).' In spite of these terminological complexities-which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether-it retains a strange seductiveness which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud's notion of the "uncanny," and compounding it by an argument that magic realism (now transferred to the realm of film) is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.' Indeed, an important new Polish film-Fever, by Agnuszka Holland (1981)-put me on the track, if not of magic realism itself, then at least of the private or personal meaning I must be giving to this term.5 Poland in general, and the Polish revolutionary movements of 1905 in particular (the subject of the film), seemed an unexpected and peculiar enough reference point until its affinities with certain Latin American films grew clearer to me. I'm thinking of two films in particular: a recent Venezuelan production called La Casa de Agua, about a historical figure, Cruz Elias Le6n, a nineteenth-century Venezuelan poet who contracted leprosy; and a Colombian feature called Condores no entierran todos los dias,6 about a turn-of-the-century gangster and political assassin.' Both films exhibit political violence-imprisonment, torture, executions, and assassinationsbut are exceedingly distinct in tone, the first offering a strange and poetic visual reality, the second an interminable and indeed implacable series of unremittingly violent acts, filmed in rich but conventional Technicolor. Fever, meanwhile, dwells if anything even more obsessively on violence and in particular on assassination as a political weapon: in the anarchist Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" (Spring 1978) and "Ideology and Symbolic Action" (Winter 1978). This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 303 tradition of "terrorism," or of propaganda by the deed, in the spirit of the assassination attempts on the Czars, of the bande & Bonnot or the Haymarket, of Conrad's Secret Agent, or of the IRA well up into our own time. The film is in fact the story of a bomb; we witness its intricate itinerary and destiny from its construction by a revolutionary chemist all the way to its final detonation, in a lake, by Czarist explosives specialists. Otherwise, Fever would seem to have little enough in common either with the lyricism of La Casa de Agua or with the tormented, sadistic, yet mindless brutality of Condores. In spite of such stylistic differences, however, I retain a sense of shared features, of which I will here isolate three: these are all historical films; the very different color of each constitutes a unique supplement and the source of a peculiar pleasure, or fascination, orjouissance, in its own right; in each, finally, the dynamic of narrative has somehow been reduced, concentrated, and simplified, by the attention to violence (and, to a lesser degree, sexuality). I want to explain why-in contrast to the more traditional Latin American conception outlined above- these three features strike me as constitutive of a certain magic realism. In different ways, all of them enjoin a visual spell, an enthrallment to the image in its present of time which is quite distinct either from the subordinate or secondary deployment of the gaze in other narrative systems or from Andre Bazin's ontological conception of the shot as the deconcealment of Being (something I tend to recognize more pertinently in certain systems of black-and-white photography). 1 I have suggested that as work in the genre of historical film, these films can be distinguished sharply from their analogues in postmodernism-what we have come to term nostalgia films, fully as much as from the aesthetic and the conception of history that characterized an older representation of history linked to the older historical novel, in Georg Lukdcs' classic sense. I have described nostalgia film elsewhere as something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time, and as it were a glossy fetish in the service of that unsatisfied craving.8 In nostalgia film, the imagethe surface sheen of a period fashion reality-is consumed, having been transformed into a visual commodity. Despite the intensely visual pleasure of what I would now call magic realist films, it is not exactly in that way, I think, that the viewing subject engages them. What is engaged is certainly History, but then in that case history with holes, perforated history, which includes gaps not immediately visible to us, so close is our gaze to its objects of perception. These holes may This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 304 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film first of all be characterized as gaps in information, yet in a succession of spatial situations seen too intensely for the mind to have the leisure to ask its other questions. Indeed, for whatever reason, the three films in question seem to presuppose extensive prior knowledge of their historical framework in such a way as to eschew all exposition and also to preempt the traditional gesture of the beginning: "Toward the twilight of a November day in the year 1812, following Campostela street toward the north of the city, there drove a two-wheeled coach drawn by two mules, one of them bestridden, as was customary in those days, by a black coachman." I would have suggested, rather, that these newer films presuppose some already existing familiarity with the people and places passing before our eyes, did I not wish to reserve this charged term for something rather different. Nor is this at all comparable to the epic in medias res, which is even more clearly marked than the classic novelistic beginning as a set of givens whose origins and significance may calmly be expected to be divulged at the conventionally appropriate time. And in general I feel that we must sharpen our consciousness of the shock of entry into narrative, which so often resembles the body's tentative immersion in an unfamiliar element, with all the subliminal anxieties of such submersion: the half-articulated fear of what the surface of the liquid conceals; a sense of our vulnerability along with an archaic horror of impure contact with the unclean; the anticipation of fatigue also, of the intellectual effort about to be demlanded in the slow apprenticeship of unknown characters and their elaborate situations, as though, beneath the surface excitement of adventure promised, there persisted some deep ambivalence at the dawning sacrifice of the self to the narrative text. We need a historical phenomenology of such entry-points, an inventory of curtains that part in bravura, or of the various flaps and apertures through which we are asked to introduce our heads; of the degrees of angle along which we peer, and the ceiling, or lowered visibility, of this narrative space we are about to inhabit. Not the least remarkable feature of Emile Zola's naturalist poetics, for example, is to be confronted in the terrible, darkened, ominous, as yet ill-defined spaces of the opening pages of his greatest novels: the predawnjolting darkness of the approach of the vegetable wagons to Paris in Le Ventre de Paris; or yet again, the room with a view of the railway terminus of the Gare Saint-Lazare in La Bite humaine, a clear and airy space, high up, and about to be galvanized by a scene of unspeakable desperation. Yet what is ominous in Zola is still a function of narrative perspective-an anticipatory reflex, whereby the novelist confirms in advance the fatal unification of the chain of events about to unfold. The entry-point of magic realist films is very different from this, even though they specifically include flash-forwards of later or even climactic events: thus, in Fever, a vertical sheet of water flung upward by This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 305 the ultimate detonation of the bomb is inserted into the initial opening sequence of its construction by the chemist. Meanwhile, in La Casa de Agua, the poet's confinement in a deep well is blanched and derealized by shots of the salt flats on which, beneath the look of toiling peasants, a few fleeing but desperately heroic revolutionaries are shot down by the dictator's militia; into later sequences in the fishing village are then also inserted flashes of a funeral procession in mud and rain-the poet's ultimate destiny. Yet such anticipations have little value as narrative signals in a situation in which no promise of narrative unification exists. Rather, these shots enter into peculiar chemical combinations with the imagesequences into which they have been interpolated, as though offering a brutal sample of a range of visual exposures: the bright-dark laboratory of the chemist side by side with the gray liquid landscape of the lake in eruption, the moldering green opacity of the stone well side by side with the blinding whiteness of an expanse of salt. Yet for reasons to be suggested later on, such permutations of the gaze-which irritate and intensify it-do not thereby, as in postmodernism and the nostalgia film, transform its objects into images in the stronger sense of that word.' Yet such initial breaks and discontinuities are also sharply to be distinguished from the mysteries of exposition of an older modernism whose enigmas had less to do with the intricacies of its subject matter than with the peremptory and supremely arbitrary decisions of the high modernist demiurge. The opening of Faulkner's Sanctuary is in this sense canonical: its characters emerging before us in some strange "always already" familiarity, as though we were already supposed to know who Temple and Popeye and the Virginia gentleman already were-yet here the familiarity is Faulkner's own, and not yet the reader's. He it is who has chosen to withhold the facts of the matter, and the (not terribly complicated) explanation for this prematurely climactic and coincidental confluence of his two narrative strands. Mystery here reinforces the prestige of the auteur and exacts the more personal tribute of a baffled preoccupation with what he may be supposed to have in his mind (or intend). It is a structure replicated on the microlevel of style by the notorious "cataphoric" pronoun of point-of-view narrative, in which an initial third person or blank "he" or "she" secures our reading identification while obliging us to wait for its proper name and civil status. Although such categories have been deployed in film theory, particularly for the analysis of traditional or Hollywood narrative, the deeper structure of the medium excludes them for reasons which the evolution of contemporary film (and the appearance of just such films which are under consideration here) makes plain. The unified subject, readily generated by verbal texts, can now be seen to be in question in film as such, despite its ultimate blossoming in the stylistic unification of the works of the great high-modernist auteurs: the camera, the apparatus, the machine replacing the subject of enunciation, just as the immediacy of sight displaces This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 306 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film the subject of reception. Our initial security and confidence in some unified narrative to come has been dispelled without return by the interventions of experimental film: we are no longer necessarily in reliable hands, things may never cohere. And even if they do, a different, another momentum has been conferred on the narrative process. In Fever, for instance; it is only well into the second hour that we suddenly grasp the form as I have baldly and dishonestly formulated it above-the bomb as a "unifying device," the events as a kind of La Ronde of political as- sassination in which it is the instrument of death, rather than the Lacanian phallus, which traverses and thus links a series of unrelated destinies (more on that particular disjunction below). Yet, this belated and retroactive discovery of the narrative thread-whose formal ingenuity may be admired on the level of Coleridgean fancy-remains disjoined from the lived experience of the film itself and forever at structural distance from it, such that two distinct visions of Fever are retained on the retina of the mind's eye. Quite other, indeed, is the bomb itself as an object of perception, and it is indeed with this that the film begins: an enormous, bewildering close-up of the bristling metal interlarded with human fingertips, gross and clumsy at this degree of magnification, yet perhaps always clumsy with fear, and slightly trembling at the vicissitudes of contact with an object so delicate and so deadly. The thing itself, not yet identified, is most peculiar indeed: a cylinder, but with intersecting crosshatches, like the barbs of an arrow, or the bare horizontal shafts of some odd tree: these two intersecting sets of rods then presumably being the axes, four and four, to be rotated against each other in order to seal or to open the device, locked by the tube of an end screw inserted as into a torpedo. Yet what is really striking-what makes up the punctum of the photograph, in Roland Barthes' senseo--is not its appeal to any tactile sense nor even the matter of color (on which more later on), but rather the mint newness of this shiny metal object; and not even that, in and of itself, but rather the contradiction between this cleanness of oil on new metal and the old, the very old, historical world in which the film is supposed to take place. As though somehow, in that ramshackle world of a prerevolutionary central Europe, you could not have new objects!-and certainly not "technology" in some contemporary science-and-industry sense! This confused thought-the attempt to think a perception, really-stages and intensifies the structural paradox of the historical novel in general: to read the past through a present of time, to live through a present marked as the past and the old, the dead and gone. So the film spins an impossible newness back upon us to confront us in bewilderment with the unthinkable con- junction between our own present in time and this ancient history: a point at which, unaccountably, large drops of fresh blood fall slowly upon the cylinder, the camera slowly lifting to disclose the inventor licking a cut finger-not the greater danger of self-destruction, but a This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 307 lesser one that merely has the ontological priority of being real. The drops of blood conjure a whole beyond of the tactile within the enormous two-dimensional image, transmuting the whorled pudginess of the stained fingers into this new visual realm. What results is not an Image, in the technical sense of derealization, but rather something else, which remains to be described and which diverts a conventional narrative logic of the unfolding story in some new vertical direction, while working through its elements by way of the mediation of the body itself. The significance of the title of La Casa de Agua (The House of Water) is also designated in its opening shot, which, however, is transformed by closure into an allegorical emblem in its own right: a young man, naked, struggling in a darkened shallow pool of water contained by stone walls, as at the bottom of an old well, his desperate efforts to invent a comfortable position (standing, lying, floating, leaning) achieving only, at the end, a mask of anguish tilted backward in a silent scream. This will prove later on to have been another flash-forward: the episode of solitary confinement in water takes place at the point in the subsequent narrative when the poet is jailed for political reasons, a confinement during which he contracts leprosy. The initial allegorical image thus proves to be a locus of semic transition. Indeed, it is the crucial chiasmus or semic contradiction within this work, whose mystery and horror lie in the superimposed, yet unjustifiable and intolerable, twin destinies visited upon the innocent protagonist. To political persecution and torture by the dictator's police (a caricatural species of pig-people, living within the village peasantry of salt miners and fishermen like some grotesque and alien occupying race), another fate is gratuitously added, as though to prolong that historical suffering into the metaphysical cruelty of Nature itself-the second doom of natural disease, which gradually works the protagonist's body over according to its own logic, resculpting his classical features into a new mask of welts and excrescences, like a monster from outer space. At a certain verge of contemporary bourgeois literature, most notable in existentialism, the ideological confusion between Nature and History rises toward the surface of consciousness, in the form of a not yet reflexively articulated contradiction between politics and metaphysics, between the "nightmare of history"- still attributable to the cruelty of other peopleand some more ontological vision of an implacable Nature in which "God is the first criminal, since he created us mortal."" Camus' Plague offers the most concentrated expression of this slippage, which emerges as a full-blown ideology when the Nazi historical project is represented through the content of that very different thing, a seething bacterial epidemic that intervenes in the web of private human destinies to terminate them in unjustifiable and properly absurd extinction. Indeed, this slippage between two distinct perspectives-the one proposing a political and historical analysis capable of energizing its spectators for change and praxis even in the most desperate historical circumstances, while the This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 308 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film other perpetuates some ultimately complacent metaphysical vision of the meaninglessness of organic life, to which the response, at best, can only be some private ethical stoicism of a "myth of Sisyphus"--this contamination of two incompatible languages has increasingly, in our own time, been identified as one dangerous source of depolitization. In La Casa de Agua, however, this very incompatibility has been foregrounded as the subject of the work itself-which dramatizes and articulates it as an unresolvable contradiction in such a way that the ideological inferences and resonances of the older identification are structurally blocked. I will return to this unexpected structure and narrative function later, just as I will also ask some more basic questions about the relationship between the ideological theme and the haunting visual surfaces of this magic realist film. At any rate, water is clearly the locus of transformation in which human malignity is exchanged for the irresistible force of natural and organic disease: a signifier (standing water, muddy and stagnant) developed and articulated, constructed, through oppositions with the signifying poles of the dazzling aridity of the salt plain, on the one hand, and, on the other, the cleanness of the sea where the poet's family plies its immemorial trade. Condores no entierran todos los dias is on the face of it a more conventional work, whose interest and lessons for us may therefore be easier to tease out. South American films (along with their European pastiche, as in some of those of Werner Herzog) frequently identify themselves by means of an opening "logo" meant to signify the immensity of the continent itself: a high-angle panoramic shot of the enormous sweep of jungle vegetation as it rises and falls into an illimitable horizon. But in Condores this now virtually conventional opening is remotivated by point of view, as we come to grasp the origination of the shot in the panoramic gaze of the eponymous predator in full flight. The landscape is then reduced to the magical domestication of farmland shrouded in light mist, and thence to the farmhouse itself, with two children playing on the front steps in a pastoral idyll not notably distinct from contemporary North American populist films set in an older Middle West. Into this rural peace comes an intrusion that also has its North American analogue: a roadster filled with large clumsy men in uncomfortable suits whose family likeness to American gangster films is unmistakable. What follows, predictably, is the massacre of the family, children included, by tommy gun: the punctum of this gratuitous horror then being the very clumsiness of the operation, the stiffness and awkwardness of the gunmen as they slip and clamber about the moist soil of the farmyard. This is, one would like to say, something like a constitutional awkwardness and not merely the result of individual ineptness or stupidity or characterological hesitation, as in the terrible scene in Fever in which a traitor is badly executed by a militant who has never used a pistol, firing over and over again at parts of the traitor's body, at the dusty ground around him, and into the soft This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 309 body now prone yet tense with the equally awkward effort to scramble away. In Condores we are closest to the stylistic or generic seam that separates magic realism from nostalgia film (there is indeed, as we shall see later, a distant ideological affiliation with Bernardo Bertolucci's II Conformista, the very prototype of the postmodernist alternative). The mint and shiny antiquity of the gangsters' limousine, for instance, clearly functions as the two-fold and now conventional nostalgia-film signal of a specific historical (or, more properly, generational) period and of a specific generic paradigm (in this case, gangster or Mafia film) of which the postmodernist version will stand as a pastiche. Such initial nostalgia-film dynamics will, however, be subverted in various ways as the film develops: this element in particular is wholly transformed by its recurrence at the end of the movie, in which (against all expectation) the Condor is finally killed-an empty small town street at night, an ominously motionless vehicle unaccountably stationed along the more archaic walls and closed wooden double doors, the Condor gunned down as he strides alone through the darkness without bodyguards as is his custom (for reasons of psychology and prestige alike). But this final sequence deploys a language of solids utterly alien to the glossy surfaces of nostalgia film: the touring car occupying a distinct and sculptural volume in the recess of the shot while the Condor's body stretches foreshortened on the cobblestones with all the inert protrusion of a Mantegna pieti. Here, however, the paradox cleaves to the unaccountable ease with which the monster is destroyed: the title had already designated his invincibility-"you don't bury condors every day"-thereby foretelling the central episode in which poisoned fruit is conveyed to the Condor's household and eaten by the eponymous assassin and his servant-wife. There follows a leisurely and interminable inspection of their death agonies-the two bodies writhing and distending side by side in the matrimonial bed, their silent sightless spasms juxtaposed as though in ironic commentary on the cohabitation of these two mute and loveless isolated individuals. A middle-class doctor presides over this long night of agony, himself withdrawn and cautious, clearly troubled by his own false situation: he is called upon professionally to save the life of a powerful being, feared and hated, whom he would surely, like the rest of the village, prefer to let die. Meanwhile, as news of the poisoning reaches the townspeople, an improvised popular fiesta springs up in the nighttime street outside-firecrackers, guitars, heavy drinking, the sheer joy of release from the oppressive existence of the now-legendary killer. But the Condor's superhuman physical strength brings him safely through the ordeal. The quiet of the following morning is marked by a shot of the ditch alongside a country road in which the dead bodies of the previous night's musicians (themselves unwanted suitors and serenaders of the Condor's daughter) have been unceremoniously dumped. In this This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 310 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film episode too, then, volume has been constructed by the stomach cramps and intestinal agony within the bodies of the poisoned victims: misery inside endowing these human shapes with a bulk and dimension that subverts the surface and purely visual logic of nostalgia image. As it stands now, this argument remains a formal one, seeking to differentiate two distinct filmic modes by which a certain historical content or raw material can achieve representation (I prefer the word "figuration"). Nostalgia film, consistent with postmodernist tendencies generally, seeks to generate images and simulacra of the past, thereby-in a social situation in which genuine historicity or class traditions have become enfeebledproducing something like a pseudopast for consumption as a compensation and a substitute for, but also a displacement of, that different kind of past which has (along with active visions of the future) been a necessary component for groups of people in other situations in the projection of their praxis and the energizing of their collective project. The account of some distinct formal alternative to this one, however, remains incomplete, and will be developed throughout the remainder of this essay. But it is important at this point to complete this essentially formalistic description with the more difficult perspective of the relationship of such formal languages with the very structure of the raw materials they appropriate: with what I have elsewhere called their "logic of content" (Lovis Hjemslev's conception of "substance") or, in other words, with some sense of the dialectical inflection of a formal code by the very structure of the raw material over which it believes itself to exercise a sovereign shaping power or mastery. I have indeed suggested elsewhere that the privileged raw material for nostalgia film seems to be drawn from a more immediate social past, ranging from the Eisenhower era and the American 1950s back to the thirties and twenties. The invisible organizing category of such choices and affinities is therefore essentially a generational one (and the reemergence in the 1960s of the concept or category of the "generation" as a way of narrativizing our lived experience and our broader visions of recent history itself is a very significant symptom indeed). The raw materials of what I have been calling magic realist film seem to me very different from these (although it is clear that my sample here is statistically inadequate and very much dependent on the accidents of personal viewing). The point is, however, that the more remote historical periods in which these films are set-although they by no means exclude parallels and analogies with the present-resist assimilation to generational thinking and rewriting.'2 Revolutionary activity in the Poland of 1905, the prehistory of the Colombian civil war, or a still more archaic nineteenth- century Venezuela-such content also resists appropriation in the service of a more static representation of stable periods and their fashions. We will return to the matter of these films' unparalleled violence in a different context later on; here it is essential to note that violence functions to This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 311 make some discontinuous or surcharged reading of the respective historical moment unavoidable. I will therefore advance the very provisional hypothesis that the possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present; or, to generalize the hypothesis more starkly, magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features. On such a view then, the organizing category of magic realist film is not the concept of the generation (as in nostalgia film) but rather the very different one of modes of production, and in particular of a mode of production still locked in conflict with traces of the older mode (if not with foreshadowings of the emergence of a future one). This is, I believe, the most adequate way of theorizing the "moment of truth" in the anthropological view of literary magic realism outlined above, and of accounting for the strategic reformulation of the term by Carpentier in his conception of a "marvelous real," a real maravilloso: not a realism to be transfigured by the "supplement" of a magical perspective but a reality which is already in and of itself magical or fantastic. Whence the insistence of both Carpentier and Garcia Mairquez that in the social reality of Latin America, "realism" is already necessarily a "magic realism": "?que es la historia de America toda sino una cr6nica de lo real-maravilloso?"'3 Not the "lost object of desire" of the American 1950s, therefore, but the articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the present (Indian or pre-Columbian realities, the colonial era, the wars of independence, caudillismo, the period of American domination--as in Asturias' Weekend in Guatemala, about the 1954 coup) is the formal precondition for the emergence of this new narrative style. 2 But it is necessary to suspend the question of history temporarily in order to turn to the peculiar and constitutive function of color in these films. To this point, my remarks on this subject have not adequately made clear in what way "color" in this new and heightened technical sense is radically incompatible with the logic of the image or the visual simulacrum we have associated with postmodernism--a logic to which the experience of chromatic images would hardly seem alien. Let me try to approach this fundamental distinction by differentiating color from glossiness, which indeed strikes me as the more relevant category for nostalgia film. As we will understand it here, color separates objects from one another, in some mesmerizing stasis of distinct solids whose unmixed individual hues speak to distinct zones of vibration within the eye, thereby setting each object off as the locus of some unique and incomparable This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 312 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film visual gratification. Glossiness, on the other hand, characterizes the print as a whole, smearing its varied contents together in a unified display and transferring, as it were, the elegant gleam of clean glass to the ensemble of jumbled objects-bright flowers, sumptuous interiors, expensively groomed features, period fashions-which are arranged together as a single object of consumption by the camera lens." A remarkable comment of Lacan is apt here (from the very different context of his meditation on the "scopic drive" in the Eleventh Seminar); the example is meant to illustrate what is for him a crucial distinction between the eye and the gaze (le regard): In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l'oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye. There would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign, in something representing grapes for the birds. But the opposite example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it. It is here that this little story becomes useful in showing us why Plato protests against the illusion of painting. The point is not that painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object, even if Plato seems to be saying this. The point is that the trompe-l'oeil of painting pretends to be something other than what it is. It appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now seems to be that something else. The picture does not compete with appearance, it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea. It is because the picture is the appearance that says it is that which gives the appearance that Plato attacks painting, as if it were an activity competing with his own. This other thing is the petit a, around which there revolves a combat of which trompe-l'oeil is the soul.'5 Lacan's excursus (wrenched from its context, which is that of the effort to define the Freudian conception of an "instinctual" drive) may serve as a useful and suggestive point of departure for grasping the postmodern image as a phenomenon in which the scopic consumption of the veil has itself become the object of desire; as some ultimate surface which has This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 313 triumphantly succeeded in drawing that "other thing," that "something else," the objects behind it, out onto a unified plane such that they shed their former solidity and depth and become the very images of themselves, to be consumed now in their own right, as images rather than as representations of something else. Lacan is less helpful with the alternative move of his fable, the status of Zeuxis' legendary grapes (in our rewriting, the locus of magic realist color and its objects). Let us therefore try a somewhat different new beginning: Sabanas was held to be the most cultivated and enlightened region of the country. .... The planting of the fields was according to the seasons, which were of untimely regularity, and according to the colors of the soil, in a wide and varied register from almost pure white to jet black. Between these extremes could be found innumerable tones and hues of brown, rose, purple, yellow, green, gray, red, and blue. People spoke of "weak" gray or "dead" gray, of "languid" or "rich" gray, of brilliant red, of brick red, of flesh red, of purple red, of yellowish red, of drab brownish red, of saffron red, fire red, carmine red, crimson red, scarlet red, burnt red, blood red, or sunset red, and distinguished between "dappled" colors and "veined" colors, between "speckled" and "marbled," and to each one of these they attributed specific qualities for certain crops.'6 This passage, from the great Cuban magic realist novel Los Nifos se despiden of Pablo Armando Fernandez, is central to the moment in which Lila, a new demiurge, re-creates the world from nothingness (an act of creation which will also end in the vision of absolute nothingness). Such a verbal text demonstrates more intensely than any visual one how to the step-by-step invention of each distinct color (and its name) corresponds not merely some general awakening of the eye itself to the differentiated range of the spectrum as a whole but rather, as it were, the calling into being of distinct and innumerable separate senses, each one of which is irritated and stimulated into life by the specific "red" in question. The generic category "red" is thereby virtually exploded as a unity, along with "sight" or the eye itself as some putative central locus for seeing. In this new perceptual heterogeneity, seeing "brick red" now involves a sense organ as distinct from that capable of registering "burnt red" as the older general sense of vision was from those of hearing or touch. Meanwhile, something of this new and imperfectly explored multiplicity of perceptual powers now returns back upon the words themselves, to confer on each an unaccustomed magical power, in the incantatory isolation of each distinct act of speech. Modern linguistic theory, to be sure, has struggled endlessly to rid itself of the stubborn old myth of some Adamic nomination-the identification of beings and objects, created creatures, individual flora and This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 314 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film fauna, by the isolated and nonsyntactical power of the individual noun. From the Saussurian perspective, such myths reinforce an incorrect and mystified notion that meaning first takes place on a one-to-one basis, in the relationship of word to thing and individual signifier to individual signified (rather than, as in the newer linguistics generally, syntactically, in the relationship between signifiers themselves and through their syntactic play and semantic oppositions). Yet perhaps some deeper truth of the Adamic myth reemerges at the "molecular" level (Gilles Deleuze's term), at the level of the individual qualities, in a dimension with which the stigmatized and ideological, unifying categories of "substance" and "object" and "noun" no longer have anything to do: Fire, fire, fire! Bayamo in flames! The splendor which emanated from the bodies effaced their features and forms. Like a madwoman she cried: Let the first appear. A cloud of red smoke struck her face, and frenetically she cried again: Let the second appear. A yellow colored cloud passed before her without so much as grazing her, and a third orangish cloud, and a fourth, green, a fifth, blue, and a sixth, indigo, and a seventh, violet. Triumphant her eyes lit up, awakening in her the power of speech, joyous, subtle, gentle and very sweet." Here the awakening of fresh sight (and voice) result from the wholesale conflagration of the older things; Pablo Armando's little allegory invites us to rethink Zeuxis' grapes in terms of colors so mesmerizing that we gradually forget the objects of which they were supposed to be the prop- erties (while, however, we are able to imagine the birds' appetite, no representational identification a la Gombrich can surely be attributed to them). The prodigious effects of these verbal texts are consistent with what is released by magic realism in its filmic or visual mode. I remember in particular the moment (in Fever) of the passing detail of an extraordinary violet apron: a punctual experience of rare intensity comparable only to Baudelaire's "green so delicious it hurts." Such moments suggest that color does not, in these films, function as a homogeneous medium, but rather as some more generalized "libidinal apparatus," which, once set in place, is capable of registering the pulsation of such discontinuous intensities. If so, it becomes tempting to suggest that it secures an antithetical function in nostalgia film, where, in the form of Lacan's "gaze," it governs a homogeneous field from which just such punctual beats of energy are excluded. When one thinks of the privileged status, in the Saussurian and high structuralist tradition, of the example of systems of color in the various languages (the very prototype of the semantic field of oppositions), it does not seem farfetched to suggest that these seemingly visual experiences This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 315 know some deeper articulation with a preconscious dimension of language itself (in much the same way that, as Freud and Lacan have both shown, seemingly existential phenomena such as sexual desires and dream narratives can be said to be the effects of the absent cause of linguistic or syntactic variations). The more immediate theoretical reference, however, must remain Stanley Cavell's remarkable meditation on the nature and significance of color in film generally: a whole utopian dimension of futurity, as he calls it, involving a "de-psychologizing" and an "un-theatricalizing of their subjects": It is not merely that film colors were not accurate transcriptions of natural colors, nor that the stories shot in color were explicitly unrealistic. It was that film color masked the black and white axis of brilliance, and the drama of characters and contexts supported by it, along which our comprehensibility of personality and event were secured.'8 This constitutive intersection between the experience of filmic color and the opening or foreclosing of certain narrative possibilities will be further explored in the next section. It is, however, important to note that even in a situation in which, since the first publication of Cavell's book, color in film has become the universal norm rather than the exception, his hypothesis retains an ever-scandalous power, suggesting that it is a mistake to imagine the world of our ordinary daily life as a world of colors, and that in that sense it would be more correct to presume that the real world, in which we move, act, and look, is more properly characterized as being "in" black-and-white. What the generalization of color film does, however, is to make the foregrounding of this property dependent, not on its opposition with black-and-white film, but rather on oppositions between various systems of color themselves-whence the possibility of distinguishing a magic realist and a postmodern deployment. Yet another theoretical reference point which must be set in place here is evidently the Freudian conception of the "uncanny," in which a represented event becomes intrinsically marked as the repeLition of an older and archaic fantasy of which no independent traces remain in the text. This "return of the repressed" makes itself felt by the garish and technicolor representation of what is given as an essentially black-and-white reality, figures as daubed and rouged as in photorealist painting, objects derealized by the very plenitude of their sensory being, by which the merely perceptual is unmasked as obsession.'9 Freud's essay proves to be more tightly constrained by its object of study (E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale, "The Sandman") than is often realized; par- This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 316 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film ticularly by a frame narrative from which the subject's past has been excluded (in order to allow it to erupt with a seemingly gratuitous force) and by strange and non-ironic distancing of the psyche which will finally be dramatized in the ideologeme of "frenzy."20 These features, which mark the original development of the concept in Freud himself, are less relevant to the films under discussion here, although the role of violence and the depersonalization of the subject by the filmic apparatus itself offer distant analogies. What is to be retained from Freud's canonical demonstration, however, is the way in which narrative elements can be intensified and marked from within by an absent cause undetectable empirically but read off their sheerest formal properties. Still, these various theoretical possibilities need to be confronted with a different kind of materialist alternative, in which the various symptoms of some new and peculiar filmic use of color are rather simply explained away by technology itself-in particular by aberrations in film stock and its processing, which might better be attributed to the economic situation of the industry in Third World countries than to any more properly aesthetic dynamic. Indeed, far more dramatically than in the sociology of literature, the study of film seems to pose a stark incompatibility between intrinsic and extrinsic analyses, between superstructural and infrastructural codes, between formal readings and just such accounts of the economic and technological determinants of these cultural artifacts-- a situation in which the facile appeal to "overdetermination" does not seem intellectually completely satisfying. Yet a certain model of overdetermination is in fact proposed by the theoreticians of Third World cinema-most notably in Cuba itself-where a technical perfection of the image (which one is tempted to identify with the postmodernism of the First World) is explicitly seen as a connotator of advanced capitalist economies. These theoreticians suggest that an alternative Third World aesthetic politics will wish to transform its own "imperfect cinema" into a strength and a choice, a sign of its own distinct origins and content.2' Here technology, or its underdevelopment, is then explicitly drawn back inside the aesthetic message in order to function henceforth as an intrinsic meaning, rather than an extrinsic accident or causal determinant. Meanwhile, this account of color (which I have already associated with phenomena of the body and with new manifestations of volume) needs to be completed by some more general characterization of its consequences for filmic space itself. The strange darkened coloration of Fever seems, for example, hard to account for on its own terms, without some consideration of the enclosed and darkened spaces in which the action takes place: even exteriors are here dampened down, either by nighttime sequences or by the omnipresence of driving rain and lowered visibility. There is perhaps at work here a stimulation of the rods and cones within the eye (which, as is well known, modify their relationship with the onset of dusk) such that rarer perceptions (the violet apron!) come to be felt, in the field of nighttime vision, as precious conquests. This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 317 In La Casa de Agua, by contrast, it is outside air and open space that predominate-whence one's sense of the virtual transparency of the color of these alternating shots: solid tones diluted with the pure white of the salt flats to the point of euphoria. Even the prison-camp-cumleper-colony is open to the air. Although the torture well stands as the most concentrated enclosure, the only genuinely interior shots are found in the brief account of the poet's student days, in the luxuriousness of the salons and high-class brothels which are thereby retroactively endowed with something of the value of a lost utopia of memory-rich, properly nostalgia-film-type images from which the rest of the film will painfully exclude him. Yet the title has another significance in additon to the one I attributed to it earlier, designating equally the fishing village of the poet's youth and his ultimate destiny. The provisional nature of these wooden shacks, not excluding the headquarters of the dictator's police itself, suggests nothing quite so much as a colonial encampment on the border of the sea, conferring something nomadic on the poverty of the fishermen and the value of a military occupation on the police barracks. This same provisionality marks the protagonist's final dwelling--the shack in which he hides his shame and scatters the sheets of his poems-and grounds the Heideggerian transience of a being-unto-death upon the earth in the more concrete historical situation of colonialism (even though technically the absent dictator himself is simply a local warlord). In contrast to these two problematic geographies-the ramshackle impermanence of a peasant encampment by the sea, or the Eastern European township with its Russian governor general and its traditional distribution of hospitals and grocery stores, warehouses and townhouses in various states of shabbiness (through which, however, the camera moves with a proximate insistence that excludes all longer perspective)Condores seems established in the more traditional stability of the Latin American small town, no doubt at least partly to underscore the paradox and the horror of a situation in which (as in El Salvador today) the population of an established urban order is killed off day after day, leaving empty houses behind them. Offscreen sound-gunshots at various distances, horses' hooves-probably plays a greater role in sculpting visual space in this film, as in the cafe sequence-a deep empty tavern room-in which the protagonist has a neighbor's dogs shot out of exasperation with their offscreen barking-or again and always, in the fateful premonitory sound of automobiles arriving and departing. 3 Space is by no means the most striking feature of Condores, however; its originality is better grasped by way of its narrative dynamic. I have already underscored the kinship of this film to the whole genre of gangster or Mafia movies, of which it is less a postmodernist pastiche than a This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 318 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film decisive formal permutation. It includes a specifically psychological diagnosis in its insistence on the puritanism of the protagonist: his horror before the nudity of his wife, his own nudity as he bathes standing in an inner courtyard, pouring buckets of icy water over himself. Such a diagnosis is long since conventional (and thereby subject, one would hope, to a certain healthy skepticism), reminiscent as it is of the various pop-psychoanalytic elucidations of militarism or fascism, from Theodor Adorno's concept of the "authoritarian personality" all the way to Reflections in a Golden Eye or Il Conformista, which position the "origins" of reactionary brutality in repressed homosexuality or childhood trauma. The novelty of Condores, however (at least from a First World perspective), lies in the fact that the protagonist is already political, living out the life of party affiliations and antagonisms (which antedate his own existence, in the form of some eternal rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives, blues and reds, or whatever) in seething resentment. North Americans have also known this permanence of politics in the narrow sense, of party loyalties and hostilities which are lived as a given of daily life with the intensity of clan rivalries, in various places and at various moments (Massachusetts, Louisiana, the great ward systems of the turn of the century, which Max Weber so admired), but our literature has generally transposed such realities into family drama and dynastic saga, even before its more recent full-blown figuration in the Mafia cycle itself. In English, only Conrad's Nostromo comes to mind as an attempt to render the Mediterranean realities of the political fact in this sense, yet even in Conrad it is given as background rather than as the stuff of daily life. In Condores, however, the political passion is from the outset conjoined to the social resentment of the future protagonist, constrained by his lowly position as an impoverished clerk and the object of frustrating jeers and taunts from wealthier townspeople who belong overwhelmingly to the other political faction. The film then documents an extraordinary transformation of the petty-bourgeois campfollower into a ferocious and deadly energy, a preternatural force of violence and retribution, thereby offering a chilling representation of the monstre naissant (Racine's description of his own dramatization of the young Nero) which is something other than the passage from private to public, from psychological injury to political vocation (Hitler is the conventional or privileged object of this kind of "psychobiography"), since it seeks to project levels of intensity within the political itself. Yet the most interesting originality of the film, what distinguishes it most sharply from its Mafia- or gangster-film analogues, can be detected in the radical absence, the silence, of any collective framework. Mafia film was constitutively organized around the solidarity between the individual chieftain and the gang, family, or ethnic group from which he will be seen to emerge: the secret glamour of such works can be accounted for by the ways in which they tap unconscious fantasies of community This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 319 and take the gangster's individual trajectory as a pretext for living the representation of some intense in-group collective life which is wanting in the viewers' own privatized experience.22 Condores, however, dissipates this spurious glamour and refuses such now conventional generic expectations: apart from a few shadowy thugs drifting in his wake and basking in his prestige, this baleful figure moves in stark isolation, with none of the overtones of deviancy or antisociality (a naively psychologizing ideology developed in the earliest of the gangster movies such as Scarface or Little Caesar). The evolution, the transformation, of Condores' hero is, rather, observed without comment, and with something of the glacial realism of the Brecht of Mann ist Mann, whose moral was that you could turn people into anything. Still, none of these observations yet reaches the point at which the problem of the peculiar relationship of narrative dynamic to the visual (and also to a certain new presence to History) becomes visible. Cavell's work on film was informed by the stunning intuition of some deeper historical tendency or break in contemporary film, which he calls "detheatricalization," but which he does not seem, whether for want of personal sympathy with this historical change, or because he still wishes to think it in analogy with the history of painting, to look for in the right place. I prefer to call this tendency de-narrativization, and I will begin to account for it in terms of reduction to the body and an attendant mobilization of as yet unexploited resources and potentialities of pornography and violence. Such terms are meant to be strictly descriptive and devoid of any moralizing intent, yet the analogies with certain notoriously problematic forms of contemporary high literature are unavoidable. I'm thinking, for instance, of the well-known and widely denounced content of Alain Robbe-Grillet's formalism, whose sadism and violence to women's bodies can scarcely be explained away by the disingenuous suggestion of the novelist himself that his works are to be read as "critiques" of precisely such omnipresent violence and pornography in contemporary culture. Robbe-Grillet's novels, however, suggest the operation of some more general law or dynamic in modernism across the board: the more complex the content, the more simple and simplifiable must be the form. Marcel Proust's great spatial arabesques-the two "ways" of the daily constitutionals, that of Swann, that of the Guermantes, or the stations on the little train-are paradigmatic of such modes of organizing complex content, which Joseph Frank termed "spatial form" (in a rather different sense of the spatial than has been at work in this discussion).2' By the same token, then, if it is complexity of the form which is wanted, as in Robbe-Grillet's own ingenious fragmentations and recombinations, then the content must be as rudimentary and as easy to reidentify as possible, as it were reified and prepackaged in advance: physical violence and pornography are the privileged and final forms of such abbreviated and diminished, yet immediate, raw ma- terial. This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 320 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film Such reduction to the body is clearly a function of film as a medium: I am tempted to suggest that in the most authentic literary forms of high modernism the place of the tangible body is occupied by the sentence itself, reified in some new materiality but not yet, as in postmodernism, transformed into its own image. That the tendential autonomy of the sentence strains to divert the energies of an older narrative attention or reading all of Ulysses testifies: yet the complex new artificial acts of intellection thereby produced are clearly very different from the effects of the analogous reduction in film, where vision accommodates only too comfortably and passively to the new microscopic or molecular demands made upon it. The new foregrounding, in film, of a properly bodily interest-the agonies of the poisoning sequence in Condores or various murders, explosions, executions, along with sexual intercourse itselfsolves the problem of narrative in a different way since these things remain events, however minute (on the other hand, is something with a beginning, middle, and end-like sexual intercourse-the same as a story?). We need to see this development in its own history, as a moment in the evolution of the philosophical vocation of narrative (before this, generally the novel), which can be described as the foregrounding, exploration, subversion, or modification of the category of the Event in general. Realism, to be sure, has on the whole been understood as a kind of representational work within pregiven or even stereotypical categories of events and actions (and thus, more metaphysically, of reality itself). It is at least clear that the richness of modernism is at one with the crisis of such received categories and with a whole new interrogation-by poesis -of the nature of events themselves, setting out again from Aristotle's dissociation of a biography from a completed action (why are they not the same? or do they only coincide in lives which are "destinies"? or is destiny not itself an ideology and an illusion?). The related but antithetical interrogation leads in the direction of the minutiae of daily life: when are those brief and inconsequential segments of time events? The meta- physical or ideological charge in such narrative practices comes when the question about the event is tormented to yield a supplementary answer about what living really is, or what reality is in the first (or last) place. Henry James of course remains the most august apologist for this vocation of the novel "experimentally" to construct or to dismantle events in such a way that, beyond these empirical happenings, the more general philosophical question about the Event itself may rise. What should now be clear is that an aesthetic of the reduction to the body in film, far from asking these questions and raising the iss of these abstract categories, seeks radically to abandon them as much possible, to peel them away and discard them from our visual experien reaching the most elementary forms of bodily experience as its buildin blocks, about which such questions need not or cannot be raised. A who range of subtle or complicated forms of narrative attention, which classical This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23: Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 321 film (or, better still: sound film) laboriously acquired and adapted from earlier developments in the novel, are now junked and replaced by the simplest minimal reminders of a plot that turns on immediate violence. Narrative has not here been subverted or abandoned, as in the iconoclasm of experimental film, but rather effectively neutralized, to the benefit of a seeing or a looking in the filmic present. But this development--which has as its historical and sociological precondition the radical fragmentation of modern life and the destruction of older communities and collectivities- is not necessarily an absolute loss or impoverishment, even if it marks the loss of the rich culture of an older modernism. It may also be understood as the conquest of new kinds of relationships with history and with being, as I have argued in the preceding pages. A history-with-holes, for example, is very precisely a kind of bas-relief history in which only bodily manifestations are retained, such that we are ourselves inserted into it without even minimal distance. The waning of larger historical perspectives and narratives, and the neutralization of an older complex of narrative interests and attentions (or forms of temporal consciousness) now release us to a present of uncodified intensities, much as the chemical effect of drugs serves to loosen our temporal "pro-tensions" and "re-tensions" in the mesmerizing contemplation of what is now given "hallucinogenically" before us. But the films under discussion here do not, as in some postmodernisms, simply seek to imitate the experience of drugs but to reconquer that experience by other, internally constructed means (much as Freud found himself obliged to abandon the external techniques of hypnosis). The mediation of the camera apparatus, the insertion of its technology into our experience, is not external in that sense. Rather, the mystery of a technological externality which is now internal and intrinsic is at the heart of the problem of the aesthetics of film, where our historical experience of the decentering of the psychic subject (in Freud and Lacan) meets it and lends it new and no longer accidental significance. But we can only evoke the psychoanalytic exploration of inner and structural psychic distances (along with the Heideg- gerian conception of an approach to Being) in connection with these films if we include some new historicism in our account as well, some constitutive and privileged relationship with history grasped and sensed in a new way, radically distinct from the chronologies of the historical novel and the fashion plates of nostalgia film alike. Such narrative reduction has, for example, very real and practical consequences for ideology and ideological analysis. It is not enough to show a systematic abridgment in the generation and projection of narrative meanings, as though that were only a matter of aesthetic choice; we must try to understand that such eradications also have a political function. We have seen, for example, that the ideological message of Condores (if it can be called that) is specifically constructed by narrative reduction, in this case by the deliberate shearing off of the Mafia collectivity which This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 322 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film had hitherto been a necessary structural feature of the genre. The full and vivid ugliness of the Condor's deadly ressentiment is conveyed by masking out the libidinal attractions of the family context, leaving only the protagonist's body in isolation. Fever is also consistent with this description, even though the circumstances of its production and reception at first confuse the issue and seem to endow it with a very different ideological message (of an older type). Released immediately before the imposition of martial law in Poland, it was thereafter withdrawn, presumably on account of the sensitivity of its representation of a Russian occupying army. (As a consequence, only one copy of the film exists in the United States.) But it would be frivolous to conclude that it is, for that reason, a pro-Solidarity film. The patriotic young fanatics of Fever are anarchists and "infantile leftists" of the purest stamp: the framework of some larger underground socialist mass party is invoked but never represented; and the film explicitly makes the point that its terrorist initiatives are radically disjoined from any such mass political movement, which the viewer assumes to have existed in the earlier sections of the film only to have disintegrated in its later stages. The first protagonist (not the least peculiarity of the film being its organization around two heroes, whose stories are followed in succession) makes the conventional defense of his activities as the expression of "solidarity" (a rather different and ironic use of this word) with the masses, to show them that they are not alone in the struggle, and that political efforts continue elsewhere, rather than as a way of achieving any precise political aim. This is not to say that Fever has any comfort for the other side, who are exclusively represented as police spies, double agents, quislings and lackeys, or else as corrupt members of the bourgeoisie who have accommodated themselves to the system and are terrified at the prospect of resistance. Yet the revolutionaries themselves have our sympathy only "by definition" as it were, ranging characterologically from the naive or the all-too-human to the peculiar pathologies of the heroes themselves, to which we must now turn. These are something like the dioscuri of the death wish-the one dark, the other blond; the one cold and gloomy, the second joyous to the point of the manic--technicians of death whose paths cross only once in the course of the narrative. The dark assassinintensified by the possession, and then the even more striking absence, of a bushy Slavic mustache-is surrounded by militants of varying degrees of incompetence and endowed with what one hesitates to call a love relationship; while his blond successor works in complete isolation from comradeship or sex, emerging, not from the world of political militancy, but from the underworld of police spies and double agents, his last act being an attempt to blow himself up with the police headquarters and its unsavory occupants (the bomb, alas, does not go off). In this woman's film, however, it is clearly the figure of the woman sympathizer who is central to the first narrative, her own peculiar longing This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UT6 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 323 for martyrdom (she wants to kill herself along with the governor general at a sumptuous gala reception, to which he fails to come) serving equally to underscore the depersonalization of the terrorist vocation, in which private fantasy and cold political strategy are pathologically dissociated and inextricably intertwined all at once. Two brutal sex scenes make this point dramatically: when, after his escape from prison, the first protagonist screws her like an animal for "hygienic" reasons, her own ecstasy stands as sufficient comment on the fantasmatic nature of her passion for a figure who, considerably more neutral characterologically than the Condor, is little more than an absence driven and possessed. In the second sequence she gives herself, in dipit amoureux, to another militant who is hopelessly in love with her and whose energetic sexual ministrations are received like a rape and literally drive her over the edge into outright catatonia. Whatever its relevance for contemporary Polish politics, then, Fever offers an implacable autopsy of the vocation of anarchist militants, whose dramatic grandeur is conferred upon them by the absolute hopelessness of their historical situation alone. This ideological demonstration also proceeds, as in Condores, by strategic omission-the absence of the massesand by the disjunction of its constitutive elements-fantasy and strategy, delirious private motivation and ostensible political calculation--which are turned back on one another in arrested contradiction. We have already examined an analogous structure in La Casa de Agua, in which the ideo- logemes of History and Nature are strangely held at a distance from each other by the very narrative which conjoins their nightmarish powers on the body of a common victim. All this may now seem distant enough from the conception of magic realism with which we began until we grasp the necessary and constitutive relationship between intensities of colors and bodies in these works and their process of de-narrativization which has ultimately been shown to be a process of ideological analysis and deconstruction. In reality these two features-strategic omission or strategic recombination of ideological or conceptual elements and perspectives, and a well-nigh sensory proximity to the bodies and solids of the same history-are but twin faces, absence and presence, of the same aesthetic operation which libidinally intensifies the remnants in the present of what had been surgically excised of its other narrative temporalities. 1. See Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction," Hispania 38 (May 1955): 187-92. 2. See Alejo Carpentier, "Pr61ogo" to his novel El Reino de este mundo (Santiago, 1971); the most useful survey of the debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, "Carpentier y el realismo magico," in Otros Mundos, otrosfuegos, ed. Donald Yates, Congreso Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana 16 (East Lansing, Mich., 1975), pp. 221-31. 3. See Angel Rama, La Novela en America Latina (Bogota, 1982), and especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitdlogos y novelistas (Madrid, 1975), in particular the discussions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alejo Carpentier. This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 324 Fredric Jameson Magic Realism in Film 4. My own general frame of reference for "postmodernism" is outlined in my "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92. 5. For further specifics, see Variety, 25 Feb. 1981. 6. La Casa de Agua, written by Tomas Eloy Martinez and directed by the Venezuelan painter and film critic Jacobo Penzo in 1984 (for further specifics, see Variety, 29 Aug. 1984); Condores no entierran todos los dias, directed by Francisco Norden, from a novel by Gustavo Alvarez Gardearzabel, 1984 (for further specifics, see Variety, 16 May 1984). I was fortunate in being able to see these films at the Sixth Annual Festival of Latin American Cinema in La Habana, December 1984. May the present article serve as a modest token of thanks to my hosts; it is dedicated to the Cuban Revolution. 7. I leave this formulation intact as a faithful reflection of my reactions and impressions; in fact, the action takes place in 1948. I am indebted to Ambrosio Fornet for the interesting suggestion that the absent subtext of the events in this film may well be the so-called Bogotazo of 9 April 1948, in which the populist leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitdin, was assassinated by right-wing fanatics of the Condor's type (see Arturo Alape, El Bogotazo: Memorias del olvido [La Habana, 1983]). 8. See my "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." 9. See, for a theory of the image as the "derealization" of the world, Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Imaginaire and Saint Genit. 10. "A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum. ... Apunctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard [New York, 1981], pp. 26-27). Barthes' analytic concept is a necessary starting point, but only that; it stands, for the investigation of the photographic image, at about the level of the New Critical concept of "paradox" for that of poetic language some thirty years ago. 11. See Sartre, The Flies, "The Flies" ("Les Mouches") and "In Camera" ("Huis Clos"), trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1946), p. 71. 12. Even so, it is always worth retaining Theodor Fontane's idea (often referred to by Georg Lukacs) that one could not successfully stage a historical novel much before the chronological period to which one's own grandparents belonged. 13. Carpentier, "Pr61ogo," El Reino de este mundo, p. 16. 14. The allegorical emblem of such an aesthetic might then well be revealed-in its limits as well as its power-in the assassination scene of II Conformista, in that rolled-up window of the locked car door from behind which the protagonist observes the pleading outraged desperation of his lover even as she pounds against it. 15. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978), pp. 103, 111-12. 16. "Consideraibase a Sabanas como la regi6n mais culta e ilustrada del pais. Por pais entendiase a todo el territorio de Sabanas y a la serie de tierras circundantes, cuya extensi6n nadie se atrevia a conjeturar, pero que se extinguia al precipitarse en el mar. La siembra se planific6 de acuerdo con las estaciones, de intempestiva regularidad, y seguin los colores del suelo, de amplia y variada gama, extendiendose desde el blanco casi puro hasta el negro azabache. Entre estos extremos, se encontraban numerosos tonos y matices del pardo, rosado, purpura, amarillo, verde, gris, rojo y azul. Se hablaba del gris "debil" o "muerto" y del gris "linguido" o "rico", del rojo brillante, rojo ladrillo, rojo encarnado, rojo purpuireo, rojo amarillento, rojo pardusco, rojo gualda, rojo fuego, rojo carmin, rojo carmesi, rojo escarlata, rojo quemado, rojo sangre y rojo atardecer, y se distinguian los colores "moteados" de los "veteados", y los "manchados" de los "jaspeados", y a cada uno de ellos se le atribuian cualidades especificas para ciertos cultivos." Pedro Armando Fernandez, Los Nifios se despiden (La Habana, 1968), p. 118; my translation. This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Winter 1986 325 17. "iFuego, fuego, fuego! iBayamo en llamas! El resplandor que emanaba de los cuerpos borr6 sus rostros, sus formas. Enloquecida grit6: que comparezca el primero. Una nube de humo rojo le golpe6 el rostro, y ella, frenetica, volvi6 a gritar: que comparezca el segundo. Una nube color amarillo, sin siquiera rozarla pas6 frente a ella, y una tercera anaranjada, y una cuarta, verde, y una quinta, azul, y un sexta, indigo, y una septima, violeta. Triunfante, se le iluminaron los ojos animandole la voz, alegre, fina, dulcisima." Ibid., pp. 160-61; my translation. 18. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology ofFilm, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 89, 91. He concludes his argument thus: When dramatic explanations cease to be our natural mode of understanding one another's behavior-whether because we tell ourselves that human behavior is inexplicable, or that only salvation (now political) will save us, or that the human personality must be sought more deeply than dramatic religions or sociologies psychologies or histories or ideologies are prepared for-black and white ceases be the mode in which our lives are convincingly portrayed. But since until yesterd dramatic modeling was the mode in which the human appeared, and its tensio and resolutions were those in terms of which our human understanding of human was completely satisfied, its surcease must seem to us the vanishing of the hum as such. Painting and sculpture found ways to cede human portrayal in favor of t unappeasable human wish for presentness and beauty-by, for example, findi ways to make paintings without value contrast among their hues. But movies cann cede human figuration or reference (though they can fragment it, or can anima something else). Movies in color cede our recently natural (dramatic) grasp of tho figures, not by denying so much as by neutralizing our connection with the wo so filmed. But since it is after all our world that is presented to us, and since tho figures presented to us do after all resemble us, but since nevertheless they are longer psychically present to us, we read them as de-psychologized, which, for u means un-theatricalized. And from there it is only logical to project them as inhabit the future, a mutation away from the past we know (as we know it). [P. 94] For a remarkable discussion of color in the European nouvelle vague generally, see Mar Claire Ropars, "La couleur dans le cinema contemporain," in L'Ecran de la mimoire, Ropars (Paris, 1970), pp. 160-73. Her reminder of Sergei Eisenstein's reflections on colo may serve generally as a motto for this section of the present essay: the sense of color as a process, developing as independently as music and in muc the same way accompanying the whole movement of the work ... Just as the soun of leather cracking must be detached from the boot that makes it in order to becom an element of expression in its own right, so the concept of orangish red must detached from the hue of the tangerine in order for color to be inserted int consciously directed system of expression and action. [Eisenstein, quoted in Ropa "La Couleur," p. 173] Finally, one is tempted to return again to the suggestive chapter "Color and Meaning" Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1957), pp. 113-53. 19. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berke and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 57-58. 20. I hope to develop this reading of Freud's essay in more detail elsewhere. 21. See, in particular, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Una Imagen recorre el mundo (Mexi 1982) and Tomis Gutierrez Alea, Dialectica del espectador (La Habana, 1982). 22. See my "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 130-48 23. "Spatiality" as Joseph Frank uses it in his famous essay is closer to a synchron arrangement for mnemonic purposes (comparable to Frances Yates' equally well-kn Art of Memory) than to phenomenological, structural, or dialectical accounts of space f Gaston Bachelard to Henri Lefebvre. This content downloaded from 130.65.109.155 on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:20:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Politics and Magic Realism Mohammad Rasoulof • He is an Iranian independent filmmaker whose films critique censorship, authoritarian rule, the government, and the systematic corruption in the society • Hesitating to face censorship, he started to use metaphoric forms of storytelling in his films but later he decided to speak out • He has been ordered to serve a one-year prison sentence over his movies as Iran’s authorities found to be propaganda against the system. The sentence also included an order to stop filmmaking for two years Filmography • The Twilight 2002 • Iron Island 2005 • The White Meadows 2008 • Goodbye 2011 • Manuscripts Don't Burn 2013 • A Man of Integrity 2017 • There is No Evil 2020 The White Meadows, 2008 • The film is an alluring discomforting journey with a man whose career is to collect tears of the inhabitants scattered across an archipelago of inhospitable islands on a sea • The film is a critical of authoritarian power for its hostility to dissent and free expression and its attempt to keep people benighted • The film does not meet the neorealist qualities so often described in Iranian New Wave Cinema. Although the film depicts some qualities of realism, it hovers into magic-realism Magical Realism • Magical realism is a term invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subject • Franz Roh used the term to describe the “Neue Sachlichkeit,” or New Objectivity, a style of painting that was popular in Germany at the time that was an alternative to the romanticism of expressionism • The genre was growing in popularity in South America and French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was influenced by magic realism Magical realism is a part of the realism genre of fiction What is Magical Realism? Within a work of magic realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world Magical realism blurs the line between fantasy and reality What Are the Characteristics of Magical Realism? • Realistic setting: the story takes place in a setting in this world that is familiar • Magical elements: From talking objects to dead characters to telepathy, every magical realism story has fantastical elements that do not occur in our world • Limited information: Magical realism authors deliberately leave the magic in their stories unexplained in order to normalize it as much as possible and reinforce that it is part of everyday life What Are the Characteristics of Magical Realism? • Critique: Authors often use magical realism to offer an implicit critique of society, most notably politics and the elite • Unique plot structure: Magical realism does not follow a typical narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end but suggests its own unique plot What are the characteristics of Magic Realism in THE WHITE MEADOWS? • Realistic setting The locations and settings are real The islands, people and the sea address real status and world • Magical elements What are the magical elements in the film? Why they send the man to the well or the girl to the sea What are the characteristics of Magic Realism in THE WHITE MEADOWS? • Limited information: Which part of the story remains unexplained for you? • Critique The story implicitly critiques the state and the authority who controls and decides how people should think, believe and live (It specifically talks about the authority who controls Iranian people’s lives) • Unique plot structure How do you find The White Meadows’ plot is unique? Examples of Magical Realism Movies • Birdman by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014 • Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin, 2012 • Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen, 2011 • Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro, 2006 • Big Fish by Tim Burton, 2003 • Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001