replication as eternal recurrence: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (2012)

I've been neglecting this blog for a few months, but I plan to make up for lost time. There will be a series of shorter posts on films that I've seen in the last four months, but let us start with what I saw tonight: Cloud Atlas (Andy Wachowski, 2012). It will provide a good control for the other films that I have on this list, all of which meditate on the same permanent crisis; a quiet, solid-state crisis, and all the more unbearable on this account. As teaser, I'll list a few of the movies that I've been meaning to write about:

Cosmopolis 
The Dark Knight Rises 
Samsara
Condition (Die Lage) 

But let us begin with this modern day version of Griffith's Intolerance...

To the left is the poster advertising the film in front of Theater 5 at the landmark Lagoon. All five digital mise-en-scenes--let us just call them "sets" for convenience--are immediately legible. We have the Downton Abbey-esque early 20th century aristocratic mansion, the futuristic asian city of Blade Runner (but also Ghost in a Shell etc.), a dark conspiratorial installation ala Resident Evil, the open 19th century seas of Pirates of the Caribbean or Amistad, and the starry skies of Star Wars or Contact (against which Tom Hanks' face is framed, stereotypically). The film begins with the starry skies and tilts down to a post-apocalyptic campfire story which transitions into a daytime forest reminiscent of Hunger Games. If this were 1916, one could accuse this film of recycling studio sets. Here, Warner Bros. is recycling rendering algorithms. But who doesn't recycle algorithms? If there is one lesson that we immediately glean from this film, it is the homogeneity of digital images in contemporary commercial cinema--we're not talking about sterotyped plots or characters (these are as old as cinema itself) but the typology of texture and light.

80 percent of films today fit within one of these texture-types and their corresponding historical obsessions. This is lesson one of Cloud Atlas; it reveals the stagnation of the digital cinema of attractions simply by placing these historical-textural mise-en-scenes in the same film. Commercial cinema is in crisis.

Clocking at 2 hours and 44 minutes, Cloud Atlas pursues five separate stories in different historical eras:  1849, 1933, 1973, 2012, the future in a blade-runner-esque New Seoul, and a post-apocalyptic Saxon-ish village. We learn at the end of the film, inconsequentially, that the final world, or maybe the entire series, does not take place on earth.

The film flirts with the eternal return: it seems like everyone is fighting to same kinds of battles, saying the same kind of words; they all seem to have lived past lives. Each age has its own struggles against what D.W. Griffith would have called "intolerance." None of this is surprising, since all the characters are played by the same recognizable actors. And its all deja vu because each sub-plot is itself unoriginal. We've seen it before: the 70s conspiracy thriller, sci-fi revolutionary martyrdom, Amistad, psychologically driven historical epic about a composer, the present-day comedy about senior citizens in a retirement home....

And the color of the sky, too, is a cliche.

What separates Cloud Atlas from Intolerance are 96 years of film history, of which the director Andy Wachowski appears to be very aware. It is true, Griffith dealt with typologies, with generic gestures, and generic characteristics in different historical epochs (christ, the modern girl, etc.), but Intolerance took place at a time when the generic was utopian; it promised a universal language. Copyrighted rendering algorithms make the generic a foundation of capital accumulation, and what we witness is not promise but saturation: the bad kind of eternal recurrence.

The music. The theme score is original; in the film world, it is composed by Robert Frobisher, the homosexual assistant to the great composer Vyvyan Ayrs. Vyvyan thinks he has heard the melody in his dreams, that it is his own, yet learns that this is just because Robert has been playing it on the piano when he is asleep (he then tries to steal the composition). This is the concreteness of the film's deja vu; and this is why the score of cloud atlas is a replica(nt) of the film's own melody. Eternal recurrence as commodity circulation.

Which is why the film is obsessed with transcendence. Halle Berry's character in the post-apocalyptic subplot gains Tom Hanks as a guide for climbing the "mountain of evil" in order to send off a call for help into outer space. The only hope for survival is to wait for a reply from out there--and the film ends as it begins, with the camera tilting up to the night sky.

I swear I've heard this song before...

Yet I am struck by a sweet sense of melancholy, a feeling that only American cinema can provide today: the sense that I am at the heart of an empire in decline...