Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity. By Christina Parker-Flynn

Abstract

The central argument of this book involves a sophisticated model of influence and interrelation between literary representation, visual technologies, and constructions of gender. Just as the doctrine of l’art pour l’art in the work of Théophile Gautier (interestingly substituted for Baudelaire as the master of literary modernism) prepared the ground for the aesthetics of early cinema, late-nineteenth-­century literature was led to imitate the forms of representation arising from the new technologies. These tendencies and reciprocal influences coalesce, in Christina Parker-Flynn’s account, around the thematic of photogénie, a term invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1830 to describe the photographic reproduction of reality, but more purposefully and richly deployed by early theorists of film such as Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein to describe the potential of cinema to copy, enhance, and even generate life. Through readings of variations of the Ovidian parable of Pygmalion, Parker-Flynn mobilizes the genetic and generative aspects intrinsic to photogénie, foregrounding the capacity of this aesthetic to replace life; whence the importance of the motif of artificiality. This argumentative line is deftly woven around a persuasive account of gender construction and fantasy. Whereas the influence of new technologies on literary representation entails a ‘wide-scale reconditioning of artistic subjectivity’ (p. 3), this reconditioning takes the route of a phantasmatic (re-)imagining of masculine aesthetic agency, hinged around the figure of the artificial woman. It is this phantasmatic figure which furnishes the structuring logic of the book. Part One addresses figurations of the artificial feminine in late-nineteenth-century literature, while Part Two engages with twentieth-century filmmakers. Each chapter revolves around a variant of the ‘figural body’ of the artificial woman. The texts and films selected are interestingly diverse and carefully considered: Part One features Gautier’s tale ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (1836); Villers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Ève future (1886; a staple reference in accounts of the prehistory of cinema); and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891; in the context of what Parker-Flynn calls ‘Salomania’). A cluster of works by Georges Méliès, Thomas Edison, and Loie Fuller, and, of course, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), form the corpus for the fourth chapter, ‘Statuesque Cinema’, while Chapters 5 and 6 move to more recent and indeed contemporary territory, with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Taken as a whole, the book proposes a powerful trajectory across a number of fields. The writing is refreshingly mobile, introducing multiple contextualizations and pertinent critical references. Striking illustrations punctuate the analysis and discussion. A distinctive characteristic of Parker-Flynn’s method and style is that arguments are constructed through close attention to the textual material, rather than through obeisance to and application of theoretical grand narratives. On the question of the artificial woman, for example, and its/her relation to masculine subjectivity, Parker-Flynn sidesteps what might seem an inevitable recourse to E. T. A. ­Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1816) and Freud’s attention to it in ‘The Uncanny’. This (deliberate) omission notwithstanding, Parker-Flynn’s book opens new and compelling avenues for intermedial aesthetics, and for considerations of gender in both literature and film.