Voyages of Life

Abstract

Voyages of Life Scott MacDonald (bio) Figures I I hope the reader can forgive a personal anecdote. When I arrived in Utica, New York, in the fall of 1971 to teach film studies and American literature at Utica College of Syracuse University, I brought with me a set of aesthetic prejudices—common to my generation, I’m sure—that led me to admire the twentieth century art at Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (the collection includes paintings by Dali, Picasso, Gris, Mondrian, Sheeler, Pollock, Rothko...) as fervently as I despised the highlight of the Institute’s collection of nineteenth-century art: the 1840 version of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life . 1 Cole’s four-part exposition of the stages of human life—“Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” “Old Age”—seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, in its representationalism, in its theology, and in its assumption—an assumption obviously typical of most nineteenth century art—that human life was the life of men. During the following years, when I sent students to the Institute and asked them to write essays about what they saw, I became accustomed to their admiration for Cole, whose accessibility they often used as a weapon in their attacks on the Institute’s “obscure,” “self-indulgent” modernist painters. As a teacher, I was simultaneously bored and excited by this response: that they inclined toward the easy, old-fashioned Cole paintings provided me an opportunity to school them on the formal and ideological dimensions of the more challenging moderns. Gradually, I came to realize that, regardless of its “old-fashioned” elements (and to some degree because of them), The Voyage of Life was “modern” in its own way: in particular, that it had enough in common with cinema to be considered, if not pre-cinematic, at least proto-cinematic. Most obviously, Cole’s images had width-to-height dimensions not so different from the 16 mm films I was presenting in my film classes; and like most commercial films, they [End Page 101] focused on the development of a single character. 2 At first, it seemed a stretch to see Cole’s paintings as cinematic in any but the most general sense, if only because his four compositions are presented in extreme “long shot” (a function of Cole’s interest in seeing human development as part of Nature’s divinely instituted grand scheme), a far cry from the modern commercial cinema’s usual articulation of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups. As I watched students engage The Voyage of Life , however, I realized that those willing to engage individual images of The Voyage of Life and their relationships to each other inevitably developed an experiential process analogous to what modern film directors achieve through editing: that is, most viewers see each of the sections in an “establishing shot” and then move in to make their own “medium shots” and “close-ups.” 3 Of course, what viewers discover as they explore the individual paintings is that Cole’s articulation of the particular qualities that define each individual stage of human life make sense only in juxtaposition with the qualities defined in the other three paintings. As a result, many viewers move back and forth from one painting to another—creating their own intercutting between the four stages of life. Further, Cole’s decision to use four successive paintings with considerable time gaps between the stages of life depicted is analogous to the way in which film editing condenses time as a means of generating storytelling energy. The more I’ve examined The Voyage of Life , the more analogies to cinema I’ve discovered. For example, with benefit of twentieth-century hindsight, we can see that the four paintings are “edited” together in a manner that recalls a major theoretical debate about film editing (“montage”) that took place in the Soviet Union during the 1920s between filmmakers V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein reviewed the debate in an oft-quoted passage from “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram”: In front of me lies a crumpled yellowed sheet of paper. On it is a mysterious note: “Linkage—P” and “Collision—E.” This is a substantial trace of a heated bout...