Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image

PRETTY

FILM AND CULTURE

Rosalind Galt

PRETTY

FILM AND THE DECORATIVE IMAGE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-52695-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Galt, Rosalind.

Pretty : film and the decorative image / Rosalind Galt.

p. cm. — (Film and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes filmography.

ISBN 978-0-231-15346-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-15347-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-52695-1 (ebook)

1. Motion pictures—Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series.

PN1995.G245 2011

791.4301—dc22

2010045025

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Pretty as Troublesome Image

1. FROM AESTHETICS TO FILM AESTHETICS

Or, Beauty and Truth Redux

2. COLORS

Derek Jarman and Queer Aesthetics

3. ORNAMENT AND MODERNITY

From Decorative Art to Cultural Criticism

4. OBJECTS

Oriental Style and the Arabesques of Moulin Rouge!

5. AT THE CROSSROADS

Iconoclasm and the Anti-aesthetic in Postwar Film and Theory

6. FORMS

Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty

7. PERVERSE PRETTINESS

Sexuality, Gender, and Aesthetic Exclusion

8. BODIES

The Sumptuous Charms of Ulrike Ottinger

POSTSCRIPT

Toward a Worldly Image

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.   Theeviravaathi / The Terrorist (Sivan, 1998)

2.   Cidade de Deus / City of God (Meirelles and Lund, 2002)

3.   Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain / Amelie (Jeunet, 2001)

4.   Kehinde Wiley, After Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s King Charles I and Henrietta Maria (2009)

5.   Bamako (Sissako, 2006)

6.   Ju Dou (Zhang, 1990)

7.   Xích lô / Cyclo (Tran, 1995)

8.   Walter Crane, The Origin of Outline (1900)

9.   The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948)

10. The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)

11. Ivan Groznyy II / Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein, 1958)

12. The Art of Mirrors (Jarman, 1973)

13. Death Dance (Jarman, 1973)

14. Arabia (Jarman, 1974)

15. Ashden’s Walk on Møn (Jarman, 1973)

16. Ashden’s Walk on Møn

17. Ashden’s Walk on Møn

18. Franz Sales Meyer, A Handbook of Ornament (1898)

19. Otto Wagner, Majolikahaus (1898)

20. Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein, 1938)

21. Adolf Loos, House Josephine Baker (1927)

22. Josephine Baker’s famous banana skirt

23. Torrent (Ibáñez, 1926)

24. Eugène Delacroix, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834)

25. Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001)

26. Publicity image of Clara Bow

27. Moulin Rouge!

28. Marius Maure, postcard of Algerian women (1900)

29. Moulin Rouge!

30. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (ca. 1870)

31. Column in the Alhambra

32. Lola Montès (Ophüls, 1955)

33. Vent d’Est (Godard / Gorin / Dziga Vertov Group, 1970)

34. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955)

35. Il conformista / The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1971)

36. Die bitteren Träner der Petra von Kant / The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972)

37. Soy Cuba / I Am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964)

38. Soy Cuba

39. Soy Cuba

40. Soy Cuba

41. Soy Cuba

42. Gianlorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652)

43. Tian bian yi duo dun / The Wayward Cloud (Tsai, 2005)

44. Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait / Pervert (1994)

45. Ecstasy in Berlin 1926 (Beatty, 2004)

46. Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (Ottinger, 1989)

47. Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia

48. Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia

49. Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia

50. L’intrus / The Intruder (Denis, 2004)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN MANY YEARS IN THE MAKING, AND THE development of my ideas has been helped by more people than I can easily list. Karl Schoonover has been both an incisive, generous reader and a source of truly invaluable support. Corey Creekmur, Nicole Rizzuto, Michael Lawrence, Louis-Georges Schwartz, and John David Rhodes read drafts of various parts of the book. Their astute suggestions have improved the book immeasurably. Other important interlocutors were Lynne Joyrich and the readers at Camera Obscura, which published an early iteration of the project. Together they challenged me to push on the intellectual histories of the pretty and to refine my claims. The readers for Columbia University Press also offered rich and perceptive responses to the manuscript and provided me with helpful advice for revisions. Thanks also go to my editor at Columbia, Jennifer Crewe, and to John Belton for their support of the project, as well as to copy editor Annie Barva and to editor Irene Pavitt for shepherding the book through production.

Throughout the research and writing of the book, my colleagues at the University of Iowa and the University of Sussex have been incredibly supportive. Department heads Steve Ungar and Sue Thornham nourished my research, and my colleagues Rick Altman, Lauren Rabinovitz, Rosemarie Scullion, David Wittenberg, Sasha Waters Freyer, Kembrew McLeod, Kathleen Newman, Andy Medhurst, Thomas Austin, Catherine Grant, Dolores Tierney, Sara Jane Bailes, Daniel Kane, and Gordon Finlayson offered insight, expertise, and sometimes food. Also indispensable have been the brilliant graduate student communities with whom I have discussed many theoretical sticking points in various seminars. Anastasia Saverino helped locate and organize material during the early stages of research. Dennis Hanlon very kindly shared his research on Jorge Sanjinés. Isabel Machado dos Santos Wildberger introduced me to some fascinating Brazilian films. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai was an erudite source of guidance on Tamil film and culture.

Many people listened to parts of this project, offered suggestions, posed questions, and provided encouragement, including Louis Bayman, Mark Betz, Ed Branigan, Chris Cagle, Francesco Casetti, Sarah Cooper, Tim Corrigan, Susan Courtney, Jane Elliot, Sally Faulkner, Susan Felleman, Anne Friedberg, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Elena Gorfinkel, Andrew Higson, Akira Lippit, Adam Lowenstein, Colin MacCabe, Laura McMahon, Nadija Mustapic, Brigitte Peucker, Michele Pierson, Duncan Petrie, Brian Price, Sergio Rigoletto, Bhaskar Sarkar, Steven Shaviro, Christine Sprengler, Sarah Street, Meghan Sutherland, Belén Vidal, Amy Villarejo, Janet Walker, Liz Watkins, Charles Wolfe, and Michael Zryd. The folks at the University of Pittsburgh were massively generous with their hospitality and critical energies, as were audiences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Kings College London, the University of Toronto, York University (in Canada), the University of York (in the United Kingdom), Temple University, the University of South Carolina, the University of the West of England, the University of Exeter, and Molekula arts center in Rijeka, Croatia. Jennifer Wild invited me to participate in the fascinating CinemArts workshop at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2010 and gave me the opportunity to talk aesthetics with Tom Gunning and George Baker. And audiences at the SCMS, World Picture, Popular Italian Cinema, and Colour and the Moving Image conferences challenged and inspired me as I developed the project.

Thanks also go to the staff at the Billy Rose Theater Collection in the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the New York Public Library at Bryant Park, New York University’s Bobst Library, the British Library, the British Film Institute, the V&A Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, the Albertina Museum, as well as the University of Iowa library’s Special Collections Department. The chapter on Derek Jarman was kindly supported by the University of Iowa’s Arts and Humanities Initiative grant, which allowed me to work with James Mackay on viewing rare films and archive material. James’s advice and generosity came at a crucial point early in the project. The book was finished with the help of an Arts and Humanities Research Council research leave.

Some of my ideas on the pretty were first worked through in Pretty: Film Theory, Aesthetics, and the History of the Troublesome Image, Camera Obscura 71, no. 24/2 (2009): 1–42. A version of chapter 2 is to be published as ‘Brash . . . Indecent . . . Libertine’: Derek Jarman’s Queer Colours, in Color and the Moving Image, ed. Sarah Street and Liz Watkins, AFI Film Reader (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Part of chapter 3 was published as Between the Ornament and the Corpse: Adolf Loos and Classical Film Theory, in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova, AFI Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2008), 195–210.

Conceived in New York and written in Iowa City and Brighton, this book has been supported by the enthusiasms and good cheer of an international gang of friends, family, filmmakers, and cinephiles. Thanks are due to Loren Noveck, Cyrilla Layland, Shannon McLachlan, John Mhiripiri, and Tracey Sinclair for their hospitality during my research trips. Jill Bradbury, Natasha Zaretsky, Pedram Navab, Pearl Ng, and other friends far and near were much appreciated online cheerleaders when I was stuck at the computer for too many hours. Katy Hoffer kept my spirits up with cinematic visions of Amazonian hoghunters, and I probably would not be thinking about the pretty at all without Evelyn So. Most of all, I thank Adrian Goycoolea for his Madame X–like call to gold—love—adventure, without which this book and much else would not be possible.

INTRODUCTION

The Pretty as Troublesome Image

INTERSPERSED THROUGHOUT THE NARRATIVE OF CATALAN DIRECTOR Joachín Jordá’s avant-garde film Dante no es únicamente severo / Dante Is Not Only Severe (1967) are several explicit shots of a surgery performed on a beautiful woman’s eye. Jordá has described the film as a provocation of the audience and the surgery shots as an attempt to counter what he terms aesthetic drowsiness.¹ The shots are certainly arresting, but more striking is Jordá’s contention that a visually unpleasant or ugly image is necessary to fend off the seduction of the aesthetic. For him, the visually attractive image can only work against true radicality, and this danger—overtaking even his own film—must be countered with violent measures against the image itself. This filmic example crystallizes a mode of thought that is all too common in film theory. Jordá’s claim, in one form or another, runs through the history of writing on film, intertwining an often implicit aesthetic judgment with a usually explicit political critique. This judgment is present even in writing that aims to avoid the aesthetic as a measure of significance, and it leads to the political critique. Moreover, as this example makes plain, the unspoken aesthetic judgment hardly lacks for political implications. In subjecting its fashion model protagonist to on-screen dissection, Dante reminds us of the old gender trouble of the avant-garde—once again, slicing up eyeballs is necessary to guard against the aesthetic danger of women.

In this book, I effect a little dissection of my own to open up the body of film’s theoretical and critical history and to look, like Stan Brakhage, at the colors and patterns of its insides. If all of this talk of bodies and blood seems far from pretty, that is indeed the point. The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical and locating truth and value instead in variants of Jordá’s uglified film body. We might think, for example, of the resilience of empty spectacle as a figure of critique in film writing from journalism to high theory.² I suggest that this critique itself must be interrogated. That is, in positing the pretty as an aesthetic field in cinema, I am not so much selecting a body of texts or techniques to be placed alongside a transhistorical Kantian schema of beauty as proposing a method of reading that troubles this rhetorical history. The pretty is already present in film theory, naming the often unspoken bad object of successive critical models. In naming it, we can trace a thread, a structuring assumption, about the relation between form and content that institutes aesthetics as a problem in and for cinema. By staking a claim on the pretty as a category, we might reimagine the contested terrain of aesthetics and politics as well as open up film histories that have been hitherto unassimilable by the critical canon. And if rendering this discourse visible might involve cutting, reading the pretty demands that we move away from the rhetoric of blood and guts.

In citing the seduction and shallowness of the aesthetic image, we locate film theory within a philosophical history that dates from Plato’s separation of idea from image. For many readers of Plato, the word or idea is primary, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason and at worst a deceptive and dangerous cosmetic.³ The very language of Western aesthetics is not only logocentric, but also, as a corollary, iconophobic, and it finds the image to be secondary, irrational, and bound to the inadequate plane of the surface.⁴ As Jean-Luc Nancy explains, The image is degraded as secondary, as imitative and therefore as inessential, as derivative and lifeless, as deceitful and weak: nothing could be more familiar to us than this motif. In fact, for the duration of the West’s history, this motif will have resulted in the alliance (and it is doubtless this that has so decisively marked the West as such) forged between the principle of monotheism and the Greek problematic of the copy or the simulation, of artifice and the absence of the original. In a nod toward cinema, he adds that this alliance continues in our present day as a deep suspicion regarding ‘appearances’ or ‘the spectacle.’⁵ Dudley Andrew has directly connected this philosophical tradition to film theory, pointing to the more passionate diatribes of Marxists and feminists, who have to be counted among the chief iconoclasts of our era.⁶ So how do we reconcile a medium based on images with this intellectual inheritance of iconoclasm, the tearing down of images?

For art historian Jacqueline Lichtenstein, the image, banished by Plato from the realm of metaphysics, was never effectively suppressed, for it has haunted philosophy ever since, as the dead man’s figure haunts a criminal: just a shadow.⁷ With this dramatic figure, she instigates a hauntology of the image, tracing the secondariness that follows the image from the realm of philosophy into art history. Because art history is obliged not to reject the image altogether, it reframes the debate to one of disegno and colore, prizing the line’s signifying properties and relegating color to the lesser realm of emotion. To this trajectory, I add film studies. If classical aesthetics created a binary of word versus image and art history replicated this hierarchy within the image, then I hope to show how the cultures of cinema inherited both Plato’s suspicion of the image itself and a modern visuality enmired in iconophobic aesthetics. Writing on film thus very often polices line and color or narrative and mise-enscène as avatars of, on the one side, purity and reason and, on the other, primitivism and deception.

That this history speaks also to film might be suggested by nineteenth-century French critic Charles Blanc’s assessment of the dangers of color for painters of historical battles: In passionately pursuing the triumph of color, the painter runs the risk of sacrificing the action to the spectacle.⁸ This concern for (active) meaning over (passive) spectacle surely resonates with cinematic discourse. For example, in a nearly perfect repetition of Blanc’s critique, Anton Kaes argues in From Hitler to Heimat that the battle scenes in German war films attempt to present an antiwar narrative, but that moral messages evaporate when up against visual pleasure and spectacle.⁹ Across the major strands of film theory, this same impulse works to exclude certain categories of film as cosmetic or overly visual, whereas others may be redeemed by their linguistic elements or by linguistic critique. We might consider Christian Metz’s focus on cinematic language as an instance of the latter and Michel Chion’s attack on what he terms the neogaudy style of postclassical cinema as one of many examples of the former.¹⁰ For Chion, the neogaudy film uses a surface play of colors and glossy cinematography—for example, in the French cinéma du look—to replace an older engagement with the world itself. In other words, surface replaces depth, images replace meaning, aesthetics replaces philosophy. In his demand for a less pretty image, Chion’s text takes as read the identity of less pretty and more significant.

Of course, in proposing this inheritance, I do not mean to suggest a wholesale identification of film theory with Platonic aesthetics. The diversity of scholarship on cinema precludes any universalizing claims. But the problematic association of the image with the overly aesthetic and therefore with the inferior is complexly and persistently intertwined with the history of cinema. Denigration slides from the image as such to specific kinds of images (too colorful, too seductive, too cosmetic), in each case modeling the image that is too imagistic for its own good. These slippages make the pretty difficult to discern: it emerges in the gaps between values or as an unspoken counterpoint to critical assertions. Some of its resonances have explicitly countered aspects of the anti-image heuristic model; for example, feminist arguments for the critical value of the surface or the detail and queer theories of drag and the performative are all significant antidepth epistemologies to which I return as models for transforming dominant regimes of value. But my focus here is on why the denigration of the aesthetic image nonetheless remains such a standard critical practice, how it comes to be received wisdom for theorists who do not agree on much else, and, indeed, how the radical revisions of feminist and queer theories have reenacted this inheritance as often as they have countered it.

For Lichtenstein, An entire tradition, of which we are the heirs, takes cosmetics to mark an original defect, to veil an ugliness always sensed beneath the virtuosity of masks, to signal an imperfection that art seeks to dissimulate. Moral puritanism and aesthetic austerity, along with resentment and an old, stubborn, and underhanded desire to equate drabness with beauty, thus make their righteous alliance and take delight in a constantly reiterated certainty: only what is insipid, odorless, and colorless may be said to be true, beautiful and good.¹¹ Film studies, as much as art history, is heir to this aesthetic tradition. This is the terrain that film theory has conceded before it begins, producing the pretty as the necessary exclusion of successive claims on a meaningful image. This book traces the history of film theory’s inheritance from aesthetic thought, examining the anti-pretty structures and rhetorical tropes that have proved central to film culture. If the philosophical rejection of the image has been constitutive of Western thought, as Nancy and others argue, then it should come as no surprise that we can find anti-image discourse even at the heart of the moving image. But the pretty is not merely an extension of philosophical or art historical discourse into a new medium.

Cinema produces a unique concatenation of forces around art and international commerce, forcing those invested in visual aesthetics to consider the possibilities of a popular art and the significance of globally transited images. The problems of Plato’s cosmetic and Kant’s universal beauty are reinvigorated by the perceived dangers of the popular taste for spectacle and the mobilization of a global audience. Aesthetic theories depend on constructions of gender, sexuality, and race to regulate what kinds of bodies and images can be beautiful and who has access to value itself. Cinema condenses the sexism and racism of traditional aesthetics, but it also poses new questions about the pleasures of the image and the geopolitics of a global image culture. It embraces the gaudy and colorful, the pretty face of this year’s starlet, at the same time as it elaborates a battery of anti-pretty critiques to keep the medium’s essential qualities distanced from such secondary charms. Thus the pretty emerges as a problem in cinema in a way that it does not in art history or literature. Cognate qualities may certainly be found in other media—and I find common ground in the analyses of scholars such as Lichtenstein and Naomi Schor who have uncovered related histories in literature and art—but what compels in the pretty is how closely it is woven into the institutions of cinema and indeed into the constitution of the cinematic itself.

This book seeks to uncover the anti-pretty rhetoric of cinema, analyzing how ideas of the cosmetic as feminine, the Asiatic as effeminate, and the colorful as secondary have saturated film culture from the beginning. It argues that theories of cinematic specificity, realism, and ideology as well as the discourses of film criticism and international film culture depend on the exclusion of the pretty even where they espouse political and ethical values that seem entirely opposed to the prejudices of earlier aesthetic models. At the same time, it examines the pretty as a cinematic practice and a perspective for analysis: What does it look like when films take the disprized features of what I characterize as the decorative image as an aesthetic principle? Can the pretty be put to critical, even political, use? Further, if the pretty is usually rejected as too feminine, too effeminate, and too foreign, it can surely provide aesthetico-political friction for queer or feminist film or for cinemas engaged with but geopolitically distanced from Western aesthetic traditions. Might prettiness in cinema be uniquely able to develop a politics that engages gender, sexuality, and geographical alterity at a formal level rather than simply as a problem for representation?

To read the pretty image is to answer a call, to respond to a question traced across the body of film history. Such a call is many faceted: it must engage the broad history of aesthetics that grounds modern visual theories, and at the same time it must situate film form and style within local economies of place, time, and culture. This book argues for a longue durée of anti-pretty discourse in modernity, complexly imbricated in the period’s encounters with its racial and sexual others. Close reading of diffcult to categorize, noncanonical, and aesthetically problematic film texts determines the stakes of this process and its potential for resistance at the local level. To focus on this history is a political act, rereading bodies of film as well as the politics of the film body.

WHY "PRETTY"?

Why write on the pretty? The word implies taxonomies of beauty: on the first page of Umberto Eco’s On Beauty, he includes pretty alongside graceful, sublime, marvelous, and superb as terms that indicate something we like and something good.¹² Pretty is not the same as beautiful—the other words are not exact synonyms, either—but it is part of a related cloud of terms. But pretty is different from those other words in the disapprobation it attracts. Pretty things do not have the status of beautiful ones. My choice of terminology is a polemical move because pretty so immediately brings to mind a negative, even repugnant, version of aesthetic value for many listeners. Feminists hear in the term its diminutive implications; a pretty girl is one who accedes to patriarchal standards of behavior and self-presentation. Marxists think of prettiness as a quality of the commodity fetish, a central function of ideology’s ability to veil real relations. Many critics hear in the term a silent merely in which the merely pretty is understood as a pleasing surface for an unsophisticated audience, lacking in depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning. To defend the beautiful or the ugly might be a heroic or radical task, but the pretty is precisely defined by its apparently obvious worthlessness. So to advocate the pretty is an uphill task of lexical redemption. In the course of researching this book, I lost count of the number of interested but confused interlocutors who assumed that the only thing I could be writing about the pretty is how reprehensible it is. I do not mention this critique to garner sympathy: the apparent obviousness of the pretty’s inferiority is exactly what makes pretty the perfect term to describe the structural devaluation of the decorative image in cinema.

As we shall see throughout this book, prettiness is consistently evoked as a lesser quality, a gesture toward what goes wrong with aesthetics rather than toward its positive qualities. It is therefore fascinating to pay close attention to this rhetoric and to note exactly what (and who) is being excluded from aesthetic value. The history of the word itself traces the terms of such a political inscription. Derived from the Old English prætt, meaning a trick, a wile or a craft, the word pretty and its earliest meanings involve cunning and art. One should not make the mistake of supposing this craft to be neutral, however, for its metaphysics is close to witchcraft. This sense is maintained by Siegfried Kracauer, who conjures a hypothetical poorly made but realistic film. Nevertheless, he argues, "such a film is more specifically a film than the one which utilizes brilliantly all the cinematic devices and tricks to produce a statement disregarding camera-reality."¹³ Such cunning tricks are very different from the meanings of beauty, a term whose French origins connoted nobility and truth. Beauty is a proper form of image to admire, whereas prettiness is at once a lesser, feminine form and, like the Greek icon itself, inherently deceptive. Here we begin to discern the unique value of the pretty for thinking about cinema. As an aesthetic category, the pretty contains within itself the ambivalence about the truth status of the image that underwrites film theory. Moreover, with its implication of witchery, the word pretty bonds suspicion of the aesthetic image to the gendered political terms of its embodiment.

It is important to understand that this book is not an etymological study: although individual instances of the word pretty and its synonyms are often telling, my creation of pretty as a critical term aims to name and thus to render visible a cluster of ideas that are by no means tethered to a single word. The pretty is not an aesthetic category with a long history of critical engagement like the beautiful or the sublime, and it is therefore not possible (or desirable) simply to review the ways that previous cultural critics have deployed the term. Nor is my aim to create a new category, along the lines of the sublime, that would delimit and reify a particular set of aesthetic practices. Rather, I want to tease out a persistent and labile work of exclusion on which the creation of aesthetic categories entirely depends. Categories of value work by defining beauty against certain kinds of image (or certain kinds of body) that are not beautiful. And writing on cinema, I argue, enacts a persistent gesture of rejection of the overly pretty image. Thus to bring this work of exclusion into view, we must look for the various terms and rhetorical moves with which it has been constituted. The exclusion of the pretty in cinema encompasses such a range of theoretical vocabularies and historical contexts that a single term is needed not to flatten out difference, but to highlight the shape of a discourse that was hitherto (as ideology always is) taken for granted. Thus what I am calling the pretty is described in a variety of ways across film cultures, with terminology varying not only by language, but also by theoretical context and critical register.

The investigation of the pretty thus encompasses a twofold linguistic imperative. The first move is to gather together under one heading a hitherto dispersed array of critical terms and dismissive gestures that, I argue, operate to produce a consistent space of exclusion. We need a word to render this process visible, and to name these excluded images as pretty is to make clear that they have been excluded systematically, not haphazardly, and for reasons that political analysis can bring to light. Because the word pretty did not name an aesthetic concept before my harnessing of it, there is no reason to suppose that critics will consistently use it to flag the ideas I am interested in exposing. But by translating these various rhetorics into the language of prettiness, I am able to visualize and describe the stakes of this devalued aesthetic field. The second move counters this synthetic impetus with an attention to the rich historicity of aesthetic terms. The pretty intersects with various concepts—the decorative, the ornamental, the colorful, the picturesque, and the like—whose own cultural histories and linguistic specificity shed light on the problem of the pretty. These linked and often contested areas of visual studies help to describe the historical terrain of the pretty, and each of them plays a major part in this analysis. Each chapter highlights particular terms and examines what role those terms play in the constitution of the pretty. Critical concepts such as the ornamental and the arabesque do not collapse into a generalized pretty, but work to locate in the connected and overlapping shapes of this terrain a category with a unique potential for reimagining film aesthetics.

Because the cinematic pretty is a definitionally international question, we must also consider how the term translates beyond the Anglophone context. There clearly can be no one-to-one correlation of words that translate aesthetic and critical concepts directly across languages, and this impossibility accentuates the need for an analysis that is not tied to a specific lexicon. But the difficulties of translation should not prevent us from thinking about the global transits of film cultures. Just as classical narrative, neorealism, and art cinema have traveled the world—to say nothing of the institutions and counterinstitutions of the studio system, the film festival, and Third Cinema—so the exclusion of the pretty recurs in complex ways across international film culture. Equivalent terms to the English pretty appear in many languages to perform similar critical labor. In French, joli/e is often used in a very similar way to the English pretty to indicate a feminized and secondary variant of beau/belle. In Italian, carino does the same work, with cinema carino naming a sweet and feminine style of filmmaking in the 1990s that is almost always dismissed by critics as inferior to the political cinema of an earlier era. The Japanese kirei is closer to pretty than to beautiful and in manga culture marks a more sexualized femininity than the more familiar kawaii (cute).¹⁴ Thus although we cannot expect the same word to exist in all of its manifestations across languages, we can use pretty to evoke a constellation of qualities having to do with beauty, value, and femininity that resonate across many sites of modern aesthetic thought.

Once having established the choice of term, we might still ask why it should be desirable to read from the perspective of the pretty. Given the suspicion that many film scholars have for any form of aesthetic inquiry, it might seem perverse to focus on such an apparently trivial and unintellectual category. Sianne Ngai has responded to similar questions in her work on the cute, in which she argues for the historical reevaluation of minor taste concepts. Ngai contends that "while prestigious aesthetic concepts like the beautiful, sublime, and ugly have generated multiple theories and philosophies of art, comparatively novel ones such as cute, glamorous, whimsical, luscious, cozy, or wacky seem far from doing anything of the sort, though ironically, in the close link between their emergence and the rise of consumer aesthetics, they seem all the more suited for the analysis of art’s increasingly complex relation to market society in the twentieth century."¹⁵ Like Ngai’s minor terms, the pretty is undoubtedly imbricated in the consumer aesthetics of popular and art cinema, not to mention industrial design, art, tourism, and so on. As she goes on to make clear, it is not enough simply to condemn these categories as coopted or secondary. By mapping the rhetorical opposition of the sharp and pointy avant-garde to the soft and infantile cute, she draws out a political analysis of Gertrude Stein’s babbling language in terms of gender, sexuality, and modernity. Like the cute, the pretty is rarely seen as worthy of close examination, and yet it is a recurrent concept in both commercial and avant-gardist cinema.

Naomi Schor’s work offers another important insight into the significance of minor categories. In Reading in Detail, she undertakes a feminist archaeology of the detail, attributing the suspicion with which the detail has been viewed for much of Western history to its association with femininity. Whereas neoclassicism favored the Ideal, freed from any particularity, the rise of nineteenth-century realism brought the detail to the center of modern aesthetics. She argues that the detail was still not valued, however, and that its place between the ornamental (linked to effeminacy and decadence) and the everyday (linked to domesticity) explains its lack of status.¹⁶ This argument shares a methodological spirit with my own, and it also speaks implicitly to the continuing exclusion of the pretty. The everyday and the domestic have been thoroughly rehabilitated by critical theory and cultural studies, but the ornamental half of Schor’s equation remains largely disprized. Whereas the detail is now valued, and even the cute enjoys a subcultural hipster caché, the pretty may be the last target of traditional aesthetic disgust. What is important in both examples is the claim that a minor category might be particularly suited not only to rereading specific texts, but also to generating theories of an art form as such. Like the role that Ngai assigns to the cute in lyric poetry and Schor to the literary detail, I find that the pretty emerges as uniquely relevant for thinking cinema’s aesthetic terrain.

Insofar as commercial cinema is constantly dismissed as too pretty—as empty spectacle, surface without depth—we might view the pretty as the aesthetic concept that best describes cinema’s articulation of visual culture and twentieth-century capitalism. And yet the pretty also names those excluded images that both film theories and, on occasion, the economic institutions of cinema have found impossible to admit. Kracauer’s cunning film lacks the realist qualities of the truly cinematic, and we can hear an echo of this rejection of the decorative image in the difficult histories of Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (1955) and Zhang Yimou’s Ying xiong / Hero (2002). Cinema depends on a certain nexus of consumerism and aesthetic seduction, but it also finds a highly decorative image to be unassimilable. In this apparent contradiction lies the pretty’s reflexive ability to draw attention to the nature of the cinematic image: a recurrent taste category in cinema, it also speaks directly to the question of cinema. The pretty bespeaks a theoretical anxiety about the modern image, but it also names practices of image making that trouble aesthetic dogma.

How can we separate the places where prettiness guarantees capitalist inclusion from those that articulate aesthetic or political exclusion? This double-edged sword precisely figures the pretty’s unique relation to cinema: no other aesthetic category assumes such dominance at the same time that it delineates such a diverse history of rejection. To understand this paradox, which is precisely what interests me in the category, we might begin by describing certain formal strategies in cinema as pretty. Without reifying an aesthetic category, we will find it is nonetheless useful to list the kinds of images that we are talking about: colorful, carefully composed, balanced, richly textured, or ornamental. As discussed in later chapters, pretty qualities include deep colors, arabesque camera movement, detailed mise-en-scène, and an emphasis on cinematographic surface. The pretty is self-evidently designed, refusing notions of cinematic chance, but it is also measured, stopping short of transgressive excess. By the standards of realism, the pretty image is too much, but it is also not enough to be redeemed as radical excess. Not quite beautiful or sublime, it is also not camp or countercultural. The pretty image precisely troubles these categories of cinematic value, demonstrating their commonality by providing a common enemy for sometimes unexpected bedfellows.

The troublesome qualities of prettiness are vividly illustrated in Santosh Sivan’s film Theeviravaathi / The Terrorist (1998), which constructs the psychic space of a young Tamil woman training to become a suicide bomber by means of a highly aestheticized attention to her immediate environment. Sivan was a successful cinematographer before turning to directing, and critical reception of the film often focused on the exceptional light effects created out of lead actor Ayesha Dharkar’s face in close-up and the jungle through which her character, Malli, travels. J. Hoberman, for instance, compares the effects to those of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and M. G. Radhakrishnan finds the images to be stunning, lyrical and almost picture perfect. In short, beautiful.¹⁷ The film is frequently described in aesthetic terms, with words such as beautiful, dazzling, and sumptuous bandied by many reviewers. But it is often found to be too beautiful or beautiful in the wrong way: its aesthetic qualities mark it as cinematic, but they also mark it as ill at ease in the world, somehow difficult to value properly. Thus Hoberman describes the bodily movement of a prisoner being tortured as a disconcertingly fabulous arabesque and Sivan’s too gorgeous cinematography as mannered (for the geo- and body politics of the arabesque, see chapter 4). A. O. Scott in the New York Times finds that Sivan’s taste for extremely tight close-ups—and his tendency to decorate Malli’s face with raindrops and tears—feels annoyingly arty, a critique that makes clear the role played by the decorative in turning artistic images into arty ones.¹⁸ And Rai Paramjit suggests that while the movie is humanistic and sensitive, the striking visuals at times feel empty,¹⁹ illustrating how even in the context of a positive evaluation of content, pretty images lead inevitably to the specter of empty spectacle.

The pretty describes exactly this quality of discomfort with a style of heightened aesthetics that is too decorative, too sensorially pleasurable to be high art, and yet too composed and arty to be efficient entertainment. To some degree, this awkwardness is the condition of the art film, and as we will see in chapter 5, there is a strong affiliation between prettiness and art cinema. Where a more robust and masculinist art house style can engage discourses on uncensored realism or ambiguous psychology, the pretty aspects of art cinema speak to the tinge of suspicion that we find in many critical and spectatorial responses to the field. Such awkwardness is accentuated in The Terrorist because postindependence Indian cinema has developed little institutional space for the concept of the art house. Even though Satyajit Ray is a foundational figure in the growth of international art cinema, the dominance of the Hindi popular film industry has stifled indigenous art cinemas and, to some degree, has prevented Indian films from accessing the film festival circuit. Moreover, the art cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s emphasized screenwriting over visual style so that Sivan’s films, which attempt to overturn this association of Indian art cinema with visual impoverishment, are often viewed as too glossy. Thus The Terrorist is an institutionally troublesome film: an art film in a country whose industry has little space for art cinema, a Tamil film in a country dominated by Hindi-language cinema, and a highly aestheticized Indian film that eschews the popular decorative aesthetics of the musical. This is exactly the territory of the pretty.

The film raises several foundational questions of prettiness and cinema. It is decorative in its style: carefully composed, deeply colored, an orchestrated system of sound, music, and image design that creates the arabesques of Hoberman’s review. It is also centered around the body of a young woman. Close-ups of the female face and body have a privileged place in film history, and we might thus move to place The Terrorist into a category of reactionary prettiness in which large-scale images of conventionally attractive female stars embody consumable visual pleasure. Moreover, the film’s close-ups of Dharkar might be accused of enabling a fetishistic relationship to the exotic brown-skinned woman whose mission as a suicide bomber places her both at odds with acceptable codes of femininity and entirely within discourses of the dangerous and unknowable non-Western subject. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in regard to the female suicide bomber trope in contemporary politics and fiction, this character is a subaltern who does not speak but acts in silence and loses all possibility of active citizenship.²⁰

The ambivalent staging of gender and political violence in The Terrorist helps us perceive the difficulty of the pretty: its frequent association with an aestheticizing (and hence potentially exploitative) deployment of the feminine, the nonwhite or non-Western, along with an aesthetic strategy that is hard to categorize generically. But it also brings forward the exclusionary gesture with which prettiness as a critical rhetoric operates: even where reviewers found the film to be politically astute or nuanced, the prettiness of the form rendered the film less meaningful. There is a hint here of a metaleptic figuration of the pretty itself in the film’s disconcerting focus on Malli’s too-pretty face (figure 1). How can one see the ugliness of political violence in a pretty image? And yet what reactionary heuristic believes that such a feminized image is incapable of serious meaning? To limit a properly political account of intercommunal violence to a realist, gritty, or sparse visual style would not only be prescriptive but also insist on a masculinist aesthetic, steeped in colonial ideas about simplicity of form and the primitive qualities of ornament. The Terrorist deploys an international art house style to figure a Tamil and international politics otherwise, forcing the spectator to take up a different perspective.

FIGURE 1 Theeviravaathi / The Terrorist (Sivan, 1998)

Light effects and close-ups locate a traumatic politics on the surface of the screen.

Its prettiness makes The Terrorist difficult to read or too easy to dismiss, but it is also essential to the film’s project. The picturesque Sri Lankan landscape through which Malli travels bespeaks for Tamil audiences a traumatic history of political violence, just as the woman’s body evokes both the culturally resonant figure of the female poet and the specter of the systematic use of rape as a political weapon against Tamil women. The Terrorist foregrounds both landscape and the woman’s body as a strategy to represent this disjunctive and traumatic Tamil experience of violenced belonging. The film cannot articulate these traumas directly but evokes them in the formal tension between the beauty of the landscape and of the woman and the ugliness of the historical events that both