4. Animated Statues and Petrified Bodies: A Journey Inside Fantasy Cinema Michele Bertolini Abstract The essay aims to show the aesthetic and philosophical implications of the polarity between the animation of stone and the petrification of the body through a journey inside fantasy cinema and horror movies. The examples offered by horror movies like The Haunting (Robert Wise), Un Angelo per Satana (Camillo Mastrocinque) and La Venere d’Ille (Mario and Lamberto Bava) re-enact the mythical imagery of the animated statue as the intertwining of simulacrum and living body. Unlike these gothic models, two postmodern masterpieces, After Hours (Martin Scorsese) and Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg), evoke at the same time the ghost of contemporary sculpture and the cinema device as simulacra-producing machine. Keywords: Fantasy cinema; animation; horror movie; simulacrum; virtual body Since its very origins, cinema has had a strong attraction to the imagery of statues, that is to say petrified bodies, providing a new interpretation in particular of the polarity between the animation of stone and the petrification of the body. This polarity has been a leading thread—at times submerged, at times explicit—in the Western imagination since the history of archaic sculpture up to the contemporary debate on simulacra, from Ovid ̕ s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to the myth of Medusa. The inventory I present here—consisting of three examples directly stemming from genre movies in addition to two more examples somehow more heterogeneous and problematic—does not aspire to be exhaustive nor exemplary. It rather acts as a distinctively interesting Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI04 Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 90 MiChele Bertolini incentive inasmuch as it triggers unprecedented conceptual and media-related flashes of insight through the comparison of the mythical imagery of statues, its literary version codified according to somewhat institutionalised fantasy (i.e. fantasy literature), and ultimately the cinematic interpretation of this conceptual hub. The reference to archaic and mythical imagery within movies harks back to a pre-cinematographic background as it enters into dialogue with cinema’s specific means. Conversely, it is equally possible to detect cinematographic anticipations in the history of visual devices, in mythical tales, as well as in the history of aesthetics and theory of art. A general methodological premise is nevertheless required here: the words ‛fantasy cinema’ in the title should be taken in their wider and inter-media (stimulating the interaction of several media) meaning, as outlined by Jean-Louis Leutrat in his text Vie des fantômes: le fantastique au cinéma. Besides this taxonomic and historical endeavour, featured as well in other enquiries into the topic, Leutrat ventures towards remote lands on the borderline between cinema genres, thus tracking down some sort of genuinely cinematographic fantasy, which stems from the nature of the device itself, following in the footsteps of theoretically prestigious predecessors such as Sigmund Freud (Das Unheimliche), Roger Caillois (Au cœur du fantastique), and Tzvetan Todorov (Introduction à la littérature fantastique). According to Caillois, fantasy actually stands for some scandal, wound or unusual intrusion that is almost unbearable in the realm of reality, some sort of suspension of the accepted order that is, however, not ascribable to the realm of fairy tales or natural wonders, hence triggering incertitude, hesitation of meaning outside the limits of institutional, intentional, explicit fantasy.1 Such a category of fantasy may well be connected to cinema fantasy, whose territory, according to Leutrat’s perspective, encompasses markedly heterogeneous materials as a truly transversal category involving the whole cinema realm—the Lumière brothers as much as Méliès.2 The notion of border, limit, threshold is then crucial to the full understanding of fantasy inasmuch as it entails a crossing movement from inside to outside, from living to inanimate, and back. The very polarities of interior-exterior, animated-inanimate, stillness-movement trace a possible journey through fantasy cinema. The opposite poles should be investigated in both directions: from the body to the statue and from the stone to the bodily memory it preserves. 1 See Caillois, Au cœur du fantastique, p. 61; Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, pp. 28-29; Lazzarin, Il modo fantastico. 2 See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, p. 10. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 91 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), adapted from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, belongs to the Gothic tradition. It is articulated according to a double line, where the Impossible swings between figuration and its absence, between an incarnated ghost and a simulacrum dissolved in atmosphere, breath, puff. The movie presents indeed a wide range of horror sound effects matching its powerful visual effects. The theme of the progressive rediscovery of bodily memory within the lugubrious monument, here Villa Crane, is remarkably articulated in The Haunting. The gloomy villa, where mournful and terrible events took place and is now a stone monument enshrouded in silence, acquires little by little a face; it palpitates, lives, breathes, it has its own voice. From the very moment she gets there, the main character, Eleanor, is under the horrible and shameful impression that the walls, towers and deformed absurd windows are watching her. Reciprocal glances between the woman and the surrounding things are further embodied by the proliferating number of heads and faces featured by the heavy architecture and interior design of the house. Faces are found on doorknobs and shutters as well as on staircase balustrades. There are sculpted veiled heads, protruding angels and face-like forms appearing amidst the walls’ decorative shoots. Villa Crane has thousands of eyes observing its passing-by guests. Eleanor ends twice her hasty running through corridors bumping into her own face, filled with horror, in the reflection of a mirror. Her own face scares her even more, as if it were that of another woman. Thus the movie aptly expresses the delicate balance between horror subjectivity and objectivity. Furthermore, the characters’ passivity towards external hostile powers is suggested and reinforced by zooming in while simulating the aggression of the house on its guests. Such an aggression is therefore filmed from the ‛subjective’ viewpoint of the house itself. Endowed with gaze, Villa Crane is also a speaking, sound-emitting, noise-producing, trembling and vibrating organism. In the key episode of the visit to the conservatory, the several giant statues gathered there trigger a discussion concerning the identity of the sculpted figures, since they are unlisted in the catalogue of the house belongings. At first identified as a religious group (‛Saint Francis sharing donations’), the guests quartet ventured into the fully anachronistic identification of the subsequent inhabitants of the villa, starting with Lord Crane, his two wives, who tragically died in the villa, his daughter Abigail and Abigail’s maid, who died suicidal in the library. The encounter with the statue plays the role of a return to the origins, to the point of contact with the beginning of the curse. One last interpretation is offered: the group of sculptures would represent, even more anachronistically, the four actors of the story, Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 92 MiChele Bertolini who would be waiting to get back to stone, with Eleanor replacing the maid (both guilty of neglecting their ill and invalid mother/mistress the night they died) and the anthropologist John Markway replacing Lord Crane.3 Eleanor starts dancing around the group of marble pieces and, holding his hand, she invites Lord Crane, the master of the house (implicitly Markway, whom she discovers she is in love with) to join in. When seen from the viewpoint of Eleanor, who experiences the encounter with the statue as the metaphor of an erotic contact, the sudden animation has both disquieting and revitalising effects, acting as the space for the discharging of desire. Based on the groove traced by Pygmalion, one might argue that cinema and sculpture share the same desiring vocation channelled by gaze and tact. One movement, seen out of the corner of one’s eye, maybe real, maybe not, achieves the transformation of architecture into a pulsing, physical body. This is the conquest of figurativity, of shape and body, that the supernatural strives for, as anticipated by the anthropologist at the beginning of his experimental sojourn in the villa. In the very maybe, in the oscillating between seeing and not-seeing, between implicit and explicit, the whole fantasy of cinema̕ s specificity is played out, that is to say the undecidability of an always suspended uncanny, which possibly means also the overcoming of genre-limited perspectives. 4 The movement towards the body, moreover, is nothing but the reverse journey of what is outlined by the prologue, that is to say the body transforming into stone. The prologue and the story relate to each other in The Haunting as the front and back side of the same process of petrification of life and figuration of the supernatural, which is the core of Villa Crane’s curse. Abigail’s fate—orphaned in the big villa, never married, living all her life in her nursery room, hemmed in by the strict biblical admonitions of her father—is visually rendered by a series of crossed fading in and out, rapidly showing her child face ageing in bed until decrepit and gradually petrified into a mortuary mask.5 This sequence might evoke the famous ageing of the vampire-countess Marguerite Du Grand in I vampiri (Riccardo 3 The provisional identif ication of Markway with lord, or with the personif ication of the house, is also suggested by the prologue, where a male voice tells the origins of the curse on Villa Crane. The identity behind the voice, later replaced by Eleanor, is not clearly determined: whose voice is this? Does it belong to an external narrator? To Markway? Is it the voice of the personified house? See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, pp. 106-107. 4 See Cappabianca, Trame del fantastico, pp. 37-38. 5 Cross fading is the syntax of the whole prologue of The Haunting, suggesting the continuity, circularity and repetition of the curse affecting the dwelling. It also evokes a ghostly, undifferentiated matter, a non-image. See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, pp. 78-79. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 93 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS Freda, 1957), which displays the petrification of female beauty in the horror of a mask, this time in long take. By appealing to ‘some standard situation of horror movies since the ’30s’, the sudden decaying of someone’s face on screen, as ‘codified semantic element’,6 transforms the film camera into a sculptor, that is to say a Medusa-like gaze which is able, thanks to the specifically cinematographic device, to sculpt flesh in virtue of a frightful acceleration of life timeframes. Based on the equivalence of sculpture and death, the camera is able to take up the sculptor’s job, thus embodying the powers of a haptic gaze that touches and transforms the targeted matter. Next to the idea of cinema as body sculpting, one may place the reference to sculpture—still within movie language—as cast, automatic imprint, moulage. As Dominique Païni points out: ‘irresistibly sculpture and cinema lead us towards a common denominator, corralling their comparable vocation to illusion: cinema replicates movement, sculpture replicates the volume of bodies, both are a matter of moulding.’7 The realism of the cast was previously outlined by Bazin and has been recently refreshed by Deleuze and Didi-Huberman.8 Such a viewpoint does not represent an overused comparison between the arts but rather the possibility of inhabiting an intermediary space between sculptural images and cinema images, the entre-images, and thus, for instance, to approach sculpture as a photo-cinematographic device for the sedimentation of time. The petrification of the face is linked to one of the two mythical figures presiding over the processes of animation of the statue, or vice versa of petrification of the body: Medusa and Pygmalion. While Pygmalion is the sculpture who, by hand and chisel, builds up, shapes and adorns death, Medusa ‘is the Gorgon sculptor who petrifies, on the spot, what touches. Thus, death and statue call mutually upon each other like silent signs constantly referring to one another to make one say what the other withholds.’9 The statue then stands for a body reduced to a corpse, deprived of the specific features of a living body.10 Granted that the corpse is the reverse of the living body, the statue doubles the corpse itself, introducing the principle of multiplication and generation of images that pertains to the logics of simulacra. The animation of stone and the petrification of the body can thus be taken as two dynamic polarities of the same mythical structure that encompasses 6 See Di Chiara, I tre volti della paura, p. 67, and Prawer, Caligari’s Children. 7 See Païni ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion: sculpter à l’écran’, p. 117. 8 See Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, pp. 9-16; Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image; Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact. 9 See Chareyre-Méjan, Le réel et le fantastique, p. 95. 10 See Rosset, Principes de sagesse et de folie, pp. 108-110. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 94 MiChele Bertolini the imagery of statues, that is to say petrified bodies, as the intertwining of simulacrum and living body. Such imagery, as Aurélia Gaillard points out in Le corps des statues, pervades Western civilisation from classical antiquity to the Pygmalionic mania of the eighteenth century.11 One may also recall that Pygmalion’s tale, as presented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, is preceded by the short episode concerning the metamorphosis of the Propetides, who are turned into stone statues because Aphrodite is offended by their indecent and lascivious behaviour. This is also the premise to Pygmalion’s renunciation of women and to the idea of shaping a simulacrum without imitating any model. The examples provided by Un angelo per Satana (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1966) and La Venere d’Ille (Mario and Lamberto Bava, 1978) are full of nineteenth-century literary impressions derived from the disturbing and threatening imagery of the animation of statues, where the feminine, embodied by the legendary married Venus of the early Middle Ages, is a destructive force against the masculine. Also in this case, it is the presence of the sculpture and of its ghost within the cinematic device (not exclusively on the explicit level of narrative fiction) that produces the most interesting effects, giving rise to some second-level phantasy pertaining to cinema as a simulacrum-producing machine. Un angelo per Satana by Camillo Mastrocinque is a late product of Italian gothic cinema—a sub-genre related to melodrama, with no strict autonomy within the Italian cultural production context of the 1950s and 1960s. It incorporates several literary elements ranging from Fogazzaro’s Malombra (twice adapted to cinema: by Carmine Gallone in 1917 and by Mario Soldati in 1942)—which is somehow the archetype of Italian literary gothic due notably to its lake-side outdoor location—to Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, in which the topic of the discovery of a misfortune-casting cursed statue is also explored, although Mastrocinque’s direct literary source is identified in one of Luigi Emmanuele’s short stories. In this case, the statue belongs to the idealised classical era, and it is fished out of the lake (Mérimée’s story, adapted by Mario and Lamberto Bava in 1979, features instead a dark, black Venus emerging from the earth). Its function is to serve as a mysterious narrative artif ice introduced to feed the audience a false lead of interpretation. The fantasy element of the statue possessing the main character, the statue depicting a nymph closely resembling a family ancestor, is actually rooted in very mundane intrigues, orchestrated by Harriet’s uncle and his lover. Beyond the clearly narrative function of the 11 See Gaillard, Le corps des statues. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 95 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS statue—the missing link between the young sculptor and the leading character Harriet—it is worth investigating how the marble statue, the image of an idealised and normative body, actually interacts with another monumental body, that is to say the virtual body of the genre-cinema star, Barbara Steele. The superimposition of statue and body triggers a dynamic exchange. The statue generates an internal scission in Harriet’s character, as her original identity as a young and shy girl is thrown off balance and an erotic, transgressive, predatory, disquieting charge is set free. Such a pattern is widely employed by Italian gothic cinema, whose pivotal centres are feminine figures and the topics of duplicity and body.12 In actual terms, the splitting of the character does nothing but mirror the ambiguity of Barbara Steele’s acting roles. In 1966, she had already collected several ‛double’ roles. In this respect, also a minor movie such as Un angelo per Satana can be taken as the ultimate recapitulating chapter of a cinema genre and career, where the classical statuary model entertains a dialectical relationship with the vampire charm of a female character actor whose beauty is clearly anti-classical. The theme of feminine internal splitting and of the evocation of a double side—overturned, stimulated or generated by the statue’s presence—is also chosen by Mario and Lamberto Bava, together with literary critic Cesare Garboli (co-screenwriter), in the adaptation of Mérimée’s fantasy short story, La Vénus d’Ille.13 This medium-length movie was finally commissioned by RAI TV show I giochi del diavolo. Storie fantastiche dell’Ottocento. At variance with the literary source, director and screenplayer emphasise here the originally only lightly suggested affinity between the two Venuses: the black, sombre, menacing statue and Alfonso’s pale, shy, delicate wife-to-be, whose name in the movie, Clara, has more than clear connotations. At first sight, the two characters display opposite features and inclinations. The statue is all terrestrial, as it is extracted from the earth, while Clara is as celestial as her name suggests. However, from the perspective of the narrative—which in the movie, unlike in the original story, is not an unnamed narrating ego fully external to the events but a real character in flesh named Matteo, directly involved and attracted by the charm of both the statue and Clara—the two figures overlap and replace one another. While sketching the statue for professional reasons, Matteo ends up portraying Clara’s profile. With her he also has a short affair, which is completely missing in Mérimée’s 12 See Curti, Fantasmi d’amore. 13 The story attracted also Jean Cocteau’s attention as far as its cinema adaptation was concerned. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 96 MiChele Bertolini account. Just one brief passage in the original story mentions the affinity between the young bride and the statue: She was not only beautiful, she was alluring. […] Her kind look, which yet was not free from a touch of malice, reminded me, in spite of myself, of my host’s Venus. While making this inward comparison, I asked myself if the incontestably superior beauty of the statue did not in great measure come from its tigress-like expression; for energy, even in the service of evil, always surprises us and inspires a sort of involuntary admiration.14 Mérimée’s text presents furthermore those structural elements of the statue’s imagery as petrified body: gaze, movement, speech. The dark Venus from Roussillon, whose beauty is fierce and cruel, has a hint of movement even while standing still, her evil smile looks like it is about to talk. The inscription on the statue pedestal—CAVE AMANTEM—has an ambiguous meaning and supports two potential translations: ‘Beware of your lover’ or ‘Watch out if she (Venus) loves you’. And finally, the truth of her shapes looks as if the statue was modelled or even moulded by nature itself.15 The doubling of the Venus statue into Clara prompts, furthermore, Bava to achieve one of the most deservedly praised shots of this career-crowning medium-length movie, which is also a meta-filmic moment of reflection on the evocation potential of strictly cinematographic phantasy. The statue, placed in the garden, perfectly still and heavy in its rigid three-dimensionality, takes on a double appearance entering Matteo’s room when he opens the window and finds the head of the statue very close to him in the glass reflection, as if the statue was actually in the room and could reflect itself on this projective screen. Cinema devices are thus evoked as the mechanism of production of bi-dimensional and evanescent, phantasmagorical and moving simulacra. The room serves as a metaphor for cinema’s projection rooms (or as a pre-cinema vision device: a darkroom), whose mirrors, glasses or windows may act as projection screens or ghost-reflecting screens. Granted that the leitmotif of the double as the persistency of the past floating back in the present and disturbing the characters’ minds is often rendered in cinema through portraits (see the proliferation of ‛portrayed women’ in cinema literature), what exactly is the role of the statue in cinema’s evocation of simulacra? On the one hand, the sculpted object provides a concrete, bodily presence to cinema’s virtual bodies by playing contrapuntally on 14 See Mérimée, The Venus of Ille. 15 See ibid. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 97 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS the contrast with film image, which is closer to the painting medium due to its bidimensionality. The simple stillness-movement antithesis appears to place sculpture and cinema at opposite poles of some ideal scale, thus giving way to the claim according to which sculpture’s presence in cinema bears testimony to some directors’ fascination and disquiet ‘concerning a condition prior to conquered cinégénie, […] the threatening or staggering return’ of an archaic state prior to the conquest of movement: ‘freeze, arrest, immobility, standstill’.16 On the other hand, the sculpted simulacrum is the idol ready to animate itself and thus the closest image competing with what Dominique Païni has defined as cinema’s ‛Pygmalion’s complex’ (the reverse parallel of Bazin’s ‛mummy complex’), that is to say the original vocation of cinema, according to some interpreters, to engender animated simulacra, endowed with gaze and movement. The issue at stake concerns a form of inter-mediality or meta-picture allowing the comparison between still images and moving pictures, thus opening the way to and inaugurating cinema’s internal discussion on its medium and pictures in general.17 In relation to sculpture, however, cinema often does not offer a new version of Pygmalion’s myth (even though Pygmalion and Galatea is the subject of Méliès’ movie) but rather is the explicit result of Pygmalion’s complex: the example of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is paradigmatic, as aptly argued by Stoichita at the end of The Pygmalion Effect.18 More than his friend and Madelaine/Julie’s deceit and trickery, the main character Scotty cannot stand the idea of being a second-level Pygmalion, given that the ‛first’ Julie has been modelled, clothed and trained by his friend to play the role of Madelaine/Carlotta Valdez. The simulacrum has been assembled and animated by someone else: the statue is already there; it is never assembled in front of the audience. Movies come in later, hinting at a second-level interpretative and theoretical action. Like the figures of the sculptor-restorer in Un angelo per Satana and of the archaeologist-designer in La Venere d’Ille, it works on previously existing shapes, already fully formed. Compared to the gothic models initially considered here, which do not depart from the rules of their cinema genre and provide overtly traditional references to sculptures, the examples provided by Cronenberg and Scorsese present two directors committing to a more direct and much more explicit reference to contemporary art and notably to contemporary sculpture. 16 See Païni, ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion’, p. 110. 17 See Mitchell, ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science’, pp. 11-30. 18 See Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 98 MiChele Bertolini For instance in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), one traditional motif of thriller and horror genre cinema is fully reversed: human corpses are hidden and masked as wax or plaster statues, gathered in a macabre horror museum functional to the display of the creative desires of failed artists.19 The papier-maché shell that simultaneously petrifies and saves the young office worker, Paul, at the end of his crazy night in New York, after being chased and harassed by a crowd of citizens and enraged women in Soho, is some sort of protective layer that allows the return from the night hell into a livid and uncertain daybreak. His liberation is not only spatial—at the end of the night, Paul is finally able to get out of the magic neighbourhood that was holding him hostage in the spare time of after hours and finds himself in front of the entrance of his firm,—but also a return back in time, inside a symbolic maternal womb, prepared and handcrafted by Jane, an artist with a maternal protectiveness for the unfortunate Paul. She saves him from lynching by hiding him in a piece of art that looks like a disguised sculpture by George Segal. It is precisely George Segal who is the object of the amused verbal exchange between the two flat burglars, Neil and Pepe, who smuggle the statue hosting Paul. It is, however, a George Segal double, as the two mistake the actor George Segal for the homonymous sculptor from New York who produces plaster bandage casts of his own body.20 The camouflage is double: a fake artwork hiding a human being downplaying him to the condition of internal organ. The fear of death, emasculation and mummification permeate the whole of this entertaining noir and surreal comedy. Kiki Bridges’ statue, which follows Paul’s traces into the night as a disquieting warning, is inspired by Munch’s Scream and it acts as a mirror of his condition, almost an anticipation of his destiny. A 20-dollar banknote is stripped from the statue by Paul, the same 20 dollars he lost; his own body is full of strips of newspaper and glue. The final petrification in plaster and newspapers is inversely the possibility of a re-birth. The body becomes a work of art, or better yet, it pretends to be one. A living body sneaks in and hides in a plaster shell as a last resort for the seemingly impossible return back home. As suggested by the title, in the exchange between body and plaster statue, the retrieval or loss of a certain amount of lifetime is at stake. Paul enters the Soho night 19 See for instance, Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933), its remake (by André De Toth 1953), Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), the latter with its carillon of full-scale statues depicting martyrs at the stake or famous female murderers, some of which are actually real bodies covered in painted wax, or also Games (Curtis Harrington, 1967). 20 The sculptor is also interested in cinema as daily common environmental or situational space. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 99 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS in a crazy speeding taxi where he loses his 20 dollars, a material symbol of the freedom to dispose of one’s own time and body. The nighttime eludes him; everything flows too fast or too slow after hours. At any rate, time is uncontrollable for the subject. The slow circular time of the mummifying process with newspaper strips allows Paul to conquer again the space of a new birth in mundane time. It is not a matter of replacement or splitting, it is rather the incorporation of the living body within the simulacrum body. The sculpture functions as a mask, a saving mask at the cost of disappearing, paid for by the protagonist’s becoming invisible.21 Unlike the mirror-screen, which doubles the image on one single surface—and which is crucial to Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)—here the image of Paul’s face slips inside the statue, inhabits it from within, anyway allowing the acknowledgment of the gap, fracture, the animated eyes seeing through the protective shell. The doubling of the simulacrum in Dead Ringers suggests instead multiplicity, that is to say the multiplication of the same image. The female figure of Claire not only ‘is an actress, profession prone to doubling, but she has in the deepest intimacy of her person a triple uterus, which reproduces the trio structure she forms with the twins’.22 Dead Ringers marks, from this viewpoint, a step further compared to fantasy tales revolving around the double (alter ego or doppelgänger) generated and moved by the discovery or retrieval of a statue, of an automaton. The statue, doubling as a corpse, as Michel Serres writes in Statues, is the shifting of a subject—lying underneath in the tomb—into an object in front of us but referring to the excluded third, which is the hic jacet, the corpse, and which requires whenever visible a shifting movement, someone to replace it.23 At first sight, Dead Ringers revolves around a process of continuous replacement between the two twins, progressively acquiring in the story different names and features, specific characters, dualities triggered by Claire Niveau’s arrival, the actress who is the lover of both of them. The female figure not only has a dramatic function of breaking and separating the inseparable couple but also triggers a process of continuous doubling in the two male figures, which see her as changing, thus bearing a metamorphic power that can be made visible or carried out. Beverly and Elliot acknowledge themselves as internally pervaded by continuous doubling: each brother conceals himself under the identity of the other. The ghost of sculpture, then, comes back to cinema in Dead Ringers, not anymore in the form of a comparison between the living and the simulacrum, 21 See Cappabianca, ‘Il doppio insanguinato’, pp. 36-37. 22 See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, p. 67. 23 See Serres, Statues. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 100 MiChele Bertolini between the three-dimensional body and its reflected image—potentially aspiring to the life of the original and to replace it—but rather as an attempt to provide visible shape and body to the internal beauty of mutant organs, as mentioned by one of the Mantle twins, who wishes there were beauty contests for the inside of bodies still waiting for the achievement of their metamorphosis. Two elements of the movie deserve particular attention: the sculptural, plastic presence of gynaecological tools, figuratively included from the opening credits almost as instruments of torture, and the twin nature of the main characters, evoking both the simulacrum-like nature of the film body of actors and the ability of cinema to generate simulacra through the process of duplication of the image. The gynaecologist tools devised by [one of] the twins, the inventors of the ‛Mantle Retractor’, are unusable for surgery and are exposed as works of art in Anders Wolleck’s gallery. These are tools that wish to elude both their identification with mere anatomical instruments to be used on corpses—the result, then, of a merely intellectualistic and cold approach to the mystery of the living body and its inside—and their assimilation of the hybrid mixtures of flesh and steel resulting from the post-organic synthesis of living and inanimate, following the imagery familiar to Cronenberg, starting from the gun-hand of Videodrome. These tools would instead embody the twins’ monstrous dream of providing an external cast—in reverse—of an internal organ that does not yet exist, of an imaginary body fitting and modelled on the morphology of technique, without being penetrated or anatomised by the tool. After risking the death of a patient with his tool, Beverly replies to Elliot: ‘It’s nothing the matter with the instrument. It’s the body. The woman’s body was all wrong’. The tools are supposed to simultaneously embody the cold lucidity of a clinical gaze and the eros of a desiring and living body, grasping the point of contact between bios and techne, but they end up incarnating Beverly and Elliot’s mental demons. The tools are casts of an absent interior; they are doubles without their originals, just as the twins themselves appear to be doubles without a matrix. They are indeed a hendiadys that got lost in the ‘journey back to the origin, inside the maternal body’24 in the attempt to repeat the moment of birth, the moment in which the one was displayed as two—as double—opening themselves up to a disturbing metamorphosis. The journey to the interior of the body that Cronenberg inaugurates in Dead Ringers—deviating from the paradigm of contamination between flesh, body and technological mediums as well as from the obsession with the hybridisation of different living species supposedly engendering the 24 See Grünberg, ‘Inseparabili, ovvero la prova della solitudine’, p. 93. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 101 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS ‛new flesh’—is solved in the aporia of an absent, missing origin. The woman figure, always potentially fertile in Cronenberg’s cinema, is here either sterile due to an excess of matrix or unreachable. It is then reduced to the full flatness of film bodies, as made explicit by cinema screens due to the technical device in use. The perfected use of split screen in the movie makes Beverly the mirror reflection of Elliot, two ghostly silhouettes without depth, two bodies made virtual by the cinema medium, thus producing an even more disquieting effect due to the absence of the ‘reassuring middle line of the old split screen, easily identified as a suture trace’.25 The screen appears therefore to be doubled by a double ghost (as if it is split in two), invaded by a double embodied actor, for instance in the final sequences before the murder of Elliot by Beverly, where the two identical bodies run one after the other and repeat the same gestures. Their roles are indefinitely mixed up. There is no more an older brother and a younger brother, a father brother and a son brother, a cynical and aggressive one and a shy and sensitive one (as shown in the first half of the movie, where their difference emerges as a difference among indiscernibles only clear to Claire). The absence of any reference or hint of the reality of the double body, to the double role of Jeremy Irons, brings forward a similar doubt concerning the nature of cinema images as deprived of all reference, as able to duplicate and to split into film spectres. Arguably the use of twins is typical of contemporary simulacra, where ‘the flesh reality of their bodies is annihilated by their similarity, by the contiguity of the same’. Faced with the image of twins, as Baudrillard argues in L’échange symbolique et la mort, ‘the gaze can only go from one to the other, and these poles enclose all vision. This is a subtle means of murdering the original, but it is also a singular seduction, […] perhaps this is the seduction of death.’26 The seductive power of death actually finds a plastic, almost sculptural result in the final image of Dead Ringers, which is almost a sculpted Piety, an overturned fraternal and filial piety between identical people, where Beverly lies down in Elliot’s lifeless lap. In Cronenberg’s cinema, the heroes of his bizarre contes philosophiques (from Videodrome to The Fly and Dead Ringers) are often alone but never unique, never identical. Like cinema stars, they are never one, they are living body and ghost together. And even their death—or their suicide—must be double. (Translated from the Italian by Tessa Marzotto) 25 See Cappabianca, L’immagine estrema, p. 114. 26 See Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 73. Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 102 MiChele Bertolini Works cited Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: SAGE, 1993). André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), in What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, pp. 9-16 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Roger Caillois, Au cœur du fantastique (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). Alessandro Cappabianca, ‘Il doppio insanguinato’, in Martin Scorsese, ed. by Edoardo Bruno, pp. 31-37 (Rome: Gremese, 1992). ———, L’immagine estrema. Cinema e pratiche della crudeltà (Milan: Costa & Nolan, 2005). ———, Trame del fantastico. Riflessi e sogni nel cinema (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2011). Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Le réel et le fantastique (Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 1994). Roberto Curti, Fantasmi d’amore. Il gotico italiano tra cinema, letteratura e tv (Turin: Lindau, 2011). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image (1983), trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986). Francesco Di Chiara, I tre volti della paura. Il cinema horror italiano (1957-1965) (Ferrara: UniPress, 2009). Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Les Ėditions de Minuit, 2008). Aurélia Gaillard, Le corps des statues. Le vivant et son simulacre à l’âge classique (de Descartes à Diderot) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003). Serge Grünberg, ‘Inseparabili, ovvero la prova della solitudine’, in David Cronenberg. La bellezza interiore, ed. by Michele Canosa, pp. 80-93 (Genoa: Le Mani, 2005). Stefano Lazzarin, Il modo fantastico (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000). Jean-Louis Leutrat, Vie des fantômes. Le fantastique au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1995). Prosper Mérimée, The Venus of Ille, trans. by Myndart Verelst (New York: Minton, Brentanos, 1887; repr. 2005). William J.T. Mitchell, ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science’, in Visual Literacy, ed. by James Elkins, pp. 11-30 (New York: Routledge, 2008). Dominique Païni, ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion: sculpter à l’écran’, in SculpterPhotographier. Photographie-Sculpture, ed. by Michel Frizot and Dominique Païni, pp. 109-119 (Paris: Marval, 1993). Siegfried S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Clément Rosset, Principes de sagesse et de folie (Paris: Les Ėditions de Minuit, 1991). Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press 103 AniMAted StAtueS And pe trified BodieS Michel Serres, Statues. Le second livre des fondations (Paris: Bourin, 1987). Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. Towards a Historical Anthropology of Simulacre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). About the author Michele Bertolini teaches Aesthetics and Art Criticism at the Accademia di Belle Arti “Carrara” (Bergamo). His research focuses on the links between the verbal and the visual, on the aesthetics and ontology of moving images, on the aesthetics of spectatorship. As well as writings on aesthetics, art theory (Diderot, Balzac, Cassirer, Malraux, Fried) and cinema (Bazin, Bresson, Lang, Tarkovskij, Tourneur, Welles), he is the author of Quadri di un’esposizione. I Salons di Diderot (Aracne, 2018) and La rappresentazione e gli affetti. Studi sulla ricezione dello spettacolo cinematografico (Mimesis, 2009). He has translated and edited: André Bazin, Jean Renoir (Mimesis, 2012), Diderot e il demone dell’arte (Mimesis, 2014), and co-edited: Abstraction Matters. Contemporary Sculptors in their own Words (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press