{"title":"Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble","authors":"Damien Pollard","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907668","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble Damien Pollard (bio) Cinema and other forms of screen-based media have many ways of representing the air, of somehow rendering its presence in an image or a soundtrack palpable. The air’s kinetic interaction with solid objects in the form of wind, its saturation with liquid particles in the form of fog or steam, and its intimate implication in the movements of the breathing body all testify to its tangible profilmic materiality.1 One of the most complex and least attended of the air’s many onscreen revelations, however, is the bubble. Bubbles seem to have drawn the attention of both amateur and professional filmmakers from the medium’s formative days. Georges Méliès’ magical “trick” film Les Bulles de savon animées / Soap Bubbles (France, 1906) features a man using a pipe to blow bubbles that are, in fact, human faces before himself floating away in an animated bubble. A few years earlier in 1902, Alfred Ernest Passmore had recorded a one-minute film of his wife and three young children blowing bubbles (real ones, unlike Méliès’ performer) using pipes in their garden in London. The children embrace the task enthusiastically, blowing hard and staring intently at the bubbles coming from their pipes as the camera holds the scene in a static wide shot. The short film revolves around the elusive appearance of the bubbles, and they exert a visual gravity that is perhaps out of keeping with their ethereal and ephemeral nature. [End Page 95] Yet, in a sense it is unsurprising that the bubble should attract the nascent filmic gaze. Bubbles had been of great interest to the visual arts for centuries: in the seventeenth century, for example, painters seized upon the image of the bubble as a showcase for technical skill. Wayne Martin explains that this is due to “the painterly challenge bubbles present: how does one create, in oil, a convincing representation of a maximally transparent object? It is worth taking note of the technique that is used: a light circle conveys a visual edge. . . . In short, one paints a bubble by painting what it reflects.”2 The bubble in these paintings serves as a spectacular celebration of image making per se but has also often garnered important moral and allegorical significance. Angelica Frey explains that “interest in bubbles in the arts, literature, and sciences reached a high point in the seventeenth century, when they became closely associated with the concept of vanitas vanitatum, the fragility and transience of human life. Homo bulla (man is a bubble) was a concept dear to the baroque era.”3 Artists such as Hendrick Andriessen, Peeter Sion, and David Bailly often invoke bubbles in this way, depicting them alongside skulls, hourglasses, and decaying fruit so that they might lend their ephemerality to the works’ articulation of human existence’s fleetingness. In vanitas painting, the bubble thus serves two purposes. It is both a demonstration of a painter’s ability to give convincing visual form to an object that itself possesses perceptible form in only the most minimal and complex manner and a symbolic linchpin for the work’s meaning. The bubble draws the gaze and yet always also reaches beyond itself. Of course, in contexts far beyond that of the vanitas painting, the bubble continues to be frequently recruited for metaphor. The (now) common terms “financial bubble” and “social bubble,” for example, play on the fragility and the brevity yet also the undeniable tangibility of the bubble’s bordered form. Peter Sloterdijk has recruited the term more extensively: Bubbles, the first in his Spheres trilogy, posits the bubble as a metaphor for the contingent social and physical spaces that humans construct for themselves.4 Elsewhere, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll has recruited the image of the soap bubble to represent a given animal’s perceptual ambit; for him, the bubble stands in for “the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.”5 As is the case with vanitas painting, these brief examples suggest that the bubble’s delicate and ephemeral visual form leads inevitably and immediately to the symbolic. In general, the bubble seems...","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907668","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble Damien Pollard (bio) Cinema and other forms of screen-based media have many ways of representing the air, of somehow rendering its presence in an image or a soundtrack palpable. The air’s kinetic interaction with solid objects in the form of wind, its saturation with liquid particles in the form of fog or steam, and its intimate implication in the movements of the breathing body all testify to its tangible profilmic materiality.1 One of the most complex and least attended of the air’s many onscreen revelations, however, is the bubble. Bubbles seem to have drawn the attention of both amateur and professional filmmakers from the medium’s formative days. Georges Méliès’ magical “trick” film Les Bulles de savon animées / Soap Bubbles (France, 1906) features a man using a pipe to blow bubbles that are, in fact, human faces before himself floating away in an animated bubble. A few years earlier in 1902, Alfred Ernest Passmore had recorded a one-minute film of his wife and three young children blowing bubbles (real ones, unlike Méliès’ performer) using pipes in their garden in London. The children embrace the task enthusiastically, blowing hard and staring intently at the bubbles coming from their pipes as the camera holds the scene in a static wide shot. The short film revolves around the elusive appearance of the bubbles, and they exert a visual gravity that is perhaps out of keeping with their ethereal and ephemeral nature. [End Page 95] Yet, in a sense it is unsurprising that the bubble should attract the nascent filmic gaze. Bubbles had been of great interest to the visual arts for centuries: in the seventeenth century, for example, painters seized upon the image of the bubble as a showcase for technical skill. Wayne Martin explains that this is due to “the painterly challenge bubbles present: how does one create, in oil, a convincing representation of a maximally transparent object? It is worth taking note of the technique that is used: a light circle conveys a visual edge. . . . In short, one paints a bubble by painting what it reflects.”2 The bubble in these paintings serves as a spectacular celebration of image making per se but has also often garnered important moral and allegorical significance. Angelica Frey explains that “interest in bubbles in the arts, literature, and sciences reached a high point in the seventeenth century, when they became closely associated with the concept of vanitas vanitatum, the fragility and transience of human life. Homo bulla (man is a bubble) was a concept dear to the baroque era.”3 Artists such as Hendrick Andriessen, Peeter Sion, and David Bailly often invoke bubbles in this way, depicting them alongside skulls, hourglasses, and decaying fruit so that they might lend their ephemerality to the works’ articulation of human existence’s fleetingness. In vanitas painting, the bubble thus serves two purposes. It is both a demonstration of a painter’s ability to give convincing visual form to an object that itself possesses perceptible form in only the most minimal and complex manner and a symbolic linchpin for the work’s meaning. The bubble draws the gaze and yet always also reaches beyond itself. Of course, in contexts far beyond that of the vanitas painting, the bubble continues to be frequently recruited for metaphor. The (now) common terms “financial bubble” and “social bubble,” for example, play on the fragility and the brevity yet also the undeniable tangibility of the bubble’s bordered form. Peter Sloterdijk has recruited the term more extensively: Bubbles, the first in his Spheres trilogy, posits the bubble as a metaphor for the contingent social and physical spaces that humans construct for themselves.4 Elsewhere, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll has recruited the image of the soap bubble to represent a given animal’s perceptual ambit; for him, the bubble stands in for “the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.”5 As is the case with vanitas painting, these brief examples suggest that the bubble’s delicate and ephemeral visual form leads inevitably and immediately to the symbolic. In general, the bubble seems...
达米安·波拉德(Damien Pollard)电影和其他形式的屏幕媒体有很多方式来表现空气,以某种方式将其呈现在图像或配乐中。空气与以风的形式存在的固体物体的动力学相互作用,它与以雾或蒸汽的形式存在的液体粒子的饱和,以及它在呼吸体运动中的亲密暗示,都证明了它的有形的轮廓物质然而,在屏幕上曝光的众多空气污染事件中,最复杂、最不受关注的是泡沫。泡沫似乎已经吸引了业余和专业电影制作人的注意,从媒体形成的日子。乔治·姆萨梅斯的魔幻“魔术”电影《肥皂泡》(1906年,法国)讲述了一个男人用烟斗吹泡泡的故事,这些泡泡实际上是人脸,然后他自己漂浮在一个动画泡泡中。早在1902年的几年前,阿尔弗雷德·欧内斯特·帕斯莫尔(Alfred Ernest Passmore)录制了一段一分钟的视频,内容是他的妻子和三个年幼的孩子在伦敦的花园里用烟斗吹泡泡(不像msamli的表演者,是真的)。孩子们热情地接受了这项任务,努力地吹着,专注地盯着从他们的烟斗里冒出来的气泡,而相机则用静态的广角镜头拍摄了这个场景。短片围绕着气泡难以捉摸的外表展开,它们施加的视觉引力可能与它们空灵和短暂的本质不相符。然而,从某种意义上说,泡沫吸引新生电影的目光并不奇怪。几个世纪以来,气泡一直是视觉艺术的极大兴趣:例如,在17世纪,画家抓住气泡的形象作为技术技能的展示。韦恩·马丁(Wayne Martin)解释说,这是由于“泡沫呈现的绘画挑战:如何在油中创造出令人信服的最大透明物体的表现?”值得注意的是使用的技术:光圈传达视觉边缘. . . .简而言之,人们通过描绘泡沫所反映的东西来描绘泡沫。这些画中的泡泡是对图像制作本身的一种壮观的庆祝,但也经常获得重要的道德和寓言意义。安吉莉卡·弗雷解释说:“对艺术、文学和科学泡沫的兴趣在17世纪达到了一个高峰,当时它们与人类生命的脆弱和短暂的概念密切相关。”人是泡沫(Homo bulla)是巴洛克时代的一个概念。亨德里克·安德森、彼得·西昂和大卫·贝利等艺术家经常以这种方式引用泡沫,将它们与头骨、沙漏和腐烂的水果一起描绘出来,这样它们就可以用它们的短暂性来表达人类存在的短暂性。在虚空的绘画中,气泡有两个目的。它既展示了画家能够以最微小和最复杂的方式为一个本身具有可感知形式的物体赋予令人信服的视觉形式的能力,也是作品意义的象征性关键。泡沫吸引了人们的目光,但也总是超越了自身。当然,在远远超出虚空绘画的语境中,泡沫继续被频繁地用作隐喻。例如,(现在)常见的术语“金融泡沫”和“社会泡沫”利用了泡沫边界形式的脆弱性和短暂性,同时也利用了泡沫边界形式的不可否认的有形性。彼得·斯洛特戴克(Peter Sloterdijk)更广泛地使用了这个术语:《球体》三部曲的第一部《泡泡》(Bubbles),将泡泡作为人类为自己构建的偶然的社会和物理空间的隐喻在其他地方,生物学家Jakob von uexk (Jakob von uexk)用肥皂泡的图像来代表给定动物的感知范围;对他来说,泡沫代表着“现象世界或动物的自我世界”。与虚空绘画一样,这些简短的例子表明,泡沫的微妙和短暂的视觉形式不可避免地立即导致象征性。总的来说,泡沫似乎……