Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble

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...