The miracle of the art-work is its uncanny capacity to build bridges between the living and the dead.
The state of being simultaneously dead and alive is the miracle of the artwork. The art becomes a character that defines its creator and also its audience. The artist depicts and creates something from nothing. An artwork which had not existed comes into being by means of the artist’s spirit. Something dead becomes alive during the creation process; then again it can revert to being dead until it is born again in the viewer’s eyes and eventually in their mind. The artist risks their life to create, which itself includes aliveness and deadness.
I will illustrate my discussion by analysing two great movies from the 1950s, which portray the obsession with art, apart from their linear narrative of captivating characters and gripping stories. These movies are not necessarily made for art-house audiences, however, due to their controversial subjects with respect to art and the artist, they can be read for their capacity to build bridges between the living and the dead; not only the movies themselves as artworks, but also their stories. Daniel Stern describes the cinema as an art form: “Cinema is the ultimate mixed art form. It can create vitality forms through its own unique means as well as simultaneously through any of other art forms that operate under its roof-music, the movement and gesture of the characters, theatrical effects, visual-science effects, language, and narrative.” (Stern, Daniel, 2010: 93)
The 1948 movie The Red Shoes is a story about a dance company manager who is planning to bring a ballet production of the fairy tale “The Red Shoes” to the stage, and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) is a story about a film producer who prepares to gather artists and to shoot successful movies.
Watching the action backstage and behind the scenes of making an artwork which itself follows the stories of its creators, it carries deadness and aliveness concepts. The role that the artist tries to perform can be more alive than their real self and vice versa. Having said that, when their movie wraps, it becomes dead as they are not rehearsing or creating it anymore; we as the audience follow their stories and their movement from one dead project to another, living one. Daniel Stern also noted: “Most probably, all cultures since the beginning have used dance and music together. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did mixing different art forms take on another aspect. […] A new spirit emerged of exploring the combination of art forms to create new and more ‘total’ forms of art, and ultimately to renew the artistic landscape.” (Stern, Daniel, 2010: 75) In the movie The Red Shoes, Lermontov (Adolf Wohlbrück), a dance company impresario, asks Vicky (Moira Shearer), the dancer, “Why do you want to dance?” and she replies, “Why do you want to live?” The notion of art as a matter of life and death recurs in the characters’ dialogue, their art and their personal life, which is inseparable from their professional, artistic life. Their very being is defined by their craft. The story begins with a young dancer (Vicky) who sees a pair of red shoes in a shop window, which captures her heart, and she passionately desires them. The shoes themselves are dead material; they do not have a lively identity. When the shoemaker offers the red shoes to her and Vicky puts them on, she turns the dead red shoes into living red shoes, through the art of dance. Art/Dance makes both of them alive so that one cannot imagine them apart; they become inseparable characters/identities.
In Sigmund Freud’s paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, he noted: “We
have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation
that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound’; and to relate them
in such a manner the unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.” (Freud, Sigmund, 1920–22: P.7,8)
In one of the ballet sequences, the abandoned, seductive red shoes are on stage, offered by the demonic shoemaker to Vicky.
As soon as she puts her feet in them in a very extreme close-up shot, a
miracle happens. Both the artist and the red shoes become alive and their
joyful dance conveys their aliveness to their audiences by means of the
pleasure of watching their performance. Daniel Stern in his book Forms of
Vitality observes: “We are moved by the arts from moment to moment as
well as over longer stretches of time. Tensions, forces, and excitement rise
and fall. Our arousal level is constantly in play during a performance.”
(Stern, Daniel, 2010: 75)
Metaphorically speaking, creating is imitating the universe’s act. It feels as
if she has committed a sin by putting on those shoes and she will pay for it.
The punishment for the artist is living in hell, a constant trip between life
and death. Artists sacrifice themselves in a sense, devoting their lives to the
pleasure of creating, regardless of what the consequences might be. In this
particular piece of art, the artist has to die, as the red shoes determine that
she must. The pleasure, which has to end up in the unpleasure. Death can
be read as an unpleasure event, as it is stepping into an unknown world,
and also a dramatic tragedy which is interwoven with the pleasure of watching a performance of death. “A reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind.” (Freud, Sigmund, 1920–22: 17)
The artist is dead, the movie ends, and the author is dead, but the story stays with us as the audience. This is what the demonic shoemaker offers at the end of the ballet sequence when the curtains are about to fall, as he holds the red shoes and presents them to us. He is asking, who will be the next victim?
The world of The Red Shoes movie is the world of art. The red shoes on Vicky’s feet and the piano under Julian’s hands are props. Props are dead without a human’s touch. Jed Sekoff noted: “The moment of death, in particular, dizzies us with its dissolution of fundamental boundary lines — between the animate and inanimate, between the present and the past, between presence and absence.” (Sekoff, Jed, 1999: 119) Turning the inanimate into the animate is a journey from deadness to aliveness, which makes the artist suffer and risk his/her aliveness in order to transform an absence into a presence.
Vicky falls in love with Julian (Marius Goring) the conductor, and Lermontov, who is the provider, the moneyman who helps them to create, gets jealous of their love. Things become ugly and complicated between them. Lermontov and Julian force Vicky to choose. Vicky, the muse, has to choose between her art and her human lover. If she decides to stay with her lover Julian, she cannot dance and perform in the red shoes because
Lermontov will not allow it. She is paralysed; she cannot choose. This is her death drive. She jumps from the balcony under the influence of the red shoes, towards an approaching train. She literally and metaphorically dances herself to death. Her ultimate love, which is itself inanimate, leads her to death. Michael Parsons noted: “[…] Being fully and creatively alive means trying to keep oneself open to what is unheimlich, and also that imaginative movement up and down the developmental pathways of one’s life needs to extend into the future. Since death is ultimately unheimlich, this implies that being creatively alive means staying imaginatively open to death; not just as a fact that we know about, but as something we shall inevitably experience.” (Parsons, Michael, 2014: 15) Parsons proposes that artists remain open to death, however, when Vicky, as an artist, faces an unfair choice, she chooses death in order to be faithful to her soul, as freedom of choice is the first and most vital requirement for creating pure art.
“The Red Shoes” performance is different from The Red Shoes movie; when
Vicky dies, Lermontov has to cast another dancer for his show, however, Moira Shearer, the actress is not dead, so the actress in the movie The Red Shoes is not dead and can appear at the movie premiere. The Red Shoes is about a live ballet performance and the definition of a live show is that it is performed in front of a live audience. This form of art does not exist after its live performance and when the artists leave the stage and when audiences leave the theatre, the material form of the art is dead, however, it’s alive in the audience and artist’s minds. In this respect, Stern noted, “The arts provide an excellent of how arousal-related vitality forms works on us. Everybody has experience of the time-based arts. In addition, everyone has encountered moments when vitality forms evoked by the arts have moved them.” (Stern, Daniel, 2010: 75)
Drawing a parallel, this movie can be likened to The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie about movies; a collaborative artwork. Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is a genius producer with no heart, who sacrifices anything and everything for the art. His slogan is, “If you dream, dream big,” in other words, if you are making art, make it great art. Shields spots artists’ weaknesses and turns them into strengths in order to create his pictures. The artists around him are vulnerable and they need him more than their own craft. Shields reminds them to have faith in their talent. They have a love-hate relationship, or a life-and-death relationship, between their craft and their ordinary life. Shields believes cheap performances are an act of selfishness, therefore emphasising the necessity of giving one’s all. His solid beliefs regarding the essence of successful art are so vibrant that upon the completion of a project, he experiences a sense of emptiness and even abstains from joining in the celebration of its triumph. It is the process of creation itself that invigorates him, breathing life into his being.
Shields firmly believes that concealing one’s artistic expression, suppressing their vitality, in order to lead an ordinary existence is an inherently self-centred act. He sees art as a platform for sharing both joyous laughter and heart-wrenching tears, seeking success until success itself becomes a hindrance. When it comes to Georgia, the renowned movie star, Shields transcends conventional morality, going to extreme lengths to facilitate the birth of his craft. At the time of their encounter, Georgia was plagued by depression and self-destructive tendencies. Despite her resistance to personal growth and change, Georgia falls deeply in love with Shields, completely disregarding her own immense talent as an actress. Shields exploits her longing for his affection, assuming the role of her lover until the completion of the film. Under Shields’ influence, Georgia delivers a truly remarkable performance; without him, she would not have achieved stardom. When Georgia discovers Shields’ deceitful actions, driven by his desire to produce the movie, she is devastated, experiencing a profound sense of loss and disappointment. Her life force diminishes, leading to an outpouring of tears as her death drive takes hold. She experiences unpleasure-ness (death). Her death drive ends up with tears. “There is something about anxiety that protects its subjects against fright and so against fright-neuroses.” (Freud, Sigmund, 1920–22: 13)
In Freud‘s book “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he proposed that, “the goal of all life is death” (1920). He noted that after people experience a traumatic event, they often re-enact the experience. The artist sells their body and soul in order to create. They live between the living and dead until something advents. The essence of being dead and alive at the same time is the legacy the artist leaves to their art-work as their new born baby. Therefore, art has the capacity to build bridges between the living and the dead. Freud also noted: “Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.” (Freud, Sigmund, 1920–22: 10)
James (Dick Powell), the screenwriter in The Bad and the Beautiful, has the same journey as Georgia. Shields notices that Rosemary, James’s wife, is an obstacle to James’s success because of her constant interruptions. Shields sends her away with an actor, which ultimately leads to Rosemary’s death. Although James achieves success without his wife, he harbours strong resentment towards Shields that persists despite his accomplishments. James reluctantly acknowledges that he works better without Rosemary, but his deep-rooted animosity towards Shields remains steadfast.
Shields propels the characters in The Bad and the Beautiful to artistic triumph, introducing them to the realms of true art. This journey is a mix of aliveness and lifelessness, pleasure and pain, animosity and aliveness, shaping their creative pursuits.
The last scene of the movie powerfully portrays the characters’ deep yearning to hear Shields’s voice, despite their prior refusal to collaborate with him again. This poignant scene illustrates the intricate coexistence of both pleasure and pain, highlighting the challenges of reconciling their simultaneous presence. It serves as a testament to the delicate task of bridging the realms of vitality/aliveness (pleasure) and lifelessness/deadness (unpleasure).
Being an artist is prophecy and the artwork is a phoenix rising from the
ashes. Everything and everybody on the way needs to be tackled. Ken
Wright in the book “Art, Creativity, Living” noted: “Artists may believe that
they are singing the world into existence, […] but even more, they are
singing to themselves the needed maternal song, and breathing themselves
from existence into life.” (Wright, Ken, 2000: 96)
The madness and aliveness of a film’s editing and filming, camera work,
music, lighting, performance, and costume design, are other aspects of this
artwork; as previously mentioned, cinema is a mixed art form. Michael
Parsons explained: “For Winnicott, playing, is an intermediate, transitional, area of experience, is essential to creative living (Winnicott, 1971a: 50). Freud describes the transference in identical terms, as an ‘intermediate region’, which functions as a ‘playground’.” (Parsons, Michael, 2014: 10) This playground/cinema is a lively field that draws different artists with different crafts to collaborate and create one film. As Stern noted,
“Collaboration seems very natural when one considers how one art form is
so frequently spoken of in terms of another.” (Stern, Daniel, 2010: 77)
Both movies, created in the 1950s, are essentially lifeless.
They are dead. However, watching a moving image, which talks to us and engages us is an experience of aliveness. Jed Sekoff explained: “Feared or pursued, the photograph marks a boundary. Looking at a photograph places us at the edge of a certain time. Neither the moment before or after. Yet, this singular moment, ever present, ever still, evokes a boundless space, alive, in motion. The dead are somehow conjured into life. And yet again, this very magic makes their death all the more certain; our loss stares us in the face.” (Sekoff, Jed, 1999: 110) Furthermore, these narratives deeply influence our souls and our ability to connect with the characters, enabling us to embark on the same journey as them. Movies as artworks engage all our senses as an audience, allowing us, as living beings, to communicate with the art (movie), the deceased, and vice versa.
Bibliography:
Sigmund Freud (1955 [1920]), ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in Standard
Edition Vol. XVIII
Michael Parsons (2014), ‘Keeping death alive’, in Living Analysis: From
Theory to Experience, Hove: Routledge
Jed Sekoff (1999), ‘The undead: necromancy and the inner world’, in
Gregorio Kohon, The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green, Hove:
Routledge
Daniel Stern (2010), ‘Vitality forms in music, dance, theatre and cinema’ in
Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts,
Psychotherapy and Development, Oxford: OUP
Ken Wright (2000) ‘To make experience sing’, in Lesley Caldwell (ed.), Art,
Creativity, Living, London: Karnac
Filmography:
The Red Shoes, (1948). Written, Directed and produced by Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger, UK
The Bad and the Beautiful, (1952). Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Produced
by john Houseman. USA
