TY - JOUR
AU1 - Evans,, Georgina
AB - Just as the film frame is always filled with image, regardless of how few objects might inhabit the space of that image, so too the contents of the aquarium extend to meet its edges, to produce what artist filmmaker Phillip Warnell, in an essay accompanying his film Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009), describes as ‘the sea with corners’.1 Like the aquarium tank, film imposes a geometric form on what is by nature expansive, amorphous and, potentially, infinitely continuous, were it not for the containing limits that package its contents for observation. In this essay I move from the entwined histories of aquarium tanks and screen technologies to explore the specificities of the encounter between screen images and other framed visions of aquatic life. I start with a broadly historical trajectory, through an exploration of the mirroring in the development of screen and aquarium exhibition practice. The formal echoes identified here lead to a consideration of how and why screens and tanks have come to be used interchangeably, with the concomitant implication that animation – in the simple sense of observable movement – can stand in for life in the case of aquatic animals. The effects of embedding underwater images within fiction film are examined through Stuart Paton’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and the discussion is later expanded through other examples, in particular Warnell’s Outlandish and CCTV footage of a burst aquarium in Shanghai in 2012. These case studies, and the history of aquatic display that informs them all in different ways, prompt a consideration of how the aquatic image can strain the conventions of narrative cinema and invite the spectator to think about the layering of filmic space. Finally I discuss how images of underwater worlds impart a sense of brittle fragility to the fourth wall, a boundary that becomes particularly loaded in images of water. The shattering of framing limits and the ejection of aquatic animals from their conventional display confront viewers with both the reality of the lives lived beyond the glass and the ways in which our understanding of them has been structured as a form of image. Most human visual access to aquatic life has been technologically mediated one way or another. Shallow rivers and ponds might offer chance, often partial, visibility of their freshwater inhabitants, and rock pools offer short-lived microcosms of the deep, but direct encounters between humans and sea creatures tend to occur in the relative transparency of the shoreline shallows, the brink between land and water that is likewise a boundary between life and death for most of the bodies that coincide there. Unassisted diving is the preserve of very few people, with those able to navigate the submarine world this way frequently subject to racist representations, as Nicole Starosielski has identified.2 Most diving activity from the nineteenth century on has instead been facilitated by equipment, which still brings only a fraction of humankind into close contact with underwater life. Instead the vast majority of viewings of underwater existence have been derived through the technologies of the aquarium, the camera, or some combination of the two. The film image of aquatic creatures has therefore always been imbued not just with an exotic and voyeuristic perspective on the unknown, as so much film delivers, but with a sense that this privileged gaze is one we might gain only by literally or imaginatively exceeding conventional human capabilities. Such spectacles are necessarily facilitated by intermediary devices. The scenes we witness in a glass aquarium are of a sort that could very rarely have been encountered in any ‘natural’ human life. As Warnell observes: The strangeness of marine occupancy and its alien composition is at the heart of aquatic life. However, this is most familiar to us in the absence of natural habitat, instead viewed in the exhibition spaces of public aquaria, or brought in to the home in domestic parlour ocean form.3 Fish ponds have been constructed and enjoyed for centuries, but aquariums, or so-called ‘parlour oceans’, were only made possible, as Celeste Olalquiaga explains, by the discovery of the need for oxygenation, for ‘until then, the goldfish displayed in glass bowls had unfailingly died of asphyxia’.4 The resolution of this problem allowed aquariums to take their place among various related crazes of the mid nineteenth century that were based on importing elements of the natural world into the home for display and study. However, unlike the fern case, butterfly cabinet or seaweed album, the aquarium has had an extraordinarily persistent popularity.5 Immense tanks continue to feature regularly in our glimpses of homes of the rich and famous, forming a recurring motif in MTV Cribs, for example, and with one particularly extravagant scheme visualized in footballer Thierry Henry’s reported application in 2012 to reconstruct his London home around a four-storey tank.6 The large-scale correlate of the domestic aquarium, the public aquarium formed a natural extension to existing zoos, with the Fish House at London Zoo opening in 1853, rapidly followed by many similar exhibits. The opportunity to observe aquatic animals that is offered by the aquarium, both public and domestic, is of course echoed and supplemented, as Warnell notes, in that they are otherwise ‘seen in astonishing deep sea film and televisual experiences’.7 The popularity of television documentaries featuring sea creatures shows no sign of abating, with episodes of the BBC series Blue Planet II securing the top four spots in the UK viewing figures for 2017.8 The exhibition of aquatic animals, and particularly sea creatures, does not, therefore, fit straightforwardly with John Berger’s account of zoos in his 1977 essay ‘Why look at animals?’, in which such artificial encounters play a role that is ‘compensatory’ for the loss of animals from everyday (human) life while simultaneously being part of the same ‘remorseless movement as was dispersing the animals’.9 When Berger writes that ‘animals transformed into spectacle have disappeared in another way’, because, in the twentieth century, ‘all animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium’, it is striking to note the logical implication that the fish in the aquarium presumably never did have the history of past, non-spectacular visibility that he attributes to other animals.10 While both domestic and public aquariums do fit the general pattern of exotic display performed by zoos, aquatic animals occupy a unique position in this domain, for modernity gave these animals a type of visibility they never previously had. Now they could be observed not just dead (or close to death, wrenched to the surface) but as living creatures, and it was the aquarium and the camera that together brought about this visibility. The interconnections between the aquarium and the cinema run deeper than the comparability in their practices of exhibiting captured life. From the first there was also an understanding that these two forms of spectacle might be enjoyed by the same audiences, in the same locations. Early public aquariums frequently became places for the exhibition of film: the Winter Garden conservatory at Brighton Aquarium, to give just one example, became the ‘Aquarium Kinema’ for a brief period in the late 1910s, and was previously the site of a Kinetoscope and some of film pioneer George Albert Smith’s pre-cinematic lantern shows.11 The sense that the aquarium and film are companionable forms of exhibition also finds expression in the number of screens still housed by aquariums, such as the Paris Aquarium Cinéaqua, and in the presence of IMAX screens, with their own repertoire of (often aquatic-themed) nature documentaries, such as that found at the New England Aquarium in Boston. It was not just through forms of large-scale public exhibition that aquariums and early moving-image technologies became intertwined. For makers of proto-cinematic entertainments, the combination of transparency and motion found in aquarium tanks held unique potential. One account of a lecture at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in 1866 describes the use of an aquarium as a sort of animate slide in a magic lantern show: A little aquarium containing living fish and plants was placed in the lantern, and an immense image thrown upon the screen. Salt water was then poured into the aquarium, and as it gradually mixed with the fresh, it refracted the light at all surfaces of contact, thus producing beautiful, changing, cloud-like shadows on the screen and also causing a great commotion among the frightened fish, lizards, etc.12 As Charles Musser describes, this was one of many public events that used some variation on the magic lantern to deliver a form of scientific realism, while at the same time being technologically spectacular.13 Here the water and the cruelly treated animals provide a notably mobile and translucent element in the projection set-up, in effect acting as a kind of mortal film frame to generate an indexical moving image. The translucency of the aquarium, exploited at this lecture in the moment of projection, would quickly invite its integration into film images, such as in Méliès’s use of fish tanks as a layer in the mise-en-scene, first in his 1903 film Le Royaume des Fées/Fairyland and then later in La Sirène/The Mermaid (1904) and 20000 Lieues sous les mers/20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1907). The filming of the ‘underwater’ sequence for Fairyland is reconstructed in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), which demonstrates how Méliès placed an aquarium directly before the camera, using it as a kind of filter through which the human action was shot. In the underwater fantasy scenes he made this way, the actors appear alongside the fish, apparently sharing one crystalline medium, give or take a few peculiarities of scale. The success of the illusion is limited more than anything by the evidently non-submerged quality of the human actors’ movements. The shared history of aquarium and camera technology, in producing the spectacle of aquatic life as a distinctively modern attraction, perhaps helps to account for the near equivalence sometimes asserted between the aquarium and various images of water-dwelling animals. For viewers accustomed to screens, the resemblance to the aquarium, with its framed, sealed-off world and its moving subjects who cannot return our gaze, seems all too clear. The aquarium is readily received as, in Warnell’s words, ‘an uncanny diorama, a fish watching television exercise’,14 a description echoed to some degree, if not in the kind of screen being evoked, by Philippe-Alain Michaud’s view of the aquarium tank as cinéma liquide (liquid cinema).15 Screens, in turn, are quite readily deployed to stand in for aquarium tanks. Water-dwelling creatures seem always to have had a particular susceptibility to being substituted by their own representations, be it in ersatz nineteenth-century alternatives to the difficult-to-maintain aquarium tank, such as the alcoholarium, in which dead, pickled specimens were displayed, or in the use of glass jellyfish to stand in for their more vulnerable prototypes.16 Today the screen offers the most convenient simulacrum for an aquarium, and similarities between the uses of tanks and the uses of screens proliferate. The large, mass spectacles of the cinema and the public aquarium tank are echoed in their smaller, domesticated forms: the home aquarium, and the small screens of the television, computer and other devices. Screens and tanks also occupy comparable places in the landscape of commercial display: while one of the world’s largest aquarium tanks is situated right in the middle of The Dubai Mall, surrounded by shops, the vast majority of pictures of the largest LED screen in Asia (or so claimed at the time of building), at Beijing’s The Place shopping mall, show it to be mimicking an aquarium. The apparent ease with which a tank can be substituted by a screen can be remarked in the brief, early twenty-first-century proliferation of DVDs titled as aquariums (‘now a withered industry’, as Zack Hatfield observes, but still available for purchase).17 These productions are frequently described in their blurbs not as films of any sort, but rather as a means of turning a domestic screen into an aquarium. For example, the DVD case for Tropical Reef Aquarium (Tony Helsloot, 2013) promises to ‘turn your television into a spectacular and realistic aquarium. There is no camera movement. All tracks are programmed to repeat automatically for a continuous aquarium on your television screen’. Marine Aquarium (Timm Hogerzeil, 2011) invites the purchaser to ‘Turn your screen into one of three unique and vibrant underwater worlds’, and the front cover of Oreade Music: Aquarium (2003) offers to ‘TURN YOUR DVD OR COMPUTER INTO AN AQUATIC WONDERLAND’. It is hard to imagine a mammalian equivalent to these products, such as proposing the transformation of a domestic screen into a virtual hamster cage merely by showing continuous moving images of hamsters shot in enclosed space with a static camera. The relative dispensability of real life in the case of aquatic creatures, and of their third dimension, implies that the aquarium might be understood as more proximate to the moving image in the first place. The presentation of screen substitutes for aquariums indicates an apparently tenuous realism accorded to aquatic animal lives in the popular imagination, for it does not seem to matter very much whether these animals could be believed to be present, or indeed ever to have existed, so long as they are visible and moving. This chimes with Warnell’s observation that the occupants of an aquarium ‘hover somewhere between play, death and the image’, for the aquarium ‘functions without mortality, which does not take place here, its occupants named specimens, as such incapable of death’.18 Warnell here pinpoints the way in which aquatic animals are all too readily replaced by other members of the same species, but his observation equally illuminates why their screen images, visions of mere animation, seem to stand in so seamlessly for their presence. A sense of deathlessness, springing from a primary putative absence of real life, seems implicit in the promise of loop play so commonly advertised in small-screen aquarium substitutes. If the scenes they show are apparently at their most desirable when infinitely cycling, we might infer a certain non-linearity attributed to aquatic time, and the experience of viewing these scenes as akin not to the discrete extent associated with film but to the experience of televisual time, in which, for Raymond Williams, ‘the flow is always accessible’.19 Any perceived equivalence of screen and aquarium tank is supported by striking formal similarities. The most obvious resemblance lies in the almost universal rectangular structure imposed on the ‘image’, but there are also close parallels in the viewing conventions associated with each type of spectacle, especially in their big, public forms. For the aquarium, while oxygenation was a breakthrough in sustaining life, developments in the manufacture of plate glass were pivotal in cementing the paradigms of visibility. Early aquarium vessels aimed primarily to meet the challenge of keeping aquatic creatures alive away from their natural habitat; scientific study could be conducted using shallow pools or vase-like vessels.20 However, advances in glass technology, and the compelling comparison with windows, soon helped to establish the overwhelming popularity of box-like tanks.21 This in turn delivered a particular structure of viewing. Human perception of the creatures in the tank was no longer hampered by optical distortions, and the dominance of the vertical plane was established, cleanly cleaving (in both senses of that word) the worlds of the viewer and the viewed. London Zoo’s Fish House of 1853 (already mentioned as the world's first public aquarium), had rectangular, box-shaped glass tanks. These facilitated clear views of a sliced-open underwater scene through the sides, and the allure of seeing an aquatic world in this sort of cross-section would endure. However, the way in which the Fish House tanks were presented in space would not prevail for long. They stood on table-like stands in a large room, allowing visitors to wander around them, maintaining a sense of the tanks as objects of appreciable size and solidity. This arrangement was rapidly superseded in public aquariums by forms of exhibition that more strongly promoted resemblance to images. Most conspicuous among these practices are those of embedding the tanks in the walls of the building (thereby diminishing viewers’ apprehension of them as three-dimensional rectangular prisms, rather than two-dimensional rectangular images) and of reducing the presence of other sources of light in the exhibition space. This positioning of the aquarium as an image-like encounter is expressed in the standards set by the Paris aquarium, built in 1860, just seven years after the London Zoo exhibit, at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. An account of its innovations is given by Arthur Mangin in his book Les Mystères de l’océan,22 which rapidly appeared in English translation.23 Mangin observed that ‘what may be called the mise en scène’ of the London aquarium ‘is not said to approach in artistic arrangement and felicitous disposition the Parisian Aquarium’.24 Whereas the London aquarium was in a ‘sort of crystal palace’, ‘built up of iron and glass, in such a manner that light can penetrate everywhere’, the Paris aquarium was designed to create the now much more familiar scene of bright, screen-like windows puncturing a dark viewing space: There are no windows, and the interior exhibits nothing but a long gallery, lighted only by two gates, situated one at each end, and by the light which penetrates through the fish-ponds. These are constructed in the thickness of the wall and disposed in a single row. The wall on the gallery side, and the lid or roof, are both of pure white glass, carefully polished; the other walls are of slate. It is evident from this arrangement that all the light which streams into the fish-ponds must come from without, while a semi-obscurity prevails in the gallery. This system of lighting has a very impressive effect, and produces a singular illusion. The gaze not being distracted by surrounding objects, our attention concentrates itself entirely on the living polyrama before us; and, as the idea of magnitude is only relative, the tableaux soon assume in the eyes of the spectator greater and yet greater dimensions, or rather, their real dimensions disappear to give place, in everybody's perception, to those which the imagination is willing to lend them.25 In this description of semi-darkness, loss of bodily self-possession and a softened awareness of relative scale, there is much that anticipates the situation of the cinema spectator in relation to objects on screen. The mobility of the spectator in a traditional aquarium is of course a key point of difference. It is notable, however, that in a traditional gallery-form aquarium this mobility is deployed above all for the production of a linear sequence of distinct visual scenes, as one tank gives way to the next with little regard for establishing a connecting continuity of time or place. This is something Michael Lawrence discusses in his comparison between the presentation of separate zoo enclosures and the slideshow form of screen savers, for which aquatic life forms a particularly popular subject, a pattern he likens to a film montage sequence of animals, which likewise produces ‘screensaver-style interruptions or interludes’.26 The traditional public aquarium compresses aquatic life into just such a sequence of framed, moving visions. It celebrates visibility while simultaneously suppressing the viewer’s ability to acknowledge the creatures as really present – and really living – in the space the spectator enters in order to view them. Thus we might argue that even the exhibition traditions associated with aquatic creatures are inclined to frame them as moving-image-like spectacles, in a way that ultimately dulls our apprehension of their vital, bodily existence.27 The synergies between the tank and the film frame are evident even in the very first film to take underwater life as its subject, the Lumières’ Aquarium (1896). The camera is placed squarely in front of an aquarium, its occupants thrashing and competing for the little space available. While most of the Lumières’ films revel in the camera’s ability to capture a complex and large field, here the white wall or background placed behind the tank eliminates much sense of depth or situation in real space. As Michaud identifies, the aquarium in this film: ‘appears, on the threshold of the history of cinema, like a metaphor for projection: in a denatured receptacle devoid of gravity, shadowless forms stand out against a white ground’.28 The Lumières’ film also participates in the persistent indifference I have already alluded to concerning the distinction, or lack of one, between life and lifeless animation in aquatic creatures: one of the frogs is manifestly dead, its motion merely the result of being buffeted around. These conventions in the presentation and viewing of aquatic life are the source of interesting tensions when aquarium-like spectacles are further reframed in the context of narrative cinema. The first example to be considered here is Paton’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which announces itself in the opening titles as ‘The first submarine photoplay ever filmed’, and is plausibly the first fiction film to incorporate footage shot underwater in the open sea.29 The film sticks loosely to its source, Jules Verne’s 1870 novel of the same title, representing the experiences of a small group of shipwrecked would-be researchers who find themselves captive guests aboard the object of their original mission: the Nautilus submarine, a vessel of futuristic capability built and controlled by the mysterious Captain Nemo. The film, like the novel, revels in both the spectacle of the untouched submarine world and the technological achievement that facilitates access to that spectacle. The driving force behind the film was the brothers George and J. Ernest Williamson, and the ‘photosphere’ they developed from an invention of their father’s. The photosphere comprised a chamber lowered to the sea floor, supplied with air by a long flexible tube connected to a ship on the surface, and equipped with windows through which the camera could capture the view.30 The brothers had already used it for an hour-long under-sea documentary (now lost), entitled Thirty Leagues Under the Sea (1914), and now sought to expand into the more lucrative realm of fiction via a feature-length adaptation of Verne’s text, in collaboration with what was then the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.31 The role of the photosphere is explicitly celebrated in the opening titles of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which announces that: ‘The submarine scenes in this production were made possible by the use of the Williamson inventions, and were directed under the personal supervision of the Williamson brothers, who alone have solved the secret of under-the-ocean photography’, before the spectator is invited to acknowledge the innovators by a brief shot of them smiling and doffing their hats to the camera. The central preoccupation of the film is the aquatic spectacle delivered by the viewing panel of the Nautilus, which looks out into the deep sea. Scenes of the intradiegetic human characters gazing into the sea through glass set them in parallel with the spectators of the film, both parties directed to contemplate the same underwater marvels. The window is situated in Captain Nemo’s private salon, a room which both in the novel and here is set up in the manner of a luxurious sitting room, embedding the aquatic spectacle in a context of familiar terrestrial comfort. Although this window constitutes (both literally and intradiegetically) a window into the open sea rather than an aquarium tank, its presentation is such that it does little to express an appreciable submarine landscape, instead echoing much more familiar viewing encounters. The Nautilus in Verne’s novel is effectively a museum as well as a vessel, and part of its function is to preserve and display Nemo’s natural history collection. This is not explicitly displayed in Paton’s film, but he does mirror Verne in his representation of Nemo as a character who, in Olalquiaga’s terms, has domesticated the sea to the extent that ‘the underwater realm becomes Nemo’s personal aquarium’.32 The opportunity to gaze into the waters is strictly controlled by Nemo, one of several details that evoke some form of screening event rather than the continual presence of a domestic window. The present-day viewer may even find here a prescient foreshadowing of television-watching habits rather than cinema, both in the apparent controllability of this flickering vision and in the private conviviality of the viewing environment. The fact that Paton chooses to present just one viewing pane, rather than the two identified in the novel, intensifies the parallel with a screen. While in the novel Nemo is entirely absent when the view is first unveiled to his captive passengers, Paton introduces a sense of staging, by having Nemo usher them to a seat before he introduces the event with the announcement, ‘I call this my magic window’. Amidst the otherwise rather functionally sketched interior of the submarine, the viewing area is nestled in heavy tasselled drapery, reminiscent of proscenium curtains. The blackness of the intertitle bearing Nemo’s words echoes the novel’s account of how ‘it suddenly went dark, completely and utterly dark’, again suggesting the mounting of a spectacle, just before the outer walls of the submarine slide open to reveal the deep.33 In the film we see Nemo move to operate some hidden control, and the darkness suddenly draws aside to be replaced by brilliant, rippling light on the faces of his passengers, apparently flooding through the window from the ocean outside. The viewing scene is shown in a static shot, with the window at an oblique angle set deep amidst the curtains (figure 1). This means that the camera never directly shows what the passengers are looking at with such delight; the situation is one of generic spectatorship, and the flickering light drawing their rapt gazes again recalls the situation of the film viewer. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Nemo’s passengers gaze through the viewing pane, in Stuart Paton’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Nemo’s passengers gaze through the viewing pane, in Stuart Paton’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916). We are invited to share the enchantment witnessed on the faces of the passengers as the film now moves into a series of shots of the undersea world, filmed using the photosphere. All of these images are edited as point-of-view shots of the collective witnesses aboard the Nautilus, but it is very clear that their ostensible presence as intradiegetic, intermediary gazes will not be allowed to compromise the delivery of this spectacular material to an audience primed to anticipate it right from the opening titles, regardless of how the narrative might have happened to get us here. Indeed, the gestures of the Williamson brothers at the start recall nothing more vividly than the ‘constant bowing and gesturing of the conjurors in magic films’ in Tom Gunning’s description of the cinema of attractions as a cinema ‘willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’.34 While the placing of the Williamsons’ claim to celebrity in the title sequence, rather than the main body of the film, keeps the narrative free of the actual ‘rupture’ characteristic of the cinema of attractions, it is also true that the film maintains awareness of its fictional premise rather lightly during the presentation of the photosphere footage. The underwater shots all fill the frame entirely without any contextualizing elements of the Nautilus or its passengers appearing in the same image, so the spectator’s direct encounter with the undersea display is not disrupted within any individual shot. The context of the intradiegetic viewing is instead maintained through reaction shots (again, we return to the static composition of the salon viewing area), and intertitles offering Nemo’s instructive commentary on the sights. These connections serve to bring some cohesion to an eight-minute presentation of heterogeneous submarine views, which would otherwise have little continuity. In this respect, the film’s sequencing of underwater scenes arguably takes the form of a slow-paced montage sequence with accompanying captions, and, if it seems to reflect any kind of time and place, this is perhaps more than anything the procession of tanks in a public aquarium of the sort described by Mangin. An intertitle in which Nemo comments on ‘how brilliant is the reflection of the sun’s rays […] fathoms below the surface’ points towards the film’s preoccupation with displaying a visible underwater world above all, rather than a sense of the shadowy deep.35 The editing does not strive to imply continuity in its presentation of the submarine landscape, nor any sense of the Nautilus as a vessel in motion through it. The act of looking at the underwater world, rather than the underwater world itself, emerges as the central subject. The showcasing of the photosphere footage, and the wonder simply of watching it, are elements that the film struggles to reconcile with the need to maintain an intensity and momentum of action appropriate to its adventure narrative. This is true even when humans leave the Nautilus, a move which might be expected to foster convincing interconnections between the aquatic realm and the human story. Whereas the first underwater sequence represents a purely visual experience, for both the spectator and the intradiegetic observers, later underwater scenes all show humans outside the Nautilus exploring the undersea world. In Verne’s novel these excursions (like the rest of the story) are narrated to the reader as first-person experience by Pierre Aronnax, a Parisian scholar of marine biology, but Paton’s spectators are moved to identify instead with a position of passive spectatorship made available by the introduction of the figure of Aronnax’s daughter. Presumably barred, as a woman, from participating in the adventures, she remains seated at the window whenever others move beyond it. Shots made from the photosphere, showing the explorers underwater, are interspersed with cuts back to her keenly watching face, thus ensuring that there are hardly any underwater images in the film that are not structured as the point of view of someone viewing the scene through the window. Even when the protagonists venture beyond the glass in 20,000 Leagues, the film maintains a certain persistent sense of separation between human observers and underwater creatures. The first expedition outside the submarine sees the men don diving suits and set out, armed with rifles and spears, to go hunting. Although we have previously seen crew members entering and exiting the vessel when it is at the surface, via an upper hatch, this time we watch the hunters descend a ladder directly into deep water, and their heavy weighted boots pulling them to the sea bed. As they trudge along they disturb the sea floor, creating sandy eddies, while streams of bubbles rise from their helmets. We are left in no doubt that these bodies really are immersed in the underwater realm (figure 2), and not merely layered against it like Méliès’s human protagonists. The meeting of worlds that happens when humans enter the submarine zone is described by Elena Past with reference to a so-called ‘edge effect’, a term she takes from John Elder’s work on ecocriticism and literature. Past writes that the arrival of the human in the underwater world is: the meeting of two ecosystems, two biotic communities that function in fundamentally dissimilar ways. When such systems meet, the space of their encounter is characterized by the creation of an ‘edge-effect’, a dynamic junction that creates what is often a notably vibrant environment.36 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Divers leave the Nautilus to explore the sea bed, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Divers leave the Nautilus to explore the sea bed, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. When humans enter the sub-aquatic realm, writes Past: ‘Aesthetics change […] The mechanics of existence are altered: gravitational pull does not act on bodies in the same way, weights are lightened, and movement is elongated, rendered more graceful and more fluid when bodies are suspended.’37 This ethereal transformation of the human is one we might recognize in the twenty-first century works Past is analysing, but it is striking to note how differently Paton stages this moment in 1916. In fact the divers’ determined strides along the sea floor, their weapons and their relentless pursuit of action represent an implacable resistance to surrendering to a different element. The film also works to cement this episode within a logic of human purpose. When Nemo invites his passengers to leave the Nautilus it is for a ‘hunting trip’, and once they have left the submarine a series of intertitles keep us apprised of their progress: they ‘visit the marine gardens’, ‘make slow headway against the swift current’ and ‘search for pearls’, before engaging in ‘shark hunting’. The portrayal of the latter does not deliver quite the climax we might have anticipated: there are cross-cutting attempts to connect the people wielding arms on the sea bed with shots of the sharks sinuously circling in watery space, but the sharks and humans appear only very fleetingly in the same shot, and it is clear that the humans are actively trying to provoke beasts who take little interest in them. Despite the use of real footage of people underwater, beyond the window, the sense of contact with this alternative environment and its inhabitants remains very limited. The meeting of human endeavour and the underwater realm is more decisively narrativized in the next underwater sequence, which sees Nemo dash from the Nautilus to save a local pearl diver who, just minutes before, had been an object of the passengers’ relaxed gaze through the viewing pane.38 At first the diver is just one more denizen of the sea, available for observation, but the dynamic changes when he is seized by a giant octopus. The film cuts rapidly between his struggles and the horrified spectators, and Nemo, armed with an axe and decked out in his diving gear, sets out with the other men on what will prove to be a triumphant rescue mission. This scene might at first feel like a reversal of the pattern Starosielski identifies elsewhere in the Williamsons’ films, whereby the free diver navigates the underwater landscape more successfully than the equipment-laden interloper, and instead to be a direct inversion of a moment she discusses in The Submarine Eye (1917) when a local diver rescues a helmet diver.39 However, as Starosielski has suggested, Nemo’s inhabiting of the sea in this film seems to reflect his status not only as an extraordinary engineer but as a figure whose racial otherness marks him as having some putatively natural affinity with being underwater.40 While Verne gives almost no information about Nemo’s past in Twenty Thousand Leagues, leaving it largely up to the reader to deduce the possible roots of his anti-imperialism, Paton chooses to incorporate elements from the later text L’Ile mysterieuse/The Mysterious Island (1875), in which a back story is elaborated for Nemo as an Indian prince, and Nemo is here played by a white actor in brownface. Other moves Paton makes away from the source text tend to point towards the film’s preoccupation with spectatorship as a theme: whereas Verne’s adventurers are already out on a seabed walk when they rescue the diver, Paton’s are observing him through the ‘magic window’ before launching their mission, a situation that allows the film to maintain its understanding of the scene as one being viewed through glass by cutting back to show Aronnax’s daughter watching from the Nautilus. In Verne’s text the aggressor in this episode is a shark, but Paton substitutes this with a model octopus, very evidently operated by a person and adorned with two huge cartoonish eyes, which lend it an anthropomorphized face.41 It provides a conspicuously human supplement to the submarine landscape; real sharks, filmed in their submarine habitat, had already failed to deliver the sort of anthropocentric narrative action that is more reliably facilitated by a puppet. The film was only able to accommodate an unaltered underwater world for the brief time that merely looking at that world could be construed as an event in itself. This reading is also supported by what immediately precedes the sequence of octopus peril. In the preamble to the attack, the undersea location is established through exact repetition of the material which introduced the film’s first underwater sequence. Once again we see Nemo’s intertitle, ‘I call this my magic window’, followed by the same shot of the sandy seabed, dotted with waving plants. When we first saw this shot, just thirty minutes earlier, it was an invitation to marvel at a never-before witnessed scene, but already it is being recycled as non-specific scene-setting, apparently not felt to be disconcertingly familiar, preparing the way for something to definitively happen. Without human action it seems that film of aquatic life rapidly comes to be understood as both generic in nature and chronologically non-specific. The film exhibits tensions between delivering the novel attraction of pristine underwater views – temporally indeterminate, enjoyable without regard to continuity – and delivering a human adventure story predicated on consequential action. This was a problem even for its first audience. As one contemporary reviewer observed, under the subheading ‘Photography is wonderful, action is disappointing’: To those who went simply to gaze upon subterranean scenes of picturesque splendor, it was altogether pleasing and satisfying. Hidden secrets of the deep were placed before the audience in all their realism and beauty […] All things considered, it was an effective picture, but at the same time there was something missing. Chances are the something missing was the story of ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ itself.42 The film’s use of real underwater images is remarkable, but the limitations on how they could be made and used mean that the photosphere footage sits within the film as spectacle within a spectacle, framed within a frame, and the turn to contemplate it comes to feel like a suspension. The tension that causes difficulty for Paton’s film – between the pleasures and spatio-temporal uncertainties attached to aquatic spectacle, and the logic of narrative – is a destabilizing force that is harnessed in Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai to amplify a mounting but indistinct sense of danger. This effect derives from the way in which one of the best-known film scenes set in a public aquarium casts doubt on how the spectator should interpret both the setting and the intricate narrative content to which it plays host. The illicit central couple – Michael O’Hara and Elsa Bannister, played by Welles and Rita Hayworth – are meeting in secret after coming together on a yachting trip. The dialogue in the scene delivers essential plot development: Elsa pleads with Michael to take her away from the husband she was coerced into marrying, and Michael tells Elsa of his scheme to fund their flight by confessing to a fake murder. The aquarium venue is alluded to in the dialogue only in the opening exchange, when Elsa tells Michael ‘I couldn’t think where else we could meet. Only tourists come here, and school children.’ The location is the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, featuring a dimly lit gallery of the kind described by Mangin (it has since been remodelled). Although the lovers barely acknowledge the tanks at all, they dominate the visual landscape of the scene. Welles maps the generic form of the aquarium, only to break it down. The question of how we should read a filmic space apparently filled with water is posed from the very start of the scene. The first shot shows an octopus tumbling from the top to the bottom of the frame, which is entirely taken up with the underwater scene until Michael steps into view in silhouette, immediately crystallizing matters of scale and camera positioning which were, for a moment, unclear (figure 3). Indeed this is, at first, a cryptic establishing shot in many respects, for the film has given its viewers no advance notice of a trip to an aquarium. For a moment it is only the confidently earth-bound nature of the actor’s stride that tells us we must be seeing him in the space in front of either a tank or a screen, layered against it rather than underwater. If there is an ‘edge effect’ here, it agitates only the spectator's uncertainty as we find this unexpected element filling the scene, and it is dispelled by Michael’s apparent ease. The viewer is given more confidence by the far more conventional shot that follows, panning round the aquarium to situate the couple as they stroll in front of an orderly gallery of tank windows in focus behind them, each with its explanatory plaque. However, our brief comfort in the aquarium as a place of neatly organized taxonomies is rapidly eroded. When Michael responds to Elsa’s list of people who visit the aquarium by adding ‘and lovers’, the dialogue fragments into rapid, overlapping expressions of their feelings delivered in a shot/reverse-shot sequence culminating in an embrace, an apparent breakdown of restraint that is reflected in a newly tumultuous portrayal of the aquarium in the background. While Elsa’s close-up is classical in treatment, in soft focus but with the framing windows of the tanks still clearly discernible, the shots of Michael see him once more excerpted from legible space by being set before an underwater image that consumes the rest of the frame. Around his head, which looms large in the centre of the composition, we see the shimmering scales of improbably large fish flicking back and forth; it is our first glimpse of an environment not functioning quite as we might expect. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) steps in front of a rear-projected ‘aquarium tank’ in Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) steps in front of a rear-projected ‘aquarium tank’ in Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). This unexpected mutability of the tanks and their contents becomes more apparent as the scene goes on, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to read the location. As Michael and Elsa hasten away from a group of sniggering schoolchildren to talk in private, it becomes ever harder to have faith in the stability of this filmic world. As Elsa reads aloud the letter in which Michael falsely confesses to killing a man, she walks through the aquarium, past tank apertures that are now much larger than those we had already seen, and in which the contents are more and more conspicuously supplied by rear-projected film images.43 The fish, which had previously appeared to be plausibly, bodily present in the mise-en-scene in the tanks of the real Steinhart Aquarium, are suddenly magnified to an enormous size, impossible to accommodate in the spaces thus far observed. In one static shot we see Elsa holding the letter in silhouette in front of a pair of huge, entwined moray eels as she reaches the part describing the fatal encounter. The film cuts as she begins to move to the right, and the next shot confronts us with a screen full of leopard sharks. As in the very first shot of the scene, we again find ourselves with no framing architecture or human presence for a couple of beats, and therefore no way of knowing how to conceive of the size of these fish. When Elsa steps in from the left there is an ostensible continuity of action, but her appearance does nothing to concretize the setting, for her body offers a benchmark which can only imply that the fish are monstrously large (figure 4). A tracking shot keeps pace with her as she continues walking and reading, never glancing at the luminous tanks, and at one point she passes a dark pillar of wall that momentarily interrupts the aquatic spectacle. Thus far such vertical divisions have indicated the barriers between tanks, equally marked by the evident separation of species, to create a sequence of distinct ‘scenes’. Here, though, we find the enormous leopard sharks keeping pace with Elsa and smoothly proceeding to the other side of what we would most naturally read as a boundary. In this moment the film hints at a dissolving of walls. The integrity of the intradiegetic frames, which had hitherto contained a series of discrete watery cubes within the human gallery space, now comes into question. A moment later, as our perspective snaps back to a medium shot of the couple in the gallery, the same leopard sharks are clearly visible behind them, now contained in one box-like tank and having resumed their usual size. The spectator is left with a sense of doubt, both about what they are actually supposed to have seen, and how to fit it with the rest of the film. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Elsa (Rita Hayworth) walks in front of hugely magnified leopard sharks in The Lady from Shanghai. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Elsa (Rita Hayworth) walks in front of hugely magnified leopard sharks in The Lady from Shanghai. At one level the distorted, circling creatures certainly suggest a metaphorical background commentary on the treachery underlying this scene – Elsa is lying – without giving too much away. Yet the increasing severity of the disruptions to the scale and apparent solidity of the tanks also provoke deeper uncertainties. The shift in the film’s aquatic images, from realistic tanks to what requires a very concerted suspension of disbelief to read as anything but film-within-film, prompts Michaud to refer to these frames within the frame as aquarium-écrans (aquarium screens); they are neither, and both.44 The spectator has to actively position her understanding of the images’ relationships with each other (somewhat in the way we are taxed by ‘double meaning’ optical illusions, such as the one that allows us to flip between seeing an urn-shaped vase or two faces in profile). The familiar forms which had at first seemed to characterize the scene can no longer be straightforwardly presumed upon, as the film hints at the collapse of its own architecture. In images of aquatic life, the distinction between a frame that more or less coincides with a tank, such as those found in Méliès’s films, and a frame that we read as a window into an underwater world, such as Paton’s photosphere images, is entirely a matter of whether we infer the presence or absence of significant off-screen space. In 20,000 Leagues’ shots of the seabed, the lack of continuity effectively interrupts any development of space, which is one of the reasons why that film’s presentation of the real submarine world feels aquarium-like. In The Lady from Shanghai, however, once the leopard sharks start to cross what appear to be walls, new uncertainties arise about off-screen space. Since the film does not give the tanks consistent solidity as boxes, it leaves open the possibility of reading them as perforations into another, potentially all-encompassing dimension: aquatic, cinematic, or both. The situation in the film therefore starts to unhinge from its ‘real world’ location, one characterized above all by containment, and it is the (supposedly central) human action rather than the aquatic world that begins to feel both diminished and increasingly enclosed. Welles himself remarked in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma that the scene promotes a curious floating away from what we might have supposed to be its core function in advancing the storyline, observing that: ‘The scene in the aquarium was so gripping visually that no-one heard what was being said. And what was said was, for all that, the marrow of the film.’45 It would be far fetched to argue that a spectator should or would infer that an entire ocean swirls behind the gallery windows of this aquarium, but it does seem that the increasing sense of some overarching, indeterminate filmic and/or aquatic layer – one so disconcerting that we cannot attend to the storyline – leaves us unable to take for granted the significance either of the plot or of the hierarchies of frames that characterize the aquarium gallery on film. Arguably this scene gestures towards the surreal, in its literal sense of the ‘super real’, a dimension free of fixed symbolism, which renders absurd human investment in the causation logic of noir narrative. Welles’s aquarium also draws the spectator’s attention, in various ways, to the particular role of the front wall of the tank, through which the viewer gazes, and to its correlate, the fourth wall of the screen image. Where a film frame is entirely filled with an underwater image, the fourth wall becomes more materially integral to the spectacle than is ordinarily the case. For the viewer, the fourth wall marks a boundary between elements, and the camera is divided from its subjects either by the glass of an aquarium or by some other transparent housing, such as the photosphere. The presence of this (usually) invisible layer in the depth of field is advertised in the opening shot of the aquarium scene in The Lady from Shanghai, when the clearly earthbound figure of Welles/Michael steps out between the octopus and the camera, thus establishing not only the presence of a barrier between the figure and the water, but a structure not dissimilar to the layering implied in Méliès’s shots made through fish tanks. Both Welles’s and Méliès’s images integrate vertically sliced layers of water, air and glass, stacked in the depth of field, although in this shot from Welles’s film the barrier is not, of course, glass, but rather the fourth wall of a screen bearing the rear-projected image, standing in for glass. In the photosphere shots of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the existence of a glass barrier separating the viewing position from the water is inadvertently indicated through a persistent smudge, most probably on the lens of the camera. This smudge interposes itself in every underwater shot, maintaining the same position but drifting in and out of visibility in relation to the tonality of the image. Its unchanging position in the frame marks an interruption to the illusion of flow between the viewer and the object of her gaze. The simultaneous transparency and impenetrability of this wall can be more dynamically demonstrated through action, for example when creatures swim up against it. Early in the aquarium scene in The Lady from Shanghai we see fish wiggling their way up the front of the tank, establishing the limits of their freedom. Still more striking is the exhibition of the fourth wall performed with exceptional plasticity by octopuses pressing against glass, as can be seen in both Roberto Rossellini’s aquarium drama Fantasia Sottomarina (1940) and Jean Painlevé’s Les Amours de la pieuvre/The Love Life of the Octopus (1967). This renders the glass entirely conspicuous, as adhesive suckers and malleable bodies model an impression of its surface. As Eva Hayward has written of the inclusion of footage showing this in Painlevé's film, By clinging to the glass wall, the octopus exposes its staging, its enclosure (as does the editor) […] In this film, the octopus is not some abstract representation but rather an actor in ‘intra-acting’ with the apparatuses: lens, aquarium, spectator, camera, film, and screen.46 Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide An octopus presses against aquarium glass, in Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (Phillip Warnell, 2009). Image courtesy of Big Other Films. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide An octopus presses against aquarium glass, in Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (Phillip Warnell, 2009). Image courtesy of Big Other Films. Warnell’s Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies uses images of an aquarium containing a lone octopus as a wordless counterpoint to scenes of a heart transplant operation and of Jean Luc Nancy reading his own text ‘Strange Foreign Bodies’/‘Etranges Corps étrangers’ (written for the film). In the artist’s own words, Outlandish ‘explores the correlation between his [Nancy’s] on-screen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced Octopus at sea’.47 The octopus is housed in a tank containing nothing but clear water, and Outlandish is highly unusual among films that use aquariums insofar as its display of the tank allows it to be comprehended as an object. It is shot from different angles, raised up on the deck of a small, otherwise crewless boat, tossed by the waves of the Mediterranean. This aquarium does not discreetly facilitate a voyeuristic immersion fantasy, but is asserted as a rectangular prism occupying three-dimensional space (in a way that those first aquarium tanks in London did, before the advent of darkened galleries). The octopus pressing up against its walls, experiencing ‘the smooth, cool suction of a glass surface for the first time’, as Warnell describes it, drives home the solidity of both its own body and its container (figure 5).48 This tank could not possibly be elided with a two-dimensional image. When the water inside it sloshes against and over its sides, and the octopus within performs the definition of its limits, we become unusually conscious of the aquarium as the object of the camera, and of the way that the tank not only displays its contents (both water and octopus) but imposes form on them. This unfamiliar three-dimensionality may be what prompts Akira Lippit’s observation of the film that the octopus ‘seems all too corporeal’ – relative to most other representations of octopuses, perhaps.49 The octopuses in these films, and the glass they bring into view, draw our attention to the totality of containment in an aquarium tank, relative even to other forms of captivity. When Berger talks of the artificiality and isolation of zoos, he asserts that animals tend to inhabit the perimeters of their enclosures: ‘The space they inhabit is artificial. Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond its edges there may be real space.)’50 Yet the discontinuity between the enclosure and the ‘real space’ beyond it seems even more starkly evident in the case of most animals kept captive in aquariums, by nature of the fact that the wall of the enclosure is also a border between air and water. Octopuses are rather an exception here in their capacity for mobility, as Painlevé recounts of his experience of filming one. It had a tendency to, ‘when one’s back is turned, escape from the tank, flatten itself out, slip under the studio door and tumble out the window on to the embankment below to the surprise of bathers’.51 It is in the nature of the tank, however, that neither human viewer nor captive creature has any prospect of extending an exploratory limb through the glass, as they might, hypothetically, through bars. Any breach of the tank boundary can only indicate some form of catastrophic collapse. The octopus’s moulding of itself, its demonstrative testing of the glass wall, imputes the slippery, muscular, tactile body that lies just millimetres away; but, unless or until the glass breaks, only the gaze can move to encounter this body. This is something Isobel Armstrong observes of windows in general: ‘despite its stubborn physical existence, the window’s boundary makes the scopic trajectory theoretical, because the body can never follow the eye’.52 Perhaps the proliferation of 3D IMAX films set underwater is motivated by the particular fantasy of achieving a seamless crossing of the fourth wall of film, and at the same time the threshold between air and water worlds, without also precipitating loss. The illusion of dissolving the boundary engenders no jarring between two different vital elements, no moment of shattering and no concomitant renegotiation of worlds usually held apart. The heightened significance of the fourth wall in aquarium tanks, and in the aquatic images that echo them, carries with it a hypothetical possibility of catastrophic shattering, one which seems to haunt many images of aquatic life. In Paton’s film, Captain Nemo observes of his viewing panel that ‘Through these crystal plates constructed to withstand the pressure of the water at this great depth, we gaze on scenes which you might think God had never intended us to see’, celebrating his own technological achievement in unveiling the underwater world, but also exacerbating the anxieties inherent in looking at vast quantities of water held back by a brittle and vulnerable material. (This is still more directly expressed in Verne’s novel, since it is Aronnax who narrates, and remarks that ‘I trembled at first at the thought that these fragile partitions might break’.)53 A similar sense of the tantalising precariousness associated with glass emerges in Warnell’s description of the aquarium as ‘set eternally at the brink of its own collapse’.54 In Past’s account of the so-called ‘edge effect’, discussed earlier, the idea of an edge serves as a metaphor for the intense sense of difference which irrupts on contact between the terrestrial and the aquatic worlds.55 Yet we might equally consider the possibility of imminent contact suggested by a glass boundary to generate a similar ‘edge effect’. The flat surface of the tank’s fourth wall offers the very paradigm of an edge: one which is smoothed, polished, thinned to near two-dimensional refinement, enabling one world to slip closely and smoothly past an entirely different one, a description that might equally apply to the fourth wall of the film image. Stories of the moment when the front, ‘fourth’ wall of a tank has shattered form a lurid popular counterpoint to the motifs of serenity so often associated with the intact aquarium tank. Just before the new aquarium at London Zoo opened in 1924, contemporary journalist Leslie Mainland wrote of how the night-watchman rushed to report that The main seawater tank in the new Aquarium had burst, and 7,000 gallons specially imported from the Bay of Biscay had ‘Gone West’, and a weird crowd of dog-fish, giant conger eels, skate, big turbot, large crabs, and poisonous ‘sting-rays’ were fighting for breath in the main corridor.56 The particular thrill associated with the splintered glass is central to Mainland’s account of the story, which dwells on the fragments littering the scene and the rescuers ‘Creeping through the jagged rents in the plate-glass front’.57 Painlevé, who enjoyed stressing the material aspects of making his underwater films, recounted how the aquariums he used for L’Hippocampe/The Seahorse (1934) ‘shattered on two occasions – once exploding with such force that it flattened a crew member against the wall while glass shards shredded a bystander’s shoes’.58 The shock and fascination provoked by stories such as this perhaps point to the extent to which aquarium creatures are often otherwise read as not quite real. They are accepted as silent spectacle until a rupture transforms their relation to the human viewer by catapulting them into ‘real space’, to return to Berger’s term. Within fiction film, the motif of the broken aquarium tends to symbolize the collapse of apparent structures of order: in Mission: Impossible (Brian de Palma, 1996), Tom Cruise’s secret agent Ethan Hunt blows up the huge tanks of an aquarium-themed restaurant as a means of escape, when he begins to see the multiple layers of deception that had characterized his most recent assignment. In Michael Haneke’s Der siebente Kontinent/The Seventh Continent (1989) the smashing of the aquarium is arguably one the most disturbing acts in the central family’s extravagantly destructive prelude to suicide. Moments which leave aquatic animals writhing out of their element, suddenly in the same space as their viewers, confront us with their existence as living, visceral beings, with the real substance which had been contained behind the glossy flat surface of spectacle. The deep shock triggered by the breaking of the screen-like tank is nowhere more evident than in the video released by Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television of the moment a 33-tonne aquarium, which had been incorporated into the displays in Shanghai’s Orient Shopping Center, spontaneously burst, leaving sixteen people injured and causing the deaths of three lemon sharks ‘and dozens of turtles and small fish’.59 The strangely compelling nature of this event, objectively of minor significance, is reflected by the large number of global news sources which picked up the story and which continue to host the images online.60 The footage lays bare what had always been implicitly at stake in the display, and in the way its viewers had thus far encountered it. The recording (presumably only ever intended to monitor human activity), never shows the intact aquarium. Instead, the first angle in the sequence aired by the BBC (to give just one source), shows us the casual observers of the tank in the few seconds before it cracks. We see one person standing in the mall gazing up off-screen at the tank, and apparently photographing it, and a small group of others occasionally glancing at it as they carry on a conversation, at ease in an unremarkable situation. Suddenly they are hit by a tide of white water bursting from the side of the frame, sweeping them off their feet as the contents of the aquarium are disgorged across the floor. The apparatus of electrical light and heat that had been sustaining the aquarium image, unseen, is now ripped from the hidden space around the tank and lies tangled with fish, whose lives in this place had only ever been intended to signify as objects of the human gaze. The contents of the aquarium image are suddenly revealed to be entirely incommensurate with the flat sheen of cosmetics posters and window displays in which the tank had been embedded. The fish themselves are newly realized as substantial, vital, fleshly bodies, cast at the feet of the onlookers. The framed spectacle of aquatic life becomes undeniably material, and in the same moment disenchanted. The tanks’ inhabitants can no longer be compared with two-dimensional images, as their struggling forms now occupy space in the shopping centre in a way they never did before. Any sense that they did not inhabit the same linear time or continuous space as their spectators is overturned, as they are thrown out into a zone which for them is one of inevitable and conspicuous mortality. The response of the human spectators is to redirect their ever-ready camera phones from the spectacle of the tank to the spectacle of animal death. Aquatic life is reframed: these creatures may have erupted into ‘real space’ for a painful, fleshly moment, but their presence there constitutes merely a brief transition from tank spectacle to screen spectacle, cycling eternally online. Footnotes 1 Phillip Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, in Phillip Warnell and Jean-Luc Nancy, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (London: Kingston University/The Wellcome Trust, 2010), pp. 39–42. For more information on this book, contact info@phillipwarnell.com. 2 Nicole Starosielski, ‘Beyond fluidity: a cultural history of cinema underwater’, in Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds), Ecocinema Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 149–68. 3 Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, p. 39 (emphasis in original). 4 Celeste Olalquiaga, Artificial Kingdoms: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 48. 5 Ibid., pp. 46–55. 6 ‘Thierry Henry plans mammoth fish tank’, Telegraph, 19 February 2012, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9091740/Thierry-Henry-plans-mammoth-fish-tank.html> accessed 20 January 2020. 7 Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, p. 39. 8 ‘“Blue Planet” most watched show of 2017 as top 10 announced’, Independent, 11 January 2018, <https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/blue-planet-ii-most-watched-2017-tv-top-10-strictly-come-dancing-broadchurch-a8153456.html> accessed 20 January 2020. 9 John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 35. 10 Ibid., p. 26. 11 Frank Gray, ‘Smith the Showman: the early years of George Albert Smith’, Film History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1998), p. 11. 12 ‘Popular scientific lectures’, The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 28 (1866), p. 119. 13 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: the American Screen to 1907. Volume I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 32. 14 Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, p. 42. 15 Philippe-Alain Michaud, ‘Aquarium ou cinéma liquide’, Specimen, no. 8 (2015), pp. 25–31. 16 Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 284. 17 Zack Hatfield, ‘Salvation mode: the forgotten joys of the screen saver’, The Paris Review, 23 May 2017, <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/23/salvation-mode/> accessed 20 January 2020. 18 Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, p. 42. 19 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 95. 20 Bernd Brunner, The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (London: Reaktion, 2011). 21 Judith Hamera, Parlor Ponds, The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 24–28 22 Arthur Mangin, Les Mystères de l’océan (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1864). 23 Arthur Mangin, The Mysteries of the Ocean, trans. W. H. Davenport Adams (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1870). 24 Ibid., p. 202. 25 Ibid. 26 Michael Lawrence, ‘Photographs and families in We Bought a Zoo’, in Michael Lawrence and Karen Lury (eds), The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 205. 27 For a discussion of how public aquariums are increasingly striving to break the nineteenth-century conventions on which this essay is focused, and an illuminating comparison with Blue Planet II, see Susanna Lidström and Anna Åberg, ‘Rising seas: facts, fictions and aquaria’, in Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, Kirsten Wehner (eds), Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 230–39. 28 Michaud, ‘Aquarium ou cinéma liquide’, p. 26 (my translation). 29 For a more comprehensive history of the Williamsons’ underwater films, and their racial politics in particular, see Starosielski, ‘Beyond fluidity’. 30 Brian Taves, ‘With Williamson beneath the sea’, Journal of Film Preservation, vol. 25, no. 52 (1996), p. 54. 31 Brian Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen (Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 33. 32 Olalquiaga, Artificial Kingdoms, p. 191. 33 Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 92. 34 Tom Gunning, ‘The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), p. 57. 35 This intertitle also attempts to reconcile the film’s claims to novel access to a deep-sea world with the fact that it was shot in the shallow, sunlit waters of the Bahamas, precisely because of the difficulty of getting enough light elsewhere. See Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne, p. 27. 36 Elena Past, ‘Lives aquatic: Mediterranean cinema and an ethics of underwater existence’, Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 3 (2009), p. 57. 37 Ibid. 38 One version of this film in circulation online is edited differently and omits the octopus sequence entirely, despite the fact that it figured vividly in contemporary promotional material. The version used for this essay corresponds closely to J. E. Williamson’s detailed account of the scene and its making (including the making of the octopus puppet and the appalling treatment of the diver), in his memoir, Twenty Years Under the Sea (Boston, MA: Ralph T. Hale, 1936), p. 162. 39 Starosielski, ‘Beyond fluidity’, p. 153. 40 Ibid. 41 Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, p. 203. 42 ‘Sub sea picture credit to movies: photography is wonderful, action is disappointing’, The Harrisburg Patriot, 5 June 1917, p. 2. 43 Charles Higham, The Films of Orson Welles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), p. 112. 44 Michaud, ‘Aquarium ou cinéma liquide’, p. 27. 45 Orson Welles, ‘A trip to Don Quixoteland: conversations with Orson Welles’, interview by Juan Cobos, Miguel Rubio and J. A. Pruneda, in Mark W. Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles: Interviews (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), p. 102. 46 Eva S. Hayward, ‘Enfolded vision: refracting the love life of the octopus’, Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal, vol. 1 (2005), p. 42. 47 Warnell, 'Foreword', in Warnell and Nancy, Outlandish, p. 3. 48 Warnell, ‘The sea with corners’, p. 42. 49 Akira Lippit, Front matter, in Warnell and Nancy, Outlandish, p. 3. 50 Berger, Why Look at Animals?, p. 35. 51 Jean Painlevé, ‘Feet in the water’, in Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg (eds), Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, trans. Jeanine Herman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 132. 52 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 115. 53 Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, p. 93. 54 Warnell and Nancy, Outlandish, p. 39. 55 Past, ‘Lives aquatic’, p. 57. 56 Leslie G. Mainland, The Hidden Zoo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), p. 15. 57 Ibid., p. 18. 58 Painlevé, ‘Feet in the water’, p. 139. 59 ‘Shark tank bursts over shoppers in China’, Telegraph, 27 December 2012, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9766987/Shark-tank-bursts-over-shoppers-in-China.html> accessed 20 January 2020. 60 ‘Aquarium bursts in shopping centre in Shanghai’, BBC News, 27 December 2012, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-20850048/aquarium-bursts-in-shopping-centre-in-shanghai> accessed 20 January 2020. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Framing aquatic life
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjaa013
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/framing-aquatic-life-h85OTq5o2Y
SP - 169
VL - 61
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -