Recontextualization of the Other in Peter Eng's The Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole
"[M]uch of what I find intriguing in these films was not intended by their makers or exhibitors."
-Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams
Much of the writing dedicated to the evolution of the cinema has, either directly or indirectly, functioned as a corroboration of what David Bordwell calls the Standard Version of film history, which, in its broadest sense, refers to the movement of motion pictures from short scenes of actuality toward a more technically and narratively complex system of storytelling through the development and deployment of all the variegated tools endemic to the medium. These can include the use of spoken text, music, editing, staging, motion of subject or of camera, or any other number of pro-filmic, enframed, or edited characteristics of cinema. What all of these techniques bear in common is their function within the narrativization of the filmed work, and, by virtue of the narrative's illusions of self-containment and self-efficacy, the exclusion of any extra- or inter-textual signifiers that may establish or deepen a filmed work's value, meaning, or -- to use a loaded term -- success.
This primacy of a self-establishing narrative overlooks a great deal of film history, especially that which encompasses non-theatrical and non-fictive works, wherein the filmed entertainment was presented not as an all-encompassing work of art in and of itself, but rather as a part of a larger presentation. In her book Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Peterson chooses to focus on travelogues specifically, an often overlooked genre of cinema that is especially prone to what she calls "intertextual complexity." Quoting Rick Altman, she explains, "'Early moving pictures were in many cases like theatrical props,' simply one part of a live performance that also involved lecturing and slides." Many of these early filmed works, then -- and, in fact, ephemeral filmed works from all points along the continuing history of the cinema -- must be thought of not as self-contained documents, but rather as particularly vivid pieces of a socio-historical puzzle, illuminating for us not only their subjects, but also -- and, perhaps, even more so -- their creators.
This intertextuality should not come at the expense of a textual reading of a given piece of film; rather, it should serve as a means of enriching and deepening one's analysis of it. While Peter Eng's The Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole (1923) is by no means what Peterson would categorize as a travelogue, many of her arguments and observations are salient to the film and point to a particularly fruitful context in which we can view and appreciate this curious work.
Seemingly commissioned to advertise some sort of industrial trades fair, Eng's film immediately capitalizes upon the widespread interest in the Inuit and other northern arctic peoples spurred by the success of Robert Flaherty's docu-drama Nanook of the North the previous year. "In picturing the world that does exist," Peterson notes, "early travel films created a world that does not exist: an idealized geography that functioned as a parallel universe on the cinema screen." From this "parallel universe" sprang countless fantastical depictions of the world, some more germane to reality than others, in which one can, in hindsight, quite clearly see a naive imperialism, a reduction of foreign lands and their citizens to a sort of Hegelian Other, subordinate and inferior to both the crews who filmed them and to the audiences who consumed them. This is by no means an arbitrary term; Peterson goes on to state, "The new visual culture of travel enabled people to envision the world as a series of consumable places." Quoting Mary Louise Pratt, Peterson elaborates, "The viewer witnesses not only a foreign culture or landscape, but the 'relations of domination and subordination' that are inscribed by the act of filming that foreign culture or landscape."
It is in this regard that Eng's film becomes, to myself at least, both most interesting and most acutely self-aware. Beginning not with filmed "actuality," but rather with a somewhat crudely animated depiction of the protagonist, Eng immediately establishes a degree of Otherness between subject and viewer that is further accentuated by the absurdity of the routines depicted (most strikingly, that of the parading of bears into a meat-grinder-like device in order to produce ice cream). This is the first of several recontextualizations which make us question not only the relationship between subject and spectator, but also the mutability and contingency of such roles and the manner in which technology shapes and changes them. Peterson adapts Pratt's notion of "contact zones" ("'social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.'") to accommodate "the safe zone of the movie theater." It is within these "virtual contact zones," Peterson explains, that viewers witness not the culture itself, but rather the "encounter" of the culture.
Eng seems preternaturally aware of this aspect of the subject-spectator interaction as he stages the titular "discovery" of Vienna not in any concrete empirical transaction, but rather on a movie screen. Here we find Eng's second recontextualization, which is perhaps the most interesting and complex of the film. Here, not only is our protagonist given his first view of Vienna, but the audience is given its first view of filmed reality. The dynamic here is worth exploring for a number of reasons. Firstly, for the sense of authority that this cinematic trick implicitly gives to its own apparatus; the power of the camera, Eng seems to be saying, is its ability to capture reality itself. Here is no mere depiction, such as we have been treated thus far through animation, but a record of living, breathing actuality. This, of course, can also be said to have the effect of affirming the Viennese white male as somehow more real than the protagonist, further reinforcing the imperialist gaze of the motion pictures, but I believe this is reductive. By presenting Vienna within the context of a cinema screen, Eng also invites the audience to consider themselves as a subject, and in doing so, to considering the very nature of observation.
It is here that we must also remember that Eng's film is primarily functioning as an advertisement for a trades fair and that we, as an audience, are being encouraged to view the latest technological advances (such as a maneuverable plow) with the same sense of wonder and awe as might our protagonist. Here, the intrinsic Otherness on which the film has seemed to capitalize posits itself against Eng's desire for us to relate and align ourselves with the protagonist, creating a somewhat uneasy conflagration of perspectives which remedies itself through the film's next recontextualization: as our protagonist sojourns to the fair, he arrives not as a caricatured animation, but personified as a flesh and blood human, occupying the same physiological -- if not the same sociological or intellectual -- plane as the Viennese. It is in this act that the protagonist is, paradoxically, rendered both his most individually relatable (through his flesh and blood personification) and his most contextually amiss (through his juxtaposition with the sophistications of Viennese society and technology).
Peterson makes two other points which are worth mentioning in light of this final recontextualizaton. First is that our protagonist's journey is not unique, but rather firmly placed within a continuum of travel that had been earning cultural cache: "[T]ourism was also spurred by a wave of World's Fair exhibitions in the second half of the [nineteenth] century." So just as tourism had prompted a profusion of films about exotic locales, so too did the cinema spark an interest in visiting those foreign lands. This Ouroboros of cross-pollination between travel and travelogues finds, in Eng's film, an interesting microcosmic snapshot of itself, in which "Other" becomes an even more malleable term.
Secondly, Peterson invokes Pierre Bourdieu, whose work "traces the ways in which 'art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil [sic] a social function of legitimating differences.'" In the case of The Discovery of Vienna..., we see a particularly ripe example of this, insofar as it not only encourages the audience to distinguish between Vienna and the North Pole, as its title implies, but also -- for the purposes of commerce (and it is in this mode that we must point to the reemergence of that term, "consumption") -- to view themselves as different and, as all advertising somehow must by design impress, deficient. By using a culturally accepted depiction of the Other as an avatar, he both conceals the implications of his motive and draws the audience in as though for pure entertainment.
For a modern viewer, a film such as The Discovery of Vienna... is fated to be more illuminating than inherently entertaining. So much of what makes it a significant work is based upon cultural signifiers both intended and imperative that one cannot simply view it in a vacuum as he or she might a so-called canonical work such as Citizen Kane, for which such historical context would serve to deepen rather than define its cache. Through the work of scholars such as Jennifer Peterson, however, we are more able to put these non-fictive and non-theatrical works into proper relief; while Eng's film may have little to teach us about the form of filmic art, its revelations about the culture which birthed it are legion and serve to remind us that intertextuality is not a detriment, but a strength that such elliptical works are fortunate to possess.
Christopher Bruno