Dark Waters: Representing the Ocean Animus
Surman, D. 2008. "Dark Waters: Representing the Ocean Animus", Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference 2008, Bounemouth, UK
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Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference 2008
Dark Waters: Representing the Ocean Animus
David Surman, University of Wales, Newport
The Looming Ocean
Looming is a word from the sea. Glim is, too, though is our daily usage we have transformed glim into glimpse and glimmer. On the horizons of the sea—as we see them from the decks of a ship or from the beach—things loom through the glim. For a moment, in the glim’s shimmering light and haze, we see beyond the horizon. Beyond the ordinary limits of our vision. (Dening 2004: 33)
In a fleeting play of light, air and water, the great mirror of the ocean seems to transform reality by creating a mirage, the glim, which acts as a lens through which our perspective is enhanced and extended. The romantic imagination couched tremendous value in the alterity of this vision, and by association focused on interpreting and representing the topography of the oceans and seas. In the seascapes of J.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, considerable depth of form is achieved through the emulation of the glim through which we see ambiguous horizons. Land and sea are universally conceived as the two extremes of a polarity. One is material, predictable, knowable; it’s counterpart the opposite—chaotic, changeable, in constant movement. This binary opposition is complicated by the processes of industrial modernity, such that the sea is constructed in two very different ways. For the sea is paradoxically both simple and complex. Antithetical to land and home, the oceans of antiquity are contradictory, malevolent spaces, ready to absorb man’s folly. They resist civilisation, and as such delimit the domain of man and gods. Crossing the ocean of classical culture often had the effect of transforming, both symbolically and literally, the self of the traveller. Later, the Christian expression of the seas baptismal dimensions cast a unique light both on the ocean and the persona of the seafarer, fisherman and navigator. It provided an interpretation, of the death of seafarers as martyrdom to a cause, immanent to their allotted role. In an epigram of 1633 by the metaphysical poet John Donne entitled “A Burnt Ship”, the rhyming poetic style represents a scene of violent finality with a sense of gruesome balance and elemental vindication.
Out of a fired ship, which by no way
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But drowning could be rescued from the flame, Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay; So all were lost, which in the ship were found, They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drowned. (Donne, 1896 [1633])
The quality of the form interacts directly with the content, in such a way that the reader is left with a paradoxical sense of a ‘perfect massacre’. The topsy-turvy image of contrasting deaths by fire and water retrieve a sense of orderly beauty from within the carnage, a transitory moment at the epicentre of an otherwise chaotic collision. The complex relationship between astrology and the navigation of the ocean is central to the interpretation of its space. On the one hand the stars provide a predictable map of heaven giving constancy and orientation; a defence against the ocean’s coercive force, into which our movement is forever alien. But as in Donne’s epigram, men at sea are always “star-cross’d”, ill-fated figures. The ocean resists and tests the knowledge we bring to its interpretation. Only the seafarer, initiated through the baptism of experience, can hope to tunes his senses to the inexpressible complexity of this ocean. Greg Dening writes that
A sailing vessel is a machine energized by natural forces and human vigor. Power so harnessed gives every part of the ship a trembling, beating life that transmits itself to the bodies of the sailors and all their senses. Sailors feel the rhythm, hear it, smell it, see it, have the language to describe it. Their watches might be their hours of vigilance, but they are always awake to the signs of life around them. When life is so dependent on skill and knowledge and the choreography of their movements, true authority is divorced from power. […] It was serious play. (Dening, 2004: 25)
The authority of the ocean is often imbibed with a degree of agency. In Aesop’s fable, the “shepherd and the sea”, the ocean is constructed as a mythic trickster; having been robbed of his cargo of dates by a sudden storm, the shepherd sighs;
“Watch out, my good fellow,” the shepherd remarked. “That smooth surface is only on the lookout for your dates.” (1996: 204)
This is only one half of our contemporary account of the ocean however. There is another ocean, one which is marked by the absence of chaotic current and the temerity of the seafarer. 2
The ocean of modernity is characterised by its flatness. The driving force of industrial technologies for travel, the desires of the new leisure classes, and economic and cultural motivations for international movement transformed the ocean into a singular, immense, absence. London to New York—through the fragmentation of space distance and time afforded by accelerating travel, the ocean is lost as a point between points. In the transatlantic cruise liner, the aggrandisement of recreation transforms the ship into an autonomous zone of pure distraction. Horizons are meant for sunsets, blue skies for sun tans, and the sea itself fades from the picture. The sheer size of the vessel shields it from all but the worst weather. Commercial air travel finalises this process, leapfrogging the ocean entirely, and creating an automatic nostalgia for its distant simplicity, as seen through a cabin window from thirty thousand feet. Topological categories such as the “Pacific Rim” express the landlocked nature of language and the capital that follows it. Denning writes,
Global capitalists encompass Oceania in their “Rimspeak.” The Pacific Rim is that imaginary space of growth beyond regions of stagnation and market decline. Encompassment in the global economy is the creation of a region outside of the ideologically and politically limited boundaries of the state, a space for market and exploitation outside of the limits that social ideas and cultural values impose. (Dening, 2004: 18)
Ocean topography limits civil society to the landlocked archipelago of human language: “A ship at sea is like an island in the ocean. The horizon is all around. That enclosing horizon seems to fill both a ship and an island with language very intensely” (Dening, 2004: 15). In their own way, the seaside pier and the submarine both represent the extension of human desire beyond boundaries normally demarcated by the ocean. Vilém Flusser writes that “…all the material power in the world was for a time concentrated on the submarine…” (Flusser, 1999: 112). The elimination of the sea from our conceptualisation of global commerce culminates in Barthes assertion that the sea “bears no message”. While the “discovery of the seaside” by the Victorian leisure classes embellished the beach with meaning, they rarely extended to the sea itself. John Travis writes that in Great Britain “By 1750 … Members of the middle class began to join the aristocracy and gentry at the seaside. To cater for this growing demand, seaside resorts began to emerge at many more places on the English coast” (Travis, 1997: 12). He adds that Victorian encounters with sea water were motivated by perceived health gains rather than for pleasure.
Few swam; most were dipped into the ‘healing brine’ by brawny attendants. This could be an unpleasant experience, especially for those of a nervous disposition. Indeed it was
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almost as though sea bathing was deliberately made as unpleasant as possible, on the principle that the more disagreeable the treatment, the more likely the cure. (Travis, 1997: 13)
Following from this scene of Victorian uncertainty, in a footnote to his essay “Myth Today”, Barthes emphasises the significant difference between beach-land and ocean topos by asking the question,
In a single day, how many non-signifying fields do we really cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me. (Barthes 2000 [1957]: 112)
Barthes rhetorical question is full of romantic sentiment, for if the sea doesn’t signify, then it evokes, as Dening has noted, “…Freud’s notion of “oceanic feeling” as a sensation of eternity, or W.H. Auden’s “barbaric vagueness of the sea,” or Gaston Bachelard’s “substantive nothingness of water,” or even Jules Michelet’s sense of the ocean as a sublime slime—wet, fecund femininity” (Dening, 2004: 13-14). Certainly, the impact of anthropology and ethnography on maritime studies gives us a clear sense that, in different ways in different places, the sea certainly signifies; that the process of “Historicizing [sic] the Sea is an exercise in deep time, shallow time—both; in deep space, shallow space—both” (Dening, 2004: 14). Search and Rescue In Roger Fry’s 1926 publication Transformation, he explains the particular quality of cinema aesthetics through the anecdotal experience of seeing a documentary film about the rescue of stranded crew of the coast of Portugal. He writes,
I was present at a film which recorded the work of rescue from a ship wrecked off the coast of Portugal. One saw at a considerable distance the hull of the vessel stranded on a flat shore and in between crest after crest of huge waves. In the foreground men were working desperately pulling at a rope which ever so slowly drew away from the distant ship a small black object which swayed and swung from the guide rope. Again and again the waves washed over it in its slow progress shorewards. It was not till it was near the shore that one realised that this was a basket with a human being in it. When it was finally landed the men rushed to it and took out—a man or a corpse, according to the luck of the passage or the resistance of the individual. The fact that one was watching a film cut off all those activities which, in the real situation, might have been a vent and
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mitigation of one’s emotions. One was a pure, helplessly detached spectator, and yet a spectator of a real event with the real, not merely the simulated, issue of life and death. (Fry, 1969 [1926]: 103-104)
His rich description recalls the incredible depth achieved in the paintings of the Romantic masters Turner and Friedrich. The ontological remark he makes is no doubt a familiar one, exhaustively explored in film theory from the sixties onward. However what is of interest here is the explicit analogy made between the landlocked position of the person looking out to sea, and the experience of the cinemagoer. The evocation of a sense of “pure” emotion not just detached but actively positioned by the experience. Fry creates a binary association between land and pro-filmic reality, and sea and film. Pulling the figure toward the land equates to pulling the figure out of its uncanny status (“…a man or a corpse…”) in the “meaningless” sea, toward the symbolic order afforded by proximity to the land. The strength of such a binary opposition and association is compounded by the native cultural resonance of land and sea. Dening notes that: “Islanders made their cultural identity—they made sense of themselves—in ritual, dance, story, design, and architecture—by making large polarities—Native/Stranger, Land/Sea, Life/Death, Violent Power/Legitimate Authority. They discovered for themselves, by story and talk, the ways in which these polarities were crossed to make themselves who they were” (Dening, 2004: 15). To be lost at sea means that the subject ceases to signify, to be rescued is to be recuperated back into signification. The movie camera inherits the problems of its operator insofar as it cannot fully penetrate into the topography of the ocean. The precarious legs of the tripod suffer the same buckling nausea as yours or mine. The camera point-of-view in Fry’s description not only records the scene, but embodies the limits of the apparatus and the physical body it substitutes. It longs to see through the glim to the heart of the storm, looming over the horizon. Its position amplifies the semantic divide between land and sea, and fails to make the sea known in the way it had been so instrumental in defining the political economy of the land. The invention of the movie camera is an expression of the same process of technological modernity that erased the complex ocean and replaced it with the abstraction of journey time. As such there is an irony to the landlocked camera, as it can only spectate from afar the events off the Portuguese coast. In this broad context we can begin to think about the ambition of Windor McKay’s Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), an “animated documentary”. The sinking of the Lusitania cruise liner by German U-Boats was a hugely controversial issue, and played a key role in instigating America’s participation in the First World War. Winsor McKay, incensed by the event, produced 5
an animated short—a sort of ground-zero report, which employs a number of perceptual cues to articulate a realistic sense of the event unfolding. The “camera eye” of the animated image sits deep in the ocean swell. This ambiguous vantage point recalls the work of the Romantic painter’s representation of shipwrecks, where the denial of clear vantage points for the viewer creates a kind of productive limbo, emphasising the alterity of the ocean topos and intensifying our awareness of the precarious placement of human elements in such a maelstrom. Such use of space can be seen in Turner’s 1805 painting Shipwreck, and his later and much more infamous (and aesthetically resolved) Slave Ship of 1840. The romantic imagining of an actual event by Turner in the Slave Ship surely impacts on McKay as he replicates the English Romantic’s labour, albeit by drawing in time rather than oil. Productive Limbo and Intentionality I don’t want to fixate on the event that the animation “documents” in The Sinking of the Lusitania. Paul Wells and others have spoken about the epistemological issues of animated documentary, and the “imitative mode” to which McKay’s film belongs. Instead I want to reflect on the animation itself, and the production of a mise-en-scène in which our perception denotes the thrashing sea as natural, and from which McKay picks significant details. I want to conclude by analysing the issues of intentionality and agency in the “productive limbo” of an animated ocean. Paul Wells has returned to consider the film a number of times, and has summarised that
The film self-consciously foregrounds its construction and operates as a quasi-newsreel which self-evidently attempts to be a ‘film of record’ based on the known facts of the event. This is an imagined narrative, using the information about the sinking as it has been (selectively) determined in retrospect. The film though superficially adopting the tone of accurate reportage is actually overtly biased in its address of the conduct of the Germans and the tragedy of the sinking. Its barely disguised ‘tabloid’ outrage is muted by the construction of scenarios in which once more the underlying seriously of the subject matter is authenticated as a model of documentary truth (Wells, 1997: 42)
Later, Wells describes how McKay employs specific textual strategies to scandalise the and spectacularise the demise of the Lusitania;
McKay accentuates the emotive dimension to the piece – lifeboats are lowered; figures continually fall to their death; a mother desperately holds her baby to her breast; the ship rolls and flounders; the waters ripple as the ship is laid to rest. (Wells, 1997: 42)
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The historicized ocean I have tentatively described in this paper provokes a number of questions about the use of animation in The Sinking if the Lusitania. The story of the Lusitania is suffused with the ambiguities of the machine age. A passenger ship operating in the heyday of such modes of travel, she was the target of German aggression (motivated in part by rumours that the ship was carrying arms in storage). McKay’s film, which Wells identifies as “tabloid”, directs full rhetorical force at the German military machine. While the film shows the sinking of the ship at sea, the interstitial statements about noteworthy victims and the larger issues position the event in the Wartime context. And yet “the waters ripple as the ship is laid to rest”. The ocean of the machine age is invisible. Both the leisurely Lusitania and the German U-boat testify to the mutability of the ocean, its essential invisibility, another essence through which human desire passes uninterrupted. However, the animation of the ocean complicates its subordination to modernity and the ideological ambition of McKay. Freed from the constraints of film photography, over the span of twenty-five thousand drawings McKay lays bare the drama of the event. The languid plume of smoke issuing from failing engines; the falling passengers; the eternal horizon; everything is created by McKay. The animation of the ocean swell asserts the drama of the scene in a spectacular series of parallax layers. And yet in so doing, McKay evokes the ocean of antiquity, and The Sinking of the Lusitania, for all its didacticism, recreates the romantic image of the shipwreck, and instead sets the fragile passengers in an intense battle with supernatural nature. In the vocational turn that has transformed media education in Great Britain and overseas, “effects animation” has been definitive of the drawn-animation skills orientated training. For instance animating flags to accurately suggest the flow of wind through fabric, the drip of a tap, the eruption of a volcano; specific technique for creating these sorts of motion reflect the condensation of knowledge and standardisation of visual solutions for animators. An example shown taken here from Osamu Tezuka’s School of Animation publication perfectly represents the issue of creating animation of natural phenomena.
In animation, when drawing water, it’s necessary to be familiar with the qualities of liquid and water. You have to accurately convey its smooth cohesiveness and fluidity. You also need to naturally evoke the sense of an irregular form that is always changing. You may think anyone can draw water, but conveying its water-like essence realistically is not easy … You won’t be able to depict a certain degree of realism unless you are well-acquainted with the movement and properties of water. It requires much effort and the timing can be
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difficult to grasp, so this is a good way to test your chops. (Tezuka Productions, 2003: 8586)
The animator has a predicament. They want to convey the perceptual cues of water-like movement, and in so doing create a sense of the natural into which they can stage action (for instance a sinking ship). But the natural is animated, the process of creating movement through sequential drawn images imbibed the moving wave with a sense of agency, motive or intentionality that contradicts its neutral status within the mise-en-scène. To nullify this ocean animus, a technics of production emerges to establish how to “animate without animating”. Departments like the experimental division at Disney determined a language for the ocean with worked in accordance with the prevailing ideologies of their time. Pinnochio and Monstro have agency, the ocean does not. The vengeful spirits of the romantic imagination interrupt the production of a standardised narrative format and character commodity, and so their life energy is transposed to the caricature of the protagonist, and they are reduced to a rehearsed lexicon of minor perceptual cues. Dening reminds us that
Islanders read the sea—historicized it—by hearing what they called, in their different dialects, “the language of the sea.” The “language of the sea began at its edges. If the Inuit had thirty words for snow, and the Nuer had twenty-seven words for the color of their cows, the Hawaiians and other islanders had as many words for the shape and character of the waves that beat against their shores. Waves, in their season and in their weather, had personal names and histories. They told stories, sang songs, made poetry through the generations how these waves had been surfed and beaten. They played with the sea at its edges. They would not have seen the sea as a Turner saw it. They played with it, imposed their signature on it with style. (Dening, 2004: 15-16)
McKay’s animation is something of an anomaly, emerging before much of the practice of animation had become standardised. His ocean is exactly that, his ocean. He animates as he sees appropriate the billowing smoke, yawning hull, falling women, crying children with a level of idiosyncrasy that would ultimately make him outmoded in the rapid developments of the twenties. In the process of creating a world through animation, be it for film, games, or virtual environments, the “author” must determine a hierarchy of value that in turn determines the method with which an asset or component is animated. I have described here the complexity of the sea, and explained how The Sinking of the Lusitania highlights how changes in our cultural attitude to the topography of the ocean. elements of animation within the frame interrelate and form a type of “productive limbo”. The historicized sea is defined by the technics we bring to it; 8
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