Figure 4. Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–1554). Loggia dei Lanzi, Museo Nazionale Del Bargello. Courtesy of Museo Nazionale Del Bargello.
The interpretive question posed by Shelley’s poem is how alive and therefore how dangerous is Medusa’s severed head, and how far the image-making of art, whether in painting or poetry, can effect a sufficient barrier against that danger. Ekphrasis ought to be safe from the problems of figuration that concern Medusa in visual media, yet Shelley’s poem is energized by the doubt that not even literary distance is sufficient. If the general aim of ekphrasis is, as it were, for the image described to come alive, then the case of Medusa gives rise to the opposite impulse: the fear that this may actually happen. Mitchell locates “ekphrastic ambiguity” in the fascination with the woman, which commingle fear of and desire for Medusa. The reader’s fear is stoked by the poem’s structural ambiguity concerning the status of the visual. Though Shelley’s title suggests that it is a description of a specific painting in the Uffizi Gallery (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, later credited to an anonymous painter of the Flemish school), Mitchell notes that the poem’s speaker seems to be standing not before the painting but the gorgon’s severed head, in the present tense, unmediated (fig. 5). By the logic of the Medusa myth, then, the speaker has cast aside the protective, intervening frame of the artwork, a repetition of Perseus’s shield, exposing himself in imagination directly to the prohibited and petrifying, hence unrepresentable, sight.
The gambit of image-making is the ambiguity of the image both as distancing representation and as what Mitchell sees as explicit in the Medusan subject matter, “the image as a dangerous female other.”43 Like the China Girl, Medusa’s “repressed image” tends to become only image—the otherness of her femininity is strangely without a gendered body.44 This is to say that her body—the site of her dangerous femininity, one would think—once again disappears. (At least that other “shattered visage” of Shelley’s, Ozymandias, got to keep his “vast [but] trunkless legs”!) Her head, meanwhile, is transformed by Shelley into a mere object: “it.” Though Mitchell does not remark on it, Shelley’s poem does evoke, if only in misdirection, the body missing from the scene, describing how “from its head as from one body grow, / As [river] grass out of a watery rock, / Hairs which are vipers.” In this simile, the head stands in for the body, but as with Canova, the sublimation of gender has already begun with the act of decapitation.45 It is curious, then, that Mitchell regards this painting as a definitive and exemplary “female image” without remarking on the fact that its subject is the absence of a female body, or that Shelley himself works to underline the paradox.46
Figure 5. A Flemish painter (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci), Medusa’s Head (ca. 1600), The Uffizi Gallery.
Like Foster and Mitchell, Kracauer uses the Medusa myth to tell a kind of origin story for the aesthetic as encounter or scene. Kracauer sets himself the problem of film’s specificity as a medium in this regard. For him, the mythical scene is analogous to the film-viewing experience: Medusa is the film image, a mediated real presented onscreen, while the film viewer has taken up the role of Perseus:
The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.47
Kracauer, like Foster and Mitchell, ignores Medusa’s body after it is split from her head, and consequently his theory follows a now-predictable trajectory that divides gender and materiality on one hand and image and immateriality on the other. Yet his interpretation of the myth opens up other, productive possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between gender and materiality for film.
Kracauer’s film theory is materialist. Because film and photography possess a mimetic relationship with the world they register, they are closer to reality than other forms of art-making, and the images they produce thereby constitute a special category of encounter, tantamount to reality itself.48 Kracauer bases much of his faith in cinema in its potential for integrating the real—the physical, material world of history—in a way that no other medium can achieve. Kracauer’s understanding of materiality is worth following, even if the materiality he sees in the image, namely, reality, has less to do with the materiality of the image, the filmstrip. The latter is the concern of this book.
Kracauer’s emphasis on film materiality offers two new conceptions of Medusa that allow us to place her outside of the narrow characterization provided so far. First, she is a figure that possesses a whole body. Significantly, Kracauer aligns the film viewer with Perseus not as a victor, but as the hero in the moment before battle: “Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.”49 By implication, his use of the mirrored shield protects him from the living, fearsome Medusa as a whole body, which Canova and Shelley have already ushered out of sight. Though Medusa’s body is not mentioned in Kracauer’s text, we can assume that it is as yet untouched by Perseus’s blade. Second, her body is comprised of visceral material. In invoking Georges Franju’s slaughterhouse documentary The Blood of the Beasts (1949) as an example of “actual horrors” seen in the Medusan reflection, Kracauer presents an industrial repetition of Medusa’s decapitation: “puddles of blood spread on the floor while horse and cow are killed methodically; a saw dismembers animal bodies still warm with life; and there is the unfathomable shot of the calves’ heads being arranged.”50 To be sure, the slaughtered cows are not gendered, but Kracauer has slyly reintroduced the body—still warm and palpable, and not a metaphysical remainder but an industrial factor—into the Medusa myth.51
Kracauer also offers a new purpose for Medusa, which, more than it displays the aesthetic powers inherent in the artwork, provides therapeutic value. In this way, cinema is “redemptive” as the title of his book suggests. He deploys Medusa’s image to effectively heal an already traumatized spectator: “The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.”52 By relocating the heroic act from Medusa’s decapitation to viewing her image in the shield, Kracauer unwittingly restores to Medusa her complete body. Even if he does not describe Medusa’s corporeality in terms of a gendered materiality, his theory offers the possibility of doing so. Strikingly, there is no violence necessary to his account. When he identifies the shield that bears Medusa’s image as belonging to Athena, he does not specify whether this is the shield on which the gorgoneion is mounted, or the one the goddess originally gave to Perseus to aid in his quest. This ambiguity is enough to wind back the progression of events in the myth and to end them, as he says, in the “mirror reflections of horror.” The body of the woman is left intact, and it is from this place, in the materialities of film, that I begin my investigation into the vanished female body.
Looking Back
In the previous section, I cautioned against feminist approaches that treat gender as something merely to be restored to the scholarly record as well aesthetic theories
