Читать книгу The Story of Looking - Mark Cousins - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

STARTING TO LOOK: FOCUS, SPACE AND COLOUR

‘If I could alter the nature of my being and become a living eye, I would voluntarily make that exchange.’

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise

FOCUS

We should start where everything started. The Big Bang did not bang. Initially at least, there was no medium through which the sound waves could travel. It could be seen, except there was no one to do the seeing. It was not the Big Bang, it was the Big Flash. The rapid expansion from quantum dimensions 13.8 billion years ago is likely to have produced so much light that the Big Flash was the brightest thing that has ever happened. It made looking possible. The seen began.

Billions of years after the Big Flash, human see-ers began too. They had missed the most visible event in history, but by the time of their arrival life had evolved to a dazzling degree. Humans looked out into the world via two swivelling, vulnerable, aqueous orbs. They were astonished, these eyeballs, and astonishing. In each, 120 million rods were able to assess brightness and darkness in five hundred gradients. Seven million cones would, in time, be able to register a million colour contrasts.

How does the photo album of our life begin? With blank pages. Let’s imagine the birth of an early Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago. She lies on her father’s hand, looks out into the world and begins to lay down visual impressions. The baby’s big, absorbent eyes start to live. The first things that register are incomplete. Where the optic nerve attaches to the retina at the back of the eye there is a blind spot, a hole in what it sees, which will be there throughout her life. She has no past, this baby, or so it seems. The baby quickly sees grey blurs. Shadows and outlines fall upon the blank pages. It takes time for life to come into sharp focus for a baby, and before it does, the world looks like this:

Soft-edged. Immaterial. As an adult we have multiple reactions to such an image. It is troubling in that, if we were to walk forward into this landscape above, we would be unable to see if there were holes in the ground, or branches that might stab us in the eye. Lack of focus makes us unsafe, uneasy. But that is not all. In the story of looking, visual softness, lack of focus, light rays meeting in front of or behind our retinas rather than on them, are not necessarily defects. These early impressions were types of imagery that would continue to play a part in how we fear, love, admire and think of ourselves.

To see how, let’s start with this image from Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 movie Persona.

A boy looks at his mother. She is in black and white and out of focus, rather like a baby would see its mum. Within minutes of its birth, our early Homo sapiens baby stares at faces – its parents, animals or even simple graphic representations of two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Contained within its genetic information is the ability to discern the arrangement. Its blank pages have ghost images on them, ready to develop.

The boy in the film holds his hand up, to try to touch such a ghost image, or is he trying to wave? He is apart from his mother; locked out of her world, as if a pane of glass separates them. There is distance between them, but the focus seems to contradict that distance. It is as if she is so close that the lenses in our eyes are not strong enough to bend the rays from her face into sharpness. Most of us have experienced waking up in bed beside someone, their head so close to ours that they are a blur; at such short distances, the other person’s two eyes can merge into one large one in the middle of their head, as if they are a Cyclops.

Bergman’s image (filmed by his great cinematographer Sven Nykvist) and the black and white, blurred trees that the baby saw tell us something about the look of love. Lack of focus, especially in close-up, makes us feel adjacent, almost in a force field. It excludes background. This image from the 1929 film The Divine Lady shows how mainstream entertainment, in its desire to depict love, has pushed visual softness to an extreme.

It is as if actor Corinne Griffith is in the fog of love, or has been burnished. This could almost be what a baby sees. Visual softness reduces psychological distance; everything seems to have melted away. The image is not far from abstraction. The reverie of the unfocused. Like our earlier image of the forest, this one is also somewhat unsettling. There is trouble in her eyes, and tears are coming. The visual softness means that we have lost our bearings here, that we are in a realm where everything is close, felt and emotionally flooded. There is helplessness in the visually soft. We do not know which way is up. This image of Corinne Griffith was photographed by John F. Seitz, who would go on to film Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity.

And visual softness is not only about a baby’s first glimpses of the world, our close encounters with a lover, or the visual strategies of romantically photographed cinema. The eyes, smile and background in this next famous image show that painters have used the unfocused too.

In Renaissance Italy, the technique was called sfumato, which its inventor, Leonardo da Vinci, described as the ‘the manner of smoke, or beyond the focus plane’. The portrait was commissioned by the husband of the sitter, Lisa del Giocondo, so, like the picture of Corinne Griffith, it is a look of love image. But it is more than that. Leonardo’s smokescreen reduced the amount of visual information in the landscape in order to leave space for us to imagine what is not there. The art historian and painter Giorgio Vasari wrote of such imagery ‘hovering between the seen and the unseen’, which gets close to the heart of the matter. The landscape in the Mona Lisa is emergent seeing. It is a kind of dawn, like the dawn we saw at the beginning of this book.

Lisa del Giocondo’s famous smile is dawning, like the light is dawning, like a baby’s vision dawns. And although we know that this is a real woman, born on 15 June 1479, and although her clothes and hairstyle are of their time and place, the sfumato clouds her and her place in the world. The unseen that Vasari mentions is the intangible, the numinous. Lisa looks like we dreamt her, like she is in a dreamscape. More than three centuries after Leonardo, the English painter J.M.W. Turner would take his idea of the defocused landscape to an extreme by painting using his peripheral vision, in other words turning his head away from his subject so that it became entirely soft edged. In Turner’s Seascape with a Sailing Boat and a Ship, nothing is pin sharp. The sky, clouds, sea and vessels fuse into each other as if they are one amorphous visual entity.

Turner was using soft focus to show the visual occlusions of sea, weather and objects, but on the other side of the world, a century later, out-of-focus imagery that resembled his paintings was used to suggest something other than love, closeness, dream or tempest. Look at this similar image from the 1953 film Ugetsu Monogatari:

Here director Kenji Mizoguchi has the scene shot with a long lens, diffused light, a smoke machine, a diffusion filter and low contrast to coax us of out of our hard-edged, three-dimensional, everyday life into a floating world. The setting is Lake Biwa in the late 1500s. Two peasants, who live modest, decent lives, want more. Their wives try to convince them not to be too ambitious, but hubris takes over. One of them, the potter Genjurō, falls for an aristocrat, Lady Wakasa, who admires his work. She seduces him and asks him to marry her. In this famous image, he seems to carry her on his back.

Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s focus is again shallow, the contrast is low. There are no blacks or whites, just shades of grey, as if their world is fogged, or floating. It is, in a sense, floating, because it is revealed that Lady Wakasa is a ghost. Miyagawa uses soft focus as a ghostly thing, as a way of depicting a haunted, parallel world.

Artists have continued to be interested in this parallel world. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the German artist Gerhard Richter regularly produced large, blurred images of faces and the sea that gave the sense of primal seeing. He said in an interview that he blurs ‘to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant’. He could be talking about the out-of-focus seeing of a newborn child in which most things, with the exception of faces, have equal weight. The very first impressions on the blank pages of a baby’s inner eye are mysterious, ghostly and imprecise about place and space. They are the foundations of our future seeing.

LOOKING OUT AT THE WORLD

Let’s think of our African baby from 200,000 years ago again. Once she learns how to focus, what she next sees, before colour, is space. The blank spaces start to acquire dimensions. Having two eyes allows her to see and judge distance, what is close and what is far. Unlike a horse or rabbit, whose eyes are on the sides of their head and who therefore see to their left and right, humans eyes are frontal, and so our looking is substantially forward. We have a greater sense of where we are going than where we are. As we grow up, we develop an aesthetic of near and far, an emotion. This man, in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog of 1818, looks out into a landscape not unlike Lisa del Giocondo’s, but where she has her back to hers, he has his back to us.

We are looking with him not so much at a landscape as into a vast space. The space makes him feel small, overwhelmed by the size of the world. The effect is consoling; it takes him out of himself, what the anthropologist Joseph Campbell called ‘the rapture of self-loss’.

We do not only perceive space when we climb mountains, of course. We want a room with a view. A house or flat with such a view will sell for more than one without. As we will see later in our story, the drive to invent hot air balloons and tall buildings comes, in part, from the desire to see space. Images are no longer things that appear on the blank pages. They appear in them. In terms of geometry, where an x-axis is left–right and a y-axis is up–down, in–out is the z-axis – that line in space that links us with everything in front of us.

In southern Scotland, on raised moorland overlooking this view, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay built six small stone walls which carry the words

LITTLE FIELDSLONG HORIZONS LITTLE FIELDS LONGFOR HORIZONS HORIZONS LONGFOR LITTLE FIELDS

The first line captures the smallness of the looker and the distance of the looked-at – the length of z. By moving the word ‘long’ in the second line, he doubles its meaning – far and wanted. We want the afar, that which stretches into the distance. The z-axis is implicated in desire; it is our sense of adventure, our wanderlust and the way that we visualise the future that lies ahead.

Reprinted by permission of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

The story of z-ness, of the journey from in to out in the visual arts, has been shifting and dramatic. In this fourteenth-century Persian illustration, four military tents, four people and distant hills are all pushed up against the picture plane, distinct from each other because of their colour or pattern. There are no shadows, a frequent sign of z-lessness.

For much of the Middle Ages, Western artists followed suit, cramming their characters, stories, incidents and symbols into a shallow, almost z-less space. But a new movement – the Renaissance – became beguiled by z, depth. As early as 1278–1318, the painter Duccio tilted the top of this Last Supper table backwards, away from the picture surface, breaking the spell of flatness and inducing a kind of vertigo, a teetering visual drama in which, to our eyes, it looks as if the cutlery and plates will slide off, onto the apostles who are in front of – or is that below? – it.

It looks as if the back wall is recessed, that the ceiling brackets are pointing towards us and that the artist has taken a step backwards out of the room, and that, as a result, he is viewing it through a window. Our child’s perception of z is analogous to this growing visual separation.

From here onwards, z – the illusion of three-dimensional space – was one of the tricks and pleasures of Western painting. Northern European artists showed us rooms seen through rooms; Mantegna made us feel as if we were sitting at the feet of Jesus Christ; allegorical or religious scenes were set in architectural spaces to make them feel touchable, real, or similar to our own lives. Z had poetics, but politics too. In his television series and book Ways of Seeing, John Berger said that paintings with such an appearance of depth, with single vanishing-point perspective, arranged the visible world as if it is centred on the spectator, ‘as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God’. He was right to draw attention to this assumption that Western lookers made that they were the centre of the universe, but the z-axis is political in another sense too. As we will see, the line from me – here – to you – there – is the line on which sympathy and empathy take place.

LOOKING AND COLOUR

Let’s imagine that we have moved forward in history from the earliest days of Homo sapiens. We are in Egypt now, at the time of Cleopatra. Another baby is looking. After seeing blurs and space, like its ancestor, our new baby starts to see colour. Her pages become tinted and more complex. In nature, the recurrent colours are the green pigment chlorophyll, in plants and algae, and the skin pigment melanin, but the biggest sheet of colour that humans ever see is sky blue. Each of the colours has its own history, but let’s focus on blue. The complexity of its story is mirrored in the stories of the other colours.

Looking at a cloudless sky is z-less. We have no sense of distance. The painter Yves Klein was born in Nice in the south of France, so in infancy would have often seen the blue-sheet sky. In his late teens, he lay on a beach and signed that sky. Will he have understood that the blueness comes from what is now called Rayleigh scattering, sunlight bouncing off particles in the atmosphere? Will he have noticed that if he dropped his eyes from the intense blue above him, to the horizon, it will have looked whiter? In Milan in 1957 he showed a series of paintings, each entirely ultramarine, mixed in a resin to make it more luminous, more intense. They echoed the infinite scale of his childhood sky-watching, the saturation of his field of vision.

Yet the story of looking at blue is not as direct as Klein’s experience might suggest. It weaves in and out of human consciousness and culture. There is no blue in the 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings, perhaps because no animals have blue fur. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, which gave Klein’s ultramarine paint its intensity of colour, was probably first mined in Afghanistan in the seventh century BCE. In ancient Egypt, where our baby is, it was a symbol of daybreak. Women – perhaps Cleopatra amongst them – painted their lips blue-black. As it could not be mined in Europe, for example, lapis lazuli was as precious as gold in the ancient world, but from around 2000 BCE there was another blue, cobalt, which was lighter and less intense than lapis.

It was used to colour glass in the Middle East, and much later, in the 1300s, to tint the underglaze in Chinese pottery.

Given that these and other blue pigments existed, and that the Egyptians had a word for blue, and that the biggest visible things in the world were blue, it comes as a surprise to hear that not once is the sky or sea called blue in the writings of Homer, or in the Bible, or in the 10,000 lines of the Hindu Veda. Unlike Jewish culture which values the verbal more than the visual, Greece was a place where looking was prized – ‘Knowledge is the state of being seen,’ wrote Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought – so we would expect Homer to have a broad lexicon of looking. He describes the sea as bronze or ‘wine dark’ and writes of its sheen, but not what we would call its colour. As Homer and the Bible’s authors lived around the Mediterranean, they will have seen it on many sunny days as it reflected the clear blue sky above.

Explaining this leads us into the subjectivity of colour, how it relates to our thinking and values. There was no word for blue in ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek or Hebrew, so when the speakers of those languages looked at the sky they did not see something on the colour spectrum so much as the light spectrum, or the space spectrum, or the divine spectrum. Most languages had words for dark and light from their earliest times, and then came red, then green or yellow. The last principal colour was blue. Little that was solid was blue. When you looked to the sky, you did not see something material; you saw where your god was. It is impossible to understand how Homer looked when he wrote The Odyssey, but he was writing about war and homecoming in a country that had no way of quarrying anything blue. Perhaps his themes favoured their own image systems. Tenebrous contrasts in tone occur throughout The Odyssey; his is a visual world of conflict. Blue is hard to fit into that paradigm.

We will return to how the cognitive aspects of colour influenced Mediterranean lookers when our story reaches the end of the nineteenth century, but let’s continue to track the story of blueness. In the Middle Ages, woad, a broccoli-like brassica that was native to the Caucasus and steppe, was widely ground to create the textile dye woad blue.

More muted than lapis or cobalt, it was used as a body paint by early Britons (Julius Caesar saw it when the Romans invaded England), perhaps because it is a mild antiseptic. William Wallace is said to have used it, hence Mel Gibson’s half-blue face in the film Braveheart. In India at the same time, the main textile dye was indigo, which is closer to purple than the others.

The development of the silk trade route between Asia and the Mediterranean led to the flourishing of indigo. It became so valued that less than five years after painting the Mona Lisa, Leonardo was contractually required to use it in his beautiful The Virgin of the Rocks. This London version of the painting is perhaps a copy, in part by his assistants, but it demonstrates well the use of blue.

The indigo was underpainted with another blue, azurite, this time derived from a copper carbonate. You could call the painting bichrome. Two colours, blue and gold, each precious, are embedded in each other. They seem to swirl like oil on water. The painting has a religious subject, of course, but at this early stage in the story of looking, it is the reduced colour palette, the way the Madonna’s gown echoes the distant hills, that catches our attention.

A century after Leonardo, Persian blue came to dominate the intricate tile work of the great mosques in Iran. Again the subject was religious, but even more than in The Virgin of the Rocks, the blue-gold combination gestures to abstraction.

When it is mined, azurite is veined with earth colours. It is hard not to see the colour scheme of the mosque, and maybe even the Madonna, in these naturally forming blue-brown combinations. They evoke earth and sky.

And so, as the word appeared in more languages, and more sources of blue were found in nature, and as our art and buildings became more blue, so did human life. As Alexander Theroux, who writes brilliantly on colour, describes:

It is the symbol of baby boys in America, mourning in Borneo, tribulation to the American Indian, and the direction south in Tibet. Blue indicates mercy in the Kabbalah and carbon monoxide in gas canisters. Chinese emperors wore blue to worship the sky. To Egyptians it represented virtue, faith and truth. The colour was worn by slaves in Gaul . . . A blue spot painted behind the groom’s ear in Morocco thwarts the power of evil, and in East Africa blue beads represent fertility.

He is telling the anthropological story of blue and how it shifts in appearance, meaning and effect.

LOOKING AND THE COLOUR WHEEL

But how does blue relate to all the other colours in life? In the late 1700s a Frankfurt-born artist, writer, lawyer, statesman, philosopher and collector had this question in mind. He travelled to Italy to see great art, and wrote about Leonardo da Vinci. What he saw in Italy led, in 1810, to his Theory of Colours, one of the most influential publications on the subject. It was a wayward work, contradicting the science of its day by emphasising not the optics of colour, but how we look at it, how it works on our imaginations. ‘Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory,’ he wrote, a manifesto of looking. His name was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Goethe sensed that colours tamper with each other, and with blackness. Of our colour, blue, he wrote ‘it is darkness weakened by light’. To scientists this was nonsense, but Homer’s descriptions of the sea in The Odyssey seem born of the same thought. Goethe’s was an artist’s account of light, and it influenced painters such as J.M.W. Turner. And Goethe’s ideas can certainly help us understand why in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, the Iranian mosque and the raw azurite, the colours seem so right for each other.

Here is an image of Goethe’s from 1809:

In his Theory of Colours he explained its significance.

The chromatic circle . . . is arranged according to the natural order . . . The colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange [demands] blue; purple [demands] green; and vice versa.

Just as Goethe predicts, diametrically opposite our blues is the yellow-gold of Leonardo and the Iranian mosques. They reciprocally evoke and even demand each other. Though he had no scientific proof for this, Leonardo wrote that colours ‘retto contrario’ – totally opposite – each other are the most harmonious. And in 1888, in a letter to his brother, painter Vincent Van Gogh wrote of the ‘antithesis’ of colours. His most famous painting, The Starry Night, is blue and yellow-gold. Stare at blue for half a minute, then look at something white, and what do you see? Yellow. After forcing blue upon your eye and brain, it is as if they – to use Goethe’s word – demand the complementary after-image, yellow.

And Goethe helps us understand other aspects of looking at colour. Both the Leonardo paintings we have seen so far depict distance, z-ness, as blue. This moment from the 2002 Chinese film Hero does the same. Despite the cloud, the trees in the landscape on the left are somewhat green. In the distance, on the right, there is a noticeable indigo shift. The film-makers emphasise this by dressing the figure in the image in the same colour.

Goethe explains this blue shift. He did experiments to show that when light travels through the moisture and dust in the air (what he called turbid media) it becomes coloured. It had long been known that white light is split as it travels through a prism (or raindrops – hence rainbows), but in the Theory of Colours Goethe describes this refraction in a way that would have been useful to Leonardo, or Christopher Doyle, who filmed the above shot in Hero:

If . . . darkness is seen through a semi-transparent medium, which is itself illumined by a light striking on it, a blue colour appears: this becomes lighter and paler as the density of the medium is increased, but on the contrary appears darker and deeper the more transparent the medium becomes: in the least degree of dimness short of absolute transparence . . . this deep blue approaches the most beautiful violet.

And as well as complementary colours, and distance, Goethe wrote about something else that opens our eyes. He said that all hues are coloured shadows, which is implied in his comment on blue. But it is the phrase ‘coloured shadows’ which is evocative.

In the image below, a man who has long wanted to see this woman this way, finally does so. It is from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. The man was in love with a woman who died (or seemed to), then met another woman who resembled her. He wanted to remake the second woman as the first, to pretend to himself that she had not died, or to gratify his erotic imagination. Hitchcock and his cinematographer Robert Burks film the scene as the man sees it, or rather, feels it.

Look at her shadow, which falls across the bed and onto the wall. Is it grey, like shadows are supposed to be? No, it is plum coloured, like the lampshade, both of which, on the colour wheel, are the opposite of the green of her dress. We think of a shadow as an absence of light, but not for Goethe, and not here. A shadow is not necessarily just less, a reduction: here it is a contortion. The darkness is alive. Even it has something to say.

Then follow that thought to this image:

It is from another film, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The man and woman appear to be in love. They are young. Her hand is closed, his is open. It is 1964. France is at war with Algeria. The guy has to tell the girl that he will go to war. They cling to each other, deferring the moment when he must leave. They live in an ordinary working-class military and shipbuilding town in the north of France that was bombed in the Second World War, but is that what this image says? Director Jacques Demy, cinematographer Jean Rabier and production designer Bernard Evein have made it noticeably chromatic – flooded with colour. The only root colour is his brown jacket; otherwise the hues are wild: the light salmon of her coat, the darker pink flush of her cheeks, the turquoise of his shirt, the lemon of his bike. And then there is the Goethe shadow on the wall behind his right shoulder. A lilac shadow which helps transform real-world Cherbourg into a movie set, or a place or an externalised, heightened feeling. Her cheeks are flushed, and so is the street.

Colour is frequently discussed in the humanities. It is everywhere, like time is everywhere, and the role it plays in looking is hard to overstate. We will revisit it in this book, but for now let’s zoom in on one moment: 4 p.m. one November day on the North Sea.

These two photographs were taken six minutes apart. There is not much blue in either. The bronze-orange in the first is the complementary colour of the green-slate in the second. The first is blurred, because of the rain. We see the horizon – there is plenty of z-axis here. The early stages of looking are all in these images.

Is it a push to say that this is how Homer might have seen the sea? He could have recognised the dark wine colour of the water on the right of the first image, or the silver on the second. Whether it is him looking, or Cleopatra or Goethe or Yves Klein or Ian Hamilton Finlay or us, we can say that seeing the unexpected colours here gives pleasure. Our eyes skim the churning sea, into the long distance, longing.

By seeing shadows, blurs, space and colour, our baby’s eyes have started to come alive. They have laid down impressions, spaces, and contrasts on her blank pages which will be overlaid. They will always be formative, these first images. Shadows, expanses of blue and softness of focus will resonate for her throughout her life as archetypes resonate within stories. Soon, new elements will be added to such ancient, primitive looking. Movements, places and emotions will register for our baby and, as they do, she will begin to learn about the visual world.