Razonamiento jurisdiccional realizado en los casos Grutter y Gratz

In an earlier chapter I mentioned the Symbolist writers’ fascination with what were generally considered to be defects in the cinematic image: vibration, celluloid rain, breaks in film. Andrei Bely’s interest in abrupt endings (‘crash endings’, as he called them), and his idea of exploiting a break in the film as a scenario device, were part of the specifically Symbolist game that approached modernity as a puzzle containing a secret prophecy. At the same time, eccentric as it was, the Symbolist response reflected some universal features of early film reception. In 1908 Bely published an essay entitled ‘Theatre and the Modern Drama’, in which he made the following remark: ‘There is indeed myth-making in the cinematograph: a man sneezes and bursts.’41 _{But what kind of ‘myth-making’ did he mean?}

Before I address this question directly, let me briefly summarise the above analysis of texts referring to the Lumière cinematograph. The impression that moving images left on their first spectators was a unique combination of mutually exclusive effects. On the one hand, the Lumières’ audiences were struck by what they believed to be the excessive naturalism of the image. The spectator of the 1890s felt that within the new medium the habitual balance between image and object was tilted in favour of the latter.

On the other hand, to repeat a contemporary account already quoted, ‘although you know that the scene has a mechanical and intimate correspondence with the truth, you recognize its essential and inherent falsity’.42 _{The increasing visual realism of the image went side by side with, and was undermined by, the}

acute sensation of its ephemerality. The surprising thing about the locomotive was not just that it seemed menacingly real but that it vanished into thin air once it left the frame. The effect of diegetic objects vanishing from the field of the image was reinforced by the perplexing transience of the image. Hyper- realistic in their visuality, cinematographic images could at any moment ‘burst like a bubble’. Life on the screen was very real but not very reliable.

This feature of early film reception made the cinema a particularly interesting medium for the Symbolists. The impermanence, the ephemerality, of the material world, conceived as a thin visible integument covering the body of the unknown, was a recurrent Symbolist motif. On 26 December 1908 Alexander Blok made the following remark in his notebook: ‘Element and culture. The feeling of

catastrophe, disease, anxiety, rupture (mankind like a person standing next to a bomb). The bomb was planted by history, and it has disrupted everything.’43 _{The end of history, the death of culture, and a}

mystical fear of the future were central to the Symbolist universe. This future was channelled through Blok’s ‘blue abyss’ of the modern city, and the cinema was its most unambiguous token. Russian Symbolism was essentially eschatological, and the ‘crisis of culture’, or the ‘end of history’, intuited by Blok and proclaimed in Bely’s essays, were just two versions of that basic Symbolist theme: the end of the world. Blok’s definition of mankind as ‘a person standing next to a bomb’ echoed Andrei Bely’s definition of reality as ‘a cake-walk over the abyss’. The cinema with its flickering, vibrating, unstable image was a perfect symbol for such a representation of the world, as was the bomb, the central metaphor of Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, first published in serial form in 1913/14. Small wonder then that the Méliès (and Méliès-inspired) series of trick films based on exploding characters were subject to an eschatological reading in Symbolist literary texts. In his 1907 essay, ‘The City’, Andrei Bely described two films that to his mind reflected the inner nature of modern life. He did not mention the titles, but the first one sounds very much like Walter R.Booth’s The ‘?’ Motorist (Hepworth, 1906), an English version of the Méliès space fantasies:

Someone is chasing after someone else. A motor car, a bicycle, a policeman are flying in pursuit. Crrump! The car smashes through a wall and drives through someone’s peaceful living room. Crunch! It smashes through the wall and calmly drives on down the street.44 _{It’s funny, but it’s really not at all}

funny. Walls and peaceful domesticity cannot protect us from the arrival of the unknown, can they? And now that same car, to the accompaniment of a waltz, is rushing up a wall in defiance of the laws of gravity; is being chased by a policeman, also defying the laws of gravity. Higher and higher. Excelsior! The motor car zooms up into the sky. Meteors fly past, but around them is nothing but empty space… The city, which has swallowed up the fields and grabbed all the riches of the earth, is just a motor car suspended in a void… Electric lights cascade from billboards, but this is the rain of meteors flashing through the ether. And the driver— Death in a top hat—is baring his teeth and rushing towards us.45

Bely’s eschatological reading of the trick cinema (‘walls cannot protect us from the unknown’) is even more salient in his description of what seems to be Lewin Fitzhamon’s film That Fatal Sneeze (Hepworth, 1907). It is this or a similar film that made Bely think of ‘myth-making in the cinematograph’:

An old man has sprinkled something in front of a child. The child sneezes. He makes his way into the room where the old man is sleeping: he sprinkles some powder. The old man gets up and sneezes. The wall collapses. He runs out into the street—and sneezes: the shop window displays come crashing down, the lamp-posts fall over, the houses fall apart. He sneezes. The earth begins to fall apart. He sneezes, and finally explodes in a cloud of smoke.46

For Bely this was a perfect representation of the end of the world in its modern (i.e. unheroic, bathetic and ironic) version. On the one hand, the English film, its shaking and swaying camera conveying the effect of a seismic cataclysm, must have looked like a visual parallel to the biblical prophecy:

…the foundations of the earth do shake.

The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.47

On the other hand, the film made this prophecy work on the level of immediate, present-day reality. For Bely, the way the world ends was not with a bang, nor even with a whimper, but with a sneeze:

Man is a cloud of smoke. He catches a cold, he sneezes and bursts; the smoke disperses… The cinematograph reigns in the city, reigns over the earth. In Moscow, Paris, New York, Bombay, on the same day, maybe at the very same hour, thousands of people come to see a man who sneezes— who sneezes and explodes. The cinematograph has crossed the borders of reality. More than the preachings of scholars and wise men, this has demonstrated to everyone what reality is: it is a lady suffering from a cold who sneezes and explodes. And we, who hold on to her: where are we?48

This cinematic motif, the motif of an unreliable reality, was transformed by Bely into the leitmotif of his famous novel Petersburg. Its story line is strikingly similar to that of Fitzhamon’s film That Fatal Sneeze. In the film a boy makes his father explode (or is it his uncle, as some sources claim?)49 _{by pouring sneezing}

powder over him while he is sleeping in his bedroom.

In Bely’s novel a young man, Nikolai (Kolenka) Ableukhov, who is a former member of a terrorist group, has two obsessions: that he must blow up his father, a senator, with a time bomb; and that he has swallowed the bomb himself and hears it ticking inside him, about to blast him to smithereens. This is how Nikolai Ableukhov plans to kill his father:

He would smuggle the sardine tin [which contained the bomb] into his father’s bedroom and place it under his pillow, or, better still, under the mattress. Later—

‘Good night, papa!’ ‘Good night, Kolenka!’

Then he would go to his own room, undress quickly and pull the bedclothes over his head… His heart thumping, he would lie there trembling in the soft bed, listening, straining, longing for the bang that would shatter the silence, tear apart the bed, the table, the walls, and also perhaps…

He would hear the familiar shuffling of slippers as his father went to the lavatory… Waiting, waiting…

Half an hour to go. The greenish first light of dawn, turning to blue, then grey, and the candle light growing dim; only fifteen minutes left. And now the candle goes out…

Every minute an eternity… He would strike a match—only five minutes had passed! He would try to calm himself down, tell himself that it would only happen after ten more slow revolutions of time, try to deceive himself…

—but then that inimitable, unmistakable, drawn-out sound— —the Explosion! Thrusting his bare legs into his drawers, or even just in his night shirt—

he would leap, out of the warm bed, his face white and twisted—Yes, Yes, Yes!—and would rush barefoot into the darkening corridor, straight as an arrow to that unmistakable sound, breathing in that special odour, that acrid smell of burning and gas, and…of something else, something more horrible than either…

He would run in, choking and coughing, and struggle through the black hole in the wall made by the explosion.

And there, beyond the hole…where the demolished bedroom had been, a grim flame would reveal —nothing: just swirling clouds of smoke.50

True, there is no sneeze motif in the novel—although the father does suffer from chronic flatulence —but for Bely, the images of the ‘exploding man’, be it the manic sneezer in That Fatal Sneeze51 _or

the bomb-ridden gas-filled Ableukhov, are symbolic of the great Nothingness we carry within ourselves: An indecent something had taken a nothing into itself, swelling up from time eternal—

—as the stomach swells from the expansion of gases, a complaint from which all the Ableukhovs suffered— —to time eternal.52