Angela Ndalianis,
Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment.
Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 262 14084 5
336pp
US$18.95 (pb)

Without knowing what form it would take when it finally arrived, this is a book some of us have been waiting on for a long time. With meticulous acknowledgment not only of the many points of contact between this work and the various authors who have previously trodden related paths, but also of the merit of some standpoints which are at variance with her own, Ndalianis carefully argues that developments in entertainment media over the last two decades or so are most clearly understood in the light of the baroque. This baroque, though, is construed not as something “contained within the rough temporal confines of the seventeenth century” but as a form and a stylistic principle that “still continued to have a life, one that recurred throughout history but existed beyond the limits of a canon” (8).

The notion that all media, even the very ‘newest,’ rely on and are only properly understood in terms of their historical antecedents has been well covered by Bolter and Grusin[1] among others, and a specific connection between the audiovisuality of the late baroque period and the pivotal technical transformations of the late twentieth century was made by Barbara Stafford[2]  in 1994. Tom Gunning[3] has on several occasions drawn attention to the thread of semi-rational spectacle that runs from the earliest cinema through to the present day, and several Latin American authors have “evaluated (from different perspectives) the affinities that exist between the baroque – or, rather, the neo-baroque – and the post-modern” (12). Ndalianis inclusively enlists all of these ideas in constructing a backdrop against which the logical emergence of her baroque/neo-baroque axis is irresistible. In five energetic chapters, which cover (inter alia) seriality, intertextuality, the many manifestations of the labyrinth, hypertextual forms, virtuosity, special effects and other spectacles, and the spiritual presence of the technological, she examines most contemporary entertainment media except, notably, television, with an emphasis on horror and science fiction movies, interactive computer games and cross-medium franchises. Her analysis is informed by a broad and deep cultural knowledge of capitalism, globalisation, history and technology, and it is this masterful integration of the social, the economic and the aesthetic which raises the bar for media analysis by several notches.

Her scholarship is profound. Such is the perceptiveness of her sharp analyses of baroque art and culture, and her dissection of a complex swathe of current media forms, that either could stand comfortably on its own as independently interesting and informative interpretations. Combined and integrated however, so that each reflectively informs the other, the effect is dazzling.

Two examples. If there is one artist who can help us to understand the historical baroque, its excesses and successes, it is the Italian sculptor Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Bernini has been, from his own time right through to the present, saluted as the master of the bel composto – “the unity of the arts…the beautiful union of multiple media”. The various components of his works – architecture, painting and sculpture – “all fold fluidly into one another,” drawing the viewer into a participatory inclusion in the very space of the work. This is not, however, merely a concern for “the production of a harmonious composition;” importantly, each medium maintains its separate significance, so that “the movement between media directly elicits responses in the viewer” (216). The significance of different aspects of the bel composto is demonstrated in Ndalianis’s analysis of four of Bernini’s works. Of these, two are described here briefly: David (1623-1624), and The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila (1644-1652).

Not surprisingly, his David is compared with Michelangelo’s David, and Ndalianis shows clearly how, while the Michelangelo work is “reliant on a frontal viewpoint,” Bernini’s “sculptural narrative … is transformed into a narrative that changes as a result of its three-dimensional capacity to engage the spectator in spatial terms.” The Renaissance notion of guiding the viewer’s perspective “is replaced by a baroque concern with complex, dynamic motion and multiple perspectives dependant on the position of the viewer in relation to the work” (153). Ndalianis’s analysis here is detailed; she shows us how a viewer circulating around Bernini’s figure sees in turn David’s concentrated expression, his sling poised ready to release the stone, and the twisting musculature of his body, and is thus subject to the dynamic unfolding of separate developments in the narrative. This dynamic narrative unfolding, in turn, links the space inhabited by, and mediated by, the sculpture with its psychological impact on the viewer.

The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila is the focal point of an altar dedicated to the Spanish Saint Theresa, a sixteenth century nun who had described, in a then-famous book, a religious vision in which the love of God had pierced her heart like a burning arrow. Bernini designed the Cornaro Chapel, with the altar and statue of Teresa which it houses, as a subsidiary chapel for the Cornaro family along the side of the small church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Here the bel composto is at its theatrical zenith. The actual sculpture of Teresa, in quasi-orgasmic ecstasy as reported in the book, appears to descend on the very rays of light which both figuratively and actually illuminate her from above, while a smiling cupid-like angel holds the arrow which he is about to plunge into her heart. A semi-relief representation of the Cornaro family in dress-circle boxes at the sides of the chapel privileges the family’s proximity to the saint, but simultaneously “lures the viewer into an architecture of vision that embraces the polycentric nature of the composition. In turn, Bernini’s skilful creation of surface, texture, and motion evokes shifting sensations and thoughts in the spectator” (216).

The full analyses that are briefly summarised here would be enough to make this an engaging critical exposition on these historical works, in its own right. Without missing a beat however, we leap forward by a century and a half. From the spectator’s dynamic circulation around Bernini’s baroque David, we are transported to The Matrix (US 1999) in which, as Ndalianis describes her “senses [being] bombarded by imagery, movements, and sounds that plunged [her] into a state of disorientation and overstimulation,” we can start to understand the equivalent neo-baroque “concern with the kinaesthetic that once primarily belonged more exclusively to the realm of the theme park attraction” (155). From the statue of St Teresa, which via its bel composto effects “make[s] possible the representation of something – faith and the love of God – that is unrepresentable” (217-8), we are conducted to “the hallucinogenic effects” of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (US 1977):

The main focus of neo-baroque spectacle is the conjuring of the sublime embodied in the vision that is made possible through effects illusions. The spectator of St. Teresa is enveloped in an almost mystical experience. Much like the response Spielberg and Trumbull intend to invoke in the audience of Close Encounters. Virtuosity reigns supreme as the performance of special effects envelops and plunges the spectator into the space of the visionary-like spectacle, involving him or her more directly in the transcendental events taking place before him or her. (218-9)

What is so welcome about this book is the freshness of its explanatory power. So many of the issues and phenomena discussed here have long been the subject of debate under the rubric of postmodernism, and Ndalianis explicitly recognizes that she follows the lead of some who “understand (from different perspectives) the neo-baroque and the post-modern as kindred spirits” (16). At the same time, her own determination to separate the neo-baroque from the postmodern stems from a well-justified aversion to the reductionism in which “Cultural production, its aesthetics, its formal qualities, and its relation to audience responses are ultimately reduced to forces of globalisation and the corporate power of multinationalism” (58). Nowhere is this opposition better demonstrated, in this book, than in her discussion of polycentric serial narratives, exemplified by the Alien film series and its later blending and interpenetration with the Predator series. This use and re-use of story fragments, cyclically rebuilt and reformed into new wholes, becomes an example of neo-baroque narrative revitalization, rather than being positioned yet again as evidence of the postmodern decay of classical narrative. With a typical retrospective explanatory flourish, the chapter ends with a discussion of J.S. Bach’s Art of Fugue, a piece in which a single theme is articulated and then cycled through fifteen polyphonic and multi-rhythmic redevelopments, extensions and repetitions:

The listener recognizes this virtuosity only when each cycle – each fragment – is considered in relation to the system as a whole. Acknowledging himself as a virtuoso who masterfully creates uniqueness out of repetition, Bach also added a fugue in which his name (B-flat, A, C, B-natural) was repeated as a theme. Although they involve alternative media, neo-baroque serials involve a similar game of reception that engages the audience on the level of the relationship between fragment and whole. The fragment also invites the reader or viewer, while accepting the fragment on its own terms, to place it gradually within a web of multiple formations. (69)

The term “baroque” is still sometimes used pejoratively to describe that which is judged to be over-ornamented, unnecessarily complex, indirect or obscure in language. Ndalianis’s book is anything but; it rescues contemporary media from what has been, for some time, a sometimes unhelpfully repetitive discussion. It sheds some light on a path forward from here, by throwing into high relief the value of linking good art theory to good art history. Here we have a revelation of the forces at play in contemporary entertainment media which allows us to understand much more about the historical baroque, and an illumination of the historical baroque which allows us to see why a very different cultural milieu, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, has led to a dynamic and inventive transformation of the same phenomenon.

Greg Battye
University of Canberra, Australia.

Endnotes:

[1] Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[2] Stafford, Barbara Maria. 1994. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[3] Gunning, Tom. 1990. “The cinema of attractions – Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde.” In Early Cinema – Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker, 56-62. London: British Film Institute.

Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006