The close relation between cinema and beheading is traceable into its technic anteriority, among topoi where decapitation and visuality move together in a dynamic manner that is ‘proto’-cinematic. Take three examples, each of which allegorizes the invention of cinema in a different way: Caravaggio’s Medusa, Dante’s Bertran de Born, and al-Hallāj’s martyrdom. The first mobilizes representational severing (the sword of the brush) as an engine of extra-cephalic gaze, the power of vision to cinematically extend beyond the head without ever losing it, to process in an unending ocular loop that intensively multiplies the head as site of vision by cutting it off. The second seizes the projective structure of cinematic consciousness, its realization of vision as the substantial extramission of self or soul into fields of experience whose unitary immanence, precisely by virtue of this projective constitution, is essentially unrepresentable — the vision-in-Many of total overwhelming illusion. The third produces script as the confiscated sine qua non of the cinema-event, the essential supplement or exterior medium whose disappearance ensures a secret identity between the entire cinematographic apparatus and the transcendental captivity of the viewer as the martyred subject of film.
Medusa’s head, seeable only as reflection, as image, is severed by a hero who enters her place by grasping an eye in the duration of its passing between two persons (Graeae), that is, by someone who seizes the substance between frames or masters the movement-image, the eye itself as intra-visual motion.[1] Perseus is a cinematographer. The identity of beheading and specular representation embodied in Medusa’s head is captured in Caravaggio’s shield painting (Fig. 11) which, through a double trompe-l’oeil (a representation of a reflection), decapitates painting itself and bleeds into cinema.[2]
Figure 11. Caravaggio, Medusa
Allegorically, the painting captures the reel, the principle of curvilinear synthesis whereby image becomes aesthetic movement, the interstitial swarm within image itself that makes all image-to-image transitions possible. What is impossible to see directly, what cannot be presently gazed at, is the identity of this swarm with head itself as synthesizing agency par excellence, the consciousness-point which is never perspectivally in place at all, is never a fixed viewing platform, but is always extra-locatively on the move. That is, cinema moves only through the essential snakiness of the head, the wholesale flexibility of capital consciousness and its specific articulation as visual flux capacitator, the unseen thing that flows image into itself. From this perspective we may say that the severed head is the serpentine and spirally ouroboric reel of cinema, a literal figuration or projection of the head’s removal of itself from itself that is necessary for synthetically seeing the world in the first place, for grasping, like a snake its own tail, the flow of time in the auto-affective touch of imaginal and phantasmatic curvature. It is exactly this synthetic self-severing that is seen each time one perceives the essential unseeability of the cinematic image, the skewed or twisting difference between my gaze and its kinetic look (concretized by Caravaggio in Medusa’s downward stare), so that, unlike Narcissus, I can continue to witness without subjective collapse the unreality of the real.[3]
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[1] “Through subtle wiles and guile, the son of Danae [Perseus]—while one was passing that eye to the other—stretched out his hand and intercepted it” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Harcourt, 1993], 4.776-7).
[2] “I see the mirror’s decapitation of self-referential representation, or in other words, the separation of the painting’s head from its body. I see decapitation of the gaze that defines the ‘subject’ to be painted and the ‘subject’ of the painter’s design. I also see the gesture of the hand and body that pose there, in the painting that is both mirror and support, in the painting and on its surface, as a represented object, the slashing of the subject: the painter’s brushstroke, the stroke of Perseus’s sword” (Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 132). In perfect counterpoint to al-Hallaj’s tetragrammatic blood Caravaggio signs his own name with the blood of John the Baptist:
Figure 12. Caravaggio, The Beheading of John the Baptist (detail)
[3] Alan Singer analyzes the cinematic structure of the painting in The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010), 86-96. His description of seeing-as-decapitation articulates the drama of the gaze, the snaky visual movement between opposite poles of beheading and petrification (beheading being also a ‘freezing’ of the head and petrification also a severing of body from its own substance), through which this cinematic continuing to witness takes place: “there is also a sense that the act of viewing entails our own decapitation. . . . the effect is complicated by our realization that we are inoculated against the gorgon’s spell by the downward cast of her eyes. For her angle of vision courts the illusion of our reciprocal ascent, on a line of sight that leads speculatively to the place where Perseus keeps his victorious grip on the monstrous trophy. But it also invites us to make eye contact from below where we might, everything else notwithstanding, risk sharing the fate of Medusa’s victims” (95). On painting as decapitation of the painter, a motif of Caravaggio’s work, see Marin, To Destroy Painting, 142. Brigitte Peucker deploys Marin’s reading of Medusa to read Hitchcock’s films in The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), chapter 4. Note that the technical converse of unseeable gaze, the invisible eye that see you, now takes the form of the snake cam. The Israeli military has developed a robotic one that crawls.
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