After reading the book "The Infinity of Lists," by Umberto Eco I've been giving some thought to the problem of Movies and Lists. I'm interested not just in a list of favorites, but instead in a special collection: a list of Movies made out of lists. Movies whose structure or content is essentially that of a list or a catalogue (e.g. Glitterati, or at least the 5 min version we see of it in Avery's rules of attraction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvG1TCyikM)
The book was made in conjunction with an exhibit at the Louvre, organized by Eco himself, so The Infinity of Lists relies on literature and painting examples. This article presents, only as a modest game, film examples for each of the chapters of the book.
The Shield and it's Form v. the List and the Catalogue
The first two chapters of "The Infinity of Lists" set the stage for the examples and diversions to follow. Two examples from the Iliad illustrate corresponding and opposite modes of representation: First, when Hephaestus forges new arms for Achiles he includes a myriad of scenes from the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon, everyday life, and music into one and perfect, closed form. Achiles' shield is round, finite, and complete; the complexity of its content contained in harmonious unity.
Opposite to this closed form and unity is another example from the Iliad in which Homer attempts to convey the immensity of the Greek armada. Here no one metaphor comes to him, and instead he devotes the next three hundred or so verses to enumerating some of the ships and his captains. This is the list mode of representation. The catalogue.
To transpose the first mode into film, one could take Casablanca, for example. Casablanca is the ideally coherent narrative structure with an extraordinarly artificial and exhuberant content, but all within a preordained and contained system of representation. Even as events are hinted to exist before and after the movie, there is nothing relevant to Casablanca that is not contained within its classic beginning, middle and end.
On the other end there are the movies that occupy this article. Movies like 71 fragments of a Chronology of Chance by Michael Haneke. The problem portrayed -multiple lives in a modern city converging towards a catastrophic event- is far from a complete explanation, and the best Haneke (or anyone) can do is enumerate an incomplete list of vignettes that hints at the constituent elements.
Sometimes the elements of "list movies" are rendered together by narrative but often mostly by being part of the same list and explained only, if ever, by a critical and social narrative outside the work itself.
The visual list
Film, like painting, is constrained by the frame. There are paintings and movies, however, that convey the idea that what we see in the frame is only a sample of a much larger group. What we see is followed by ellipsis. As Eco puts it, "not all but only an example of the totality whose number is hard to calculate, at least as much as Homer's warriors were."
The obvious examples here would be the hordes of CGI-produced armies on Lord of the rings, or the cocoons housing human batteries on The Matrix. But a more satisfying connection to painting can be made in Peter Greenaway's continuation of the dutch painting tradition of still lifes known as Vanitas.
Each Vanitas is an allusion to a wider list of delights. It mixes an abundance of disjointed perishables in one frame inviting us both to reflect on the range of hedonism and its transience. The marvelous filmed Vanitas of Peter Greenaway in movies like The Cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover are only the first example of why he is the prime list-making director.
The Ineffable
"Faced with something that is immensely large, or unknown, of which we still do not know enough or of which we shall never know, the author proposes a list as specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest"
As far as the topos of innefability goes the key movie examples are obvious and need no explanation: 2001: a space Oddyssey and Terrence Malick's The Tree of life.
Honorable mention should be made of Gaspar Noé and Enter the Void, which as flawed as it may be stands as one truly ambitious and original piece taking a stab at the visual representation of the ineffable.
List of things
The history of literature, Eco reminds us, is full of obsessive collections of objects. From the mundane contents of Bloom's kitchen board in Ulysses to Prospero's instruments. The allusion to Prospero should give a hint at the great list-maker, Greenaway, but I'll mention not his lists of wonders but two of his list-films based on everyday objects: Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire,1985 and The Tulse Luper's suitcases.
http://petergreenaway.org.uk/26bathrooms.htm
List of places
In a way many road movies could be counted as examples of movies dealing with lists of places. None more vertiginous and dense than Roger Avary's Glitterati, or at least the 5 min version we see of it in The Rules of Attraction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvG1TCyikM
There are lists and lists
In this chapter the distinction is drawn between the practical list and the poetical. The practical list has a referential function: like the grocery list, it only makes sense with respect to that which it signifies. The poetic list is enamoured with signifiers, it exists as a mantra, a lethany, that makes sense only in the aesthetic pleasure of putting the words (or images as the case might be) together in the order prescribed by the list.
Admittedly, movies in this category are the most abstract. This is a necessity as we are talking of movies joining frames not by narrative cohesion but simply by the beauty of putting one image after the next. At its most ethereal, the poetic list finds place in Stan Brakhage's short films, of which Glaze of Cathexis is a fine example.
Less abstract samples of sequential images forming poetic lists include Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates and wonderful sequences by the greatest poet film has produced: Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly in the meditative Andrei Rublev or the slow still water tracking shots of Stalker.
Exchanges Between List and Form
Instead of a movie made out of lists, in this category we are looking for a movie given form by being a list. Bear in mind, it is not sufficient to have multiple parts, in this case at best we have a single unity of story split between chapters and at worse a list of disjointed movies glued together by external branding. No, we are looking for a work that makes sense only inasmuch as being formed by a list of movies.
Such work is Kieslowsky's The Decalogue. The Decalogue is made out of ten movies, each dealing with a commandment, and while individual movies make sense (as the apple in Arcimboldo's Spring makes sense alone pictorially) the work in total is only rendered form only as a list of the ten elements.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092337/
The rethoric of enumeration
In the chapter "the rethoric of enumeration," Eco gives a delightful breakdown on the different devices for enunciating accumulations, particularly anaphora, asyndeton, polysyndeton (lists repeating the same word at the beginning of each phrase, lists with no conjunctions linking them, and lists with conjunctions, respectively).
I admit this article hits a limit in this topic. One could make a parallel between different types of cuts and transition techniques in movies (jump cuts, fades, lists with voice overs and without, etc) but I fear this is either too specific or too forced of an analogy.
Lists of mirabilia
The list of marvels serves the double medieval function of listing wonders, which often we know not to exist, and presuming a form, an order, belying the list.
A nice example of lists of mirabilia I can recall is from an endearing clay animation called Mary and Max where lists of small mirabilia owned by each party are listed and shown sequentially over many exchanges from afar.
Collections and treasures
The voracious appetite for accumulation has one definitive reference in cinema: Xanadu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qY-eqnw_DXE#t=17s
The Wunderkammer
The cabinets of wonders, those rooms filled with rarities and monstrosities prefiguring our natural science museums can be found in Greenaway movies like a Zed and two Noughts and even as sets for whole pieces such as Mark Romanek's Closer music video for Nine Inch Nails.
The challenge of finding a movie that is a Wunderkammer in itself, is only satisfied by one film to my knowledge: Historia Naturaeby the great Jan Svankmajer, best known for his mixtures of live action and stop motion animation like Alice and Faust, delightful rarities in themselves.
List of properties, List by essence, The aristotelian telescope
It is the goal of science and abstraction to understand the world by it's essence, Eco explains, and thus a purely scientific description of a tiger would set the tiger somewhere in a tree of genus, species, etc. Meanwhile, it is the goal of description and analysis to break down every possible accident and mention that a tiger called Shere Khan was Mougli's enemy in The Jungle Book.
The first, tree-like sort of knowledge sacrifices detail for the sake of clarity, while the latter, a rhizome (or fully connected graph, if you prefer the computer science term to Deleuze's poetic analogy of entangled underground roots) sacrifices clarity for the sake of connection and extensibility.
It is proper of a primitive culture that still has to construct a hierarchy to use the list by properties, instead of essence. It is also proper of a very mature culture (as eco says, maybe one in crisis) to use a list by properties, because it casts doubt on all previous definitions. Both the Medieval and Postmodern mind gravitate toward the rhizome, and thus the list by properties.
Films that are representations of properties, hinting at a hidden/underlying encyclopedia of meaning and metaphor are not very popular (and often not very good movies either, despite what Jodorowsky fans say) but there are some truly genuine jewels that fit the bill. The open and list-like exploration of encounters and properties of the race and guilt problem in Michael Haneke's Caché is one of them.
Excess, from Rabelais onwards
This type of list is excessive not just out of necessity given the number of things referred, but excessive in it's labyrinthic love of itself and its artifice. One extraordinary example suffices: The Draughtsman's contract, by Peter Greenaway.
Coherent Excess
Out of excessive lists, two trends rise in the post-modernity of
lists. The first is the coherent excess that deforms but stills refers to some underlying order. The purest example is The Alphabet, by David Lynch (warning: this can be a disturbing piece, play at your own risk)
Chaotic Enumeration
The second trend in the contemporary excessive list is the chaotic enumeration. Lists in this category are not necessarily long. Brakhage would be often a good example, but to provide a counterpart to the dark previous example, I suggest here Begotten by E. Elias Merhige.
Begotten is a great film, but it's truly hard to watch. Perhaps the most visceral piece of legitimate cinema I've encountered and it could be argued that it does have a certain metaphorical plot, but a full viewing should make it obvious why is included in the realm of the chaotic. (warning: this is definitely a disturbing piece, don't trust the trailer's promise of balance)Mass-media lists
The mechanics of lists find their place in mass media as well but there
they serve a more basic role. They are in place just to remind us of abundance. This is common enough in musicals that Eco himself draws his examples from the genre for this chapter: Bathing beauty by Minelli and Footlight parade by Lloyd Bacon, only two of many examples of numerous repetitions of essentially the same showgirl repeated over and over.A simple music video by Nikki Minaj where you have eight or nine indistinguishable dancers (both from each other and from the main performer) would suffice, but in order to keep the examples interesting here is a more cinematic choice: Citta de la Donne by Fellini. Definitely not his best film, but one where the artifice of the mass-media list (that is, the all-you-can-eat buffet) is put to a use other than the typical musical number.
List of vertigos
Lists of vertigos imply containers for infinite lists or describe mechanisms to generate them. Examples include Borges' library containing all the books that can be written with 26 symbols.
Lists of vertigos present a problem for our exercise. Literature can only define the list, and leave the vertigo to take hold of the reader as the implication of the definition sinks in. Films show things, they enumerate them explicitly.
There is no film, in the strict sense, that can directly show the vertigo of infinite or truly huge lists. Of course it is conceivable to make a "film" that shows say, the decimal points of Pi as it is being calculated by a computer on the background, or a "film" made of 26 shorts that keep being shown randomly one after the other. However, unless you are willing to consider such exercises cinema, we hit here a limit of the medium.
Attempts at combinatorials have been tried in experimental cinema, both arthouse and commercial (e.g. the point and choose HBO Voyeur http://archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur/) but until we are ready to declare cinema dead (or at least limited the way we have declared photography and painting before it) and explore image in ways other than the passive sequentially of film, the list of vertigos will remain out of reach.
Exchanges between practical and poetic lists
Sometimes practical lists become a thing of poetry and poetic lists serve a referential or practical purpose beyond them. Such exchanges can be found in cinema too. One tremendous example is M is for Man, Music, Mozart:
A non-normal list
If the list of vertigos takes us to the edge of the capacity for the medium, the non-normal list puts us beyond it. And beyond the reason of lists themselves.
What a non-normal lists asks from us is a paradox familiar to readers who have studied set theory: Consider the list of all list that are not members of themselves.
If the list itself is not member, then it should be included on our list. But only things that are not members of themselves should be in it(!).
This paradox, formulated by Russell, opens a can of worms far beyond this article (and beyond Eco's book). If you have not seen this paradox before, and your mind is not blown away yet, I suggest you read the definition on The Infinity of lists rather than the wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox) .
As for our game, this chapter puts the nail in the coffin: There isn't a film that is a non-normal list.
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Fabio Arciniegas A., San Diego CA, November 25, 2011
