Gesamtkunstwerk and Medium Specificity Theory

The term Gesamtkunstwerk, attributed to German composer Richard Wagner, means “total art” or “synthesis of arts.” Wagner, of course, originally coined it in reference to opera, but the term was adopted by early film theorists to describe film as an “everything art.” And rightfully so, as the apparent synthesis in modern cinema of image, color, sound, movement, literary origin, and structural analogousness make film a new sort of Gesamtkunstwerk that has much in common with Wagner’s concept.

Another early art theory, that was most remarkably applied to film by Rudolph Arnheim, is the Specificity Thesis, which was extrapolated from an earlier theorists named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who published similar ideas in Laocoon (1766). Both Laocoonism and the Specificity Thesis suggest that, since each art excels at one, exclusive purpose, and each art retains one quality that differentiates it from all other arts, then “each art form should explore only those avenues of development in which it exclusively excels above all other arts,” and thus sets itself apart.

Seemingly, these two notions of film as art oppose each other. So, which is accurate? Is film an utterly unique art form and should therefore refrain from exploring dialogue, music, or color? Or is film a composite art, free and compelled to undertake all the purposes that its various parts bring in tow? Or, a third option, could film be both a hybrid and specific – could it satisfy both theories? To decide, let us look at the characteristics of film that fall into each theoretical camp.

If there is a characteristic of film that makes it unique from all other arts, it is film’s ability to record reality unfolding. Yes, a painting or a photograph can record a single moment of reality, but film is exclusive in its capacity to record every moment of a given reality. This differentiation seems at first to lend credence to the notion of film specificity. If film’s exclusive quality is the capture and animation of motion, then developments including sound, color, and editing technologies have no place in film. But excellence is the goal of specificity – achieving greatness in a medium’s unique quality is it’s purpose – so the Specificity Thesis contradicts itself if it stands in the way of excellence. Let us then examine Noel Carroll’s objection to the thesis as it applies to sound in film.

Carroll argues that since specificity calls for soundless film, any example of excellence in dialogue film must prove the thesis false. He invokes Groucho Marx’s speech to the ministers in Duck Soup. “A [specificity] theorist might praise the scene as theater rather than film, but this seems wrong, for what is excellent about the scene is that it is delivered by that man, Groucho Marx, with that voice, at that time (the Depression). Indeed, what is most valuable about that scene is that it is a recording of a performance…that could not be replicated today on stage…no matter that it is dominated by speech.”

As we can see, it is difficult to unilaterally ascribe the Specificity Thesis to film. So what of Gesamtkunstwerk? How is film a composite – an “everything art?” As mentioned before, it is apparent that film is a conglomerate of color and framing (painting), sound (music composition), dialogue (literary composition), and narrative. But each of these elements can only support an argument for the compositeness of film if each serves the purpose of the ultimate work. With that in mind, let us use Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing as a springboard for our investigation.

The first shot in Do the Right Thing is a close up of DJ Love Daddy, whose music serves as an aural expressway between otherwise unconnected scenes. This component, the art of music, certainly serves the ultimate purpose of the film, as it supplements the theme that though cleaved by race, the neighborhood is still very connected in communal space and experience. Another art, still photography, is an important part in the composition of Do the Right Thing as Gesamtkunstwerk. Indeed, it is pizzeria owner, Sal’s, refusal to put up photos of famous African Americans on his wall that sparks the key actions of the film. Finally, extensive editing and unconventional camera work (anathema to specificity theorists) also stresses the underlying social problems in Lee’s film. Radio Raheem’s direct address into the camera (which emphasizes his belligerent disposition), and Mookie’s high-angle shot motif suggesting his indifference, for example.

Clearly, painting, photography, music, literature, and color are all able to add to the ultimate purpose of film – thus making film undoubtedly a hybrid of many arts. This truth, however, does not require us to disregard the Specificity Thesis all together. Indeed, it seems our third option might be the most appropriate. Perhaps film’s exclusivity lies in its ability to combine all art into a purposeful, meaningful, coherent sum. Perhaps, film is specifically meant to be composite.


Parallel Editing in D.W. Griffith’s “An Unseen Enemy”

Appearing first in 1907, parallel editing (sometimes called cross-cutting) alternates shots of two or more lines of action occurring in different places, usually simultaneously. The two actions are therefore linked, associating the characters from both lines of action. This development was a result of more sophisticated temporal film editing techniques and audience understanding of film time. “Viewers no longer had to wonder if action shown in a given scene occurred before or after a previously shown action," Charles Musser mentions, and offers as the first example film, The Runaway Horse, which "explicitly acknowledged a linear temporality through its use of parallel editing."

Still, it was D.W. Griffith who perfected parallel editing, as “The time in which parallel editing was totally accepted by the spectators began around the middle of 1908, when Griffith made his film The Fatal Hour.” One of Griffith’s most potent uses of this new editing style (second perhaps only to his A Corner in Wheat) is his film An Unseen Enemy, which will be the bases for our discussion here.

Released in 1912, this 15-minute film is about the orphaned, adolescent daughters of a recently deceased physician. Their older brother is able to convert some of the doctor's small estate to cash. But it is late in the day, and with the banks closed he stores the money in his father's household safe. The slatternly housekeeper, aware of the money, enlists a criminal acquaintance to crack the safe. They lock the daughters in an adjacent room, and the drunken housekeeper menaces them by brandishing a gun through a hole in the wall. But the resourceful girls use the telephone to call their brother who has returned to town. He gets the message and organizes a rescue party. The resultant film is very carefully constructed, building confidently to a famous Griffith "last minute rescue" made all the more potent by its early use of parallel editing.

Indeed, it is Griffith’s “last minute rescue” scenes that best illustrate his use of parallelism, and we will investigate An Unseen Enemies’ here.

There are essentially three strands of action in the rescue sequence, and thus three different “spaces” through which Griffith cuts. They are the maid and her accomplice outside the locked room, the girls within the locked room, and the brother racing to the rescue. To amplify the tension and power created by his parallelism, Griffith employs an array of connections to help link the three lines of action.

The first of these connections is spatial. Spatial relations in editing often refer to the construction of a whole space through multiple shots of the various parts of that space. For example, in Unseen Enemy, the girls are kept at bay by the pistol, which the maid has pointed at them through a hole in the locked room’s wall. The viewer, seeing only the maid’s hand in the girl’s room, is well aware when Griffith cuts back to the maid and her accomplice, that the rooms are connected, and that time is unbroken. Thus, in this example, Griffith deftly utilizes spatial relationships to both augment and clarify his parallel cuts between two places in time.

Another connection is temporal. Griffith is known for his use of the telephone to indicate simultaneous moments in time across multiple locations (Death’s Marathon, for example). In An Unseen Enemy, he also uses the telephone to ensure that the viewer recognizes these two different actions – the brother racing to the rescue and the sisters trapped in the room – are occurring in chorus. The telephone call the girl’s make to message their brother links them all in time, as Griffith’s crosscutting links them in narrative.

Yet another parallel instrument that Griffith employs is a rhythmic relation between his crosscut shots. Rhythmic relationships between cuts are found in the connections and implications between each successive shot’s length. For example, in Death’s Marathon, when the friend is rushing to stop the husband’s suicide, Griffith utilizes increasingly lengthy shots of the wife, dismayed on the phone, and increasingly shorter shots of the husband preparing his death. This, of course, elicits a stronger audience connection to the wife’s suffering and adds an increased tension to the (ultimately unsuccessful) rescue.

In An Unseen Enemy, Griffith does almost the same thing. His crescendo in shot length on the sisters as their captivity becomes more and more perilous, and his descendo in shot length on the brother rushing to the rescue serves not only to clarify the parallel actions occurring simultaneously, but also magnifies the mounting jeopardy in which the sisters find themselves.

Thus, as mentioned, crosscutting is generally meant to suggest that actions are occurring at the same time. However, in An Unseen Enemy, Griffith nimbly employs it to gain a deeper significance between the concurrent events. An Unseen Enemy’s cross-cuts between the activities of sisters, the menacing thieves, and the brother speeding to the rescue, not only illuminate the contrast between the various dramatic situations of each action-line, but do even more by mounting the tension in the sequence to a breaking point – indeed, the hallmark of Griffith’s famous “race-to-the-rescue” film.