The Age of Innocence
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or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary
signs”—^the unmistakable presence of these environments in the film
provides elegant support to the narrative.
Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence as a Work o f Hypermediacy
Claire Monk argues that with the release of Sally Potter’s
Orlando in early 1993, a new strand of period/literary films was
launched which, given their “implied reaction against heritage,” she calls
“post-heritage” (7). While she identifies one characteristic of these films
as “a deep self-consciousness about how the past is represented,” she
claims that “what most unites the post-heritage films is undoubtedly an
overt concern with sexuality and gender . . . (7). I would agree with
Monk that Scorsese’s Innocence is a post-heritage film, but I would do
so not because of its gender politics, instead because of Scorsese’s use of
what Monk characterizes as “distancing strategies” (one of her examples
from Carrington (1995) being “a camera which restless circles its human
subjects, as if under pressure to prove that it is not lingering on period
spectacle” (7)). And I would do so even though often Scorsese’s express
purpose in his camera movement is to linger on historical spectacle.
Rather, what makes Scorsese’s Innocence a post-heritage film is its
complex and barely contained tension between immediacy and
hypermediacy.
In only one instance does RKO’s Innocence present an
exhibitionist hypermediacy. The film begins with a rapid montage of
shots of 1920s Jazz Age New York—skyscrapers, traffic, jazz
performers, boxing matches, gangland shootings, sensational headlines—
and Jazz Age New Yorkers drinking and dancing. This montage of quick
shots, swooping crane shots, canted angles, and multi-imaged
kaleidoscope shots, joined by dissolves and accompanied by a jazzed-up
version of the film’s romantic theme music, has a distinctly cubist
quality. Reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929), its function is predominantly to establish the mood of the times,
which serves a narrative function only in its contrast to the sedate and
contained 1870s. It does so, in part, by foregrounding the unique
capabilities of cinematic apparatus. Once this introduction is past,
however, the film limits itself to the conventions of Hollywood
continuity, and the film’s overall effect is of typical Classic Hollywood
immediacy.