Discourse

On frostbitten fingers

In his essay "Cinema and Exploration," André Bazin gives the early films of polar discovery a central place in film history. He argues that,

It was after World War I, that is to say in 1920, some ten years after it was filmed by Ponting during the heroic expedition of Scott to the South Pole, that With Scott to the South Pole revealed to the film-going public those polar landscapes which were to constitute the major success of a series of films of which Flaherty's Nanook is still the outstanding example.¹

In this narrative, only a few short steps separate the travel documents of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley to the nascent genres of documentary and ethnographic film. Exploratory films here form an Ursprung for the British documentary movement and the anthropological film, instantiating a relation to landscape space that would become a key element of non-fiction filmmaking.

Bazin goes on to make an immediate geographical and significatory shift. He continues, "Not long afterwards, very likely because of the success of the Arctic films, a type of production appeared which we might categorize as 'tropical and equatorial.'"² This spatia [End Page 53] l displacement from the poles to the equator enables an elaboration of exoticism, which Bazin notes is particularly important in the films made in the Southern hemisphere. He adds,

. . . this poetry, especially in those films shot in the South Seas, began to take on an exotic quality. From Moana, virtually an ethnographic document, to Tabu, by way of White Shadows, we are aware of the gradual formation of a mythology. We see the Western mind as it were taking over a far-off civilization and interpreting it after its own fashion.³

This development appears to take us far from the journeys of Scott and Shackleton, for while the North of Nanook permits a colonial gaze, the Antarctic contains no distant civilization to conquer, simply the uninhabited polar landscape.

However, I want to suggest that this is not a simple colonial progress narrative from Ponting to Flaherty to Grierson or Murnau, but rather that the polar exploration film enables a complex staging of space and time. We find in Bazin's account of these films two kinds of origin: the beginnings of a particular narration of geographical space, and the emergence of a particular discourse of cinematic authenticity. Naturally, these two cinematic structures carry a significatory and ideological weight, although Bazin's characteristic lightness of touch does not press hard on the implications. Instead, the two origins come together in the pregnant example cited by Serge Daney as illustrative of Bazin's erotics—the frostbite suffered by Shackleton's cameraman Herbert Ponting as he re-loaded film in polar temperatures, which, for Bazin, made the film more beautiful.⁴ Here, experience and geography are marked in terms of extremity; both written on the body of the filmmaker.

This example suggests the part of the essay that is best known: its use of the exploration film to exemplify the precedence in film of temporality over mimesis as a signifier of the profilmic real. Bazin famously argues that the scrappy and unintelligible footage of the Kon-Tiki voyage compels not because of what we can see—which is not a lot—but because of our knowledge of how and when it was shot. Kon-Tiki (Heyerdahl, 1950) is, for him, an overwhelming film because the film itself is a trace of the adventurous journey. He describes a fleeting image of a whale, and asks whether it is the whale we are interested in seeing, or the fact that:

. . . the shot was taken at the very moment when a capricious movement of the monster might well have annihilated the raft and sent camera and cameraman seven or eight thousand meters into the deep? The answer is clear. It is not so much the photograph of the whale that interests us as the photograph of the danger.⁵ [End Page 54]

This notion of capturing a moment in time rather than an object is, of course, central to Bazin's ontology of cinema. What I want to focus on, however, is the place of the exploratory event in this theory, where the ontological question of cinematic specificity intersects with a unique historical moment, in the early twentieth-century polar film, of filming danger.

In considering this question, I will turn not to the exploration films themselves, but to a contemporary fiction film that inserts their images into its narrative. Why this approach? One reason is suggested by Bazin himself when he criticizes the feature Scott of the Antarctic (Frend, 1948) for relying entirely on reconstructions. He complains that "The studio reconstructions reveal a mastery of trick work and studio imitation—but to what purpose? To imitate the inimitable, to reconstruct that which by its very nature can only occur once, namely risk, adventure, death."⁶ The polar landscape here stands as a specific case in the histories of realism and exploration, a space and time peculiarly inappropriate to imitation. Bazin goes on to suggest that the fictionalized narrative of Scott's journey should have included documentary shots, arguing: "If I had been in Charles Frend's position I would have done my best to include some shots from the Ponting film . . . by including some of the stark realities of the original, the film would have taken on a meaning which it now completely lacks."⁷ It is this very situation—one that could only be hypothetical to Bazin—that I want to investigate: what happens to the inimitable event of risk, adventure and death when its record is re-contextualized, decades later, in a fictional film.

The Forbidden Quest, directed in 1993 by Dutch filmmaker and curator Peter Delpeut, is a self-conscious art-film experiment, a sort of European Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999) that creates dread not from the immediacy of video but out of the uncanny materiality of early film images. The film opens in 1941, with a documentarian interviewing J. C. Sullivan, who we learn is an old ship's carpenter, and the only survivor of a 1905 Antarctic expedition that went horribly wrong. The sailor, it turns out, has more than sea-tales: he presents the journalist with evidence of his fantastical story in the shape of some reels of film, shot during the fateful journey of the "Hollandia." The film continues by interweaving Sullivan's interview testimony with its supposed filmic record, which consists of actual historical footage. Delpeut uses some famous material, from films such as The Great White Silence (Ponting, 1924) and South (Hurley, 1916), but he also works with anonymous films from the collection of the Netherlands Film Museum, including records of voyages to other frozen locations, including Greenland, Northern Norway and Alaska. [End Page 55]

The sources are authentic, and the images stunning, but the story that they tell is highly fictional, as Sullivan relates an accursed journey to the ends of the earth. The voyage begins mysteriously, when Sullivan is hired without any information as to where the expedition is going, or why. As the ice-breaking ship sails south, he realizes that Antarctica is the only possible destination. His feelings of unease prove justified when the sailors see a polar bear—obviously not native to the South Pole—and they believe they have been cursed by God when one of them kills the miraculous bear. From this point on, everything goes wrong for the expedition. Soon, the journey becomes horrific as the crew perish, the boat is lost, and a supernatural realm is finally discovered at the Pole. Throughout, this fantastical story is staged using only documentary footage, manipulated to create the effect of a new narrative. Forbidden Quest, then, exerts some pressure on Bazin's reading of the exploration film. It not only re-contextualizes these ur-texts of documentary cinema within a fantasy narrative, but mobilizes their exemplary theoretical effect of authenticity in the service of witnessing a false history. This essay explores Forbidden Quest's engagement with Bazin, considering three areas of intersection: the narration of reality through geographical exploration, spatial displacement, and the temporality of the image.

Forged documents

As his examples of Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922) and Moana (Flaherty, 1926), much less Tabu (Murnau, 1931) or White Shadows in the South Seas (Van Dyke, 1928) demonstrate, Bazin does not attribute to the exploratory narrative a simple facticity. Rather, he finds a peculiar promise in films of exploration, directed both towards an authentic reality of experience and towards the fantasies of Western myth-making. The appeal of the polar exploration film, as with the South Pole itself, may be found in the deceptively blank purity of its canvas. While the South Seas cycle was readily turned towards exotic romance fantasies, the polar film has largely retained an aura of purity. Forbidden Quest works upon exactly this effect, unraveling and re-combining the genre's discourses of fact and fiction, document and myth.

This work is not, however, apparent at the outset of the film, which appears to invoke an untroubled use of the historical document within fictional narrative, similar to the one imagined by Bazin for Scott of the Antarctic. The film's early sequences seem to follow Bazin's advice, inserting historical images into its narrative quite seamlessly. The investigation structure allows the reels of film [End Page 56] to be introduced quite naturally as mementoes kept by Sullivan, and the aged appearance of the footage is motivated narratively by its status as historical evidence. While the expedition took place in 1905, Sullivan is being interviewed forty years later, and thus the footage is already old. When Sullivan begins to relate his journey, the corresponding images are used straightforwardly, illustrating the voiceover narration with scenes of sailing, seascapes and ice floes. In a scene of preparation for the voyage, there is even foley work in which we hear crates being loaded onto the ship, thus creating a naturalistic effect of three-dimensional space. Sound sutures the historical images into a coherent diegesis, ensuring that there is no gap between the temporally disjunct narrative spaces.

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Figure 1.

Forbidden Quest (Delpeut, Zeitgeist Films, 1993) Historical footage illustrates the Southbound expedition.

As the narrative progresses, however, the film becomes more and more self-reflexive, drawing attention increasingly both to the documentary nature of the polar footage and to its fantastical manipulation. First, there is a shift in the film's sound, from the naturalistic effects at the beginning of the story to an almost complete silence once the Antarctic is reached. This silence does double duty, creating awareness both of realism and artifice. On the one hand, the soundless images remind spectators that this is archival footage—we watch it in a silence evocative, for contemporary viewers, of the experience of early cinema. Thus prevented [End Page 57] from entering an aural narrative space, we may contemplate the beauty and hardship contained in these records of polar adventure. On the other hand, this unnatural silence contributes to the sense of foreboding building in the narrative, replacing the reassuring soundscape of the port with an eerie and perhaps supernatural flatness in the white desert of ice. The film demands simultaneous spectatorial engagement with the diegetic and the historical connotations of silence.

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Figure 2.

Forbidden Quest: The "picture man."

A second example is even clearer. The climax of the film occurs when the narrator reaches a supernatural realm, possibly representing the gates of Hell, or the passage to Heaven. As Sullivan says, "We were beyond . . . we had gone beyond, to the Other side." This terrifying place beyond the limits of exploration is represented visually by tinting the footage in shades of pink, orange and red. This simple effect certainly makes the icy landscapes look uncanny, and the warm colors connote the impossible heat described by the narrator. However, its most obvious reference is the color effects of early cinema, including the original blues and yellows that we have already seen in Herbert Ponting and Hurley's footage respectively. As fantastical as the effect is, it simultaneously refers to a history of cinematic manipulation, turning the spectator's attention as much to the historical context of the images as to the supposed narrative climax.

There is a play here on the authentic and the fabricated, the profilmic and the textual. The film's effects depend simultaneously [End Page 58] on the truth status of the historical footage, and its fictional undermining. We oscillate as spectators between these poles, between the affective pull of the profilmic and the suspense of the fictional narrative. The story of danger is both real and faked, and it is gripping both ways.

Moreover, the film includes a textual figure that mediates these layers of meaning, embedding within the text an embodiment of its documentary history. The "picture man"—the cinematographer who accompanies the expedition, and who shoots the images that authenticate Sullivan's testimony—is certainly a self-reflexive joke: like his apparatus, he can neither hear nor speak. But the picture man's role is more than an in-joke. Sullivan constantly reminds us of his presence, bringing the source of the image insistently into the narrative, even when, by this logic, there would have to have been a second picture man present to record the work of the first one. The narration acknowledges this incipient mise-en-abyme structure when Sullivan speaks of a mysterious extra person who walks with them, an un-countable surplus that dogs the venture. This Other, whose presence is so uncannily felt by Sullivan, may intimate the gaze of the camera beyond the frame, or indeed that of the present-day spectator, but in either case the picture man points beyond the diegesis, to profilmic space and the historical apparatus of documentation. Bazin describes the cinematographer on expeditions as an "official witness," and the term suggests what is at stake in Forbidden Quest's dialectic of reality and fantasy.⁸ The narrative picture man forms a fantasmatic locus for film's historical function, and yet someone did record these scenes. Witnessing here is at once a fiction and a reality, and the film reflects upon its status as both as a document and a forgery.

Heading South

Bazin describes the spatial displacement that occurs in the shift from polar films to colonial fantasies of the tropics. This formulation at first implies a geographical innocence to the polar film, prior to the ideological projections to be found in later ethnographies. However, by linking these forms chronologically and causally, Bazin implicates all cinema of exploration in the same cultural logic. The physical and visual conquest of exotic places has a clear connection with colonial narrative, but what is striking is the process of displacement. Polar films might mark the cinematic emergence of a particular colonial form, but the (geographical) content must be altered for the form to become fully legible. The [End Page 59] Forbidden Quest elaborates on this geopolitical process, staging a curious spatial displacement of its own.

The title of this article cites the film's introductory epigraph, which in turn quotes the Velvet Underground song "Stephanie Says."⁹ This opening points to the playfulness of the film's discourse on space, for we are not, of course, in Alaska. Moreover, the song's Alaska is not a place at all, but a girl: this reference suggests a further distance from real place, but it also implies a colonial metaphor for the phrase "in Alaska." Like Freud's "dark continent," the frozen north is imaginable as a female body to be conquered. The citation certainly evokes a space of cultural, rather than geographical, experience, but it is not simply a knowing reference. Rather, it opens the film with a troubled metaphorical space, and a geographical displacement that soon becomes pointed, for the film's story centers on a confusion of north and south. The appearance of the Arctic polar bear is the misplaced sight that begins the supernatural narrative, and an equally impossible tribe of Antarctic Eskimos are one object of the captain's quest. Space, here, is out of joint and the film's climactic region of the dead is, like Lou Reed's Alaska, between worlds. Of course, we know as spectators that these uncanny effects are produced by mixing Arctic with Antarctic footage. In another doubling of reality and fantasy, the disjunctive appearance of the polar bear makes apparent the work of editing, whereby, in actuality, we may well be in Alaska.

This effect is certainly playful—a smart use of creative geography to produce a story. However, there are also cultural meanings here, and a colonial structure is at stake in these spatial reversals. The ship's crew, for instance, is northern European, including Dutch sailors, Norwegians, a Russian, the Irish narrator and the Siberian dogs. The only "Southerner" is an Italian, who is wild and untrustworthy. Thus, the film does include a "savage Southern" stereotype, but instead of being a South Sea native, he is Southern only within the ethnic politics of Europe. The fictional "primitives" of the film are discovered in Antarctica, a fantasmatic projection, like the polar bear, of the exotic North within the barren South. This spatial displacement embodies Bazin's connection of the exploration film to ethnography, magically transposing ethnographic subjects into Antarctic space. As the South Pole becomes inhabited, so the politics of exploration become visible. The Eskimos, meanwhile, are eaten by the Italian, in a pithy reversal of the conventional geopolitics of the cannibal narrative.

We might read this fictional encounter through Catherine Russell's concept of experimental ethnography, a method that enables her to read the ethnographic valences of experimental film (and [End Page 60] vice versa). Although Russell does not mention Forbidden Quest in her book, the film intervenes in many of the same debates as her wide-ranging examples. Thus, in common with Unsere Afrikareise (Kubelka, 1966), Forbidden Quest both uses and undermines the tropes of ethnographic film.¹⁰ The film's Eskimos form a native subject of visual investigation, with scenes depicting family groups, as well as strange fetishes like the animal-skull altar. Like Peter Kubelka's hunter, the picture man, in this context, is nothing if not an embodiment of the colonial gaze. (And, as we shall see, Forbidden Quest, along with Unsere Afrikareise, guarantees realism via the spectacle of animal death.) In addition, Russell identifies the intersection of ethnography with found-footage film, a connection that sheds light on Forbidden Quest's ideology of exploratory space.

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Figure 3.

Forbidden Quest: Ethnography and the Eskimo family.

She argues that "The complex relation to the real that unfolds in found-footage filmmaking lies somewhere between documentary and fictional modes of representation, opening up a very different means of representing culture. Found footage is a technique that produces 'the ethnographic' as a discourse of representation."¹¹ An apt description of Forbidden Quest's experimental-documentary-fictional status, this formulation also makes clear the relationship between the film's forged documents and its reflection on the colonial logic of the exploration film. The film's narrative certainly undermines this logic—not least in the scheming Dutch adventurers [End Page 61] and cannibalistic Italian. Moreover, the structure of fantasy destabilizes any notion of empiricism, for the picture man's images fundamentally do not make sense. The Eskimos prove both unknowable and uninformative, and they are rapidly wiped out as a consequence of the encounter. However, a well-worn critique of ethnography is less important here than interrogating the exploratory film itself: what Forbidden Quest's spatial displacements make clear is the ideological relationship between the European north and the "blank slate" of the Antarctic.

The film's geopolitical logic plays upon Bazin's history of polar spaces. But it does so from a locatable place—literally from the Dutch film archive and rhetorically as a part of Dutch national cinema. The fictional narrative announces its national concerns quite clearly: the ship is named the "Hollandia," and its Dutch captain and senior crew are described as a secretive cabal, engaged in some covert colonial project. Yet this national discourse is easily missed for, as Ernest Mathijs complains, very few films from the Low Countries are understood internationally as national texts.¹² Delpeut's work is no exception, and his films, especially the better-known Lyrical Nitrate (1991), circulate as internationalist meditations on early cinema, with little reference to their country of origin. Forbidden Quest, though, makes a narrative point of its Dutchness, and for good reason. The place of Dutch maritime history and its political legacy is implicated in its North-South logic, just as it is a central point of reference for Bazin's postwar France.

Furthermore, France and the Netherlands share a historical imbrication of national film culture and realisms, in which representing the real and representing the nation are rarely too far apart. Dutch cinema, as Mathijs points out, has a long history of tying notions of cinematic quality to cultural authenticity, both in fiction film and documentary.¹³ For instance, perhaps the most celebrated Dutch director is documentarist Joris Ivens, whose films—such as New Earth (1934) and Zuiderzee (1930)—emphasize the documentary power of the profilmic, as well as thematizing a concern for social realities and the human struggle with nature. Of course, there is a problem with this ascription of national realism: Ivens was as much a formal and political radical as he was a realist, and he was an important part of Amsterdam's avant-garde filmmaking community.¹⁴ These elements, I would argue, make him all the more important for Delpeut's project, but in any case it is as part of a history of realist Dutch cinema that these documentaries are conventionally understood. Thus, Forbidden Quest's inclusion of early documentary films participates in a national discourse about authentic representation. Its archival method raises questions of national [End Page 62] preservation quite directly: what do we hold in the Dutch museum? In staging exploration as fantasy, it complicates both the history of Dutch realism, and the place of Southern spaces in forming Northern European national cultures.

On frosted snouts

The Forbidden Quest's effect depends upon two kinds of spectatorial knowledge: that the narrated story is false, and yet that the footage is authentic. This doubling of the evidentiary status of the cinematic image entails a discourse on loss, where the historicity of the footage evokes the same effect extratextually that the narrative of the expedition's loss produces internally. This effect of loss speaks to the place of the exploration film in Bazin's theory of cinematic time and place. The film of exploration depends upon temporality for its affective power: as Bazin reminds us, we care most about the filming of danger. Delpeut's film repeatedly draws attention to the punctuality of its footage, but to the temporal draw of capturing a unique moment in time and space is added a historical affect of distance, loss, and decay. What becomes plain at a century's remove is the imbrication of historicity with temporality in these images.

Bazin argues that the expeditionary film compels not despite problems in the image, but because of them. Thus, on Kon-Tiki again, "How much more moving is this flotsam, snatched from the tempest, than would have been the faultless and complete report offered by an organized film, for it remains true that this film is not made up only of what we see—its faults are equally witness to its authenticity. The missing documents are the negative imprints of the expedition—its inscription chiseled deep."¹⁵ Forbidden Quest, of course, upsets this logic, for its missing shots are missing precisely because the events never happened. But at the same time, it evokes Bazin's material inscription of authenticity historically, by locating indexical affect in the deterioration of its footage. We can find this effect throughout the text, where spectatorial awareness of the films' authenticity involves a fetishistic investment in the rarity and incompleteness of the early polar footage. It becomes most striking in a sequence that depicts the catastrophic loss of the ship. In this scene, the sailors make camp, and we see footage of a ship being worked on, as well as men, dogs and provisions waiting on the ice. The scene has only non-diegetic music at first, then during a slow pan across the camp, both sound and image change markedly. For the first time, we see highly deteriorated film, and as the marks of [End Page 63] decay jump across the surface of the image, the voiceover comes in, intoning "we lost the ship, we lost the ship." As the pan continues, the disfigurement of the image increases until it dominates, with flashes of recognizable figures only occasionally visible behind the abstractions on the surface. Here, decay and loss in the story are marked by decay and loss of the nitrate stock.

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Figure 4.

Forbidden Quest: Deteriorated nitrate stock overtakes the image.

This effect recalls Philip Rosen's reading of Bazin in terms of "markers of indexicality," with the deteriorated shots doubling Rosen's temporal schema.¹⁶ In this instance, we have the indexical trace of the filmed image overlaid with another indexical trace—the temporal process of nitrate's decomposition. Thus, the original historicity of the profilmic event is doubled by the historicity of cinema. Rosen's focus on the relationship between historicity and temporality in Bazin is useful, but how do we read the specificity of this self-reflexive, formally doubled figure? The sequence doubles both the image itself and its enunciation, so it makes sense to turn to the formal trope in which figuration is conventionally doubled in cinema: that of superimposition. In Forbidden Quest, decomposition is not simply an unfortunate loss of visual clarity, but is utilized to produce a secondary layer of meaningful image. In his analysis of superimposition, Marc Vernet follows Christian Metz, arguing that the layering of two images produces a doubled signification that [End Page 64] does not so much add meaning, but grafts evocation onto enunciation.¹⁷ For Vernet, this surplus produces a cinema-specific figure of absence and loss.¹⁸ While the "superimposition" is a material rather than a textual effect, we nonetheless find exactly this surplus in Forbidden Quest's deteriorated images, where on both levels of figuration, enunciative signifiers of pastness (this footage is old, this expedition takes place in 1905) are augmented by an evocative conjuration of loss, decay and death.

It is striking is that Forbidden Quest evokes historicity most insistently via loss and decay. Bazin writes in "Death Every Afternoon" that, "[d]eath is surely one of those rare events that justifies the term . . . cinematic specificity."¹⁹ The corollary of filming danger is the possibility of filming death, and this film makes plain the close connections among ontology, historicity and finality. Death is certainly central to the film's structure: the use of archival footage ensures audience knowledge that all those involved are long gone. The narrative also focuses on death—most of the sailors perish, and those who survive witness a passage beyond life. Even the narrator, Sullivan, dies in the narrative present before he can finish his tale. However, we see no scenes of human death represented directly. More significant is the prominence of animal death in the film, a topic that, as my citation of "Death in the Afternoon" suggests, has a particular resonance for Bazin's understanding of cinematic specificity.

The film locates animal death as the linchpin of its evocative rhetoric. The expedition's first port is South Georgia, where a slow pan past the eviscerated corpses of several whales sets the tone for the journey. The Italian demonstrates his "strange power" by shooting sea lions, whose bodies we see being hauled across the ice. The natives worship at an animal-skull altar. This discourse on corporeality and decay is repeated throughout the film, most insistently in relation to the expedition's husky dogs. The dogs have played an important narrative role from the outset: Sullivan narrates the process of building their cages in Norway, and later in the film he describes the animals as his best friends on the voyage. And, more importantly, the first time we see seriously decomposed film is in a driver's point of view shot of huskies pulling a sled. The image is aesthetically beautiful, and it memorably introduces material loss in relation to a canine image. After the loss of the ship, however, the dogs take on a pivotal evocative role.

Lost in the ice, their situation desperate, the men are forced to kill their own dogs for food. The weight of this event is shown clearly in the death of the captain's dog, Caruso. As the narrator describes the event, we cut to a close up of a dog, looking directly at the camera, his eyes half-closed, his muzzle covered in snow. The [End Page 65] image is almost completely motionless, but the dog's eyes move slightly, enough to show us that he is still alive. Close ups of any kind are rare in the historical footage, making the shot both surprising and compelling. Sullivan's next words are, "Van Dyke's eyes were frozen, he couldn't bear this world any longer."²⁰ The captain succumbs to frostbite, and to mourning for his lost dog. But the frozen eyes we see are Caruso's, not Van Dyke's. The shot comes from Shackleton's expedition, and is one of a series of canine close ups in the film. Peter Delpeut describes the original sequence thus:

After an establishing shot showing the men making their way uphill with the help of dogs, there follow four or five close ups where we see the frosted snouts of these dogs looking directly at the camera. After the painful efforts in the preceding shot, these close ups are like an homage to these animals that played a crucial role throughout the journey. It is no more than a brief instant in a movie that chronologically narrates facts that the public already knew about, but it is precisely these small "human" details that bestow a special strength on the movie.²¹

In both films, the non-human "human" detail evokes a historical experience that cannot be easily seen, but in Forbidden Quest, the canine stands in for the human, and the almost imperceptible movement of the dog's eyes condenses an entire narrative of despair and death.

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Figure 5.

Forbidden Quest: The evocative canine close up.

[End Page 66]

In fact, Caruso's death is a turning point in the narrative, an event whose importance is marked by a textual density that reiterates previous markers of historicality, loss, and presence. Immediately after the sequence described above, Sullivan describes the remaining sailors' rescue, claiming that they were saved by the sound of Caruso's voice. The interviewer is confused, and thinks Sullivan is referring to the dog's whine, but Sullivan scornfully reminds him that Caruso the dog is dead. Instead, the sailors are led to their comrades by hearing a song by Enrico Caruso, emanating from the phonograph on the nearby ship. Over images of the men returning to the ship, we hear a ghostly-sounding original recording of the famous tenor. From beyond the grave, the film implies, the canine Caruso has pointed the way to safety, voiced by his human counterpart. Back in the narrative present, the spectator might notice an old phonograph in Sullivan's house. As a historical object and a fragile recording of a moment long past, the record of Caruso's voice functions, like the elegiac close up of his namesake, as a fetishistic marker of loss.

If the death of Caruso stands in for the losses we cannot see, then another instance of animal death structures the significance of visuality in this system. The polar bear is the only animal whose death occurs onscreen. For Bazin, this is crucial. On bullfighting, he claims,

This is why the representation on screen of a bull being put to death . . . is in principle as moving as the spectacle of the real instant that it reproduces. In a certain sense, it is even more moving because it magnifies the quality of the original moment through the contrast of its repetition. It confers on it an additional solemnity.²²

The death of the bear is certainly a moving image. The scene begins by cross cutting between the men with guns and the bear itself. We see first a long shot, then a closer one of the bear climbing out of the water and being hit, twisting and falling over. This final part of the shot, the moment of the bear's collapse, is repeated in close up six times, compulsively re-playing the defining moment. Finally, there is a new shot of the bear, as it slips below the water, and the sequence ends with the sailors hoisting the limp body onto the boat.

This death is of central narrative significance, for the sailors believe that they have incurred the wrath of God by killing the miraculous bear. As Sullivan explains, "that's when it started, the thing that began it all." But like Serge Daney, Forbidden Quest also understands the fetishistic nature of the event, the temporal erotics of the moment of death. We see the bear shot repeatedly, the [End Page 67] moment of his twisting fall cut at closer and closer intervals, focusing in on the irreplaceable moment. For Daney, animal death makes visible the fetishistic nature of cinematic transparency, whereby we know very well that there is no fully present cinema, and yet all the same, the idea underpins the theoretical desire for realism.²³ The death of the polar bear, like Daney's reading of Bazin, synthesizes two kinds of "decisive moment": the representational authenticity of the bullfight and the experiential authenticity of the frostbitten filmmaker. Thus, while the scene illustrates Bazin's spectacle of death, by evoking, narrating and repeating its temporal specificity, it also expands the theory, demanding that we read this spectacle within a doubled, fetishistic logic. Here, the image of the bear's death retains its solemnity, its affective power, and yet the historical work of evocation enables us to read the image also in terms of an erotics of loss. For Daney, Bazin's understanding of cinematic death is always fetishistic. What Forbidden Quest elaborates is the relationship between this foundational cinematic fantasy and the medium's engagement with history.

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Figure 6.

Forbidden Quest: The "decisive moment" as the polar bear is shot.

In the cinema museum

Finally, Forbidden Quest works upon a question fundamental to Bazin: how to render change visible. The fantastical narrative of exploration, the sequences of animal death, and the degradation of film all signify the decay of the object, and all stage the same fetishistic relationship to time and space. In each instance, the film shows us change in plain view. If the early exploration film concretizes [End Page 68] Bazin's concern for space and time, as well as for experience and its limits, then Forbidden Quest elaborates on the historical implications of these texts today. And, as its postcolonial spatial displacement indicates, these have never been apolitical questions. Such evocations of loss propose a limit to preservation, where we understand "preservation" both as the archival activity undertaken by Delpeut in the Netherlands Film Museum, and in Bazinian terms of cinematic ontology. It is in these two valences of the term that we can locate the film's discursive center.

In an article on exploration films, Peter Delpeut imagines a whimsical scenario of preservation, in which "the films performed a dialectical exercise amongst themselves and challenged museum researchers to dedicate all their attention to their being seen and reconstructed."²⁴ A dialectical approach is indeed necessary to understanding the film's ideological engagement. Russell condemns another contemporary film that uses found footage of colonial travel, From the Pole to the Equator (Giankian and Ricci Lucchi, 1987), for recycling colonialist ethnographic images as nostalgic spectacle, without distance or critique. Thus, "From the Pole may be one of the most significant cinematic recyclings of the colonialist cinema of attractions, and yet it fails to realize the dialectical potential of the archive."²⁵ As Delpeut's literally self-reflexive films suggest, preservation must be an active re-thinking of the historical image and its work in the present.

But if these mischievous films, arranging themselves in the museum, remind us of the famous dancing table that Marx invokes to illustrate the commodity fetish, I would argue that Forbidden Quest instead evokes a Freudian structure of the fetish, and the agency that Delpeut assigns to his sources demonstrates the projections of historical desire at play in the work of the preservationist. The further we get from the profilmic experience, the greater its fetishistic power, as evidenced by recent interest in early cinema in general, and images of the Shackleton and Scott expeditions in particular. In citing the early exploration film at a century's remove, Forbidden Quest makes this fetish visible, evoking both the pleasures and perils of preservation. Furthermore, the question of cinematic specificity has taken on an increased critical importance in recent years, as evidenced both by recent work on Bazin, and by broader theoretical debates on temporality, trauma and the status of the real. By evoking history and fantasy in the scene of exploration, Forbidden Quest reaffirms the significance that Bazin located in these films for both film history and theory. [End Page 69]