Blackwell Reference Online

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Word associations: only interesting if you leave out five of six connecting links. Elias Canetti Mallarmé – representing the inner limit of that great surge of lyricism in French poetry of the late nineteenth century, extending from Verlaine and Rimbaud through Valéry – well understood the exigencies of the relation between sound and image in Wagner. In his celebratory text, “Richard Wagner: reverie d'un poëte frangais,” Mallarmé writes of the sublime, totally generative aspect of Wagner's music: “an audience would have the feeling that, if the orchestra were to cease exercising its control, the mime would immediately become a statue.” As the myth of Galatea offers the scenarization of an ontological category error transformed, through wish–fulfillment, into aesthetic delight, its inversion is particularly telling. Cinema is the art of animation par excellence, which is why the immobility of the frozen moment is particularly disquieting. Luis Buñuel, in the chapter of his autobiography preceding the discussion of L'Age d'or (1930), recounts that in his dreams he was never able to make love in a satisfying manner: “sometimes, when the climactic moment arrives, I find the woman sewn up tight. Sometimes I can't find the opening at all; she has the seamless body of a statue.” This anti-Galatean moment informs the (almost) climactic garden scene of L'Age d'or , when, just as the ... log in or subscribe to read full text