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Popular Culture Review
with paintings—on a similar wall covered with paintings. The mise en
abyme quality of the painting’s quotation of its own setting reduces even
the film’s characters to so many images among images.
A second defining element of hypermediacy is the calling of
attention to media as media, or what Mitchell describes as an emphasis
on “process or performance rather than the finished art object” (Bolter &
Grusin 31). Thus, Bolter and Grusin argue that, “[i]n the logic of
hypermediacy, the artist. . . strives to make the viewer acknowledge the
medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgement” (41-42).
Consequently, in cinema, self-reflexivity or the use of film-making
techniques that violate the Hollywood conventions audiences have been
trained to perceive as “natural” creates a hypermediated viewing
experience; both disrupt the viewers’ suspension of disbelief by
reminding them they are watching a film.
The Age o f Innocence is rendered a hypermediated viewing
experience by Scorsese’s repeatedly calling attention to the film’s
cinematic construction through such self-conscious techniques as
elliptical dissolves, circling and virtuosic tracking shots, swish pans,
slow motion, fades to brilliant colors, and the fading down of diegetic
sound to demonstrate a character’s preoccupation. Similarly, during a
conversation between Newland and Ellen in a theater box, diegetic sound
is faded down to silence so as to present the couple as literally in a world
of their own, oblivious to the crowd around them. Further, on two
occasions, letter writers recite the letters’ content in direct address to the
camera, a sharp departure from the conventional voiceover or sustained
shot of the written page itself; it is as well a curiously unsettling choice,
since the letter-writer is speaking to no one, the letter’s recipient being in
a different geographical location in the film’s diegesis and the audience
(to whom the words appear to be addressed) not being that recipient.
A particularly pointed moment of self-reflexivity occurs in the
scene in which May’s bridal photograph is taken. The scene begins with
a close-up of May’s upside-down image reflected in a camera lens, an
explicit illustration of the mechanics of the photographic process—of the
manufactured nature of photography and, by implication, film. As the
movie camera pulls back to reveal the diegetic camera on its tripod and
May posing before it in her wedding gown, the photographer steps into
frame. It is Scorsese, in a cameo appearance in which he doubles his role
as one who captures the technological replications of reality. By taking a
role that draws such attention to his role behind the movie camera.