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Popular Culture Review
characters and images as works of art rather than “real” entities in the
“real” world. Ellen is simultaneously both image being reproduced on
canvas and image created on the cinema screen, and the former
highlights and reinforces the latter.
In addition, Scorsese remediated painting into his film technique.
For instance, he describes the fades to color as resembling splashes of
paint, and he equates his use of dissolves to painting: “I stumbled upon
the idea of shortening many of the shots that I took, sort of like a brush
going through and painting bits and pieces of color, swishing by”
(Christie 18). For example, Scorsese deleted the midsection of a shot that
tracked down from a high angle, over the length of a dinner table, to a
two-shot of two diners; instead, he dissolved from the camera’s initial
movement over the table to the concluding two-shot. He was particularly
pleased with the result because “it looks like an impressionist painting”
(Smith 72).
In these contradictory impulses, and in particular in its
hypermediated foregrounding of cinematic process and multiplication of
sensory data on screen, Scorsese’s Innocence produces an aesthetic at
odds with the emphasis on authentic immediacy which, a legacy from
heritage cinema, still dominates the period or historical film today. At
first blush, it is an aesthetic, indeed, at odds with Scorsese’s own efforts
at historical accuracy. It can be partly explained, however, by his source
material. Unlike other literary sources for period adaptations, Wharton’s
The Age o f Innocence is a story of human society as mediation, as an
enterprise conducted entirely through its “a set of arbitrary signs.” Hence
Wharton’s slyly wry narrator, whose meaning must at times be found
between the lines. And thus, in keeping with the thematic core of the
novel, Scorsese, as Murphy correctly observes, has created “a thoroughly
‘mediated’ environment—a world in which form is all, in which social
rites and patterns and objets d’art possess a kind of supernatural mana
that can fuel or stall human experience and identity” (12). In addition,
Scorsese the cinephile has long been known as a formalist director who
delights in quoting earlier films and experimenting with cinematic
technique. He admits, in fact, that he is “tom between strict narrative and
more digressive impulses” (Smith 72).
Finally, and ironically, much of what reads as hypermediation in
Innocence is the result of Scorsese’s attempt at immediacy in
communicating to the audience the felt experience of the characters. He
explains, for instance, that the “flickering/strobe editing effect” of the