The Age o f Innocence: A Case Study o f Remediation
Throughout the 1980s, the English-language period film was
increasingly preoccupied with providing the viewer an “authentic,”
apparently unmediated experience of the past, or what Jay David Bolter
and Richard Grusin term immediacy. Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation
of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age o f Innocence, however, is rife with
tension between both this impulse toward immediacy and what Bolter
and Grusin have identified as the opposite impulse toward hypermediacy,
or the calling attention to media as media, in which we take pleasure in
the act of mediation itself In its faithfulness to Wharton’s novel—itself
an attempt to accurately recreate 1870s New York society—and in the
scrupulous attention to authentic period detail, Scorsese’s film offers the
immediate experience of its represented past that other recent period
films do. At the same time, however, the film offers a hypermediated
viewing experience with its many self-conscious cinematic techniques,
as well as its mediations of, and allusions to, the arts of film, opera,
theater, and painting. The result is a film in which the viewer is never
long allowed to “settle” in 1870s New York, despite Scorsese’s
spectacular and tantalizing invitations to do so, but shuttles from the
film’s time setting to later moments in cinema history and from viewing
“real” characters in a “real” world to observing multiple, mediated
images. As such. The Age o f Innocence is arguably the forerunner of later
cinematic experiments in representing the past, in which the mediated
nature of all such representations—despite the popular taste for movies
that give us the past “as it really was”—is increasingly flaunted.
Bolter and Grusin argue that, rather than inventing a new
aesthetic, digital media exhibit a long-standing tension in Western
culture between immediacy—^the illusory disappearance of the medium
itself, which places us “in” the space represented—and hypermediacy—
the foregrounding of media as media. Defining “remediation” as the
representation of one medium in another. Bolter and Grusin seek to
explain late-twentieth-century digital or “new” media in terms of those
media’s absorption and repurposing of other media in service of the
“twin preoccupations” with “the transparent presentation of the real and
the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves” (21). At the same
time, however, the authors contend that both preoccupations have long
been at the core of Western visual culture. For instance, they see the
impulse toward immediacy as existing simultaneously in the principles