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Popular Culture Review
In contrast, Scorsese’s film exhibits simultaneous pulls of equal
force toward immediacy and its opposite, hypermediacy. Hypermediacy
is “a visual style that, in the words of William J. Mitchell, ‘privileges
fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity
(Bolter & Grusin
31). Thus, it is defined by multiplicity: “the logic of hypermediacy
acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible”
(33-34). Hence hypermediacy often takes the form, “not as a window on
to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on
to other representations or other media” (34); its most obvious examples
are “the heterogeneous ‘windowed style’ of World Wide Web pages, the
desktop interface, multimedia programs, and video games” (31^ Such
representation, in Richard Lanham’s terms, creates a tension between
looking at and looking through the mediated representation (Bolter &
Grusin 41), so that, for example, the user of a desktop interface
“oscillates between manipulating the windows and examining their
contents, just as she oscillates between looking at a hypertext as a texture
of links and looking through the links to the textual units as language”
(33). Such hypermediacy was not bom with digital technology; however;
it exists, for example, in a European medieval cathedral “with its stained
glass, relief statuary, and inscriptions [which constitute] a collection of
hypermediated spaces, both physical and representational” (34).
In Scorsese’s Innocence, the very density of the period detail in
the film’s interiors creates a viewing experience that is simultaneously
immediate and hypermediated. A sense of immediacy is generated by the
decor’s apparent authenticity and by its deeply layered, almost tactile
effect. At the same time, however, this very density of detail also
generates a sense of hypermediacy as the camera lingers over it, inviting
the viewer to see both an opulent room and a collection of statuary,
paintings, framed photographs, patterned fabrics, ornately carved
furniture and mantelpieces, and elaborately decorated urns. For instance,
in the first scene in Mrs. Mingott’s home. Woodward’s narration
describes Mrs. Mingott, her influence in New York society, and her
“foreign” first-floor bedroom, while the camera travels over wainscoted
and wallpapered walls; a fireplace mantle adorned with prismed lamps,
china pups, and silver-engraved vases; a timbered and carved ceiling;
decorated screens; statuary; an intricately carved staircase; a sta