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experience the “unmediated” illusion of moving through spaee and time.
By using the moving camera to approximate this adopted illusion and not
the abbreviated, conneetive pov shot that reads as “natural” on the
Hollywood screen, however, Scorsese transforms immediaey into
hypermediacy.
Finally, Seorsese’s Innocence creates a tension between
immediacy and hypermediacy in a number of its remediations of other
media. As Bolter and Grusin note, media engage in a constant process of
absorbing and repurposing older and newer media. Thus, cinema today
inereasingly utilizes digital technology for such purposes as creating
credible speeial effects or believable sets and physical locations, with
digital technology doing the work once done by miniatures and matte
painting. This cinematic absorption or remediation of digital media
serves the goal of immediacy, as the film-makers intend to offer viewers
a seamless illusion of diegetic “reality.” Scorsese remediated digital
technology in just this manner in, for instance, the exterior long shot of
Mrs. Mingott’s home, located in “an inaccessible wilderness near the
Central Park,” which depicts a single mansion surrounded by
construction sites of what will eventually become some of New York
City’s most expensive real estate. This remediation of digital technology
is entirely in keeping with the dominant period-film aesthetic of
“authenticity” and is, in fact, a remediation used in other historical film
and television, such as in Channel 4’s recreation of Tudor England in the
2006 Elizabeth I television mini-series (Picture Perfect).
Similarly, Innocence reproduces opera and stage drama in scenes
where characters watch performances of Gounod’s opera, Faust, and a
performance of the stage play. The Shaughraun, both of which serve
symbolic functions in the novel and the film. The lovers’ farewell scene
from the melodrama in particular foreshadows Newland’s and Ellen’s
eventual separation. Indeed, Scorsese has acknowledged that the opera
and theater performances within the film serve a function similar to that
which movies do in his modern-day films: “a combined narrative
comment and psychological index” (Martin Scorsese Interviewed 23-24).
In these instances, however, these remediations are in the nature of
adaptations and do not, in and of themselves, rupture the immediacy of
Scorsese’s reproduction of 1870s New York.
In contrast, Scorsese’s quotations from previous cinema
constitute a hypermediated remediation of prior media. Scorsese and
Cocks include in their coffee table book a descriptive list of twenty-two