The Age of Innocence
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films that “had some bearing on The Age o f Innocence: as an inspiration,
as a source of stylistic or spiritual nourishment, even as a temporary tool
.. . [M]ovies th a t. . . found their way, one way or another, into The Age
o f Innocence" (Scorsese & Cocks 168). Explicit quotations of other films
occur, for example, when Newland, while reading a devastating note
from Ellen, is shown with a strip of light illuminating his eyes in
imitation of similar lighting in Detour (1945) (Scorsese & Cocks) and in
the three overlapping shots of May’s rising from her chair to tell
Newland of her pregnancy (an announcement that puts an end to his love
affair with Ellen), a borrowing from the plate-smashing scene in
Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925) (Christie).’ At these moments, viewers
familiar with the earlier films recognize the allusions, while the rest of
the audience sees, at a minimum, “unnatural” lighting unmotivated by
the set design and “unnecessary” cuts in May’s movement. In either case,
the maimer in which these instances were constructed is foregrounded,
distracting the viewer fi"om the narrative thread that Hollywood
continuity is designed to foreground.
Moreover, among the self-conscious cinematic techniques
Scorsese uses are ones that deliberately evoke not the time of the film’s
diegesis or, as in the “cybernetic” long tracking shot of Newland walking
through adjoining rooms, the time of the film’s production, but the time
of the novel’s release: cinema’s silent era. Thus, on occasion Scorsese
uses an iris or side wipe as the transition between scenes; in the scene in
which all other diegetic sound fades down while Newland and Ellen
converse in the theater box, the fade down is accompanied by an iris
effect encircling the couple and thus separating them from their
surroundings visually as well as aurally. In each of these instances, the
audience is reminded of cinema as cinema, of the medium as a medium,
and each such reminder is an instance of hypermediacy.
Finally, on occasion, Scorsese’s remediation of painting
highlights process and image in a self-conscious manner that calls
attention to itself A scene in which Newland approaches Ellen in the
Boston Common opens with a close-up of a painting-in-process of the
Common which includes Ellen among the painted figures. The camera
then pans from Ellen’s painted image to Ellen herself; she sits in a
bucolic setting in which Scorsese’s staging of the extras pays obvious
homage to George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on la Grande Jatte
(1884). This equation of Ellen and the film’s mise-en-scene to painting
both remediates painting as cinematic image and “paints” the film’s