El Cid and Kracauer’s Mass Ornament :: Medievalism Kracauer Film Cinema Movies

The numerous historical films that merely illustrate the past are attempts at deception according to their own terms. Since one always runs the danger, when picturing current events, of turning easily excitable masses against powerful institutions that are in fact often not appealing, one prefers to direct the camera towards a Middle Ages that the audience will find harmlessly edifying. The further back the story is situated historically, the more audacious filmmakers become. They will risk depicting a successful revolution in historical costumes in order to induce people to forget modern revolutions, and they are happy to satisfy the theoretical sense of justice by filming struggles for freedom that are long past.1 Kracauer’s analysis of the historical film culminates in a dismissal of historical, and thereby factual, efficacy. In this circumstance, the period piece can assume an earlier time frame as a departure from the burden of accuracy rather than an acceptance of it. Academic records indicate that El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, 1961) ignores much of Rodrigo Dà ­az de Bivar’s factual exploits as a warrior for hire, fighting more often for compensation than any religious or moral certitude. Why, then, was this character’s story so appealing as a platform for a historical epic film? El Cid’s historical ambivalence suggests that it’s story is more appropriately detailed for potential aesthetic achievement than realism. Kracauer begins describing the aesthetic condition of the mass ornament as a reference to the Tiller Girls, a performance group based on visual uniformity. He focuses on their performance of emulation and repetition, through which they are â€Å"no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.... One need only glance at the screen to learn that the ornaments are composed of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies in bathing suits. The regularity of their patterns is cheered by the masses, 1 This passage is taken from Siegfried Kracauer’s essay â€Å"The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies.† themselves arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier.2† Already, there is an allegory bridging this performance art with the cinema. The masses are clearly the film’s intended audience gathered in a theater, which composes the modern medium for the cinematic ornament. The film’s actors become the performative aspect of this equation, wherein their acting and involvement in a character role, no matter how important, is meager and unnecessary without the remainder of the operative whole. The film opens with a revelatory glance at this phenomenon, as Rodrigo carries a cross through an empty landscape. In retrospect, his great battles and leadership are abstract and ineffectual without the massive army of followers. As the stand-in Christ figure, he showcases the absence of the epic’s ornament: a solitary figure,