While the post-cinematic is typically understood as the passing of film-as-celluloid, the digital expressivity of film need not involve the loss of materiality. Inspired by Giuliana Bruno’s call for cinematic materiality to be re-thought through the substance of material relations rather than through technological definitions, this article examines how the baroque endures in the post-cinematic. Concentrating my analysis on Birdman: Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) as one instance of the post-cinematic baroque, it argues for the baroque as being organised by particular vectors of movement that move between the horizontal and the vertical and the inner and the outer, often giving rise to composite and/or highly spatialized displays. Taking inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the fold, art history, media archaeology and film studies, I argue for Iñárritu’s film as enacting baroque configurations of body, space, movement and environment. As with the formal and affective uplift of the musical and superhero film genres as well as the importance of movement in historic baroque forms, Birdman defies the horizontal plane. As I argue it, Birdman reprises the longstanding baroque desire to become space in every direction.
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Becoming Space in Every Direction: Birdman as Post-cinematic Baroque
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Becoming Space in Every Direction:
Birdman as Post-cinematic Baroque
Saige Walton, University of South Australia




Abstract

   While the post-cinematic is typically understood as the passing of film-as-cellu-
   loid, the digital expressivity of film need not involve the loss of materiality. Inspi-
   red by Giuliana Bruno’s call for cinematic materiality to be re-thought through
   the substance of material relations rather than through technological definitions,
   this article examines how the baroque endures in the post-cinematic. Concentra-
   ting my analysis on Birdman: Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro
   González Iñárritu, 2014) as one instance of the post-cinematic baroque, it argues
   for the baroque as being organised by particular vectors of movement that move
   between the horizontal and the vertical and the inner and the outer, often giving
   rise to composite and/or highly spatialized displays. Taking inspiration from
   Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the fold, art history, media archaeology and film
   studies, I argue for Iñárritu’s film as enacting baroque configurations of body,
   space, movement and environment. As with the formal and affective uplift of the
   musical and superhero film genres as well as the importance of movement in hi-
   storic baroque forms, Birdman defies the horizontal plane. As I argue it, Birdman
   reprises the longstanding baroque desire to become space in every direction.


                                                                       And did you get what
                                                         you wanted from this life, even so?
                                                                                        I did.
                                                                    And what did you want?
                                                        To call myself beloved, to feel myself
                                                                        beloved on the earth
                                                          (Raymond Carver, Late Fragment)

   If the question ‘what is cinema?’ continues to haunt us in the digital age, it
brings with it renewed opportunities to consider how the post-cinematic con-
nects with media experiences of the past. The post-cinematic is defined here
as the passing of film-as-celluloid though this passing is not equated with the
loss of materiality. In her book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and
Media, Guiliana Bruno argues that materiality needs to be re-thought ‘not

                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                          Saige Walton


[as] a question of materials but rather […] the substance of material rela-
tions’.1 By detaching cinematic materiality from tired definitions of a film’s
technological make-up, Bruno enables an embodied appreciation of how our
‘sense of space and contact with the environment’ persists in the digital by
tracing shifting sets of material and aesthetic relations across film and media
history.2
   Following Bruno’s lead, this article explores how the baroque’s substance of
material relations might be mapped across the pre-cinematic, the cinematic and
the digital. Concentrating my analysis on Birdman: Or, The Unexpected Virtue
of Ignorance (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014), I consider some of the ways in
which historic baroque configurations of space, body and environment find new
life and liveliness in Iñárritu’s film. To develop the possibility of a post-cinematic
baroque, I draw particular inspiration from philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work
in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). For Deleuze, the baroque is more
than just a historic era or even an aesthetic style. What he calls the baroque fold
is a trans-historic trait that inflects ‘architects, painters, musicians, poets, and
philosophers’, as well as filmmakers into the twenty-first century.3 If ‘the Baroque
can be stretched beyond its precise historical limits’ as Deleuze insists it can, it is
because contemporary media works also have the capacity to move ‘according to
the fold’.4 While Birdman is not the only instance of what we might call a digital
or a post-cinematic baroque, it allows us to re-visit the history of baroque forms
and their movements and how they might connect with cinema for this is a film
that moves ‘according to the fold’.5
   To help me establish the relevance of the baroque to the digital expressivity of
Birdman, what follows will draw important connections between Deleuze’s fold
with vitalist accounts of the baroque in early art history; with different film gen-
res that are devoted to the lures of movement or moments of uplift and with Nor-
man M. Klein’s media archaeology of baroque special effects. To clarify: I am not
suggesting that the post-cinematic age is inherently baroque or that the baroque
was not present in earlier generations of filmmakers. As I have argued elsewhere,
the baroque needs to expanded beyond notions of a visually spectacular and/or
technologically-driven aesthetic if it is to have saliency for contemporary film and
media theory. This article continues that endeavour by considering how the post-
cinematic baroque is organised by particular vectors of movement that alternate
between the horizontal and the vertical.6 The attitude of becoming space in every


1
  Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), p. 2.
2
  Ivi, p. 8.
3
  Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 34.
4
  Ivi, pp. 33–34.
5
  Ivi, p. 34.
6
  See Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp.19–22.

66
                               Becoming Space in Every Direction


direction is a longstanding tendency on the part of the baroque that connects its
art history to Deleuze’s fold and both to the architectonics of movement that is
performed by Iñárritu’s film.


Deleuze’s Architectonic Folds

   In his seminal Life of Forms in Art (1934), the early French art historian Henri
Focillon was amongst the first to identify the baroque as a recurring or cyclical
phenomenon. For Focillon, forms are mobile because they are ‘specific to time
but also spanning across it’.7 According to Focillon, the baroque is a trans-hi-
storic form that can reveal ‘identical traits existing as constants within the most
diverse environments and periods of time’.8 In his vitalist and morphological
account of form, Focillon is well attuned to the baroque appetite for movement,
energy and spatialized dispersal. He suggests that baroque forms yield dispersive
displays of movement that transform time into space. To quote Focillon, baroque
forms will ‘proliferate like some vegetative monstrosity. […] they tend to become
space in every direction […] to become one with all its possibilities’.9
   For Focillon, the baroque aesthetic is bound up with a strong sense of liveliness,
with movement and with multi-directional dispersal. In his later work on The
Fold, Gilles Deleuze also understands the baroque as a vital operative function
or trait: it ‘endlessly produces folds’.10 Like Focillon’s evocative description of
becoming of ‘space in every direction’, Deleuze’s baroque insists on arresting
movement and spatial dynamism as essential to baroque form and thought.
However, Deleuze goes one step further than Focillon by positing that an optical
account of the baroque — even the baroque conceived as its own spectacular
optic — might be too restrictive. As it is prone to a powerful sense of movement
in and through space, Deleuze identifies ‘the operative concept of the Baroque
[as] the Fold, everything that it includes, and in all its extensiveness’.11 For
Deleuze, the fold is the formal and conceptual means by which we can account
for both the historic specificity of the baroque and the trans-historic activation
of the baroque-as-fold in contemporary media.
   While Deleuze’s titular guide and interlocutor in The Fold is Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, it is the philosopher’s use of historic baroque media (espe-
cially architecture) and his engagements with early art history that concern me
here. Re-reading Deleuze’s text alongside early art historic studies of the baro-


7
   Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), p. 8.
8
  Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. by George Kubler (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books,
1992 [1934]), p. 58.
9
  Focillon, p. 58 [emphasis added].
10
   Deleuze, p. 3. As Tom Conley notes in his translator’s introduction, Deleuze’s trans-historic take
on the fold parallels Focillon’s morphology of forms.
11
   Ivi, p. 33.

                                                                                                  67
                                         Saige Walton


que, the architectonic implications of the fold become particularly striking.12 The
architectural sensibility of the fold comes to the fore through Deleuze’s repeated
engagements with the work of the early Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin,
whom he cites as the first to establish the baroque as a distinct set of ‘material
traits’.13 Drawing directly on Wölfflin’s writings on historic baroque architecture,
Deleuze glosses baroque material traits as the following: a ‘horizontal widening
of the lower floor’; a ‘flattening of the pediment’; the ‘rounding of angles and
avoidance of perpendiculars’; sets of ‘curved stairs that push out into space’;
‘spongy, cavernous shapes’; matter that is handled in ‘masses or aggregates’; and
the expression of ‘vortical form always put in motion by renewed turbulence’.14
   Lest the architectural nature of the fold be missed, consider the references
to architectural foundations, façades and frameworks that appear in Deleuze’s
conceptual scaffolding of the baroque-as-fold. In addition to Wölfflin’s mate-
rial traits, outlined above, the philosopher defines the baroque as inventing ‘the
infinite work or process. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to
continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity’.15 This is
Deleuze’s radical re-definition of the baroque, as what he calls ‘the fold to infini-
ty’.16 At the same time, his sensuous descriptions of the baroque as air-borne or
as a potentially infinite or processual movement rely heavily upon the grounding
and solidity of architectural metaphors and motifs. A gravitational pull to earth
as opposed to the urge to take flight is particularly evident in Deleuze’s allegory
of the Baroque House. Here, baroque architecture is put to the purpose of phi-
losophy as a folding between two levels or floors. By way of the Baroque House,
Deleuze identifies the baroque as moving between two specific levels that fold
between immanent ‘pleats of mater’ (the lower level; the life of the senses) and
the immaterial ‘folds in the soul’ (the upper level; the life of the mind).17
   Throughout, Deleuze consistently makes use of historic baroque architecture
and early art history to argue for the baroque fold as being organized by parti-
cular vectors of movement. Invoking Wölfflin once more, he comments that: ‘as
Wölfflin has shown, the Baroque world is organized along two vectors, a deepening
toward the bottom, and a thrust toward the upper regions’.18 He also quotes di-
rectly from Wölfflin’s first book Renaissance and Baroque (1888) to outline how
the ‘Baroque underlines matter’, even though ‘it does not suffice to contain the
mass that spills over and passes up above’.19 For Deleuze, as for this article, the
baroque moves between the horizontal and the vertical, the earth and the air, also


12
   Ivi, p. 33.
13
   Ivi, p. 4.
14
   Ibidem.
15
   Ivi, p. 34.
16
   Ivi, p. 122.
17
   The Baroque House is Deleuze’s means of reconciling any ontological split between the life of
the body and that of the soul/mind. See Deleuze, p. 39.
18
   Ivi, p. 29 [emphasis added].
19
   Ivi, p. 123.

68
                              Becoming Space in Every Direction


folding between the inner and the outer (the mind and the senses). How might
these ideas be pushed cinematically?
    At this juncture, we can identify a number of aesthetic and material traits to
Deleuze’s baroque fold that can be brought to bear on Iñárritu’s film. These
features include: the expression of prolonged, processual or infinite movement;
a clear foregrounding of architecture; and repeated emphases on vertical move-
ment, flight and propulsion, as this exists in counterpoint to the horizontal. As it
enacts a tension between the horizontal and the vertical, seeking liberation from
the lower level or else presenting bodies and worldly objects in literal states of
suspense or in flight — Birdman can be approached as one instance of a post-
cinematic baroque that moves ‘according to the fold’.20
    Birdman begins with the clicking of drumsticks, followed by clashing cymbals
and drumbeats that evoke the sounds of rolling thunder. Against the film’s per-
cussive score, red letters begin to form a quotation from the last published poem
of American short-story writer and poet, Raymond Carver (Late Fragment: a
poem that was written while Carver himself was dying of cancer). After the film’s
title appears, we catch a brief glimpse of jellyfish that can be seen beached upon
a seaside foreshore. The film then cuts to the unexpected image of a meteor seen
hurtling through space. The meteor’s downward trajectory and its fiery move-
ment through space is interrupted by a hard cut that gives way to a still shot of
the film’s lead, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton), seen from behind. Like the
movement of the meteor, Riggan is suspended in-between the grounding of the
earth and the sky. Our introduction to Riggan sees him meditating in a backstage
dressing room, while microscopic dust particles float about and the sounds of a
ticking clock quietly count down his mortality.
    Within the first few minutes of Iñárritu’s film, we have moved from the gran-
deur of macro-scale movements in outer-space to a scene of mundane, earthly
reflection. However, the film’s enigmatic opening ushers in unresolved questions.
Does it belong to an internal or external event? Are these images ‘real’ or ‘imagi-
ned’? Are they a metaphoric stand-in for Riggan’s mental meditation or perhaps
an excerpt from one of his blockbuster movies? Similarly, the first lines of dialo-
gue that are spoken by Riggan’s alter-ego, the Bird-Man, could pertain to either
the cosmological journey of the earth or reflect the terrestrial angst of a washed-
up Hollywood actor on Broadway: ‘How did we end up here?’. The opening be-
comes even more complex if we consider the few brief words of Spanish that can
be heard before the film’s ‘overture’ for they feature the composer of Birdman,
Antonio Sánchez, who can be heard asking director Iñárritu a question.21

20
   Ivi, p. 34. Birdman can therefore be distinguished from other digital films such as Russian Ark
(Russkiy Kovcheg, Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov, 2002). Though both films are structured by
virtuoso long-takes, the latter does not enact baroque movement between the horizontal and the
vertical. On the digital baroque as avant-garde see Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media
Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). On baroque haptics
and digital filmmaking see also Walton, pp. 208–26.
21
    Dolores Tierney, ‘Dolores Tierney on Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance’,

                                                                                               69
                                       Saige Walton


   From the beginning, Birdman introduces a movement between the horizontal
and the vertical. Grandiose shots of the sky and outer-space function in clear
counter-point with the more mundane concerns of Riggan. In addition, the film
moves freely between the internal and the external and between a ‘realist’ and a
‘fantastic’ film aesthetic so as to muddy the distinctions between them. Throu-
ghout, we watch Riggan/Bird-Man enact super-heroic powers in a film that is
not overtly coded as belonging to this genre. Set inside the space of the St. James
theatre in New York City, much of Iñárritu’s film follows Riggan at ground-level
as he rehearses his own stage play adaptation of a Carver short story, What We
Talk about When We Talk about Love. As the camera trails Riggan in the midst of
rehearsals or behind the scenes, we get to see Riggan’s interactions with the rest
of the cast; his troubled relationship with his young rehab daughter, Sam (Emma
Stone); his desperate need for artistic affirmation and approval in the wake of his
Hollywood career fallout and to witness his psychological conflict with his inner
Bird-Man (and all that his alter-ego represents).
   For the character of Riggan Thompson, unlike the Bird-Man, the ‘art’ that
is the theatre trumps literature as well as the pleasures of Hollywood ‘enter-
tainment’. For Birdman itself, however, divisions between media or between
Hollywood filmmaking versus ‘art’ are a much more complicated matter. In his
descriptions of the pre-modern baroque ‘unity of the arts’, Deleuze outlines how
separate art forms such as painting, sculpture and architecture were delibera-
tely merged so as to be folded into one overarching and implicitly populist per-
formance.22 In the post-cinematic performance that is Birdman, Iñárritu brings
together literature, theatre, poetry, comic books, music and cinema and destabi-
lizes the borders between them. Interestingly, the director also makes a number
of references to the history of baroque and neo-baroque literature in this film:
from the structure of the play within a play format to the inclusion of people on
the street shouting lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (‘a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury’) or the scene in which actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton)
can be seen reading a copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths. And yet, despite
this film’s many literary references to Carver and to other authors or its allusions
to the craft, aspirations or pretentions of the American stage, it is cinema that
remains Iñárritu’s foremost and virtuoso ‘player’.
   Writing of the historic baroque unity of the arts, Deleuze comments upon how
the baroque seeks to ‘attain a unity of the arts as “performance”, and to draw
the spectator into this very performance’.23 Similarly, Iñárritu’s folding together of
multiple media formats is done in order to draw the spectator deeper into the
kinaesthetic performance and imaginative potential that is cinema. As William


Mediático: Media and Film Studies Blog, 23 February 2015 <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/medi-
atico/2015/02/23/birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-ignorance-alejandro-gonzalez-inarri-
tu-2014/> [accessed 24 March 2016].
22
   Deleuze, p. 123.
23
   Ivi, p. 123 [emphasis added]

70
                               Becoming Space in Every Direction


Brown comments, ‘what really comes through’ in Birdman is just how powerfully
‘cinema can trump theatre through its central device: movement’.24 Expanding
Brown’s comments further, I would add that it is not just the appeals of cinema-
tic movement that catalyse this film but the baroque desire to become space in
every direction. In these terms, baroque forms will detach from the ground by
endeavouring to ‘go through the ceiling’ through aesthetic expressions of infinite
circulation and ambient movement.25 Those familiar with Birdman will be well
aware of how the film is structured by a particular stylistic conceit, achieved in
and through uses of digital cinematography and editing. Following the first of its
few visible edits, Birdman proceeds as the film were one long, fluid and conti-
nuous take across multiple spaces and across different time frames.26 Emmanuel
Lubezki’s camera follows not only Riggan and his movements in and through
the St. James theatre but also the film’s ensemble cast: bodies move upstairs and
downstairs, out onto the rooftop, in and out of dressing rooms and on and off the
Carver stage set. The space of the St. James theatre and the movement of its inha-
bitants therein unfurl in an ever-winding and continuous spatial display wherein
‘architecture and film co-exist in the same moment’.27 Just when we thought that
every possible nook and cranny of the theatre space had been revealed, the ca-
mera then follows Riggan downstairs into the bowels of the theatre before unex-
pectedly bursting through the stage doors with him and moving outside onto the
bustling city streets to meet Mike. Yet another layer of spatial complexity and
potential avenue for human as well as camera movement is added.
   According to Robert Sinnerbrink, the Mexican-born Iñárritu often favours
the structure of the ‘network narrative’ to portray ‘dispersed engagement, coa-
lescing events and clashing story lines’.28 This is because the network narrative
allows Iñárritu to plait together multiple plot lines and different diegetic spaces
and times, inter-weaving the fates of his different characters or that of entire ci-
ties into one labyrinthine structure. By way of Birdman, I think we can add post-
cinematic and baroque complexity to Iñárritu’s use of the network narrative. Ra-
ther than weaving together separate plot lines, the film re-configures the network
narrative as a multi-directional, architectonic and highly spatialised display that
gets physically moved along by the entrances and exits of the characters and the
seemingly weightless choreography of Lubezki’s camera.


24
   William Brown, ‘Birdman and the Intoxicating Alchemy of Cinema’, The Conversation, 6 Janu-
ary 2015 <https://theconversation.com/birdman-and-the-intoxicating-alchemy-of-cinema-35275>
[accessed 24 March 2016].
25
   Deleuze, p. 34.
26
   In Birdman, editing is disguised by darkness or the calculated use of edges and corners. See Tier-
ney who compares its digitally masked edits to Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948).
27
   Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: The New Press,
2004), p. 11.
28
   Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘Postsecular Ethics: The Case of Iñárritu’s Biutiful’, in Religion in Con-
temporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation, ed. by Costica Bradatan and Camil
Ungureanu (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 166–85 (p. 169).

                                                                                                  71
                                         Saige Walton


Birdman as Baroque Scripted Space

   Birdman is not just a paean to cinematic movement. Iñárritu stages very par-
ticular kinds of cinematic movement — movements that have the potential for
transforming the dynamics of the ordinary and the everyday. For my purposes, it
is important to note how this film enacts a constant dialectical tension between
the ‘fantasy’ of the vertical (motifs of flight; cinema and superheroes) versus the
‘reality’ of the horizontal (motifs of gravity; the theatrical stage and fatherhood).
Even as the film’s human characters tread the theatre boards, the camera repe-
atedly drifts, floats or orbits around their bodies. Independent of Riggan or of
others, the camera’s vision will halt to contemplate the verticality of buildings; to
linger on the motion of birds in flight or scenes of the sky transitioning from day
to night. Through his inclusion of air-borne motifs together with Lubezki’s am-
bient camera, Iñárritu make it seem as if the film itself were trying to take flight.
   In his Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th Century,
Scott Bukatman draws important formal and conceptual parallels between the
superhero and musical genres. As he details, both genres enact a ‘freedom of
movement’ that allows them to superimpose ‘the fantastic on the face of the utili-
tarian, bringing the city back to the fact of its own fantasy’.29 Likewise, Iñárritu’s
film partakes of the freedom of movement; scenes of urban fantasy and moments
of literal as well as affective uplift that pervade these two genres.30 As Bukatman
observes, to be a superhero or an inhabitant of the musical ‘you’ve got to be able
to move’ or, at very least, access enhanced powers of human motion’.31 Throu-
gh the seeming effortlessness of song and dance, the urge to flight or displays
of super-human strength and speed, both superheroes and musical characters
embody the agility of the other-worldly. Given his tongue-in-cheek references to
the Hollywood super-hero, it is not surprising to find that Iñárritu’s own Riggan/
Bird-Man (played by a former Batman) is endowed with his own special motorial
powers that involve levitation, flight and the telekinetic manipulation of objects.
Similarly, Lubezki’s camerawork enacts its own carefully rehearsed and digitally
achieved super-human movement. In this regard, Birdman encourages us to feel
as if its vision were live and natural and akin to the spontaneous eruption of
energy, grace and movement that occurs in a Hollywood musical (numbers that
themselves were just as labour intensive as well as skilfully timed and carefully
choreographed as the camerawork displayed here).
   What might all this have to do with a baroque organisation of body, space
and environment? To answer that question, we must turn to Norman M. Klein’s


29
   Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), p. 189.
30
   Note the musical significance of this film’s location on Broadway; advertisements for musicals
that appear throughout or the use of percussive beats and sounds while the characters walk and
talk.
31
   Ibidem.

72
                                 Becoming Space in Every Direction


notion of the baroque scripted space. In his book The Vatican to Vegas: A History
of Special Effects, Klein conducts an illuminating media archaeology of baroque
film and media by tracing their roots back to the ceiling and dome decoration of
seventeenth-century Europe. As these were purpose-built architectural sites that
the beholder had to personally navigate, movement was essential to feeling the
scripted space. To quote Klein: ‘when the sky was askew on a ceiling, it operated
like an animatic, a five-minute stroll towards revelation, from pride to humility,
from hubris to prayer’.32 If grand-scale ceilings and domes opened up a senso-
ry portal to the divine, that portal could only be accessed through the move-
ment of the beholder below. The ‘space underneath [the] dome generated […]
walk-through stories’ that encouraged the beholder to enact their own ‘tangible
path to God’ through walking, drifting and free floating ‘inside the skin of these
domes’.33 Scripted spaces speak to how the baroque is entrenched in palpable
connections between body, space and environment that will open up in multiple
directions.
   Obviously, these architectural effects existed centuries before film and they
were also catalyzed by very different historic and socio-political contexts. Like
Bruno, however, Klein refuses technological specifics in order to cut a media
archaeological path from the history of scripted spaces into cinema.34 His work
suggests a walk-through mode of story-telling that can be extended to films who-
se architectonics moves from the horizontal to the vertical. Whether analogue or
digital, such films build towards moments of formal and affective uplift through
their privileging of movement, uplift and weightlessness. Wandering about insi-
de the scripted spaces of the historic baroque, the beholder had encountered all
manner of gravity-defying effects. From flat walls that bent and curved to an ar-
ray of ornamental figures, often floating in mid-air (angels, clouds, cherubs and,
of course, birds). These in-built special effects were intended to move not only
the body but the mind of the beholder into moments of elation and/or private
contemplation. Like Birdman, scripted spaces were carefully designed to unfurl
in multiple directions and to alternate between impressions of weighted form/
bodies as opposed to weightlessness. The progressive movement of the beholder
concluded with epiphanic movement in the mind, triggering sensory surprise or
a ‘moment of wonder’.35
   Following his altercation with a prominent Broadway theatre critic, his dau-
ghter and others, an increasingly despondent Riggan commits suicide on the
stage during preview week. Following the blast of the shotgun, the camera lin-
gers on a view of the theater audience and their standing ovation before rising
upwards to the roof of the theatre, taking in its glittering lights. At this point, the
film folds in upon itself by returning to previous paths of character and came-


32
   Klein, p. 53.
33
   Ivi, p. 50 [emphasis added]
34
   Ivi, p. 11.
35
   Ivi, p. 12.

                                                                                    73
                                          Saige Walton


ra movement in order to initiate new trains of thought. According to Anthony
Vidler, what is so unique about Deleuze’s baroque-as-fold is its spanning of the
physical and the mental, as well as ‘its ability to join […] all levels and categories
at the same moment’.36 In the penultimate scene of Birdman, we find an equiva-
lent to Deleuze’s folding between matter and mind and the conjunction of all
levels or ideas in a moment.
   Against the fanfare of a drumroll, we return to the descending meteor from
the film’s opening. A band troupe, formerly glimpsed outside the space of thea-
tre, now beat their drums on center stage for the camera. We glimpse flashes of
the Carver stage set illuminated by lighting, while Spider-Man and other people
in costumes from Times Square slowly move across the stage. We return to the
dressing room that had featured in the opening, replete with its tiny dust specks.
In this revealing sequence, Iñárritu weaves between the macro and the micro,
collapsing all the different spaces and times of the film into one composite display
that lends cinematic form to the opening lines of poetry from Carver: ‘And did
you get what you wanted from this life, even so?’ Shots of the meteor speeding
through the sky give way to a return to the beached jellyfish, now surrounded by
flocking birds. Imagery pertaining to the earth and the sky meet, intertwining the
film’s horizontal and vertical impulses. Despite the quasi-spiritual nature of this
sequence, Birdman does not invoke a transcendental beyond for Riggan. Iñárri-
tu’s film comes full circle, suggesting that there might be an intricate yet entirely
immanent connection or folding between things.37 The scene ends with a raised
shot that takes on a non-descript hospital ceiling, where Riggan is revealed to
have survived and finally feels himself to be ‘beloved on this earth’.


Conclusion: Taking Flight

   Taking my cues from the work of Deleuze, Bruno, Klein and other thinkers,
I have approached the baroque’s substance of material relations in film through
its kinaesthetic appeals to the body, space, movement, architecture and envi-
ronment rather than through strict technological definitions. In doing so, I have
considered how Birdman bears substantial continuities with the movement that
organises historic baroque forms (the scripted space) and with film genres (mu-
sicals and superhero films) that also privilege vertical movement and moments
of uplift.
   In my analyses of Birdman, it has certainly not been my intention to graft
Deleuze’s ‘infinite’ fold onto the stylistic technique of the long-take nor to reduc-
tively imply that all digital filmmaking is baroque. Given Deleuze’s own archi-


36
   Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 218.
37
   According to Sinnerbrink, Iñárritu often couples quasi-spiritualism with realism in his filmmak-
ing.

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                             Becoming Space in Every Direction


tectonic conception of the fold, I have instead suggested that particular vectors
of movement shape baroque forms and a baroque cinema (analogue or digital).
Here, bodies as well as camera movement will seek to take flight, to levitate and
to fulfil the baroque urge to become space in every direction.
   As D. N. Rodowick reminds us, the ‘difficulty of placing film as an object
grounding an area of study does not begin with the digital “virtualization” of the
image’.38 Given that the history of film studies has involved ‘constantly shifting
terrain for thinking about time-based spatial media’, Rodowick suggests that the
ongoing critical flux as to just what constitutes film in the age of the post-cine-
matic might be approached ‘a positive thing’.39 For this article, that critical flux
allows alternate media archaeologies and different aesthetic modalities such as
the baroque to emerge into view. By way of conclusion, I find it significant that
Iñárritu’s film gestures towards potentially infinite yet invisible conjunctions of
film, body, space and movement. In the closing scene of Birdman, Riggan em-
braces his inner super-hero and defies gravity once more. This moment of uplift
occurs entirely off-screen. It is intimated only by the sense of joy or hopefulness
that flickers across Sam’s face as she sees her father in flight. Embracing the
vertical pleasures of Hollywood, Iñárritu’s Birdman hints that it is really cinema
itself that allows all of us (not just the Bird-Man) to take formal, imaginative and
affective flight. New as well as old possibilities of still await us in the wings.




38
   D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.
12.
39
   Ibidem.

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