In his book Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Gilles
Deleuze intermingles film studies with philosophy to study the idea of
movement in a film. In the section titled “Frame and Shot,” he introduces the
idea of framing. He states,
We
will call the determination of a closed system,
a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the
image - sets, characters and props - framing.
The frame therefore forms a set which has a great number of parts, that is of
elements, which themselves form sub-sets. It can be broken down. (Deleuze 12)
The frame as a whole
contains all that can be seen within, and what can be seen can be broken into
sub-sets to explain the composition.
Not only can these
items be sub-grouped, but a frame may contain another or many other frames. Of
these “frames in frames,” Deleuze says,
As
a general rule, the powers of Nature are not framed in the same way as people
or things, and individuals are not framed in the same way as crowds, and
sub-elements are not framed in the same way as terms, so that there are many
different frames in the frame. Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights,
car windows, mirrors, are all frames in frames. (14)
Frames may be
infinitely framed. One only needs to think of looking in a mirror that is
reflecting a mirror to see this concept.
But with the frame,
the viewer is not only allowed to see what can be seen, but is prohibited from
seeing what is outside the frame (at least the greatest frame).
In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the window frame is used in
several different ways. The first section of To
the Lighthouse is titled “The Window,” and this section provides a frame
for the novel, and the over thirty references to a window or a pane within this
section provide a frame for perspective.
In some cases, the
window serves as a frame to what is contained, what resides inside with the
viewer, such as when James sees “his father, stopping in front of the
drawing-room window, [and saying] “it won’t be fine” (Woolf 8); when “Charles
Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with [Mrs.
Ramsay’s] husband” (Woolf 11); or as Mr. Ramsay “at the window … bent
quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of
something” (Woolf 35). The physical beings are on the same side of the window
as the viewer, so that an illusion is created by the window frame of contained
image, much like a portrait. Unfortunately for James, this containment with his
father results in extreme negative feelings toward Mr. Ramsay.
In other cases, the
window serves as a boundary, or a partition between two people. Woolf even
illustrates this boundary when she uses parentheticals to mention the windows,
as in these three passages: “(as she sat in the window which opened on the
terrace)” (Woolf19); “(she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected
lights)” (Woolf 107); “(she was looking at the window)” (Woolf 112). By setting
the mentions of the window within parentheses, Woolf creates the same boundary
that the windows create.
But even this
boundary can be transcended with the eyes; the physical body cannot move
through the (closed) window, but the eye can see beyond to the other side of
the window, at least what the frame of the window allows it see. Several times
throughout the novel, Mrs. Ramsay and James are viewed through the window,
generally by Mr. Ramsay and Lily. Mr. Ramsay spies the two as he walks along
the terrace:
He
stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and
as one raises one’s eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a
tree, a cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on
the printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his
distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him and
satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear
understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid
mind. (Woolf 36)
And later, as he was
“stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but
now far, far away, … his wife and son, together, in the window” (Woolf 37) and
imagining himself the hero who “puts his armor off and halts by the window and
gazes at his wife and son” (Woolf 39). In these instances, Mr. Ramsay not only
sees Mrs. Ramsay and James within the frame, he is also separated from them,
relegated to the outside.
Lily views the two
while she is painting: “Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the
colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James, she kept a feeler on
her surroundings lest some one should creep up, and suddenly she should find her
picture looked at” (Woolf 21); and “she saw … Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in
the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending” (Woolf 50). After seeing
the two in the window, Lily decides that this is the view she should paint.
This makes Lily’s painting a frame of a frame: the boundaries of the canvas
form one frame, the edges of the painted window form another.
But interestingly,
Mrs. Ramsay seems to focus on the importance of leaving windows open, doing
away with the boundary of the window pane, and creating a space that can be
traversed. When giving instruction to guests, she says “they must keep the
windows open and the doors shut” (Woolf 17). And when she is contemplating the
house, she takes inventory of open doors and windows: “the hall door was open;
it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window on the
landing was open, for that she had opened herself. That windows should be open,
and doors shut — simple as it was, could none of them remember it?” (Woolf 31)
Mrs. Ramsay’s makes an impression on Lily as she “opened bedroom windows. She
shut doors” (Woolf 52). By maintaining open windows (and closed doors), Mrs.
Ramsay allows the inside and outside to mix, at least ethereally, erasing the
boundary of a closed window pane.
Works Cited
Deleuze,
Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
London: Athlone Press, 1986.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Mark Hussey, annot. and
intro. 1927: NY: Harcourt, 2005.
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