ABSTRACT

As Morrison mimics the process of fabrication of the Frankenstein's Creature by ‘stitching together’ footage of heterogeneous origins, this essay aims to produce a meta-discourse on this process by ‘stitching together’ fragments of two short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and notes on an exhibition curated about the concept of ‘bachelor machine’.

These texts displace ‘the monstrous’ toward issues of the circularity of the gaze, the question of who dreamt the dreamer, and the violent obsessions that mark ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’.

Morrison displaces the terrain from the filmic (metaphorical illustrations of a narrative) onto the pro-filmic (the conditions in which the footage was taken and film made), shifting the question of ‘the monstrous’ from the Creature to the cinematic apparatus itself.

KEYWORDS

bachelor machines, mise en abyme, off-screen space, orphan films

The phrase ‘spark of being’ comes from the Chapter 5 of Mary Shelley's novel, as Victor Frankenstein recounts his story to Captain Robert Walton, whose ship is trapped in the frozen Arctic sea. James Whale's 1931 Boris Karloff vehicle, however, is the version that comes immediately to mind. Renamed Henry, Frankenstein experiments with dead body parts and electricity, and mayhem comes not only from the grotesque shape of his creation, but from human trespass: his assistant Fritz had secured the brain of a criminal. The method used in the novel is more mysterious and no misstep takes place: ‘I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet’ (Shelley 2008, 26).

Unlike Whale, Morrison bookends his film with polar sequences, a faithful reflection of the novel's structure. The original narrative is referenced by intertitles separating the different ‘chapters’ (as in silent cinema). Yet, ‘there’s no visible murder, no mayhem […] just some Army footage [in which] they are dragging a corpse off’ (Morrison, 2010).

The Creature, mentioned four times in the titles, seems nowhere to be seen … or is he? Is he the lone sled driver glimpsed at a distance in the midst of a relentless ice field framed by two icebergs? Is he the caped figure standing in the last shot's non-descript landscape?