The Peripatetic Frame: Images of Walking in Film

169 Pages·2019·3.956 MB·English

by  Thomas Deane Tucker

The Peripatetic Frame
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The Peripatetic Frame
Images of Walking in Film
Thomas Deane Tucker
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial
and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more
information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress . com
© Thomas Deane Tucker, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by
Westchester Publishing Services, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP rec ord for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0929 2 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0930 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0931 5 (epub)
The right of Thomas Deane Tucker to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Framing Walking 1
1. First Steps 13
2. Tramping with Chaplin 30
3. The Pedestrian Camera 44
4. Gumshoes 64
5. Homing 81
6. Aimless Walks 98
Conclusion: Running Out of Frames 130
Bibliography 139
Filmography 149
Index 153
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Figures
I.1 Boulevard du Temple 10
1.1 Roundhay Garden 20
3.1 Satantango 58
3.2 Werckmeister Harmonies 61
3.3 The Turin Horse 62
6.1 Breathless 108
6.2 Cléo 116
6.3 Umberto D. 123
6.4 Umberto D. 123
6.5 Umberto D. 127
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Acknowledgements
This book would never have been written without the support of family,
friends and colleagues. I want to first thank my wife Katy, whose patience
reading countless drafts and encouraging words during many nights of
trepidation were beyond mea sure. I owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Smith,
who spent an inordinate amount of time and energy closely reading the final
draft and offering sound advice. Thank you to Dean Jim Margetts, Pro-
vost Charles Snare and President Randy Rhine of Chadron State College
for granting me a sabbatical leave to finish the proj ect. To the people of
Clifden, Ireland, I thank you for your endless hospitality in your wet and
wild setting, especially in your pubs and cafés where I was always welcome
to sit and write without ever feeling as if I had overstayed my welcome. I
want to recognise my editor at Edinburgh University Press, Richard Stra-
chan, for his understanding and patience in letting me extend deadlines I
was unable to meet. Fin ally, I want to thank my three dogs, Pearl, Jasper
and Allie for teaching me the real joys of g oing for a walk.
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Introduction: Framing Walking
In November 1974, film-m aker Werner Herzog learned that his mentor
German film scholar Lotte Eisner had suffered a massive stroke in Paris and
was at death’s door. In a g rand gesture worthy of any number of the enig-
matic characters who populate his films, Herzog immediately set off on foot
from Munich on a pilgrimage to Paris, intending to walk a ‘million steps in
rebellion against her death’. Burdened only with a new pair of boots, a
jacket, compass and duffel bag, he somewhat mystically believed that Eisner
would not die as long as he walked all the way to her doorstep. Herzog kept
a journal of his trek, publishing it four years l ater as Of Walking in Ice.
Reading Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice – organised in diary form around
succinct chapters for each day walked and narrated in short bursts of dream-
like, hallucinatory passages in which he portrays himself in often gloomy
surroundings – feels like watching a Herzog film screened in one’s mind.
Herzog recognises this himself, stating:
When you travel on foot it i sn’t a matter of covering a ctual territory, rather a ques-
tion of moving through your own inner landscapes. I wrote a diary of my walk to Lotte –
the story of a journey on foot – which is like a road movie that never lingers on
physical landscapes. (Cronin 2014: 281)
In her review of the book, Helen MacDonald called it a reco rd of the ‘wreck-
age of history and myth’, a description that could easily apply to Herzog’s
entire cinematic oeuvre. With each documented step, Herzog jars the reader
through an onslaught of ambulatory images and thoughts marching against
the conventional beat of the ‘rest of the world in rhyme’ as he navigates bliz-
zards, despair, stray dogs and wild forests in his ritual pilgrimage of hope.
Cross-c utting between moods of gut-w renching anguish and ecstatic delir-
ium, Herzog’s m ental road movie leaps from harrowing scenes like this one:
Wet, driving snow falls intensely in front, sometimes from the side as well, as I com-
pulsively lean into it, the snow covering me immediately, like a fir tree, on the side
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