MICHELLE E. BLOOM

                    PYGMALIONESQUE DELUSIONS AND ILLUSIONS OF MOVEMENT:

                    ANIMATION FROM HOFFMANN TO TRUFFAUT

OVID'S MYTH OF PYGMALION provides a model that modern literary and cinematic versions of the myth revise. On the one hand, many nineteenth-century tales represent the desire for the animation of the inanimate in "gynomorphic" form, retaining the gender and metamorphosis of the Ovidian myth. However, as I show with reference to E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" (1816-17) and Villier's novel The Eve of the Future (1886), the "happily-ever-after" formula of the Pygmalion narrative in Book X of the Metamorphoses—a formula in which the gynomorphic statue comes to life and its creator marries her—no longer applies. Rather, in nineteenth-century narrative fiction (the novel and especially the short story), the Pygmalion myth fails as modern Pygmalion figures experience the "Pygmalionesque delusions" of this essay's title.

The "Illusions of Movement" of my title, which appear to be the semantic equivalent of "Pygmalionesque delusions," differ from those delusions because they evoke the medium of "moving pictures" or cinema. I demonstrate that cinema usurped the "Pygmalionesque space" previously dominated by literature by means of a chronological study of several films, beginning with Georges Méliès's turn-of-the-century silent short Ten Women in One Umbrella (1903), proceeding to Karl Freund's 1935 Hollywood horror film Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre in his American film debut, and culminating in François Truffaut's penultimate and most somber film, The Green Room, featuring Truffaut himself (1978).

I claim that cinema becomes the favored medium of the fantastic, dominating without monopolizing the twentieth-century's Pygmalionesque space. The phrase "Pygmalionesque space" is a deliberately vague term, because I want to suggest not only that cinema took over the role of representing Pygmalionesque desire—even a Pygmalionesqu desire gone awry—but also that the very medium embodies the longstanding human desire for the animation of the inanimate. As anticipated in fin-de-siècle literature and as seen on the screen since the early silents, even when the Pygmalion paradigm fails in film, the medium itself succeeds in creating the illusion of movement through its signifiers, techniques, and metaphors.