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Romantic Ruins
“All men take secret delight in beholding ruins. This sentiment arises from the frailty of our nature, and a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the caducity of our own existence. We find moreover something consoling to our littleness in observing that whole nations, and men once so renowned, could not live beyond the span allotted to our own obscurity. Ruins, therefore, produce a highly moral effect amid the scenery of nature; and, when they are introduced into a picture, in vain does the eye attempt to stray to some other object; they soon attract it again, and rivet it upon themselves.”
Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity (1802)
Reinventing Ruins
Largely thanks to writers like Chateaubriand, the conception of images of ruined buildings, particularly of sacred spaces, took on a new inflection during the Romantic period. Where architectural ruins had always been understood to suggest disintegration and the passage of time, they were now also understood to suggest tragic grandeur by acting as a civilizational “memento mori,” a reminder of the ultimately transitory nature of all human constructs. For Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Novalis, and William Wordsworth (especially in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” 1798), the encounter with ruins facilitated a deep reflection upon the nature of history and also activated the imaginative and generative powers of memory.
The most important of French painters, Eugène Delacroix, built upon precisely these sorts of ideas when he argued that “a ruin, in fact every work of imagination of which portions are missing, must have a stronger effect on the mind in proportion to what our imaginations have to supply in order to gain an impression of the work” (9 May 1853 entry in his Journal [1]).
Cycles of History
In The Course of Empire (1835-1836), the artist Thomas Cole visualized these ideas in a series of five paintings that are rich with cinematic resonance. Cole was the founder of the American landscape tradition (the Hudson River School), but, like John Boorman, he was born in the United Kingdom and was deeply influenced by British painters such as John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. He met Turner during a return visit to the United Kingdom in 1829 and was inspired by Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, The dramatic shift in scale between the small figure and the ruined castle to the left, the protrusion of a tree inside what should be the sheltered space of the original edifice, and the juxtaposition of coarse, impressionistic brushwork and a precise delineation of light coming through clouds all reinforce the overall sense in Constable’s painting of human effort being undone by the overwhelming power of nature.
Cole elaborates upon the models of Constable and Turner, and introduces a sense of historical cyclicity that evokes both the Biblical Ecclesiastes (“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever”) and the not-incompatible idea of the phases of civilization elaborated by Giambattista Vico in The New Science (1725) [2]. The paintings were clearly conceived as a series, and Cole mapped out the original layout in this 1833 drawing.
Thomas Cole's Montage
In what Sergei Eisenstein would later have identified as a kind of proto-montage thinking, Cole connects the different paintings not only to each other, but also with the paintings they are grouped with (in the left, center, or right grouping). In this way, the smoke in painting four is made to echo the smoke in painting one; the reflections in paintings three and five comment upon each other, the pillar in painting five is in the same place as the leaves in painting one, and the viewer is encouraged to register slight variations in vantage point as much as shifts in time. The final painting is dominated by ruins and, as in Hadleigh Castle and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the reassertion of natural life.
This idea of an atavistic return to nature, of dilapidation as a vehicle for, is central to many Boorman films including Deliverance (1972), Excalibur (1981), and The Emerald Forest (1985). Earlier versions of Excalibur placed an even greater emphasis on the presence of Celtic ruins, which was also central to the climax of Roman Polanski's Thomas Hardy adaptation Tess (1979).
The Monastic Ruins at Glendalough
In his autobiographical film essay I Dreamt I Woke Up (1991), John Boorman set a key scene in the ruins of the Glendalough monastic city. First established by St. Kevin near the end of the sixth century, Glendalough is among the best-preserved and most-visited of all Celtic ruins.
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Film Music
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Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
