Film 1900 : Technology, Perception, Culture 9780861969166, 0861969162

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Front Matter Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.1 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture Edited by Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier

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Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture

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Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture Edited by Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier

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iv

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780 86196 696 7 (Paperback)

Published by John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, Ebook Kingdom edition ISBN: 9780-86196-916-6 United e-mail: [email protected]; web site: www.johnlibbey.com Direct orders (UK and Europe): [email protected]

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Table of Contents Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.2 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Contents Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Triangulating a Turn: Film 1900 as Technology, Perception and Culture Annemone Ligensa

1

Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship Thomas Elsaesser

9

Viewing Change, Changing Views: The ‘History of Vision’-Debate Frank Kessler

23

The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse Ben Singer

37

Mind, the Gap: The Discovery of Physiological Time Henning Schmidgen

53

‘Is Everything Relative?’: Cinema and the Revolution of Knowledge Around 1900 Harro Segeberg

67

The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer: Hugo Münsterberg’s Theories of Perception, Psychotechnics and Cinema Jörg Schweinitz

77

Chapter 7

Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany Scott Curtis 87

Chapter 8

The Scene of the Crime: Psychiatric Discourses on the Film Audience in Early Twentieth Century Germany Andreas Killen

Chapter 9

Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Programme as a ‘Modern’ Experience Andrea Haller

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99

113

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

‘Under the Sign of the Cinematograph’: Urban Mobility and Cinema Location in Wilhelmine Berlin Pelle Snickars

125

Perceptual Environments for Films: The Development of Cinema in Germany, 1895–1914 Joseph Garncarz

141

‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’: The Changing Composition of Film Programmes in Britain, 1908–1914 Ian Christie and John Sedgwick

151

The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement Tom Gunning

165

‘Dashing Down Upon the Audience’: Notes on the Genesis of Filmic Perception Klaus Kreimeier

175

German Tonbilder of the 1900s: Advanced Technology and National Brand Martin Loiperdinger

187

Sculpting With Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art In Motion’ Michael Wedel

201

‘A Cinematograph of Feminine Thought’: The Dangerous Age, Cinema and Modern Women Annemone Ligensa

225

Cinema as a Mode(l) of Perception: Dorothy Richardson’s Novels and Essays Nicola Glaubitz

237

Biographies of the Authors

249

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Introduction Triangulating a Turn: Film 1900 as Technology, Perception and Culture Chapter Author(s): Annemone Ligensa Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.3 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Introduction

Triangulating a Turn: Film 1900 as Technology, Perception and Culture Triangulating a Turn

Annemone Ligensa ur cultural ‘matrix’ today is not only digital, it is also still filmic, in the sense that it is significantly comprised of technologically (re)produced moving images. Film did not die in the digital age; rather, it is noticed less per se, precisely because it is ubiquitous: it is now playing not only in cinemas, or even on television, but on airplanes, advertising screens in public spaces, notebook computers, mobile phones – and thus on our minds more than ever before. It has become so pervasive, that it is not only part of everyday reality, it may be difficult to image life without it. Around 1900, by contrast, media of any kind were still a rare experience for many, as an account from Max Hölz’ (1889–1933) autobiography exemplifies:

O

Up until I was fourteen years old, I had taken part in only three children’s amusements: the first was a school trip to the ruins of a monastery, the second was a puppet theatre show … and the third … was a visit to a panopticon in the nearby town during a local festival.1

Early cinema scholars have described the ‘train effect’ (i.e. reports of spectators’ fear of being hit by the locomotive depicted in Lumière’s Arrival of a Train) as the ‘founding myth’ (Martin Loiperdinger) of the new medium in 1895:2 even though it is not literally true (neither was the illusion complete, due to the black and white as well as silent images, nor did spectators lack knowledge that what they were seeing was a technological reproduction), it does encapsulate the cultural ‘impact’ of the novel experience of seeing an artificial, but lifelike representation of movement. Contemporaries were already aware that this effect would wear off; but some also saw that film had the potential to become a less ‘direct’, but all the more lasting and profound cultural force. Just as film, in many respects, had its roots far back in the nineteenth century (e.g. individual technological elements, exhibition practices, aesthetic forms), it took many years for the technological innovation to become a culturally dominant new medium. Hence, ‘1900’ is not intended to point to the developments of a single year or to claim that a cultural phenomenon emerged in a mere moment, but to signify a significant turn in media history, which has continuing effects to this day. Furthermore, since film is a part of modernisation, i.e. it is shaped by it, represents it and perhaps even promoted it, it seems apt to connect the

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

emergence of film with the ambivalent connotations that regularly arise with new centuries in general and the specific cultural concerns around 1900 in particular.3 To structure the exploration of this media turn, technology, perception and culture can be usefully employed as a conceptual ‘triangulation’. As a technological medium, film from its inception was shaped by the restrictions as well as potentials of industrialisation and commercialisation. Even before film became a large-scale industry, film producers adopted many of the strategies of modern capitalism (e.g. standardisation, transnational operation, advertising).4 However, it is important to recognise how these developments depended on and were also shaped by culture, especially the acceptance of audiences.5 Examples of this are the integration of the new medium into existing cultural traditions (e.g. variety shows, fairs), the adoption of forms familiar from other media (e.g. theatre, illustrated press) as well as processes of differentiation for various audience segments (e.g. age groups, local audiences). The well-known debate about the so-called ‘modernity thesis’ (David Bordwell)6 foregrounds, among other concerns, the question of whether audience preferences were pre-existing and relatively unchanging (i.e. film became such a success because it best catered to them), or emerged together with modernity, even with modern media themselves (i.e. the specific conditions of modern life brought about new leisure activities, modern advertising induced new desires etc.). That contemporaries were debating such questions as much as we are today is indication both of their importance as well as the difficulty to answer them conclusively. But within a larger framework, more often than not, differing positions reveal themselves to be complements to each other, rather than contradictions. In various ways, ‘perception’ is a central and mediating concept between the other two. Conceptualising ‘film as a form of perception’ is a powerful, yet potentially problematic metaphor that requires some explanation and differentiation. The short-circuiting of what is represented with the process of its reception, to the point of conflating subject and object and focussing only on the ‘percept’, tends to understate the potential for difference, creativity and even resistance on the production as well as the reception side (which need to be studied empirically). Furthermore, the physiological connotations of the term may tempt one to overstate the malleability of the experience of media technology on a psycho-physical level.7 A cultural history of the emergence of film is an ideal ground to rethink such issues. For instance, Jonathan Crary charts the history of the theory of perception, including its changes around 1900;8 but as Michael Chanan reminds us, the invention of film, which successfully (re)creates moving objects for our ‘perceptual apparatus’, was possible under a theory of motion perception that we now know is wrong (and even today, we still do not fully understand how it works).9 One might even argue that science was inspired more by practical discoveries of new technologies than vice versa. Furthermore, the (entertainment) audience neither needs nor necessarily wants explanation of theory or technology to experience media. Hence, the relationship between epistemes, technologies and experiences is

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Introduction Triangulating a Turn

3

indirect and complex. Bearing this in mind, ‘perception’ is nonetheless useful as a concept to capture the ‘deep impact’ that media have as sensory experience, both on an individual level as well as on a societal one. Transferring the concept to a ‘social body’ (i.e. as ‘public perception’) provides a fruitful connection to the theory of the ‘cultural public sphere’,10 in which film undoubtedly brought about a profound transformation (e.g. wide diffusion, access and participation of social strata, convergence of high and popular art). The contributions to this volume each address one or more of these three aspects – technology, perception, culture – and their interrelations, in different configurations and degrees of emphasis. Hence, even when the authors argue on the basis of individual examples, they are not primarily concerned with early filmmakers and films, but with the cultural significance of film as a new medium per se. In order to further the understanding of the conditions for and reverberations of film’s emergence around 1900, some of the studies look far back into the nineteenth century, and some even forwards to ours. The contributions not only stem from a range of disciplines, but many work in an energetic spirit of transdisciplinarity. Several times, two studies are in direct dialogue with each other on the basis of a shared topic, but sometimes aspects only touched upon in one study are elaborated in others, creating a complex map of interconnections. The noticeable interest in German examples and theory perhaps requires some explanation. As is well-known, many of the oft-quoted, contemporary theorists of modernity in general and of film in particular were German (e.g. Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer). It is perhaps less well-known what the reasons for this may be. Germany experienced a particularly dynamic process of modernisation precisely at the time when film emerged, and reactions to both were not only unusually prolific, but particularly critical. Hence, the German discourse is a rich and fascinating source, but we should be wary of reading it as general experience. In this regard, both the examples from other countries that some of the studies provide in this context and the analyses of the cultural background of the German examples is of great theoretical value.11 In his ‘archaeologies of interactivity’, Thomas Elsaesser discusses the trope of the naïve spectator, which repeatedly appears throughout media history in different guises (e.g. rube, zapper, video game player), not simply with new media technologies, but, according to Elsaesser, versions of the ‘rube double-take’ on attention, interaction and bodily presence tend to turn up whenever there is transference of, or struggle over, symbolic power between one medium or media-technology and another.

This also shows that, despite the indisputable importance of cultural conditions, media developments have a certain logic of their own, and different media directly and self-referentially react to each other. Frank Kessler’s contribution provides a thorough and lucid account of the idea that ‘vision has a history’, as well as suggestions how to explore it further, based on the concepts of ‘dispositif’ (Jean-Jacques Aumont)12 and ‘cultural series’ (Michèle Lagny)13. He argues that this notion should not

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

entail the assumption of a ‘unified scopic regime’, because various aesthetics and reactions to them may co-exist simultaneously (across media and even within a single medium). Ben Singer takes up and expands the ‘modernity thesis’-debate more generally. He explores the paradoxicality of early cinema, i.e. the fact that contemporary film theories and films expressed ambivalent and contradictory currents, rather than simply siding with modernisation. He proposes the term ‘ambimodern’ to point to antimodernity as an essential element of the modern. Henning Schmidgen’s challenging study explains the basis of Henri Bergson’s film theory in nineteenth-century physiology, connected in turn to phenomena of modernisation (e.g. standardisation of time, communication technologies). Via Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, Schmidgen presents ‘a history not only again highlighting the fact that cinema is sometimes experimental, but also showing that physiological laboratory experiments are essentially cinematographic’. Harro Segeberg’s discussion of the aesthetics of the ‘cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault)14 in the context of contemporary epistemic revolutions, such as Albert Einstein’s relativity theory and the ‘psychological physics’ of Ernst Mach, provides a nuanced exploration of the relationships between epistemes, aesthetics and new media. In Segeberg’s words: the term ‘emergence’ … is taken to imply that in media history, not only manifest technological and economic conditions need consideration, but also cultural configurations, which consist of autonomous, irreducible elements (e.g. epistemes and aesthetics). Such elements cannot be derived or interconnected on the principle of strict causality, which is precisely why they are ‘creative’, but they develop in complex co-evolution, rather than being merely contingent.

Jörg Schweinitz’ analysis of the first major academic film theory, Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay, highlights the tensions between modern and traditional values that cinema provoked, as well as providing an important example of the concerns of German theory, even in the case of a German psychologist who emigrated to the USA and worked as a ‘psychotechnician’ for modern capitalism. Despite the fact that Münsterberg was willing to take the new medium more seriously than many German critics, he based his optimism on envisioning film as a further example and fulfilment of idealist aesthetics. (We might remind ourselves that Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of German physiological psychology, also explicitly identified himself with Kantianism.) Scott Curtis does not explicitly address it, but (Neo-)Kantianism also seems to be the shared epistemic, aesthetic and ethical background of the medical applications of cinematography and the discourses on the potentially harmful physical effects of cinema on audiences that he describes as a significant part of the German Kinodebatte (‘debate on cinema’). Curtis shows that ‘by understanding what German doctors considered to be the improper mode of spectatorship, we come to understand what they thought was a proper way of viewing images’. Andreas Killen explores a cultural phenomenon that Curtis also men-

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Introduction Triangulating a Turn

5

tions in his context, and that Stefan Andriopolous has introduced into film theory: hypnosis.15 By analysing several examples of films that deal with hypnosis as well as censorship cases against the contemporary background of expert as well as public discourses, Killen reflects Kracauer in a new light: For all his commitment to taking mass culture on its own terms, Kracauer’s analysis remains embedded within an older, deeply conservative set of discourses about film and its relation to its audience, according to which the cinematic image, by virtue of its unheimliche Macht [‘tremendous/uncanny power’], established a virtually demonic influence over the viewer’s psyche’.

Andrea Haller and Pelle Snickars analyse different sides of the same coin, the connection between cinema and urbanisation. While Snickars examines the material web of public transportation and communication, i.e. the relationship between modern means of transportation and cinema location in Berlin, Haller explores the web of discourses on big city life and the early cinema programme, revealing their similarities. Snickars argues that for Berlin audiences, the easy accessibility of cinemas through public transportation as well as the convenience of the continuous programme were the significant characteristics of the cinema experience: ‘Hence, attending the cinema was effortless entertainment: Kintopps temptingly positioned themselves at busy street corners, willing to satisfy one’s visual pleasure at almost any time’. Haller concludes that Cinema critics adopted concepts and arguments that had already been developed by cultural theorists, such as Simmel, in other contexts. The concern about the effects of cinema and especially its programming practices was fuelled by the same uncertainties and worries that accompanied modernisation in general.

Hence, despite many factual connections between film and urban life, e.g. that permanent cinemas first emerged in big cities and adapted themselves to their urban environment, interpreting the new medium as essentially sharing the characteristics of modern urbanisation, especially its negative aspects, was itself a particular perception. This, among other aspects, is further substantiated by Joseph Garncarz’ overview of the development of cinema as a media institution in Germany, e.g. by the fact that the short-film programme, adapted from the live programme of urban variety theatres, worked equally well with the rural audiences of travelling film shows. In Europe, before permanent cinemas appeared, apart from the ‘optische Berichterstattung’ (‘visual reports’) in high-class variety theatres, film was mainly shown in itinerant cinemas on festivals, markets and fairs, and the diffusion of this exhibition form has thus far been underestimated. Hence, the new media technology was integrated into diverse cultural contexts and established traditions, before becoming the basis of a separate and distinct media institution. Ian Christie and John Sedgwick’s study on the so-called ‘transitional era’ in Britain (i.e. the turn towards the longer narrative film that was connected with permanent cinemas, especially those for middle-class audiences)16 surprisingly reveals, among other things, that in contrast to the USA and Germany, this development does not seem to have entailed ‘nationalisation’. Neither did British producers immediately embrace the

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

trend towards the longer film, nor did exhibitors mainly select US films (as they did later). This deserves further investigation, for which cultural comparison should prove valuable. Tom Gunning’s and Klaus Kreimeier’s essays aim to recapture the essence of what was new about film: ‘the attraction of motion’. Early cinema not only recorded movement as a spectacle in itself, but many subjects and genres of early cinema, such as phantom rides, serpentine dances, physical comedies etc., highlighted and played with it. Gunning regards this fascination with technologically (re)produced motion as having been deeply ambivalent, fraught with danger and sexually charged energy. Read with Benjamin’s film theory, such virtual thrills served as a cultural reaction formation against the shocks of modernity. According to Gunning, the phantom ride provokes not only a crisis within the spectator’s relation to space and landscape, but a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself, its temporal protentions and retentions, its constant reach into the distance, balanced by its sense of passing by and leaving behind. If the phantom ride is ‘a mysterious and impressive allegory’ one might describe it as an allegory of spatial perception itself.

Martin Loiperdinger’s contribution analyses Tonbilder, i.e. early German musical films with synchonised sound – a little-known phenomenon, despite recent interest in the sound of early ‘silent’ cinema.17 Loiperdinger explores technological, economic and cultural characteristics to reveal the surprising degree of technological sophistication and cultural specificity of this genre. Despite their success with audiences, Tonbilder experienced only a short boom phase, followed by rapid decline, for which Loiperdinger identifies economic reasons. Similarly, Michael Wedel deals with a perceptual and technological phenomenon that one does not immediately associate with (early) film: stereoscopy. Wedel shows that stereoscopy influenced the aesthetics of early as well as German expressionist cinema, which aimed to achieve virtual ‘relief effects’. According to Wedel, the exploration of stereoscopy across media reveals that in a particular historical situation – characterised by competing technologies, arts and forms of entertainment, as well as specific creative environments and cultural pressures – stylistic paradigms take shape in variable degrees, depending on current aesthetic debates and generic horizons, but also on personal dispositions and cross-media concerns.

The collection concludes with two studies on gendered perception and the perception of gender, respectively. Nicola Glaubitz finds in the film theory of the British modernist Dorothy Richardson a contemporary precedent to Jennifer M. Bean’s contention that early cinema was ‘dominated by exhibitionism rather than voyeurism, by surprise rather than suspense, and by spectacle rather than by story’.18 However, Richardson simultaneously complicates this view, by also imbuing her theory with a more contemplative, literary mode of perception. My own study, dealing with the reception of the Danish bestseller The Dangerous Age and its filmic adaptations, aims to highlight the sensationalism of early cinema well into the era of the longer narrative film and the culturally specific reactions to it.

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Introduction Triangulating a Turn

7

Notes 1.

Max Hölz, Vom ‘Weißen Kreuz’ zur roten Fahne: Jugend-, Kampf- und Zuchthauserlebnisse (Berlin: Malik 1929), 22 (my translation).

2.

See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image 4, 1 (Spring 2004): 89–113.

3.

On ‘1900’ as a significant turn in media history, apart from the work of the University of Siegen research centre ‘Medienumbrüche’, see e.g. Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800, 1900, 4th, rev. ed. (München: Fink, 2003), Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Thomas Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (München: edition text und kritik, 2002) and (specifically on the USA) Carol A Stabile (ed), Turning the Century: Essays In Media and Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). For a cultural analysis of ‘turns of centuries’, see Arndt Brendecke, Die Jahrhundertwenden: eine Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung und Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999).

4.

See e.g. Deac Rossell, Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).

5.

The role of audiences, users etc. is stressed e.g. in Brian Winston’s media theory, see his Media Technology and Society (London: Routledge, 1998).

6.

See e.g. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Tom Gunning, ‘Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows’, in Murray Pomerance (ed), Cinema and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 297–315. See also Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

7.

For an excellent discussion of these issues, see e.g. Noël Carroll, ‘Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, 1 (2001): 11–17.

8.

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

9.

See Michael Chanan, The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema In Britain (London: Routledge, 1980); Oliver Braddick, ‘The Many Faces of Motion Perception’, in Richard L. Gregory (ed), The Artful Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 205–231; Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision’, Journal of the University Film Association 30, 4 (Fall 1978): 3–8; Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited’, Journal of Film and Video 45, 1 (Spring 1993): 3–12; Dale Purves, Joseph A. Paydarfar and Timothy Andrews, ‘The Wagon Wheel Illusion In Movies and Reality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 93 (April 1996): 3693–3697; Robert M. Steinman, Zygmunt Pizlo and Filip J. Pizlo, ‘Phi is not beta, and why Wertheimer’s discovery launched the Gestalt revolution’, Vision Research 40 (2000): 2257–2264.

10.

See Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920)/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren, 2008).

11.

On Germany’s cultural Sonderweg, see e.g. Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing On Film In Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

12.

See Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: Nathan, 1990).

13.

Michèle Lagny, ‘Film History: or History Expropriated’, Film History 6, 1 (1994): 26–44.

14.

See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

15.

See Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Spellbound In Darkness: Hypnosis As an Allegory of Early Cinema’, The Germanic Review, 77 (2002): 102–117 and Besessene Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften und die Erfindung des Kinos (Munchen: Fink, 2000).

16.

See Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

17.

See e.g. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

18.

Jennifer M. Bean, ‘Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema’, in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader In Early Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002): 1–27, quote p. 6.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship Chapter Author(s): Thomas Elsaesser Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.4 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 1

Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship Archaeologi es of Interactivi ty

Thomas Elsaesser t is difficult not to discuss contemporary cinema in terms of its multiple – and for some, mortal – crises: loss of indexicality, due to the transition from photographic to digitally generated images; death of the auteur cinema, even in Europe, as a creative force, overtaken once more by Hollywood’s Bat-, Spider- and Iron-Men, with their sequels and prequels; decline of the cinema as an art-form, its medium-specificity diluted by the hybridisation of a film’s textual autonomy in the DVD bonus package; appropriation of the cinema’s history and cannibalisation of its cultural memory through television and the internet serving up teasers, trailers and other pre-cooked forms of compilation and compression. Finally, some of the most persistent anxieties arising from these crises of cinema centre on spectatorship and narrative, figured as a loss of attention and the decay of storytelling. Filmmaking, according to this argument, is threatened by the impatient, hyperactive spectator, and trapped by the contradiction between ‘game logic’ and ‘narrative logic’. Of course, these symptoms of decline can be turned around and advertised as signs of continuity, transformation and renewal: digital technologies have vastly extended a filmmaker’s creative tools; special effects have been the lifeblood and ‘attractions’ of cinema since its beginning; platforms like the video recorder or the DVD player have created new markets not only for the mainstream; the bonus package encourages reflexivity, provides historical information, technical background and can be put to good pedagogical use, while television and the internet open up distribution, circulation and choice unmatched by site-specific cinemas. As to the active-interactive spectator, his or her heightened involvement in the story or immersion in the spectacle has been the goal of the popular arts for centuries. In what follows, I shall take a different line of defence, arguing that it is possible to map certain variables around spectatorship and narrative (which include some, though by no means all of the phenomena just listed) and trace their persistence as a constant throughout the history of cinema, thus providing a possible ‘archaeology’ for both the impatient viewer and the interactive user. It means shifting somewhat the ground and focus of our

I

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

theories, while extending the conceptual framework deployed by the studies of spectatorship in film theory and cultural studies towards anthropology. As so often, such a shift is best implemented by a ‘return’ to early cinema: reviewing – and, if necessary, revising – our interpretations of the cinema’s initial modes of bodily engagement and sensory immersion. If successful, it should permit a fresh approach to the issue whether there is a future for the cinema after narrative, thereby also illuminating another perennial question: why and how did the cinema turn to narrative in the first place?

Modernity and the attention economy An obvious starting point for such an archaeology would be to re-examine the evidence we have of how spectators construed or experienced cinema around 1900, how they made sense of the different kinds of movement and of the new kinds of surface agitation within the fabric of the everyday. Did the apparitions on the screen take them out of their lives into the ‘kingdom of shadows’, or were they inclined to integrate or embed moving images into the urban experience, as its natural extension and site of heightened sensation? Such studies have been undertaken under the headings of modernity and visuality, of shock and protective shield, conceptually held together by the idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’, typical for an intense and immersive but also intermittent and impatient spectatorial habitus. Fast-forward to 2000: can one locate a similarly contradictory dynamic (or ‘dialectic’) in contemporary modes of spectatorship, and how might one describe their polarities? In other words, what are the dynamics of attention and interaction commensurate with our contemporary media environment, and what kinds of bodily presence and sensory agency do they entail or stage? A second shift is required: one that opens up the somatic as well as the perceptual field, taking us away from the cinema as a physical site of optical projection, though hopefully only in order to bring us back to the cinema as a space of mental, affective and sensory extension. Firstly, then, let us look at ‘attention’, that is, the selective perception of a particular stimulus (sustained by means of concentration and the exclusion of interfering sensedata).1 In the contemporary knowledge society and information economy, attention has arguably risen to the status of a universal currency, while also becoming this society’s scarcest resource. As such, it paradoxically emerges as both a problem (for child psychologists, cultural critics and advertisers) and a solution (for audiences and spectators), in that the audio-visual media constantly solicit our attention and spare no effort or expense to retain it. Attention is the problem for educators, under the name of attention deficit disorder, and for cultural critics who lament the general amnesia in our culture, blaming television or video games. But attention is the solution when considered as a response to the dilemmas of overload and over-exposure, because as a form of selectivity, as an ability to shift or switch, it allows for a mode of perception – and by extension, spectatorship – that refuses to be absorbed or drawn in, that resists contemplation or analysis in depth, resolutely staying on the surface and remaining alert. It is the reed rather than the rooted tree that weathers the storm, and it is the cork, bobbing on the water, that survives a flood.

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What if the attention economy demanded choices being made between being ‘reed’ or ‘cork’, rather than, as used to be, between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ spectatorship, or between ‘identification’, ‘distraction’ and ‘distanciation’? In such a case, the much-maligned figure of the television zapper, along with the equally despised first-person shooter of the video game might yet become the unlikely heroes of these new ‘flexible’ modes of perception: witting or unwitting vanguard figures, parrying the doublebinds of interactivity, as bodies engage with images, and images require different motor-skills or hand-eye coordination in order to be ‘grasped’. At once target and survivor, the zapper wields the remote control as much to ward off the ever-increasing army of programmes, as s/he selects favourites or chooses amongst them. But the zapper is also the canny user, the disabused and uncommitted sceptic, who surveys all, brushes or grazes the media world with the lightest of touches, before deciding who or what to engage with, and for how long. Similarly, the first person shooter, armed with joystick, console or mouse, learns to be both defensive and aggressive, to anticipate the ambush and prepare for the next proactive, pre-emptive move, all in order to gain a foothold on the terrain, and then to stay the course. It may seem that these two figures – the zapper and the gamer – are typical phenomena of the last 30-odd years, products of television and the Internet and thus symptomatic of precisely those crises of the cinema just mentioned, especially the decay of narrative and the corresponding decadence of spectatorship.2 Yet one can also recognize in this configuration a much older cultural trope, that of ephemerality, chance and the fugitive moment, first diagnosed by Charles Baudelaire around the emergence of photography, with its confusing and hyper-stimulating l’émeute du detail (‘riot of detail’), given a heroic-ironic embodiment in the urban rag-picker, the drunk and the dandy, but also – even more emblematic for our purposes – typified in the ‘man of the crowd’, from the story by Edgar Allen Poe. The significance of this tale largely comes to us through Walter Benjamin, interpreting Baudelaire, who translated Poe. The man of the crowd’s modernity is manifest in his anonymity as much as in his ‘state of heightened sensitivity’: As Poe describes him, in ‘one of those happy moods – which are so precisely the converse of ennui-moods – of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses greatly its everyday condition’,3 he can stand for a new somaticsensory state of immersive bodily attention. Yet such clarity of alertness, coupled with introspection, also acts like a shield or mirror: for much of the time, Poe’s protagonist is not immersed in the ebb and flow, but glued to his window as if to a screen, watching the crowd over a whole day and night cycle, both switching focus and varying speed. It is as if Poe’s narrative anticipates or emulates some typically ‘cinematic’ techniques of montage and editing, as well as ‘televisual’ ones, of fast-forward and action-replay, and thus the protagonist becomes not only the well-known flâneur of the metropolis in Benjamin’s interpretation, but already the zapping attention-flâneur of media-immersion and mediasaturation.

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

In other words, the trope of the ‘fugitive moment’, of ‘sensory overload’, of ‘heightened sensitivity’ and selective surface attention inevitably brings us back to Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s theories of the ‘culture of distraction’, which Benjamin contrasts to the reception mode of ‘auratic’ works of art, and Kracauer to the reading mode of the realist novel. If Versenkung (‘sinking into a text’) is the gathered, focused concentration that leads to immersion, distraction is the mode of perception engendered by the technical media, particularly the cinema. At this point, one needs to be clearer what is meant by ‘cinema’. Benjamin keeps intact the essential tensions just outlined between distraction and focussed immersion, which I argue are typical for the contemporary mode of selective attention and bodily participation. Yet he refers to a cinema that knows about the problematic status of narrative, as in the films of Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov, neither of whom assumes storytelling to be the necessary destiny of cinema, as it reaches ‘maturity’ as an art form. Likewise Benjamin, for whom the turn to narrative is more like a compromise formation or even a reactive rearguard action, a sign of the cinema mimicking the bourgeois novel. As is well-known, in the debate between ‘realists’ and ‘formalists’, Benjamin favoured the montage cinema of the Soviets, but not exclusively for the political reasons of outlining an aesthetics appropriate to the Socialist revolution. The mode of ‘distracted viewing’ and the ‘montage of attraction’ advocated in Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’-essay4 signify both more and less than artistic experiment and revolutionary practice. They can be understood as a complex counter-stance to another kind of revolution. For with the emergence and rapid dissemination of mechanically reproduced sounds and images at the turn of the twentieth century, there began a data-flow previously unknown in human history, whose main material supports were the cinema, photography, radio and the gramophone. Time and the moment could now be stored, without the intervention of any kind of symbolic notation, such as a musical score, verbal language or a chronometer. But the recording and transmission of sights and sounds, thanks to the camera and the phonograph, also meant the proliferation of acoustic and optical data in quantities, and with a degree of physiological presence as well as signal precision (‘fidelity’) hitherto unimaginable. The impact can be measured negatively: widely resented as a threat to the established arts and their institutions, the cinema also occasioned medical warning about eye strain and attentiondeficit, besides the better-known moral panics about sexuality, drink and other ‘depravities’ or ‘degeneracies’. But mechanical reproduction also gave rise to what has been called ‘haunted media’: extremely popular para- and pataphysical experiments that accompanied the discovery of electricity, electro-acoustics, electromagnetic fields and radio waves. Jeffrey Sconce (who coined the term) has documented some of the rich folklore and fantasy-literature accompanying the introduction into everyday life of the telephone, the telegraph and the wireless.5 Friedrich Kittler has shown how all data-flows prior to the phono- and cinematograph had to be cut up, symbolized and pass through the ‘gate’ of the signifier: alphabet, grammatology, writing … [so that the technical media] launched a two-pronged attack on …

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the book [and its monopoly] on the storage of serial data. The gramophone [for instance] empties out worlds by bypassing their imaginary aspect (signifieds) for their real aspects (the physiology of the voice).6

Against this background, Benjamin’s theories and Eisenstein’s practice can be seen as the complex aesthetic-philosophical interventions that they are: both mimetic of the riot of detail unleashed by audio-visual technology and anti-mimetic in that they try to recapture or re-instate the regulatory powers of language and grammar, of form and syntax for these seemingly undifferentiated, unframed, horizon-less magnitudes of data. A materialist media theory (around repetition, seriality and assembly) as well as the idea of film language (around montage and interval) answer to Benjamin’s dual concerns, namely to identify the cinema as the art-form appropriate to technical modernity and to elaborate a theory of spectatorship that combines the mode of distraction with that of immersion. At another, philosophical stage, the cinema exposes the contradictions between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (two kinds of ‘experience’: integrated and continuous vs. shock-like and intermittent), thereby becoming, in Benjamin’s words, modernity’s optical unconscious.7 It is in this context that the question of narrative becomes decisive: its therapeutic function – to contain conflicts by representing actions and motives as Manichean either/or choices – at once disguises and highlights the breach in the fabric of experience that it is meant to heal. In terms of the embodied spectator as modernity’s subject, Benjamin argues against narrative, because its ‘linearised’ focalisation of attention and its causal chains of temporal succession put the body under the tyrannical dominance of the eye, while repressing this body’s other faculties and senses.8 Instead, filmmakers should use the ‘dynamite of the millisecond’ to blast open the artificial continuum of narrative, to inoculate the spectator against the very hierarchy that vision imposes on the sensible world. Forty years on, the same questions would be debated around ‘interpellation’, ‘voyeurism’ and ‘subject-positioning’ as the ideological effects of narrative in psychoanalytically inspired film theory. In both Benjamin and Screen Theory, the cinema appears as an apparatus of integration and stabilisation, disciplining the spectator via pleasure rather than coercion. Yet only Benjamin – emphasizing the somatic, traumatizing aspects, where bodily motor-skills are the perpetual ‘return of the repressed’ and thus the default mode of cinema’s mode of perception – is fully alert to the monitoring, and, above all, self-monitoring type of reflexivity inherent in the cinema. Anticipating Michel Foucault’s surveillance paradigm, Benjamin, perhaps more than Jacques Lacan, is the theorist to take along when undertaking an archaeology of the zapper and the gamer, who is training, besides the eyes and vision, also fingers, touch and hands, making them fit for new steering, monitoring and self-monitoring tasks. Such an archaeology would inevitably lead us back to early cinema and the origins of narrative in the dilemmas of spectatorship. One of the singular achievements of New Film History and early cinema studies is surely the systematic deconstruction of the notion that narrative was either natural or pre-ordained. The cinema adopted story-telling formats only gradually, and for reasons that were social (attracting a

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

middle-class audience), economic (charging higher admission) and ideological-institutional (shifting power from exhibitors to producers), rather than merely technical or aesthetic, suggesting that longer narratives did indeed have a containing, controlling and ‘disciplining’ function.9 But as a large cultural form, present in very different media and across the arts, narrative is not only a widely disseminated mode of address and intersubjectivity (i.e. ‘narration’, ‘narrator’, ‘point of view’, ‘tense’). As an almost universal cultural framework for ‘meaning-making’, narrative is also an efficient and tested principle of data storage and symbolic data processing. Having proved remarkably well-suited for processing the data produced by human perception and the brain, one might say, how well did narrative perform with mechanically generated sounds and images? From about 1912 onwards, films were deploying narrative’s formal resources ever more successfully as a way of coping with the levels of contingency and ‘meaninglessness’ in the data generated by the new technical media. But this sorting and coding of sensory data in order to make them fit for human comprehension and consumption came at a cost. Narrative radically reduces the quantity and complexity of visual and aural signals, and ‘matching’ the (‘raw’) data with the (already culturally coded) story material meant imposing hierarchies as well as producing a ‘surplus’ and repressing it – precisely what Benjamin meant by the ‘optical unconscious’. Or, to paraphrase Kittler, narrative would be the cultural ‘gate’ of the signifier, once more reminding us why film theory is periodically so concerned to establish a ‘grammar’ or filmic ‘language’ – the ‘alternative’ to narrative, but within the same anthropological-ideological perspective. In such a view, narrative cinema represents a historically specific solution to a problem, namely how to manage (audio-)visual data in the first century of technical media. The ‘realism’ of narrative fiction, as one encounters it in the nineteenth century novel and as it was partly taken over in twentieth century mainstream cinema, represents an optimised form of information transmission: the very high density of data storage (in the photographic image) is ‘scaled down’ (or compressed) by linear narratives with individualised agents, while the reduction is, in turn, compensated by the universality and ease of access, represented by stories with a beginning, middle and ending (no special skills or mediators are required), taken from the cultural repertoire of European literature (and, rarely, also other cultures). As a compromise formation and the outcome of several kinds of struggle, narrative cinema has, in its hegemonic, universalising claims, always been contested (e.g. by the avant-garde, by European auteur-cinema), as well as historicised and polemically polarised by early cinema studies (e.g. Noël Burch, Tom Gunning, Ken Jacobs), so that non-narrative forms are now assumed to be typical for films up to 1907, but also – as the ‘cinema of attractions’ – an autonomous, alternative mode, present throughout the history of cinema and currently once more in the ascendant.10

The rube films: towards a theory of embedded attention Returning to spectatorship, then, I want to propose as emblematic for this ‘early cinema’ not the rowdy masses in smoke-filled rooms, nor young

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couples enjoying brief moments of unchaste behaviour, but the phenomenon that Tom Gunning, Stephen Bottomore and Yuri Tsivian have discussed under the heading of ‘the (in)credulous spectator’,11 when alluding to the so-called ‘train effect’, that is, the widely reported and often repeated stories of people fleeing in panic from the onrushing train upon the screen, or women pulling up their skirts so as not to get wet when watching films with titles like Rough Sea At Dover (1895) or Panoramic View of Niagara Falls In Winter (1899). Were these reports ‘for real’, or were they simply ways of advertising the sensationalist effects of the cinematograph, exaggerating its potential for embodied perception? Did the make-belief of fright and anxiety give extra cover to erotic foreplay and licentiousness, or what exactly was going on? My suggestion is to accept all of the above explanations, but to take them as indices of a particular form of reflexivity in the mode of ‘embodiment’ and ‘interactivity’. It seems to me that spectatorship right from the start was a) reflexive in relation to consciousness (‘I am watching a film’), b) reflexive in relation to the spatio-temporal dimension (‘I am here but transported elsewhere’) and c) reflexive in relation to embodiment and situatedness (‘I am watching with my eyes, but my other senses are also present, as is my capacity for taking action’). Possible proof for these assertions of reflexivity is a re-reading of one particular type of film practice associated with early cinema and repeatedly revived in subsequent decades. The (in)credulous spectator that I have in mind is most fully embodied in that often-ridiculed figure of the country bumpkin, who makes a sporadic appearance throughout film history, so much so that one can speak of a genre, usually referred to as the ‘rube film’. The rube is almost as old as the cinema itself, emerging at the turn of the century, first in Great Britain and the USA, but similar films were also produced in other countries.12 In the best best-known example of the genre, Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show, made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in 1902, the simpleton spectator leaves his box, climbs onto the stage and ‘enters the story’ – by attempting to grasp the images on the screen, by reacting to them physically, by joining the characters on the screen, in order to interfere with an ongoing action, or by looking behind the image to discover what is hidden or kept out of sight. Characteristically enough, Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show is a remake of a British prototype, Robert Paul’s The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901). Part of the Edison catalogue entry reads: Here we present a side-splitter. Uncle Josh occupies a box at a vaudeville theatre, and a moving picture show is going on. First there appears upon the screen a dancer. Uncle Josh jumps to the stage and endeavors to make love to her, but she flits away, and immediately there appears upon the screen the picture of an express train running at sixty miles an hour. Uncle Josh here becomes panic stricken and fearing to be struck by the train, makes a dash for his box. He is no sooner seated than a country couple appears upon the screen at a well. Before they pump the pail full of water they indulge in a love-making scene. Uncle Josh evidently thinks he recognizes his own daughter, and jumping again upon the stage he removes his coat and prepares to chastise the lover, and grabbing the moving picture screen he hauls it down, and to his great surprise finds a Kinetoscope operator in the rear. The operator is made furious

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE by Uncle Josh interrupting his show, and grappling with him they roll over and over upon the stage in an exciting encounter.13

Insofar as Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show was a remake of Robert Paul’s film, the differences are equally telling. Porter, for instance, substituted for the films-within-a-film his own company’s films, including Edison’s Parisian Dance (copyrighted 15 January 1897) and Black Diamond Express (copyrighted 27 April 1897), thus taking reflexivity from the realm of illusionism and trickery into self-reflexivity, i.e. product placement and self-promotion. These ‘Uncle Josh’ or rube films pose a question. Are they intended, as is often claimed, to be didactic parables, teaching a rural or immigrant audience how not to behave in the cinema, by putting up to ridicule someone like themselves?14 Yet – similar to the ‘train effect’ – was there ever such an audience, or such a moment of ‘infancy’ and simplicity in the history of the movies, where this ontological confusion with regards to objects and persons might have existed? If the ‘train effect’ and Uncle Josh belong to the folklore and urban mythology that early cinema generated about itself, then the second level of self-reference, citing the first, would be that they promote a form of spectatorship where the spectator watches, reacts to and interacts with a motion picture while remaining seated and still, retaining all signs of affect and agency bottled up within him/herself. This, then, would raise a further question: do these films articulate a meta-level of self-reference in order to ‘discipline’ their audience – not by showing them how not to behave, i.e. by way of a negative example, by shaming and proscription, but rather by a more subtle process of internalised control? Do the rube films not discipline their audience by allowing them to enjoy their own superior form of spectatorship, even if that superiority is achieved at the price of self-censorship and self-restraint? The audience laughs at Uncle Josh, who is kept at a distance and ridiculed, and thereby it can flatter itself with a self-image of urban sophistication. The punishment meted out by the projectionist at the end is both externalized as the reverse side of cinematic pleasure (watch out: ‘behind’ the screen, there is the figure of the ‘master’) and internalised as self-control (watch out: in the cinema – as in the modern world of urban display and self-display – the rule is ‘you may look, but you may not touch’).15 This gives an additional dimension to the genre: the cinema would collude with, and be part of the civilisation process as conceived by Norbert Elias (or Pierre Bourdieu),16 according to whom the shift of bodily orientation from touch (a proximity sense) to sight (a sense that regulates distance and proximity) constitutes a quantum leap in human evolution. What, however, typifies the cinema’s particular ‘modernity’ would be that it re-enacts, but also exacerbates this quantum leap, by ‘performing’ the kind of cognitive-sensory double-bind, associated in Marxist theory with commodity fetishism. For instance, the object on display in the shop window also says to the consumer ‘look, but don’t touch’, but it resolves the conflict by inviting the flâneur or gawker to enter: a gesture that relieves the eye and promises control through the sensory plenitude of touch and caress (‘the eye handing over to the hand’, you might say) with the act of purchase (i.e.

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‘possession’). In the cinema, by contrast, the same scene of desire and discipline is staged as a kind of ‘traumatic drama’ of touch and sight, with both senses at once over-stimulated and censored, seduced and chastised, obsessively and systematically tied to the kinds of delays and deferrals we associate with the workings of narrative.17 The theorist of this promise of proximity enshrined in the cinema and also elegiac allegorist of its traumatic deferral is once more Benjamin. One recalls the famous passage from the ‘Artwork’-essay in which he outlines the cultural-political significance of tactile proximity and haptic perception as it takes shape around the moving image and its contact with the masses: The desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of everyday reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.18

What is hinted at here through the act of substitution – likeness – and mechanical duplication – reproduction – is the ontological gap that opens up in the trade-off between the sense of proximity and the one of distanceand-proximity, and also the irreversible nature of the deferral that pushes haptic perception into the realm of the optical unconscious and visuality into the realm of phantasmagoric possession.19 The rube, in other words, like the zapper or the first-person shooter, at first glance appears to be naively ‘trapped’ in the superabundance of data he [sic] encounters in the realm of the sound-image, but on reflection, he also ‘performs’ this entrapment, either for the benefit of another viewer/spectator, or as the reflexively doubled self-discipline, in which he is both attacking and defending, ‘getting lost’ on the surface, in order not to get caught, pushing buttons, in order not to get pulled into the spiral of the ‘Maelstrom’ – another Poe-reference, this one dear to Marshall McLuhan as an allegory of mankind extending itself via its media and at the same time encircling itself. The rube film, then, in my extended definition, would refer to a genre or practice of self-reflexive or auto-referential cinema that inserts the body (of the protagonist/spectator) as both blockage and enabler, as source of breakdown and triumph, at the interface of active and passive, manipulator and manipulated. In this sense, the rube film returns us to some fundamentals of the cinema’s mode of spectatorship, concerning the questions of attention and agency, fixed site and mobile view, temporal delay and instant reaction, while also bringing into play the philosophical conundrum of how an image ‘enters’ a body and a body ‘enters’ an image. It represents, if you like, a counter-ontology to both the ‘cinema as window on the world’ and the ‘cinema as mirror to the self’, each of which have held sway for about half of the last 50 years of film studies.

The (extra-)diegetic spaces of early cinema We can return to the question of narrative from an anthropological perspective, poised between embodying a set of intuitively graspable sorting and ordering principles of contingent data and acting as a ‘defensive shield’ or ‘protective film’ to manage this data’s overload. By replicating the autobio-

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graphical mental schema we all carry in our heads (since one tends to regard one’s life as a linear trajectory, inflected by goals and moving in an irreversibly forward direction), narrative in the cinema does double duty: it acknowledges contingency, excess and overload, but also articulates time, space and agency in such a way as to assure consistency of self, represented as an ongoing process rather than a fixed identity. A term for this time, space and agency configuration of narrative in both cinema and literature is ‘diegesis’, first used by Etienne Souriau and subsequently made famous in literary studies by Gérard Genette.20 Souriau’s definition seems very simple: ‘everything which concerns the film, insofar as it represents something’, but also: ‘the reality of the fiction’. More commonly, diegesis refers to the time-space continuum represented (but also merely implied or supposed) by the film: in other words, the ‘world’ of the film. Even more commonly, diegesis is invoked negatively: when referring to something as ‘extra-diegetic’, one usually means a space deemed to be present, but represented neither on-screen nor implied as off-screen (e.g. a piece of music heard, but whose origins are not locatable in the narrative, or another absent-present sound-source, such as a voiceover commentary).21 The point about early cinema, in relation to narrative, performance, commentary and spectatorship – in contrast to ‘classical cinema’ – is that it did not practice this clear distinction between diegetic and extra-diegetic. Given the multiple kinds of possible interrelationship between screen space and audience space (e.g. pianola music or an orchestra performing in the auditorium, the presence of a lecturer, frontal staging, actors directly addressing the audience), a film’s diegesis was far less stable and predetermined, being more like a score that needed an event to realise itself, with each ‘film performance’ dynamically establishing a diegesis by the interplay between what occurs on screen and in the auditorium.22 I have elsewhere argued that the changing relations between screen space and auditorium space constitute one of early cinema’s most crucial variables and a key determinant of the cinema’s adoption of narrative, which suggests that only when considered together, in their mutual interdependence, can we begin to understand how spectatorship functioned in this unique, but also uniquely overlapping diegetic space.23 In my argument, it is the rube – sometimes within the film, sometimes from outside – who personifies spectatorship at this delicate, but also turbulent juncture, where diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds, the imaginary space of the action and the physical space of the audience, are not yet rigorously separated nor ‘disciplined’ by a newly empowered eye at the expense of hand and touch. If film scholars now tend to speak of ‘haptic vision’, a ‘tactile cinema’ or ‘the skin of the film’ – a perceptual-sensory configuration that, after Annette Michelson, Antonia Lant, Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, Angela della Vacche and many others, seems set to become a new paradigm of spectatorship for Anglo-American film studies – it might be worth looking for the ghost of a ‘rube’ haunting any smooth transition or clean break from the ocular-centric theories of classical cinema to a body-based aesthetic of ‘early’ and ‘late’ cinema. The rube’s ambiguous and disruptive mode of reflexivity stands guard, as it were, when we begin to rewrite all of film history and

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spectatorship around the body as total perceptual surface, in order to accommodate the digital. That the highlighting of texture and touch opens up genealogies that bypass the photographic mode (based on luminosity through transparency) is evident: haptic vision, for instance, can help reinstate video as the true predecessor of the digital image (whose luminosity is achieved through refraction, opacity and saturation) and thus avoid the deadlock and blockages currently surrounding accounts of the cinema that insist on projection and transparency as that which must define cinema, or declare ‘indexicality’ to be the main dividing line between photographic and post-photographic (also now often called ‘post-film’) cinema. However, in the rush to leave behind the ocular-centric paradigm, the rube reminds us that one of the enduring appeals of the cinema since its beginnings was the separation of eye from body, allowing the eye to travel, transgress, explore and penetrate spaces otherwise too far away or too close, too small or too big, too dangerous or too socially out of bounds.

The return of the rube I want to end by hazarding a hypothesis, namely that versions of the ‘rube double-take’ on attention, interaction and bodily presence tend to turn up whenever there is transference of, or struggle over, symbolic power between one medium or media-technology and another. One instance I am currently exploring concerns classical narrative’s transition to – or perhaps more accurately: Hollywood filmmakers’ and screenwriters’ testing and toying with – interactive narrative and game-logic. This, too, has produced its share of rubes, usually coded in stories that either double a conventional diegetic world with a parallel universe of surveillance, which at crucial points tilts the more familiar one out of kilter, or introduce an alternative world in the form of time travel, underscoring how both worlds are inextricably interdependent of each other. A good example of the former is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), while Richard Kelly’s cult film Donnie Darko (2001) could be a case of the latter. A film that combines both the surveillance paradigm and the necessity of time travel is Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006), a blockbuster full of chases and explosions, but readable also as meta-cinema: ‘Edwin Porter’s Uncle Josh meets Jean Cocteau’s Orphee in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo’. I realise that this brief account of the rube figure as spectatorial delegate does not provide adequate proof that early cinema, contemporary Hollywood science-fiction thrillers and the interactive narratives of video games share sufficient pertinent traits to support as wide-ranging a thesis as the one I am proposing. Nonetheless, my suggestion is that across the two lines of inquiry – reassessing the diegetic space of early cinema and re-activating the (in)credulous spectator embodied in the ‘rube’ phenomenon (also originating in early cinema) – one might arrive at a possible understanding of how the audiovisual media themselves figure media change and the transfers of cultural capital, complementing, as it were, ‘from within’ our own scholarly analyses ‘from without’.24 More specifically, my claim would be that the cinema has periodically re-calibrated its spectator by allegorical figures such as the rube (who can be comic or tragic or both) and narratives that play with

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ontological confusion and information overload. At the same time, the persistence of the ‘rube’ and his many different incarnations across the history of the cinema at crucial turning points suggests that attention, interaction and reflexivity based on bodily self-presence, performed failure and cognitive or ontological ‘category mistakes’ might prove to be as salient for interactive narrative and spectatorship in the new century as typically ‘modernist’ forms of reflexivity and self-reference, such as mise en abyme, mirroring, doubling or alienation/distanciation were for the last. Just like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, became the patron saint of the ‘active reader’, from Laurence Sterne to Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust to Thomas Pynchon, so the rube of early cinema, tearing down the screen while trying to rescue the world, might yet preside over the ‘interactive spectator’, from early cinema to present-day video games, via Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard, Buster Keaton and Steven Spielberg, but also Edwin S. Porter and Tony Scott.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

See also: ‘Everyone knows what attention is’, wrote William James in his Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890). ‘It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. ... It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.’ Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention (14 September 2008). The director Gianni Amelio once bitterly complained: ‘Young people today want a product that is not to be consumed individually, but rather collectively. They go to the cinema in groups of 20 to 25 and need it as an accomplice to their behaviour, a cinema with regular gags, for example, that allow you to slap the person beside you on the shoulder. This sort of movie-going functions much like being in a bar or discotheque: you go to the cinema, not primarily in order to see a film, but to enjoy yourself and each other, preferably at the expense of the film.’ Jörg Hermann, ‘“Wir gehen auf den Tod des Kinos zu”: Ein Gespräch mit Gianni Amelio’, in Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Filmjournalisten/Hamburger Filmbüro (eds), Neue Medien contra Filmkultur? (Berlin: Spiess, 1987), 28–37. Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1850), available online at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/POE/manofcro.html (2 October 2008). Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 10th ed., 1977), 7–44; English translation ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 211–244. For a history of electricity in popular culture see Jeff Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy To Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 246. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978). The term ‘linearised’ was introduced into film studies by Noël Burch, ‘Passion, pursuite: la linearization’, Communications 38 (1983): 30–50. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991). See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). See Tom Gunning: ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’, Art & Text 34 (1989): 31–45; Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Coming of the Cinema’, History Today 46, 3 (1996): 14–20; Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema In Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. by Alan Bodger (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 134–155.

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Chapter 1 Archaeologies of Interactivity 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

21

For an extensive discussion of rube films in American cinema, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 25–30. Edison catalogue, 1902, quoted from http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0000414/plotsummary (1 October 2008). See Isabelle Morissette, ‘Reflexivity In Spectatorship: The Didactic Nature of Early Silent Films’, Offscreen (31 July 2002), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/reflexivity.html (2 October 2008). For an inverse reading of the relation between looking and touching, see Wanda Strauven, ‘Touch, Don’t Look’, in Alice Autelitano et al (eds), I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema (Udine: Forum, 2005), 283–291. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). I have written elsewhere about two scenes from 1924 films (Fritz Lang, Die Nibelungen [Nibelungen] and Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr.) that exemplify these dilemmas, by precisely citing the rube film genre. In both cases, the film spectator’s implicit contract with (barred) haptic palpability of the moving image is made explicit. See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’, in Paolo Bertetto and Sergio Toffetti (eds), Incontro ai fantasmi – il cinema espressionista (Rome: Centro Sperimentale 2008), 87–98. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 223. The appropriate cinematic illustration of Benjamin is the famous ‘rube’ scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers, 1963). Godard harks back to the turn of the century, but also looks forward to ‘interactivity’, because his film is about the category mistake of thinking that the civilisational ‘quantum leap’ from hand to eye might be reversible. See Wanda Strauven, ‘Re-Disciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier’, in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 125–133. Etienne Souriau, ‘La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie’, Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2,7–8 (1951): 231–240; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse , trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 [1972]). In some cases what appears to be extra-diegetic will reveal itself as ‘diegetic’ after all, as in films by Orson Welles (voice over commentary) and Fritz Lang (music). An attempt to re-think ‘diegesis’ in relation to both early cinema and television can be found in Noël Burch, ‘Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits’ in Screen 23, 2 (July/August 1982): 16–33. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Once More Narrative’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), 153–155. I am referring, among others, to Jay David Bolter and Richard Gruisin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000) and – with its idea of the cinema as the digital media’s cultural interface – Lev Manovich, ‘An Archaeology of a Computer Screen’, Kunstforum International (1995), available online at http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_nature.html (2 October 2008).

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Viewing Change, Changing Views: The ‘History of Vision’-Debate Chapter Author(s): Frank Kessler Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.5 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 2

Viewing Change, Changing Views: The ‘History of Vision’-Debate

Viewing Change, Changing Views

Frank Kessler I n the late 1940s, in an essay for Revue Internationale de Filmologie,1 the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte van den Berck replied to critical comments regarding his theses on the ‘impression of reality’ in the cinema, which had been brought forward by the French art historian Pierre Francastel in a previous issue of the journal.2 Michotte concluded his rectification with a remark that betrayed some exasperation on his part:

I

All this shows once again how difficult it can be for people of different backgrounds, practicing different disciplines, to comprehend the questions posed in the framework of their own science and the significance attached to the solutions of those problems.3

Michotte’s complaints about Francastel’s misreading of his ideas were undoubtedly justified, but, obviously, the major difference between the two authors’ approaches had deeper roots. The point of the argument is not just a misunderstanding caused by Francastel’s drawing hasty conclusions from a few passages in Michotte’s article that, it seems, he did not fully grasp. While Michotte is interested in elucidating the differences between the perception of filmic images and everyday perception at a psycho-physiological level, in order to then ask the question how, in spite of those differences, the viewer still experiences an ‘impression of reality’, Francastel argues in a more general way that cultural factors need to be taken into account in order to fully, and correctly, understand how films are perceived. On the one hand, Francastel is opposed to approaches that take the filmic image to be a simple reproduction of reality – but Michotte, in fact, would hardly have disagreed with him in this regard – and, on the other hand, he considers representations to be historically and culturally determined. Movement, he states, is not perceived as an essence by direct intuition, but by distinguishing a series of ‘signs revealing more complex realities. One or more thresholds of intellectual perception must exist that differ from the threshold of optical perception.’4 Hence, with regard to filmic space, Francastel proclaims:

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE The point of departure for all concrete speculation on filmic space is in the recognition of the psychological and social character of perspective. It is not a golden rule or a fixed law corresponding to a substantive law of nature: it is a function of the intellect, one of the frames which confers an order to the sensations in the mind.5

He goes even further, extending his claim beyond images to the way the world is viewed: Each epoch, each society, each age of humanity, each profession, each human being has its attention attracted by a particular aspect of the exterior world; each has its space, its perspective.6

Hence Francastel, opposing an approach to the visual as signification to one that privileges physiology, takes a ‘culturalist’ view of perception, while Michotte concentrates on psychological mechanisms that he implicitly takes to be transcultural and transhistorical. And even if, as one can infer from Michotte’s reaction, this is rather a dialogue des sourds (‘deaf men’s dialogue’), the argument opposing, in a certain sense, the art historian and the psychologist inaugurates, at least in the field of film studies, a debate that, as we will see, is still underway – intermittently, but nonetheless persistently, and in its latest version with regard to early cinema. Theorists arguing in favour of an approach regarding ‘perception’ as culturally and/or historically determined, albeit with very different definitions and from different theoretical and epistemological backgrounds are, for instance, Jean-Louis Comolli, in a series of articles published under the general title ‘Technique et idéologie’ in Cahiers du cinema, but also the anthropologists Sol Worth and John Adair in their study on Navajo filmmaking, Through Navajo Eyes, or Paul Virilio in his Guerre et cinéma.7

II A recent chapter in this debate was opened by David Bordwell, with his attack on what he calls the ‘history of vision’-approach in his History of Film Style, continued and renewed in Figures Traced in Light.8 But now the positions are reversed: whereas Francastel, Comolli, Virilio and even Worth implicitly or explicitly criticised approaches that did not take into account the crucial importance of culture, history or ideology with regard to perception, Bordwell criticises Tom Gunning and others for linking stylistic features of (early) cinema too hastily to aspects they identify as the specific conditions of vision that characterise modernity, such as urbanisation, mechanisation, industrialisation, acceleration and fragmentation. Bordwell concludes: ‘In sum, we do not have good reasons to believe that particular changes in film style can be traced to a new way of seeing produced by modernity’.9 For Bordwell, in other words, the so-called ‘modernity thesis’ (a term he coined himself) is but another variant of ‘Grand Theory’, a top-down model seriously lacking explanatory force and, ultimately, a form of faulty reasoning: The appeal of the modernity thesis seems to spring from two sources. First, epochal accounts in general exercise a commonsense power; they promise ultimate explanations. As a causal force, modernity looks more significant than the camera lens’s optical pyramid. Second, the modernity thesis relies on two

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basic strategies of informal cognition: picking out prototypes (unusually vivid instances) and reasoning by association (the dominant approach to interpreting literary texts). Writers in this tradition have typically started by asserting the power of modernity and then illustrated their claim with striking examples. No proponents have sampled a wide range of early films to find out how many are shocking.10

However, in spite of these clear-cut conclusions, it is in fact much less clear what exactly is at stake in this discussion, and so it may be useful to undertake a reconstruction of the various levels at which Bordwell’s criticism is aimed. The questions Bordwell is asking concern (i) the way in which the phrase ‘changes in perception’ is to be understood, (ii) the explanatory range of the ‘modernity thesis’ and (iii) its adequacy, or productivity, with regard to the analysis of stylistic phenomena. (i) Bordwell’s starting point is a famous quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), first published in 1936, in which Benjamin states, that over long periods in history, ‘the mode of human perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence’, in this context referring to Alois Riegl’s art-historical studies on the late Roman art industry.11 Obviously, as Bordwell also acknowledges, this cannot mean that cultural changes affect the biological sense apparatus and the psycho-physiology of perception as such, and so he asks: ‘should we not rather speak of changes in habits and skills, of cognitively monitored ways of noticing or contextualizing information available in new surroundings?’12 For Bordwell, however, this would be ‘a big concession’13 to be made by advocates of a history-of-vision approach, but this in fact does come much closer to the type of argument Benjamin proposes. In Benjamin’s view, historical factors do play a role in the way human perception ‘is organised’ (again a term that is indeed ambiguous, yet not necessarily referring to the biological level of organisation; in fact, the German text reads ‘organises itself’, which rather evokes the idea of an adaptation to a cultural situation), but by no means an exclusive one.14 At another, somewhat more hidden point in his essay, namely in a footnote, he refers more specifically to ‘tiefgreifende Veränderungen des Apperzeptionsapparates’ (‘profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus’),15 thus pointing explicitly at a different and more complex level of perception. Apperception, in the Leibnizian sense, is defined as ‘perceptio melior, cum attentione et memoria coniuncta’ (‘higher perception, connected to attention and memory’),16 and it seems that this comes closer to what Benjamin has in mind than the biological and psycho-physiological level of perception.17 Benjamin, in other words, talks about perception as a historically specific experience, and not about mankind’s biological constitution. But here Bordwell objects that talking about culturally acquired perceptual habits and skills does not necessitate presupposing the existence of a single ‘mode of perception’. He refers to Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience In Fifteenth Century Italy as an exemplary study, which takes into account historically specific habits and skills, without positing the existence of a specific Renaissance way of

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seeing.18 This, however, somehow reduces the gap that, at first sight, so radically seemed to separate Bordwell’s position from the history-of-vision approach. The question now is, in how far the expression ‘mode of perception’ is conceptualised as an all-encompassing, monolithic ‘scopic regime’,19 or rather as an attempt to bring together various and heterogeneous facets of the visual experiences that were brought about by the modernisation processes in the nineteenth century. (ii) What then is the explanatory range of the modernity thesis, Bordwell subsequently asks, and he points to the fact that Benjamin’s essay, written in the 1930s, mainly refers to editing as the central device that makes cinema a medium responding directly to the modern mode of perception, while the films of the early period ‘rely little upon editing, and thousands of the films that purportedly exemplify modern vision consist only of one shot’.20 This, it seems, poses a number of problems. Firstly, Benjamin’s remarks refer to a type of film belonging to a historically different period than the ones to which the modernity thesis refers. Secondly, editing as a device can be used in a great variety of ways, not all of which produce the abruptness and fragmentation that is taken to be characteristic of modern urban life. Thirdly, the overall process in the course of which the cinema of attraction is by and large replaced by the cinema of narrative integration as the dominant product of the industry (with the exception of, among others, Soviet montage cinema, which indeed appears to be the main point of reference for Benjamin), clearly is at odds with the idea that it is foremost the cinema of attractions which corresponds to a modern mode of perception – especially when it is supposed to ‘have overhauled humans’ experiential equipment’.21 These arguments do indeed point to a number of fundamental problems one would encounter if the so-called modernity thesis (a) really implied the idea of a fundamental and irrevocable modification of our biological equipment; if (b) it were used as a guiding principle to explain and account for changes in the history of film and, more specifically, film style; if (c) Benjamin’s essay were read as a theoretical model presupposing a mere cause-and-effect relationship between film and the modern urban environment; and if (d) the essay were to be taken simply at face value, without taking into account its specific place in Benjamin’s philosophical project, and hence taken out of its own historical context. Obviously, one can never be quite certain in how far theorists arguing for an approach that takes into account the changing perceptual environment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century do stay clear of such problematic assertions, but overall, it seems to me, scholars mostly have tried to prudently avoid any kind of oversimplification or dogmatism in this respect. Bordwell, however, is surely justified in pointing out these dangers and demanding from those who disagree with him to reflect upon the methodological and theoretical basis on which they build their argument. (iii) Finally, Bordwell raises the question in how far the history-of-vision approach has anything to say about the history of film style. Here the

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discussion becomes somewhat confusing. Bordwell’s conclusion that the explanatory force of the so-called modernity thesis with regard to film style seems to be rather unpromising22 is countered by Gunning, by declaring that ‘no one has claimed that modernity supplies the total explanation for film style’.23 To this, Bordwell retorts that in Gunning’s account, Griffith’s crosscutting in rescue scenes is ‘explained by appeal to broad social and economic forces characteristic of modernity’.24 In reply, Gunning affirms that he in fact had shown that there was a complex combination of factors, all of which played their part in the stylistic transformations taking place around 1909, but that, on the other hand, ‘this is not to say that modernity cannot be related to different styles and their success with audiences’.25 In a way, the debate ends up turning in circles, because the ‘modernity thesis’ appears to be the construction of an ultimately untenable position, while those who are attacked for adhering to it, refuse to defend it. So instead of going further into a discussion which basically concerns the weight – or rather: the relative weight – that is attributed to the experience of modernity as a contextual factor in the process of stylistic change in cinema, one could, once again, point to the obvious danger of oversimplification, but one could also just turn the question around and ask: is it really possible to entirely exclude the changes in everyday experience brought about by urban modernity, when looking at early cinema as an emerging medium of the late nineteenth century?

III Linking this debate back to the Michotte-Francastel discussion and other attempts to look at cinema from a ‘culturalist’ point of view, that is from a point of view that presupposes the existence of a variety of ‘ways of seeing’ that are culturally and historically dependent (or, to put it in a somewhat more nuanced way: that take into account historically specific perceptual habits and skills), a number of problems arise, which can be addressed in a series of caveats. (i) It is important to be clear about the level at which such culturally or historically determined perceptual effects are supposed to occur. The expression ‘perceptual change’ is extremely vague and thus there is the danger that it may function as a convenient – an all too convenient – explanation, and hence become part of a rhetorical strategy that, in the end, has a tendency to veil more than it reveals. (ii) The notion of culturally and historically determined ‘ways of seeing’ refers, generally, to a complex conglomerate of factors ranging from discursive constructions of the visual to a broad field of experiential phenomena not all of which are related to vision in the strict sense of the term.26 The heterogeneity of elements that tend to be evoked makes it often difficult to estimate in what way they contribute to an explanation of the issue at hand. (iii) The exact relationship between the contextual factors – culture, ideology, language – (which in fact are rather seen as ‘background’ factors than

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as contextual ones) and the filmic manifestations on which they are supposed to shed light – representational strategies, stylistic features, thematic choices – is notoriously difficult to establish if one wants to avoid oversimplification. (iv) Finally – and this is a point upon which Bordwell does not even touch –, there is the vexed issue to what precisely the term ‘modernity’ refers.27 Charles Baudelaire’s famous remarks on the flâneur and the urban crowd, probably written in 1859 and published in 1863, are separated from Benjamin’s essay by over 70 years, with Georg Simmel’s equally often quoted reflections on ‘Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’) from 1903 situated in between.28 Obviously, these three authors refer to different experiences when talking about modernity, something that becomes quite clear, for instance, when one looks at the kind of artistic practice they allude to as modern. For Baudelaire, the ‘painter of modern life’ is Constantin Guys, and Simmel sees Auguste Rodin as the emblematic modern artist, while Benjamin evokes Dadaism and Surrealism. To make matters even more complicated, Henri Meschonnic has shown that within Baudelaire’s text itself there are different, even contradictory, conceptualisations of the modern.29 Accordingly, Raymond Williams comes to a rather critical conclusion: Thus the retention of such categories as ‘modern’ and ‘Modernism’ to describe aspects of the art and thought of an undifferentiated twentieth-century world is now at best anachronistic, at worst archaic.30

All in all, it seems, looking at cinema in the context of ‘modernity’ poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems that are not easy to solve. Obviously, the methodological choices that inevitably have to be made depend on the kinds of questions one wants to ask. The important thing, in any event, is to make them explicit in order to be able to counter objections of the kind put forward by Bordwell. In his extraordinarily rich discussion of the different facets of the image with regard to its perception, apperception, reception, form and aesthetics, Jacques Aumont uses the concept of dispositif as the instance that regulates the relation between the viewer and the image in a given symbolic, and thus also social, cultural and historical, context.31 This approach, it seems to me, can indeed be very productive, and I have tried to adopt it, albeit in a slightly different way, in order to conceptualise the ‘cinema of attractions’ from the perspective of historical pragmatics.32 As for the specific problems that the ‘modernity thesis’ poses, things might become less complicated if one reversed the perspective. Instead of asking how the experience of modern (urban, mechanised, industrialised, fragmented etc.) life has impacted on cinema and, conversely, in what ways cinema affected the visual habits of its viewers, it might be easier to explore the various ways in which cinema taps into such experiences. This, in my view, is what most authors working on such questions have actually done. However, as Bordwell’s objections show, this may not have been stated explicitly enough to avoid misunderstandings. What would be gained by such a change of perspective? In the first

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instance, it entails that the weight of any kind of explanatory claim is lifted. Looking at the way in which films relate to aspects of modern life does not mean that the latter have the power to determine the shape of the former.33 In becoming a form of popular entertainment, early cinema had to find ways to attract audiences – being an attraction, and presenting attractions definitely offered a possibility to do so. This, I think, is more than a tautology or a truism. In order to successfully establish itself, early cinema needed, among other things, to relate to its audiences’ experiences and demands; and it needed to do so also in order to be able to compete with other kinds of ‘visual delights’. So early filmmakers exploited film’s astonishing capacities to ‘remediate’34 stage acts as well as panoramic views, magicians’ tricks as well as wax work scenes, instant photography’s accurate depictions as well as the exoticism of colonial exhibitions or the excitement of fairground thrill rides, while turning all these into a specific form of spectacular (re)presentations. The social and cultural developments brought about by modernity offered new ways of providing mass entertainment, and cinema tapped into them, just as other popular media of the period did. Cinema, in other words, simply had to be modern in order to stay in business. These are questions that scholars such as Vanessa Schwartz, Lauren Rabinovitz, Rae Beth Gordon and many others, including, of course, Tom Gunning and Ben Singer, have explored in many fascinating studies.35 Secondly, on the methodological level, the change of perspective allows the construction of various ‘series’ of documents and to look at the way they intersect, without having to establish a hierarchy among them and without using them as direct empirical evidence. As Michèle Lagny, from whom I borrow the term ‘series’, observes: In fact, ‘series’ exist simply because we are asking preliminary questions of a group of comparable documents; yet they can describe with convincing precision and insight only some aspects of a social phenomenon. … The structure and the global evolution of a phenomenon can be interpreted only if we compare the observed aspects with other aspects designed through other ‘series’, yet its articulation remains a random factor.36

Keeping this in mind, we shall need to carefully evaluate what kinds of conclusions can be drawn when looking at correspondences and differences between such ‘series’. This might help us reduce the danger of overstating the case we are trying to make.

IV In order to illustrate my point, I propose to look at a specific group of films, which are often seen to represent an almost emblematic aspect of modern life, namely the urban street scene. Studies linking cinema and the experience of big city street life frequently draw upon literary sources, the most famous of which are Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) and Baudelaire’s poems – especially in the reading proposed by Benjamin37 –, but also on philosophical and sociological reflections such as those presented by Simmel, as well as many other contemporary sources, such as reports by travellers, journalists etc. Particularly relevant, of course, are

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contemporary texts that themselves directly and explicitly make a connection between modernisation, big city life and cinema. To quote just one example: Then there is the most important characteristic of the cinema: its absolute modernity. … The peculiarly vibrating atmosphere of our time and the nervous, fast-paced, abbreviating existence of modern man is suddenly taken out of the dance and change of time and experiences a moment of eternisation. Existence depicted is existence transfigured. The transfiguration of the flow of the present into the sphere of reverie and illusion impresses us so strongly, that only when our existence passes before us in a play we come to believe that we understand it.38

These written documents constitute a ‘series’, an extraordinarily rich one, indeed, in which the perceptual aspects of the urban experience are particularly highlighted. Torn between fascination and anxiety, the discursive constructions of urban street life provide a background against which cinema as a medium, but also particular films, have been read, often backed by socio-historical data. This, however, resulted, in many cases, in more or less homogenising readings, downplaying the tensions within the series, and not always taking into account the diversity of representational strategies that can be found not only in films, but also in other media. Looking at representations of urban street life in paintings, photographs or films and considering them as different documentary ‘series’, one can easily observe similarities that create links between them, but also dissimilar features that separate them. There are aspects specific to the respective medium, which allow us to establish continuities within each of the ‘series’, but also lines cutting across them and producing units at a different level. All this makes it difficult to claim the existence of a unified scopic regime, but it does provide reasons to take into account the historically specific visual and sensory environment that surrounded cinema as an emerging medium. Thus, for instance, it is possible to distinguish a number of viewpoints adopted by painters as well as photographers and cinematographers: the bird’s eye view, photographed from an actual window or painted from a real or imagined one, the observational position at a street corner, the immersion in the flow of urban movement etc. There are virtual and actual panorama views in all three media, but also, as a cinematographic specificity, the view taken from a vehicle in motion. All this asks, of course, for a more systematic study of representational strategies, the effects they produce and the way in which they refer to aspects of the modern urban experience. However, it is clear that, at least for photographers and cinematographers, choosing a certain point of view means setting up their camera at one place rather than another, and it is therefore deliberate, but it may simply be dictated by practical considerations or the conditions under which the photographing or filming takes place. As I have argued elsewhere with regard to early cinematographic street views,39 there is also a pragmatic dimension to these images: they may concentrate on characteristic sites and thus emulate the tourist’s gaze, but also on the crowd and the traffic in the streets, they may focus on the typical

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as well as on the topical, on the exotic as well as on the familiar (especially the last aspect will depend on the exhibition context in which they appear). Furthermore, when we are dealing with moving images, they may foreground the continuous and regular flow of movement or, by contrast, disruptive change; they can aim to convey the impression of an accidental observation and try to avoid the curiosity of on-lookers, or, by contrast, as is the case with many travelling showmen, actively invite reactions from the passers-by, e.g. in order to lure them to their screenings.40 In order to understand the street scene in turn-of-the-century films, we thus need to take into account a variety of representational conventions, a range of thematic options, as well as a number of different pragmatic functions. While these can be regarded as rooted in specific aspects of modern visual culture, they cannot (and need not) be reduced to a unified mode of vision. Undoubtedly, we could often identify instances of the fleeting, ephemeral, fragmented and accidental character of the modern visual experience, as many scholars have, but in limiting ourselves to this dimension, we would neglect the variety of strategies, functions and modes of address these films can have. For instance, as Martin Loiperdinger has shown in the case of various Lumière films,41 the seemingly ‘accidental’ view is quite often the result of rather elaborate strategies in which the opérateurs engaged. The extraordinary immersion into the urban environment that many Lumière cameramen have sought to convey depended on choices regarding camera position and angle. Hence, the corresponding views should be understood as the results of production processes that were sometimes highly complex, rather than as mere registrations of a profilmic modern environment spontaneously captured by the cinematographic lens. To just briefly discuss one example: the Lumière view Berlin – Potsdamer Platz (1896, catalogue number 220). It could be taken as a more or less typical instance of a film depicting the continuous flow of vehicles and pedestrians that characterise the metropolitan cityscape, whereas the Potsdamer Platz is not shown as a recognisable architectural ensemble. The dense urban traffic, however, does not look chaotic, but appears to circulate in a complexly organised fashion. This is the result of the way in which this view was taken. The camera is situated at a corner of Potsdamer Platz, close to the kerb, filming at eye-level diagonally across the street. The image is thus divided into several planes on which movement occurs in different directions: directly in front of the lens, horse-drawn omnibuses and cabs pass from right to left, and behind them in parallel, others move in the opposite direction. Still further in the background, perpendicular to the central axis, a third line of vehicles appears. In addition, pedestrians cross the street, run alongside to catch a bus, or walk past the camera, sometimes glancing furtively towards it. An article published on 29 November 1896, in the Provinzialzeitung of Bremerhaven, a small town by the North Sea, comments on this particular film, asserting: With the view Potsdamer Platz one feels spontaneously transported to the big city. The cabs, the horse-drawn trams and buses, the passers-by anxiously

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE making their way, all this provides a life-like image of the enormous traffic in the metropolis.42

While this statement could be seen as an almost perfect illustration of Benjamin’s observations, the Lumière view itself, interestingly, hardly supports such a reading. The passers-by seem not at all frightened; they routinely and skilfully circulate between the numerous vehicles, apparently unaffected by the dense traffic that surrounds them. The anonymous journalist from the provincial newspaper may actually have projected his or her – and/or possibly the potential readership’s – feelings about the big city onto the images on the screen. The view conveys a fascination with the spectacular rush of urban traffic rather than a feeling of threat or anxiety. The comment published in the Provinzialzeitung, however, indicates the range of reactions such images could provoke. Whether pleasurable or menacing – in this film, the Lumière cameraman, by choosing this particular point of view, turns metropolitan life into an attraction: a spectacle of multi-layered movements, a constant renewal of sights to see, a visually engaging composition. Hence, such a view serves at least two functions: it demonstrates the capacity of a modern technological achievement, the Lumière cinematograph, to capture and reproduce movement, and by the same token it turns such movement into a spectacle, a living picture that gives the viewer an impression of modern metropolitan life. The view, however, is anything but a random record of urban modernity: it (re)creates it as an image resulting from a purposeful representational strategy.

V In conclusion, I would like to return to Pierre Francastel and his critical comments on Michotte van den Berck. When he remarks that ‘each epoch, each society, each age of humanity, each profession, each human being has its attention attracted by a particular aspect of the exterior world; each has its space, its perspective’,43 he obviously does not refer to a biological level of perception, but to the field of historically and culturally specific experiences within which perceptual (or rather: apperceptual) acts occur. This is what he means by stating: ‘One or more thresholds of intellectual perception must exist that differ from the threshold of optical perception’.44 Hence, his – as well as Benjamin’s – ideas need not be taken as a unified ‘scopic regime’ dictating ‘ways of seeing’ in a biological or deterministic sense. Granted that the perceptual input as such is not treated differently at a physiological level, the interpretation of this input (the ‘intellectual perception’) depends on the culturally and historically specific experiences that people use as a frame of reference. In any event, operating with a dichotomy opposing ‘naturalist’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches to perception is too simplistic to grasp the complexities involved here. In dealing with the history of moving images, we may analyse to what aspects of the exterior world the attention has been drawn, in what ways they are seen, what feelings and values are associated with them and through what representational strategies they have been depicted. Early cinema around 1900 is a part of, and participates in, the visual culture of its time. Undertaking to understand the ways in which the new medium tried to

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attract its audiences should also entail the analysis of the kinds of ‘visual delights’ it had to offer them. The attempt to historically reconstruct its ‘ways of seeing’ with regard to its visual environment constitutes one approach to this question.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

Albert Michotte van den Berck, ‘Le caractère de “réalité” des projections cinématographiques’, Revue Internationale de Filmologie 1, 3–4 (1948): 249–261. Pierre Francastel, ‘Espace et Illusion’, Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2, 5 (1949): 65–74. Albert Michotte van den Berck, ‘A propos de l’étude de M. P. Francastel “Espace et Illusion”’, Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2, 6 (1949/50): 139–140, quote p. 140. English translation quoted from Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 131. Francastel, ‘Espace et Illusion’, 66 (my translation). Ibid. 68, quoted from the English translation in Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France, 130. Ibid. Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Technique et idéologie’, Cahiers du cinéma 229–240 (1971–1972); Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972); Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinéma I. Logistique de la perception (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Editions de l’Etoile, 1984). David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 139–146 and Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley, CA et al.: University of California Press, 2005), 244–249. Roughly speaking, and without doing justice to all the nuances in the various contributions, one could say that the debate includes in particular David Bordwell and Charlie Keil on one side, and Tom Gunning and Ben Singer on the other. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 146. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 247. When introducing a label such as ‘modernity thesis’ Bordwell, by the same token, ascribes a level of consistency to a body of work that is undoubtedly less dogmatic than the term might suggest. Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 10th ed., 1977), 7–44, quote p. 14. English quotation from the translation available online at http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communicati on/benjamin.html (18 August 2008). The original German version is actually somewhat more nuanced in that it does not refer to ‘humanity’ in general but to ‘human collectivities’. See also Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Berlin: Mann, 2000 [1901]); English translation: Late Roman Art Industry, trans. by Rolf Winkes (Rome: Bretschneider, 1985). Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 142. Ibid. Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 14. ‘Die Art und Weise, in der die menschliche Sinneswahrnehmung sich organisiert – das Medium, in dem sie erfolgt – ist nicht nur natürlich, sondern auch geschichtlich bedingt.’ (‘The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.’) Ibid., 39, note 29 (note 19 in the English translation). ‘The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen.’ According to the entry ‘Apperzeption’ in Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, Vol. 1, (Berlin: Mittler, 2nd edn, 1904), 58. See also Noël Carroll, ‘Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, 1 (2001): 11–17. Carroll also attacks the so-called modernity thesis for postulating a transformation of human perception at a biological level. My thanks to Annemone Ligensa, who drew my attention to this text. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 143 and 301, note 93. See also Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Similarly,

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Carroll, in ‘Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception’, describes the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘noticing’, the latter also being a matter of habits and skills. I borrow this term from Martin Jay, who in turn borrows it from Christian Metz. See Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Forster (ed.) Vision and Visuality (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988), 3–23. Note that Jay in fact talks about a ‘plurality of scopic regimes’ with regard to modernity. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 143. Ibid., 146–147. Ibid., 146; see also Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 246. Tom Gunning, ‘Modernity and Early Cinema’, in Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 439–442, quote p. 441. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 245. Gunning, ‘Modernity and Early Cinema’, 441. For example, Jonathan Crary particularly addresses contemporary theories of perception, an approach which space does not permit me to adequately discuss here. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). See e.g. the excellent overview in Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), ‘Chapter 1: Meanings of Modernity’, 17–36. Charles Baudelaire, Ecrits esthétiques (Collection 10/18, Paris: UGE, 1986) 360–404; Georg Simmel, ‘Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Theodor Petermann (ed.), Die Grosstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung, Vol. 9, Dresden: von Zahn & Jaensch, 1903), 185–206. English translation: ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. by Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1964), 409–424. See Henri Meschonnic, Modernité Modernité (Collection folio essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 105–120. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 2007), 38. Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: Nathan, 1990), 147 and passim. See my ‘The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 57–69, and also my ‘La cinématographie comme dispositif (du) spectaculaire’, Cinémas 14, 1 (2003): 21–34. Obviously, cinema, as a medium, is dependent on modernity in a variety of ways: in order to come into existence, it needs the kind of mass audiences with enough leisure time and income to spend to turn it into a viable business, which, in turn, depends on the infrastructure of industrial production and distribution, on transportation networks etc. I borrow this term from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999). See, among others, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA et al.: University of California Press, 1998); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and of course the essays collected in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA et al: University of California Press, 1995). Michèle Lagny, ‘Film History: or History Expropriated’, Film History 6, 1 (1994): 26–44, quote p. 35. Lagny uses the term ‘series’ in a more general and more senses than André Gaudreault, who speaks of séries culturelles in order to designate specific cultural practices within a larger cultural paradigm (e.g. the féerie as a cultural series within the cultural paradigm of stage shows in the late nineteenth century). See his Cinéma et attraction: Pour une nouvelle histories du cinématographe (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2008), in particular 113–116. However, Lagny’s and Gaudreault’s definitions are not mutually exclusive. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Alfred A. Baeumler, ‘Die Wirkungen der Lichtbildbühne: Versuch einer Apologie des Kinematographentheaters’, März 2, 6 (1912), 334–341, reprinted in Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium, 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 186–194, quote pp. 190–191 (our translation; emphasis in the original).

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Chapter 2 Viewing Change, Changing Views 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

35

See my ‘Comment cadrer la rue?’, in Enrico Biasin, Giuglio Bursi and Leonardo Quaresima (eds), Lo stile cinematografico/Film Style (Udine: Forum, 2007), 95–101. See e.g. Livio Belloï, ‘Lumière und der Augen-Blick’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 4 (1995): 27–49; Karsten Hoppe, Martin Loiperdinger and Jörg Wollscheid, ‘Trierer Lokalaufnahmen der Filmpioniere Marzen’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 9 (2000): 15–37; Tom Gunning, ‘Pictures of Crowd Splendor: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate Films’, in Vanessa Toulmin et al. (eds), The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon (London: BFI, 2004), 49–58. See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘“La vie prise sur le vif”: Akzente des Zufälligen in den Städtebildern des Cinématographe Lumière’, in Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder (eds), Bildtheorie und Film (München: edition text + kritik, 2006), 381–392. Quoted from Martin Loiperdinger, Film & Schokolade: Stollwercks Geschäfte mit lebenden Bildern (Basel/Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1999), 222 (my translation). Francastel ‘Espace et Illusion’, 68, quoted from the English translation in Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France, 130. Ibid., 66 (my translation).

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse Chapter Author(s): Ben Singer Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.6 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Chapter 3

The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse

The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema

Ben Singer

‘T

he cinematograph is the most perfect expression of our time’, declared the Austrian writer Karl Hans Strobl in 1911.1 Ricciotto Canudo, writing the same year, likewise pronounced the cinematograph to be ‘absolutely modern, that is to say only possible in our era, composed of certain essential elements of modern spirit and energy’.2 Indeed, so significant among ‘the great symbols of our time’ was the new art, according to Brazilian essayist João do Rio in 1908, that ‘in the future, the man of our era will be classified as the homo cinematographicus’.3 Hominid taxonomists ultimately failed to take heed (opting for the even more idiosyncratic term homo sapiens sapiens), but the point was clear: movies were the very emblem of modern life, the quintessential manifestation of modernity. To these observers, and to many others who participated in the belletristic reaction to cinema’s commercial big bang a century ago, the coupling of movies and modernity made sense in an immediate and compelling way. Intertwined with modernity technologically, sociologically, and phenomenologically, cinema seemed to epitomize and encapsulate modern experience more vividly than any other form of cultural expression. The prominent early discourse on film and modernity warrants recapitulation and clarification not just for the sake of better understanding an important rhetorical current in cinema’s cultural history, but also because its central tenets have carried over as basic premises informing recent scholarship interested in situating movies within sensory, intellectual, institutional, and vernacular contexts of modernity. Given the degree of congruence between the perceptions voiced a century ago and those emphasized today, a heuristic model of the original discourse might better equip us to sketch out and assess current critical-historical frameworks for thinking about film and modernity.

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In most general terms, and at risk of grossly oversimplifying a large and varied body of texts, what the original discourse and the contemporary critical-historical paradigm have in common, I believe, is this: they both incorporate what might be called a dynamic model of the cinema-modernity nexus. By this I mean a basic conception of both modernity and of early cinema attending to determinative forces and phenomena characterized in terms of novelty, velocity, mobility, instability, flux, contingency, transformation, attraction, shock, distraction, disconcertion, hyperstimulus, and so on. This is not a uniform array, to be sure, and propositions regarding the interrelationships between film and modernity differ in significant ways. Nevertheless, it is fair to generalize that discussions of film and modernity have tended to gravitate toward a particular bandwidth of experience marked by dynamic fluidity and change.4 The dynamic paradigm has stimulated a rich and growing literature on the nature of modern life and of cinema as an emblematic element within it. Not surprisingly, however, it has also invited energetic dissent, particularly from scholars who argue that it simply does not give much purchase on the actual nature of early cinema, or, to be more precise, on the actual nature of early films with respect to their formal and sensual characteristics and with respect to the evolution of those characteristics over time. I will revisit below some of the conundrums surrounding the so-called ‘modernity thesis’,5 but I believe it is necessary to challenge the primary thrust of recent film-and-modernity scholarship on different grounds, as well as from a different perspective – not with the aim of repudiating or scuttling it (à la the modernity-thesis critique), but rather in hopes of expanding the model to yield a more complex and ambiguous view of modern culture beyond what the default dynamic conception invites us to entertain. Cinema was indeed inextricably linked to modernity in a number of ways, but modernity was complex and contradictory in many respects, and by the same token, so too were the cinematic texts created within it. An appropriately expansive model of modernity must take into account not just dynamic forces of social and aesthetic novelty, flux, intensity and so on, but also prominent counter-forces of antimodern sentiment that resulted from, and were intertwined with, the dominant thrust forward. Modernity is better understood as a heterogeneous arena of modern and counter-modern impulses, yielding cultural expressions that reflected both ends of the spectrum, along with, and perhaps more frequently, ambivalent or ambiguous positions in between. We need, in other words, to recognize the paradoxicality of modern culture, whereby antimodernity is understood as an essential component of the modern, and cultural-aesthetic forms like film and film criticism can be seen to pull in opposite directions at the same time, often within the same works. The task at hand is to understand the various ways in which an impulse toward antimodernity reacted against the more conspicuous upheavals of modernity. Moreover, in a less dialectical vein, it seems reasonable to expect that various forms of cultural and aesthetic tradition simply continued on through inertia, coexisting as ‘extramodern’ continuities alongside modern currents and countercurrents. And perhaps above all, we

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need to understand how instances of cultural expression (e.g. certain films and film-theoretical propositions) could have been both modern and antimodern at the same time. I daresay an awkward neologism like ‘ambimodern’ is called for. The rather abstract exhortation above amounts to just so much fancy talk unless it can be brought down to earth with concrete examples of currents, counter-currents, and cross-currents in both film-critical discourse and film-making practice. Here, I will only attempt to sketch in a couple of examples from criticism. Before doing so, however, it will be useful to isolate the key strands of the principle film-and-modernity discourse.

Cinema as contingent product of modernization Several interrelated presuppositions merged within the silent-era discourse on cinema as the epitome of modernity. First, and generally tacit in the literature, was the recognition that cinema fundamentally was tied to modernity as a contingent product of modernization. That is, its existence was entirely contingent upon the social-industrial underpinnings of advanced capitalism. The emergence of cinema was predicated on a specific convergence of modern technology (mechanical engineering, chemistry, optics, electricity, etc.); on systems of speculative investment and industrial rationalization applied to the efficient manufacture and distribution of amusement; on massive urbanization; on the subsequent coalescence of a mass audience resulting from that urbanization and from the unprecedented vitality of a modern labor economy that generated at least a modicum of expendable income for a significant portion of the population; on the cultural permissibility of heterosocial public circulation – after all, it is difficult to constitute a mass audience if women or other social groups are constrained from participation; on extensive transportation and communications networks, essential for the distribution and merchandising of films, not to mention the coordination of production, and so on. Such basic preconditions are so taken for granted today that we tend to overlook cinema’s nature as a serendipitous byproduct of an intricate convergence of many different systems and circumstances distinctive of late nineteenthcentury modernization. Canudo was right, in a more material sense than he may have intended: cinema was only possible in the modern era.

Cinema as all-encompassing survey of modernity A more overt strand of the early cinema-and-modernity discourse had to do with cinema’s unprecedented capacity to capture the world. Cinema was tied to modernity because, to a large degree, modernity was the very stuff of cinema – its raw material. Critics understood cinema as a device for grasping, and occasioning contemplation of, the vast and heterogeneous array of phenomena constituting modern reality. Cinema was the mirror of modern life. As Canudo put it, ‘Present day humanity actively seeks its own show, the most meaningful representation of itself’.6 Cinema chronicled modernity with a breadth of scope and representational verisimilitude unlike anything ever seen before. It seemed to show the entire world, show

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everything, the whole panoply of modern life, representing virtually the sum of all conceivable contemporary settings and states of affair. Actualities obviously displayed a special affinity for the novel spectacles of modernity – urban crowds, traffic, cityscapes, marvels such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the mesmerizing attraction of Coney Island electrified at night, the extraordinary mobilization of vision enabled by trains and trolleys, and so on. Narrative films were no less attuned to the portrayal of faits divers, depicting every facet of the modern human situation – the squalor of life in the tenement; the fragility of wellbeing; the pressures of exploitative labor and sexual extortion; the marvels and anxieties of new technology; the perils and possibilities of demographic diversity and unpredictable heterosocial contact; the social dynamics of every-man-for-himself individualism and competition, and so on. To be sure, movies also presented many images for which modernity hardly seems the most salient frame of reference (say, a kinetoscope view of a peasant woman feeding pigeons, or highlights from Shakespeare, the Bible, etc.). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that cinema was centrally, if not exclusively, concerned with showing people their world, functioning as a sort of encyclopedia of the modern physical and experiential landscape. In a remarkable 1923 essay entitled ‘The Cinema and the Modern World’, the Australian-born poet Bertram Higgins articulated this ‘surveyist’ conception of cinema: Most of us habitually live and move among gigantic, inexplicable shadows – in a world of mechanically multiplying forms that seem to spring from impersonal energies. … Into such a [bewildering] world came the Cinema. … From the pioneer days of the Biograph two-reelers, slapstick comedies, and serials, the Cinema has been swift to catch and interpret the rhythm of our civilization. … It dealt, in a consistently extraverted manner, with the whole scene of modern outward life which had grown up out of the Industrial Revolution. It showed this hard surface in all its lineaments, magnified it, played with it, satirized it, contrasted its powerful and its clumsy features. By doing so, it purged us of our terror and awe for the incomprehensible aggregations of stone, steel and iron by which we are oppressed and belittled. … Cinema has never lost that early intimate relation with the visible hulks and supports of the new civilization. … The Cinema, by the original all-roundness of its representation, has made itself master of the forms of an outward life which it can amass, refine, correct, distort according to its whim and fancy.7

Higgins understood cinema as an instrument for surveying the totality of modern reality in all its visible manifestations, the ‘whole scene’ of its ‘outward life’. That is an insight in and of itself, but Higgins went beyond simply noting cinema’s singular capacity to capture and display modern life in all its novelty and expansiveness. Cinema’s delineation of modernity, he posited, engaged various processes of rumination, analysis, interpretation, inflection, remolding – all means by which, he suggested, cinema enabled modern individuals to fathom, reflect upon, and cope with a social and experiential landscape of unprecedented complexity and discontinuity. Higgins’s essential understanding of cinema accords closely with what Miriam Hansen recently has articulated under the rubric of ‘vernacular modernism’. The salience of classical Hollywood films across the globe derives,

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Hansen suggests, from their ‘ability to provide, to a mass audience both at home and abroad, a sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of modernization and modernity’.8 Higgins presaged this conception of cinema’s social-psychological function in the modern milieu. A more common characterization of cinema’s social-psychological impetus pointed to film as a means to compensate for impoverished modern experience, an escape from the tedium of over-routinized labor and the bleakness of urban-industrial blight. This current also incorporated the understanding of cinema as an all-encompassing survey of modern existence. As Hugo von Hofmannsthal described it in 1921: Everything that usually is hidden from view behind the cold opaque facades of endless houses is revealed. All the doors fly open. We see the places of the rich, the young girl’s room, hotel lobbies, the robber’s hideout, the alchemist’s workroom. It is like traveling through the air with the demon Asmodeus who takes off the roofs of houses and exposes all secrets.9

Whereas Higgins stressed cinema as eyewitness to ‘modern outward life’ (helping individuals contemplate and master modernity), Hofmannsthal underscored film’s power to extend experience into the normally hidden inner world of private activity (with escapism and rejuvenation as the salient gratifications). The two emphases are complementary; they are two facets of the same conception of cinema as a limitless visual encyclopedia of modernity.

Cinema as catalyst and emblem of perceptual change – quantitative and qualitative dimensions This surveyist motif is inextricably intertwined with observations regarding the transformation of perceptual experience in modern times, a phenomenon in which cinema figured prominently both as a prime emblem and as a preeminent factor. The visual culture and environment of the modern capitalist metropolis transformed perceptual experience in crucial ways – transformed perception, one might say, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Cinema contributed to and symbolized both forms of perceptual change. Quantitatively, the sheer magnitude and diversity of the modern individual’s perceptual encounter of the world was unlike anything previously experienced in human history. With new economies of circulation, new levels of heterosocial interaction, new networks of transportation, new waves of emigration, and above all new forms of mass amusement and mass representation (illustrated newspapers, magazines, dime novels; photographs; films; travelling shows, etc. …), fin-de-siècle generations took in more sights than had any before. It might even be reasonable to assert that modern individuals laid eyes on more than all prior generations combined. The volume of things seen, firsthand or virtually, in the course of a typical life was utterly unprecedented. Modern people saw exponentially more other people, more places, more objects, more events, more marvels, more miscellany, more stimuli of every kind, than their ancestors ever had. Cinema epitomized and escalated this state of affairs, presenting, as Blaise Cendrars put it in 1917, ‘A hundred worlds, a thousand movements,

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a million dramas simultaneously enter[ing] the range of the eye with which cinema has endowed man. … An uproar of images’.10 Framing film as, fundamentally, a medium for myriad and kaleidoscopic display, Cendrars stressed a quantitative expositional explosion as the crux of cinema’s radical novelty. As an apparatus of documentation and depiction enabling even the humblest individuals to witness the inauguration of a president; the explosion of a battleship; the electrocution of an elephant; the flight of a zeppelin; a striptease on a trapeze; a trip to the moon; a man hanging from a church steeple in his nightshirt; the destruction of Montmartre by a comet, etc., etc. etc. – cinema was both a crucial catalyst and the ultimate symbol of the radical heterogeneity and scope of visual experience in modern life. Alongside modernity’s quantitative reconfiguration of experience, qualitative perceptual transformations also commanded attention. Many contemporaneous observers described the perceptual field of urban modernity as busier, more complex, more discontinuous, more fleeting, more forceful, more curious, and more spectacular than in earlier times. Once again, cinema was seen as both a contributing factor and an emblematic epitomization. At the heart of the film-and-modernity discourse, from João do Rio in 1908 to Walter Benjamin in 1936 (and again fifty years later when academic film scholars resurrected the idea), was a comparison between the film-viewing experience and the perceptual intensity of quotidian experience in the metropolitan environment. Critics were struck by what they perceived to be a close qualitative correspondence between the sensory dynamics of the movies and the phenomenology of the metropolis: both, they stressed, were marked by perceptual intensity, fragmentation, and speed. The perception of qualitative congruencies between movies and modern life motivated an inference that the relationship was causal: film was an expression or manifestation of the modern psyche and sensorium immersed in the newly intensified metropolitan environment. A typical example comes from the German author Hermann Kienzl, who in 1911 proclaimed: The psychology of the cinematographic triumph is metropolitan psychology. The metropolitan soul, that ever-harried soul, curious and unanchored, tumbling from fleeting impression to fleeting impression, is quite rightly the cinematographic soul.11

Likewise, Strobl followed up his above-quoted 1911 assertion that ‘the cinematograph is the most perfect expression of our time’ by elaborating that, Its rapid, restless pace is like the nervous bustling of our lives; the fidgety flickering, the flitting quality of its scenes are completely opposed to a measured promenade that occasionally comes to a contented pause. These pictures that pass by at dizzying speeds show that the present world has no sensibility for idyll.12

In a similar vein, Herbert Tannenbaum (a German art dealer, film director and film theorist) maintained that movies show a life nearly like that of modern man, a life that rushes by in the haste we so strongly condemn but basically love so dearly. A good part of the effect that cinema exercises on us people of the twentieth century has its origins in this

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parallel. We enjoy it when we se how actions occur and how everything lives and is in flux.13

More than just an analogy based on coincidental resemblance is involved here. Some sort of causal connection between the modern environment and the cinematic medium is implicit, if not explicit, in this rhetoric.

Rethinking the modernity thesis Just what such causation might entail is a thorny question. In earlier work, I tried to outline several mechanisms that might help make sense of the so-called ‘modernity thesis’ (i.e. the proposition that early cinema mirrored modern perceptual experience in its dynamic sensory register, and that the former was a causal outgrowth of the latter).14 I will not retrace those steps here, but I would like to discuss some lingering problems, and suggest some possibly less vexed ways of understanding assertions about the phenomenological symmetries between film and modernity. The modernity-thesis debate concerned, among other things, the viability of a phenomenological analogy between film and modernity focusing on immediate or ‘in the moment’ streams of sensation. At issue, in part, was whether or not the moment-by-moment experience of watching a film actually resembled the moment-by-moment perceptual experience of the metropolitan milieu. Was it apt to say that sensory intensity and flux characterized the look and feel of early cinema – or even the modern perceptual milieu, for that matter? Did viewers in 1910 really feel that film images were ‘tumbling from fleeting impression to fleeting impression’ and ‘pass[ing] by at dizzying speeds’? Many early films do not really look and feel that way when we watch them today. Skeptics of the modernity thesis were not totally off the mark when they raised that objection. So why should we presume that the original spectators of early films perceived them so differently from us? Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that a contemporary viewer asked to sit through a program of typical early films (not just films selected to support a hyperdynamic characterization) normally would find them somewhat less astonishing, less charged with powerful attractions, less viscerally arousing, less kaleidoscopic and ‘phantasmagoric’ than critics like Kienzl, Strobl, and Tannenbaum (and proponents of the modernity thesis) would lead one to assume was the norm a century ago. The burden for scholars interested in taking such characterizations at face value would be to explain why and how early audiences saw films ‘with different eyes’ than ours today. An explanation along these lines presumably would argue that early audiences were generally more impressionable – less adjusted to the challenging perceptual demands of big-city life, and by the same token, more sensitive to comparable stimuli in films. But how would one support such an argument? The notion that early spectators saw films with different eyes than ours would be relatively easy to support in the case of first time viewers, or a country rube mesmerized and discombobulated upon visiting a big city. Uninitiated viewers did indeed describe movies in strikingly hyperdynamic terms. As one first-time spectator exclaimed in 1898, ‘My eyes! My head! And the whizzling and whirling and twittering of nerves … [everything]

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whirling and squirling and racing against one another …’.15 But what about a savvy urbanite, a habitué, someone for whom the novelty of moving pictures had long since worn off? For such a spectator, positing a significantly different sensory-perceptual ‘baseline level’ of impressionability than that obtaining among viewers today would be difficult to support. To sidestep that problem, perhaps one could argue that proponents of the modernity thesis are not obliged to defend the notion of an appreciably different psychophysiological norm a century ago. All they have to do is offer reasonable explanations for how immersion in big-city life could alter sensory tastes, appetites, and competencies. It may well be that many viewers took early films in stride, relatively untaxed by the perceptual demands posed by films. If so, it could suggest that big-city life had ‘recalibrated’ the sensorium, bolstering normal capacities to cope with intensified sensory arousal in both quotidian and virtual (cinematic) perceptual environments. Such a state of affairs, one could argue, would be completely consistent with the main thrust of the modernity thesis – that movies mirrored modernity with respect to perceptual intensity, and that the two were causally interrelated, not just similar by coincidence. One might even say that if audiences took films in stride, this supported the modernity thesis: movies and modernity were in synch. What would be lost in such a formulation, however, is any sense that hyperdynamic journalistic descriptions conveyed veridical (even if somewhat pumped up) accounts of conscious reactions to the movies. They may still illuminate a dynamic whereby the ‘cinematographic soul’ reflected the ‘metropolitan soul’, but on the ‘recalibration’ hypothesis, this interrelationship would not be something strongly felt, at least not self-consciously, on the level of subjective experience. But this is hardly a satisfying solution, for either skeptics or proponents of the modernity thesis. Skeptics would surely retort, if film was not really felt to be perceptually hyperdynamic and intense, ostensibly similar to the milieu of urban modernity, then maybe it simply wasn’t in any meaningful sense. Proponents, on the other hand, would find nothing to cheer about in a compromise that not only compelled them to ignore the passionate first-hand accounts comprising much of the film-andmodernity discourse, but also left them in the untenable position of claiming that attractions, jolts, shocks, perceptual intensity, etc. were defining qualities of early film, despite a general lack of subjective awareness of those qualities. The only conclusion at hand is that the issue of how film and modernity related to each other on a qualitative, phenomenological level remains seriously vexed – at least if one approaches the issue with the hope of outlining tangible, veridical causal processes. Discourse analysis, however, need not take that approach, since it attends to a different guiding question: Not, ‘Were early critics right?’ but rather, ‘Under what rationale did early critics express the ideas they did?’ On that question, it is relevant to point out that the discourse becomes much less vexed if one considers that early critics may not have been trying to convey the moment-by-moment phenomenology of film-viewing so much as trying to characterize cinema, or the film medium, as a whole – describing an overarching impression or

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cognitive conception conjured up when reflecting upon cinema in general. Their actual object of description, in other words, may not have been the immediate sensory experience of watching a movie, but rather an after-thefact aggregate mental model of cinema that materialized when thinking about cinema’s distinctive features. For example, the emphasis placed upon rapidity of image changes in film – the movement ‘from fleeting impression to fleeting impression’ … all ‘pass[ing] by at dizzying speeds’ – may have derived to some extent from actual sensory-experiential impressions of perceptual hyperdynamism, but it also derived from a more detached cognitive understanding, namely, that the cinematic medium as a whole far outstripped theater in the rapidity with which it could accomplish scenic changes. Placed next to the lumbering physicality of theater, with its stagehands lugging furniture, rolling wooden trees into place, raising and lowering canvas backdrops, etc., it is not surprising that cinema’s scenic rapidity, its amazing power to replace one visual configuration with another instantaneously, impressed itself upon the minds of early critics. Moreover, the conception of cinema as tumbling from one view to another may have been less an expression of an actual feeling of imagistic superabundance experienced while watching early movies than an indirect articulation of the quantitative phenomenon discussed above. Film was understood as a medium, a medium of imagistic superabundance – apprehended as such by virtue of an aggregate conceptual model of cinema based upon the sum total of all films seen by the critic and an imagined set of all films vaguely extrapolated therefrom. The variety program format, grasped as an eclectic, incoherent procession of separate attractions, undoubtedly also reinforced a cognitive schema of film as a medium of myriad display. By accentuating thought-based, as opposed to more feeling-based, responses to film, I do not mean to discount the latter. My point is that the qualitative and quantitative rhetorical strands might blur together ambiguously. Scholarly interpretations based on period characterizations of film as a barrage of images may misconstrue the rationales underlying such accounts. The barrage of images may refer as much to a cognitive conception of the film medium as to the immediate perceptual experience of viewing a film. Phenomenological reflections may blend with concept-driven understandings of cinema as a whole.

Discursive counterimpulses The dominant thrust of the film-and-modernity discourse, I have suggested, focused on a conceptualization of film as a contingent product of modernization, as a surveyistic witness to modernity, and as an encapsulation of quantitative and qualitative changes in experience ushered in by modernity. Alongside these currents of perceiving cinema as ‘modern’, however, one finds rhetoric that seems to reflect a quite different frame of reference and frame of mind, attuned less to novel and dynamic dimensions of twentieth century life than to cinema’s potential as an instrument of metaphysical revelation and spiritual transcendence. These concerns might be described as broadly neo-Romantic and, at least nominally, antimodern

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in attitude and aspiration. They associated cinema with the ethereal, the mystical, the atavistic, and the supernatural. I will touch on two examples, one already well-known, the other meriting greater recognition. The former is a body in silent-era writings on film that has come to be known as French Impressionist film theory. It is doubtful that anyone associated with this body of work would assent to the designation ‘Neo-Romantic’, but the label applies to a fair degree. French Impressionist critics were fascinated by the intriguing phenomenon that whenever something was filmed and projected on the big screen, the thing (anything, everything) became more interesting than in its original, unmediated, real-world instantiation. As Antonin Artaud put it, ‘It is a fact that even the driest and most banal image is transformed on the screen’.16 At certain fleeting moments, things became not just interesting, but piercingly resonant, stirring, arresting, strangely supercharged with drama. They dubbed this phenomenon ‘photogénie.’ The close-up, they contended, amplified this effect, at times to the point of eliciting a sensation of epiphany, the impression of perceiving some sort of higher truth. In such instances of supposed revelation, instances of pure ‘photogénie,’ the film image seemed to offer a glimpse of an object’s essence or Platonic ideal. ‘It has the air of an idea’, as Jean Epstein put it.17 He elaborated: The screen abstracts and defines. … We are not dealing with an evening, but evening. … Instead of a mouth, the mouth. Everything quivers with bewitchment. I am uneasy. In a new nature, another world. … The human eye cannot discover [photogénie] directly. … A lens zeroes in on it, taps it, distilling photogénie between its focal planes. … This is why the cinema is psychic. It offers us a quintessence twice distilled. … The cinema is essentially supernatural. Everything is transformed … .18

Epstein referred to the film image as the purified end-product of two ‘distillations:’ first, the film lens filters out and transforms certain elements of the original object (color and detail are filtered out, the object is magnified, etc.), and then the spectator’s eye and brain makes a second pass, filtering and transforming the object even further in various ways. This process of abstraction, Epstein perceived, endowed objects with an aura of universality, quintessence, or prototypicality. The face on screen appeared to be ‘made of memories in which I see all those I have known’.19 The lens revealed not a mouth, but the mouth – the essence of mouthness. Like Epstein, Artaud understood photogénie as a result of special cinematographic transfiguration: The lens pierces to the center of objects, creating its own world [through] a work of concerted and mechanical elimination that allows only the best to remain. … The lens classifies and digests life, it reveals the sensibility, the soul … and presents us with a world that is pristine.20

Artaud employed metaphysical terms to convey the resulting impression, expressing a notion of cinema as a magical instrument for peering beyond the veil into the noumenal realm where objects exist in their pure, ideal, essential form. He proclaimed: The cinema is essentially the revealer of a whole occult life with which it puts

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us into direct contact. … A whole imperceptible substance takes shape and tries to reach the light. The cinema is bringing us nearer to this substance.21

Few people today would endorse the quasi-religious, spiritualist rhetoric of French Impressionist criticism, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as nothing more than quaint and silly mystification. Epstein, Artaud and others were attempting to communicate what they perceived to be salient and remarkable features of the medium – effects that actually might not be so outlandish in light of recent research on cognitive prototypes. In any case, the pertinent point is that this critical current highlights the heterogeneity of early discourses on cinema. Conceptualizing cinema in terms of the occult, the supernatural, the metaphysical realm of noumena, Impressionist criticism seems very far removed from the main dynamic thrust of the cinemaand-modernity discourse. It gravitated toward the half-light of Romantic spiritualism rather than the materialist glare of the contemporary urban industrial milieu. A differently inflected Neo-Romantic strain framed film less as an instrument of epistemological insight than as a powerful atavistic conduit into a mythic realm of primal communion and exhilaration. Hofmannsthal’s 1921 essay ‘Der Ersatz für die Träume’ (‘The Substitute for Dreams’), mentioned earlier, is a compelling example. After analogizing cinema to the revelatory powers of the demon Asmodeus ‘who takes off the roofs of houses and exposes all secrets’, Hofmannsthal elaborates: It does not just satisfy our nagging curiosity: as with a dreamer, a more secret drive is satisfied. … The scenery, house and park, forest and harbor that flows by behind the figures makes a kind of faint background music which might stir God-knows-what longings and exhilarations in those dark recesses where no written or spoken word penetrates. Meanwhile, on the screen a whole literature flies by in shredded tatters – better yet, a whole welter of literatures. … We see beautiful beings and lucid gestures, faces and glances expressing entire souls. They live and suffer, struggle and vanish before the eyes of the dreamer. But the dreamer knows that he is awake. He knows that he doesn’t have to hold back. With all that is in him, deep down to the most secret fold, he stares at this shimmering wheel of life forever turning. It is the whole person giving in to the spectacle. Not a single dream from tenderest childhood is left unstirred.22

The crucial inspiration for Hofmannsthal’s apologia of cinema as a substitute for dreams was not his compatriot Sigmund Freud but rather German and English Romantic philosopher-poets like Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Hölderlin called for, ‘a revolution in the way we think, feel and imagine that will eclipse the world as we have known it till now’. Novalis, embracing ‘the art of drawing life out of everything’ and affirming that ‘to vivify everything is the goal of life’, summarized the ethos in a provocative way: ‘Everything must become food’.23 At issue was much more than just a valuation of visual pleasure and sensual vibrancy. The ultimate purpose of vivifying the world was not to make the world more interesting and pleasurable, but more metaphysically redolent. As Novalis voiced the premise: ‘All that is visible clings to the invisible. That which can be heard to that which cannot; that which can be felt to that which cannot. Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable.’24

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Thomas Carlyle spoke of a ‘Spiritual Optics’ and William Blake simply called it ‘Vision’.25 The purpose of renovating perception was to invite fleeting revelations of a cosmic level of reality beyond ordinary phenomenal appearance or rational understanding. Hofmannsthal aligned himself with a particularly vigorous and primordial metaphysical worldview. Toward the end of the essay, he ventures into strange rhetorical territory, employing organic vegetative metaphors for the interior self, and talking about some deep region so interior that the self is no longer a self, a region occupied by a mysterious being or force simply referred to as ‘he’. This whole subterranean vegetation trembles down to its darkest roots, while the eyes take in from the flickering film the thousand-fold image of life. Yes, these dark roots of life – he –, the region where the individual ceases to be an individual, he, whom words seldom reach – hardly even the word of prayer or the stammering of love –, even he trembles. From him the most secret and deepest feelings of life originate: the sense of indestructibility, the belief in necessity, and the contempt for mere random reality. From him, once stirred, stems the powerful urge to create myth. From this dark gaze, out of the depth of being, comes, like a flash, the symbol: the sensuous image of spiritual truth inaccessible through reason.26

From this mysterious being ‘he’ originate life’s most profound and passionate feelings: feeling of indestructibility, of necessity, of contempt for phenomenal reality, of compulsion to produce myth. Somehow, out of this being is projected ‘the symbol’ – the vision of a spiritual truth lying beyond the reach of ordinary perception. All this happens when this being is roused – roused by cinema! How are we to make sense of such rhetoric? One pitfall would be to assume, from convention, that ‘he’ refers to God or Christ. That would be dead wrong, for this ‘he’ is, in fact, a blind, brutal force that was sometimes dubbed the ‘Antichrist’.27 Hofmannsthal’s conceptualization draws directly from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. The ‘he’ is Dionysus, the figure Nietzsche adopts as a shorthand embodiment of the primal life force, the ‘mysterious substratum’ of all existence, which he also referred to as the Primordial One, the ground of Being, the primal Being, the Original Oneness, or, following Arthur Schopenhauer, simply, the Will. For these philosophers, this vital force constituted the ultimate matter of noumenal reality, the elemental stuff of all existence, an invisible substance roiling perpetually behind the veil of visible phenomena. The goal of art was to transport us into a primordial state in which one is able to grasp ‘the exuberant fecundity of the world will’ and ‘for a brief moment [to] become, ourselves, the primal Being’. Through Dionysian art, discrete selfhood dissolves into the teeming, churning, vital mass and we are ‘made aware of the eternity and indestructibility of that … life force with whose procreative lust we have become one’.28 Hofmannsthal exalts cinema as nothing less than a Dionysian art – a primal, suprarational art of spiritual enchantment, cosmic revelation, and primordial communion. The key point with respect to my principal line of argumentation is quite straightforward, more a statement of fact than of theory: alongside the

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dominant impulse of the film-and-modernity discourse to highlight cinema as a quintessentially modern phenomenon – a product, catalyst, and emblem of rapid and profound social, technological, and experiential transformations within the milieu of urban modernity – a neo-Romantic counterimpulse also developed, more atavistic, mystical, otherworldly, and metaphysical; less explicitly aligned with the radical dynamics of modern life. This counter-current diverged from the dominant film-and-modernity discourse in many ways. To the extent that it eschewed the rhetoric of modern dynamism and aspired toward modes of contemplation and transcendence informed by timeless conceptions of ideal forms, cosmic forces, and alternate realities, one might be inclined to apply the term ‘antimodern’. But such a designation would obscure more than it reveals. The countercurrent is no less modern, no less immersed in the milieu of modernity, no less triggered by or symptomatic of the prevailing experiential states of affairs. In the case of Hofmannsthal, for example, it is impossible to detach his hope for a mystical-aesthetic redemption of life from his woeful apprehension of the bleakness and enervation wrought by urban-industrial modernity. One could also tease out the degree to which his conception of cinema as an all-encompassing ‘shimmering wheel of life’ revealing and emitting a magnetic pull toward a primordial maelstrom where individuation dissolves into an elemental life force is actually predicated upon distinctly modern aspects of the medium that I stressed earlier: its radical encyclopedic expansiveness (yielding an impression that what film shows forth is not just this or that state of affairs, but rather pure, perpetually roiling vitalism in all its vastness and chaos) and its status as a mass medium in which the masses dissolve, in the dark, into a common oneness. Modernity is inextricably intertwined with this Neo-Romantic metaphysic. As for Epstein, suffice it to say that it hardly would seem apt to describe as antimodern a critic who, regarding sensational serials like The Exploits of Elaine, exclaimed that such films ‘mark an epoch, a style, a civilization no longer lit by gas, thank God’.29 The ultimate point I hope to forward is that we need to complicate and expand our understanding of the many ways in which critics a century ago thought about and reacted to cinema’s relationship to modernity. To some degree, this entails attending more closely to strands of discourse that diverged from the dynamic models of film and modernity that typically hold center stage in contemporary scholarship. In doing so, however, the most appropriate and fruitful approach will likely be one that avoids the heuristic temptation to carve out starkly dialectical oppositions and contradistinctions, and instead remains sensitive to the kinds of paradoxes and ambiguities that make nominally antimodern lines of thought ineluctably modern.

Notes 1.

Karl Hans Strobl, ‘Der Kinematograph’ (1911), repr. in Fritz Güttinger (ed.) Kein Tag ohne Kino: Schriftsteller uber den Stummfilm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1984), 50–54, quote p. 52. Translated for the author by Gabriele Hadl.

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2.

Ricciotto Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’ (1911), repr. in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939 , Vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 58–66, quote p. 59. João do Rio, Cinematógrafo (Oporto: Chadron, 1909), 386. Translated for the author by Carlos Roberto de Souza. I learned of this work from Tom Gunning, who learned of it from João Vieira. My generalization about the ‘dynamic’ premise of recent scholarship on film and modernity is probably most blunt-edged and problematic when it comes to characterizing the work of Tom Gunning. Even though Gunning has done most to advance this perspective in contemporary film studies, his approach toward modernity is also among the most eclectic inasmuch as it has attended sensitively to a somewhat different phenomenological register pertaining to the uncanny, symbolism, spiritualism, gnostic insight, etc. In this regard, Gunning’s broadened research program anticipates some of the reorientation I call for in the latter part of this essay in relation to what I am terming ‘ambimodernity’. Key discussions concerning the modernity thesis include: Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’, Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31–45; David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 139–146; Tom Gunning, ‘Early American Cinema’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 255–271; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, ‘Chapter 4: Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101–130; Charlie Keil, ‘“To Here from Modernity”: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema’, in Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 51–65; Tom Gunning, ‘Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows’, in Murray Pomerance (ed.), Cinema and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 297–315. Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’. Bertram Higgins, ‘The Cinema and the Modern World’, The Spectator (8 December 1923): 895. Miriam Hansen, ‘Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film As Vernacular Modernism’, Film Quarterly 54, 1 (Fall 2000): 10–22 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘A Substitute For Dreams’ (1921), repr. in Fritz Güttinger, Kein Tag ohne Kino, 446–449, quote p. 448. Translated for the author by Tatjana Dems and Antje Ascheid, et al. Alternative trans. by Lance W. Garmer in Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (eds) German Essays On Film (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52–56. Blaise Cendrars, ‘The ABCs of Cinema’ (1917), trans. by Esther Allen, repr. in Monique Chefdor (ed.), Modernities and Other Writings By Blaise Cendrars (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 25–29, quote p. 25. Hermann Kienzl, ‘Theater und Kinematograph’, Der Strom 1, 7 (1911): 219–221, trans. quoted from Anton Kaes, ‘The Debate About Cinema: Charting a Controversy (1909–1929)’, New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 7–33, quote p. 12. Strobl, ‘Der Kinematograph’. Herbert Tannenbaum, ‘Art and Cinema’ (1912), trans. by Lance W. Garmer, repr. in McCormick and Guenther-Pal (eds), German Essays On Film, 3–7, quote p. 5. See my Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), specif. ‘Chapter 4: Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis’, 101–130. ‘At the Palace’ [review of the ‘American Biograph’], Punch (6 August 1898): 57, quoted from Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 (New Haven, Yale UP, 2007), 29. Antonin Artaud, ‘Sorcery and the Cinema’ (1927), trans. by P. Adams Sitney, repr. in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 49–50, quote p. 49. Jean Epstein, ‘Magnification’ (1921), trans. by Stuart Liebman, repr. in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 235–240, quote p. 239. Epstein, ‘The Senses I (b)’, trans. by Tom Milne, repr. in Abel, ibid., 241–246. Epstein, ibid., 243. Antonin Artaud, ‘The Premature Old Age of the Cinema’ (1933), repr. in Selected Writings, ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Helen Weaver (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 311–314.

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Chapter 3 The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

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Artaud, ‘Sorcery and the Cinema’, 50. Hofmannsthal, ‘A Substitute For Dreams’, quote pp. 448–449. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], ‘Logological Fragments I: No. 92’ (c.1797–98), in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1997), 65. Novalis, ‘On Goethe’ (1798), ibid., 118. Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 377. Hofmannsthal, ‘A Substitute For Dreams’, 449. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘A Critical Backward Glance’ (1886) [preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy], in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Francis Golffling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor), 11. Nietzsche, ibid., 102–103. Epstein, ‘The Senses I (b)’, trans. quoted from Stuart Liebman, ‘Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory 1920–1922’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1980, 261.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Mind, the Gap: The Discovery of Physiological Time Chapter Author(s): Henning Schmidgen Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 4

Mind, the Gap: The Discovery of Physiological Time Mind, the Gap

Henning Schmidgen Introduction he fact that Gilles Deleuze, in his two volumes on cinema, Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image) and Cinema 2: L’image-temps (Cinema 2: The Time-Image), often refers to the brain has not received appropriate recognition. Film theorists such as David Rodowick have read these volumes with a focus on the internal logic of Deleuze’s theory of images and signs, whereas philosophers interested in Deleuze’s reference to and reliance on biology, neurology and brain research have largely neglected his work on cinema.1 However, the brain constitutes an important thematic knot in Cinema 1 as well as Cinema 2, and Deleuze insistently explores this knot, albeit from various points of view. On the one hand, he traces the motif of the brain in films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), i.e. the brain appears as a topic of motion pictures. On the other hand, Deleuze quotes directors such as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance describing the effects of cinema on the brain. For example, he argues that cinematographic images are capable of creating shocks in the spectator, by way of ‘communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’.2 Here, the brain emerges as an important element in arguments concerning the aesthetics of cinema, which seem to be loosely connected to the findings of fields such as neurophysiology and experimental psychology. Furthermore, Deleuze reflects on the cultural and social developments that, according to him, have changed the human relation to the brain:

T

Our lived relationship with the brain becomes increasingly fragile, less and less ‘Euclidean’ and goes through little cerebral deaths. The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision.3

In Deleuze’s view, it is not just the growing popularisation of brain research that is responsible for this new, ‘passionable’ configuration of the cerveau vécu. Philosophers have also contributed to this configuration. In three extended commentaries, Deleuze refers to Henri Bergson as a thinker ‘who was, with Schopenhauer, one of the rare philosophers to propose a new conception of the brain’.4 He elaborates:

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Bergson ... introduced a profound element of transformation [into our conception of the brain]: the brain was now only an interval [écart], a void, nothing but a void, between a stimulation and a response.5

Considering the extensive knowledge regarding the structures and functions of the brain that was available around 1900, it is legitimate to ask how far such a reduced description of the cerebral can be seen as ‘transformative’, i.e. innovative. The new element that Bergson, according to Deleuze, contributed to the theoretical conception of the brain is characterised by its uncertainty and/or vagueness. Obviously, Bergson was not eager to compete with contemporary brain research. In other words, he did not aim to contribute to the findings of science. Rather, Bergson’s gesture points in exactly the opposite direction. Given the high methodological standards and rich details of contemporary brain research, the object of this science was to be turned into a tabula rasa again, so that the brain could be recognised, once more, as a philosophical problem, if not a riddle. This is why Bergson declares the brain a ‘zone of indetermination’,6 i.e. a space of freedom and creativity. Following Bergson, the brain is an essential gap that is not exclusively defined by structural and/or spatial notions, but according to functional and/or temporal terms, i.e. longer or shorter intervals between stimulation and response. What the encephalon, then, embodies is the ability of organisms to defer, hesitate and repose indefinitely. What role, then, does Bergson’s curiously empty conception of the brain play in Deleuze’s work on cinema? First of all, one should note that Bergson’s cerebral interval or void is hardly similar to the interstices that literally catch the eye when seeing a film. In other words, they are not equal to the ‘space or division between photograms, shots, sequences’, as Rodowick and other Deleuze-commentators have suggested.7 Deleuze does, indeed, discuss the fact that movies are composed of sequential series of single images separated by bars of identical size. This ‘cellular’ nature of film is the prerequisite for the potential to arrange and combine sequences in virtually endless ways. Deleuze explains, for example, that ‘montage is composition, the assemblage [agencement] of movement images as constituting an indirect image of time’.8 Similarly, with respect to the brain, he speaks about the ‘horizontal organization of association’, i.e. modes of communication and non-communication among brain cells located in the cortex.9 Thus, the gaps between the single images of a film become comparable to the space between cortical cells, i.e. synaptic clefts, glia cells, etc. Relying on Steven Rose’s and Delisle Burn’s neurobiological studies on synapses and the electro-chemical transmissions from one neuron to another, Deleuze, in fact, suggests that a film can be understood as a kind of tissue consisting of sequential image-cells, which are associated and ‘relinked’ with one another in a more or less probabilistic order.10 However, Bergson’s notion of ‘interval’ is different, and Deleuze is aware of this. Bergson’s écart refers to general biological prerequisites for perception. Deleuze quotes the passage from Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory, 1896) where Bergson says of the perceptual process that living beings ‘allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others, isolated, become “perceptions” by

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their very isolation’.11 According to Bergson, perceptions in living beings are neither produced by the mirroring of certain aspects of encountered matter, nor by accentuating such aspects. On the contrary, the goal-oriented neglect and suppression of specific features in the continuous flow of matter, within which the living being constantly resides and moves, create perceptions. In order to transform, by means of perception, mere existence into ideas, it is necessary, according to Bergson, not to throw more light on the object, but, on the contrary, to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.12

It is this procedure of goal-oriented detachment, which operates on the principle of the reduction of complexity, that Deleuze applies to cinema. Thus, the point of comparison shifts from the film and its individual images, i.e. the product of cinematography, to filming as a fundamental process – an activity of isolating that, by means of the film camera, allows for engendering images within a ‘world of universal variation, universal undulation, universal rippling’.13 Deleuze suggests: ‘[This] is an operation which is exactly described as a framing: certain actions undergone are isolated by the frame and hence … they are forestalled, anticipated’.14 In other words, Deleuze relates Bergson’s void to techniques of framing and mise en scène, i.e. aesthetic practices that serve to suppress the surrounding and, by the same token, contribute to the emergence of ‘“quartered” images’15 in a world of generalized transformation – images that can be projected onto the screen, where they come to be perceived as moving, i.e. motion pictures. Unquestionably, cinematography is a man-made technology. However, its basic principle corresponds to a general biological phenomenon: the selection of images, as Bergson puts it. The interval, the void, that is in question here, is neither the interstice between the single images of a film, nor the cleft between two cerebral cells.16 Bergson’s interval is definitely not situated ‘inside’ the brain. It is the biologically or technologically realised span between stimulus and response, an intermediary region that is defined in terms of time, not space. Bergson’s remarkably reduced conception of the brain can and should be historicised. The first chapter of Matter and Memory is based on contemporary scientific practices, i.e. the procedures and assemblages devised and used by laboratory scientists for investigating the time relations embodied in the human brain and nervous system, even though Bergson criticises the interpretations of their results. Since the mid-nineteenth century, scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Adolphe Hirsch and Franciscus Donders conducted experiments for measuring the propagation-time of Reizungen (‘stimulations’) in the nerves and the brain, thereby delineating and defining the span between stimulation and response that, decades later, would form an important background for Bergson’s conception of the brain. Bergson repeatedly refers to insights derived from psycho-physiological experiments with lower organisms, e.g. when discussing the perceptual function of the ‘various prolongations of the protozoa’, ‘the ambulacra of the echinodermata’ and ‘the stinging apparatus of the coelenterata’.17 The

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corresponding experiments were performed by scientists such as Alfred Binet and Max Verworn in the 1880s,18 and Bergson relies on such research when bolstering his comparative and evolutionist approach. However, in his discussion of the actual functioning of the brain and nervous system, Bergson adopts the stimulation-response-scheme of experimental psychology, or ‘physiological psychology’, as Wilhelm Wundt termed it, which focused on human subjects. This becomes especially clear when Bergson discusses the ‘movements’ with which living beings respond to external stimulation: The truth is that my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back or inhibiting movement.19

This can be taken as an implicit, but literal, description of the experimental systems that, beginning in the 1850s, were used by Helmholtz, Hirsch and Donders for investigating human reaction times and their underlying cerebral as well as nervous processes. Furthermore, when Bergson likens the brain to a central telephone exchange that ‘allows communication or delays it’,20 he (consciously or unconsciously) alludes to the fact that the scientific practices in question emerged with the industrialisation of communication in the nineteenth century.

Telegraphs The basic scheme that guided psycho-physiological time experiments well into the twentieth century was defined by Hermann von Helmholtz in the early 1850s (see Figure 1). For his pioneering investigations on the propagation speed of nervous stimulations in the frog, the Königsberg physiologist devised two interconnected electric circuits, one to stimulate a nerve-muscle preparation, the other to measure the so-called ‘current time’ by means of a galvanometer. Both circuits could be closed in such a way that the preparation was electrically stimulated and the electric current was simultaneously sent through the galvanometer. When the muscle began to contract, the current in the galvanometer circuit was immediately and permanently interrupted. From the deflection of the needle, Helmholtz could read off the time the muscle needed to contract after stimulation. The differences between the results obtained when placing the electrode on different parts of the nerve-muscle preparation allowed him to calculate the propagation speed of what was later called the ‘nervous impulse’.21 The set-up combined two electric circuits. In the first circuit, the electric current generated by the battery (R), passing through the induction coils (I1 and I2), stimulated the nerve-muscle preparation (N/M). The second circuit connected the galvanometer (T) to the battery (Z). The switch (S/P) allowed both electric circuits to close at exactly the same time. The devices within the metallic frame (A) guaranteed, that, after the contraction of the frog muscle, the time-measuring circuit would be permanently interrupted. By placing the electrode on different points of the nerve (n1, n2), Helmholtz measured the time the motor nerve needed for conducting the excitation. Helmholtz applied the same principle in his experiments with human

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Fig. 1. Reconstruction of the pioneering experiments conducted by Hermann von Helmholtz for determining the propagation speed of excitations in the sensory nerves of the frog. [Source: Carl Kuhn, Handbuch der angewandten Elektrizitätslehre, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der theoretischen Grundlagen (Leipzig: Voss, 1866), 1193.]

beings: ‘At some limited point of skin … a very weak electric shock’ was applied to the experimental subject.22 The subject was asked to respond to the sensation as quickly as he or she could, by means of ‘a certain movement of the hand or the teeth’. Then, a different point of skin was chosen, a light shock was given again, and the responses were measured. From the difference in measurements for the big toe and the neck (or the finger and the throat), Helmholtz deduced the absolute speed of the propagation of the stimulation in the sensible nerves of human beings. This deduction was based upon the assumption that the only difference in the various series of experiments consisted of the position of the electrodes on the surface of the body. All other factors – the stimulations themselves, the functioning of the measurement instruments, the identity of the conduction speed in the sensible and motor nerves, even the transposition of sensations into movements – were deemed by Helmholtz as constant. For example, when estimating the time required for the cerebral processes involved (1/10 second, according to Helmholtz), he explicitly underscored that ‘the duration of the processes of perceiving and willing in the brain does not depend upon the place on the skin at which the impression is made’.23 Helmholtz argued that, within his series of experiments, he had found a ‘sufficient agreement’ of the individual results with one another. Thus, what remained constant were only the ‘sums’ of the measured times. How these sums were constituted remained largely obscure. Accordingly, the conceptual distinctions Helmholtz suggested for breaking down the response process into its components were weak.

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In the few statements devoted to experiments with human subjects, Helmholtz spoke of the propagation of the stimulation in the sensible nerves, the processes of ‘perceiving and willing in the brain’ and the transmission of the ‘message’ through the motor nerves to the muscles as the ‘sending of the signal’.24 Helmholtz’s experiments were carried out in a context in which physiology (or ‘organic physics’), telegraph technology and the military were closely interrelated. Three years before publishing the first volume of his path-breaking Untersuchungen über thierische Elektricität (Investigations On Animal Electricity, 1848),25 Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond (a colleague and good friend of Helmholtz) had made concrete suggestions for measuring ‘the speed of the muscle and nerve activity’ at a meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin. In 1847, the journal of this society (of which Helmholtz was a member), Fortschritte der Physik (‘advances of physics’), printed the report of a young lieutenant in the Prussian artillery. Under the title ‘Über Geschwindigkeitsmessung’ (‘on speed measurements’), Werner Siemens offered an overview of the most recent methods for exactly determining the ‘speed of [solid] bodies’. Almost all of the devices Siemens presented and explained relied on electromagnetism and were closely connected to telegraph technology. And whether it was Charles Wheatstone’s chronoscope or the timing apparatus devised by Siemens himself, the main field of application was the military. As Siemens put it, especially ‘to the artillery it is of importance to know the speed of projectiles at various points of their trajectory’.26 The military background of ‘time microscopy’ was not unfamiliar to Helmholtz. Between 1843 and 1848, he had received his training as squadron surgeon and military physician in Potsdam.27 With his transition from frogs to human beings and the introduction of the time-based stimulation and response method (sometimes called ‘variation and subtraction method’), Helmholtz founded a field of research that, for a while, would be explored by individual researchers from diverse backgrounds. It was not until the 1870s that scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Alfred Binet in Paris and Edward B. Scripture at Yale University began to consolidate and expand this field at both the institutional and disciplinary level, contributing to a growing ‘physiological’ or ‘experimental psychology’.28

Clocks The German-Swiss astronomer Adolphe Hirsch (1830–1901), director of the State Observatory at Neuchâtel, was one of the first individuals after Helmholtz, other than the German ophthalmologist Rudolph Schelske,29 to publish a study on the speed of what he called ‘nervous conduction’. The background for Hirsch’s investigation was not only scientific, but also technological and economic. In 1858, the Neuchâtel observatory was founded with the explicit aim of providing the clock makers in the Jura mountains with precise measurements of time. As a well-trained astronomer, Hirsch was aware that individual observation errors affected the registering of star passages that were required for astronomical time measurements. Since the early nineteenth century, astronomers had increasingly

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become aware that individual differences between observers could result in significant measurement errors. But Hirsch was not just interested in the problem of the so-called ‘personal equation’. Ever since his student days in Heidelberg, where he studied with Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle (1809–1885) and other naturalists, Hirsch had also been fascinated by physiology. He maintained an intense correspondence that often focused on physiological questions with Du Bois-Reymond, whose father was from Neuchâtel. In his 1862 publication on the problem of nervous conduction, Hirsch renamed the ‘sum’ Helmholtz had defined as the time between a stimulation and the beginning of a movement ‘physiological time’,30 a term Wilhelm Wundt would adopt when publishing the first textbook on the emerging discipline of psychology, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1874).31 Of even greater consequence for future developments in experimental psychology was Hirsch’s use of an instrument that was far easier to handle than the galvanometer used by Helmholtz: the Hipp chronoscope (see Figure 2). Hirsch had personally borrowed this precision time-measuring device from the instrument-maker Matthäus Hipp. The set-up consisted of the Hipp chronoscope (H), a ‘fall apparatus’ (F), a telegraph key (U), a battery (K) and a rheochord (R). The experimental subject was asked to respond upon hearing the sound caused by a steel ball (k) hitting a board (B). Underneath the board, there was an electric contact, so that hitting the board opened a circuit that started the chronoscope. The subject was asked to respond as quickly as possible and to press the telegraph key. This closed the circuit and stopped the chronoscope.

Fig. 2. Adolphe Hirsch’s experimental set-up for psycho-physiological time experiments as depicted by Wilhelm Wundt in 1874. [Source: Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 770.]

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Hipp was the former director of the Federal Telegraph Institution in Bern. In the early 1860s, he had moved to Neuchâtel, where he founded his own private telegraph factory. This factory equipped the Neuchâtel observatory with the telegraphic apparatus Hirsch needed for communicating time signals to the clock-makers’ workshops in the Jura mountains and to the telegraph office in Neuchâtel. From June 1860, all the telegraph offices in Switzerland received their time signals from Hirsch’s observatory, establishing a vast landscape of standard time.32 The Hipp chronoscope had received its first public presentation in the late 1840s. This ‘time seer’ was an electromagnetically controlled mechanical clock that could measure short time intervals with a precision of up to 1/1,000 second. Hipp’s instrument was based on Wheatstone’s chronoscope, and, like Wheatstone and Siemens, Hipp thought that his device would be of major interest to the military. In 1849, the chronoscope was presented as an instrument ‘to measure the time of falling bodies and for experiments on the velocity of shotgun bullets’.33 However, it was the first of the suggested uses that played a role in the applications of the chronoscope during the 1850s. Physicists such as Friedrich Reusch and Wilhelm Eisenlohr used the Hipp chronoscope to demonstrate Galileo’s laws of falling bodies in the classroom.34 In the following years, experiments with falling bodies served as routines for calibrating the precision of a chronoscope before using it in reaction time experiments. When Hirsch published his chronoscopic experiments on the speed of sensory perception and nerve conduction in 1862, he stressed that research on the propagation speed of stimulations in the nerves of living organisms was, properly speaking, the task of the physiologist. But following the model created by Helmholtz, Hirsch carried out his own experiments on the topic, with human beings as experimental subjects. One of them was Hipp, the others mostly members of the Neuchâtel Society of Naturalists.35 Despite the initial publication of Hirsch’s study in French and in the obscure bulletin of the Neuchâtel Society of Naturalists, it soon began to attract the attention of physiologists and future psychologists. In 1865, a German version of Hirsch’s paper was published in Jakob Moleschott’s journal Untersuchungen zur Naturlehre des Menschen und der Thiere (‘investigations into the physiology of men and animals’).36 This version of Hirsch’s article had a decisive impact on further studies of ‘physiological time’ and also on the use of the chronoscope in this context. When Wundt published his Principles of Physiological Psychology more than ten years later, he quoted Hirsch’s study and strongly recommended the chronoscope for the purposes of physiological and psychological chronometry, because the instrument ‘allows one to immediately read off the absolute value of time’.37 In the following years, Hipp’s instrument was present in nearly all of the new psychology laboratories throughout Europe and the United States. In 1902, the successor to Hipp’s firm in Neuchâtel, the company Peyer & Favarger, advertised the chronoscope with the fact that it had already been sold to more than 65 scientific institutions in cities all over the world, including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow and Cambridge, MA.38

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Kymographs In 1865, Franciscus Cornelius Donders (1818–1889), professor of physiology at Utrecht University, began to work on ‘physiological time’ in close cooperation with his student, Johan Jacob de Jaager. Their initial aim was to reproduce Helmholtz’s experiments on human beings. Furthermore, they were particularly interested in the psychological aspects of the time relations in the human brain and nervous system. Similar to Helmholtz and Hirsch, Donders and de Jaager initially applied electromagnetism for the purpose of precise time measurements.39 During the course of their joint experiments, however, Donders became more and more sceptical about the precision of the electromagnetic recording device they were using. In a manuscript, Donders described what he saw as the fundamental problem of this method: ‘If the current intensity changes, the results also change’.40 As long as the energy for their instruments was derived from ‘galvanic elements’ that were difficult to standardise, constancy of current intensity was indeed a problem that had long occupied time-measuring physiologists and psychologists. At first, Donders and de Jaager used a conventional kymograph for measuring time (see Figure 3). The energy source (a) consisted of four Grove elements. Through the induction coils (c and c’), the current was led on one side to the Pohl seesaw (W) and the electrodes (n and n’), and on the other side to the switch (p) and the needles at the kymograph. The seesaw was operated by the experimenter, and the switch by the experimental subject. At the kymograph, two needles were operated by means of electromagnetism. The left needle registered stimulations and responses, the right one the ticking of the metronome (not on the drawing). (For reasons of visibility, the two curves on the kymograph drum are represented higher on the drum than they were actually inscribed.) In his search for other, non-electromagnetic time-measuring devices,

Fig. 3. Experimental set-up with kymograph for measuring physiological time. [Source: de Jaager, De physiologische tijd, I.]

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Donders discovered the phonautograph of Léon Scott. This instrument was initially constructed to graphically record human speech. In the early 1860s, the Parisian instrument maker Rudolph Koenig supplied the phonautograph with a time-measuring device. Since Koenig was able to determine exactly how many vibrations a tuning fork made per second, he made use of the fork as a time marker. Thus, the modified phonautograph could not only record human speech, but also a time curve. Koenig’s apparatus allowed Donders to use human utterances as both stimulations and responses. According to Donders, speech was a much more ‘natural’ stimulation than was electricity. In addition, speech was psychologically more interesting, because it was regarded as directly connected to uniquely human activities. In their basic form, Donders’ experiments carried out with the modified phonautograph also followed Helmholtz’s variation and subtraction strategy. But Donders moved the method from physiological to explicitly psychological terrain. In a first series of experiments, he measured the reaction times to simple verbal stimuli such as ‘ki’. The experimental subject was simply asked to respond by repeating ‘ki’ as quickly as he or she could. In a second series of experiments, Donders confronted his subjects with an arbitrary succession of syllables ‘ki’, ‘ka’, ‘ko’, etc. Here, the subject was asked to respond only when he or she had heard ‘ki’. Comparing the results of the two series, Donders claimed to have obtained the time needed for a basic psychological process (i.e. the identification of ‘ki’), or as Donders put it, ‘the decision in a dilemma’.41

Conclusion Fragmented language and falling bodies serving to measure reaction times that were used to break down complex psychological processes and phenomena into their most basic elements – these practices definitely seem remote from Bergson’s philosophy of durée. Bergson not only criticised the modern, Galilean notion of translating movements in space into uniform units of time, which he even called the ‘cinematographic illusion of modern science’,42 in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (‘essay on the immediate data of consciousness’, 1889),43 he argued against the reduction of experience to elementary entities such as sensations and perceptions. Indeed, the experiments carried out by Helmholtz, Hirsch and Donders ‘did’ something very similar to the practice of cinematography. They isolated – i.e. framed – sequences from a flow of movements or behaviour. The experimental subject only had to sit still and – following half-technological, half-physiological orders – to respond as quickly as possible to different types of stimulations. The sequences in these experiments were repeated and rearranged, i.e. subjected to montage, in order to arrive at new phenomena, perceptions and facts. However, the result of these repetitions and differentiations was the measurement of the time-span, the gap between stimulation and response – a delineation of the brain and the nervous system as an interval or void in the sense of Bergson and Deleuze. The functioning of Helmholtz’, Hirsch’s and Donders’ experiments led to a far-reaching deterritorialisation of the organised body. These ex-

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periments did not account for any concrete anatomy forming the basis of the production and propagation of stimulations or their transformation into responses. They were not concerned with the precise path stimulation took through the body. Their main interest was in the time required for taking the path, for accomplishing the process. The organic body only intervened as a flattened entity, a map offering multiple points of access. Only the distances on the map contributed to the detection of time differences. This deterritorialisation of the body was not an end in itself. It constituted the crucial prerequisite for the reterritorialising practice of conceptual distinctions that immediately followed the experiments. These conceptual distinctions served to analyse the experimentally framed behavioural sequences, i.e. the stimulation-response process. Following Helmholtz, Hirsch explained that the ‘physiological time’ he sought to measure consisted of three parts: (1) The transmission of the sensation to the brain; (2) The action of the brain that transforms sensation into will; (3) The transmission of the will via motor nerves to the muscles and the execution of movement by them.44

Based on his extensive anatomical and physiological knowledge, Donders named a total of twelve partial processes that he assumed to be occurring in the time-span between excitation and reaction, from the action of the stimulation ‘on the perceiving elements in the sensory organs’, the conduction of the stimulation through the ‘sensible nerves’ to the ganglion cells of the medulla and the ‘increase in activity of the nerve cells of the organ of will’, i.e. the brain, to the conduction of the stimulation in the ‘movement nerves’ toward the muscles that complete the required response.45 But instead of actually reaching the ‘firm ground’ of the anatomy and physiology of the body, these experiments (at least Donders’) created for the scientists a separate territory regarded as autonomous: the territory of the psychological. Perhaps one could even say that they gave birth to this territory. In other words, Donders’ experiment instantiated in the acoustic realm what the cinema would later materialise in the optical. Through a system of vibrations, inscriptions and transmissions, it spread an ‘experimental night’ in the laboratory.46 It cultivated a territory or land ‘completely of its own’ (Donders) and created an experimental, ‘unknown body’ (Deleuze). Thus, one can recognise the experiments by Helmholtz, Hirsch and Donders as important elements in a history of cinematography inspired by Deleuze and Bergson – a history not only again highlighting the fact that cinema is sometimes experimental, but also showing that physiological laboratory experiments are essentially cinematographic.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

See David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997) and Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 156 (emphasis in the original). Ibid., 212. Ibid., 210.

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5. 6.

Ibid., 211. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 32 and 39. See Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 30. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 211. Ibid. See Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1973) and B. Delisle Burns, The Uncertain Nervous System (London: Arnold, 1968). Bergson, Matter and Memory, 36; Deleuze, Cinema 1, 62. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 36. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 61. In connection with the latter, one should also recall the fact that the term ‘synapse’ was not coined by Charles E. Sherrington until 1897, i.e. one year after the publication of Bergson’s Matter and Memory. See e.g. Olaf Breidbach, Die Materialisierung des Ichs: Zur Geschichte der Hirnforschung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 195–197. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 32. See Judy Johns Schloegel and Henning Schmidgen, ‘General Physiology, Experimental Psychology, and Evolutionism: Unicellular Organisms As Objects of Psycho-physiological Research, 1877–1918’, Isis 93, 4 (2002): 614–645. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 44–45. Ibid., 30. Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘Vorläufiger Bericht über die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Nervenreizung’, Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin 17 (1850): 71–73. Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘On the Methods of Measuring Very Small Portions of Time, and Their Application to Physiological Purposes’, Philosophical Magazine 6, 40 (1853): 313–325, quote p. 324. See also Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘Mittheilung für die physikalische Gesellschaft in Berlin betreffend Versuche über die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Reizung in den sensiblen Nerven des Menschen [15 December 1850]’, Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, NL Helmholtz 540. Helmholtz, ‘On the Methods’, 324. Ibid. Emil Heinrich Du Bois Reymond, Untersuchungen über thierische Elektricität, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1948). Werner Siemens, ‘Ueber Geschwindigkeitsmessung’, Fortschritte der Physik 1 (1847): 47–72, quote p. 47. See Leo Koenigsberger, Hermann von Helmholtz, 3 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1902–1903). See also Jimena Canales, ‘Exit the Frog, Enter the Human: Physiology and Experimental Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Astronomy’, The British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 173–197. Rudolph Schelske, ‘Neue Messungen der Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit des Reizes in den menschlichen Nerven’, Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin 29 (1862): 151–173. Adolphe Hirsch, ‘Expériences chronoscopiques sur la vitesse des différentes sensations et de la transmission nerveuse’, Bulletin de la Société des Sciences Naturelles de Neuchâtel 6, 1 (1862): 100–114, quote p. 103. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), 730. On the role of the Neuchâtel observatory in the history of standard time in Switzerland, see Jakob Messerli, Gleichmässig, pünktlich, schnell: Zeiteinteilung und Zeitgebrauch in der Schweiz im 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich: Chronos-Verlag, 1995), 69–93. Wilhelm Oelschläger, ‘Das Hipp’sche Chronoskop, zur Messung der Fallzeit eines Körpers und zu Versuchen über die Geschwindigkeit der Flintenkugeln, etc.’, Polytechnisches Journal 14, 114 (1849): 255–259. Henning Schmidgen, ‘Zur Genealogie der Reaktionsversuche in der experimentellen Psychologie’, in Christoph Neinel (ed.), Instrument-Experiment: Historische Studien (Ber-

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

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35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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lin/Diepholz: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 2000), 168–179. Hirsch, ‘Expériences chronoscopiques’, 113. Adolphe Hirsch, ‘Chronoskopische Versuche über die Geschwindigkeit der verschiedenen Sinneseindrücke und der Nerven-Leitung’, Untersuchungen zur Naturlehre des Menschen und der Thiere 9 (1865): 183–199. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 772 (my translation). On the use of the chronoscope in psychology, see Rand B. Evans, ‘Chronoscope’, in Robert Bud and Deborah J. Warner (eds), Instruments of Science (New York/London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 115–116 and Horst Gundlach, ‘The Hipp Chronoscope As Totem Pole and the Formation of a New Tribe: Applied Psychology, Psychotechnics and Rationality’, Teorie & Modelli n.s. 1, 1 (1996): 65–85. Johan Jacob de Jaager, De physiologische tijd bij psychische prozessen (Utrecht: P. W. van de Weijer, 1865). See also Origins of Psychometry: Johan Jacob de Jaager, Student of F. C. Donders, on Reaction Time and Mental Processes [1865]. With a Complete Facsimile of the Original Dutch Text, ed. by Josef Brozek and Maarten S. Sibinga (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1970). Franciscus Donders, ‘Onderzoekingen over den duur der psychische processen’, unpublished manuscript, Utrecht University Museum, Donders Papers, Do 01.11, I, 9. Franciscus Donders, ‘Over de Snelheid van Psychische Processen’, Onderzoekingen, gedaan in het Physiologisch Laboratorium der Utrechtsche Hoogeschool (Tweede Reeks), 2 (1868–1869): 92–120, quote p. 105. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (London: MacMillan, 1911), 347–365. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: Essay On the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Sonnenschein, 1910). Hirsch, ‘Expériences chronoscopiques’, 103–104. Franciscus Donders, ‘Die Schnelligkeit psychischer Prozesse: Erster Artikel’, Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 9 (1868): 657–681, quote p. 664. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: ‘Is Everything Relative?’: Cinema and the Revolution of Knowledge Around 1900 Chapter Author(s): Harro Segeberg Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 5

‘Is Everything Relative?’: Cinema and the Revolution of Knowledge Around 1900 ‘Is Everything

Relative? ’

Harro Segeberg Introduction n 30 January 1931, Albert Einstein was a guest at the Hollywood premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Legend has it that when bystanders cheered the two media stars, Chaplin turned to Einstein and said, ‘The people applaud me because everyone understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you’.1 This is in keeping with Einstein’s comment in his notes that his theory of relativity was ‘of incomparable beauty, but only one colleague has really understood it’ (26 November 1915).2 If these remarks are taken as more than just witticisms, then it is hardly likely that the pioneers of cinema around 1900 were declared experts and avid supporters of modern physics. Nor would most of them have been seriously interested in such subjects as the dethroning of human consciousness by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, the radicalisation of Immanuel Kant’s epistemology by the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, or the vehement criticism of the idea of progress by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nevertheless, early cinema was part of an epoch in which, as Alexander Moszkowski put it in 1911, the ‘very basis of human thought’ was so radically shaken that ‘not a single deeply rooted conviction’ was able to withstand it.3 Given all this, my essay will not ask how the pioneers of early cinema reacted to these revolutions in knowledge, but rather how they acted within those cultural contexts (to which, in turn, they contributed). I do not want to claim direct or even causal connections between these epistemes and the emergence of cinema. Rather, the term ‘emergence’ (which often appears in connection with early cinema) is taken to imply that in media history, not only manifest technological and economic conditions need consideration, but also cultural configurations, which consist of autonomous, irreducible elements (e.g. epistemes and aesthetics). Such elements cannot be derived or interconnected on the principle of strict causality, which is precisely why they are ‘creative’, but they develop in complex co-evolution, rather than being merely contingent. This makes an exploration of potential connections between the scientific revolutions and the emergence of cinema as a new media technology around 1900 seem worthwhile.

O

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Hence, I will ask: did early cinema address contemporary audiences as Relativitätsmenschen to whom ‘everything is relative’, as the German popular discourse on relativity theory put it in the 1920s?4 Or did it not, from its inception, rather constitute a ‘new school of perception’, which presented a modern (re)construction of sensory experience, rather than its complete de(con)struction? If it can be convincingly argued that early cinema was to some extent related to what Einstein, Mach and other revolutionary thinkers around 1900 were trying to show in their own way, then one could advance the hypothesis that early cinema represented a decidedly relational and situated, but precisely calculated (rather than arbitrary) aesthetics, in which time and space were no longer categories that are prior to perception, but organisational forms of sensory experience that were created in individual acts of perception. Or, to put it differently and more concretely: Einstein’s ‘thought experiments’ in connection with his theory that time and space exist and vanish along with matter found a visual equivalent in film projection, where imaginary spacetimes appeared and disappeared along with their individual coordinates and objects. That this is not just an overstated metaphor can be illustrated with the example of a ‘cinematic thrill ride’ that the science fiction author H. G. Wells and the British cinema pioneer Robert W. Paul conceived in 1895 as a novel form of exhibition whereby the spectators have presented to their view scenes which are supposed to occur in the future or past, while they are given the sensation of voyaging upon a machine through time, and means for presenting these scenes simultaneously and in conjunction with the production of the sensation by the mechanism described below, or its equivalent. 5

As Terry Ramsaye points out, this concept almost seems to anticipate not only the cut-back and close-up but also the fade-in and fade-out, the overlap-dissolving of scene into each other and all of the supplemental tonal effects of sunshine, fog, rain, and moonlight and the like, now common to screen drama.6

This ‘cinematic time machine’ was not realised, and the aesthetic devices Ramsaye mentions were yet to come, but the virtual experiences that were technologically feasible and actually put into practice around 1900 were novel and engaging enough at the time. Rather than flee from the calculated shock of the Lumière locomotive, as legend claims,7 audiences sought to repeat such ‘safe thrills’, as the lasting success of the medium proves. Thus, cinema can be regarded as part of a new ‘culture of time and space’, as Stephen Kern has argued.8 But Kern mainly explores this hypothesis on the level of technology, not in detail on the level of the aesthetics specific to early cinema. Hence, I will advance my argument in three steps: Firstly, I will briefly look at what I have referred to as the contemporary ‘revolutions of knowledge’. Secondly, I will look at some examples of films that belong among what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault9 have called the ‘cinema of attractions’. Thirdly, I will give a short summary of the significance of the cinema of attractions within the contemporary epistemological context.

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The revolutions of knowledge around 1900 Kern argues that around 1900, the single and unchanging point of view of the nineteenth century gave way to the plural and relativistic outlook of the twentieth. More specifically, he states that ‘From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space’.10 One of the major revolutionary thinkers of this epoch was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), particularly by virtue of his criticism of the idea of ‘progress’. Nietzsche argued that the ‘unchangeable sequence of certain phenomena’ in nature was not based on ‘laws of cause and effect’, but on a ‘power struggle between two or more forces’.11 In such a power structure, according to Nietzsche, the dynamic energy of matter develops potentials for attraction or opposition, which only appear to be the result of intentional, calculated forces of pressure and impact. When such concepts were transferred to the realm of the human psyche, of which Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychoanalysis was an important example, then human development was no longer seen as guided by rational ‘causality’ or ‘free will’, but rather by hidden, unconscious forces. In particular, the assumption of the inherently destructive potential of such drives shocked contemporaries.12 In the natural sciences, such impositions on established beliefs were voiced, for instance, by Ernst Mach (1838–1919). His ‘empiriocriticism’ renounced the claim that science was able to make statements about reality independent of perception. Instead, science should concentrate on economically organizing sensory data with the help of hypotheses and pictures (in the sense of contemporary Bildtheorie [picture theory]). Hence, Mach’s ‘psychological physics’ left no room for the ‘pointless role’ that the ‘thingin-itself’ still played as a basic metaphysical postulate for the majority of his contemporaries.13 In other words, Mach argued that we never directly experience material objects, but only their sensory effects, i.e. we perceive ‘psychological objects’.14 Another example from physics is the discovery of non-linear, discontinuous ‘quantum processes’ by Max Planck (1858–1947), which undermined the prevalent concept of matter. In the 1920s, Werner Heisenberg’s (1901–1976) ‘uncertainty principle’ furthered the scepticism that scientific statements about nature can ‘present, but no longer represent phenomena’.15 To Niels Bohr (1885–1962), another important quantum physicist, is attributed the remark that ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature’.16 Last but not least, Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) theory of relativity not only became a major new paradigm of physics, but (somewhat later) also a popular phenomenon.17 Nevertheless, modern physicists’, and especially Einstein’s, aim still was the mathematical formulation of universally valid natural laws, but, as Einstein explained, this seemed to require a multiplicity of coordinate systems, which were related to each other in a ‘uniform translatory motion’.18 Hence, in spatial terms, statements pertained to ‘local’ conditions and were, in this sense, ‘relative’ – but not in a general epistemological sense, because the mathematical model and its solutions were well-

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defined and interpretable. In fact, Einstein never gave up on a ‘universal world formula’ that would reconcile apparently incommensurable theories and explain away the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, Einstein’s statements on time and space profoundly challenged (and even went far beyond) everyday perception. For instance, according to Einstein’s ‘relativity of simultaneity’, whether two events are simultaneous depends on the observer and thus his position in space. Therefore time ‘can only be determined for the place where the clock that measures it is situated’.19 According to Einstein, time and space are neither independent of each other nor of our perception, but inextricably linked in what he called ‘spacetime’. In mathematical terms, this is created by adding time as a ‘fourth dimension’ – in perceptual terms, it is almost beyond imagining. Contemporary (German) art attempted to melt down these disparate epistemes into a closed system with more or less causal connections, culminating in the diagnosis of a deep crisis. In Expressionism, for example, Einstein’s (strictly mathematical) theory of relativity, Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘will to power’ (in distorted form) and (pop) psychoanalysis merged to form a concept of modern man as ‘psychocentric’, driven only by will and impulse and unchecked by objective principles.20 Similarly, the Dadaist artist Hugo Ball reflected that around 1900, [t]he world revealed itself as a blind struggle of forces unleashed over and against each other. Man himself became matter, chance, conglomerate, brute, the insane product of abrupt and inadequately twitching thoughts. Man lost the privileged position that reason had reserved for him.21

If one wanted to escape such scepticism and pessimism, it became increasingly clear that the search should not be for a new, totalising worldview (Weltanschauung), but rather for aesthetics that were as open and flexible as possible. Hence, it seems fruitful to ask what role cinema played in this endeavour.

The aesthetics of the cinema of attractions If we look at the cinema of attractions from the perspective of the epistemes described above, the disparate subject matter of the programmes presented by the first cinematograph shows may at first seem to imply a rather heterogeneous, if not random aesthetics. As one contemporary put it in 1908, the programmes typically consisted of ‘more or less coloured feéries, comedies, fantasies, travel views and actualities’.22 Hence, to explore whether the cinema was linked to the revolutions in knowledge around 1900 in the more complex and consistent manner indicated above, it would be necessary to focus not on this variety of content, but rather on the structures of perception and representation commonly underlying it.

(i) Cinematic objects If one examines the documents describing the reception of the first Lumière shorts in Paris in this context, it is striking that they not only intensely reflected on the ‘new way of seeing’ that ‘moving pictures’ afforded, but also their ‘reality effect’. From today’s perspective, this sometimes comes across

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as rather naïve and naturalistic: ‘life-like portraits’,23 ‘life itself is caught in the act’, ‘through the addition of colours and a connection with the phonograph … an accurate and detailed rendering of life will be achieved’24 etc. However, at the same time, other contemporary documents link the new ‘photographic projections’ to ‘radiography and roentgen rays’ and thus the ‘magic tricks of science’.25 Both descriptions existed side-by-side, because contemporary observers knew, of course, and hence the documents often stressed, that not reality itself was perceived, but an ‘illusion of reality’,26 which was artificially produced by projected light. Even more paradoxically, the reality effect was achieved despite the fact that the images were not only silent, but mostly black and white. Furthermore, the effect of the visual was so strong that it virtually extended to the auditory: some spectators described ‘people living, walking, moving, chatting’.27 If we interpret this as saying that the silent cinematograph could almost make audiences hear what they were seeing (or wish that they were able to), then it is understandable that audiences longed for a ‘synthesis of the cinematograph, phonograph, cathode rays, kinetoscope, telescope, telegraph and all the other graphs that will come’ as soon as possible to be able to travel ‘from Paris to the moon’ with it.28 The significance of such perceptual effects and desires can be understood with Mach’s theories. Mach’s suggestion to no longer postulate the existence of stable identities of ourselves or the objects of the world entailed that the sensory impression of a seemingly unified object should be analytically broken down into the separate impressions of different senses.29 Mach claimed that such isolation and intensification of sensory impressions would lead to fairly accurate statements on the range and efficiency of perception.30 The cinematograph not only seemed to agree with this, but added to it by demonstrating that one sense may even affect another. Furthermore, Mach stressed that even though a purely visual impression may seem to correspond to a single object, on closer examination such an impression is in fact comprised of several different visual operations.31 Hence, when one proceeds to analytically separate such operations as well, one learns that, for example, gazes upwards vs. downwards, or far vs. near, are connected with different experiences of space.32 From this one could draw the conclusion that the cinematograph, which separates and isolates visual impressions, simulates, demonstrates and even enhances visual operations that are not conscious in everyday perception. Indeed, Mach himself, in a 1884 essay on the chronophotography ‘of a bullet in flight and other highly transitory phenomena’, noted that one was able to see much more detail with the aid of photography than through direct observation.33 Similarly, Walter Benjamin later stated in his famous essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’) that it was the camera with ‘the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions’ that had ‘isolated and made analyzable things’ unperceived by the ‘naked eye’.34 Hence, neither Mach’s ‘psychological physics’ nor the cinematograph questioned the existence of a world outside of ourselves that produced our

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sensations.35 But both science and the cinematograph insisted, each in its own way, that not the ‘thing-in-itself’, but ‘complexes of sensations’ form what we conceive as objects.36 Or, put differently: the ‘abridgments and delimitations as body, ego, matter, spirit, etc., which have been formed for special, practical purposes’37 do not represent reality as such, but ‘an ideal mental-economical’ version of it.38 One can conclude from this: in cinematographic projections, which many contemporary spectators experienced as ‘magical’, objects produced by light seemed real, because their sensory effects, precisely by virtue of their fragmentation and isolation, were much more intense than everyday perception. This was the new medium’s source of pleasure and fascination, and thus the early cinema of attractions might be called a cinema of sensory attractions.

(ii) Cinematic spacetimes In connection with his theory of relativity, Einstein advanced the hypothesis that matter could curve space; it found empirical support in 1919 by experiments conducted during an eclipse. Furthermore, he set out to find mathematical formulae for the effect of foreshortening in the perception of fast-moving objects, which was later called ‘relative seeing’.39 While Einstein was interested in effects that would appear at the speed of light, the cinematograph experimented with speeds that were achievable in everyday life. The experience of movement was, of course, the cinema’s central – and therefore much-discussed – innovation. Hence, it is noteworthy that contemporaries enthusiastically remarked in connection with the very first Skladanowski films, that their ‘street scenes, the fire alarm and the dispatch of the fire brigade, the military parade and the changing of the guards and the comical scenes from everyday life’ deserved particular applause because they made visible ‘in vivid truth to nature’40 what, as Benjamin would say, ‘had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception’.41 Or, a look at the Lumière catalogues, containing 1,000 titles, reveals that the large variety of short city views was based on the promise that the cinematograph would chronicle almost every form of movement in almost every big city’s life in panorama, long, full or medium shots.42 That the cinematograph was not only the origin of this coordinate system, but also determined the perception of movement within its space through various visual operations, demonstrated that it was not space in itself, but perspectives produced with technological means that created a particularly effective impression of movement. Mach pointed out that if the observer himself is in motion, this can change and/or intensify the sensual impression an object produces.43 The Lumière operators exploited this effect when they placed their cinematograph in trams, trains, elevated trains, montgolfières, ships or lifts. This can be illustrated with several examples from as early as 1896/7. For instance, for the film Panorama pris en chemin de fer, the cinematograph was situated in a suburban train and recorded the cityscapes that passed it, their contours becoming blurred in the foreground – a form of technologically produced ‘relative seeing’. In Panorama des rives de la Seine à Paris and Cologne, pont de

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bateaux, the cinematograph was sent on a boat trip. The operators combined different perspectives within a single take to simulate a panoramic pan, which gave the audience the impression of having experienced an overview of the entire city of Paris or Cologne in a mere 50 seconds. In Panorama pendant l‘ascension de la Tour Eiffel, the cinematograph takes the lift up the Eiffel tower. During filming, the cameraman stopped at least once to simulate a ‘montage’ of takes to create the impression of a complete ascension in 50 seconds. Hence we might say that, in this case, time defined the space that could be travelled in the cinematographic movement. This method of ‘cutting in the camera’ was used even more extensively in Spanish Bullfight, where the cameraman repeatedly stopped his recording of a Spanish bull fight to document the entire event with a single reel of film (about 17 metres in length, an equivalent of about 50 seconds). Furthermore, in Le mur démolé, a demolished wall re-erects itself when the film is run backwards. If one considers slow and fast motion, stop tricks and many other manipulations of time, there can be no doubt that early cinema, from the magic films of Georges Méliès to the short films of around 1905, abounded in experiments with technologically created spacetimes.44 That they exist and vanish along with their objects becomes clear when the spectator becomes aware of the ‘relativity’ of his or her own observational position. Maxim Gorky, in his famous review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhni-Nobgorod fair in 1896, noted that the illusion that the locomotive will crash into the audience faded the moment that the locomotive disappeared beyond the edge of the screen, whereupon a new and completely different image immediately appeared.45 Or, a reviewer of city films regarded serial views as a ‘veritable miracle of precision and simplicity’, because ‘a large group of people can witness about a minute of animated scenes’ and ‘their tempo can be freely varied’46 (probably referring to manipulation of projection speed). A photographic journal attests: ‘The audience was highly satisfied’.47 Again, one could summarise: it was not only the objects presented, but also time and space as the ‘frames’ of perception that become ‘relational’ in the cinema around 1900. But this does not mean that to the cinematograph ‘everything was relative’. On the contrary, it aimed to establish an aesthetics that was based on simple and precise calculation.

Summary I have to admit that it is by no means mandatory to compare the scientific theories of Mach or Einstein with the entertainment medium of cinema (historical simultaneity alone is not sufficient reason to assume that they were significantly related), nor is there only one way of doing this. Indeed, as Bernard M. Timberg shows in his discussion of the film theories of Henri Bergson, Hugo Münsterberg and Vachel Lindsay, in the context of dichotomies that were being debated around 1900, particularly vitalism vs. mechanism (and, connected with this, objective vs. subjective time, energy vs. matter, mind vs. body, free will vs. determinism), cinema was used to exemplify one pole as much as the other. Timberg goes so far as to argue that cinema functioned as a myth (in the sense of Claude Lévy-Strauss) that reconciled such opposites.48 But whatever the conclusion, taking the cue

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from Kern and what he has called ‘conceptual distance’ as an approach to cultural history, we might find something of value in exploring the connections between such disparate fields. As a technology, the cinematograph was not a major new invention, but rather the accumulation and combination of already known methods of recording and projecting. Together with the fact that it was at first integrated into established cultural contexts and practices (e.g. variety shows, fairs) this perhaps even furthered its acceptance as a ‘new school of perception’. This is not simply meant to refer to some specific, common themes of cinema and science (such as science fiction) or the use of the cinematograph in science and education, but more indirectly and generally to the aesthetics of early cinema. The heterogeneity and tempo of the early short films, representing diverse places, times and ‘realities’, imply a spectator who was no longer looking for stable identities of objects and human beings, but rather, in the manner of Mach and Einstein, shifted between different perspectives to take a position that was suited for the given situation and limited in duration. The fragmentation, isolation and recombination of visual impressions was not lamented as a restriction or burden by such a spectator, but rather understood and enjoyed as a mode of perception that was no longer based on homogeneity and continuity, but variety and change. Even though the cinematograph was rooted in the nineteenth century in many ways, it participated in and furthered the self-reflexive and entdinglicht aesthetics characteristic of the twentieth. This, I hope, will contribute to a further understanding of the reasons why the fascination between cinema, art and science was not only great, but also mutual. As Timberg states, ‘scientists, philosophers, and avant-garde writers at the turn of the century were engaged in a dialectic of ideas that set the stage for film’s emergence as a cultural force’.49 On the one hand, it is certainly justified to insist on the historical specificity of early cinema and to be wary of contextualisations that are based on a very general concept of modernity (or even postmodernity). But, on the other hand, it is at least as important to note that, around 1900, not only science or the artistic innovations of the avant-garde (upon which I have hardly touched50) brought about the media revolutions that were to profoundly shape the twentieth century, but that the entertainment industry also played an important role. My essay intended to once more argue for the recognition of a popular culture that, in its particular way, was not less advanced or significant than scientific or artistic revolutions. Acknowledgements: My thanks to Annemone Ligensa for numerous valuable suggestions on my essay.

Translation by Anna Wille and Annemone Ligensa

Notes 1. 2. 3.

See Ze’ev Rosenkranz, The Einstein Scrapbook (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 177. See Jürgen Renn, Albert Einstein – Ingenieur des Universums: Einsteins Leben und Werk im Kontext (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2005), 116. Alexander Moszkowski, ‘Das Relativitätsproblem’, Archiv für systematische Philosophie 17 (1911): 255–281, quote p. 255. Quoted from Carsten Könneker, ‘Auflösung der Natur – Auflösung der

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Geschichte’: Moderner Roman und NS-‘Weltanschauung’ im Zeichen der theoretischen Physik (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001), 9. See Könneker, ‘Auflösung der Natur – Auflösung der Geschichte’, 154–167. Quoted from Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986 [1926]), 155. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 157–158. See e.g. Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image 4, 1 (Spring 2004): 89–113. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1983]). See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Zum “Causalismus”’ [1985/86], in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 12 (München: dtv, 1980), 135, 92. See e.g. Hermann Glaser, ‘Im Land der Seelen: Sigmund Freud in Wien’, in Georg Fülberth (ed.), Fin de siècle: 100 Jahre Jahrhundertwende (Berlin: Elefanten, 1988), 64–67. See Ernst Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen, foreword by Gereon Wolters (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991 [1886]), 24, note. English translation: The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical To the Psychical, trans. by C.M. Williams, rev. and enl. ed. (Chicago, IL and London: Open Court, 1914 [1897]), 17. Whether Mach paved the way for relativity theory or whether he would have supported it (as Einstein believed) is in dispute. See e.g. Paul K. Feyerabend, ‘Machs Theorie der Forschung und ihre Beziehung zu Einstein’, 435–462, John Blackmore, ‘Mach über Atome und Relativität – neueste Forschungsergebnisse’, 463–483 and Gereon Wolters, ‘Atome und Relativität – Was meinte Mach?’, 484–507, in Rudolf Haller and Friedrich Stadler (eds), Ernst Mach – Werk und Wirkung (Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1988). On similar, current debates on the epistemology of science see e.g. Ulrike Bergermann et al., ‘Hot Stuff: Referentialität in der Wissenschaftsforschung’, in Harro Segeberg (ed.), Referenzen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Realen in den Medien (Marburg: Schüren, 2008), 51–78. specif. 54–55. Bernulf Kanitscheider, Von der mechanistischen Welt zum kreativen Universum: Zu einem neuen philosophischen Verständnis der Natur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), 108 (emphasis in original). Aage Petersen, ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19 (September 1963): 8–14, specif. p. 12. Einstein first used the phrase ‘relativity principle’ in the essay ‘Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper’ (1905), reprinted in Albert Einstein et al.: Das Relativitätsprinzip: Eine Sammlung von Abhandlungen, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1990 [1913]), 26–50. Presentations for a general audience are e.g. ‘Zur Methodik der theoretischen Physik’ (1930), ‘Was ist Relativitätstheorie?’ (1919) or ‘Über Relativitätstheorie’ (1921), all reprinted in Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, ed. by Carl Seelig (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980 [1934]); English translation: Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, Based on Mein Weltbild ed. by Carl Seelig and other sources, new trans. and revisions by Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1956). Albert Einstein, ‘My Theory’, The Times (28 November 1919); German version ‘Was ist Relativitätstheorie?’, in Mein Weltbild, 127–131. Ernst Peter Fischer, Einstein für die Westentasche (München and Zürich: Piper, 2005), 41. See also Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 18–19; 81; 134–135. See e.g. Paul Hatvani, ‘Versuch über den Expressionismus’, Die Aktion 7 (1917): 146–150 and Robert Müller, ‘Die Zeitrasse’, Der Anbruch 1, 1 (1917/18): 2 and 1, 2 (1917/1918): 2, both reprinted in Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (eds), Expressionismus: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910–1920 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), 38–42 and 135–138, respectively. Hugo Ball, ‘Kandinsky – Vortrag, gehalten in der Galerie Dada’ [1917], reprinted in Anz and Stark, Expressionismus, 124–126, quote p. 124. Georges Dureau, ‘Le cinéma et le theâtre’, Ciné-Journal (15 September 1908), quoted from François Jost, ‘Die Programmierung des Zuschauers’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 11 (2001): 35–48, quote pp. 35–36.

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23.

See Henri de Parville in Les Annales politiques et littéraires (26 April 1896). Quoted from Martina Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96 (Köln: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1996), 37. See Bulletin de la Société Francaise de Photographie 16 (1895). Quoted from Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96, 14. De Parville, in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, quoted from Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96, 37. Léo Claretie in Revue encyclopédie (28 March 1896), quoted from Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96, 35. See Le Progrès (14 June 1895). Quoted from Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96, 16. See Louis de Meurville in Le Gaulois (12 February 1896). Quoted from Müller, Cinématographe Lumière 1895/96, 30 (my emphasis). Ibid., 31. Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen, 84. Ibid., 26. Ibid, 84. Ibid., 93. Ernst Mach, ‘Photographie einer abgeschossenen Flintenkugel und anderer sehr. flüchtiger Erscheinungen’, Photographische Correspondenz 21, 287 (1884): 287–289. See also Marlene Schnelle-Schneyder, Photographie und Wahrnehmung am Beispiel der Bewegungsdarstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Jonas 1990), 144. Schnelle-Schneyder regards Mach’s experiments as a forerunner of later flash photography. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ [‘second’ (now ‘third’) version], in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Vol. I/2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 471–508, quote p. 498, 500. English translation available online at http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communication/benjamin.html (7 September 2008). Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen, 26. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 25; English translation 31. Ibid., 19; English translation, 24. See Alto Brachner et al. (eds), Abenteuer der Erkenntnis: Albert Einstein und die Physik des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Deutsches Museum, 2005), pp. 76–77. See Stettiner Zeitung (18 March 1897) and Pommersche Reichspost (18 March 1897). Quoted from Friedrich Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films, Vol. 1: Textband, 2nd exp. ed. (Hildesheim et al.: Olms, 1979 [1956]), 244. Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 498. See Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, Auguste et Louis Lumière: Les 1000 premiers films (Paris: P. Sers, 1990). On the techniques of the Lumière cameramen, see Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, Le cinéma des origins: Les frères Lumière et leurs operateurs (Seyssel: Ed. du Champ Vallon, 1985). See Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen, 195, 116. See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 29–30. On the history of slow and fast motion in film see Andreas Becker, Perspektiven einer anderen Natur: Zur Geschichte und Theorie der filmischen Zeitraffung und Zeitdehnung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004). English translation: Maxim Gorky, ‘Review of Lumière Program, 4 July 1896’, in Jay Leyda (ed.), Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 407–408. ‘Der Kinematograph der Herren August [sic] und Louis Lumière’, Allgemeine PhotographenZeitung 3 (1896/97): 16–21, quote pp. 17, 21. Photographische Correspondenz 427 (1896): 196. Bernard M. Timberg, ‘E=mc2 and the Birth of Film’, Texas Studies In Literature and Language 22, 2 (Summer 1980): 263–285. Timberg, ‘E=mc2 and the Birth of Film’, 263. On science and the visual arts around 1900 see e.g. William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles In the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). On literature and technology see e.g. Harro Segeberg, Literatur im technischen Zeitalter: Von der Frühzeit der deutschen Aufklärung bis zum Beginn des ersten Weltkriegs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997).

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer: Hugo Münsterberg’s Theories of Perception, Psychotechnics and Cinema Chapter Author(s): Jörg Schweinitz Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.9 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 6

The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer: Hugo Münsterberg’s Theories of Perception, Psychotechnics and Cinema The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer

Jörg Schweinitz ugo Münsterberg’s book The Photoplay (1915/16) is justly regarded as the first major film theory by an academic. On first reading, one is struck by two interwoven, but contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, we encounter an advanced, modern understanding of the psychology of perception and film viewing, but on the other hand, we find a rather traditional concept of art, drawing upon ideas of nineteenth century idealist aesthetics. This inherent contradiction is heightened by the fact that as a psychologist Münsterberg not only worked in the field of perception, but was also one of the founders of applied psychology, specifically of so-called Psychotechnik (‘psychotechnics’). He was full of optimism about the logic of the mechanised modern world and wanted to provide psychological services for the capitalist demands of his time. This background should be kept in mind when reading The Photoplay. Hence, in the following analysis, I will look into these three characteristic features – psychology of perception, psychotechnics and idealist aesthetics – of Münsterberg’s theory and their interrelations, in order to explore the basis for his understanding of contemporary media change and perception. I will argue that his rather conservative stance regarding aesthetics in the specific combination with the two other aspects was not merely reactionary. In the cultural upheaval around 1900, where continuity and discontinuity reigned simultaneously, he was a Versöhnungsgestalt (‘a figure of reconciliation’), who emphasised continuity.1 In his psychological theory of perception, from the impression of movement to comprehending images, Münsterberg highlights the mental activity of the perceiving subject:

H

But psychologically the meaning is ours. In learning the language, we have learned to add associations and reactions of our own to the sounds which we

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE perceive. It is not different with the optical perceptions. The best does not come from without.2

This pre-semiotic idea is characteristic of Münsterberg, but extraordinary for a 1916 text on the subject of ‘reading’ images. However, Münsterberg did not conceive of this activity as spontaneous and independent, but as induced and controlled by film. This activity is to be understood as a mechanism that is ultimately reactive and whose effects unfold involuntarily (a point that is repeatedly and strongly emphasised). In other words, Münsterberg’s understanding of activity does not imply any sovereignty of the spectator over the perceptual object. There is no modernistic notion of ‘interactivity’ between film and spectator (as James Monaco has claimed).3 On the contrary, Münsterberg insisted that this activity was an indication of the power cinema exercised over its audience. In his view, the result of such activity was that the viewer was pulled even more strongly into a diegesis. Everything is geared to maximise immersion, to facilitate the entry into an imaginary space, the closed world of the film. Thus, Münsterberg was the first to point out that cinema forestalls the spectator’s mental activities and inscribes them into the film. Its specific techniques – such as close-ups, flash back/flash forward (which Münsterberg calls ‘cut back’ and ‘cut forward’), distinctive camera movements, striking montage rhythms or unusual combinations of shots – trigger and guide mental functions – such as the focus of attention, memory and imagination – as well as activate emotional response. In Münsterberg’s view, spectators can hardly avoid reacting to filmic forms and involuntarily experiencing their effects.4 For example, when confronted with a close up, we have to focus on the enlarged detail; when watching a shot taken with a spinning camera, vertigo is (re-)produced in a process of somatic empathy. Hence, the spectator’s consciousness is encircled and an almost hypnotic immersion is achieved. Münsterberg thus established a concept of intense immersive experience that accorded with contemporary changes in filmic narration and its corresponding effects. Fittingly, Vachel Lindsay observed in 1917 that Münsterberg ‘unintentionally wrote a guide-book to the newest photoplay experiment, Intolerance’5 (a film released the same year, but months after The Photoplay had been published). Even half a century later, Münsterberg’s concept of immersion was – implicitly – continued in the apparatus theory inspired by Jean-Louis Baudry.6 The fact that Münsterberg’s psychological arguments were both timely and prescient may, on first glance, appear to contradict his second tendency, i.e. his affinity to idealist aesthetics. How can a theory based on such a traditional paradigm as idealist aesthetics, which has its roots in the nineteenth, even partly in the eighteenth century, point forward? How can such a theory do justice to contemporary cinema as a product of modernity, of profound change in media and culture? These questions become all the more pressing, when we consider the fact that Münsterberg’s aesthetic premises were not specifically developed with film in mind, but long before in his more general theory on values.7 Münsterberg, the German-American psychologist and philosopher who had been brought to Harvard by the precursor of pragmatism, William

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James, was committed to German idealism. Münsterberg explicitly stated this, for example, as early as 1906 in his programmatic lecture at Yale University that – in keeping with his attempts at ‘reconciliation’ – was entitled Science and Idealism.8 Therein he turned against pragmatism which ‘spreads among our academic youth like a contagious disease’9 and pleaded instead for the necessity to ‘overcome the relativity of every historical point of view’10 by committing to ‘absolute ideals’11 and eternal values. For Münsterberg, it was settled ‘that our scientific time ought to ask once more: Is there anything in this world which is really valuable in itself, anything which justifies the idealistic belief in absolute values?’12 He answered this rhetorical question by stating that the assumption of absolute values outside the realm of human subjectivity and historical relativity was a logical exigency: If there exist no absolute values, no one of us can justify his preferences13 … [T]he objective world must have a will of its own and its will must force itself upon me, and must become my own desire.14

According to Münsterberg, the aims of ‘self-fulfillment’ and ‘selfrealization’15 belong to the eternally valid principles at work in the ‘objective world’, and in his thoughts on aesthetics, he particularly points out the idea of complete satisfaction through ‘the self-fulfillment of art’.16 Münsterberg characterises this understanding of art, these ideas that we typically associate with the pre-modern art of the nineteenth century, by two main features. Firstly, he refers to the notion of the harmonious totality of a work of art, an ideal order complete onto itself, in which each element has its justification within the overall structure. A work of art is independent of ‘the amusement which tickles my senses’,17 rather following an eternal principle: Those tones [of a melody] seek one another. They have life of their own, complete in itself. We do not want to change it. Our mind simply echoes their desires and their satisfaction. We feel with them and are happy in their ultimate agreement without which no musical melody would be beautiful.18

Münsterberg expects the same principle of cinematic art. At the same time, the second feature that is constitutive for his aesthetics is already hinted at: the remoteness of the inner world of a work of art, separated from the spectator’s everyday experience, detached from the sphere of practical interests: The genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely changed that they are separated from all possible reality, isolated from all connections and made complete in themselves.19 ... The work of art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is, in perfect isolation.20

This ‘aesthetics of isolation’ echoes Immanuel Kant’s interesseloses Wohlgefallen (‘disinterested pleasure’).21 To Münsterberg, cinema as a new media technology seemed particularly suited for and devoted to realising art’s eternal demand to materialise in new forms, precisely due to its immersive potential. Moreover, film, via camera and editing, had the ability to not only intensely engage with, but also transform objects and events. Filmic techniques inscribe an extraordinary subjectivity into the medium – in

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Münsterberg’s words: the ‘play of the mind’ – and thus distinguish the filmic from the profilmic. In sum, he attested that film was an entirely new esthetic development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind.22

Undoubtedly, Münsterberg wanted to elevate film to the sphere of respectable art. At first glance, this aim seems paradoxical: avowing himself to cinema, which was the contemporary epitome of modernity, while at the same time describing it as a further form of the eternal principles of art; and while these principles were derived from idealist aesthetics, he also put modern psychology to the service of this argument. This line of argument has its strong points, despite the fact that it understates the cultural rupture caused by the new medium. Firstly, the attempt to ennoble cinema by aligning it with high art and its established values was also an aim of the film industry itself, e.g. through filmic adaptations of noted literary works, such as Cabiria (1914), The Birth of a Nation (1915) and German Autorenfilme, and Münsterberg, who kept abreast of current developments, was fully aware of this. Furthermore, it remained a concern of many later film theories. For example, Rudolf Arnheim’s Film als Kunst fifteen years later followed in line with this tradition, in which Arnheim argued that film worked with new techniques, but that they could be based on aesthetic principles known from established arts.23 Secondly, the reference to idealist aesthetics furthered the theoretical interest in the immersive experience that the new medium provided, particularly the narrative cinema of the 1910s, since it was precisely this new form of experience that fit the idealist concept of aesthetic perception. Finally, Münsterberg on the basis of his aesthetic premises described the immersive experience more realistically than many later ‘apparatus theories’. For him, total immersion is impossible, since aesthetic immersion never completely obliterates the essential difference between real experience and mediated experience. Hence, for the aesthetic idealist, aesthetic experience is constituted by the spectator’s full awareness that he or she is entering a fictional non-reality. In this view, art should never transgress into complete illusion. German academic aesthetics around 1900 appreciated (sometimes with reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) the oscillating state between the immersive experience of an artwork’s content and the sovereign gaze on its form. As Münsterberg puts it: ‘The fundamental condition of art, therefore, is that we shall be distinctly conscious of the unreality of the artistic production’.24 In contrast to most contemporary theorists, Münsterberg believed that cinema was potentially capable of creating such an aesthetic experience.25 Consequently, and again similar to Arnheim, he argued against enhancing film’s reality effect with speech and sound (but he was not against the use of music, due to its abstractness). Just like the other arts self-reflexively display their categorical distinction from reality with their specific means, such as frames around paintings or pedestals for sculptures,26 so cinema should also abstain from masking this distinction and not attempt to create a complete illusion. It is remarkable that none of Münsterberg’s German colleagues, most

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of whom shared the same basic theories and values, managed to transfer their aesthetics to the new medium – on the contrary, they stressed the cultural rupture that cinema brought about and mostly regarded it as negative.27 They interpreted cinema as a source of a disordered, incessant flood of stimuli, as a medium of a new, dynamic urban perception; the visual, popular medium stood for the end of the ‘Gutenberg age’. German intellectuals in the 1910s cemented this rupture by the – in their eyes – irreconcilable difference between cinema and ‘true art’. Popular film was regarded as the very opposite of everything that was expected from the established arts. While the film industry aspired to align itself with traditional art, not only conservative intellectuals, but also avant-garde artists stressed cinema’s difference from it – and they valued it precisely for this reason. For example, Kurt Pinthus declared in the foreword of Kinobuch, a collection of expressionist film treatments that he edited in 1913/14: Thus, we younger poets and authors, who believe that elevating life (and perhaps also enjoying art) means being shaken to the core, arousing what is most human as well as metaphysical, cannot fight cinema (even though it is an enemy of high art). It enthrals the masses with movement. It excites us with things we have never seen before.28

A fruitful aspect of the German discourse was that it highlighted discontinuity and thus the cultural innovation and rupture that cinema represented. In this regard, the avant-garde’s arguments were sometimes more original than Münsterberg’s concept of continuity. On the other hand, his was the more realistic and optimistic view. His position held the benefit that it enabled him to acknowledge new phenomena and developments as realisations of widely shared and highly regarded values. Hence, he was disposed to analyse the new immersive quality and the narrative techniques of cinema in the 1910s in much more detail. Nevertheless, Münsterberg’s emphasis on continuity also had its drawbacks and produced tensions within his own work, particularly with a realistic and pragmatic view of media developments. This tension becomes particularly visible when studying the relationship between Münsterberg’s aesthetic idealism and his psychotechnics. Today, Münsterberg is mostly remembered as one of the founders of applied psychology (in Germany and the USA), rather than in connection with an idealist philosophy of values. He explicitly called the field of applied psychology in which he worked Psychotechnik (‘psychotechnics’). In his view, psychotechnics is not identical to applied psychology, but a sub-area of it, and it deals with the development of practical advice for everyday modern life on the basis of psychological knowledge. Whereas cultural psychology was devoted to the interpretation of mostly past psycho-social processes, psychotechnics applied and developed psychological knowledge to design current and future services for everyday life according to Kulturaufgaben (‘cultural demands’).29 The range of psychotechnical fields of activity included psychiatry, pedagogics, criminology, politics, business, advertising and industrial psychology. For example, Münsterberg developed psychological principles for the establishment of truth in trials (thus he is called the father of the concept of the lie detector). He drafted assessment tests for vocational selection,

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such as of switchboard operators at American Bell or drivers in New York’s public traffic. The latter is particularly interesting in our context, because it involved a driving simulator for measuring the reaction time of the candidates that was based on a film apparatus.30 As diverse as these areas were, psychotechnics aimed to provide them all with means to fulfil required tasks, based on knowledge that, in Münsterberg’s view, could not be acquired spontaneously. It had to be gained through psychological research, often via experiments. Since a science that fulfilled practical tasks was generally called a ‘technical science’, Münsterberg regarded the term psychotechnics as appropriate: ‘It may be considered as psychotechnics, since we must recognize any science as technical if it teaches us to apply theoretical knowledge for the furtherance of human purposes’.31 How strongly Münsterberg’s way of thinking was linked to contemporary industrial technologisation and the technologically supported pursuit of efficiency is expressed in his remark that psychotechnics stood in the same relationship to psychology as engineering to physics. In his book Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), he suggested that industry should employ groups of qualified psychotechnicians as ‘psychological engineers’32 to increase efficiency: Some of these psychological engineers would devote themselves to the problems of vocational selection and appointment; others would specialize on questions of advertisement and display and propaganda; a third group on problems of fatigue, efficiency, and recreation; a fourth group on the psychological demands for the arrangements of the machines; and every day would give rise to new divisions.33

The analogy between Münsterberg’s ‘psychological engineers’ and ‘efficiency engineers’, who were at the time employed in the US industry (including the film industry)34 in the wake of Taylorism, is striking. In fact, he was thinking of nothing less than psychological efficiency engineers. One of these ‘new divisions’ would be taking care of the presentation of goods. But in this context, it is characteristic of Münsterberg as an idealist philosopher that he stressed the distinction between the realm of the beautiful (das Schöne), which served art, and the sensuously pleasant (das sinnlich Angenehme), which served economics: If the display is to serve economic interests, every line and every curve, every form and every colour must be subordinated to the task of leading to a practical resolution, and to an action [to sell the product], and yet this is exactly the opposite of the meaning of art. Art must inhibit action, if it is perfect. ... The aesthetic forms are adjusted to the main aesthetic aim, the inhibition of practical desires. The display must be pleasant, tasteful, harmonious, and suggestive, but should not be beautiful, if it is to fulfill its purpose in the fullest sense.35

William Stern, who originally coined the term Psychotechnik, labelled this basic dualism as Münsterberg’s ‘two-world theory’.36 It reflects Münsterberg’s contradictory doubling as psychotechnician and idealist. As Münsterberg wrote in Psychology and Industrial Efficiency: We must understand that every technical science says only: you must make use of this means, if you wish to reach this or that particular end. But no technical science can decide within its limits whether the end itself is really a desirable one.37

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Whether purposes ‘are desirable or not is a question which does not concern the technical scientist, but which must be considered from ... other points of view’.38 According to Münsterberg, the philosophy of values and aesthetic theory can give answers regarding cultural desirability. Conversely, psychotechnics can offer assistance to an artist who tries to ‘elicit an effect on the mind of the listener or spectator, in order to evoke certain aesthetic emotions’.39 Hence, one can read central thoughts of Münsterberg’s film theory as clearly emanating from a psychotechnical perspective. Nonetheless, his main interest lay in cinema as art and not as amusement that ‘tickles the senses’,40 so he abstracted his concept of film from its everyday existence as a commodity of mass entertainment. The two perspectives, idealist aesthetics and psychotechnics, modified each other: on the one hand, the idealist concept of beauty, Kant’s ‘disinterested pleasure’, was transformed into an effect that was efficiently realisable only by means of psychotechnics; on the other hand, the idealist understanding of art limited the potential application of psychotechnical principles to film. The latter restriction becomes particularly clear when comparing Münsterberg’s thoughts on the functioning of ‘certain standard forms of communication’41 in business life. Like Frederick Winslow Taylor or Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Münsterberg explained the necessity of his explorations as follows: ‘The single individual can never find the ideal form of motion and the ideal process by mere instinct. A systematic investigation is needed to determine the way to the greatest saving of energy’.42 However, while Taylor and Gilbreth were concerned with physical working processes, which were to be researched, developed and implemented according to the principles of rationalisation and efficiency, Münsterberg was concerned with the psychological efficiency of business communication. Hence, he regretted that, for example, in sales talk or advertising people mostly acted on spontaneous impulses, and that such communication was not yet touched by contemporary processes of mechanisation. In his view, such unstandardised communication was as outdated as craftsman’s work in relation to factory products.43 Such a statement was typical of Münsterberg. His solution, which he claimed was an obvious one, was to transfer the concept of scientifically optimised standardisation of working processes to the sphere of communication: ‘As soon as the accurate form for a suggestion or argument is found, it needs to be secured and then practised, if both psychological economy and effectiveness are to be achieved’.44 Münsterberg described the profit of using standardised phrases under four aspects.45 Firstly, we gain psychological economy when using the accurate argumentative form: the speaker will experience a positive effect of automation, since the application of standardised phrases requires less effort and thus provides mental relief. Secondly, by using the appropriate suggestive form, effectiveness is increased, because the phrase is optimally adapted to the addressee. Thirdly, on the customer’s side, a training and recognition effect will be achieved, which creates familiarity; the more frequent the repetition, the better its retention and thus the greater its effect. Fourthly, this finds its completion in the pleasure experienced in repetition as such.

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This pleasure is based on the warm feeling elicited by being familiar with something, a positive emotion: ‘The pure value of memorising is all the more important … because, according to a well-known psychological law, the pleasure of repetition as such is easily transferred onto the recognised object’.46 Interestingly, these four aspects of Münsterberg’s business psychology later periodically re-emerge in the thinking of film theorists, whenever they explore the reasons of standardisation in filmic narration and the phenomena of serials and genres.47 Münsterberg, without referring to film in this context, indirectly prefigured the repertoire of concepts and arguments in these areas. Indeed, a look at cinema around 1916 reveals that genres, serials and all kinds of visual and narrative stereotypes were already firmly established.48 Furthermore, with the pleasure of repetition, Münsterberg addressed a subject that he also investigated in the context of his experimental aesthetics of form, obsessed with quantification, in the vein of psychotechnical service for the arts. In his laboratory, he researched ‘the question of how much liking is owed to the repetition of forms and the conditions under which true pleasure can still be achieved by only partial repetition’.49 Taking all this into account, we might assume that Münsterberg’s interest in the standardisation of communication would also have entered into his theory of film, especially since he exhibited a sense of the practical demands of cinema and even actively collaborated with the film industry.50 For example, he attributed the lack of interest in newsreels among contemporary US film producers to the fact that ‘the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays’.51 While Adorno, decades later, attributed the schematisation he diagnosed in the ‘culture industry’ (including Hollywood’s film industry) to psychotechnics (which for him was a term with purely negative connotations),52 Münsterberg, the dedicated psychotechnician, who was very interested in the standardisation of forms, stereotypes and the pleasure of repetition in general, did not address such issues in his study on film. The reason for this paradoxical neglect may once again be found in Münsterberg’s idealist aesthetics, which left no space for economic contemplations. Hence, in the realm of art, Münsterberg downplayed modern standardisation of form and instead championed the continuity of eternal values. Here we encounter the lapses into inconsistency of which Münsterberg’s Harvard colleague, the pragmatist John Dewey, wrote in 1910, when reviewing The Eternal Values. Dewey claimed that such blind spots could be found in any philosophy ‘that professes Ultimates, Absolutes, and Eternals’.53 Hence, at certain critical points of Münsterberg’s theory, the idealist dominated and restricted the psychotechnician.

Notes 1.

On Münsterberg and his general attempt to reconcile traditional and modern values see e.g. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980); on vitalism vs. mechanism in his film theory in particular see e.g. Bernard M. Timberg, ‘E=mc2 and the Birth of Film’,

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22, 2 (Summer 1980): 263–285. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York and London: Appleton, 1916), 73. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Language, History, Theory, 3rd edn (New York et al.: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1977]), 394. See Münsterberg, The Photoplay, Chapter 4: ‘Attention’, 72–91. Vachel Lindsay, ‘Photoplay Progress’, The New Republic 10, 120 (17 February 1917): 76–77, quote p. 77. See Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, 302–312 and ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches To the Impression of Reality In Cinema’, 690–707, both in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Filmtheory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1970]); see also Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds) The Cinematic Apparatus (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Hugo Münsterberg, Philosophie der Werte: Grundzüge einer Weltanschauung (Leipzig: Barth, 1908); English version The Eternal Values (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1909). Hugo Münsterberg, Science and Idealism (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1906). To ‘cement the friendship’ (p. v) between Harvard and Yale University Yale invited some professors of Harvard University to speak at Yale every winter. Ibid, 29. Ibid, 20. Ibid, 71. Ibid, 6–7. Ibid, 20. Ibid, 32. Ibid, 62. Ibid, 45. Ibid, 31. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 166–167. Ibid, 165. Ibid, 150. Münsterberg was closely connected to the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism, which was founded by Wilhelm Windelband and continued in Münsterberg’s generation by Heinrich Rickert. Max Weber, a friend of Münsterberg’s, was also rooted in this philosophical tradition. Ibid, 233. See Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932), 11. English translation: Film As Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957). Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 161 (my emphasis). See Jörg Schweinitz, ‘Psychotechnik, idealistische Ästhetik und der Film als mental strukturierter Wahrnehmungsraum: Die Filmtheorie von Hugo Münsterberg’, in Hugo Münsterberg, Das Lichtspiel: Eine Psychologische Studie und andere Schriften zum Kino, ed. by Jörg Schweinitz (Wien: Synema, 1996), 21–24. See Hugo Münsterberg, ‘Why We Go To the Movies’ [1915], reprinted in Hugo Münsterberg On Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. by Allan Langdale (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 171–190. For a collection of examples, see e.g. Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992). Kurt Pinthus, ‘Einleitung: Das Kinostück’, in Kurt Pinthus (ed.) Das Kinobuch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983 [1914]), 24. See Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914), 6. See ‘Der Kinematograph als Prüfstein für Chauffeure’, Lichtbildbühne 5, 38 (21 September 1912): 38–39. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1913), 17. Ibid, 307.

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33. 34.

Ibid. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thomson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 85–153. Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 273. William Stern, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: in memoriam’, Journal of Applied Psychology 1, 2 (June 1917): 186–188. Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 17. Ibid, 17–18. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, 6. Münsterberg, Science and Idealism, 31. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, 435. Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 297–298. See Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, 435. Ibid. See ibid., 423–424. Ibid, 423. To name just one example: Peter Bächlin Der Film als Ware (Frankfurt am Main: Athäneum Fischer, 1975 [1947]). See Jörg Schweinitz, Film und Stereotyp: Eine Herausforderung für das Kino und die Filmtheorie – Zur Geschichte eines Mediendiskurses (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), specif. 127–137. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, 650. See also Hugo Münsterberg (ed.) Harvard Psychological Studies, Vol. 2 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906), specif. 31–39 und 193–268. For example, in June 1915, Münsterberg visited the Vitagraph studios for research. The film company, who was very proud of this attention, arranged a photo session to have the Harvard mandarin’s picture taken with their star Anita Stewart. Later, Münsterberg worked for Paramount as an advisor, on an installment of the popular science series Paramount Pictographs that dealt with psychological tests. See Jörg Schweinitz, ‘Psychotechnik, idealistische Ästhetik und der Film als mental strukturierter Wahrnehmungsraum’, 13–14. Münsterberg, Science and Idealism, 10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente’ [1947], reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 7–298, specif. p. 187. English translation available online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm: ‘Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology [‘Technik zur Psychotechnik’], into a procedure for manipulating men.’ John Dewey, ‘Hugo Münsterberg, The Eternal Values [Review]’, Philosophical Review 19 (1910): 188–192, quote p. 190.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany Chapter Author(s): Scott Curtis Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 7

Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany Between Observation and Spectatorship

Scott Curtis etween 1895 and 1918, motion pictures endured a difficult and very public transition between their good standing as a scientific tool and their growing notoriety as an instrument of mass culture. This is not to imply, however, that motion pictures during this time were either one or the other; from the very beginning, film has been many things to many people, from scientists to educators to entrepreneurs. Film continued to be a manifold object and experience even after it was associated primarily with entertainment. But during the early period, and particularly in Germany, there was a strong contrast between the enthusiasm for motion pictures as a scientific or pedagogical tool and the simultaneous condemnation of its incarnation in mass culture. To a certain extent, this is unsurprising: the German debates about cinema follow more or less the same pattern that we can find in nearly all countries at this time. There seems to be no reason to think that the German discussions in the scientific community and those in the public sphere are exceptional or even related. But if we look closely, we find that the scientific and public debates about cinema are indeed related: the reasons scientists and physicians accept film as a scientific instrument are rooted in the same logic that prompts them and others to reject cinema’s public manifestation. This logic concerns, to put it too simply, the perceived difference between observation and spectatorship. That is, the participants in both discussions seem to agree on the advantages and dangers of the moving image, but many of these advantages and dangers appear to stem from different ways of viewing the image. This essay will explore this difference by comparing the German-language discussion of motion pictures as a medical research tool with the debates about cinema’s threat to public health. To illustrate this divide, we need only look to some representative quotations. The first is from a 1919 survey of the use of motion pictures in medicine:

B

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE [Micro-cinematography] captures [fixiert] what a scholar has witnessed and researched in his quiet laboratory, so that he can then demonstrate his collected research to a larger group, be it at a conference, before a medical society, or in an auditorium of students. But micro-cinematography not only documents movement processes, it is also a helpful tool for research itself. It captures every phase of movement and therefore provides the researcher the opportunity to examine each image at length and to study the temporal and spatial relationships of the movements carefully and leisurely. Micro-cinematography does not require hasty progress, as living movement often does; it allows the scholar the time he needs to grasp all worthwhile detail. He can use each image entirely at his discretion.1

Compressed in this paragraph are most of the advantages typically cited in the early literature on the scientific application of motion picture technology. To point them out briefly: first, the cinematic image, like the magic lantern slide, is projectable, and thus can be shared among colleagues and students. This makes it ideal for education, which requires an efficient dissemination of information, but also for rhetorical purposes: the scientific film, like all scientific illustration, exists to present evidence meant to persuade others. The size and spectacle of the cinematic image can have a powerful persuasive effect in itself, but part of that power comes from the photographic character of the image. This speaks to the second advantage, its ability to ‘capture’ or to document moving phenomena. It is worth noting that this documentary power draws not only from the indexical quality of the image – its temporal and physical relation to the object photographed – but also from the detail of the photographic image, which offers in its own way a description of the object, a more comprehensive and immediate enunciation of the phenomena than is possible in the time it takes to describe it in words. This rich ‘description’, that is, the texture of the image encourages the researcher to look for evidential patterns. The detail of the image becomes the basis for both the documentary function of the photograph and the mode in which it is appropriated. In other words, the detail and texture of the photographic image provide the ground for a particular kind of observation, one that appreciates the immediacy of the image, but takes its time to contemplate the phenomena the image depicts. This leads to the third advantage: the ability to control the rate of movement. Note that the author quoted above, Dr. Martin Weiser, emphasises the slow pace of scientific study, the almost contemplative stance before the image: ‘in his quiet laboratory ... to examine at length ... carefully and leisurely ... the time he needs’. How the researcher can take this stance toward the moving image, we will soon see. But for now, this testimonial will stand in contrast to other descriptions of cinema common in the medical community – those that decried cinema as a threat to public health. Alongside the enthusiasm for the scientific potential of motion pictures there existed another discourse that was not so enthusiastic, often including the same participants – the medical community was extremely vocal in its denunciation of cinema. Between 1904 and 1914, German reformers and physicians consistently viewed the new medium of motion pictures with suspicion. Not only did they protest against dank, unventilated storefront-cinemas, but physicians also felt that the

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motion pictures themselves presented a serious danger to public safety. The sensational subject matter of many films threatened to corrupt the taste of the nation. But this content was delivered by a particularly insidious form, as this doctor attests: The effect of this sensational subject matter is heightened by the temporal concentration of events. The cinema concentrates the sensations of a detective story or thick trashy novel into 10 or 15 minutes. The resulting psychological effect is thus completely different. When reading, we can pause at will, critically reflect on the text, relieve ourselves of the internal pressure through contemplation, digest the scary parts. In the cinema, such leisurely [gemütlich] excitation of the passions is intensified and multiplied by the rapid succession of vivid images that passes before our eyes. There is no time to reflect or to free oneself, no time to adjust the soul. These spine-chilling and grotesque ‘dramas’ distress the nervous systems of young and sensitive persons to the point of suffering, but without providing the spectator any of the means with which he usually defends himself against attacks on his nervous system: quiet contemplation, intellectual assimilation, and sober criticism are not possible.2

The contrast with the previous quotation is instructive. If cinema provides the researcher ‘the opportunity to examine each image at length and to study the temporal and spatial relationships of the movements carefully and leisurely’, it does not afford the average cinema-goer that same luxury – ‘quiet contemplation, intellectual assimilation, and sober criticism are not possible’. The difference, of course, is cinema’s temporal rush, its insistent and impatient movement forward, which can have a lulling, even hypnotic effect. Those without sufficient training, education, or Bildung (‘cultivation’) might be susceptible to cinema’s lurid charms. But the Gebildete, the educated, professional class, apparently has the tools to manage this temporal onslaught. What are these ‘tools’? Most obviously, researchers, unlike the average cinema-going audience, are in control of the image and its projection – they can literally manipulate their films however they please. But this ability to control the rate of projection goes hand-in-hand with a mode of viewing that is very much part of a nineteenth-century researcher’s training and identity. The next section describes the connection between experimentation, observation, and medical research in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany.

Observation and experiment Nearly from the beginning, motion pictures were enlisted as an aid to medical diagnosis and education. German doctors, in particular, were captivated by the potential of the cinematic image. For example, between 1900 and 1920, Germans wrote far more and far more frequently about medical cinematography than their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the rest of the world.3 One could say that Germans wrote more about everything, but Germany’s leadership in certain specialties that made extensive use of cinematography, notably radiology and neurology, helps validate this claim.4 Of course, the number of journal articles praising cinema’s potential as a new medical technology should not imply that the general practitioner put it to use on a daily basis. On the contrary, given the expense, skill, and patience required to operate a motion

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picture camera – much less one adapted for medical use – the average doctor never came in contact with one or even considered the possibility. During this period, the medical application of cinema remained confined primarily to research laboratories and medical school lecture halls, with a few privileged physicians leading the way. Still, German researchers enthusiastically applied motion pictures to a range of specialties, from ophthalmology to gynecology.5 Why would motion pictures be so attractive to the medical researcher? At one level, the answer appears rather obvious. After all, photography’s growing legitimacy as a scientific document in the late nineteenth century – along with changes in photographic and printing technologies – helped to make photography a convenient, even necessary choice for medical illustration.6 In addition, medical schools had been using magic lantern slides and other projection technologies with increasing frequency during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 In this light, motion pictures appear on the scene as merely one more device in the scientific/pedagogical toolbox; in fact, most medical researchers saw motion pictures as merely an extension of series photography, especially during its early applications. Given all this there was no good reason not to use motion pictures. That answer, however, ignores the specificity of the medium and of the discipline. There are other reasons relating to specific characteristics of motion pictures and to the specific needs of the discipline of medicine at the time. For example, over the course of the nineteenth century, western medicine had steadily shifted its emphasis from a study of the form and structure of the human body – usually associated with the fields of anatomy and pathology – to a study of function associated with the rise of physiology and laboratory medicine. This emphasis on function called for devices that could record change over time, such as Marey’s kymograph or his chronophotographs – eventually motion pictures would be very useful for this task. But this shift toward function was also accompanied by a new appreciation for the role of experiment in medicine. Pushed by successes in laboratory sciences such as chemistry and physics, and led by such prominent researchers as Claude Bernard, western medicine began to embrace scientific method and experiment.8 Up to this point, from Hippocrates of antiquity to Bichat in the early nineteenth century, observation had been the primary model for medicine; pathological anatomy and dissection had charted the primary advances in the field. With Bernard and others leading the way, researchers saw the advantages of actively manipulating functions in order to understand the secrets of the body. Not everyone agreed with this approach, of course. August Comte and Rudolph Virchow, especially, voiced doubts about the applicability of experimental methods to such a highly variable system as the human body. Comte continued to argue for the value of observation and the comparative method.9 This contested line between experiment and observation, while I have drawn it too starkly, is nonetheless an important characteristic of modern western medicine. The use of motion pictures in medical research express this tension between experiment and observation in especially interesting ways. In order to explore the relationship between motion pictures and ex-

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periment, we first need to be clear on what an experiment is. For the sake of argument, let me characterise it as a reproducible interaction between object and apparatus in a closed system of isolated and controllable variables to produce and to demonstrate a correlation between some property of the object and some property of the apparatus.10 A few features of this definition are especially noteworthy. First, as a system, an experiment is designed to isolate and stabilise elements of the system so that they can be compared. A well-designed experiment accounts for and controls variables. The variables are hence effectively isolated in the system so that they can be observed and compared with each other. Second, a good experiment is reproducible – it can be executed again and again with roughly the same results. Why is this important? Ultimately, it is so that other researchers can check the work and its results. An experiment is, fundamentally, a demonstration – a representation of natural phenomena – but also an exchange of information. Its reproducibility allows the experiment to become public and objective. In the absence of the actual experiment, the researcher’s report of the experiment functions as a kind of ‘virtual witnessing’, as Steven Shapin calls it.11 The public nature of the experiment means that representation, inscription, and documentation are not just very important to the process, but that experiment itself is in many ways a representation. Observation is generally regarded as entirely different from experiment. In contrast to experiments, in which variables are perceived as controllable and which often involve instruments designed to measure results, observation is considered a more passive and holistic approach to natural phenomena.12 Yet the two are closely related. Close observation is clearly an important element of experimental method; one must observe changes in variables, read the results of a measurement, or study the effect of a manipulation. But even when it is not connected to experiment or manipulation, as in astronomy, observation is not merely a passive accounting of events. Modern medical observation, even as differently described by Michel Foucault (as an ‘analytic gaze’) and Michael Hau (as a ‘holistic gaze’),13 is not simply a ‘taking in’, but also a ‘sorting out’. That is, the physician observes signs and symptoms but also compares them (with each other, with other cases) at the same time. In fact, observation, which involves both perception and interpretation, is correlation, in the sense that finding the mutual relation between different structures or characteristics is exactly what scientific observation is supposed to do. Because the doctor is able to make comparisons only after having seen a number of patients on which to base them, medical observation depends on the repetition or series of cases. And having seen a symptom across dozens of cases, that symptom becomes a stable feature of all of them – it ‘stands out’ as a salient feature or variable. Hence observation is also a process of mentally isolating a variable and correlating it with other variables across cases. In this way, observation is hardly passive; it is a very active part of the diagnostic process that echoes some features (isolation, repetition, correlation) of experimental method, even if a typical feature of experiment (interaction of object and apparatus) is absent.14 How do motion pictures fit into this scheme? How are motion pictures

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like experiments? On one hand, motion pictures are like other forms of illustration, which have certain features in common with experiment. Like experiments, illustrations are representations and abstractions of natural phenomena; they isolate and stabilise salient features of the phenomena; they are reproducible and exchangeable. This is not a specious comparison of illustration and experiment; in certain fields in which experiment is not a primary means of investigation, such as geography, illustrations can act, logically speaking, as experiments.15 That is, a sufficiently rigorous and informative diagram can provide many (but not all) of the same functions as experiment: isolation of variables, representation of detail in abstract forms, and reproducibility. Furthermore, because motion pictures can record in real time, they function as a document of an event or experiment and allow for another kind of ‘virtual witnessing’ – one in which the audience sees, rather than reads. So motion pictures can document an experiment, but they can also act in certain ways like an experiment by isolating, stabilizing, representing, and reproducing events. On the other hand, motion pictures are much different than other forms of scientific illustration. Because of its ability to record the duration of an event, film can be manipulated differently than other kinds of images – the researcher can use motion pictures not simply as a record of an event, but almost as a substitute for the event itself. The researcher can use film ‘experimentally’. That is, in some applications, the filmed record functions as a simulated experiment that can be endlessly repeated. The object of study can be reviewed at different speeds or compared in different ways. Frame-by-frame analysis, for example, is the primary means by which researchers extract usable data from scientific and medical motion pictures.16 The individual frames are studied, compared to one another, magnified, traced, and eventually projected at different speeds; the event – the film – is broken down, recomposed, and synthesised. In this way, film allows a similar kind of isolation, manipulation, and comparison of variables that we find in experimental method. But motion pictures and illustrations differ from experiment in one significant feature: they do not normally interact with the object of study. In this respect, and because it records visual data, film has more in common with observational techniques. The ease with which it records its data, reproduces and repeats that data, and presents that data for comparison and correlation makes film an ideal ‘inscription device’, as Bruno Latour would call it, and a powerful observational tool.17 Indeed, the way that medical researchers actually used film testifies to its appeal as a flexible instrument with which they could exercise their observational skills. As an example, in an 1897 presentation to the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians (Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte), Austrian cardiologist Ludwig Braun listed the features of cinematography most important for his work, three of which are quoted below: 2. The study of the resulting – especially the enlarged – images allows the analysis of movement, the recognition of every intermediate state and every phase of the process, and with that, a more exact assessment of the resulting transitional steps than was possible before.

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3. The individual photograms are strongly similar. If one lays two successive images over each other, aligning those parts that remain motionless, the moving parts show positions that correspond to the differences in their movement. From this, one can perceive the spatial displacements, judge them better than before, and to a certain extent measure them and calculate the speed of the displacement in space from the time of exposure and the number of exposed frames. 4. The cinematographic shot can thereby be used to present to the observer any movement of the heart synthetically, at will, and even decelerated to a rather great extent without impairing the clarity of the images.18

This particular session of the Society was devoted to the scientific application of photography, so Braun’s presentation fits in this panel as a demonstration of the use of cinematography as an extension of series photography. We can see this in Braun’s emphasis, in number 3, on comparing different frames of the film in order to come to conclusions about the movement of the heart.19 So the cinematograph functions as a very fast camera that can generate image after image to be compared and correlated. Indeed, analysis of movement or of change in general is actually a series of carefully designed comparisons of elements of that movement or stages of its development. What scientists prize most highly is not the movement per se, but the relation between one point and another, the comparison of ‘transitional steps’, which can result in empirical quantification. Depending on the exposure time, motion pictures are capable of providing ever finer transitional steps – a series of more and more images to be compared. Cinema therefore becomes something of an ‘instant archive’ of images, a repository of views to be correlated into a conception of the general law. But motion pictures also move, and this does have its advantages. Most prominently, as we see here in number 4, motion pictures have a temporal malleability that can be used in much the same way as the comparison of still images. That is, just as the proliferation of images generates many spatial displacements to be compared, so the variability of projection speed generates many temporal views that can be similarly evaluated. The scientist thus obtains from a single strip of film many different vantage points to correlate. Furthermore, the relation between cinema’s still images and their movement in projection also correlates to elements of scientific method, namely, the relation between analysis and synthesis. If analysis is the breaking down of phenomena into its constituent parts, and if synthesis is the reconstitution of those parts in order to check that the analysis was correct, so functions motion pictures in scientific experiment. Moving images function primarily as a supplement to the individual frame, as a test of analysis. In other words, Braun emphasises two aspects of scientific or medical observation in his presentation of motion pictures as a scientific tool: 1) correlation, here the comparison of stages of heart movements, and 2) control, meaning the researcher’s ability to manipulate the apparatus to produce specific results for study, which in this case refers primarily to the ability to control the pace of the film. Both of these features imply that having the time to study, to contemplate these images is crucial for this process. Braun’s presentation in 1897 is typical of the approach physicians would take toward

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the scientific application of motion pictures, even into the twenty-first century.20 This use of motion pictures expresses their investment in a particular mode of viewing linked to scientific training in experimental method and close observation. This investment, I argue, is the basis for many of the medical community’s complaints about cinema in the public sphere.

Spectatorship Physicians agreed that cinema presented two distinct medical threats, physical and psychic. The physical threat is probably best exemplified by the damp, crowded Ladenkinos (‘storefront cinemas’) that were the targets of many editorials, or perhaps by the ‘flicker effect’ that so many complained about during the early years.21 Dr. Paul Schenk, for instance, warned teachers who hoped to use motion pictures for educational purposes. From the standpoint of visual hygiene, the usefulness of cinema as an educational tool remains dubious. Modern man systematically ruins his eyes. We suffer from an excess of visual stimuli. ... The much-maligned ‘flicker’ of the cinematic image is a malaise that presently, and probably forever, deprives the cinema of the claim to be a ‘hygienic’ means of instruction. ... This impression is further strengthened by the unnaturally fast changes of scenery. Our eyes cling intently to the screen, where, in addition to the flicker of the images, a change of scenery takes place almost every minute within a time period that lasts 8 to 12 or up to 15 minutes.22

Cinema’s educational utility, according to Schenk, is hampered by the threat its ‘flicker’ presents to student health. On one hand, this flicker supposedly damages the eyes; there is apparently a physical connection between the flicker and nerve damage of some sort. On the other hand, this damage is intensified by the pace of the film. In fact, this physical damage almost acts as a metaphor or outward symptom of a deeper, psychic damage caused by the temporal push of cinema. This diagnosis is also taken up by reformers or Kinogegner (‘enemies of the cinema’) in a general medicalisation of cinema in the discourse of the time.23 Albert Hellwig, one of Germany’s most prolific Kinogegner, cites an Italian doctor’s discussion of cinema’s assault on the sensitive mind: Of a group of neurasthenics, d’Abundo observed that frequenting cinematographic presentations brought about all sorts of ailments, especially insomnia. It was not so much the influence of the contents of the presentation, but rather an effect, in combination with the flicker, of the quickly moving action.24

Another writer, O. Götze, put a finer point on it: The hasty tempo of the images, and especially the Leipziger Allerlei-like [a mixed vegetable dish] program, seduces the child into careless observation and contemplation. Even the images that could offer intellectual enrichment go by so quickly that clear impressions cannot possibly form.25

With this observation, Götze articulates the position of the medical community and of reformers with regard to the cinema. Medically speaking, the cramped, oppressive atmosphere of the theatres, together with the flicker effect, presented a threat to physical health, while the immoral content of the films and their delivery by means of a relentless temporality

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presented psychological dangers. There is no psychic distance between the image and the viewer; the viewer cannot control the pace of the film. Therefore cinema effects the nervous system directly without the mediation contemplation provides. In this respect, cinema is often compared to hypnosis. As Stefan Andriopolous has shown, this comparison taps into contemporary debates about hypnotic crime that flourished during the initial heyday of discussion about hypnosis, between 1885 and 1900.26 Conversely, Jean-Martin Charcot and Albert Londe used observational technology to record the behaviour of hysterics and the effects induced by hypnosis.27 But what does hypnotism do for the researcher? That is, what is its function? Understanding this question allows us to fully grasp the analogy between cinema and hypnotism from the point of view of the physician. In its modern form, hypnotism allows the investigator to probe deeply into the patient’s psyche. It has the effect of anaesthesia – it allows the physician to explore the psyche without the interference of a ‘live’ consciousness. It is a form of ‘psychic dissection’. In this respect, it suspends time. Or, more precisely, it makes the subject more temporally malleable. Berlin psychiatrist Albert Moll declared, Hypnotism is a mine for the psychological investigator, for hypnosis is nothing but a mental state. When we think that psychologists have always used dreams so much in their investigations of mental life, and that experiments can be better made in hypnosis than in ordinary sleep, because it can be regulated at pleasure, we cannot deny the value of hypnosis to psychology.28

One prominent French psychiatrist put it this way: Through numerous examples, I will try to show that with hypnotic processes we may practice, if I may express it in this way, an actual moral vivisection (if the reader is not too frightened by the word) and witness with our own eyes and make function the intellectual mechanism just as the physiologist sees and makes function the organic machine.29

The theme here is control, or ‘regulation’ – thinking of the organism (psychic or somatic) as a machine. Like a film strip, the subject’s consciousness under hypnotism can be paused, rewound, slowed down, or inspected bit by bit. It gives the researcher time to explore, to accumulate data, to contemplate the details, and to correlate their patterns. In this way, the comparison between cinema and hypnosis goes further than what we find in the discourse itself: it’s not just that cinema is a hypnotist, or even that hypnotism is a constant theme in the films themselves, but that hypnotism and cinema are functionally equivalent in the eyes of the researcher. Both are experimental apparatuses that have a flexible, controllable regulatory mechanism in the hands of the scientist, and both have, in relation to the layman, a potentially dangerous pace precisely because it cannot be controlled. What distinguishes the masculine professional is not only his will, but his training in scientific (or ‘wissenschaftliche’) observation. Indeed, this training is his primary defense against the onslaught of – and the seductive power of – images. The scientific appropriation of motion pictures depends on the ability of the researcher to halt this onslaught, to forestall its assault and read slowly. It must be so: if the researcher is to correlate the data, he must be able

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to control the flow of data. Ultimately, then, the negative comparison between cinema and hypnosis is about mastery. Mastery not only of the hypnotised subject, but of the ability to hypnotise. Hypnotism and motion pictures were perfectly acceptable scientific tools, as long as they were in the qualified hands of (male) professionals. Hypnotism, for example, was condoned (and still is) as a legitimate procedure for psychic exploration. Likewise, motion pictures were used by physicians in Germany to help diagnose disease. Like motion pictures, hypnosis was used to isolate, stabilise, and present – in this case, psychic or somatic trauma. Hypnosis was a tool for acquiring the distance and time necessary to observe and diagnose. Physicians used motion pictures to record the human body, but then they slowed the images down or stopped them to examine the phenomenon frame by frame, also giving them the time and distance they needed to master the event. In the same way, hypnosis allows access to different temporal registers. In both cases, the scientific use of hypnosis or motion pictures implies a mastery of time and of the human body. Film’s popular incarnation, however, implies a lack of mastery of both. Comparing these two discourses – physicians writing to each other in technical journals about cinema’s potential and writing to each other and to the public about its threat – allows us to see quite clearly the criteria for cinema’s legitimacy. By understanding what German doctors considered to be the improper mode of spectatorship, we come to understand what they thought was a proper way of viewing images. We could also argue, to add another level of inquiry, that this proper mode is not simply the result of disciplinary training. The ‘objectivity’ of the scientific eye does not arise merely out of professionalisation, but also in contrast to the ‘subjectivity’ of the untrained other. That is, disciplinary modes of viewing rely on class distinctions, as well as professional and moral categories.30 Comparing the medical discussion of moving medical images to the medical condemnation of movies helps us map the distinction between the two kinds of images and two modes of viewing onto professional issues of objectivity and subjectivity, social issues such as the German tradition of self-cultivation, and the moral issues of self-mastery and public hygiene. Furthermore, the way physicians actually used medical cinematography allows us to consider the connection between stillness, movement, time, and mass culture.

Notes 1.

Martin Weiser, Medizinische Kinematographie (Dresden and Leipzig: Steinkopff, 1919), 62. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2.

Robert Gaupp, ‘Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt’, in Robert Gaupp and Konrad Lange, Der Kinematograph als Volkunterhaltungsmittel (München: Dürer-Bund-Flugschrift zur Ausdruckskultur 100, 1912), 9. Emphasis in original.

3.

The most comprehensive survey of world literature on medicine and cinema – even though it is 40 years old – remains Anthony R. Michaelis, Research Films in Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, and Medicine (New York: Academic Press, 1955). Specific statistics about Germany’s output compared to other countries can be found on p. 326. For a contemporary survey, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

4.

A particularly vivid indication of the rise of German radiology is the change in the rosters of editorial board advisors of the major radiological journals. The Archives of the Roentgen Ray

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Chapter 7 Between Observation and Spectatorship

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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(London), for example, had no one from Germany on its board in 1907, but had seven members from Germany and Austria by 1913. The best survey of the early literature in Germany is still Weiser, Medizinische Kinematographie. See Renata Taureck, Die Bedeutung der Photographie für die medizinische Abbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Kohlhauer, 1980) and Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America since 1840 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). See Sigmund Theodor Stein, Die Optische Projectionkunst im Dienste der exakten Wissenschaften (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1887). See Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, translated by Henry Copley Greene (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 21–22. Originally published as Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1865). See also William F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and His Place in the History of Ideas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 58–59. This strong distinction between observation and experiment in medicine is useful heuristically, but even Bernard recognised the limits of experimentation. See Sebastian Normandin, ‘Claude Bernard and An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine: ‘Physical Vitalism’, Dialectic, and Epistemology’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 62.4 (October 2007): 495–528. I adapt this definition from Hans Radder, The Material Realization of Science (Assen and Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1988), 59–69 and In and About the World: Philosophical Studies of Science and Technology (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996), 11–20. Steven Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science 14, 4 (November 1984): 481–520. See also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). See the section on ‘Observation and Attention’ in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 234–246. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973), esp. 88–106; Michael Hau, ‘The Holistic Gaze in German Medicine, 1890–1930’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 495–524. I am not prepared to debate, however, which came first, experiment or observation. Homer E. LeGrand, ‘Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Experiments?’, in Homer E. LeGrand (ed.), Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science (Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 241–270. Michaelis, Research Films, 23–27. Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1–40. Ludwig Braun, ‘Ueber den Werth des Kinematographen für die Erkenntniss der Herzmechanik’, Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte 69, I (1898): 185–186. Emphasis in original. I should note that this comparison of frames is not simply a function of 1897 technology, but a pattern of use that continues in modern applications of scientific cinematography. Scott Curtis, ‘Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics’, in Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (eds), Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 218–254. See Thierry Lefebvre, ‘Flimmerndes Licht: Zur Geschichte der Filmwahrnehmung im frühen Kino’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 5 (1996): 71–80. Paul Schenk, ‘Der Kinematograph und die Schule’, Aerztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung 14, 15 (1 August 1908): 312–313. For a fuller survey of this trend, see Andreas Killen, ‘Psychiatry, Cinema, and Urban Youth in Early-Twentieth-Century Germany’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 14.1 (2006): 38–43. Albert Hellwig, ‘Über die schädliche Suggestivkraft kinematographischer Vorführung’, Aerztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung 20, 6 (15 March 1914): 122. O. Götze, ‘Jugendpsyche und Kinematograph’, Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung 16 (1911): 418. Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Spellbound in Darkness: Hypnosis as an Allegory of Early Cinema’, The Germanic Review 77, 2 (Spring 2002): 102–117; and Besessene Korper: Hypnose, Korperschaften und die Erfindung des Kinos (München: Fink, 2000).

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27.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpétrière, trans. by Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Albert Moll, Hypnotism (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 333, my emphasis (this version is a translation of Der Hypnotismus, 2nd edn [Berlin: Fischer, 1890]). To be fair, it should be noted that this particular application of hypnosis is rare during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the therapeutic technique is overwhelmingly used for somatic ailments. Beaunis, ‘L’Expérimentation en psychologie par le somnambulisme provoqué’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 20 (1885): 113. Emphasis in original. On the moral dimensions of objectivity, see especially Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 81–128 and Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moralized Objectivities of Science’, in Wolfgang Carl and Lorraine Daston (eds), Wahrheit und Geschichte: Ein Kolloquium zu Ehren des 60. Geburtstages von Lorenz Krüger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 78–100. See also Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

28.

29. 30.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: The Scene of the Crime: Psychiatric Discourses on the Film Audience in Early Twentieth Century Germany Chapter Author(s): Andreas Killen Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.11 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 8

The Scene of the Crime: Psychiatric Discourses on the Film Audience in Early Twentieth Century Germany The Scene of the Crime

Andreas Killen n the journal she kept during her time studying with Sigmund Freud in the years 1912–1913, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote in passing about the pleasure she took in going to motion pictures. She described her great enjoyment of the scenarios on offer in Vienna’s cinematographs and predicted an illustrious future for the new medium in a world in which changes in the modern workplace had caused such monotony, fatigue, and diminished powers of concentration that most people could not enjoy more demanding forms of art. Salomé’s passing reflections suggest that film spectatorship’s origins had their basis in an underlying process of psychosocial restructuring – a process she did not stigmatise or regard as pathological.1 Her partner in these excursions to the cinema, the psychiatrist and Freud disciple Viktor Tausk, subsequently identified the possibility of a more disturbing dimension of spectatorship. In a paper delivered in 1919, he connected the film experience with the psycho-pathology of the Beeinflussungsapparat (‘influencing machine’), a delusion in which the patient ‘saw pictures’ and felt himself to be under the control of a sinister figure, often a doctor.2 These two accounts, one positive and the other paranoid, represent two poles of the discourse about the cinema in the early twentieth century. Of the two, it was undoubtedly the more negative account that found a greater resonance. Particularly in German film commentary, the thematization of spectatorship as a highly problematic phenomenon has a long history. One strand of this tradition reached its culmination in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, who, in his classic study From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, made Weimar spectatorship central to the task of explaining the success of National Socialism among the German masses. In the belief that film offered unmatched insight into mass psychology, Kracauer practiced film criticism as a species of case history, in which the patient was the German Volk, and Caligari and Mabuse became both personifications of the malevolent doctor-figure and premonitions of Hitler.3 In this essay I am concerned less with raising questions about Kra-

I

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cauer’s argument per se than with pointing to some of its origins. Specifically, I want to explore certain aspects of the psychiatric discourse about the film audience that took shape in the early twentieth century. Hitherto relatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of early commentary on film.4 Yet it formed an important strain within the emerging public debate about the new medium. From the turn of the century on, experts in many fields – psychology, psychiatry, law, criminology, medicine – studied the effects of film-going on eyesight, nervous and mental health, moral development, and public order. They conducted experiments, produced surveys and questionnaires, examined statistics, and poured over clinical records and court cases. Out of these materials, they wove a wide-ranging discourse around the film experience, one that found resonance in the worlds of social reform and public policy, in sociological criticism, as well as, ultimately, in popular film itself. Long before Kracauer, experts had turned their commentaries on film into a form of collective case history, linking film-going to contemporary social problems and pathologies ranging from nervousness and homosexuality to juvenile delinquency and crime. Salomé’s statements, for instance, echoed the findings of a survey conducted by one doctor published in the film journal Der Kinematograph in 1911. According to this survey, many female respondents cited their fatigue and desire for distraction as the main reason for going to the cinema, a finding further echoed in the dissertation sociologist Emilie Altenloh published on the eve of the war.5 For their part, many psychiatrists ascribed a nervenstörende Einfluss (‘damaging influence on the nerves’) to the experience of going to motion pictures.6 They wove elaborate variations on the theme of the cinema’s danger to the audience, particularly women and youth, whom studies identified as making up a significant proportion of the film public. Prominent cinema-reformer Konrad Lange wrote that, ‘The cinematograph has given us a new means of increasing nervousness and shortsightedness’, and a few years later, extended this concern about film to the health of the nation as a whole, warning of ‘the dangers that would arise if we were to breed a shortsighted and neurasthenic generation of youths’.7 Such views were common among the members of the so-called Kinoreformbewegung (‘cinema reform movement’). While many reformers rejected film outright, others were more circumspect, concentrating their warnings on the category known from the context of popular fiction as Schund (‘trash’). Most psychologists and physicians concurred in finding Schund especially dangerous for the nervous and moral constitution of youth. But whether they referred to film in general or merely to its most sensationalistic products, reformers and medical experts treated film as a major concern and went to great lengths to communicate their view of the motion pictures as a medium that placed its audience at risk.8 In what follows, I will focus on one particular motif in the medical discourse about film spectatorship, namely the problem of hypnosis. Among those writings that connected film-going with disturbances of vision and consciousness, hypnosis and the related phenomena of suggestion assumed special importance. This theme later figured prominently in the

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writings of Kracauer, for whom one of the hallmarks of the Weimar cinema was the powerful influence it exercised over what he saw as its psychologically traumatized postwar audience. Repeatedly he conceptualized this as a form of virtual hypnosis, with Mabuse as paradigmatic example. Yet Kracauer was hardly the first to emphasize this motif.9 Where Salomé saw in film a form of necessary and welcome relief for audiences worn out by their daily exertions, doctors rather tended to see dangers and repeatedly warned of cinema’s ‘hypnotic’ effect on tired and easily ‘suggestible’ audiences.10 As one such doctor phrased it, ‘The effects of the cinema are … often intensified into a kind of hypnosis, which is then followed by suggestive after-effects’.11 This kind of analysis drew on an older concern about the dangers associated with hypnosis, both as a clinical and as a popular phenomenon. As is well-known, the roots of the turn of the century interest in hypnosis lay in France, where Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim had rescued it from disrepute and made it a subject of scientific study and experimentation. In addition to its clinical uses for treating hysteric patients, hypnosis became a key term in the writings of crowd psychologists. Gustave Le Bon argued that the crowd shared many psychological characteristics with the female hysterics of Charcot’s Salpetriere, particularly their susceptibility to suggestion and mental contagion. In its typical state of ‘expectant attention’ and ‘suggestibility’, wrote Le Bon, the crowd was an essentially ‘feminine subject’, prone to outbreaks of collective hysteria and even violence.12 The writings of Le Bon and others, such as Gabriel Tarde, made the hypnoid state a powerful specter of crowd psychology and of early twentieth century discourses on ‘mass society’ and ‘mass culture’. Le Bon regarded the cinema as a particularly dangerous tool of mass suggestion and called for the state to assume control of the new medium.13 One of the key topoi of the fin de siècle discourse on hypnosis was that of criminal suggestion: the claim that hypnotized subjects could be induced to commit crimes. In France, this claim played a central role in a handful of celebrated court cases in which defence lawyers cited psychological experiments allegedly demonstrating that certain subjects could be hypnotized into committing crimes and even murders.14 As we shall see, this claim would be picked up and repeated on numerous occasions in the German medical literature about the dangers both of public hypnosis and of cinema. In Germany as well, hypnosis was granted scientific legitimacy, and suggestion became a major cultural trope of the fin de siècle. Much of its former disrepute still clung to it, however, particularly in connection with the phenomenon of public hypnosis. Embraced by showmen and by enthusiastic crowds, this practice gained popularity around the turn of the century. Lay hypnotists drew sizable crowds to their street-corner and fairground performances and were blamed for outbreaks of crime, madness, and suicide.15 As Stefan Andriopoulos has shown, it is precisely this tradition that is invoked in the opening scenes of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919).16 In 1895, the Reich banned public hypnosis on the grounds that such demonstrations posed risks to public health and order – a ban coinciding exactly with the advent of the cinematograph. The chief

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issue, as one provincial official wrote to the Prussian interior ministry, lay in the possibility of an unscrupulous hypnotizer ‘influencing the will’ of his unsuspecting victim and thereby gaining control over him. The question had arisen in connection with the proceedings against a defendant who claimed his crime had been carried out under the influence of a post-hypnotic spell.17 By 1910, the debate about popular hypnosis had found its way into the deliberations of the Reichstag. One of this body’s provincial representatives stated authoritatively that there could be no doubt concerning the risks associated with hypnotism. These were of two kinds: injuries to health and incitements to crime. In support of the latter contention, however, he could only cite a recent article by an unnamed doctor arguing that hypnotized subjects could be used as instruments of crime.18 Despite this official’s assumption that a connection existed, grounds for such an assumption remained shaky, as more sober observers recognized. Nevertheless, the existence of such a nexus became a staple of not just medical, but public discourse as well. In a manner that bears out Ian Hacking’s observations concerning the role of scientists – in this case psychological claims-makers – in creating social facts, sheer force of repetition helped expert commentators turn the nexus between crime and hypnosis from a matter of speculation into a version of reality far outweighing all arguments to the contrary.19 By the time the cinema – another cultural phenomenon with a complicated, though strongly French pedigree – became established in Germany, there was thus already a long-standing concern with hypnosis and its effects. In a variety of ways, this concern became grafted onto the emerging discourse about popular cinema and its effects on the audience. In that context it became wedded to two sets of concerns: those stemming from the fear that filmic crime dramas, like hypnosis, could – by influencing the suggestible viewer – serve as an inducement to crime; and those stemming from the filmic depiction of hypnosis, a phenomenon that, as Jörg Schweinitz has shown, was part of a well-established genre from the very beginning of cinema.20 Most commentaries took as their point of departure the physical experience of the spectator. The darkened room, in which impressions of the outer world were screened out, the flickering images and lights on the screen, the narrowing of the field of vision and consciousness to the events depicted on screen, the unheimliche Macht (‘tremendous’ or ‘uncanny power’) of those images, all were integrated into an account of spectatorship stressing its closeness to certain syndromes – lack of impulse control, paralysis of the will, suggestibility, and so forth – well-known from the clinical literature on nervous illness.21 In particular, the belief that absorption in the filmic image was akin to a state of somnambulism or hypnosis became a recurring motif of expert commentary on the experience of spectatorship, one often invoked in defining that experience as the precursor to psychopathology or social vice. If cinema in general was seen as harboring dangerous power, then this was all the more true of the hypnosis film, a genre in which the hypnotist was frequently portrayed as a master criminal who turned his hypnotized

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subjects into helpless accomplices. Dramas of hypnotic crime were believed to influence suggestible audience members by tempting them to imitate what they saw on screen. Both of the factors in play here – the hypnosis-like experience of spectatorship and the depiction of hypnosis on-screen in dramas of crime and vice – posed a danger to the audience. Quite apart from the scenes, criminal or otherwise, depicted on screen, the cinematograph itself became, in the expert mind, the scene of a crime. These mutually reinforcing concerns converged most clearly in the analogy between one of the standard filmic techniques for conveying the hypnotic procedure – the narrowing or contraction of the camera iris – and the narrowed field of vision and state of consciousness often attributed to the spectator. Both recall a syndrome long seen as one of the hallmarks of the hysteric disease-picture: contraction of the visual field. First described by Charcot, this symptom was regarded as emblematic of the hysteric’s failure of perceptual synthesis and her weakness of will. One context in which it acquired special significance was that of railway medicine, where doctors used it to assess the validity of pension claims for traumatic neurosis, and where it thus became associated with ‘modern technology’.22 As a general signifier of weakness and suggestibility, it served as shorthand for a crisis of the perceiving subject that found its perfect contemporary analog in the spellbound state of the film spectator. Cinematically, the so-called ‘iris shot’ served a dual function: that of illustrating the hypnotic procedure, and that of placing the spectator in the position of the hypnotized subject. This technique finds its clearest expression in the scene in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), in which Mabuse hypnotizes detective von Wenk. As he becomes unmoored from the surrounding reality of the gambling den, von Wenk’s descent into a hypnoid state is dramatized by the gradual contraction of his field of vision, until he – and the audience with him – can see only Mabuse’s demonic gaze, which gradually fills the entire screen.23 This technique cites and enacts what in expert discourse had come to be seen as a general characteristic of the film experience, namely the dramatic narrowing of the audience’s field of vision and consciousness. Whether literally or figuratively, the medical commentary on spectatorship thus evoked a disease picture rooted in the fin de siècle discourse of the clinic and of crowd psychology. Charcot had asserted that such states could only be observed in hysterics. Other physicians such as his rival Bernheim, however, felt they were more broadly generalizable. As Jonathan Crary has suggested, late nineteenth century experiments on the faculty of attention tended increasingly to blur the boundary between its normal and pathological forms; such experiments seemed to show that the narrowing of attention that occurred in focused concentration could easily approach that of hypnotic trance.24 According to the German-American psychologist and film theorist Hugo Münsterberg, hypnosis represented a state of (pathological) ‘over-attention’; in an account later echoed in his description of the filmic close-up, Münsterberg wrote that hypnotic techniques ‘narrow the contents of consciousness, but hold the idea of the hypnotizing person steadily in the center of attention’.25

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The fear of film’s suggestive hold over its audience found expression in a number of contexts. It appears, for instance, in the wartime ban on foreign films, a step taken by the War Ministry to prevent such films from trying to ‘influence the Volksstimmung (‘popular mood’)’.26 It also appears in the public discussion about the so-called Aufklärungfilm, the scientific or educational film that sought to enlighten the public, often on controversial topics such as venereal disease or homosexuality, but that, according to conservative film reformers, actually served to incite or tempt audience members into the behaviors depicted on-screen.27 Above all, the theme of suggestibility became a constant refrain of the debate about the relation between Schund and crime. The notion of film as a Beeinflussungsapparat that might ‘incite its audience to crime’ – this formulation, with numerous variations, was replayed over and over again in the medical literature and in censor decisions, where it was often invoked to ban or limit distribution of films. One typical expression of this concern can be found in an article in the Socialist publication Vorwärts in 1913, which spelled out this apprehension concerning cinema’s role as ‘educator’ of youth and cited the case of a real life crime allegedly based on that of a film.28 In similar fashion, leading film-reformer Albert Hellwig warned that film operated suggestively on all levels of the child’s fantasy life, and thus represented a threat to his mental and nervous constitution and moral development.29 The fact that popular crime films glorified the criminal had, claimed Hellwig, been well-demonstrated by criminal psychologists. To illustrate the consequences, he cited the case of the notorious Borbecker Knabenmord, in which a young man brought to trial on the charge of murdering a little boy recounted in court the films he had attended in the days before committing his otherwise completely unmotivated act.30 This case would become a touch-point for other reformers and continue to be cited well into the 1920s.31 Yet while he shared the belief that filmic representations of vice incited audiences to criminal behavior, Hellwig also recognized that the empirical basis for the causal connection between Schund and criminality remained weak: ‘I regret nothing more’, he lamented, ‘than that it remains so extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to obtain exact proofs of the bad effects of the criminal Schundfilm’.32 Seemingly in direct contradiction to such statements, however, Hellwig proceeded to argue that there could be no doubt that crime films had a ‘decided effect on juvenile criminality’, a fact that could be deduced from ‘general psychological principles’.33 Posed in this way, the problem to which Hellwig alluded was a scientific and, specifically, a psychological one, and it is therefore not surprising that he leaned heavily on the authority of psychiatric discourse in his attacks on Schund. Nor is it surprising that German film censors turned frequently to medical specialists and psychiatrists in their dealings with this question. Well into the 1920s, the Interior Ministry – concerned about the proliferation of popular demonstrations of hypnosis on street-corners and other venues, as well as the depiction of hypnosis in films – sought clarification of whether the question of the causal nexus between hypnosis and crime had been settled. Questionnaires were sent around to the officials of the individ-

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ual German states, and the views of leading experts were solicited.34 In one oft-cited opinion submitted to the Interior Ministry, Vienna psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg claimed that he had conclusively demonstrated in laboratory experiments that people under hypnosis could be compelled to commit crimes.35 Prominent German psychiatrists Karl Bonhoeffer and Emil Kraepelin both submitted opinions warning of the dangers lurking within the popular cinema. Bonhoeffer, in particular, regarded both public hypnosis performances and hypnosis films as dangerous, insofar as they incited criminal tendencies in the audience. He warned that such performances were capable of ‘lowering the feeling of responsibility felt by youth and by easily influenced people towards criminal acts’. From the standpoint of public health, hypnosis films were to be regarded as ‘harboring a potential for hystericizing significant parts of the population’.36 Bonhoeffer also cited a secondary danger, namely the alleged increasing tendency of youthful perpetrators to blame their actions on the influence of a film. The fact that motion pictures could be invoked in what amounted to a kind of insanity defense for juvenile offenders may be seen as a perverse consequence of a situation in which the experience of spectatorship was, in medical discourse, frequently likened to a form of temporary madness. The doctors’ claims regarding the suggestive powers of the cinematic image were echoed in juvenile offenders’ claims of temporarily diminished responsibility for their criminal actions as a consequence of being under the influence of a film.37 Yet, for all the power of the image of the spectator held spellbound in the grip of the cinema – an image that exercised its own spell over the medical imagination –, the assertion of a causal nexus between film and crime rested on weak foundations. In the absence of compelling forensic proofs concerning the dangers of film, specialists often pursued secondary lines of argument and postulated a variety of ‘indirect effects’. At the same time, to strengthen their case, physicians often invoked the notion of ‘slumbering’, ‘latent’ and ‘potential’ audience proclivities, thereby framing their argument around a notion of vulnerability that derived added force from reports indicating the high percentage of women and youth in the film audience.38 In doing so they often fell back more or less explicitly on the discourse of crowd psychology and its medical antecedents. Here it should once more be recalled that the late nineteenth century re-discovery of hypnosis took place in a specific context, namely that of clinical medicine’s encounter with hysteria. Even after the discourse about hypnosis and suggestion had, to some extent, detached itself from that context, the figure of the hysteric remained a latent part of it. According to Charcot, only the already, or at least potentially, nervously afflicted, could be hypnotized. In particular, susceptibility to hypnosis was the hallmark of the hysteric. In contrast to those like Bernheim who felt that anyone could be hypnotized, Charcot, as Ruth Harris notes, argued that the high number of hypnotizable individuals simply indicated that a high proportion of the population were in fact latent hysterics, and therefore the widespread use of hypnosis would release these diseased proclivities and greatly augment the sum of nervous disease.39

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As Paul Lerner has argued, it was the Charcotian rather than the Bernheimian model that ultimately prevailed in the medical condemnation of public hypnosis and of popular cinema.40 Indeed, as Bonhoeffer’s warnings concerning the dangers of mass hystericization indicate, this Charcotian specter was repeatedly conjured in the debate about film, suggestion, and social pathology. An article in the Vorwärts on medical views about the cinema indicates the extent to which this specter had found its way into popular discourse. It cited a certain Dr. Scharpf, according to whom sensationalistic films often led to ‘hysterical fits’ among audience members and in some cases actually produced neurosis. The cinema’s ‘suggestive effect’ exercised a powerful influence particularly over its youthful audience, whose consciousness became so drastically ‘narrowed’ (Einengung der Bewusstseins) that they entered a virtually ‘hypnotic’ state: ‘For adolescent psychopaths’, argued Scharpf, ‘the cinema provides a schooling in crime’; moreover, its ‘coarse eroticism’ corrupted them by ‘inciting a boundless lasciviousness’.41 For physicians writing about film and its dangerous influence over the audience, it was natural to invoke hypnosis and alongside it, the phantasm of the suggestible, ‘hystericizable’ audience. Indeed, hysteria became a kind of master-trope of the scientific and medical discourse about spectatorship. It occupies a significant place in the film writings of Münsterberg, which represent an outgrowth of his psychotechnics – his investigations of those problems, including monotony, fatigue, and the fragmentation of attention in the workplace, that form part of the process of psycho-social restructuring alluded to by Lou Andreas-Salomé in her reflections on film-going.42 Writing in 1914, Münsterberg asked: By what wholesome appeals to the desire for amusement can the masses be diverted from the unhealthy influence of the motion pictures, which too often make crime and vice seductive and create a hysteric attitude by their thrills and horrors?43

Even in Münsterberg’s more positive later appraisals, in which the hypnosis model of spectatorship is to some extent downplayed, this remains a latent possibility: ‘The spellbound audience in a theater or in a picture house is certainly in a heightened state of suggestibility and is ready to receive suggestions’.44 What such statements underline is the way in which this discourse about spectatorship was constructed around a specific conception of the audience as a social grouping marked by highly stigmatized characteristics: suggestibility, inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and a proneness to imitation. Those factors, such as fatigue and nervousness, that, according to commentators like Salomé, made film so ideal as a means of entertainment for the modern public, were precisely what enabled the medium, in the view of doctors, to gain dangerous influence over the public. All these attributes fit the clinical picture associated with hysteria, and it is not surprising that this term figures so centrally within the antiSchund discourse.45 Reformers writing about the causal nexus connecting Schund with crime, via hypnosis or suggestion – either on screen, or in the space between

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the screen and the audience – invariably did so by conjuring up the disturbing image of the (female) hysteric (or her counterpart the juvenile psychopath). The notion of latent impulses (crime, nervous illness, perversion) that lie slumbering within specific individuals, and that can be triggered by the power of hypnosis or by that of the filmic image, was repeatedly invoked by doctors and government censors to justify censorship and to root out the problem of moral-psychological crisis associated with Schund. This thematization of audience vulnerability and suggestibility, this discursive coupling of the experience of spectatorship with mental illness and crime, can be observed particularly clearly in the reception accorded the film Unter fremdem Willen, a film whose treatment by the censors would set an important precedent for the Weimar period.46 In 1912, Éclair, a French film concern, filed a lawsuit against Berlin’s Chief of Police, whose exhibition permits determined guidelines for Prussia (the largest German state), following ban of this film. The film tells the story of a doctor who, to pay off his gambling debts, hypnotizes his wife and orders her to rob her own father. In the process of carrying out the robbery she accidentally kills him, though she remembers nothing of her role in this tragedy. The circumstances of the murder are learned by an older doctor, who resolves to use the woman to discover who was responsible for putting her under hypnosis. At a party he carries out a hypnotic experiment on her, in which her husband’s guilt is revealed. The film ends with the doctor’s arrest by the police. Éclair protested the ban and brought a suit against the censor. But the court rejected the firm’s claims, heeding instead the prosecutor’s warnings: The film depicts the uncanny power of hypnosis, under the influence of which someone can be turned against his will into a criminal. This kind of scenario poses a danger and is capable of creating great unrest among the audience, as well as of producing feelings of anxiety among highly sensitive individuals. Moreover, the danger of imitation by people who believe they possess hypnotic powers cannot be ignored.

Insofar as the censor’s decision recapitulates much of the contemporaneous medical discourse about film, several things about this opinion are worth emphasizing. One concerns the court’s rebuttal of the defendant’s argument that the audience would clearly recognize the fantastical nature of the events depicted on-screen and would not be unduly influenced by them: ‘The effects of hypnosis are too well known for the possibility of the depicted events not to be plausible’. Indeed, the court emphasized, the power of the film image made the depiction of hypnosis on-screen even more dangerous than the live public experiment. More to the point – in fact, according to the censor, this was to be regarded as ‘the heart of the matter’ – Éclair’s suit failed to ‘take account of the possibility that the hypnotic effect may awaken more or less slumbering criminal tendencies in the audience’. Here the censor fell back on an argument concerning the filmic image’s capacity to catalyse latent pathologies in weak-willed or hysterically predisposed individuals. In doing so, it also postulated an implied identity between the film’s audience and its female protagonist. She, as the censor remarked in passing, was marked by a ‘besondere Veranlagung zum Medium’ (‘a particular susceptibility to serving as a medium’) – a susceptibility

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she shared with all those in the audience who were themselves, in the censor’s words, ‘leicht beeinflussbare, der suggestion zugängliche’ personalities (‘easily influenced, suggestible’ – characteristics highly reminiscent of hysteria).47 For, as the censor continued, regarding the audience itself, it could be assumed that there was a kind of equivalence between simply knowing about the effects of hypnosis and being susceptible to them. Prepared in advance to believe in the power of hypnosis, the audience gathered in the cinema – in that state of ‘expectant attention’ that Le Bon had identified as the precondition for the mass suggestibility of crowds – would be defenceless to resist that power once confronted by it on screen. The film censor’s conclusion was: It scarcely needs emphasizing that, purely objectively, the possibility of hypnotic influence being turned to criminal purposes is recognized by modern science. To multiply the many paths to crime through this means, insofar as it will be introduced into popular awareness and imitated by people of low morals, goes against public order and morality.

This decision would be cited as a precedent in the Interior Ministry’s decision after the war to greatly restrict the distribution of so-called hypnosis films. To return to our point of departure: the censor’s ruling in this case rests on what might be called a Tauskian, or paranoid, reading of the dangers of spectatorship. There is, however, another way of reading this film, which is to say that it in some sense allegorizes the drama of the cinema’s unheimliche Macht and thus stages this reading as part of its filmic diegesis. In her positive appraisal of motion pictures, the psychoanalytic disciple Lou Andreas-Salomé singled out the superior power of the filmic illusion to that presented on the stage as part of its tremendous appeal for the modern public: ‘Only the technique of the film permits the rapid sequence of pictures which approximates our own imaginative faculty; it might even be said to imitate its erratic ways’.48 Film as a model, even a tool for the ‘erratic ways’ of the imagination: this possibility brings us closer to the complex meanings of Unter fremdem Willen. The film presents its female protagonist’s story as a proto-psychoanalytic case history, using hypnosis to bring about the recovery of a repressed memory and thus a cure for her original trauma. Hypnosis figures as both cause and, via a form of counter-hypnosis (‘Gegenhypnose’, in the censor’s words), cure of the woman’s condition.49 Offering the female protagonist as surrogate for the audience, the film allows that audience the simultaneous pleasure of identification and distancing. At the same time, the unmasking of the true criminal and the therapeutic liberation of the woman from her pathogenic secret occur in the context of a public hypnosis experiment of precisely the sort that the Reich had banned. In this sense Unter fremdem Willen seems to represent an instance – however unsuccessful, ultimately – of what Heide Schlüpmann has characterized as the early silent film’s ‘internalization of the censor’.50 Looking back, on the one hand, to the clinicians and public hypnotists of the late nineteenth century, and forward, on the other, to the cinematic master-hypnotists and arch-criminals of the 1920s, the film offers a meta-

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commentary on the Kinoreformers’ construction of the popular cinema as a crime scene. As it would be for Kracauer, film reception, in this instance, becomes case-history – except that here it is fully conscious of its status as such. If, in the postwar era, films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Dr Mabuse, the Gambler would explicitly dramatize the medical construction of spectatorship as a state akin to somnambulism or hypnosis, then this film offers evidence that already in the prewar era the popular cinema had begun to achieve an allegorical representation of its hold over the audience. In closing, to return briefly to Kracauer: by undertaking what he called a ‘psychological history of German film’, he sought to lay bare the inner physiognomy and dispositions of the German people, thereby shedding light on their responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. This method of proceeding has many parallels with those discourses on film spectatorship and its relation to social pathologies such as crime that had been elaborated by medical and legal experts since virtually the dawn of cinema. Having established film and its relation to the audience as objects of scientific study, these experts determined the basic parameters for Kracauer’s analysis. For all his commitment to taking mass culture on its own terms, Kracauer’s analysis remains embedded within an older, deeply conservative set of discourses about film and its relation to its audience, according to which the cinematic image, by virtue of its unheimliche Macht, established a virtually demonic influence over the viewer’s psyche. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference ‘New Paradigms of Perception’ at Siegen University (Germany) for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to Annemone Ligensa, Scott Curtis, and Stefan Andriopoulos for their suggestions, comments, and help.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé, trans. by Stanley H. Levy (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 101. Viktor Tausk, ‘On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” In Schizophrenia’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 519–566, reprinted in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds) Incorporations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1992), 542–569. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). A good overview is provided by Scott Curtis, ‘The Taste of a Nation: Training the Senses and Sensibility of Cinema Audiences In Imperial Germany’, Film History 6 (1994): 445–69. Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990), 39; Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino (Jena: Diederichs, 1914). Robert Gaupp, ‘Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt’, in Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel (München: Callwey, 1912). Konrad Lange, quoted from Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks, 203. See Bundesarchiv R 86/943, ‘Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos’, Vorwärts (27 March 1913). On Kracauer’s similarity to film critics of the early 1900s, see Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks, 188. Samuel Drucker, ‘Das Kinoproblem’, Neue Zeit 32 (1914). Bundesarchiv R 86/943, ‘Die Gefahren des Kino im Urteil des Arztes’, Vorwärts (16 September 1920). Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960 [1895]), 39.

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110 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship In Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 63. Ruth Harris, ‘Murder Under Hypnosis in the Case of Gabrielle Bompard: Psychiatry In the Courtroom In Belle Époque Paris’, in William F. Bynum et al. (eds) The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. 2 (London: Tavistock, 1985), 197–241. Ibid., 199. See also Paul Lerner, ‘Hysterical Cures: Hypnosis, Gender and Performance In World War I and Weimar Germany’, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 79–101. Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Spellbound In Darkness: Hypnosis As an Allegory of Early Cinema’, The Germanic Review, 77 (2002): 102–117 and Besessene Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften und die Erfindung des Kinos (Munchen: Fink, 2000). Bundesarchiv R 1501/111803, Kaiserliche Statthalter in Elsass-Lothringen an den Reichskanzler Fürsten von Hohenlohe Durchlaucht, 19 March 1898. Bundesarchiv R 1501/111803, Stenographische Berichte des Reichstags, 4 March 1910. See e.g. Ian Hacking, ‘Making Up People’, in Thomas C. Heller et al. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–236, ‘The Invention of Split Personalities’, in Alan Donagan et al. (eds) Human Nature and Natural Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 63–85, and Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Jörg Schweinitz, “Der hypnotisierende Blick: Etablierung und Anverwandlung eines konventionellen Bildes,” in Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder (eds) Bildtheorie und Film (München: edition text + kritik, 2006), 426–443. See Gaupp, ‘Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt’ and Hermann Duenschmann, ‘Kinematograph und Psychologie der Volksmenge’ [1912], reprinted in Andreas Kümmel and Petra Löffler (eds) Medientheorie 1888–1933: Texte und Kommentare (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 85–99. See Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves and German Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 108–114. See Andriopolous, ‘Spellbound In Darkness’; Schweinitz, ‘Der hypnotisierende Blick’; Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000), 108–113. Jonathan Crary, ‘Unbinding Vision: Manet and the Attentive Observer In the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 51. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy (Boston: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1909), 117; see also The Photoplay (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1916]), 85. Bundesarchiv R 1501/114033, Kriegsministerium an das Kgl. Oberkommando in den Marken, 29 September 1915. Bundesarchiv R 86/943, ‘Aufklärungsfilme – Animierfilme’, Deutsche Tageszeitung (31 July 1919). See also Andreas Killen, ‘Psychiatry, Cinema and Youth In Early-Twentieth-Century Germany’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 14 (2006): 38–43. Bundesarchiv R 1501/114033, ‘Das Kino als Erzieher’, Vorwärts (1 August 1913). Albert Hellwig, ‘Kind und Kino’, Beitrage zur Kinderforschung 119 (1914); see also Schundfilms: ihr Wesen, ihre Gefahren und ihre Bekämpfung (Halle an der Saale: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1911). Albert Hellwig, ‘Über die schädliche Suggestivkraft kinematographischer Vorführungen’, Ärztliche Sachverständigenzeitung 20, 6 (1914): 119–124. See e.g. Hans Büchner, Im Banne des Films: die Weltherrschaft des Kinos (München: Deutscher Volksverlag 1927), 134. Albert Hellwig, ‘Die Beziehungen zwischen Schundliteratur, Schundfilms und Verbrechen’, Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, 15 (1913): 1–32. Albert Hellwig, ‘Der Kinematograph vom Standpunkt der Juristen’, Die Hochwart 3, 4 (1913): 73–80. See Bundesarchiv R 1501/111804, ‘Hypnose und Suggestion’. Bundesarchiv R 1501/111804, ‘RGA to RMdI, betrifft: Hypnotische Vorführungen im Film’, 9 August 1922. Bundesarchiv R 1501/111804, ‘RGA to RMdI, betrifft: Darstellung der Hypnose im Film’, 7 April 1922. See, for instance, the censorship documents relating to the film Augen (1920), available online at http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/filme/f017992.htm (14 October 2008).

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Chapter 8 The Scene of the Crime 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

111

See Curtis, ‘Taste of a Nation’. See Harris, ‘Murder Under Hypnosis in the Case of Gabrielle Bompard’, 206. Lerner, ‘Hysterical Cures’, 94–95. Bundesarchiv R 86/943, ‘Die Gefahren des Kino im Urteil des Arztes’. See Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1913). Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology: General and Applied (New York: Appleton, 1925 [1914]), 454. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 97. On early twentieth century figurations of the ‘crowd’ and ‘mass society’ in relation to film see, among others, Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship In American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Sabine Hake, Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Bundesarchiv R 1501/111804, ‘MdI an den RMdI, betrifft: Die Frage des ursächlichen Zusammenhangs von im Film dargestellter Hypnose und strafbaren Handlungen’, 4 August 1922. The files on the hearing over Unter fremdem Willen are included in the postwar hearing over the film Die Hand des Würgers (1920). In an article about this decision, Hellwig likewise invokes the dangers of allowing a film like Unter fremdem Willen to be seen by ‘sensitive’ or ‘excitable people’, or by people who are ‘easily influenced, suggestible’, again stressing the identity between female protagonist and audience. See Albert Hellwig, ‘Hypnotismus und Kinematograph’, Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie 6 (1916): 310–315. Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal, 101. On the notion of ‘counter-hypnosis’ in silent film, see my ‘Weimar Cinema between Hypnosis and Enlightenment’, in Gyan Prakash (ed) Fear in Modern History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press [forthcoming]). Shlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks, 61.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Programme as a ‘Modern’ Experience Chapter Author(s): Andrea Haller Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.12 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 9

Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Programme as a ‘Modern’ Experience Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel

Andrea Haller

I

n one of his numerous essays on the implications of modernity, the German sociologist Georg Simmel reflected on the need of modern man for distraction, remarking that No other phenomenon of modern life accommodates this need as much ... Nowhere else is such a great variety of heterogeneous impressions brought together in outward unity, so that they appear as connected to the average, superficial perception. Hence, a vigorous interaction among these impressions is produced, a mutual contrast and enhancement, which is denied to completely unrelated entities.1

In retrospect, this may seem as if Simmel were referring to early cinema. But the passage is from an essay entitled ‘Die Berliner Gewerbeausstellung’ (‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’), which deals with a Berlin trade fair and its way of presenting attractions. Moreover, Simmel wrote it in 1896, less than a year after the first films were shown at the Wintergarten in Berlin and at the Grand Café in Paris. Thirteen years later one could read in the German trade paper Der Kinematograph: ‘Where else could you find something like this! The world is rich and life is diverse. But one single cinema programme outshines the world and life with regard to richness.’2 In this piece from 1909, Georg Melcher reflected on the effects (Wirkmechanismen) of the contemporary cinema programme. Although Simmel and Melcher (among several others) refer to different phenomena, their arguments and the characteristics they stress bear a striking resemblance. They both mention richness, diversity and intensification. When browsing through contemporary German publications on film and cinema, one can find many examples that describe cinema-going in terms almost identical to Simmel’s. Especially exhibition and programming practices played a crucial role in the discourse on the modernity of cinema. Thus, I will examine the connection between Simmel’s reflections on modern life and the contemporary cinema programme, and I will argue that

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it was a specific mode of perception that underlay both. The modernity of the cinema experience during the short-film period not only derived from the films themselves, but from the way in which they were presented. I will therefore explore the extent to which the short-film programme as an exhibition format and a mode of organising visual experience can be regarded as a typically ‘modern’ perception. Two texts by Simmel in particular will be used as sources: ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’)3 from 1903 and ‘Die Berliner Gewerbeausstellung’ (‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’) from 1896. It is not known whether Simmel ever went to the cinema, and he never explicitly commented on the subject in his extensive work. But we do know what he thought about modern amusements in general: his essay ‘Infelices possidentes!’ on the new urban forms of leisure, written under the pseudonym ‘Paul Liesegang’, is a fierce polemic against modern commercial entertainment, alleging that its only purpose is to fill the inner void of modern man by stimulating the senses.4 Furthermore, in his writings about the psychic disposition of modern man and the means of adapting to modern life, especially to big cities, Simmel used arguments and concepts similar to those of many contemporaries who wrote about cinema. By relating Simmel’s reflections to the exhibition practice of the short-film programme and contemporary assumptions regarding its reception, one discovers that the mode of perception that was said to underlie the experience of big-city life, trade fairs and cinema, as well as the psychic disposition of their respective audiences, were much alike. In contemporary discourses as well as in current theories on the connection between cinema and modernity, it is often claimed that film is a typical modern medium and even that modern culture is cinematic. However, the focus is mostly on films, i.e. individual media products, rather than the practices of presenting them. In recent publications, scholars stress the effect of modernity on early cinema and its audiences, particularly the shocking novelty and the visceral stimulation of the ‘cinema of attractions’, pointing out the similarity to modern commodity culture.5 Others explore the connection between specific modern phenomena, e.g. the telephone, the railroad, electrification, advertising and department stores, and cinema as a cultural practice and perceptual phenomenon.6 In his extensive œuvre, Simmel investigated how the big city functioned and particularly the impact of modern capitalist economy on the social and individual life of people. In his well-known essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Simmel described how the contemporary experience of the new urban spaces and the changing social order was influencing intellectual and emotional life. Simmel did not aim to give a historical overview of modernisation. Instead, he wanted to gain insights into the experience and social reality of modern life. In his opinion, modern life was characterised by fragmentation and arbitrariness, which had a great bearing on people and their mental disposition. Simmel stated that The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists of the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.7

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Hence, according to Simmel, the Steigerung des Nervenlebens (‘intensification of nervous stimulation’), i.e. the increasing over-stimulation of man, is the hallmark of modernity. Also and more specifically, this was a main feature of early cinema, as contemporary authors, journalists, sociologists, cinema reformers and industry experts, who wrote about the new medium, noted. For example, in her dissertation on cinema and its audience, sociologist Emilie Altenloh wrote in 1913: What seems to me more crucial, however, is that both the cinema and those who visit it are typical products of our times, characterised by constant preoccupation and a state of nervous restlessness. Those who are constantly on the go at work during the day cannot free themselves from this haste when they want to relax. As they pass the cinema they will go in to seek some distraction from a short period. … Cinema does not seek such concentration [as a work of art does]. It creates such powerful effects that even shattered nerves can be stirred to life, and the rapid succession of events, the jumble of the most varied kinds of things, allow no room for boredom.8

The ‘jumble of the most varied kinds of things’ (Altenloh) and the ‘swift and uninterrupted change’ (Simmel) are the symptoms, the outward expressions of modernity. Hence, once the ubiquitous tropes are identified, it almost seems as if Simmel were writing about a contemporary cinema programme, which typically contained diverse short films in quick succession. Conversely, when describing its effects, cinema practitioners and theorists seemed to echo Simmel’s statements from their point of view. For example, in an article from Der Kinematograph, the German cinema reformer Hermann Häfker explained the ‘rules’ for putting together an effective cinema programme: The second commandment is diversion – opposition, contrast. Speed is followed by tranquility, something familiar follows something exotic, nature follows romance, earnestness follows humour … Afterwards, try to raise tension in the programme.9

The contemporary cinema programme was characterised by a great variety of film genres, subjects, visual attractions (Schauwerte) and moods. At first sight the cinema programme may have seemed like a chaos of completely unrelated items thrown together at random. However, it was actually dramatically and affectively structured according to specific rules, such as contrast, opposition, tension and progression, as well as affinity and harmony. The early cinema programme was almost a ritual, a schematic frame that could be filled with various content. It mattered less which films were programmed than how these films were combined. A programme filled only with the latest highlights would have been as ineffective as a programme filled only with sentimental melodramas or endless chases. However, these principles of programming often provoked fierce objections. For example, Alfred Döblin, the German author who was also a doctor specialising in nervous diseases, commented with concern: The triggering stimulus is as simple as the reflex of lust: crimes with dozens of dead bodies, gruesome manhunts, then excessive sentimentalities; the blind beggar and his dog pegging out on his grave; a film with the title: ‘Respect the

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Poor’ or ‘Prawn Fishers’; warships; no patriotism when watching the Kaiser and the army; only nasty amazement.10

Furthermore, Simmel states: Man is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts – all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.11

Although Simmel is referring to the modern metropolis, his vocabulary is just as suitable for describing the perceptual processes of early cinema (e.g. ‘images’, ‘onrushing impressions’). Not only each individual film, but the short-film programme as a whole was an arrangement of visual stimuli based on the principle of the ‘difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it’. Hence, a visit to a cinema show at the time in many ways resembled a walk through the modern city. The cinema-goer became a visual flâneur. In the cinema as in the streets, the ‘spectator’ experienced fleeting and unconnected impressions, whether a new film, shop-window or street scene. The connection between the concept of flânerie as discussed by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin has already been examined by several theorists, e.g. Anne Friedberg, who states that seen in the context of the following architectural and social history, cinematic spectatorship can be described as emerging from the social and psychic transformation that the arcades – and the consequent mobility of flânerie – produced.12

Moreover, the cinema programme not only simulated a walk through the city, but often around the world. In 1909, Der Kinematograph gave the following account of a typical cinema programme: The requirement to offer something for everybody leads to the ambition to present the greatest variety. And so a love-scene follows a murder, a serious drama follows a children’s play; first we are in Europe, then in an exotic country, now we are walking under palm-trees, soon we will be freezing at the North Pole.13

Hence, as regards swift changes and the compendiousness of sensations, the modern city and the early cinema programme were highly congenial. In Simmel’s theories on the increase of mental activity and nervous energy, there is a highly critical undertone.14 As is the case with many of his German contemporaries, Simmel’s work is marked by deep ambivalence towards modernisation and the emergence of mass culture and mass consumption. On the one hand, he regarded the rising consumer society as an impetus for the modernisation of the German Kaiserreich, but on the other hand, he perceived it as a threat to ‘subjective culture’, because modern man might become overwhelmed and alienated by the choices and possibilities that ‘objective culture’ offered.15 Consumerism and modern lifestyles provided both the potential of individualisation and social integration. But they also posed the threat of disintegration, by unhinging the modern subject

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from traditional relationships.16 The reservations that social theorists such as Simmel held against modern urban life, mass culture and consumer society were fuelled by the same misgivings that contemporary cinema critics and reformers articulated. The shared worries concerned the potentially overwhelming choices and impressions. The cinema reformers, especially those with a psychological or medical background, explicitly and vehemently criticised the rapid succession of disparate film images, which was assumed to prevent the viewer from fully engaging with them. The potential results of ‘overstimulation’ are also described in detail. According to Simmel, the people of the metropolis display a so-called ‘blasé attitude’, a Schutzfunktion (‘protective function’) they have developed to cope with the constant onrush of stimuli: ‘The blasé attitude results from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves’.17 It is a ‘peculiar adjustment’18 to the experience of overly strong, complex and rapid stimuli. This reaction results from an eventual insensitivity to such stimuli. Man has become incapable ‘to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy’, as Simmel puts it. ‘[Things] appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other’, he explains.19 Again, similar ideas of ‘emotional blunting’ can be found in discourses on early cinema and its audience. Reformers and critics claimed that, due to the variety and multitude of impressions in the cinema programme, the audience became either somehow ‘immune’ to the effects, so that they craved a ‘higher dose’, or they were unable to cope at all and passively surrendered. For example, an essay from 1909 reads: ‘Hence you can blame cinema for the danger that the rapid experience of the whole scale of emotions stunts children’s ability to feel truly and deeply’.20 The author, Georg Kleibömer, feared that children might lose their sense of empathy and sympathy for others and even the emotional connection to their own experiences. Another essay stated: One becomes used to swiftly and abruptly hurrying from one image to another. One loses the slow continuity of a succession of images, the ability to hold on, which is needed to judge thoroughly.21

Häfker even complained: ‘The theatre owners have created an audience that is overly demanding, hypercritical and blasé and that cannot be satisfied at all’.22 Moreover, the rapid succession of diverse stimuli was not only assumed to have negative consequences for people’s emotional capacities. The structure of the programme and its organisation of perception were regarded as especially dangerous for people with sensitive and unstable dispositions – i.e. women, children and workers. Cinema-going reputedly not only caused mental and moral, but also physical harm, and it was held responsible for ‘modern’ afflictions such as neurasthenia, a nervous disease with which primarily women were seized. In the writings of the cinema reformers, one can find numerous claims of women fainting or becoming hysterical in the cinema.23 For example, Robert Gaupp, a medical doctor and psychologist, held that the rapid succession of unrelated images not only strained the eye,

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but increased mental tension beyond all bearing, especially for ‘sensitive people’: ‘There is no time for meditation and therefore no possibility of mental compensation’.24 According to Gaupp, the variety and speed of impressions in the cinema was unhealthy, because it led to over-excitation of the nerves, overloading of the brain and over-stimulation of the imagination. The Deutsche Bühnenverein, the German theatre association, also criticised the cinema with similar arguments. Even when the content was unobjectionable, the images would promote superficiality and lead to ‘the audience’s withdrawal from mental involvement, false sentimentality, false tragedy and a general precipitancy of emotions’. The cause was explicitly identified: ‘The diversified programme is to blame for that’. And again, behind psycho-physiological explanations, i.e. ‘the brain is unable to handle these varied images’,25 moral, class- and gender-related concerns lurk: It is true that women of the lower social classes surrender to these entrancing images with body and soul, and that cinema absolutely enthralls children. ... It is also true that the man sitting next to them, even if he comes from the same social class, is smiling at the emotions of his neighbour.26

This discourse about the alleged effects of the film programme, particularly on female cinema-goers, can be better understood in the context of similar discourses within the general debate on modernisation and consumerism, e.g. regarding the causes of kleptomania or agoraphobia. In such medical, reformist and social discourses, modernity, urbanity and femininity were connected, to understand – or rather, to cope with – the contemporary changes of the public sphere.27 From Simmel’s writings, one can deduce yet another analogy between the metropolis and the cinema: the short-film programme of early cinema was based on the premise that all attractions were equal. Due to the spreading of the blasé attitude, life in the metropolis increasingly resembled a short-film programme. Modern man was still able to perceive different stimuli, and he could differentiate them according to their emotional content, but he was no longer able to differentiate them regarding their emotional intensity. As Simmel put it: The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.28

Furthermore, in the big city, encounters between human beings, like all impressions, were characterised by rarity and ephemerality. Therefore, modern man felt the need ‘to appear “to the point”’, to appear concentrated and strikingly characteristic’, as Simmel says.29 One had to intensify, specify and even exaggerate one’s characteristics to make them unambiguous, since there was no time to paint a differentiated picture. This also applied to the films of the short film programme, which were based on brevity, clarity and the ability to tell their story ‘to the point’. And just like each individual film in the context of a programme offered specialised and distinct stimuli, modern man had to ‘specialise in [his] services … in order to find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function which cannot

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readily be displaced’.30 Both film and man required ‘differentiation’ and ‘refinement’31 to persist in a modern context. Finally, the life of modern man itself became cinematic. As in the cinema, where you could witness someone else’s experiences, modern man perceived his own experiences as if they were detached from him. While real life increasingly came to resemble a cinema show, the perception of real life – and man’s mental and emotional engagement with it – increasingly came to resemble the spectator’s gaze in the cinema. What this meant to contemporaries was best expressed by Hermann Kienzl, who aptly stated that the Großstadtseele (‘big city soul’) was a veritable Kinematographenseele (‘cinema soul’): The psychology of the cinematic triumph is the psychology of the metropolis – not simply because the metropolis is the focal point for all emanation of social life, but because the spirit of the metropolis, this hounded, lurching, enquiring and fathomless spirit, is the essential spirit of the cinematograph!32

In sum, for Simmel’s contemporaries, cinema was the perfect expression of a new Zeitgeist. This strong affinity between the early cinema programme and modernisation can be further illustrated and confirmed with the second essay by Simmel. In his review of the Berlin trade fair (‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’), he analyses the new public attraction of the metropolitan trade fair as an important site where the processes of modernisation and commodification show their visible – and visual – effects. The trade exhibition combines in condensed form – i.e. in limited space and time – all the features of modern urban life, i.e. its social interactions as well as its perceptual consequences, in which Simmel was interested throughout his work. The Berlin trade fair was held from 1 May to 15 October 1897, at Treptower Park in the south of Berlin. Throughout the summer it attracted around 7.4 Million visitors. Under the patronage of the association of the Berlin tradesmen and industrialists, the production sector of the aspiring metropolis displayed its potential. In addition to the exhibitions of various local companies from different branches, such as the textile, machine, electro, chemical, optical and photography industry, visitors could watch marine shows in a giant water basin or a Völkerschau on Kairo with a 36 metre replica of the Cheops pyramid, stroll through a replica of ‘Old Berlin’, visit the North Pole or the Alps, entertain themselves at a large amusement park or dine at one of several restaurants.33 Thus, the event was a kind of Wilhelmine Disneyland, rather than simply a trade fair. An event bringing together economic power, technological innovations, spectacular entertainment and modern modes of perception would seem to be the perfect environment for the newly invented cinematograph. And indeed, the Kinematograph Lumière, along with three other cinematographic exhibitions, was present at the Berlin trade fair. People willing to pay a small extra fee could watch a short programme of projected films. In numerous showings and in spatial proximity to other vending and entertainment machines of Ludwig Stollwerck’s Deutsche Automaten-Gesellschaft, the Kinematograph Lumière presented a programme of assorted Bilder (‘views’). It was a very popular attraction.34

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In his review of the event, Simmel remarked that the ‘material’ and the ‘samples’, as he called the exhibits, which had been gathered from around the world, only attained their conclusive form under the roof of the exhibition, where they ‘become a part of a single whole’.35 However, he felt that The way in which the most heterogeneous industrial products are crowded together in close neighbourhood paralyses the senses – a veritable hypnosis, in which individual impressions just barely brush the upper layers of consciousness, and finally in memory, only the most frequently repeated notion triumphs over the remains of countless impressions that are worthy, but weakened through fragmentation: the idea that one should amuse oneself here.36

Here again, whether Simmel attended a cinema show at the trade fair or not, he might just as well be describing the perceptual effects of an early cinema programme, because its composition was also based on the proximity of heterogeneous elements. An individual short film became ‘part of a single whole’ within the cinema show. Only in the overarching arrangement of the programme could it develop its inherent and distinct qualities to fulfil its function. Similar to the trade exhibition, it was not the individual product, i.e. the single film, that was most important, but the higher purpose of the whole programme, ‘that one should amuse oneself here’. Or, to quote another part of the essay: ‘In the face of the richness and diversity of what is offered, the only unifying and colourful factor is that of amusement’.37 Thus, whether for an exhibition or a film show, not so much the individual stimuli, i.e. what was combined, but rather how they were combined, was crucial. It was this perceptual principle that made exhibitions and cinema programmes attractive events. Similar to the critics of early cinema, Simmel was ambivalent about the perceptual experience of world fairs. On the one hand, ‘every fine and sensitive feeling … is violated and seems deranged by the mass effect of the merchandise offered’, but on the other hand, he admitted that it was exactly this ‘richness and variety of fleeting impressions’ that was well suited to the needs of overstimulated and tired nerves.38 As Simmel’s remarks suggest, the presentational pattern and the perceptual mode of the cinema programme relied on principles already established by other forms of exhibition and entertainment, such as fairs, dime museums, variety theatres and even public morgues.39 Thus, the psychic disposition of the cinema audience existed before cinema was invented. Simmel suggested that such amusements functioned as surrogates, a topos also often used for cinema and its programme. Modern man, whose own experiences had become increasingly monotonous due to the specialisation of labour that capitalism required, was seeking distraction and compensation in ersatz-institutions, such as trade fairs or cinema. Simmel states: It appears as though modern man’s one sided and monotonous role in the division of labour will be compensated for by consumption and enjoyment through the growing pressure of heterogeneous impressions, and the ever faster and more colourful change of excitements.40

Altenloh later expresses remarkably similar ideas in relation to cinema. But in 1896, when Simmel wrote that no other phenomenon catered to modern perceptions quite like trade exhibitions, he was probably not yet

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able to imagine that cinema would not only equal, but surpass other forms of entertainment in the fulfilment of such desires. Furthermore, trade fairs and cinema were both forms of commodified display. As several theorists have observed, the main purpose of such trade exhibitions was not to directly further trade, as one might assume, but to promote the principle of display. Simmel reflects on the ‘shop-window quality of things, a characteristic which the exhibition accentuates’.41 The design of the trade fair fostered this impression, because the exhibited products were ‘aestheticised within an environment that foregrounded the spectacle of display rather than the function of “productive work”’.42 The commodities on display at the Berlin trade fair were presented as objects of desire, not as objects to satisfy basic needs. Thus, this manner of presenting the products of Berlin’s industry was geared towards the shop-windows of department stores and shopping arcades, which accentuated the practice of looking rather than the actual act of shopping. This, again, recommits to cinema, i.e. the connection between films, window-shopping and commodified culture.43 Above all, Simmel stresses the passive aspect of reception, i.e. the moment of ‘receiving and enjoying’, in the sense of ‘just looking’. But neither at fairs, nor in cinemas at the time, did audiences usually just sit and watch. During early cinema shows, there was much activity and participation: people talked, ate and drank, sang along with song slides, and came in and left whenever they wanted. Thus, the audience itself contributed to the perceptual variety and stimulation of the event. To some extent, even the architectural design connects the exhibition with cinema. The constructions of such exhibitions were ephemeral. Simmel mentions the ‘attraction of the transient forms’, the ‘lack of permanence’ and that the architect was ‘freed from the stipulation of permanence’.44 Furthermore, the entrance pavilion and many other buildings of the Berlin trade fair were built in an Oriental style, with minarets and cupolas, but featuring new materials, such as glass and steel. As in the case of contemporary department stores, the architects were not bound by tradition; rather, the design was not only subordinated to the purpose of display, it became a part oft it.45 The architectural design of the more elaborate permanent cinemas followed similar principals: numerous picture palaces were built in Oriental or fantasy styles, and their facades were often modelled on travelling fairground shows. Their main purpose also was to celebrate display – the display of the fleeting projected image. In sum, the mode of perception to which the early cinema programme catered, with its diverse and seemingly unrelated stimuli, was characterised by fragmentation, variety and rapidity. It represented the everyday experience of the metropolitan flâneur, whose state of mind was described by contemporaries with physiological concepts such as ‘shock’, ‘excitation’ and ‘overstimulation’. This organisation of perception was similar to the manner in which visual attractions were presented at other exhibitions and entertainments, e.g. the Berlin trade fair of 1896, which Simmel described. The experience of cinema around 1900, in particular its exhibition and programming practices, was regarded as quintessentially modern, but it had

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its predecessors, and it was based on modes of perception similar to other modern phenomena, e.g. trade fairs, department stores, variety shows – and the metropolis itself, the epitome of modernity. Cinema critics adopted concepts and arguments that had already been developed by cultural theorists, such as Simmel, in other contexts. The concern about the effects of cinema and especially its programming practices was fuelled by the same uncertainties and worries that accompanied modernisation in general.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

Georg Simmel, ‘Die Berliner Gewerbeausstellung’, Die Zeit: Wiener Wochenschrift für Politik, Volkswirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 8, 95 (25 July 1896): 59–60; English translation: Georg Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’, trans. by Sam Whimster, Theory, Culture & Society 8, 3 (1991): 119–123, quote p. 120. However, we (I and the editors) have re-translated the quotation, because Whimster’s translation is not close enough to the original. Georg Melcher, ‘Von der lebenden Photographie und dem Kino-Drama’, Der Kinematograph, 112 (17 February 1909). Georg Simmel, ‘Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Theodor Petermann (ed.), Die Grosstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung, Vol. 9 (Dresden: von Zahn & Jaensch, 1903), 185–206. English translation ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. by Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1964), 409–424. Georg Simmel (aka Paul Liesegang), ‘Infelices Possidentes!’, Die Zukunft (8 April 1893). English translation in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds), Simmel On Culture (London: Sage, 1997). In this essay Simmel mentions the Berlin Apollo-Theater, a variety theatre that later began to incorporate films in its programme. I thank Daniel Fritsch for pointing this out to me. See e.g. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avantgarde’, Wide Angle 8, 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship In American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture In Turn-of-theCentury Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998). See e.g. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA et al.: University of California Press, 1995) and Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997). Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 409–410 (emphasis in the original). Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1914). English translation (excerpt): ‘A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience’, Screen 42, 3 (2001): 249–293, quote p. 257–258. Hermann Häfker, ‘Zur Dramaturgie der Bilderspiele’, Der Kinematograph 32 (7 August 1907). Alfred Döblin, ‘Das Theater der kleinen Leute’, Das Theater 1, 8 (December 1909), reprinted in Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium, 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 153–155, quote p. 155. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 410. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 68. ‘Gruppen und Pausen im Kinotheater’, Der Kinematograph 143 (22 September 1909). Dietmar Jazbinsek, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben von Georg Simmel – Zur Geschichte einer Antipathie’, in Schriftenreihe der Forschungsgruppe ‘Metropolenforschung’ des Forschungsschwerpunkts ‘Technik – Arbeit – Umwelt’ am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, FS II 01–504 2001, http://skylla.wz-berlin.de/pdf/2001/ii01–504.pdf (31 March 2007). See Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (1900). English translation: The Philosophy of Money, ed. by David Frisby (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004). See Thomas Lenz, ‘Konsum und Großstadt: Anmerkungen zu den antimodernen Wurzeln der Konsumkritik’, in Michael Jäckel (ed.), Ambivalenzen des Konsums und der werblichen Kommunikation (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 41–52. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 413–414.

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Chapter 9 Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

123

Ibid., 415. Ibid., 414. Georg Kleibömer, ‘Kinematograph und Schuljugend’, Der Kinematograph 124 (12 May 1909). Curt Moreck, Sittengeschichte des Kinos (Dresden: Aretz, 1926), 69–70. Hermann Häfker, ‘Zur Dramaturgie der Bilderspiele’. On medical discourses, see Scott Curtis, ‘The Taste of a Nation: Training the Senses and Sensibility of Cinema Audiences In Imperial Germany’, Film History 6, 4 (1994): 445–469. Robert Gaupp, ‘Die Gefahren des Kinos’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte 9, 2 (July 1912): 363–366, reprinted in Schweinitz, Prolog vor dem Film, 64–69, quote p. 66. ‘Die Denkschrift des Deutschen Bühnenvereins: Die Anklagen gegen die deutschen KinoBesitzer’, Lichtbild-Bühne 5, 25 (22 December 1912). Leopold Schmidl, ‘Logik und Psychologie in der tragischen Bildidee’, Der Kinematograph 200 (26 October 1910). See e.g. Elaine S. Abelson, ‘The Invention of Kleptomania’, Signs 15, 1 (Autumn 1989): 123–143. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 414. Ibid., 421. Ibid., 420. Ibid. Hermann Kienzl, ‘Theater und Kinematograph’ Der Strom 1, 7 (October 1911): 219–221, reprinted in Schweinitz, Prolog vor dem Film, 230–234, quote p. 231. See Paul Thiel, ‘Berlin präsentiert sich der Welt: Die Treptower Gewerbeausstellung 1896’, in Jochen Boberg, Tilman Fichter and Eckhart Gillen (eds), Die Metropole: Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 1986), 16–27 and Dorothy Rowe, ‘Georg Simmel and the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896’, Urban History 22, 2 (August 1995): 216–228. See Martin Loiperdinger, Film & Schokolade: Stollwercks Geschäft mit lebenden Bildern (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1999), 150–168. Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’, 120. Ibid., 119. This, again, is our own translation. Ibid. Ibid., 120. See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’, 120. Ibid., 122. Rowe, ‘Georg Simmel and the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896’, 223. See e.g. Janes Gaines, ‘The Queen Christina Tie-Ups: Convergence of Show Window and Screen’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, 1 (Winter 1989): 35–60. Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’, 121. Rowe, ‘Georg Simmel and the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896’, 223 and 226.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: ‘Under the Sign of the Cinematograph’: Urban Mobility and Cinema Location in Wilhelmine Berlin Chapter Author(s): Pelle Snickars Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.13 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 10

‘Under the Sign of the Cinematograph’: Urban Mobility and Cinema Location in Wilhelmine Berlin

‘Under

the Sign of the Cinematograph

’

Pelle Snickars hile urbanisation was one of the principal facets of modernisation, new means of transportation were prior to almost every other innovation, as Wilhelmine Berlin grew and expanded to become a modern metropolis. Sometimes called ‘Chicago on the Spree’ – and definitely the most modern European capital at the time – Berlin’s infrastructure of road and rail networks constituted the core of urban communication. In the year 1900, more than 80 million passengers used the city’s public transportation network.1 A similar infrastructural assumption serves as the guiding principle of this study on urban mobility and transportation, population density and cinema as a new media institution. This essay, in short, argues that transportation facilities and pedestrian traffic are the definitive factors to describe and understand the dispersion of the early Berlin Kintopps (the equivalent of the US nickelodeons).

W

Berlin transportation Alan Trachtenberg once noted that historical knowledge seems to declare ‘its true value by its photographability’.2 Hence, besides conveying aesthetic ideals and media practices, photographs and films record ephemeral actions and events of everyday life (or at least give this impression). One of the more striking photographs of Berlin’s rapid urban development during the Wilhelmine era was taken by Waldemar Titzenthaler in the winter of 1907 (see Figure 1). It portrays an almost deserted Reichskanzlerplatz. Situated on the western brink of Charlottenburg – not yet a district of Berlin, but a city of its own – it was, indeed, remote at the time. In the 1900 Baedeker guide to Berlin and its environs, the Reichskanzlerplatz was regarded as too inaccessible to be included on the main map.3 A few years later, however, while Berlin continued to grow at a breathtaking speed, the Reichskanzlerplatz constituted the edge of the ever-expanding metropolis. Berlin’s population doubled from 1 million in the late

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Fig. 1. The former Reichskanzlerplatz in Berlin (today Theodor-Heuss-Platz). Photograph taken by Waldemar Titzenthaler during the winter of 1907. [Source: Landesarchiv Berlin.]

1870s to almost 2 million by 1900. Population growth was primarily constituted by large-scale immigration, especially from the East, to which the upper classes reacted by moving west (vividly expressed in the phrase Zug nach Westen), leaving the eastern and northern parts of the city to the working classes. The Reichskanzlerplatz belonged to such a bourgeois locality: Westend, a fashionable residential area of the wealthy. These inhabitants are, however, more or less absent in Titzenthaler’s photograph, which displays only a few shadowy figures, even though unpopulated spaces are atypical of Titzenthaler’s urban imagery.4 Berlin has sometimes been called a ‘nowhere city’, and Titzenthaler’s image of the empty Reichskanzlerplatz is an appropriate illustration for such a motto. It is a photograph of an overgrown metropolis, where even more spaces await urbanization. What is most striking in Titzenthaler’s image is the lack of buildings despite the existing traffic infrastructure. A huge white signboard announces Baustellen verkäuflich (‘construction sites for sale’), directing potential investors to an address further downtown. However, the almost uncanny quality of the photograph principally derives from the two underground railway entrances, which are visible in the foreground. In March 1908, the very first commuter to the new underground station was no lesser person than Kaiser Wilhelm II. His so-called Kaiserfahrt to inaugurate Berlin’s newest underground line took him from the station Knie, along the Kaiserdamm through Charlottenburg towards Westend and ended at Reichskanzlerplatz. Two weeks later the route was open to the general public. The circumstances were aptly described by the Berliner Volks-Zeitung, declaring that ‘at the Reichskanzlerplatz everything ends – outside there is only a sandpit’.5 Hence, travellers were literally going nowhere.6

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For a further depiction of the rapid development of urban transportation around 1900, two early Lumière films can serve as examples. The wonderful meta-historical Entrée du cinématographe, shot in London during spring 1896, visually testifies that even if film seemed like the quintessential medium of modernity, people were still arriving at the cinema with horse and carriage. Besides revealing a Victorian class structure – where bourgeois gentlemen, carrying canes, strolled by a poorly clad sandwich man – the film depicts a vanishing society in rapid change. The film camera clearly captures the hallmarks of modernity: a hectic public space full of activity, with rapid traffic and numerous billboards. The closest Berlin equivalent is probably Panoptikum Friedrichstrasse, also from 1896.7 It depicts the entrance of the Kaisergalerie, a location with a similar bustling atmosphere. More than ten horse-drawn carriages, busses and carts pass by on the Friedrichstraße during the films’ mere 30 seconds. Hence, the Lumière short shows that electrification of the public transportation system had hardly begun in Berlin at the time. Horsepower still constituted the primary energy for city travel. If a pedestrian could walk two and a half kilometres in 30 minutes, a horse-drawn tram was two kilometres faster. The latter so-called Pferdebahnen dominated urban traffic and were estimated to travel at the speed of 9 km/hour. By contrast, electric streetcars would run at 15 km/hour, at least according to a statistical chart provided by Erich Giese in his extensive investigation on the future transportation network of Berlin, Das zukünftige Schnellbahnnetz für Groß-Berlin.8 The main purpose of Giese’s publication was to figure out where new transportation facilities were needed most in the expanding metropolis. Through empirical research undertaken in the early teens, Giese collected statistics for a number of charts, depicting, for example, population density and traffic flows. From such data, he conceived suggestions for new transportation routes. Furthermore, his book also presented the historical development of different forms of communication and transport, as well as Berlin’s demographic development. Two charts in the beginning of the book, for instance, display the population density in central Berlin around Friedrichstraße. In 1880, almost 260,000 people were living in the area, a figure that, by 1914, had dropped to less than 140,000, i.e. a decrease of 120,000 inhabitants during a thirty-four-year period. In another chart, or rather, a map of population density, Giese estimated where people would move in the near future (see Figure 2).9 Giese expected the primary population growth around the industrial areas in the northeast of the city. According to Giese, there were two main reasons for this population dispersion. Firstly, because of the development of a new network of streetcars, the Straßenbahnnetz, workers no longer needed to live within walking distance from their place of work. Secondly, the general Zug nach Westen contributed to this trend, and one reason why the urban haute bourgeoisie could – or, indeed, would – move westwards also were the new transportation facilities. The completion of the Berliner Ringbahn (‘circular railway’) in 1877 had already laid the foundation of a western ‘inner’ urban space, of which real estate speculators soon became aware and from which they profited. Legend has it that the old

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Fig. 2. Expectations of Berlin’s demographic development in 1914. Grey dots represent a presumed 1,000 inhabitants, black ones an existing 1,000. [Source: Giese, Das zukünftige Schnellbahnnetz für Groß-Berlin.]

potato farmers of Schöneberg also did: overnight they became millionaires by selling their fields to various construction companies. As Berlin grew, urban planners were continually looking for new solutions to its increasing traffic problems. Between 1896 and 1902, all horse-powered means of public transportation were gradually electrified, and streetcar tracks were embedded into the city’s vast road system. In the centre, however, one exception remained – Unter den Linden. Apparently, Kaiser Wilhelm II did not allow his Prachtallee to be subjected to such ‘imprints of modernity’. Nonetheless, by 1914, more than 130 electric streetcar lines were in operation, adding up to more than 50 percent of Berlin’s transportation system.10 Hence, streetcars were electrified prior to the underground. Since Berlin was largely built on Sumpf und Sand (‘marsh and sand’), city administrators were doubtful and hesitant as to whether an underground system was feasible at all. Among other things, they feared that it would damage the city sewers. Apparently, Siemens suggested the construction of an elevated railway, while AEG proposed an underground system. In the end, a joint proposal succeeded, and in 1896, work began on an elevated railway through the new southwestern part of the city. The so-called Stammstrecke of the Berlin underground was eventually opened in 1902. The – as it turned out – partly elevated and partly underground railway soon became very

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Fig. 3. Berlin’s Gleisdreieck station.

popular. Traffic became more and more congested – and soon the inevitable happened. In September 1908, Berlin witnessed its first and most serious railway accident. At the intersection Gleisdreieck – the modern transportation node par préference in Berlin – the so-called Hochbahn went in three different directions. It appears that one train crashed into the side of another and a wagon fell from the viaduct, causing the death of 18 people. The event headed all newspapers, and five film companies were soon on location, among them Messter (see Figure 3). Furthermore, in conjunction with the underground, a number of major commercial ventures were also established, notably the modern department store Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe). It opened in March 1907, five years after the inauguration of the underground station Wittenbergplatz. Retailers such as KaDeWe took advantage of new transportation facilities. On the one hand, it made shopping more convenient for customers, and, on the other hand, the store gained walk-in customers through the increased traffic. Payments were co-ordinated through a network of 150 cash decks connected to a central cashier’s office via a pneumatic dispatch system. Thus, as people poured in and through KaDeWe’s numerous departments, money floated through its inner network of tubes.11 But not only KaDeWe had a pneumatic dispatch system. The city of Berlin had built a similar postal network, which in fact anticipated its underground railway system by more than 40 years. The Berliner Rohrpost began operation in 1865 (see Figure 4). Over the years, with some 90 stations and 400 kilometres of tubes, it developed into the second largest of its kind after Paris. German production of pneumatic dispatch systems was also located in Berlin, and several companies were exporting equipment on a large scale. Since its transportation patterns are comparable to later traffic routes, Berlin’s pneumatic dispatch system serves as an interesting predecessor of the transportation network built around 1900. Apparently, the

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Fig. 4. General overview of Berlin’s pneumatic postal system in 1873.

Rohrpost system was able to deliver up to eight million dispatches annually, and messages only took about an hour to reach the various recipients across the city. Hence, in more than one sense, this underground postal system was an innovative technology indicative of ways in which communication and transportation later became the most important features of urban modernity.12

Berlin cinemas In June 1907, the cinema reformer Hermann Lemke went for a stroll through Berlin. In an article in Der Kinematograph based on this leisurely promenade, Lemke argued that if one had been away from Berlin for a while, one would, upon return, immediately notice a brand new constituent of its everyday life: No matter in which street one walks, everywhere one reads ‘Vitaskoptheater’, ‘Theater lebende Photographien’, ‘Kinematographentheater’. Berlin is living under the sign of the cinematograph! I made the effort to walk through the north, south, east and west of the city in order to count the cinemas. At 200, I gave up.13

In January of the same year, ‘Bardolph’ in Berliner Tageblatt claimed that Berlin had 280 Kintopps, a figure probably taken from the first issue of the same trade paper where Lemke published his flânerie.14 However, statistical confusion reigns, not only due to contradictory reports, but also the fact that it was only in 1920 that all of Berlin’s separate districts became part of the metropolis. Alexander Jason, in his dissertation on film industry statistics, claims that the number of Berlin cinemas increased from 21 to 132 between 1905 and 1907; by 1910 there were 139 cinemas, and by 1912 the figure had risen to 195.15 However, in 1912, the journalist Ulrich Rauscher claimed that Berlin had as many as 400 Kintopps,16 while the cinema and housing re-

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former Viktor Noack referred to a study in which Berlin was said to have around 300 cinemas. As a regular writer on film, Noack was aware of the uncertainty in this matter, and he explicitly proposed ‘a municipal investigation concerning the influence of cinema on the mental life of the inhabitants of Berlin’.17 Noack’s proposal, of course, indicates that no such investigation had been done before in Berlin, in contrast, for example, to Vienna, where the Wiener Magistrat had undertaken such an investigation, to which Noack referred. According to Noack, in 1913 in Germany, there were around 3,000 cinemas, which were attended by some 1.5 million people a day.18 However, as Jeanpaul Goergen has reminded us, proof and verification of such figures in, for example, the daily press, is rather difficult to find, especially in the case of Berlin. For instance, in 1909 the city was said to have between 150 and 200 Kintopps, but only 26 are listed in the city index of addresses, the Berliner Adreßbuch.19 Consequently, Goergen has proposed to ‘distinguish between two classes of cinema: the visible cinema and the invisible cinema’.20 Following Goergen, the smaller Kintopps belonged to an invisible cinema culture, hidden mainly because of their limited impact on an urban public sphere. Hence, a Kintopp in a local Berlin district had a restricted scope, and its only means of communication was its facade. By contrast, companies dealing with moving pictures, first and foremost the world-market leader Pathé Frères, were conspicuously present within the new urban cinemascape. For example, in 1909, some fifty companies were listed in the Berliner Adreßbuch. Film advertising was prolific and sometimes occupied nearly two pages. Berlin was the main film distribution hub for Germany, as well as for Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Most film companies established themselves in the so-called Filmviertel (‘film quarter’), along the south of Friedrichstraße, which also hosted a number of film studios. Even though the Berliner Adreßbuch was probably financed by small fees, it remains a fascinating resource, hinting at the gradual development of an urban media sphere. The directory, for example, situated Berlin’s early cinema in a larger media framework, where phonographic companies, not to mention photographic ones, strongly outnumbered motion picture companies.21 These film companies and their production and distribution of films were, of course, the basic prerequisite for the emergence of permanent cinemas during the first decade of the twentieth century. However, means of transport were also a very important factor. The earliest permanent cinemas in Berlin established themselves in busy thoroughfares in the city centre, notably on Unter den Linden and in the area around Friedrichstraße.22 The Kinematograph Unter den Linden 21, for instance, was situated near the famous Kranzlereck, a popular location with cafés and restaurants, Tanzbars and amusement attractions.23 The Friedrichstraße, sometimes nicknamed Saufstraße (‘booze street’) due to its more than 250 pubs, was the centre of the red light district. It also served as a mass cultural entertainment hub with numerous cinemas, wax museums, circuses and variety stages. At some of the latter, notably the Berliner Wintergarten, moving pictures were shown as early as the mid 1890s.

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Hence, the economic achievement and popular success of cinema as a new media institution – as is the case with most commercial undertakings – was dependent on the immediate environment. However, the establishment of permanent cinemas was also ‘always traffic oriented’, as Max Kullmann noted in his 1935 dissertation on the development of German Lichtspieltheater.24 The location was not enough in itself; logistics, patterns of public transportation and pedestrian traffic mattered at least as much. In fact, this seems to have been evident from the very introduction of film. Historians have linked the Skladanowsky brothers’ success at the Wintergarten – the best-known Berlin variety theatre – to its location near one of the city’s densest transportation hubs, the Bahnhof Friedrichstraße.25 In comparison, the Apollo-Theater – where, in 1896, Oskar Messter began with his Kosmograph film projections and where he continued with his so called Tonbilder (‘illustrated song films’) in 1903 – lay much further down on Friedrichstraße, ‘and, thus, not at all as profitable and advantageous in terms of passenger transfer as the Wintergarten’.26 Audiences were dependent on means to get to the Kintopp, but factual extensions of transportation routes (i.e. exactly what streets were traversed) were even more significant. Still, before 1908/09, purpose-built cinemas were rare in Berlin. Even though cinema swiftly became an institution of urban social life, the early Berlin Kintopps were predominantly located in buildings originally designed for other purposes than film projection. For example, in January 1907, ‘Bardolph’ of the Berliner Tageblatt paid a visit to a Berlin Kinoladen (‘cinema shop’). ‘The establishment of a Kintopp is very simple’, ‘Bardolph’ stated. All that was required was a local shop, made dark by blackened windows; rows of chairs, held together by a wooden rod, and some kind of screen on which to project the moving images; a piano or a nickelodeon and a counter selling beer and refreshments.27

As Brigitte Flickinger has shown, early cinemas in Berlin were usually part of certain integrated architectural patterns. They were either situated in tenement blocks or in commercial areas, in buildings that were combinations of living apartments and places of business. Hence, from early on, different entrepreneurs and owners of various locations accepted, and even appreciated, the new entertainment form as a part of cultural and commercial urban life. As Flickinger accurately notes, they did so ‘in spite of the raging debate on the usefulness or the moral and cultural dangers’28 of the new medium. As a background to these debates (which existed in several European countries, but seem to have been particularly vehement in Germany), it is important to stress that ‘cinema-going’ – a cultural concept yet to come – was very different during the early period from what it became later. A film culture based on attention, silence and narrative immersion had not yet developed (i.e. ‘classical cinema’). Instead, attending a Kintopp literally meant arriving at a fairly arbitrary moment. One would watch for a while, constantly interrupted by the changes of reels and salesmen of refreshments. Finally, one would depart, not always as the programme ended, but when one got tired and had seen enough. The fact that numerous Berlin Kintopps offered standing room tickets at a lower price is further testimony

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of such walk-in and almost restless reception. ‘Bardolph’ mentions that ‘those who could not find a seat stand close to the walls’.29 Some cinemas even sold tickets for reversed seats – with patrons sitting behind the screen either in a straight line or at a right angle (in which case a mirror was used to relay the projection), so that half of the audience would see the film reversed. It goes without saying that this made intertitles difficult to read, but since Berlin cinemas sometimes had an Erklärer (a commentator explaining what went on), he usually also read the inverted text out loud. Hence, early Berlin cinema audiences came and went at random. At the time, watching films was almost like consuming any other product – or at least exhibitors promoted the new medium this way. Catering to public demand, they sought to create film programmes that would attract audiences enough to return. In fact, the very institution of urban cinema depended on the establishment of a Stammpublikum (‘regulars’) – a paradox indeed, since audiences were unpredictable and often inconsistent in their preferences.30 Hence, exhibitors had to go out of their way to present new and exciting programmes, or risk losing their business. ‘Some smaller Kintopps continue to show old pictures, and sometimes even rerun films from previous years’, an annoyed critic in Der Kinematograph stated in August 1908. ‘They still manage to find an audience for such screenings, but they should consider the damage done to their theatre’s reputation and not be surprised if audiences never return’.31 Even though longer films – what Corinna Müller has termed the Langfilmszeit of early cinema – appeared around 1910, the programme structure of film exhibition, and thus the mode of reception connected with it, was relatively persistent.32 Furthermore, attending the cinema remained linked to transportation and communication patterns. For example, Albert Brocke, in a 1908 introduction to the requirements for operating a cinema, argued that a cinema entrepreneur should, in the first place, ‘seek out a locality in the busiest streets, if possible close to a railway station’. Brocke’s advice mainly targeted exhibitors in smaller cities.33 However, Max Kullmann later, in a historical study, made a similar claim, noting that German cinema entrepreneurs in general had acted briskly and efficiently, in accord with the latest developments in the urban transportation system. Since people decided to attend a cinema impulsively and on a whim, countless cinemas were, according to Kullmann, established ‘in the busiest areas of the suburbs’. Consequently, cinemas tended to be situated in close proximity to one another (even though this intensified competition). By and large, this pattern seems to have been the same in most German cities. ‘All over [Germany], cinemas were tightly clustered’, Kullmann noted, ‘not least because the most recent cinema owners always believed they had to choose the same place to attain a favourable location’.34

Berlin audiences In the summer of 1911, the journalist Franz Pfemfert gave the terse comment that one could form an opinion on a national culture by reading entertainment statistics. The masses of modernity craved amusement and distraction, and pivotal among these were, of course, moving pictures: ‘Nick

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Carter, cinema and Berlin tenement houses – this trivial trinity belongs together’, Pfemfert laconically stated.35 Many comments in the German trade press were, in fact, arrogant and ostentatious towards members of the lower classes who frequented cinemas. For example, blue-collar workers had bad manners; they were noisy and reeked: ‘the cheap seats are occupied by people who do not exactly smell like nectar and ambrosia’, as one critic put it in 1908.36 As in other big cities, the audiences of early Berlin Kintopps were predominantly workers and children. The composition of early film audiences has been discussed in detail by various scholars, notably in the Cinema Journal debate on Manhattan nickelodeons. Interestingly, cinema location was a major topic of the discussion.37 For example, Ben Singer, in the first of his articles on the subject, argued that a range of factors shaped the distribution of nickelodeons in Manhattan: neighbourhood class, population density, ethnic concentration, municipal codes and regulation, transportation patterns, the availability of commercial space, rent rates and so on.

Singer states that these factors, often combined in various ways, were the prime reasons for encouraging – or discouraging – the opening of a new cinema. According to him, population concentration was the ‘best predicator of nickelodeon distribution’, since cinemas most frequently ‘clustered in the densest areas of the city – densest either in terms of residential concentration or volume of pedestrian traffic’.38 Hence, although trying to make a case in point, Singer’s concept of ‘density’ seems somewhat ambiguous, designating either residential concentration or pedestrian traffic. But these are not necessarily the same, and, moreover, Singer in fact stresses population density as the primary factor for cinema location. However, in the case of Berlin, I would argue that traffic routes and hubs in general and pedestrian traffic in particular are factors that are superior to population density for describing and understanding the dispersion of the Berlin Kintopps. Certainly, people were inclined to attend cinemas in their neighbourhood. However, the primary factor for cinema entrepreneurs seems to have been proximity to the public transportation network. For example, in the district of Friedrichshain, one of the most densely populated blue-collar boroughs of Berlin, only two out of 18 cinemas were located in crowded residential areas far from transportation nodes – at least according to the so called Kino-Pharus-Plan from 1919. This map marked out 300 Berlin cinemas, and its publication testifies to the status of moving pictures by the late teens. However, it contained numerous cinemas that had been in operation for more than a decade, which also makes it useful for describing the period of early cinema.39 In the case of Friedrichshain, high population density made some quarters economically viable for local tradesmen, craftsmen and small shops. By contrast, local cinema owners apparently disfavoured such localities. In trying to attract an audience – from school children on their way home to workers leaving their factories – moving picture vendors were keener on establishing themselves near places of urban mobility. According to the Kino-Pharus-Plan, 16 out of 18 cinemas in Friedrichshain were situated in the proximity of the transportation

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Fig. 5. Cinema location in the district of Friedrichshain according to the Kino-Pharus-Plan.

network, either clustered around the Bahnhof Frankfurter Allee, or along various streetcar lines running through the area (see Figure 5). The district of Wedding can serve as another example. In Wedding – often nicknamed Rote Wedding because many socialists lived there – the working classes also dominated the overall demography. Around 1910, Wedding had 17 Kintopps, the second largest number among Berlin districts (after the central district Mitte). Wedding was a blue-collar borough, where many people both lived and worked, since a number of the city’s industries were located in the area, notably AEG. As Julie Ann Lindstrom has shown in her dissertation on Chicago nickelodeons, establishment of cinemas often seemed to have been dependent on where people lived and were they worked.40 Hence, Wedding testifies to a similar pattern. However, cinemas were still firmly linked to transportation nodes and routes. For example, six Kintopps were clustered around the main train station Bahnhof Wedding, and another eight around the streetcar intersection on Pank Straße. Interestingly, in the eastern part of Wedding, cinemas did not establish themselves along the main thoroughfare, the Brunnen Straße, but on the adjacent, smaller Swinemünder Straße. Both streets had streetcars, but Swinemünder Straße was probably more densely populated, since parts of the Brunnen Straße faced the park Humboldthain (see Figure 6). Hence, even though Wedding and Friedrichshain were densely populated urban areas, cinema owners were nevertheless inclined to favour transportation nodes and routes. One might offer two basic explanations why transportation facilities were a more important factor than population density for early cinema location in Berlin. On the one hand, Berliners attending Kintopps seem to have done this spontaneously, and on the other, population density is, undeniably, a problematic concept in relation to Berlin housing, since the

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Fig. 6. Cinema location in the district of Wedding according to the Kino-Pharus-Plan.

city is often said to have been the largest tenement house in the world. This expression also appeared in the subtitle of Werner Hegemann’s classic 1930 study, Das steinerne Berlin.41 According to Hegemann, with an average of 75.9 persons per building, Berlin had the highest inhabitant density in the Western world; in comparison, Manhattan had only 20.4. Hegemann based his statistics on earlier investigations, primarily done by Rudolf Eberstadt in 1910, and interestingly, when planning the future transportation network of the city, Erich Giese also drew upon them. The Berlin Mietskasernen were immense rental barracks with three to four dank courtyards extending from the street. The high population density, however, was largely due to the sheer size of the building blocks, and hence as a statistical category it gives a somewhat distorted notion of living conditions. The other reason why the transportation network and pedestrian traffic seems more suitable than population density is the fact that film viewing at the time was almost literally a ‘moving’ experience. Berlin’s cinema audiences were often described by contemporary observers as a laufpublikum (‘walk-in audience’), i.e. as being on the move, hurrying into and out of the Kintopp. ‘Cinema is convenient’, noted the critic Raoul Auernheimer, since Kintopps ‘lie temptingly at every street corner. Regardless of the hour, this automatic restaurant of the mind is always willing to satisfy one’s appetite’.42 The raison d’être of this viewing pattern was the city’s vast public

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Fig. 7. Traffic on Alexanderplatz around 1905.

transportation network. Hundreds of connecting lines made it exceptionally easy to jump off, jump in and see a film. For example, around 1910, in the southwest district of Steglitz, cinemas were situated along the main thoroughfare, the Schloßstraße, with its Straßenbahnlinie. Similarly in the northeastern district of Prenzlauer Berg, audiences travelling with the Hochbahn along Schönhauser Allee could choose between several cinemas. Mass transportation hubs serve as another case in point. Prior to 1910, on a regular day, the Alexanderplatz – the eastern centre of Berlin – saw some 140,000 pedestrians and 13,000 vehicles pass by.43 Some were heading for the train station Stadtbahnhof – opened in 1882 and part of the railway line traversing the central city – others proceeded towards the Berliner Stadtbahn, the underground or the numerous electrical streetcars (see Figure 7). Obviously, pedestrian traffic was immense – and in all likelihood the main reason why Berlin’s first Riesen-Kinematograph (‘giant cinema’), the Union-Theater am Alexanderplatz, opened opposite to the Tietz department store in September 1909. Hermann Tietz had inaugurated his lavish store five years earlier. The magnificent four-storey palace transformed shopping into a spectacular experience, which could be effortlessly continued by crossing the street to the ‘most beautiful cinema of its kind in the world’, according to advertisements. Apparently, some 800 persons could be seated in the Union-Theater am Alexanderplatz, a figure no other Berlin cinema matched at the time.44

Conclusion Due to a lack of extant documents, historical research on early cinema in Wilhelmine Berlin is very difficult. Much was lost in the two world wars. Furthermore, the Berlin daily press published very little on film – especially compared to the USA.45 In accordance with a reformist press agenda,

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newspapers avoided reporting on film as entertainment and instead wanted to associate it with information and education. Nevertheless, voices in the trade press and a few items gleaned from the daily press testify to the centrality of transportation as a factor for Kintopp location. For example, in his often quoted essay entitled ‘Kino und Schaulust’ (‘cinema and visual pleasure’) from 1913, the Dadaist artist Walter Serner reflected on the boom of permanent cinemas in 1907/08. The two main reasons for the success of the Berlin Kintopp, Serner argued, were the ‘convenient location on thoroughfares and the continuous film programme’.46 For the Berlin laufpublikum, these were significant characteristics of the cinema experience. Hence, attending the cinema was effortless entertainment: Kintopps temptingly positioned themselves at busy street corners, willing to satisfy one’s visual pleasure at almost any time.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

See Uwe Poppel and Sigurd Hilkenbach, Ein Jahrhundert Berliner U-Bahn in Streckenplänen und Fotos (Berlin: Jaron, 2002), 81. Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs’, Representations 9 (1985): 1–32, quote p. 1. See Baedeker, Berlin und Umgebungen (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1900). For a discussion of Waldemar Titzenthaler’s photographs, see e.g. the catalogue Berlin – Photographien von Waldemar Titzenthaler (Berlin: Nicolai, 1987). Titzenthaler’s photographs are now in the public domain. Consequently, almost 50 of them can be found on the web at http://commons.wikimedia.org (15 September 2008). Titzenthaler had originally worked in advertising, as well as psroviding the illustrated press with images. But he was also a keen urban photographer. His images were often taken from a high angle, emphasizing perspective and spatial depth. The Berliner Volks-Zeitung is quoted from Ruth Glatzer (ed.), Das Wilhelminische Berlin: Panorama einer Metropole 1890–1918 (Berlin: Siedler, 1997), 303. For a graphic introduction to the Berlin underground, see Poppel and Hilkenbach, Ein Jahrhundert Berliner U-Bahn in Streckenplänen und Fotos. For a general introduction to early German non-fiction cinema, see Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Vol. 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005). See Erich Giese, Das zukünftige Schnellbahnnetz für Groß Berlin, Berlin: Moeser, 1919. The black dots on his map illustrate approximately where a thousand people lived, and the red ones represent where a thousand inhabitants would presumably live in the forthcoming years. The purple parts, in turn, mark the most important industrial areas at the time. Michael Erbe, ‘Berlin im Kaiserreich (1871–1918)’, in Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.), Geschichte Berlins, Vol. 2: Von der Märzrevolution bis zur Gegenwart (München: Beck, 1987), 691–793, specif. p. 737. For a discussion of Berlin’s department stores, see e.g. Alexander Sedlmaier, From Department Store To Shopping Mall (Berlin: Akademischer Verlag, 2005). For an introduction to the Berlin pneumatic dispatch system, see Ingmar Arnold, Luft-Züge: die Geschichte der Rohrpost in Berlin und anderswo (Berlin: GWE, 2000). Hermann Lemke, ‘Berlin – Kinematograph und Sittlichkeit’, Der Kinematograph 24 (June 1907). ‘Zur Geschichte des Kinematographen-Theaters’, Der Kinematograph 1 (January 1907). Alexander Jason, Der Film in Ziffern und Zahlen: Die Statistik der Lichtspielhäuser in Deutschland 1895–1925 (Berlin: Hackebeil, 1925), 21. For a discussion of the early cinema landscape in Berlin, see also Gabriele Kilchenstein, Frühe Filmzensur in Deutschland: Eine vergleichende Studie zur Prüfungspraxis in Berlin und München (1906–1914) (München: diskurs film, 1997), 46–57. Ulrich Rauscher, ‘Die Welt im Film’, Frankfurter Zeitung 31 (December 1912). Victor Noack, Der Kino: Etwas über sein Wesen und seine Bedeutung (Leipzig: Dietrich, 1913), 12. Ibid.

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Chapter 10 ‘Under the Sign of the Cinematograph’ 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

139

See the heading ‘Kinematographen-Theater’ in Berliner Adreßbuch IV: Handel und Gewerbebetriebe (Berlin: Scherl, 1909). Jeanpaul Goergen, ‘Cinema In the Spotlight: The Lichtspiel-Theaters and the Newspapers In Berlin, September 1913 – A Case Study’, in Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920)/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren, 2008), 66–86, quote p. 67. See various media-related headings in the Berliner Adreßbuch IV. See e.g. Sylvaine Hänsel and Angelika Schmitt (eds.), Kinoarchitektur in Berlin 1895–1995 (Berlin: Reimer, 1995), 100–101. For a discussion of the establishment of the Kinematograph Unter den Linden 21, see Jeanpaul Goergen, ‘Der Kinematograph Unter den Linden 21: Das erste Berliner “Kino” 1896/97’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 6 (1997): 143–165. Max Kullmann, Die Entwicklung des deutschen Lichtspieltheaters (Kallmünz: Laßleben, 1935), 136. Michael Hanisch, for example, notes the centrality of the Central-Hotel at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße and its winter garden when describing the Skladanowsky brothers’ first screenings there. Michael Hanisch, Auf den Spuren der Filmgeschichte: Berliner Schauplätze (Berlin: Henschel, 1991), 13–16. Iris Kronauer, ‘Vergnügen, Politik und Propaganda: Kinematographie im Berlin der Jahrhundertwende (1896–1905)’ (PhD dissertation Humboldt Universität Berlin, 1999), 81. Bardolph, ‘Im Kientopp’, Berliner Tageblatt (10 January 1907). Brigitte Flickinger, ‘Cinemas In the City: Berlin’s Public Space In the 1910s and 1920s’, Film Studies 10 (2007): 72–86, specif. 79. Bardolph, ‘Im Kientopp’. For a discussion see Thomas Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino (München: edition text + kritik, 2002), 94–117. ‘Berliner Plauderei’, Der Kinematograph 87 (August 1908). See Corinna Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994). Albert Brocke, ‘Ständige Kinematographen-Theater in Provinzial-Städten’, Der Kinematograph 100 (November 1908). Kullmann, Die Entwicklung des deutschen Lichtspieltheaters, 136–137. For a comparison within Germany, see Michael Töteberg, ‘Neben dem Operetten-Theater und vis-à-vis Schauspielhaus: Eine Kino-Topographie von Hamburg 1896–1912’, in Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds.), Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920)/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren, 2008), 87–104. Franz Pfemfert, ‘Kino als Erzieher’, Die Aktion 1, 18 (1911): 560–563, reprinted in Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 165–169, quote p. 167. Paul Levy, ‘Die sachgemässe Entlüftung des Kinematographen-Theaters’, Der Kinematograph 94 (October 1908). The debate went on for two years, and seven articles were published on the topic in Cinema Journal: Ben Singer, ‘Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data On Audiences and Exhibitors’, Cinema Journal 3 (1995): 5–35; Sumiko Higashi, ‘Manhattan’s Nickelodeons’, Robert C. Allen, ‘Manhattan Myopia; or, Oh! Iowa!’, 75–103 and Ben Singer, ‘New York, Just Like I Pictured It ...’, 104–128, Cinema Journal 3 (1996); William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, ‘Manhattan’s Nickelodeons: New York? New York!’, 98–102, Judith Thiessen, ‘Oy, Myopia!’, 102–107 and Ben Singer, ‘Manhattan Melodrama’, 107–112, Cinema Journal 4 (1997). Singer ‘Manhattan Nickelodeons’, 19. The Kino-Pharus-Plan – published by the renowned Pharus Verlag in 1919 – contained 300 Berlin cinemas, graphically divided into four categories. A black dot represented small Kintopps with less than 301 seats. According to the Kino-Pharus-Plan there were 181 of these; most of the smaller cinemas had been in operation for a decade or more. The next category was cinemas with between 301 and 600 seats. 90 of them, marked with an x, were mapped out. Cinemas with 601 to 1,000 seats were represented with an encircled x, of which there were 20. Finally, a large dot with a circle around it represented film palaces with more than a thousand seats, of which there were only 9 at the time. For a discussion of the map, see Brigitte Flickinger, ‘Zwischen Intimität und Öffentlichkeit: Kino im Großstadtraum – London, Berlin und St. Petersburg bis 1930’, in Clemens Zimmermann (ed.), Raumgefüge und Medialität der Großstädte im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006), 135–152.

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140 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Julie Ann Lindstrom, ‘“Getting a Hold Deeper In the Life of the City”: Chicago Nickelodeons, 1905–1914’, (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston/Chicago IL, 1998). Werner Hegemann, Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt (Berlin: Kiepenhauer, 1930), 55. Der Kinematograph 300 (1912), quoted from Bernhard Zeller (ed.) Hätte ich das Kino! Die Schriftsteller und der Stummfilm (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 23. Dieter Glatzer and Ruth Glatzer, Berliner Leben 1900–1914 (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1986), 57. Hanisch claims, however, that only 600 persons could be seated. Still, the Union-Theater am Alexanderplatz also boasted a restaurant of its own, an orchestra and a printed film program – all in order to resemble an ordinary first-class theatre. For a discussion, see Hanisch 1991, 204–209. For a recent example, see Jan Olsson’s book on the early film culture in Los Angeles, almost entirely gleaned from sources in the daily press. Jan Olsson, Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 To 1915 (Stockholm: SLBA, 2009). Walter Serner, ‘Kino und Schaulust’, Schaubüne 9, 34/35, Vol. 2 (1913): 807–811, quoted from Zeller, Hätte ich das Kino!, 57.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Perceptual Environments for Films: The Development of Cinema in Germany, 1895–1914 Chapter Author(s): Joseph Garncarz Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.14 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 11

Perceptual Environments for Films: The Development of Cinema in Germany, 1895–1914 tual Environment s for Films

Percep-

Joseph Garncarz

‘C

inema’ can be defined as form of entertainment that is entirely or mainly comprised of projected films. Historically, cinemas developed in a wide variety of forms: itinerant or permanent, open-air or in a closed building, public or private, showing a programme of short films or a single feature film, open to anyone or restricted to a particular audience (e.g. adults), charging admittance or funded by other means – all these aspects (and more) may vary and thus can be used to differentiate types of cinemas. In Germany, the type of cinema that was institutionalised soon after the invention of film was a publicly accessible, closed space, where mainly films were shown to a paying audience. This type had two variants, the itinerant cinema, which appeared in 1896, and the permanent cinema, which appeared in significant numbers around 1905. By 1914, permanent cinemas were firmly established as the dominant form of film exhibition. Why did itinerant cinemas appear before permanent cinemas? Why did permanent cinemas supersede itinerant cinemas in the long run? What made this form of entertainment more attractive to audiences than others, such as variety shows?

Itinerant cinemas Itinerant cinemas, which presented film shows on festivals, markets and fairs, were usually solid buildings made of wood, which could accommodate up to 700 patrons (see Figure 1). Like the fairground business in general, the operation of these shows was discontinuous and seasonal; depending on weather conditions, the season usually ran from March to November. Around 1900, this form of film exhibition became a transnational, European media institution.1 Except for the name and some of the decorations of the facade, there were hardly any national differences. Since the buildings were similar, the showmen could buy as well as present their shows in other countries, not just in their country of origin. Hence, for

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Fig. 1. Leilich’s Cinematograf, 1904. [Source: Stadtarchiv München.]

example, German showmen travelled to Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and conversely, foreign showmen travelled to Germany. In the USA, by contrast, travelling showmen usually presented films in permanent, multi-purpose locations, such as opera houses, municipal buildings or churches.2 The itinerant cinema as a media institution developed all over Europe on the basis of similar or shared cultural infrastructures. In Europe at the time, a rich culture of festivals, markets and fairs existed, which took place in regular cycles. Such events usually lasted for two or three days, but the largest, such as the Munich Oktoberfest, the Hamburger Dom or the Leipziger Schaumesse, even for two or three weeks. The itinerant showmen travelled from event to event with their attractions, even far into rural regions. For attractions with the primary purpose of entertainment, the fun fairs in connection with festivals were more important than markets, and, in turn, markets were more important than trade fairs. The cultural infrastructure of such events was based in the institution of the Catholic church, for which festivals, e.g. the local anniversary of a church consecration or general holidays such as Easter or Pentecost, were a fundamental part of its traditions. Since the Reformation, this cultural infrastructure was criticised, secularised and restricted by the ‘Protestant ethic’ (as Max Weber termed it in his classic study from 1905)3 in regions with a Protestant majority, but not completely suppressed.4 Showmen used the infrastructure of festivals, markets and fairs to present their attractions to a large audience. These amusements, such as thrill rides and games, and also food and drink, mainly appealed to the senses and satisfied a desire for entertainment. Many attractions addressed the audience as spectators, among them itinerant variety shows, which

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Fig. 2. Robert Melich’s Specialitätentheater at the Kopstadtplatz during a fair in Essen, Germany in 1889. [Source: Stadtbildstelle Essen.]

presented a programme of short, diverse numbers, such as artistes, singers, dancers and comedians (see Figure 2). In the 1870s, the travelling show business was professionalised and industrialised. In 1883, the first German trade journal of travelling showmen was founded, Der Komet, which became the most important forum of communication within the business (and it is therefore an invaluable historical source). Specialised companies appeared, which supplied showmen with attractions, such as carousels, organs and trailers. Through new technologies and production processes, the attractions were constantly improved, updated and produced in relatively large numbers. In 1896, itinerant cinemas emerged, often from variety shows that were converted by installing a film projector and a screen. After a short phase in which films were shown as only one number of a programme among live acts, most showmen turned exclusively to films. The new technology had several advantages for showmen. Firstly, film projection did not require the employment and accommodation of a large troupe of personnel. Secondly, film could be used as a recording and distribution medium for live acts that appeared on metropolitan variety stages, but did not tour small towns (e.g. the comedian Little Tich or the serpentine dancer Annabelle). Thirdly, film provided the means for creating spectacular special effects (e.g. double exposure and stop-motion) that were not possible even on the most technologically sophisticated stages (e.g. magic tricks or impossible feats of acrobats) as well as the reproduction of natural spectacles (e.g. catastrophes or exotic landscapes). Finally, and most importantly, the new medium was very popular with audiences.

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Itinerant cinemas, like the travelling variety shows that preceded them, primarily aimed to entertain their audiences. They adopted the programming practice of showing several short films as ‘numbers’ (around 2 to 3 minutes in length), which was a proven success. The entire programme only ran for about 15 to 20 minutes, because the visit to such festivals usually comprised several attractions. The programmes usually included a wide range of genres. The fictional film became a significant part of the programme from 1902 onwards;5 nevertheless, the main emphasis was not on (elaborate) narration, but on ‘attractions’ (in the sense of the concept developed by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault6), because this accorded with the ‘perceptual environment’ of such events as a whole. Hence, such film programmes consisted of acrobats, magic shows, fairy tales, physical comedy, travel and industrial views etc. Since travelling carnivals created attractions and catered to pleasures that were transcultural, the film programmes of different countries were very similar. Just like German, French or Italian youths could equally enjoy the latest thrill rides, they could attend itinerant cinemas and be entertained by the same or very similar films. Travelling carnivals were a European institution, and thus offered entertainment that was culturally relatively unspecific, emphasising sensual pleasure and the testing of physical boundaries, instead of narratives that involved imaginary participation in fictional worlds. This was reflected in the programming practices and the types of films that itinerant cinemas selected. The ‘cinema of attractions’ of European countries was thus closely connected to the cultural context of travelling carnivals. The large number of films and wide variety of genres and forms that existed at the time were produced by a quickly increasing number of film companies in direct response to the demand of such itinerant cinemas. Before 1908, 92 per cent of the films shown in German itinerant cinemas were European productions. The French company Pathé was the market leader, because their films were perfectly suited for this exhibition context in terms of content and form. Their films were technologically of high quality, yet also cheaper, due to the large size of the company’s total output. Hence, the European, and particularly French, dominance in international film supply at the time was a consequence of the fairly homogenous and very prosperous European itinerant cinema. Itinerant cinemas were a great success. The number of places visited multiplied within only a few years (see Figure 3). By 1904, around 1 million tickets were sold per week, around 36 million per season. The audience consisted of all social strata, which were differentiated by the price and comfort of seats. In Catholic regions the itinerant cinema achieved greater diffusion than in Protestant regions (for the reasons explained above). This difference was probably not directly due to the difference in cultural attitudes between Catholics and Protestants, but indirectly to the different number of festivals (as explained above). Consequently, an increasing number of travelling variety theatres were converted to itinerant cinemas, more and more showmen presenting entirely different attractions turned to film projection, and the increasing

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Fig. 3. Number of locations of itinerant cinemas in Germany, 1895–1914.

competition among travelling cinemas motivated investments in larger and more luxurious cinemas. Showmen often bought a new building for the new season, with a larger number of seats and a different design. For example, in 1904, Heinrich Hirdt replaced his itinerant cinema, which was designed like an ‘Oriental palace’, with one in the ‘modern’ style of Art Nouveau.7 In the process, a few entrepreneurs emerged as market leaders; they owned more and larger itinerant cinemas than others. The larger the company, the more widely it travelled, and thus the larger the region it serviced. The territory of the largest companies covered several states or provinces and often even neighbouring countries. For transporting the heavy and bulky buildings and equipment, showmen usually used the railroad, which was so well developed in Germany around 1900 that even small towns could be visited. For the distance between the train station and the fairground, many showmen owned a so-called Lokomobile, a tractor that could also be used to generate electricity for illuminating the cinema facade.8 Hence, the European itinerant cinema emerged from and remained closely connected to its cultural context of festivals, markets and fairs. But in Germany, it also became the model for the first permanent cinemas, which were, however, furthered by a different professional group and within only a few years developed programming practices that were significantly different from those of itinerant showmen.

Permanent cinemas Before 1905, attempts to establish permanent cinemas failed, because film supply was not large and diverse enough to keep regular audiences interested. But since the itinerant cinema business was such a success, film supply was stimulated, so that from 1905 onwards, production was able to sustain longer programmes as well as more frequent changes of programme.

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Fig. 4. Berlin storefront cinema Metropol-Kino-Theater in 1912. [Source: Filmmuseum Berlin - Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek.]

Thus, a necessary condition for permanent operation was met – and indeed, around 1905, a boom of permanent cinemas set in. The first German permanent cinemas were converted shops and thus were called Ladenkinos (‘storefront cinemas’). These cinemas were usually situated in the centres of big cities and accommodated less than 200 patrons. They resembled entertainment pubs: an important part of their appeal was the fact that beer was served – hence, a colloquial German term for these cinemas was Kintopp (a glass of beer was called ‘topp’ in Berlin). In contrast to itinerant cinemas, storefront cinemas were open all year round (see Figure 4). The first permanent cinemas were opened by owners of small shops that were forced out of business by department stores, which were spreading at the time.9 Travelling showmen hardly participated in this trend. Firstly, they had no need to expand or change their line of business as long as itinerant cinemas were successful and even able to expand. Secondly, settling down did not accord with their traditional way of life. The new cinema entrepreneurs, who had no prior experience in the entertainment business, turned to itinerant cinema as a successful model, which they probably knew from personal experience as spectators. At first, permanent cinemas showed the same types of films that travelling cinemas presented, but around 1908, they began to develop their own programming practices. The common features between itinerant cinemas and the first permanent cinemas were that mostly films were shown and that they were arranged in a programme of diverse short numbers, usually comprising numerous fictional and non-fictional genres. Since permanent cinemas were not part of an event that offered other amusements besides cinema, their programmes were longer, around 60 minutes or more. Since longer

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programmes were more easily filled with a smaller number of longer films (since they were supplied and selected individually), the average length of individual films increased to 10 minutes around 1908 and to 30 minutes or more from 1911 onwards.10 The most significant innovation in the programme of permanent cinemas was the establishment of a new film form, the so-called Filmdrama. In itinerant cinemas, narrative forms were relatively marginal, because films were very short and elaborate narration did not accord with the cultural context in which travelling shows were integrated. The film drama added a new type of experience to cinematic entertainment: film spectators were offered virtual involvement in fictional worlds similar to the perceptual position in dramatic theatre. The most common German genres of this form were Sittendramen (‘dramas on social mores’, particularly dealing with sexual relations and often with female protagonists), Nationalepen (‘national epics’, which depicted events of German history in a ‘patriotic’ tenor) and Sensationsfilme (‘sensation films’, i.e. films with spectacular stunts, which exemplify the potential that ‘attractions’ could be embedded in narrative to some degree). As long as itinerant cinemas were the dominant type of film exhibition, which transcended national boundaries, the content and references of most films were culturally unspecific, such as fairy tales that were commonly known in many countries or comedies based on physical humour, which was transnationally communicable. By contrast, permanent cinemas addressed a local audience and thus particularly selected culturally specific films. This strategy was very successful. Emilie Altenloh’s 1913 study on German audiences in Mannheim and Heidelberg concluded that spectators particularly enjoyed domestic films: Films that allow members of an audience to make a connection with their own social environment, whether depicting life as it is or as they wish it could be, are the most popular and allow for greater emotional identification. … Foreign films are less able to arouse this sort of interest because they are characterized by a foreign sensibility and only seldom strike a chord.11

Furthermore, a contemporary survey among readers of a film magazine showed that German stars and stars primarily appearing in German films were very popular.12 Hence, demand for such ‘film dramas’, particularly of domestic origin, increased, and accordingly, German film production was stimulated – and achieved a significant share of supply, well before World War I (and the import restrictions it brought about). Permanent cinemas were an even greater success than itinerant cinemas. They quickly spread from city centres to the periphery, and from big cities to small towns. In 1908, permanent cinemas sold four times as many tickets as itinerant cinemas (about 170 million per season). By 1911, there were more than 2,000 permanent cinemas. At first, permanent cinemas, in the form of Ladenkinos, were mainly attended by the lower classes, but around 1910, Kinopaläste (‘cinema palaces’) appeared, which addressed ‘better’ audiences. At first, the emergence of permanent cinemas did not affect the success of itinerant cinemas, and both types coexisted for a while. In fact, itinerant

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cinemas were even booming when permanent cinemas appeared in significant numbers. But since the two media institutions presented a very similar type of entertainment, they entered into direct competition wherever they appeared together. Hence, with the diffusion of permanent cinemas from big cities, itinerant cinemas were forced to recede to smaller towns, where, around 1910, permanent cinemas finally caught up with them and pushed them out of the market entirely. The decline of itinerant cinemas was even more rapid than their rise (see Figure 3). By World War I, the diffusion of itinerant cinemas had dropped below that of 1898. The war dealt another blow: not only because showmen were drafted, but also because most festivals were cancelled. Less than 4 percent of 700 (known) German itinerant cinema owners founded permanent cinemas. Most (re)turned to other fairground attractions, such as thrill rides or animal acts. By the 1920s, itinerant cinema (in the form described here), despite its initial success, had almost completely disappeared.

The development of cinema types The establishment of cinema can be described as an ‘unplanned process’ (as defined by Norbert Elias13), i.e. as the development of a social institution that no one planned per se, but whose structure and course resulted from numerous planned individual actions. The ‘invention’ of media technologies (e.g. film projection), entertainment institutions (e.g. cinema and theatre), venues (e.g. itinerant and permanent cinema) and aesthetics were all ‘unplanned’ in this sense, but emerged from the interaction of many different individuals, both producers and audiences. Early cinema entrepreneurs introduced a large number of innovations at a remarkable pace in various areas, such as technology, cinema architecture, programme structures and film forms. However, some of these were preferred more by audiences than others and thus proved more profitable in the long run. Hence, the audience is the most crucial factor (but, unfortunately, also the one least documented by historical sources). Since audiences were attracted to attend a cinema primarily by virtue of its programme, the success not only of individual cinemas, but also of a type of cinema mainly depended on programming practices. Furthermore, since audiences at the time were offered a choice between a rising number of amusements, the attractivity of contemporary film programmes can be usefully described in relation to other forms of entertainment. Thus, the short-film programmes of itinerant cinemas successfully competed with travelling variety shows. They presented a larger diversity of ‘numbers’ (e.g. non-fictional films), which, in addition, were more spectacular (e.g. stars, special effects). The film dramas of permanent cinemas successfully competed with theatrical entertainment, because they were addressed to a broader social spectrum. German theatre was mostly an institution of the elite, which was reflected in the location, atmosphere, repertoire and ticket prices of theatres.14 Theatres were restricted by licenses, whereas cinemas were not, so they could offer more ‘sensational’ fare (within the limits of censorship, to which both entertainment forms were subjected). Hence, cinema became a ‘serious’ challenge to established cultural institutions. The German elite was highly

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suspicious and critical of this restructuring of the Kulturöffentlichkeit (‘cultural public sphere’),15 as is documented by the particularly prolific and polemical discourse known as the Kinodebatte (‘debate on cinema’).16 Furthermore, the price of amusements is also an important factor for audiences. Both forms of cinema were cheaper than competing forms of entertainment. Itinerant cinemas were cheaper than travelling variety shows, and permanent cinemas were cheaper than dramatic theatres (because cinema cost less to operate). Since cinema provided more attractive entertainment at a cheaper price, it became a highly successful competitor on the market of contemporary amusements. The cheaper price was particularly important for the lower classes, which could not or only rarely afford to attend other, similar forms of entertainment. An even cheaper price was also one of the reasons why, in turn, permanent cinemas were able to literally push itinerant cinemas ‘off the map’, because they were not burdened by the costs of travelling and could operate all year round. Finally, the increasing market size enabled the exploitation of economies of scale, so that prices could be reduced even further. Thus, in sum, the main characteristics of cinema as a new entertainment institution, which surpassed similar institutions in size and scope, were in place in Germany before World War I. Acknowledgements: My thanks to Martin Loiperdinger, Peter Krämer and Annemone Ligensa for comments. A more detailed account can be found in my book, Maßlose Unterhaltung: Die Etablierung des Kinos in Deutschland, 1896–1914 (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld [forthcoming in 2009]).

Translation by Annemone Ligensa

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

See Joseph Garncarz: ‘The Fairground Cinema – A European Institution’, in Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 2008), 79–90. See Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 1–27; Edward Lowry, ‘Edwin J. Hadley: Traveling Film Exhibitor’, in John L. Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 131–143. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited, translated, and with an introduction and notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). And despite the fact that criticism of such events, especially in their increasingly secularised and commercial form, often even came from conservative Catholics; see Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). See Joseph Garncarz: ‘Der nicht-fiktionale Film im Programm der Wanderkinos’, in Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (eds), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Vol. 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 108–119, specif. 113–115. See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). See Joseph Garncarz, ‘“Die schönsten und elegantesten Geschäfte dieser Branche”: Wanderkinos in München 1896–1913’, in Monika Lerch-Stumpf (ed.), Für ein Zehnerl ins Paradies: Münchner Kinogeschichte (München: Dolling und Galitz, 2004), 36–46, specif. 41. Arthur Fay, Bioscope Shows and Their Engines (Lingfield: Oakwood Press, 1966).

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150 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE See Joseph Garncarz, ‘Über die Entstehung der Kinos in Deutschland 1896–1914’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 11 (2002): 144–158. See Corinna Müller, ‘Variationen des Kinoprogramms: Filmform und Filmgeschichte’, in Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Die Modellierung des Kinofilms: Zur Geschichte des Kinoprogramms zwischen Kurzfilm und Langfilm 1905/06–1918 (München: Fink, 1998), 43–75. Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 58. English translation quoted from: Emilie Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema’, Screen 42, 3 (2001): 249–293, quote p. 259. ‘Wer ist der Liebling des Publikums’, Illustrierte Kino-Woche (2 January 1914): 7. See Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology?, trans. by Stephen Mennell and Grace Morrissey, with a foreword by Reinhard Bendix (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). See e.g. Charlotte Engel-Reimers, Die deutschen Bühnen und ihre Angehörigen: Eine Untersuchung über ihre wirtschaftliche Lage (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911). See Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920)/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren, 2008). Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992); Anton Kaes (ed.), Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978).

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: ‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’: The Changing Composition of Film Programmes in Britain, 1908–1914 Chapter Author(s): Ian Christie and John Sedgwick Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.15 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 12

‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’: The Changing Composition of Film Programmes in Britain, 1908–1914 ‘Fumbling

Towards

Some New Form of Art? ’

Ian Christie and John Sedgwick Young industries are often strangers to the established economic system. They require new kinds or qualities of materials and hence make their own; they must overcome technical problems in the use of their products and cannot wait for potential users to overcome them; they must persuade customers to abandon other commodities and find no specialised merchants to undertake this task. These young industries must design their specialist equipment and often manufacture it. George Stigler1

n film history, the period between 1907 and 1914 has been described as one of ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’.2 It is the period in which film, as a commodity type, reached the level of mass production and consumption. To do this required the application of modern business throughput systems and an industry structure that allowed for the necessary division of labour. In the USA, daily changes of programme for first-run cinemas and twice-weekly changes for most of the rest became the exhibition norm during this period. Considering that there were some 8,000 motion picture theatres in the USA in 1909, increasing to 14,000 by 1914, the logistics of this operation must have been formidable.3 For both Eileen Bowser and Charlie Keil, 1907 marks the divide between film as essentially a handicraft industry and one built along big business lines. This was also the year in which innovation in filmmaking technique allowed producers to build audiences through product development. We contend that film length provides an important indicator of the relationship between filmmaker and audience. The ambition to make longer films no doubt had aesthetic as well as economic components, but above all, it required willing audiences. In effect, the process was one of experimentation, as filmmakers discovered how to deliver longer narratives that audiences were able to follow and appreciate.4 Following the conventional ‘film

I

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grammar’ understanding of this period, Bowser identified innovations in ‘connecting shots’, which enabled filmmakers ‘to produce a more “complex narrative” while enlisting the spectator’s emotion in the film’,5 while Janet Staiger has argued for a more fundamental interpretation of the linkage between changing forms and the market: We need to understand that the production of meaning is not separate from its economic mode of production nor from the instruments and techniques which initials use to form materials so that meaning results.6

To a large extent, this is the underpinning of David Bordwell’s ‘basic’ story of film history: filmmakers and audiences learn how to make and follow more complex – which also means – longer films, and so the modern ‘feature’ is born.7 But a closer examination of data from this period, and especially of the discourse of trade magazines and their advertisers, shows that this was far from a smooth transition. Nor was it necessarily led by ‘meaning’ – the shared desire of makers and viewers to develop film’s dramatic potential so often assumed by teleological film history. There were strong economic reasons for the shift towards long films becoming the staple of cinema programmes, and the implications of this shift were momentous for many producers and producing nations. This study focuses on five key aspects of film during the ‘transitional’ period: programme composition, film length, genre balance, market share and the shift from a footage sales business model to an ‘exclusive’ rental model. Based on empirical evidence from the British market, it aims to add to the growing body of knowledge about how film became the distinctive transnational, large-scale industry that it did in the years before the outbreak of World War I in Europe.

Context In 1907, the London based American film producer and entrepreneur Charles Urban declared that ‘the entertainment side of the business has now reached its maximum … and future development will be upon the educational side’.8 Urban, like so many leading figures in the industry, was desperate to improve the social status of filmgoing in order to attract the middle class. Indeed, it is clear from his film catalogues and writings that he expected the instructional role of film to become much more prevalent, with schools, technical colleges, medical schools and industrial training centres becoming future exhibition venues. His instincts were correct insofar as the middle classes were, at the time of his writing, showing a nascent interest in going to the ‘pictures’, but he was hopelessly wrong about their taste in films. Like the working class audience, they wanted to be enthralled and entertained by films that were comic and/or dramatic and able to convey meaning through a narrative structure that was both coherent and succinct. As filmmakers became better able to tell such stories, adapting their methods from the existing narrative forms, so the length of films increased, and with this the degree to which films differed from each other also increased. Another factor in attracting middle class audiences was the emergence of purpose built cinemas that were not only attractive buildings

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architecturally, but comfortable and safe to be in. These two factors combined to secure a committed and growing audience for moving pictures before 1914, an audience that had learned to discriminate between films, being attracted to the cinema increasingly by particular producer ‘brands’, subjects, and the actors who appeared in them. The development of film as a commodity and the ‘system of provision’ built around it took essentially the same path in the three leading markets of France, Great Britain and the USA, reflecting the international scope of the industry from the very beginning. Robert C. Allen has underlined the importance of vaudeville in securing an audience for films in the USA during the first ten years: Until the advent of the nickelodeon around 1906, American vaudeville provided the embryonic picture industry with hundreds of exhibition outlets across the country and an audience of millions.19

Whilst the timing and diffusion of the various modes of exhibition may have differed marginally, the British and French filmgoing experiences were essentially identical. In cities and towns, ‘vaudeville’ meant ‘music hall’ or ‘variété’/‘café-concert’, and ‘nickelodeons’ were known as ‘penny gaffs’ or ‘cinématographes’ (by 1907 ‘cinéma’, the abbreviated name of the Lumière apparatus, had become the enduring designation of the premises) in Great Britain and France, respectively. Rural communities in all three countries were served right up to the end of this period by ‘travelling showmen/women’ playing a variety of fairgrounds and community halls.10 By 1910, however, audiences in each of the three countries were increasingly watching films in fine ‘theatrical’ settings. Each of the national audiences, including those in the USA, also saw the same films, at least until the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, the Edison-led cartel incorporated in 1908, which restricted the exhibition opportunities in the US market of non-cartel US and all foreign film producers, except Pathé Frères and Gaston (brother of Georges) Méliès.11 The absence of language barriers and the fact that both European and US filmgoers (many of which had of course recently arrived from Europe) were able to appreciate films from producers based in various countries, due to the transcultural subject matter of the ‘cinema of attractions’, encouraged an international market for films.

Programme composition Multi-film programmes had of course been the norm since the beginning of cinema shows, dictated by the brevity of the earliest subjects. The first demonstration programmes of early 1896 in Paris, London and New York consisted of around ten films, each lasting about 50 seconds, but by the Autumn of that year, Robert Paul was showing at least 20 films in his segment of the Alhambra music hall programme.12 With films issued at between 50 and 100 feet in length (60 feet = 1 minute at 16 frames per second), many were clearly required to make up a commercially viable show. And even when, by 1907, film length had increased to include

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subjects of typically between 300–600 feet (5–10 minutes), at least 4–6 titles were needed. There was in fact no commercial incentive for producers to make longer films, so long as films were sold outright by the foot, especially if the cost of elaborating a longer film was likely to be greater than making an equivalent footage of short ones. Whatever pressures there were to increase length presumably came from the exhibitors, based on their experience of audience preferences.13 Discovering the exact composition of a typical film programme of c. 1907–1910 is difficult, but from reports in a British trade journal the following is likely to be typical of 1909 (see Table 1). Table 1. Typical programme screened at the Prudential Hall, South Shields

Film titles

Length (feet)

Length (min)

The Fear (Pathé Art Series)

900

15

Morgan the Pirate, Part 2 (Éclair)

785

13

The Sailor’s Adopted Children*

500

8.33

Shark Fishing In the North Sea*

500

8.33

Trollhatten Falls In Winter*

500

8.33

Mr Absentminded*

300

5

A Disastrous Oversight*

300

5

Bridget’s Evening Out*

300

5

The Donkey That Wasn’t an Ass*

300

5

Film programme total

2,700

73 14

Source: Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 15 April 1909 Note: *Unidentified films with estimated length, based on lengths of similar titles from this period.

The most obvious features of this programme are the two longer films, both identifiably from French producers, one of which is already acting as the main attraction, or ‘headliner’, as it would become known, and the other an episode of a serial intended to encourage the audience to follow this weekly. Of the remaining seven subjects, two appear to be non-fiction, while four read like comedies from their titles. The headliner could equally have been a Vitagraph ‘quality’ film from the US, but is unlikely to have been a domestic production, because only four 1,000 feet films were released by British producers before 1909 (see Table 2).15 British exhibitors were already moving towards greater differentiation in their programmes, with longer and more spectacular films becoming an important attraction. But British producers, who had been important international suppliers until the early 1900s, did not succeed in meeting this demand and so lost market share. How had this happened?

Film length and genre balance in British fiction films A good idea of the growth of British film production of ‘entertainment’

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Chapter 12 ‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’

films in the period before World War I can be obtained from Denis Gifford’s catalogue of British films.16 Although counting films is a crude measure of industry vitality, failing as it does to capture qualitative differences between films and audience preferences, as reflected in the number of prints made, it is at least a place to start.17 Table 2 shows a dramatic annual growth over the first 20 years of moving pictures in the number of films made by British producers, their aggregate footage and their average length and running time. Table 2. Annual statistics of British ‘entertainment’ film production

Year

Number Aggregate Number of length of films films (feet) = 1,000 feet

Number Longest Mean Mean of films film length running = 2,000 (feet) (feet) time feet (min)

1895

3

80

27

0.44

1896

31

1,343

43

0.72

1897

44

2,171

49

0.82

1898

89

6,398

72

1.20

1899

104

6,933

67

1.11

1900

121

9,877

82

1.36

1901

94

10,021

107

1.78

1902

135

16,444

122

2.03

1903

128

20,879

163

2.72

1904

224

42,664

190

3.17

1905

246

60,734

247

4.11

1906

277

83,757

1

302

5.04

1907

314

97,294

1

310

5.16

1908

341

131,754

2

386

6.44

1909

369

150,485

5

1,630

419

6.98

1910

362

191,302

5

1,500

528

8.80

1911

409

231,687

15

2

2,500

571

9.52

1912

583

440,675

128

15

4,300

770

12.83

1913

666

675,244

216

79

7,500

1,050

17.50

1914

831

1,033,380

360

190

5,749

1,260

21.00

Source: Gifford, The British Film Catalogue. Note: A number of films are not given a length by Gifford and do not contribute to the

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

Fig. 1. The growth in the mean length of British ‘entertainment’ films, 1895 to 1908. [Source: Gifford, The British Film Catalogue.]

estimates found in the last two columns. A reel of film – 1,000 feet in length – was screened at 60 feet per minute and hence lasted for 16.67 minutes.

Taking the early years first, it was not until 1906 that the average length of films exceeded five minutes. A genre breakdown of the years before 1908 based on Gifford’s catalogue reveals that British producers concentrated on comic films. Between 1904 and 1908, of the 1,402 films released, just fewer than 60 per cent (808) were comedies, while Gifford classified less than 25 per cent (333) as dramas. However, as Figure 1 shows, the genre that served as the driver to greater lengths was the drama. By 1908, the mean length of films in this genre had risen to 522 feet, some 122 feet longer than the mean length of all films and 160 feet longer than the average comic film. 1908 also saw a noticeable annual rise in the number of British dramatic films, increasing from 63 to 108 over the year, with their aggregate lengths doubling to 54,00 feet, comprising 40 per cent of all output. Between 1907 and 1914, the number of British films marketed grew on average by 13 per cent per annum, while aggregate film length grew at the annual rate of 34 per cent, with the number of 1,000 foot or more films increasing from 1 to 360 and the average film length quadrupling over these eight years. However, it is clear that the real impetus for growth of both aggregate output and average running times occurred during the last four years of the period, from 1911 onwards, with the emergence of films of 2,000 feet or more of particular interest.

The wider film market in Britain British exhibitors had never shown British fiction films as a matter of principle, despite occasional patriotic appeals in the trade papers. Yet there are a number of dramatic shifts apparent, if we compare the situation in

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Chapter 12 ‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’

1907–08 with 1912–13 in respect of the proportion of British films on the British distribution market, the average lengths of these and the genre composition. Two datasets have been created, consisting of all known films exhibited in Britain over two twelve month periods – June 1907 to May 1908 and May 1912 to April 1913. The earlier dataset was obtained from the ‘recent publications’ entries in the trade journal Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, while the later one was derived from the Kinematograph Film Monthly Record listing of new films released in Britain. Table 3. Films marketed in Britain and their genre composition, June 1907 to May 1908 Drama Comic Trick

Musical Interest News

Other Total

British films

71

157

17

68

120

100

3

536

Foreign films

237

235

51

0

43

4

0

571

Total films

308

392

68

68

163

105

3

1107

Import penetration (%)

76.9

59.9

75.0

0

26.4

4.8

0

51.6

Source: Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly.

Table 3 shows that over half of the films released in Britain during 1907–1908 were of foreign origin. While the bulk of the interest and news films was made by British producers, reflecting the culturally specific nature of such films, the same is not true of the ‘entertainment’ genres of drama, comedy and trick. Given the importance of drama in the development of storytelling techniques and marketing strategies, the extent of import penetration here is of special interest and suggests that already by this stage in the history of film, British producers lagged behind some of their European and American counterparts.18 Table 4. Market shares in the British market, June 1907 to May 1908

Producers

Films marketed

Percentage of the entertainment market

Percentage of the news and interest market

Percentage of the overall market

Pathé Frères

164

15.9

11.6

14.8

Urban Trading

111

2.3

34.0

10.0

Gaumont (UK)

101

4.4

14.2

9.2

Gaumont (FR)

99

11.8

0

8.9

Hepworth

95

7.3

12.7

8.6

Vitagraph

94

11.2

0

8.5

Walturdaw

75

5.9

9.7

6.7

739

58.8

82.2

66.7

Total

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Fig. 2. The frequency distribution of film lengths by genre of new films released into the British market, May 1912 to April 1913.

Source: Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly

The market shares of the major players in the British market are to be found in Table 4. Between them, the seven largest producers in 1907–8, counting separately the British and French wings of Gaumont, supplied two thirds of all films, with Pathé Frères, as in the USA, the market leader.19 The contrast in the scale of the industry between 1907–8 and 1912–13 is dramatic. Between May 1912 and April 1913, approximately 4,800 films were marketed in Great Britain, four-and-a-half times the number released in 1907–1908. Of these, the Kinematograph Film Monthly Record listed the lengths of 4,446 films, whose combined length of just over 4 million feet represented something like a tenfold increase on the estimate of film lengths over the 1907–8 season. (Remember the films in the two datasets, 1907–8 and 1912–13, consist of all films marketed in Britain, compared to the ‘entertainment’ films produced by British producers, listed by Gifford and recorded in Table 2.)20 The statistical distribution of film lengths for the 1912–13 season is captured in Figure 2, showing that the bulk of releases (77 per cent) were still 1,000 feet or less in length, although something of an industrial standard prevailed, in that the most frequent class interval of film length were films between 901 and 1,000 feet, most of which were 1,000 feet in length and many of which were produced by the Edison-led trust, the MPPC. The genre composition of this distribution indicates that ‘long films’ were almost exclusively dramatic and that the proportion of dramas declines as film length falls, with the crossover point with the comedy genre occurring in the class interval 700–799 feet. The comedy genre dominates in the subsequent four lower class intervals, while dramas fall to zero. Among the shorter films, travel and interest co-exist with comedy; and an interesting

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Fig. 3. Comparison of lengths of all films released on British market: March 1909, January 1911, and March 1912. Source: The Bioscope Film Releases Supplements, 1909, 1911, 1912.]

feature of the evolution of film length on the UK market between 1909 and 1912 is that shorter films do not immediately decrease in number or proportion of the whole, even as 1,000 feet films make their appearance (see Figure 3). The doubling in number of films between 400–600 feet in 1911 has no obvious explanation, except to show that the rise of the long film did not lead to any immediate suppression of shorter subjects. Indeed the continued presence of films lasting between 6–10 minutes testifies to a persistent belief among some exhibitors that audiences preferred ‘variety’ to the ‘tyranny’ of the long film.

Enter the ‘exclusives’ Rachael Low drew attention to the impact of the ‘exclusive’ system of renting as long ago as 1948, and we want to build on this pioneering account, while also integrating it with our study of film length.21 We have seen that by 1909, a typical programme already included ‘headliners’ and shorter supporting items. In the market situation of 1909, exhibitors were experiencing difficulty in identifying what they should be booking, and wondering whether their nearest rivals might be offering the same films. One of the services that began to be advertised was agents offering complete programme packages at fixed prices, together with the security of knowing that this package was ‘exclusive’ to a particular area – for which guarantee exhibitors would pay more.22 Low cites Nordisk’s Den Hvide slavehandel II (In the Hands of Imposters, Part II, 1911), released by New Century Film Services in 1911, as the ‘first film in this country specifically handled as an exclusive’.23 The trend had

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Table 5. Films of 3,000 feet or more released onto the British market, May 1912 to April 1913

Title

Date released

Producer Length or (feet) distributor

Length (min)

Quo Vadis?

Mar 1913

Jury

8,000

133.33

The Ironmaster

Mar 1913

Ruffell’s

3,800

63.33

Oliver Twist*

Oct 1912

Hepworth

3,700

61.67

Tigris

Mar 1913

Itala

3,600

60.00

In the Springtime of Life

Feb 1913

Pathé

3,425

57.08

The Nihilist

Nov 1912

Skandinavia 3,377

56.28

On the Steps of the Throne

Feb 1913

Pasquali

3,350

55.83

An Evil Fascination

Jun 1912

Brockliss

3,335

55.58

A Woman’s Ambition

Sep 1912

Pathé

3,270

54.50

Zigomar

Mar 1913

Éclair

3,265

54.42

Mathilde

Feb 1913

Éclair

3,250

54.17

The Chancellor Called the Black Panther

Aug 1912

Kinografen

3,240

54.00

The Stolen Treaty

Feb 1913

Nordisk

3,165

52.75

For Love Is Life

Feb 1913

Pathé

3,156

52.60

The Greed of Gold

Oct 1912

Pathé

3,145

52.42

As You Like It**

Feb 1913

Vitagraph

3,115

51.92

Witchcraft

Nov 1912

Cines

3,100

51.67

The Shaughraun**

Mar 1913

Kalem

3,075

51.25

The Devil’s Daughter

Feb 1913

Nordisk

3,008

50.13

The Dice of Life

Jul 1912

AFR

3,000

50.00

The Lady Detective

Aug 1912

Cosmo

3,000

50.00

The Outcast

Aug 1912

Walturdaw

3,000

50.00

Word of Honour

Sep 1912

Hubsch

3,000

50.00

Twixt War and the Girl

Sep 1912

Walturdaw

3,000

50.00

The Fatal Ring

Oct 1912

Gaumont

3,000

50.00

Lucile**

Nov 1912

Thanhouser 3,000

50.00

Theodora

Mar 1913

Gaumont

3,000

50.00

A Woman’s Crime

Mar 1913

Ruffell’s

3,000

50.00

Source: Kinematograph Film Monthly Record Note: *British; **US. All 28 films listed are dramas.

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actually begun earlier, with Clarendon announcing The Invaders on an exclusive basis in 1909, but by April 1911, the system appears to have been in full swing. The Cinematograph Film Hiring Company was offering Ved Fængslets Port (Temptations of a Great City, 1911) as ‘the big boom for your show’, with all bookings for London and the suburbs for the first two weeks already taken, but ‘some vacancies’ for subsequent weeks. As Low noted, the concept of incentivising bookings probably owed something to the extraordinary publicity stunt perpetrated by Will Barker earlier in the same year. Barker announced that his film of Sir Herbert Tree’s production of Henry VIII (1911) would only be distributed for six weeks, after which all twenty copies would be burned.24 Renters’ advertisements in 1911–12 repeatedly stress large potential returns from the latest sensation, and the need to act quickly to secure an exclusive booking. The effects of the ‘exclusive’ boom were threefold. First, to drive up the prices paid by renters to secure these desirable films, which led to higher charges to exhibitors, organised on a sliding scale according to how close the booking was to the original release. The highest prices asked – 12 guineas for Fox’s A Fool There Was starring Theda Bara in 1915 – were only affordable by the biggest city-centre cinemas, which encouraged stratification of types of venue. Second, the films deemed suitable for such promotion were almost invariably imported: initially, Italian, Danish or French, then mainly American, which accelerated the down-grading of British films, despite efforts by local producers to enter this lucrative new field.25 Third, the currency of exclusives, which were all long films and became longer within a few years, consolidated the ‘feature’ as the centrepiece of the cinema programme. However, there is also some incidental evidence from trade papers and advertisements that programmes became longer to accommodate these features, retaining numerous short films until well into the teens.26 Table 5 shows the impact of these trends on the upper end of the rental market by 1912–13. The 28 films with running times of 50 minutes or more (3,000 feet and above) are all dramas and were mostly made in Europe, although, interestingly, the list is not dominated by any single producer or by producers from any one country.

Conclusion What can we learn from this admittedly imperfect compilation of data? Whatever its various origins and motivations, the ‘long film’ emerged around 1909 as an innovative product which soon acquired premium value in the changing business structures of the young industry. It favoured – or perhaps required – drama, rather than comedy or topographical interest, which had been the specialisms of British producers. Its use by renters to engineer new terms, whereby they would encourage competition among exhibitors and so drive up the potential value of certain films, would create the tripartite structure of production, distribution and exhibition that has remained in place for nearly a century. Italian ancient world spectaculars and Danish thrillers and sex dramas (including the notorious ‘white slave’ films) were the distinctive new genres that pioneered the long film between

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1909–13, but once its value was recognised, US producers became the most successful and reliable providers of its most popular genres in the teens: the western, the social problem film and the historical epic.27 Meanwhile, in 1913, The Times carried a sustained reflection on the potential significance of this new phenomenon that was monopolising the attention of such a large proportion of the population: It is not life, it is not art, it is not music, it is not literature. Whether, all the same, we are fumbling towards some new form of art which is to have movement and shape, to be like life and yet to be selected and arranged as a work of art, who can say?28

The previous twenty years of ‘fumbling’ had seen Britain move from pioneer status to the position of becoming a major consumer of the developing long film, while dramatically losing market share in their production. Ironically, in 1914, the short film comedy would see an exuberant, if temporary, revival – largely due to the early work of an expatriate British comedian: Charlie Chaplin.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

George Stigler, ‘The Division of Labour Is Limited by the Extent of the Market’, Journal of Political Economy 59 (1951): 185–193. Terms used by, respectively, Charles Keil and Eileen Bowser, in Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004) and Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–15 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 6, 18. At least longer secular narratives, since multi-part Biblical narratives were already in circulation by 1905, and presumably presented no difficulty to audiences who already ‘knew the story’. Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 57–58. Janet Staiger, in David Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1985), 87. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly 1, 9 (11 July 1907). Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: McGrawHill, 1985), 57. On this period, see inter alia Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes To Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Rachael Low and Roger Manvell, The History of the British Film, 1896–1906 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948); Vanessa Toulmin et al. (eds), The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain On Film (London: British Film Institute, 2004). Abel, The Ciné Goes To Town, 35–6. See the first Lumière programme in Paris, December 1895, reproduced in Georges Sadoul, Lumière et Méliès (Paris: Editions Pierre Lherminier, 1985), 34. A Robert Paul Animatographe programme of 31 August 1896 has been preserved as a handbill and lists 20 subjects (Barnes Collection). A 1912 manual for exhibitors explains the value of the ‘feature’ film in attracting audiences. James F. Hodge, Opening and Operating a Motion Picture Theatre (New York: Scenario, 1912), accessible at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/openingoperating00hodgrich (29 September 2008). Based on reports in ‘Around the Shows’, a regular column in The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, in which the Prudential Hall, South Shields, was reported regularly – apparently on the basis of the manager sending full programme details – while only highlights are noted from other shows. The programme reproduced here was accompanied by Cinephone, one of a number of mechanical synchronisation systems in wide use during the 1900s, providing the

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Chapter 12 ‘Fumbling Towards Some New Form of Art?’

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

163

experience of recorded music accompanying film as a special feature, before this became routine with sound-on-film systems after 1927. Such as Williamson’s The Tower of London (1909). Gifford’s original 1973 catalogue of British films did not include films of ‘interest’ – travel, education, primitive documentary – or ‘actualities’ – news and events. However, the 2001 edition includes a second volume devoted to non-fiction. See Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue, 2 vols. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). The demand for novelty – a characteristic that appears to be an inalienable aspect of the demand for film – meant that exhibitors could not continuously re-screen particular film products, without driving audiences away. See the discussion of film as a commodity in the introduction to John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing In 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000) and John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny, ‘The Characteristics of Film As a Commodity’, in John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film (London: Routledge, 2005), 6–23. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the greater average length of films classified as dramas. Using the entries in Gifford’s catalogue, the average length of all British entertainment films was 386 feet, while the mean length of films classified as dramas was 524 feet. See Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). The estimate is derived by scaling down the mean length of films recorded in Table 1 for 1908 (based on entertainment films only), so as to reflect the relatively shorter length of interest and news films. Table 1 records the mean length of ‘entertainment’ films in 1908 as 386 feet. Table 2 indicates that ‘news and interest’ films comprised 25 per cent of the films put on the market in 1907–8. Hence, the mean length of all films for that season can be estimated at 300 feet. Multiplying the number of films released in the 1907–8 season, 1,107, by 300 feet per film provides a rough estimate of the aggregate length of all new films. Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948), 45–48. Low gives 9 March as the date of this offer. Film rental, rather than outright purchase, had begun as early as 1901, according to Richard Brown, ‘War and the Growth of Rental In Britain: An Economic Perspective’, Film History 16 (2004): 28–36. However, it did not become general trade practice until the end of the decade. Low, The History of the British Film, 46. Low gives 9 March as the date of this offer. Low, The History of the British Film, 95. Apparently this promise included burning the negative. Cricks & Martin tried to launch exclusives, as did Cecil Hepworth, with The Deception in 1912. The report of a new cinema opening by Montagu Pyke in Brixton in 1911 mentions ‘a full two hours’ show’. The Bioscope (16 March 1911): 59. In the absence of any comprehensive programme or box-office information for Britain during this period, it is impossible to know which, if any, British long films were successful (but if this were the case, it would raise the question why British producers did not react to this demand), and whether British audiences were particularly attracted to US films because of a shared culture. ‘Cinematograph – Truth and Fiction’, The Times (9 April 1913), 11.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement Chapter Author(s): Tom Gunning Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.16 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 13

The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement The Attraction of Motion

Tom Gunning hroughout the formative period of film culture (starting in the late teens and lasting at least until the 1950s), that the art of cinema was essentially related to its mastery of kinesis, the representation and the perception of motion, would have been taken for granted by most theorists and practitioners. Since that time, the centrality of motion to cinema has, while rarely being explicitly denied, certainly been marginalized in most discussions in favour of narratively based issues (issues of storytelling and characterization in the analysis of films, of processes of identification, ideological containment or representation in the discussion of spectatorship). I maintain the importance of a return to the consideration of motion as a neglected (if not repressed) factor in film aesthetics, theory and history. While I feel this issue remains essential for contemporary cinema as well, my focus in this essay will be on the way motion in early cinema, especially in its first decade, was serving in itself as one of cinema’s major attractions.

T

Lumière and movement genres Claiming that motion formed the main attraction offered by the first projections of the Lumière cinematograph would surprise no one, but I fear we may have also lost the ability to experience not only the novelty of cinematic movement, but also its powerful sensual and cognitive effects. Returning to initial receptions of these films allows us to refocus not only on the leaves moving in the breeze so important to Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of film,1 but to re-experience L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895) While analysis of the proto-narrative offered by its gag structure (or even its reputed phallic imagery) often dominates contemporary commentary, the film’s initial reception often focused on it as part of a genre of water-effects films, as the spray issuing from the hose creates a spectacle impossible in cartoon representations of the gag, on which the film may have been based. Water, smoke, leaves fluttering in the winds – these were unique spectacles of an eddying, free-formed and unpredictable motion, which can hardly be related to the purposeful trajectory that Gilles Deleuze describes as the ‘movement image’.2 Thus, the subjection of movement to narrative pur-

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poses may well form an important aspect of film history, but by no means constitutes an essential part of the phenomenology of the film image. The fascination of a movement with little trajectory across space seems pervasive through the Lumière films as well as the actuality films of other filmmakers, focusing not only on natural phenomenon like water and steam, but also in the images of urban crowds milling and filling the streets. The motion pictures of Edison, Lumière and other early inventors may have derived technically from the analysis of motion accomplished by the chronophotographers, but the cinema’s reversal of chronophotography’s analysis into discreet poses into a synthesis and recreation of motion in full flight represents a true revolution in effects and purpose. Chronophotography offered scientific quantification, while the motion reproduced by the cinema supplied entertainment and novelty. The delight in the reproduction of motion for Edison and a number of other early filmmakers focused primarily on the movement of bodies, as did the work of chronophotographers (and even borrowed from them the use of neutral backgrounds in order to better delineate the play of limbs and muscles). But whereas the motion of the body was mastered and broken into static poses by the chronophotographers, the kinetoscope displayed the skilful movements of trained performers. The possibility of an endless loop transformed the motion into a perfect machine, but maintained the unique mastery of the human body on display. Elsewhere I have discussed the way in which the serpentine dance of Loïe Fuller, one of the most frequently portrayed subjects in early cinema, captured the complete surrender to the frenzy of motion that cinema could deliver.3 Named the ‘serpentine’ by a theatre manager, this first form of the dance was described by a New York reviewer: Suddenly the stage is darkened, and Loïe Fuller appears in a white light which makes her radiant and a white robe which surrounds her like a cloud. She floats around the stage, her figure now revealed, now concealed by the exquisite drapery which takes forms of its own and seems instinct with her life. The surprised and delighted spectators do not know what to call her performance. It is not a skirt dance, although she dances and waves a skirt. It is unique, ethereal, delicious. As she vanishes, leaving only a flutter of her robe upon the stage, the theater resounds with thunders of applause. Again she emerges from the darkness, her airy evolutions now tinted blue and purple and crimson, and again the audience rise at her and insist on seeing her pretty, piquant face before they can believe that the lovely apparition is really a woman.4

Thus, Fuller’s dance offered something to the new art of motion pictures not found in the many other dance numbers recorded by the new medium. Like the modern experience of shock that violently disarranged concepts of solidity and objectivity and conveyed the seeming insubstantiality of modern experience, Fuller’s dance displayed motion as a matrix from which form was born, a possibility of continuous transformation. New aesthetics saw motion as a force in itself, a plasmatic energy that created forms rather than simply move them about, strongly opposed to the classical conception of movement as a series of points along the trajectory of a self-sufficient object, which the contemporary and influential philosopher Henri Bergson attacked as a confining illusion of the mind.5 In the films of

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serpentine dances, the body seems swallowed by a flux and reflux of motion, less solid matter than a materialization of energy and movement itself. Fuller, one of the inspirations of Art Nouveau, created a perfect image for the interlacing and superimpositions of these diverse strands: motion itself as a spectacle, the body hidden, yet also revealed, transformed ethereally but also powerfully working its limbs and muscles (Fuller had to be carried to her dressing room after a performance, a sign, some felt, of her neurosis or hysteria, but more likely an indication of the enormous physical effort of manipulating yards of fabric). Fuller literally embodies the modern enigma of the representation of motion, its attempt to both define and transcend binaries of man and woman, material and ideal, knowledge and mystery. But movement alone does not exhaust Fuller’s direct relation to the cinema: Fuller could be said to have created cinema before cinematography, by wedding movement to light. Fuller’s art relied on light in several fundamental ways. Most importantly, light cloaked itself in colours, which supplied the most immaterial of covering for Fuller’s form, staining her fabrics in a constant transit and transformation of hue. The posters designed for Fuller’s publicity, or even more the series of prints designed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, to capture the spectrum of Fuller’s effects, clearly show the inspiration such a spectacle must have provided for a future abstract art of pure form and colour endowed with an appearance of mutability. But more directly, Fuller’s colour symphonies provided the cinema with its first impulse towards colour. Early films of serpentine dances demanded tinting of some sort. The direct application of tints to the film stock provided a brilliant equivalent. Both Edison and Lumière hand-tinted their serpentine films and the changing patterns of free-form colour, make these first colour films one of the most satisfying instances of the art of motion in early cinema. Motion, as Bergson indicated, posed a challenge to the enduring habits of the mind, such as its tendency toward analysis into discreet and static images. It was the resolution of motion into discreet images on the strip of motion picture film or the chronophotograph that inspired Bergson to describe this distortion as ‘cinematographic’. The actual projected motion, far from revealing the limitations of the cinema, revealed this spectacle of the transformation of matter into motion. The motion genres of early cinema celebrate the manifold possibilities of motion through a new possibility of display.

The phantom ride Early filmmakers understood the value and spectacle of motion and approached its exploration with the true experimentalism of commercial showmen and practical engineers willing to test the limits of their instruments and the appetites of their audiences. Thus, Lumière’s peripatetic cameramen, wandering across the globe as – to use Félix Mesguich’s phrase – ‘hunters of images’,6 projecting as well as filming with their highly portable cinematograph, were intensely aware of both shooting and exhibition as closely related aspects of the same mechanism. Antonio Promio, when filming in Venice, decides to experiment with the effect of cinematic

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motion. Rather than filming things coming at his camera as he usually did, Promio (at least according to his later account) tries out the possible effect of moving his camera in relation to his surroundings. Thus, Promio placed the cinematograph into a gondola and filmed the banks of the Grand Canal as he moved past them. While we might describe this as simply filming the most banal of tourist views, Promio described it rather as an experiment in the relative relations between the camera, objects and motion itself. The question, then, occurs, whether the mobile camera represents a continuation of the motion genres or their radical transformation. I would maintain both – in the spirit of radical experimentation with novelty during cinema’s earliest period. While the genre of placing cameras on mobile vehicles on water and land becomes primarily understood as a simulacrum of tourism and its visual and mobile fascinations, it seems to me more important to approach this most enduring of motion genres as precisely an exploration of mobile perception and its vagaries. Moving pictures redefined the interaction of frame and spectator. The poster Albert Truchet designed for the 1896 exhibitions of the Lumière cinematograph shows ladies watching an arrival of a train on the screen in front of them.7 But the train track emerges from the left corner of the screen frame, extending into the space of the audience. This anomaly reflects more than a stylistic flourish. A British commentator writing under the name O. Winter described the effect of the Lumière film thus: ‘And a train, running (so to say) out of the cloth, floats upon our vision’.8 The fantasy of the train’s emergence from the screen was omnipresent and powerful in the novelty era, attested to by numerous journalists, including Maxim Gorky, who, in 1896, imagined the Lumière train ‘plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bone and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall’, a fantasy he then deflated by adding, ‘But this too is but a train of shadows’.9 Cinema simultaneously maintains the frame (the screen rectangle fixed and visible in the front of the auditorium) and ruptures it. The quadrilateral on which the film is projected does not vary, but, as the Truchet’s poster illustrates and the fantasies of emergence testify, movement extends beyond the frame, ‘out of the cloth’ – or seems to. Films featuring motion aimed at the camera opened up a new space beyond the frame. This novel movement towards the camera – that is, towards the spectator – prompted cries of alarm and fantasies of collision. Movement toward the camera seemed to undermine the traditional separation of spectator and picture, collapsing the contemplative distance in the anticipation of collision. Picking up on Promio’s experiment on the Grand Canal, fantasies of entrance into the landscape became realized in another sort of train film, undoubtedly the most popular and most visually dynamic. These films did not simply show locomotives moving towards the camera, but mounted a camera on a train, capturing a mobile view of a landscape. Edison first shot such a film in June of 1896, View from Gorge Railroad. These films deliver an experience of movement more extensive and dynamic than the films of trains charging at the camera. With the camera mounted on the front of a train, these films actually travel through space, like the train itself, moving

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through the landscape. Catalogues and exhibitors called such films ‘phantom rides’, a term richly evoking the uncanny effect of ghostly movement that I feel was central to their popularity. Many historians see these films simply as simulacra of train travel or other sorts of tourist journeys. Certainly the essence of this genre resides in what Charles Musser has called the ‘viewer as passenger’ convention.10 But most of these films show a strong deviation from the tourist experience, firmly embodied in point of view. As the Edison catalogue stressed in the description of their 1903 film Phantom Ride On the Canadian Pacific, ‘the view taken from the front of the train running at high speed is one even tourists riding over the line are not privileged to enjoy’.11 The viewpoint of the train traveller was lateral, looking through the window as it moved past the landscape. But the cinematic phantom rides dove straight into the landscape and presented this plunging point of view directly to the viewer. Many of these films promoted spectator experiences that contrasted sharply with contemplative visual voyages. The Edison Company advertised their 1901 film Panoramic View of Lower Kicking Horse Canyon for its physical thrills and the appearance of danger: [O]f all panoramic mountain pictures this is the most thrilling, as the audience imagines while they are being carried along with the picture the train will be toppled over thousands of feet into the valley below.

Of a companion film of the same canyon, Panoramic View of Upper Kicking Horse Canyon (1901), the catalogue claimed: ‘the train seems to be running into the mountains of rock as each curve is reached and rounded, making the scene exciting from start to finish’. The key attraction of Edison’s Panoramic View of Mt. Tamalpais (1902), according to their publicity, lay in ‘the sensation of momentarily expecting to be hurled into space’.12 These films fully exploit the dynamics of their unique frontal point of view, driving a wedge between the ‘phantom ride’ and the distanced panoramic perception of the train tourist. The view from the front of the train created a more thrilling perspective, allowing the suspenseful anticipation of collisions and derailments described in the Edison catalogue for their Kicking Horse Canyon panoramas. Far from a contemplative mode, this viewpoint summoned up the possibility of shock and intense sensual involvement, which had migrated from the painted panorama and intensified, as it found its home in the new electric fairground with its thrill rides, such as the Leap Frog Railway, which threatened passengers with a direct collision between train cars, only to have the cars ‘leap over’ each other at the last moment. Such fairground attractions strove to create a sense of physical danger, while passengers were actually nestled in a device guaranteed to keep physical collision and injury in abeyance.13 But in the early films taken from a camera mounted on the front of the train, the effect of this viewpoint often becomes nearly overwhelming, to my mind the richest and most dialectical experience offered by early cinema in its exploration of movement and point of view. Such phantom rides substitute sensation for contemplation, overcoming effects of distance in a rush of visual motion. The longevity of the phantom rides film genre testifies to the inherent

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power of its effect. I have found examples as early as 1896, and many exist as late as 1907, when the cinema of attractions had become increasingly seduced by the tasks of narrative. From 1905 to about 1907, i.e. towards the end of the era of the cinema of attractions, this genre was renewed by George C. Hale, who returned it to its roots in the panorama and brought it closer to the new electric amusement parks. Hale adopted the exhibition strategy of many panoramas, such as the Trans-Siberian Express Panorama, by fashioning a viewing area that imitatedlocation of the viewpoint from which the scene the panorama represented would have been seen. Thus, in Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, the audience was seated in a mock-up of a train car, complete with sound effects of the clickety-clack of the wheels running over the rails and the hiss of the air brakes, as they watched the films projected in the front of the car, narrated by lecturers dressed as train conductors. These theatres were briefly very popular, and films taken from the front of trains are often referred to as Hale’s tours films, somewhat anachronistically, since the genre had been in existence for nearly a decade before Hale introduced his specialized theatres.14 The increased mimesis of train travel that these theatres offered reaffirm their role as ersatz tourism, like the panoramas themselves, a new technological version of what Bernard Comment refers to as ‘a dream that had been prevalent since the beginning of the nineteenth century: to travel without having to move’.15 But the intensity of this experience, as I have argued, exceeded a simple reproduction of travel and transformed the experience of landscape. Only a thick description of this experience, both phenomenological and historical, reveals its radical transformation of the landscape tradition. In previous essays I have quoted an anonymous journalist’s account of one of the Biograph’s earliest phantom rides.16 I find it such a rich description of the experience that I feel compelled to return to it once again in this new context: The way in which the unseen energy swallows up space and flings itself into the distances is as mysterious and impressive as an allegory. A sensation is produced akin to that which Poe in his ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ relates was communicated to him by his doomed companion when he sketched the shaft in the heart of the earth, with an unearthly radiance thrilling through it. One holds his breath instinctively as he is swept along in the rush of the phantom cars. His attention is held almost with the vise of a fate.17

The terms of comparison that this journalist offers probe deeply into the novelty of this experience of spectatorship. The locomotive, which never appears on the screen, but is present only in its motive force, literally embodies an unseen energy that compels the camera, the film and the viewer down the track. Since it remains off-screen and invisible, the locomotive takes on the basic characteristic of a phantom, a presence evident in its effects, while remaining unseen. Although we know the camera was perched on the front of a train, the film delivers a fantasy of total visual dominance. It is our eyes, liberated from any visible body, that fly down the track, ‘swallowing up space’. The head-on confrontation between the viewer’s vantage point and the

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direction of movement into space evoke the possibility of shock and collision, in contrast to the lateral view of the traditional train rider that created the sense of separation essential to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls ‘panoramic perception’.18 Nonetheless, a fundamental fissure between viewer and spectacle remains, dependent less on visual viewpoint, yet physically more absolute. As much as the expectation, even the sensation, of collision may be evoked by such films, no collision is ever possible. As with the fantasy of emergence of the train from the screen, we remain in a realm of shadow, not substance. No physical shock is possible, no meeting between our bodies and the space on screen can occur, however much we may seem to penetrate into it. This ultimately ontological separation between viewer and screen therefore posits a new form of the distance characteristic of panoramic perception, the return of the unreality of the image repressed by the apparent sensual immediacy delivered by the cinematic experience of motion. As film viewers, we seem to be there, to actually fulfil the desire for entrance into an illusionary landscape. Space streams right at us – yet, it only invites our eyes to enter, our bodies remain seated on the other side of the screen. We experience our exile from this represented space, like a phantom hovering over our seeming participation. In these films the spectator physically vanishes, leaving only the energy of travel, the sensation of movement through the landscape. Yet this all-seeing eye is also a physiological eye, one alert for the possibility of collision and ready to flinch at the sensation of danger, even as it is protected by its very medium from physical contact. In spite of its fulfilment of the centuries-old fantasy of penetration, it remains what Walter Benjamin describes as the modern ‘protective eye’, watchful of potential shocks, rather than ‘daydreaming surrender to distance and faraway things’. As Benjamin speculates, the magic of distance maybe broken.19 The convergence of tracks in the distance, the ultimate image of perspective in our culture – parallel lines merging at the vanishing point of infinity – sets up the dynamic balance of the visible and the invisible in these films. The energy forcing us down the tracks remains unseen. The space through which we travel, once we have moved past it, slides around the frame, and vanishes as well, forming an invisible wake of remembered space trailing behind us. As we move towards the ever-receding horizon, new bits of landscape seem to come into existence at the limits of our vision, hills, bridges, train stations, towns, cliffs and forests burst into sight. An ever-renewed landscape emerges from the distance that remains continuously bisected by the tracks in front of us, which hold steady not only our trajectory but, as the journalist quoted above cannily observes, our attention, as in a vice of fate. Our track cannot deviate, nor can we look in any other direction than straight ahead, any more than we can retain a sight of the passing landscape of which we only catch a glimpse. All space is in constant motion – everything is continuously both approaching and slipping away from us. The vanishing point, the fixed convergence of classical perspective and its point of coherence, becomes in the phantom ride’s movement a point of constant transformation and instability. New vistas emerge from it like ants

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swarming up from an unseen anthill. Instead of the point where things vanish, the far distance becomes the point of entrance into visibility. Our point of view, as stand-ins for the camera, becomes the point at which everything converges and then disappears, reversing the traditional schema of perspective. The reversal reworks perspective’s inherent sense of visual dominance into an experience of an abject subjection to the course of movement and the logic of the track. As shaped by the camera lens, instead of offering a broad and inviting foreground, a stable viewing point on which traditional landscape staffage figures can loll at ease to gaze into the distance, the foreground of a phantom ride represents the narrowest point of the image, as well as the point of greatest velocity, the anticipated site of collision. To watch a phantom ride film, I find, provokes not only a crisis within the spectator’s relation to space and landscape, but a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself, its temporal protentions and retentions, its constant reach into the distance, balanced by its sense of passing by and leaving behind. If the phantom ride is ‘a mysterious and impressive allegory’ one might describe it as an allegory of spatial perception itself.20 In one of his papers on psychoanalytic technique, Sigmund Freud advised patients beginning analysis to imagine ‘you were a traveller next to a window of the railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside’.21 Access to the unconscious unfolds like a sightseeing trip. But the phantom ride’s direct stare down the track seems to invoke more closely the hypnotic state that Freud increasingly rejected as a means of reaching unconscious experience. In the opening of his film Zentropa (Europa, 1991) Lars von Trier has the voice of Max von Sydow address the audience as a hypnotist, inducting them into a trance that will be the film, entered into by following the camera movement down these train tracks. The tracks appear gleaming within darkness, passing through no visible landscape, other than the abstract pathway they lay down.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). See Tom Gunning, ‘Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion’, in Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi (eds), La decima musa: il cinema e le altre arti / The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Other Arts (Udine: Forum, 2001), 25–42. Richard Nelson Current and Marcia Ewing Current, Loïe Fuller: Goddess of Light (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 35. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. by Athur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911 [1907]). Félix Mesguich, Tours de manivelle: Souvenirs d’un chasseur d’images (Paris: Bernard Grassett, 1933). Reproduced in Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, Art Nouveau: Utopia – Reconciling the Irreconcilable (Köln: Taschen, 1996), 9. O. Winter, New Review (February 1896), quoted from Colin Harding and Simon Popple (eds), In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 13. Maxim Gorky, ‘Review of Lumière Program, 4 July 1896’, reprinted in Jay Leyda (ed.), Kino:

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

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A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 407–408. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 429. Edison Catalogue, 1903. Edison Catalogue, 1902. See my discussion of such thrills in relation to early cinema ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Films (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–133. Hale’s Tours are described in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 429–431. See also Raymond Fielding’s pioneering essay, ‘Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture’, in John Fell (ed.) Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 116–130. Bernard Comment, The Panorama, trans. by Anna-Marie Glasheen, rev. and exp. ed. (Berlin: Reaktion Books, 2002 [1993]), 130. Tom Gunning, ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space In Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’, in Fell, Film Before Griffith, 355–366 and ‘The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity’, Yale Journal of Criticism 7, 2 (Fall 1994): 189–201. Musser cites another account of the same film written around the same time, published in The Phonoscope; it reads: ‘He was a passenger on a phantom train ride that whirled him through space at nearly a mile a minute … There was nothing to indicate motion save that shining vista of track that was eaten up irresistibly, rapidly and the disappearing panorama of banks and fences. The train was invisible … and faraway … was the mouth of the tunnel and toward it the spectator was hurled as if a fate was behind him and the spectator being flung through the cavern with the demoniac energy behind him. The shadows, the rush of invisible force and the uncertainty of the issue made one instinctively hold his breath as when on the edge of a crisis that might become a catastrophe.’ (Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 53–54). The similarities between the two descriptions are striking and either indicate a broadly common mode of experiencing this film, or less excitingly, a single author. I suspect the former, but cannot rule out the latter. New York Mail and Express (25 September 1897), reprinted in Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), 28–29, quote p. 29. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space In the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1986). Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 313–355, specif. p. 341. This thought, besides being prompted by the anonymous journalist and by Immanuel Kant’s concept of the sublime as an experience that makes us reflect ultimately on perception itself, is also inspired by Annette Michelson’s pioneering essay, ‘Towards Snow’, Art Forum 9, 10 (June 1971): 30–37, in which Michael Snow’s extraordinary film Wavelength (1967) is seen as a phenomenological reflection of consciousness. Thinking about Snow’s film in relation to the painting in Edgar Allan Poe’s text could be a fascinating exercise. It is no coincidence that Snow has made perhaps the greatest of all landscape films, La Région Centrale (1971). Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment [1913]’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1958), 121–144, quote p. 135.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: ‘Dashing Down Upon the Audience’: Notes on the Genesis of Filmic Perception Chapter Author(s): Klaus Kreimeier Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.17 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 14

‘Dashing Down Upon the Audience’: Notes on the Genesis of Filmic Perception ‘Dashing

Down

Upon

the Audience ’

Klaus Kreimeier ‘Dashing Down Upon the Audience’: Notes On the Genesis of Filmic Perception

Klaus Kreimeier

I he film 104th Street Curve, New York, Elevated Railway was shot in New York at the end of March or the beginning of April 1899.1 From the right, a locomotive with five carriages enters the picture. The camera observes the train from close distance. The train makes a slight turn to the right, and while it drives into the distance, skyscrapers and warehouses become visible on the right hand side. There is a sign on one of the facades that reads ‘Allcock’s’. On the opposing track on the left, a second train comes into view, quickly advancing into the foreground. It passes directly in front of the camera, towards the right, filling up nearly the whole picture. Behind the windows, vague outlines of the passengers’ heads can be discerned. After the train has passed, the back of the first train becomes visible again, now very small in the distance. This shot lasts 40 seconds (at a projection speed of 16 frames per second). In the following shot, the camera is positioned between the tracks. From the left, a train appears, advancing into the foreground. There are railroad workers in the centre between the tracks. They are facing the camera, waving to it, and they are coming closer, so the viewer comes to realise that the camera is mounted at the front of a train. This train is moving towards the other one on the opposite track, which the camera captures in full view. After the trains have passed each other, the city beyond the tracks can be seen. The city and the sky over it now fill the picture in the middle- and background and pass in front of the camera in a long, curved panorama shot. When the train makes a turn to the left, the view changes. Streets, skyscrapers, warehouses and rows of trees appear on the right, and railroad tracks on the left. Finally, the train stops on a central track. A small train station (or a signal station) can be seen in the distance. A train drives by on the right hand track into the horizon, and another one rushes towards

T

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and passes the camera on the left hand track. This is happens once more, and then the film ends. The second shot is one minute and 40 seconds long. Editing within the camera can be identified, i.e. the two shots are comprised of several takes, but there are no changes of perspective connected with the cuts. The film was shot for Edison by James White. The cinematographic railway journey follows a famous s-curve of the elevated railway between 104th and 92nd street in Uptown New York. Without much camera work, the route offers changes of scenery and perspectives that have become a common part of our perceptual experience since the invention of the railroad, but which the cinematograph could ‘adequately’ reproduce for the first time, i.e. in a manner similar to our direct experience. Cinematography freed the photographic camera, the observer and technical representative of our eyes, from its fixed position. In the film 104th Street Curve, the camera owes its mobility to the vehicle on which it is placed; at the same time, the camera provides the train with ‘eyes’, which seem to glide over the scenery. The recording device and the vehicle operate as a technical unit. The route with its curves, the opposing movements of the other trains and the scenery that passes by on either side of the train constitute an ‘organic’ field of perception, which is, at the same time, a complex cinematic construction. Around 1900, Edison’s films, but also those of other US companies, explored the New York railway again and again – as if the young medium were discovering a new visual experience that suddenly revealed itself. For example, the 1903 film Elevated Railroad, New York by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, shot in a different s-curve of the elevated railway, follows the same rhythm and exploits the same kind of spectacle as Edison’s film. But the ‘railway genre’ can be traced as far back as 1896. That year in May, the Edison company constructed a portable film camera and deployed their cameraman William Heise to film everyday scenes in New York. The numerous short films that he made include Elevated Railway, 23rd Street, New York, which shows an incoming train (a view that Lumière’s Arrival of a Train had established in Europe), and which the Boston Herald described as ‘so realistic as to give those in front seats a genuine start’.2 That the all-round entrepreneur Thomas Edison went down into media history as one of the ‘inventors’ of film is due in no small measure to cameramen such as James White, William Heise and James B. Smith. In 1888, Edison, together with his collaborator W.K.L. Dickson, was still concentrating on the development of the phonograph, a device for recording and reproducing sounds. It was the chronophotography of the Englishman Edweard Muybridge and the encounter with the Belgian Etienne-Jules Marey at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 that inspired Edison ‘to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear’ and to use the celluloid strip developed by George Eastman for the recording and reproduction of optical information. Around 1890, Edison and Dickson constructed a camera for recording moving pictures and the Kinetoscope for exhibiting them as peep-shows. In the effort to present image and sound in synchronous combination, they added a phonograph:

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An exhibition cabinet had to be constructed to hold the phonograph and the motion picture film, with a mechanism to operate them simultaneously, so that the auditor-spectator at the peep-hole could see the movies and hear the music at the same time.3

Nonetheless, Edison himself diverted his attention to other projects. He had created the first technical audio-visual laboratory in cultural history, but he does not seem to have envisioned its economic prospects, which were soon exploited by showmen in penny arcades. Edison did not secure patent protection beyond the USA, so that European entrepreneurs were free to copy his machine or to use parts of it in devices of their own invention. Edison’s film camera was made obsolete by Auguste and Louis Lumière’s success with their Cinématographe, a combination of recording device and projector. Moreover, with the first public and commercial film projection on 28 December 1895 by the Lumières, it became apparent that the future of motion picture exhibition was the screen and not the peepshow. The Lumières’s Cinématographe premiered in the USA on 29 June 1896.4 The show took place at Keith’s Union Square Theater in New York, and it is not far-fetched to assume that Edison’s employees and those and other companies, such as Biograph and Vitagraph, were profoundly influenced by this event. Only a short time afterwards, in the following October, Dickson’s Biograph company showed a film of the Empire State Express on an unusually large screen at the Hammerstein’s Grand Opera House, which was described as ‘positively frightening on the giant screen’.5 Film historiography has all too readily adopted contemporary advertising rhetoric: Empire State Express, said to be Biograph’s very first film,6 is described as a ‘phenomenal hit that thrilled – and momentarily terrorized – unsuspecting viewers’.7 As was the case for other popular genres, such as the police or fire brigade films, not only the film companies, but also the cameramen competed fiercely in the hunt for the most impressive visual effect, the greatest sensation. Around 1896, particularly Heise and White, who had been lured away from Vitagraph, travelled New York and Pennsylvania for Edison. On 12 December 1896, Heise filmed the Black Diamond Express, one of the USA’s fastest express trains in the open country. According to Charles Musser, Black Diamond Express was an imitation of Empire State Express made shortly before.8 At the beginning, the film shows railroad workers busy with repairs of the track. When a train appears out of the background and approaches in a drawn-out curve, the workers step back from the tracks and wave to the conductor, who leans out of the window. The camera is positioned to capture the rhythmic movements of the workers, the locomotive’s billowing cloud of steam and the acceleration effect of the train passing by – a visual composition of increasing intensity that reaches its climax when the locomotive rushes past the camera at the end. The ambitious and ingenious showman Lyman H. Howe presented Black Diamond Express with sound effects to create a dynamic audio-visual installation: ‘it seemed as if the train were dashing down upon the audience, the rushing of

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steam, the ringing of bells and the roar of the wheels making the scene a startlingly realistic one’.9 Early train films capture the mobilisation of the sensorium in a changing, increasingly technologised and automated world. They symbolically supplant the horse, which, according to Jonathan Crary, had remained ‘a primary nineteenth-century image of vehicular power and energetic motion’10 despite the invention of the railway. The horse dominated representations of motion between the 1830s and the 1890s, from Emile Reynaud’s praxinoscope to Muybridge’s chronophotography. The cinematograph explored the perspectives, the tempo and the ‘attractions’ of an age shaped by technology, industrialization, and mechanical energy.11 At first, the film camera itself remained static and observed this dynamic world, which many contemporaries experienced as chaotic, from a fixed vantage point. When the camera became mobile, it adopted the curious, nervous gaze of the urban flâneur – the habitus of the traveller to whom perception, as sensory ‘presence of mind’, had become an accessory of modern mobility. Films shot from moving trains, so-called phantom rides, are documented for England and France since 1898,12 but for the USA as early as 1896. For example, Dickson filmed Panoramic View From Trolley, Atlantic City in the summer of 1896.13 In this way, the tempo that characterized modern means of transport, such as the railway and soon the automobile, became inscribed into audio-visual media. Technologies of movement and of perception merged to form an integrated ‘machine’. Cinematographic images of vehicles designed for the transportation of goods and masses of people ‘transported’ new ways of seeing and thus actively shaped the development of a new visual language that was specific to film. Thus, even before the turn of the century, the phantom ride anticipated the tracking shot (for which the camera is mounted on a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails), which was otherwise rare before 1905.14 Since single shots were usually only one minute long, filmmakers needed a technique to ‘stretch’ the representation, in order to capture longer events: Several successive, one-minute-pieces of film have been skilfully edited together in such a way that the changes and joins are hardly discernible. This early use of editing serves simply to extend the length of a film, without attempting to combine disparate and complementary elements.15

In this way, Edison and Biograph created their phantom rides over the Brooklyn Bridge, which have remarkable visual effects. For example, Edison’s New Brooklyn To New York Via Brooklyn Bridge (1899), filmed through the front window of a rail car, records a journey on the elevated railway across the famous bridge. At the beginning, the camera’s gaze emerges from the dark of a tunnel into the daylight, similar to a fade-in. The iron bracing and the steel ropes of the bridge, which converge together with the railway tracks in the vanishing point at the centre of the image, create a shimmering play of light and shadow. At the end, the train arrives in Manhattan, flanked by two towering skyscrapers. In 1897, the Biograph company made The Haverstraw Tunnel, shot on the West Shore Railroad, which ran parallel to the Hudson River. For the first time, the camera was mounted on the cowcatcher (the metal frame at

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the front of a train designed to clear the track of obstacles). According to Musser, the audience reaction to the film proved that ‘moving pictures could still elicit a strong visceral response’.16 The reviewers particularly noted the abrupt changes of light and darkness brought about by the train riding in and out of the tunnel. The psychodynamic implications of the bodily shock that the effect created are expressed in a review from the New York Mail and Express: ‘The shadows, the rush of the invisible force and the uncertainty of the issues made one instinctively hold his breath as when on the edge of a crisis that might become a catastrophe’.17

Invisible forces The reviewer gives a relatively ‘rational’ reason for comparing the perceptual experience with a catastrophe: if there had been a collision in the tunnel, the female half of the audience would have suffered a nervous breakdown. But the terms that he uses, such as ‘invisible force’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘crisis’, may prompt one to explore the actual possibility of evoking a feeling of existential catastrophe with filmic means, particularly those of phantom rides and plunges into tunnels, which were evidently able to send the audience of early cinema reeling – an audience that was curious and hungry for pleasure, but also inexperienced. Hence, voyeurism and thrill-seeking merged. In the second half of the nineteenth century, photography fed the contemporary fascination with the railroad; its images were later adapted and standardised by cinematography. With the spread of the railway network in the USA and Europe (and also Japan), locomotives, tracks, stations etc. became ubiquitous visual motifs. The industrial landscape of the railroad created a specific iconography, which photography integrated into its repertoire, as did contemporary painting, and which was later transferred to film: tunnel-like views through train stations, railroad tracks extending in radials from city centres, freight and passenger trains crossing bridges over deep valleys.18 Images of railway accidents, such the one at Paris’ Gare Montparnasse in 1895,19 became icons of dark portent even in early amateur photography, and a photo of a German train blown up on a bridge near Mézières in August 1870 transformed the documentation of an event into a metaphor for catastrophe, industry and war.20 Railway accidents motivated new psychological (instead of physical) concepts and therapies of trauma.21 Sigmund Freud, in his ‘General Theory of the Neuroses’, categorised railway phobia among the situational fears that most people have learned to ignore in everyday life (even though accidents are real dangers, they are not likely, and thus they usually do not prevent us from travelling by train).22 Freud claimed that railway phobia was acquired in adulthood and could become a severe mental illness. In his case study of ‘little Hans’, Freud noted that childhood fantasies of Verkehr (meaning both ‘traffic’ and ‘sexual intercourse’) may also involve other (including premodern) means of transportation, progressing from the horse-drawn carriage to the railway, as the railway phobia is added to street phobia.23 Literature around 1900 also reveals that the cataclysmic fears of the age derived in part from the unmastered encounter with modern means of

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transportation. Conversely, however, these technologies and the new manmachine relationship they created were also diagnosed as symptoms of an all-encompassing cultural crisis that threatened to end in catastrophe. ‘Railway’ and ‘tunnel’ emerged in this context as particularly vivid metaphors for existential tendencies, since they were loaded with concrete experience. For example, Franz Kafka wrote: Observed with a tainted earthly eye, we are in the situation of train travellers who have met with an accident in a long tunnel, at a point where one cannot see the light of the entrance any longer, and the light at the end is so small that the gaze loses it again and again and has to search for it constantly, where beginning and end are uncertain.24

II On 21 May 1905, seven months after the opening of the New York subway, G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, who would later become famous as a cameraman for D. W. Griffith, filmed Interior NY Subway, 14th St To 42nd St for the American Mutoscope and Biograph company. The camera is mounted on the front platform of a subway train, which follows a train on the track ahead with varying distance, on the route between Union Square and what was then Grand Central Station. A special car on the parallel track provides the light necessary in the tunnel, producing visual effects that combine the spectacle of plunging into a seemingly boundless depth with the ability to ‘see in the dark’ – an experiment in perceptual psychology between realistic impression and graphic abstraction. The film is one of several subway-films, which were used by exhibitors as raw material to be re-assembled and combined with narrative sketches to create comical vignettes on modern transport. Many film histories showed little interest in these and other early films due to their lack of sophisticated narration, overlooking the values of technical experiments and of visual effects (whether intended or accidental).25 On the one hand, the travel film emerged as a genre in the first years of the twentieth century, making new demands on camera techniques as well as narrative strategies.26 On the other hand, the nickelodeon boom in the USA stimulated the production of films that combined the fascination of movement with narrative. The development from programmes of short films in variety theatres to longer narrative films in permanent cinemas reveals an interdependence of film form and exhibition, a structuring process from which cinema emerged as a ‘school’ of modern perception. In Hale’s Tours,27 a sense for the ‘cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning), instinct for the market and an intuitive understanding of the potential of film converged, forming a much-imitated synthesis of diverse endeavours to create a perceptual experience that was uniquely suited to the new medium. George C. Hale built an exhibition venue that looked like a train carriage: At one end, as if through the window of an observation car, the audience watched back-projected films of panorama train rides. Hale’s set-up … included machinery to simulate the movement of the carriage.28

In the most advanced shows, the film screenings were accompanied by ‘the rocking of the car and the sound of railway clatter’29 – a precedent of

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much later, more or less successful attempts to create a ‘pan-sensory’ experience that would involve the entire body of the spectator.30 The idea as such was not new: Hale himself, originally a fireman, had employed such effects in 1900 when he presented American fire fighting techniques at a competition in Paris. Furthermore, the great panoramas of the nineteenth century that set large painted canvasses in motion with mechanical means had already provided similar effects.31 Their attraction was based on a ‘passenger perspective’, which media technologies prior to cinema, such as the magic lantern, had also sought to simulate. For illustrated travel lectures, not only travel sujets in general, but particularly railway motifs were frequently offered by producers of magic lantern slides. David Robinson notes that the genres advertised in magic lantern catalogues and, for example, the Biograph catalogue of 1902 were very similar.32 The specific innovation of cinema was to create a more perfect illusion of adventurous travel without leaving one’s seat: ‘The spectator was not an outsider watching from safety the rush of the cars. He was a passenger on a phantom train ride that whirled him through space at nearly a mile a minute.’33 Films such as What Happened In the Tunnel (1903) or A Romance of the Rail (1903) imitated the multi-perspectival, distracted mode of perception of the modern traveller, which Hale enhanced with special effects: The superrealism of the exhibition strategy was adumbrated by bits of action along the sidings and in the train, which contradicted the suggestion of a fixed point of view. Coherence was sacrificed in favor of variety and a good show.34

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his history of the railway, has argued that spatial distance and with it nature itself fell prey to the new transportation technology. The railway was a giant machine of destruction: ‘Annihilation of time and space’ was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation into which the railroad placed natural space after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers.35

Function, quality and direction of movement ceased to depend on nature and its forces, but rather came to depend on ‘a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality’.36 The new mode of motion generated a new mode of perception: the railway dictated a new ‘frame’ for sensory experience, i.e. it imposed a technologically determined point of view to the traveller as observer. This precisely identifies the interface between modern technologies of transportation and of perception. With reference to Schivelbusch, Charles Musser describes the connection between railroad and cinema as a relationship of perceptual dispositifs that are based on mediation, separation and disparity: The traveler’s world is mediated by the railroad, not only by the compartment window with its frame but by telegraph wires, which intercede between the passenger and the landscape. The sensation of separation that the traveler feels on viewing the rapidly passing landscape has much in common with the theatrical experience of the spectator.37

The question arises how new this mode of perception (based on framing and separation) was in cultural history. For example, Klaus Bartels regards the camera obscura, the peep-show and other optical media of the

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eighteenth century, which responded to the growing demand for visual illusion, as instances of the ‘framed vision’ (Rahmenschau) that characterises the modern age.38 Ludwig Fischer even claims that the concept of ‘landscape’ emerged from the construction principles of the two-dimensional, perspectival image, which is essentially constituted by its frame, i.e. its selected boundary.39 The distance between a natural view and its observer that is produced by a frame or a technical apparatus together with perspectival effects enabled the concept of landscape, i.e. its conscious perception and articulation. Hence, the railway carriage window and the photographic frame only increased the permeation of technology and intensified the ‘sense of separation’, i.e. the observer’s feeling of being ‘outside’ of the scene. The result is ambivalent, because the intellectual power gained by the subject also excludes it from the observed reality. With regard to photography, Fischer remarks that the perceiving subject is helplessly expelled from the content of the constructed image, banished by the power of the visual machine. The visual dispositif of central perspective, the dominant construction of space in the modern age (since it accords with its ideal of rationality),40 is constituted by violence. As Bernd Busch puts it,41 central perspective is a production relationship that reduces perception to strategies of constructing and domesticating reality and that exploits the sensuality of human beings and the corporeality of objects. Its visual principles are based on (self-)deception, but it nonetheless functions perfectly as a means for the construction of external reality and for wielding power over nature, as an instrument of domination in the service of rationalism. The question is, then, how the moving image, i.e. ‘filmic perception’, relates to this deception and its anthropological and cultural implications. The impression of movement that film produces itself involves deception, since the illusion results from the calculated interplay between a sequence of static photographic images and our perceptual apparatus. The specific quality of filmic movement is its apparent transcendence of the fixed arrangements of central perspective, even though the individual film images are also constructed according to its principles. Film promised to free the fettered gaze, to restore a perspectival multiplicity that was denied in the dispositif of central perspective, and to provide a boundless journey through the real world. However, as Fischer explains, central perspective is only blurred, not sublated by the quick succession of filmic images. It is precisely the apparent liberation of the rigid, monocular gaze that Fischer, with reference to Friedwart Maria Rudel,42 regards as the true deception of filmic perception, which is dominated more forcefully than ever by the principles of central perspective. The spectator is cognitively and emotionally enthralled by a seemingly multi-perspectival visuality, which conceals its ‘centralistic’ structure more perfectly than prior media that had attempted to simulate motion. Therein lies the overwhelming fascination of film, the basis of its meteoric rise from penny arcades to nickelodeons to cinema palaces, eventually to become a mass medium. It was particularly the phantom ride that promoted this specific fascination of film, a perceptual experience that was often described as ‘shock’. In the short films of the railway genre, the static image literally picks up speed.

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The railway, which ‘transports’ the visual illusion, crosses the space of the image diagonally, as in Black Diamond Express, or pulls the gaze into the depth, as in the Brooklyn-Bridge films, and thus represents a force that targets not only vision, but the entire sensorium. What Crary notes for the ‘semantics’ of early media that simulated motion certainly also applies to the railway as a cinematic motif: The fascination had little to do with the figure or motif itself but rather with the illusion of movement, with ist pulsing, expanding, and contracting in endless, variable slower or faster, loops of motion.43

The cinematic ‘loops of motion’, now supported more than ever before by technology, were synchronized with the movements and rhythms of the technologically determined processes of modern reality and appropriated their mechanical energy. The phantom ride’s ‘hyper-realism’, its dynamic as well as linear trajectory of movement, and the merging of its point of view with the passenger-perspective epitomized the potentials of the new medium, before a demand for more complex narration and hence for montage set in. Permanent cinemas showed mostly films – in contrast to variety theatres, which had presented films only as one attraction among many. The infrastructure of permanent cinema created a new market and new modes of reception, a new audience, and, compared to travelling cinemas, a more localized orientation of the programme. The economic ambitions of exhibitors and the increasing sophistication of audiences demanded longer films and more frequent changes of programme, which in turn influenced producers, regarding the rhythms and methods of production as well as the standardisation of film form and content. Thomas Elsaesser, with reference to Musser, describes the transitional era as period of intense competition, in the course of which the textual and organisational control over the experience of cinema shifted from showmen and exhibitors to producers.44 More pointedly, the influence on the perception, concepts, orientations and behaviour of a growing audience was transferred from traditional institutions of showmanship that were rooted in past centuries to a modern, industrial complex of production. Translation by Annemone Ligensa

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Many of the Edison films are accessible on the website ‘Inventing Entertainment’ of the Library of Congress, which also offers descriptive data and search functions (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html). Quoted from Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen To 1907 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 118. See Benjamin B. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry From Its Beginnings To 1931 (New York: Dover, 1970 [1931]), 7. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 137. Quoted from David Robinson, From Peep Show To Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 64. See ‘Biograph Company’, Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/65904/Biograph-Company. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 152.

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184 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE Ibid., 164. Quoted from ibid., 178. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001), 271. See also Joachim Paech, ‘Das Sehen von Filmen und filmisches Sehen: Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der filmischen Wahrnehmung im 20. Jahrhundert’, Christa Blümlinger (ed.): Sprung im Spiegel: Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit (Wien: Sonderzahl, 1990), 33–50. See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (2nd edn) (London: Starword, 1992), 32. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 150. See Salt, Film Style and Technology, 47. Robinson, From Peep Show To Palace, 75. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 228. Quoted from ibid. See e.g. the photographs in Ursula Peters, Stilgeschichte der Fotografie in Deutschland 1839–1900 (Köln: DuMont, 1979), 157–159; and Margarett Loke (ed.), The World As It Was 1865–1921: A Photographic Portrait From the Keystone-Mast Collection (New York: Summit, 1980), 32. See the reproduction in Brian Coe, The Birth of Photography: The Story of the Formative Years 1800-1900 (London: Ash & Grant, 1976), 95. See the reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim, Die Fotografie (Wien: Molden, 1971), 143. See e.g. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds): Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma In the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). See Sigmund Freud, ‘Part III: General Theory of the Neuroses’, A General Introduction To Psychoanalysis [1915/6–1916/7], trans. by G. Stanley Hall (New York: Liveright, 1920), 207–402, specif. 344–345. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia In a Five-Year-Old Boy’ [1909], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 10 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–149. See also Sigmund Freud, ‘Part II: The Infantile Sexuality’, Three Contributions To the Sexual Theory [1905], trans. by Abraham A. Brill (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1910), 34–58, specif. p. 54. Franz Kafka, ‘Das dritte Oktavheft’, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1976), 52–77, quote p. 54. [Translation by A.L.] See e.g. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 386–390. See Charles Musser, ‘The Travel Genre In 1903–04: Moving Toward Fictional Narrative’, Iris: A Journal of Theory On Image and Sound 2, 1 (1984): 47–60. On the genre more generally, see Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See Raymond Fielding, ‘Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism In the Pre-1910 Motion Picture’, John L. Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 116–130. Robinson, From Peep Show To Palace, 95. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 429. See Lauren Rabinovitz, ‘From Hale’s Tours To Star Tours: Virtual Voyages and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real’, Iris: A Journal of Theory On Image and Sound 25 (Spring 1998): 133–152. On the panorama, see e.g. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. by Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997 [1980]); and Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (New York: Abrams, 2000 [1993]). Robinson, From Peep Show To Palace, 71. See also David Robinson, The Lantern Image: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420–1880 (Nutley: The Magic Lantern Society, 1993). Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 261. On the multiple relationships between early cinema and the railroad, see also Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 264. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space In the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1987 [1977]), 10. Ibid.

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Chapter 14 ‘Dashing Down Upon the Audience’ 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

185

Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 260–261. Klaus Bartels, ‘Vom Erhabenen zur Simulation: Eine Technikgeschichte der Seele – Optische Medien bis 1900 und der menschliche Innenraum’, Jochen Hörisch and Michael Wetzel (eds), Armaturen der Sinne: Literarische und technische Medien 1870 bis 1920 (München: Fink, 1990), 17–42. Ludwig Fischer, ‘Perspektive und Rahmung: Zur Geschichte einer Konstruktion von “Natur”’, Harro Segeberg (ed.), Die Mobilisierung des Sehens: Zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte des Films In Literatur und Kunst (München: Fink, 1996), 69–96. See Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). Bernd Busch, Belichtete Welt: Eine Wahrnehmungsgeschichte der Fotografie (München: Hanser, 1989). See Rudel, Friedwart Maria: Video et cogito: Die Philosophie der Wahrnehmung und die kinematographische Technik (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 1985). Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 271. Thomas Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (München: edition text + kritik, 2002), 114.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: German Tonbilder of the 1900s: Advanced Technology and National Brand Chapter Author(s): Martin Loiperdinger Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.18 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 15

German Tonbilder of the 1900s: Advanced Technology and National Brand German Tonbilder of the 19 00s

Martin Loiperdinger Technologically reproduced sound in early cinema he beginning of ‘sound film’ is usually associated with the end of the 1920s, when silent films, performed with live music, were superseded by the sound-on-film process, in which the rendering of images and sound were synchronised on the filmstrip. However, we know that the idea to present sound and moving pictures simultaneously is older than film itself. In 1887, when Thomas A. Edison commissioned his employees to experiment with photographing moving objects and replaying them as ‘moving pictures’, he was thinking of an apparatus that would ‘do for the eye what the phonograph has done for the ear’.1 When Edison began selling his Kinetoscope machines, he marketed phonographs with listening tubes alongside. This combination was given the name Kinetophone. It permitted the visitors to the Kinetoscope parlours to experience hearing and seeing simultaneously. Contemporaries sensed that such innovative reproduction technologies, as an ersatz for live performances, had the potential to bring about an aesthetic and cultural revolution. The life-size projections of ‘living photographs’ with the Cinématographe Lumière inspired fantastic visions of representing reality. Only a few days after the first public film showing in Germany, the Sunday review section of a Cologne paper envisioned the consequences of being able to technologically reproduce opera performances:

T

We had hardly recovered from marvelling at the Kinetoscope in the wonderland of automats when the cinematograph appeared, showing us everything in life-size. And it presented everything that the Kinetoscope offered on a small scale to the individual not just for one person alone, but for an entire audience. Street and railway scenes, activities on water and on land – the real thing. … Now comes the phonograph that plays whole pieces of music for us today; doubtless it will continue to be improved and will ultimately permit an entire audience to hear the sound at once. It is only a question of time before a connection of the two separate devices will produce a unified cinematophonograph. This machine would then perform whole opera scenes, with the trueto-life actions of the actors/singers on the screen, accompanied by the exact sounds of the music of singing and orchestra at the same time … . Opera stages

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE might then become unnecessary; the managers would not need to pay enormous fees any more, would no longer become exasperated at the caprices of the artists or at the dissatisfaction of a demanding audience. With the cinematophonograph, one showpiece ensemble would suffice to provide hundreds of cities with the pleasures of opera.2

Music was used in film projections from the very beginning, either performed live or played from a phonograph or gramophone. Mechanical music devices were a part of the standard equipment of many itinerant showmen who travelled the countryside with the magic lantern and the cinematograph. In the first Berlin exhibition venue, Unter den Linden 21, the film pioneer Oskar Messter employed a phonograph for musical film accompaniment as early as 1896. Appropriate pieces of music were selected for each film: The ‘Hohenfriedberger Marsch’ resounded for the guard parade at Unter den Linden in Berlin, and ‘a playful dance tune’ for a serpentine dancer.3 Initially, the technological reproduction of music was a more or less arbitrary accompaniment to film. Nevertheless, the development of sound film was not a large stretch from this performance practice. Around 1900, no process existed as yet that recorded images and sound on the same medium, but it was not very difficult technically to synchronise separately recorded images and sounds to some degree. As early as the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre presented a sound film system developed by Clément Maurice and Henri Lioret that roughly synchronised film with cylinder sound recordings. Thus, the audience were treated to simultaneously seeing and hearing such French theatrical stars as Sarah Bernhardt and Cléo de Mérode. On 7 November 1902 in Paris, Léon Gaumont demonstrated a system to synchronise pictures and sound that was marketed in April 1904 under the name Chronophone. The film pioneer Alice Guy made numerous films with synchronised sound for Gaumont, called phonoscènes.4

Messter’s Biophon On 29 August 1903, Germany, known for its great enthusiasm for music, finally came up with its own version. In the Apollo-Theater in Berlin, film pioneer Oskar Messter presented an apparatus for showing films with synchronised sound that he had devised. He christened it Biophon and retained this brand name for all 35 patents for the synchronisation process that he submitted between 1903 and 1908.5 The term Tonbild (‘sound picture’) soon became established for the films shown with the Biophon. The Berlin newspapers greeted the innovation effusively.6 The Vossische Zeitung even ranked the local inventor above the universally admired Edison: The close union of talking machine and cinematograph, to which, for example, Edison, ‘the Wizard of Menlo Park’, had so eagerly aspired for several years, has been successfully completed here in Berlin. A demonstration in the ApolloTheater for invited guests proved as much yesterday afternoon. The ‘silent musician was heard before the court’. The proceedings were lively enough in this courtroom. The avidly gesticulating judge, who seemed to be delighted with the sound of his own voice, the attentively listening jury members, who

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Chapter 15 German Tonbilder of the 1900s

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Fig. 1. Porten in an unidentified Tonbild (Duskes, c. 1908). [Source: Bundesarchiv Bildarchiv, Koblenz.]

occasionally interrupted the proceedings – all were there, as were the contending parties. By means of the cinematograph, real life was breathed into the life-like personae. The spoken word completely matched the movements of the depicted individuals. No less thrilling was the portrayal of the ‘Lustige Ehemann’. A violinist impressively performed Sarasate’s ‘Spanischer Tanz’. The striking finale of the screening came with ‘Übungen auf dem Kasernenhof’.7

Messter achieved the synchronisation of picture and sound by connecting the film projector via a crank and electric motors with a gramophone, adding a manually operated device for correction. The Tonbild devices marketed some years later by other producers, such as Duskes, Deutsche Bioscope, Vitascope and Liesegang, were based on the same principle. To facilitate the synchronised start of the playback, the shellac gramophone records pressed for the Tonbild screenings were furnished with a startingmarker. The production of the Tonbilder was carried out in two steps. First, music and speech were recorded on a gramophone disc; then a fitting scene was acted out and filmed in the film studio while the record was played: First, the artists record the vocals onto the disc, taking into account, of course, the tempo, etc. of the scene to be acted out later. When the disc is … finished, the artists’ own voices are played back to them on a special gramophone, exactly synchronised, that is, at the same speed at which a cinematographic recording machine is running. They then attempt to sing and act exactly in time with the gramophone, while the cinematograph photographs their movements, including those of their lips. With adroit artists, almost no disturbing difference arises between sound and picture, thanks to the finely constructed recording and playback devices.8

The actors in the cinematographic recording were not necessarily identical with the artists of the sound recording. The film studios frequently

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hired unknown actors who had a good command of the skills required. Hence, for example, Henny Porten, who became the first German film star years later, made her film debut in Messter’s 1906 Meissner Porzellan, followed by further Tonbilder for various companies.9

Messter’s Tonbild screening service and Tonbild theatres Encouraged by his success at the Apollo-Theater, Messter laid down farreaching plans to utilise his new invention in his paper ‘A brief presentation of the new sensation of talking living photographs, with the purpose of founding a company’. He proposed a company with 700,000 marks capital stock, of which 200,000 marks were to be used as operating capital for a worldwide Tonbilder circuit for variety theatres, calculated on the basis of equipment including 34 screening units. The remaining 500,000 marks were to be used for purchasing patent rights, namely the rights to Messter’s own patents as well as those of his competitor Gaumont, envisioned as partner.10 The Parisian multinational company did not accept Messter’s offer, but agreed to divide the market between France and Germany. Hence, unfazed by the French competition, which was very powerful at the time, Messter managed to become the exclusive supplier of Tonbilder in Germany, and was able to occupy this niche almost without competition for several years. Furthermore, with his screening service for variety theatres, he succeeded in establishing a closed distribution system. The comparatively low cost was probably the main attraction for the variety theatres. Presenting top Berlin musical theatre stars via Messter’s recorded sound and picture repertoire was much cheaper than hiring second- or third-rank live performers. Upon Messter’s premiere at the Apollo-Theater, a journalist had already prophesied: Woe betide you poor actors and singers in the provinces: You are threatened with the dreadful fate of annihilation, for the Messrs theatre managers will become accustomed to meeting the demands of theatres outside the nation’s capital biophonically. They get off cheaper that way and can even maintain that now the programme is just as good – or just as bad – as in the elegant capital city.11

However, the variety theatres themselves were among the losers when the competition squeeze began, set in motion by the industrial recording of picture and sound in the entertainment sector. In city centres, it was often the so-called Tonbild Theater that opened in the buildings of former variety theatres. They set themselves apart from the simple storefront cinemas through their grander furnishings and higher prices and targeted a ‘better’ audience. Messter founded several Tonbild theatres of his own. In the autumn of 1905, he furnished his first exhibition venue Unter den Linden 21 as a Tonbild theatre. There the patrons were able to regularly view screenings of the ‘singing, talking and music-making photographs’.12 At the beginning of 1909, Messter supplemented his Biophon apparatus, which cost 2,000 marks, with a cheaper version, the Synchrophon, which cost only 300 marks. By 1913, when the Tonbild period came to an end, Messter, by his own estimate, had sold approximately 500 Tonbild projection machines.13

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Chapter 15 German Tonbilder of the 1900s

Tonbilder glut on the German film market When the boom of permanent cinemas set in, Messter’s exclusive Tonbild screening service was challenged by an open market where several Tonbild manufacturers sold their product to a rapidly growing clientele of Tonbild theatre owners. The German competitors disregarded Messter’s patent claims and produced their own, less expensive Tonbild projection machines. Messter filed several suits defending his patents, some of which dragged on for years. In the meantime, the low-cost suppliers had already successfully satisfied the demand: The market was saturated. Price cutting then became the main method in competing for sales of the continually growing supply of Tonbilder. Hence, a rapid price decline set in. As late as 1907, Messter was able to demand 2.50 marks and more per metre for his Tonbilder, plus the costs of the shellac disc.14 In February 1909, a ‘Tonbild uniform price’ of 1.50 per metre was laid down at the Paris Film Manufacturers Congress.15 But only a year later, the metre price fell to 1 mark, clearly below the production cost. The Tonbild market collapsed. The table below illustrates the rapidly rising German Tonbild supply in 1908 and 1909 and the just as swiftly shrinking Tonbild supply in 1910 (see Table 1). The figures represent the numbers of titles advertised in the trade press by the six most important Tonbild suppliers of the German market, extracted from German film supply data compiled by Herbert Birett.16 No supply catalogues of German Tonbild producers are known to be extant. The total extent of Tonbilder sales, i.e. the number of copies sold, is unknown, because sales figures for individual titles are not available. Table 1. Tonbild titles on offer by German producers

1910

Total

Messter

1907 1*

17

51**

13

82

Deutsche Bioscope

18

74

56

31

179

0

29

66

14

109

0

49

20

12

81

22

35

10

0

67

Deutsche Mutoskop & Biograph Duskes Internationale Kinematographund Lichtbild-Gesellschaft Vitascope Total

1908

1909

0

0

29

52

81

41

204

232

122

599

*See endnote 17; ** see endnote 18.

Between 1903 and 1911, Birett’s data documents a total of 850 Tonbilder. Almost all are German; only Pathé Frères and Gaumont appear as significant foreign suppliers. Only a few titles are known from the years before 1907, when Messter held the monopoly on German Tonbild production. Tonbilder were rarely advertised in the trade press before permanent cinemas were founded. By his own estimate, Messter produced a total of approximately 500 Tonbilder, of which he was able to sell between 60 and 70 copies, sometimes even over 100.19 In his film history from the 1950s, Friedrich von Zglinicki

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Fig. 2. Lohengrin – “Wenn ich im Kampfe für Dich siege” (Deutsche Bioscop, 1908). [Source: Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF, Frankfurt am Main.]

adopted Messter’s figures. He estimated this output to be one-third of the approximately 1,500 Tonbilder produced in Germany between 1903 and 1913, for which about 100,000 metres of film negative were exposed.20 Even if Zglinicki’s estimate of the German Tonbilder production seems somewhat high, such figures are not unrealistic, as it must be assumed that extant sources are incomplete. For example, the Duskes company, which ‘erected a large open-air studio to record talking and singing pictures in one of Vienna’s suburbs, where the foremost Austrian stage artists were to be employed’, had ‘no fewer than 276 recordings of music films’ available in September 1908.21 That is more than five times of the Duskes Tonbilder documented for that year. Even if it can be assumed that part of the stock did not come from Duske’s own production, it points to a significant discrepancy. Despite these imposing production figures, Tonbilder comprised a comparatively small market segment. Such films were seldom shown by travelling showmen. Only a few of the permanent cinemas, i.e. the Tonbild theatres, offered them, and even there they occupied at best a third of the running time of a programme. In international comparison, Tonbilder seem to have been something of a German specialty. At the beginning of 1909, a trade newspaper mentioned parenthetically that ‘the Tonbild industry is mainly German’.22 Duskes, with a capital stock of 500,000 marks and a list of 276 Tonbilder in 1908, had more Tonbilder on the market than the French giant Gaumont, whose catalogue comprised around 200 Tonbilder at the time. Gaumont’s Tonbilder were only a sideline business, whereas for Duskes they formed the main source of revenue. Furthermore, Messter’s continually growing annual balance sheet, 156,537 marks by 1908, owed its success almost exclusively to the Tonbild business. Hence the 1909 price collapse of the Tonbilder hit his company all the harder, with a revenue-decrease of nearly one-third, down to 111,321 marks.23 Messter was the first to take appropriate action and converted his

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production strictly to silent films. These films also fetched a metre price of only one mark, but were considerably less costly to produce.24 Normally, over-production crises are solved by the introduction of technologies that, with higher initial capital investment, achieve lower costs per unit, thus making the production profitable again. But the Tonbild decline could not be rectified in this way, since a technology that would have met these demands was not available at the time. The only escape from the crisis of the German Tonbild industry was to return to silent films.

An advanced technology neglected by film historiography Up to now, film historiography has generally overlooked or ignored the Tonbild sector.25 This may be partly due to the lack of material to study. Less than 1 per cent of German Tonbild production is accessible as picture and sound together. Several Messter Tonbilder are available that Messter recopied for his Ufa short film Als man anfing zu filmen (1934). The others are Rigoletto (1908, Deutsche Bioscop), Die Fledermaus (1908, Duskes) and Die lustige Witwe, III. Akt – Die Grisetten (1908, Duskes), which the German Film Institute transferred from 35 mm nitrate to 16 mm safety film in the 1960s, plus the talking Tonbild Auf der Radrennbahn in Friedenau (1904, Messter), starring the comedian Robert Steidl, restored by the German Kinemathek. The fact that Tonbilder were produced in two different recording technologies may partly explain why over 99 per cent of German Tonbilder are unavailable for researchers and the public. Since images and sound were recorded separately, the two media were split up in the course of time. Thus archivists are often faced with special problems of identification and matching.26 Furthermore, the lack of interest in Tonbilder by archives and film historiography is a regrettable expression of a widespread and persisting German disdain towards popular culture. Hence, a significant part of German film production and reception, which has important insights to offer for the historiography of audio-visual media, is under-researched.27 Consequently, it is not surprising that in connection with Tonbilder misconceptions and false conclusions abound. For example, we might single out a remark by Thomas Elsaesser, because it pertains to the central media characteristics of Tonbilder. In an essay on film style and the industry of Wilhelmine cinema, Elsaesser reflects on a ‘producer-driven’ and an ‘exhibition-driven’ model of filmmaking. He assigns Tonbilder to the pre-industrial phase of film production: Whereas Tonbilder were, to a certain extent, ‘producer-driven’, as a combination of technological experiment and cross-media reference to ‘high culture’ (as a kind of pocket-size opera), their swift decline is a good example of the influence of ‘exhibition-driven’ forces, not just because their synchronisation technology was fragile and unreliable. Since their exhibition was labour intensive, Tonbilder did not lend themselves well to incorporation into programmes. They were thus ill-suited for standardisation (with regard to programme and screening formats), which went hand in hand with the industrialisation of the film business. Tonbilder remained a kind of half-finished product that belongs rather to the craftsman phase of early filmmaking.28

On the one hand, Elsaesser’s assessment is correct concerning the special circumstances of screening Tonbilder. Gramophone discs at the time

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limited the film length to 65 metres, that is, not quite 4 minutes at a speed of 16 images per second. The simultaneous start of picture and sound depended on the alertness and dexterity of the projectionist, as did the synchronisation of film projector and gramophone, which had to be constantly checked and corrected. Furthermore, film and shellac disc had to match completely: Torn and re-spliced film copies with several frames missing were unusable for a satisfactory Tonbild showing. On the other hand, the industrial standardisation of the Tonbild was much more advanced than that of silent films, which might more appropriately be called a ‘half-finished product’, because they arrived for exhibition with no sound at all. By contrast, every Tonbild was connected to technologically recorded sound. This sound accompaniment could be reproduced at the point of exhibition in identical fashion anywhere and at any time, whereas the sound accompaniment for a silent film was not fixed per se. Performances could vary considerably, depending on the selection of music, the live musicians or music automats, the involvement of film lecturers and sound effects and even audience reaction. Elsaesser’s remarks primarily address the technical and practical circumstances of Tonbild exhibition, i.e. that the quality of the actual screening still partly depended on the skill of the projectionist. However, even more important for understanding the specific media characteristics of the Tonbild is the fact that the sound itself is ‘canned’ and thus standardised. Significant sound elements of the exhibition were separated and integrated into the production process. Live elements were at best still possible as an introduction or bridge before the Tonbild presentation began. Thus, in principle, the technology of the Tonbild expands the technological transmission of standards determined by the producer. It was surely a technical handicap of the Tonbild that image and sound were still separated rather than stored on the same medium, as in the sound-on-film process, introduced only 25 years after Messter’s first Biophon showings. This lack of convergence may have disturbed the screening more or less noticeably. However, defining Tonbilder as ‘a kind of half-finished product that belongs rather to the craftsman phase of early film making’ does not follow from this. Tonbilder did not disappear due to technical problems, as is often argued, but because their production was no longer profitable. Elsaesser’s claim that ‘their swift decline is a good example of the influence of “exhibition-driven” forces’ is not convincing. Earlier, Tonbilder had seen a good two years’ boom. If technical problems at the point of exhibition did not stand in the way of commercial success, how could they have been the cause for this decline? An ‘exhibition-driven’ reason cannot be found. The cause was rather the overproduction actively brought about by producers in response to the technology’s success, leading to a price decline that made the production of Tonbilder unprofitable, finally bringing the market to a standstill. Compared to silent films, Tonbilder constituted an advanced technology in economic terms, since they required an increased investment by producers, on which they could then expect a higher return. To the usual studio costs for shooting silent films the costs of the sound recording had to be added, either for rights obtained from a sound recording company or for an

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in-house production. The high fees for music stars significantly increased the costs, since there were no silent film stars yet – except for the monarchs in newsreels, who demanded no fee.29 With the higher metre price, up to 250 per cent of the metre price of silent films, the sale of Tonbilder brought the seller an increased return on investment. Tonbilder thus increased the producers’ capital turnover. Since the Tonbild buyers had to pay considerably more than for silent films, the Tonbild theatres demanded higher admission prices than did the cinematograph theatres that screened silent films with live music only. The increased box office revenues entailed higher rents, which increased the value of the respective real estate etc. In other words, the Tonbild theatres, which targeted a ‘better’ audience, were an instrument to segment the young market of permanent cinemas: As a highly regarded technology, the Tonbild was the first and most important means for cinemas to distinguish themselves from the competition, and thus it quickly became de rigueur for the equipment and programmes of the more sophisticated venues.30

Tonbild attractions – German music stars on screen To justify the higher admission price, the Tonbild theatres had to offer uncommon attractions. Technologically reproduced sound per se was not sufficient. After all, sound was offered, even of better quality in acoustic form, from live musicians and lecturers in the majority of ‘silent’ cinematograph theatres. The special attraction of the Tonbilder was that they stood out from the international short film programme, supplied predominantly by French companies until 1912, as a highly noticeable and unmistakably national element of contemporary film culture – less so because, as described above, they were predominantly German productions, but because they often brought to the screen well-known German actors and musicians, performing in German. For this reason, Tonbilder attained economic and cultural distinction on the programme and on the market. Several years before the introduction of the star system in the German film industry in 1911,31 Tonbilder presented stars of German music theatre performing well-known German music. As nearly all the Tonbild producers were headquartered in the nation’s capital, they availed themselves of local actors and singers and seized on the current repertoire of the Berlin variety and music theatres for the sound and film recordings. They had the entire palette of classical and popular music at their disposal, from opera to operetta to frivolous hit songs and catchy melodies from revues at the Metropol-Theater. Oskar Messter presented, for example, besides the comedian Robert Steidl and the inevitable Otto Reutter couplets, singeractors Joseph Giampietro, Alexander Girardi, Gustav Schönwald, Hedwig Francillo-Kaufmann, Marie Ottmann, Hedwig Voltz, Ida Perry and Albert Paulig on screen and through megaphone, as well as international stars of dance, such as Cléo de Mérode, Otero and Saharet. The genres of the music, songs and dialogue pieces of the currently known Tonbilder have not yet been analysed quantitatively. The publicity texts in the trade press as well as the numerous brief commentaries on Tonbild programmes indicate that excerpts from operettas stood at the top of

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the list of favourites. Tonbilder can be understood as both a reaction to and an agent of popular music culture: The audience’s favourable reception of Tonbilder can be attributed to their familiarity with the musical repertoire; their popularity in turn extended the spread of this repertoire. Tonbilder became downright fashionable in Germany. In order to understand the significance of this phenomenon, we must consider the circumstances of the reception of music at the time. The technical reproducibility of musical performances was still very limited and imperfect. On the other hand, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, a general trivialisation of the music tradition had set in, which ranged from arrangements of original versions for the salon orchestra and solo instruments to pared-down opera performances and magic lantern shows, all the way to Liebig collector’s cards. The resounding success of Messter’s Tonbilder is also indicative of how much the general German culture of the time had already been instilled with elements of opera and operetta.32

Although Tonbilder in general did not fall under the German Kinoreformer’s charge of ‘trash and smut’, they met with disapproval from representatives of the literati who judged the technological reproduction and fragmentation of works intended for the stage as extremely poor taste, to say the least: The only German industrial sector of cinematography is the Tonbild. These monsters are produced thus: A singer (or several) records a ‘vocal’ onto the gramophone disc. As rhythm for this mostly dreadful singsong, an actor then mimes the movements of a singer; a cheap decoration is placed alongside and all of this is recorded cinematographically. Then, in the cinema, the playback of the vocal is ruined by the simultaneous projection of the mime with his mouth agape and his arms waving. And this tastelessness the cinema playbills call a Tonbild.33

The film industry confronted the hostility of cinema reformers who saw decency and/or art endangered with the conviction that it was offering cultural education to the public. The industry denounced the ‘colossal admission prices demanded by the theatres for the performances of famous singers’ and recommended itself as inexpensive culture-bearer for a wider audience: It is regrettable that these high prices deny the middle class or the man in the street the opportunity to enjoy hearing really famous singers. In order to eliminate this calamity, the cinematograph has intervened with a helping hand.34

At the end of April 1907, the Deutsche-Tonbild-Theater-Gesellschaft was founded, with 30,000 marks capital stock.35 We are told that it was able to screen the operettas Walzertraum and Der Graf von Luxemburg in excerpts of six to eight Messter Tonbilder as premieres in Frankfurt even before they were shown live in music theatres there.36 However, their alleged educational mission did not prevent the Tonbild industry from making use of erotic charms and frivolous ambiguities for many of the Tonbilder as a ploy to attract customers and audiences. The Tonbild catalogue descriptions for potential buyers made quite pointed reference to the ‘spicy’ character of the films. For example, the following could be read in a Duskes catalogue about the Tonbild Das Schaukellied:

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Who wouldn’t have liked to sit in a swing in his youth! Even grown-ups enjoy the opportunity at folk festivals to swing through the air. Our film has a host of delightful, pretty girls in racy costumes, who are slowly swung ever higher by young fellows, also portrayed by ladies. As they push the swings, they sing a charming song, comparing the girls to angels at whose sight you believe you are granted a view into heaven.37

Sometimes educational ambition merged with erotic desire to form a harmonious unity. A trade observer was able to report an example in 1907: Biophonically, I saw and heard, well put together, the aria ‘Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben’ from Don Juan [Don Giovanni], the way different composers have arranged it in diverse colourful stage settings with the obligatory vocal. Also the barcarolle from Hoffmanns Erzählungen at the Berlin Comic Opera, with Hedwig Francillo-Kaufmann’s lovely, voluptuous body stretched out languorously on a divan, a sight for the gods.38

Tonbilder as a model for media historiography Contrary to the perceptions of numerous cineastes and many film historians who allege that early German film was not up to date, it can be said that the German Tonbild industry produced technologically advanced films that were obviously well received by their audiences. With its linguistic and cultural limitation to the domestic market, the Tonbild industry anticipated the national orientation in film production that would emerge again with the introduction of the sound-on-film process. This early ‘model’ of a national film production needs to be thoroughly (re)examined as a significant phenomenon of cultural history, since Tonbilder were presented as unmistakably ‘German’ amidst the international programmes of silent films. As in a prism, the convergence of technological reproduction and live performance is bundled and refracted in the Tonbilder: film and shellac disc on the one side, music and variety theatre on the other. The Tonbild was a product in which a complex intermedia-configuration crystallised for a brief time. At present, we cannot adequately judge the economic thrust and the cultural power the Tonbild industry developed between the opposite poles of art and entertainment. In any event, more research on this specifically German film genre promises insights into the dynamics of the entertainment and educational sectors in Wilhelmine Germany at the turn of the century. Beyond compiling a profile that demonstrates how the Tonbild technology represented the live repertoire of music theatre and variety stage, it would be necessary to provide a comprehensive review of the economic relationship between the shellac disc industry and the film industry in the first decade of the twentieth century. In economic terms, the Tonbild technology occupied a very small niche of the German film market. It was taken up by the German film industry and initially exploited with considerable profit. Paradoxically, the success of the Tonbild was also its undoing: After a brief and vigorous boom, it perished in a classical overproduction crisis. Technologically and economically preferable alternatives were not available at the time. The supply of silent films was in the hands of the leading French companies. It was not until the end of 1910 that new prospects for profit emerged for the German film

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industry. The Düsseldorf film distributor Ludwig Gottschalk introduced the Monopolfilm (‘exclusive’) distribution system to Germany with the Danish feature film Afgrunden (The Abyss, 1910). Its leading lady Asta Nielsen became a film star within a few months. At the end of May 1911, a syndicate was founded in Frankfurt to produce and internationally distribute the ‘Asta Nielsen Monopolfilm series’. With that, the turn from the short film programme to the long feature film was initiated.39 The introduction of the film star system emanated from Germany: Hence it seems that the collapse of the Tonbild boom, so painful for the German filmmakers, was one reason that the establishment of the long feature film was instigated in Germany. Translation by Frankie Kann

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Thomas A. Edison’s caveat to the US Patent Office, October 1888, quoted from Ian Christie, ‘Early Phonograph Culture and Moving Pictures’, in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). Amadeus Gänsekiel, ‘Es muß alles anders werden!’ Kölner Sonntags-Anzeiger, 26 April 1896. I wish to thank Martina Müller for drawing my attention to this text. On the introduction of film in Germany, see Martin Loiperdinger, Film & Schokolade: Stollwercks Geschäfte mit lebenden Bildern (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1999). Hans Klepp, ‘Lebende Photographieen’, Die Technik 1 (1897): 1, quoted in detail in Martin Koerber, ‘Oskar Messter – Stationen einer Karriere’, in Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Oskar Messter – Filmpionier der Kaiserzeit (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1994), 27–92, quote p. 48; a sketch of the exhibition venue Unter den Linden 21, drawn by the projectionist Otto Wittmann, can be seen on p. 35. See Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 43–77. Christian Ilgner and Dietmar Linke, ‘Vom Malteserkreuz zum Panzerkino’, in Loiperdinger, Oskar Messter, 93–134, quote p. 118. See ‘Stimmen der Presse über Messter’s Biophon’ [transcripts from press articles], Bundesarchiv, Oskar Messter Estate, BA NL 1275, File No. 480. Vossische Zeitung, 407 (1 September 1903); transcript in ‘Stimmen der Presse über Messter’s Biophon’. ‘Wie singende Bilder (Tonbilder) entstehen’, Der Kinematograph 65 (25 March 1908). See the Henny Porten filmography compiled by Corinna Müller in Helga Belach, Henny Porten: Der erste deutsche Filmstar 1890–1960 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1986), 173–175. ‘Exposé über die neue Sensation der sprechenden lebenden Photographien zum Zwecke einer Gesellschaftsgründung’, Bundesarchiv, Oskar Messter Estate, BA NL 1275, File No. 480. Staatsbürger-Zeitung 284 (5 September 1903); transcript in ‘Stimmen der Presse über Messter’s Biophon’. ‘Zur Geschichte des Kinematographen-Theaters’, Der Kinematograph 1 (6 January 1907). Oskar Messter, Mein Weg mit dem Film (Berlin-Schöneberg: Max Hesses Verlag, 1936), p. 65. Heinrich Putzo, ‘Aus den Kindertagen des Tonfilms’, Lichtbildbühne 277/8 (20 September 1929). ‘Nachklänge zum Fabrikanten-Kongreß’, Lichtbildbühne 43 (18 February 1909). See Herbert Birett, Das Filmangebot in Deutschland zwischen 1895 und 1911 (München: Filmbuchverlag Winterberg, 1991); I wish to thank Herbert Birett for assistance in drawing up the chart. Figures for Messter Tonbilder for 1907, 1908 and 1910 correspond to those of Birett, ibid. and CineGraph – Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film, entry ‘Oskar Messter’. Birett, ibid. and CineGraph differ here: Birett names 36 Messter Tonbilder for 1909; CineGraph lists 40 and an additional 11 titles with question marks – altogether 51 as a current maximum. Messter, Mein Weg mit dem Film, p. 65. Friedrich von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1979 [1956]), p. 284.

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Chapter 15 German Tonbilder of the 1900s 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Kinematographische Rundschau 40 (15 September 1908). ‘Nachklänge zum Fabrikanten-Kongreß’. According to Rainer Karlsch, ‘Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der Messter-Firmen’, in Loiperdinger, Oskar Messter, 149–166, quote p. 154. See Corinna Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen 1907–1912 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), pp. 83–84. No monograph exists on German Tonbilder. A few pages on the subject are scattered throughout books and essays, as in Müller, ibid.; Koerber, ‘Oskar Messter’; Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films; Harald Jossé, Die Entstehung des Tonfilms: Beitrag zu einer faktenorientierten Mediengeschichtsschreibung (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1984); Harald Pulch, ‘Messters Experiment der Dirigentenfilme’, in KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 3 (1994): 53–64; Ennio Simeon, ‘Messter und die Musik des frühen Kinos’, in Loiperdinger, Oskar Messter, 135–149; Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Tonbilder’, in Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (eds), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Vol. 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 269–274. For example, there are several Tonbild sound discs in the Oskar Messter estate, but it is not known what happened to the films belonging to them. Conversely, the archives of the German Film Institute (DIF) hold some 20 Tonbild nitrate films without knowing where the matching sound discs are. The increased international research of recent years on sound in early cinema has not included German Tonbilder: see Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), Film History 11, 4 (1999): ‘Special Domitor Issue: Global Experiments In Early Synchronous Sound’; Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema; Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner (eds), Le Muet a la parole: Cinéma et performances à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 2005). The only exception is a brief article on German Tonbilder in Denmark: Jens Ulff-Møller, ‘Biophon Sound Films In Danish Cinemas, 1904–1914’, Film History 11, 4 (1999): 456–463. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Wilhelminisches Kino: Stil und Industrie’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 1 (1992): 10–28, p. 18. Elsaesser repeats this passage about Tonbilder almost verbatim ten years later in the chapter ‘Norm und Form: Geschichte und Gegengeschichte im frühen deutschen Kino’ of his book Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (Munich: text + kritik, 2002), p. 158. See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II., der erste deutsche Filmstar’, in Thomas Koebner (ed.), Idole des deutschen Films: Eine Galerie von Schlüsselfiguren (München: edition text + kritik), 41–53 and ‘“Kaiserbilder”: Wilhelm II. als Filmstar’, in Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (eds), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Vol. 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918, 253–268. Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie, 79–80. See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Der erste Filmstar im Monopolfilmverleih’, in Karola Gramann, Eric de Kuyper, Sabine Nessel, Heide Schlüpmann and Michael Wedel (eds), Asta Nielsen: Sprache der Liebe (Wien: filmarchiv austria, [forthcoming]), 177–186 and “Afgrunden in Germany 1910/11: Monopolfilm, Cinema-Going and the Emergence of the Film Star Asta Nielsen”, in Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (eds), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives on Film Cultures and Cinema-going [forthcoming]. Simeon, ‘Messter und die Musik des frühen Kinos’, 138–139. Heinrich Auer, ‘Zur Kinofrage’, Soziale Revue 13, 1 (1913): 19–36. Publicity text by Duskes, almost verbatim in ‘Neue Films’, Der Kinematograph 91 (23 September 1908) and in Kinematographische Rundschau 41, 1 (October 1908). Der Kinematograph 19 (8 May 1907). Putzo, ‘Aus den Kindertagen des Tonfilms’. ‘Lang ist es her! Auch eine Erinnerung, aber eine erfreuliche’, Der Kinematograph 499 (19 July 1916). K. Döring, ‘“Kientoppographisches” aus Berlin’, Der Kinematograph 44 (30 October 1907). See Loiperdinger, ‘Der erste Filmstar’ and ‘Afgrunden In Germany 1910/11’.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Sculpting With Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art In Motion’ Chapter Author(s): Michael Wedel Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.19 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 16

Sculpting With Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art In Motion’ Sculpting With Light

Michael Wedel Introduction: film as a ‘plastic art in motion’ n early writings on the development of film style, the medium’s artistic potentials and the possibilities of unfolding cinematic space beyond the limits of the screen, film theoreticians, critics and practitioners frequently alluded to the metaphor of film as a ‘Plastic Art in Motion’.1 In his essay ‘The Birth of the Sixth Art’ (1911), Ricciotto Canudo saw in the cinema a ‘superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry)’.2 According to Canudo, film should not only turn into animated painting, but evolve into a ‘Sculpture developing in Time’.3 In a similar vein, Vachel Lindsay (1915) spoke of the alternation between long tableau shots and close-up shots in film as producing ‘dumb giants’ and bodies ‘in sculptural relief’.4 Hence, when Hugo Münsterberg (1916) famously referred both to the visual arts and to stereoscopy as models for creating the perceptual illusion of plasticity and depth in order to clarify the difference between the film spectator’s object of knowledge and his or her object of impression, he could already build on a well established line of thinking about cinematic space as an interface for different media intertexts and modes of aesthetic experience. For Münsterberg,

I

the stereoscope … illustrates clearly that the knowledge of the flat character of pictures by no means excludes the actual perception of depth, and the question arises whether the moving pictures of the photo play, in spite of our knowledge concerning the flatness of the screen, do not give us after all the impression of actual depth.5

Throughout the 1910s, both the visual and plastic arts and the technological experiments with stereoscopic cinema played a key role in theoretical debates on the stylistic possibilities of carving out a three-dimensional perceptual space from what was essentially conceived as a two-dimensional image. Visual techniques such as high-contrast cinematography and light-

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ing, editing and masking shots, staging with several planes of action and pictorial framing, but also the incorporation of music and sound effects, effective narrative structure and ‘deep’ psychological characterisation, formed a set of stylistic options that was discussed and put into practice in order to overcome the material flatness of the filmic image. The aim was to create a ‘virtual experiential space’ that would enhance emotional involvement and offer the spectator a sense of embodied vision. Consequently, it seems worthwhile to reconstruct the connection between early film style and the creation of a virtual and immersive narrative space in the 1910s. Against the horizon of what was essentially an international phenomenon, German cinema will serve as a case study in order to demonstrate how the process of stylistic innovation of cinematic space took shape at the intersection of two interrelated discursive fields: on the one hand, the adaptation and appropriation of developments in the visual and performative arts and, on the other, technological experiments in stereoscopic photography and projection. The idea of a film style that would promote the plasticity of the filmic image, cast into the mould of the ‘cinema as sculpture’ analogy, was substantially informed by the intertext of stereoscopic photography and the paradigm of stereoscopic vision. Stereoscopic vision was, in Jonathan Crary’s words, an ‘inherently obscene’ visual regime, which ‘shattered the scenic relationship between viewer and object that was intrinsic to the fundamentally theatrical [i.e. perspectival] setup of the camera obscura’.6

‘Total visual recall’: stereoscopic practice and binocular vision The principle of stereoscopy was implemented in a popular optical device: when seen through a binocular stereoscope, paired images with a twin-lens camera produce a startling illusion of three-dimensionality, whereby the mind converts the flatness of the images set side by side on a piece of cardboard into a perception of depth.7

Therefore, stereoscopy or ‘stereography’, as it was sometimes called, primarily ‘refers to the optical process whereby two-dimensional images are designed to be perceived as having three-dimensional depth’.8 Physiologically, stereoscopic vision is based on the principle of binocular parallax, i.e. the differential angle between the optical axes of each eye. In his treatise on optics, Hermann Helmholtz (1878) located stereoscopic vision at the intersection of physiological and mental processes: ‘Seeing the world with two eyes, we contemplate it at the same time from two slightly different viewpoints, thus obtaining two images from slightly different perspectives’.9 Historically, stereoscopy emerged as a viewing technology and perceptual model around the same time as the invention of photography, based on Charles Wheatstone’s theory of stereoscopic vision (1838)10 and David Brewster’s development of the lenticular stereoscope (1849).11 Stereoscopic practice can be divided into two different forms of viewing: one by means of a hand-held device (a nineteenth-century form of portable and home entertainment) and the other by means of projection upon a screen via the so-called stereopticon (essentially equivalent to a double-projector magic

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lantern).12 In both viewing contexts, according to historian Richard Kriebel, the ‘stereoscopic photograph, properly taken and presented, appears not as a picture, but as the recreation of the actual scene. It produces total visual recall – you are there.’13 The stereoscope received its first major public exposure at the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace in 185114 and subsequently became a hugely successful medium of mass entertainment. There were a number of scientific applications, the most prominent being medical surgery and military reconnaissance, but its primary use was in the field of popular culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of stereoscopic images were in circulation: for the most part, views of landscapes and architecture, but also representations of events, both actual and staged for the camera. With regard to the latter, often called ‘French tissues’, Brewster, in his book The Stereoscope (1856), wrote that ‘the most interesting scenes in our best comedies and tragedies might be represented with the same distinctness and relief as if the actors were on stage’.15 The most important features of stereoscopic vision were ‘the eerie paradox of tangibility, the illusion of an accessibility to touch, the sense of proximity of object to viewer’.16 As a visual technology, whose ‘pictures were not only informational, but … became keys to experience associated with the things that were pictured’,17 stereoscopy’s immense popularity undoubtedly contributed to ‘shape the horizon of expectations for early cinema’.18 As William Uricchio, amongst others, has pointed out, many pre-1906 actualities adopted compositional conventions of the stereograph: Rather than rely on stereographic projection, filmmakers seem quickly to have exploited the illusion of depth created by moving the camera towards the vanishing point (phantom train rides) or by allowing traffic to move towards the camera (the Lumière effect).19

Examples of early cinema’s striving for stereoscopic effects include a stereoscopic version of the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1895), made in a two-colour format in 1903, the ‘anaglyphic scenes’ in films directed by Enrico Guazzoni between 1910 and 191820 or Giovanni Pastrone’s assertion that in Cabiria (1914) he chose to move his camera along curved rather than straight tracks in order to create the ‘impression of relief’ in approximation of stereoscopic effects. A number of early cinema scholars have referred to the cut-in enlargements of objects in Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) or The Gay Shoe Clerk (1906) – which was probably even based on specific stereo-photographs – and in films by D.W. Griffith as further instances of early cinema’s simulation of stereoscopic effects.21 As a form of visual representation, stereoscopy can, in art historian Ernest Gombrich’s sense, justifiably claim to have established a powerful norm for technologically mediated forms of vision, which had strong stylistic reverberations within early cinema and other arts.22 As a particular way of perceiving the world, it has left its traces on the literary imagination of writers ranging from Marcel Proust to Walter Benjamin, from Franz Kafka to James Joyce, to name just a few of the most prominent figureheads of modernism. And, as late as 1937, Sergei Eisenstein modelled his idea of the

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‘multi-viewpoint, sequential montage’ along the lines of the binocularity of stereoscopic vision, when he wrote: Binocularity is the existence of two viewpoints that enable an object to be seen in relief. The same principle underlies the multi-viewpoint, sequential nature of montage, which also permits the object or event to be perceived, as it were, ‘in relief’.23

Hence, the history of stereoscopy’s influence on popular fantasy, cultural modes of visual representation and artistic imagination reaches well beyond its ‘physical life’ as a media technology and mass medium, which dramatically declined during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Whether this sudden demise as a distinct cultural practice was due to ‘the film medium’s escalation of the terms of visual sensation’, or whether it should rather be related to ‘the rapid spread of home photography’24 is open to debate and further research. Be that as it may, it seems reasonable to assume that stereoscopy had a substantial influence on the development of early film style in its attempts to overcome the material flatness of the cinematographic image. As will be shown, this legacy was especially strong in German cinema: it provided filmmakers with a stylistic model of visual composition, which was not only prominent in popular genres, such as melodramas or crime and fantasy films, but also contributed to the artistic paradigm that, in the early 1920s, became widely known as cinematic expressionism.

‘Contact at a distance’: the illusion of depth vs. the relief effect in early film style In many studies on the so-called ‘transitional period’ of the 1910s,25 early film style is conceptualised in relation to the illusion of depth. Early cinema scholars have evaluated and acknowledged the international stylistic innovations and transformations of this period particularly on the basis of devices for the creation of filmic space, such as staging in several planes of action, character movement along a diagonal axis, perspectival set-design and lighting, the blocking of characters and overlap of objects, scene dissection and reverse-field editing. However, this concept stays within the limits of the paradigm Crary would call ‘monocular vision’. Hence, taking the binocular model of stereoscopic vision as the point of departure for an analysis of early film style constitutes a radical paradigmshift from ‘perspectival illusion’ to ‘perceptual immersion’. In connection with this, a more suitable term to describe stereoscopic effects in films than ‘illusion of depth’ would be ‘relief effect’, because it describes the impression of the image protruding from the screen towards the spectator, rather than the illusionary production of a deep space ‘inside the image’. The relief effect refers to the visual gesture of reaching out into the auditorium and towards the spectator, rather than pulling the spectator out of his or her seat into the virtual world on the screen. Such an understanding of stereoscopic effects as directly addressing the spectator, who is physically present in the space of exhibition, and appealing to his or her immediate sensorial perception, rather than imaginary investment into the filmic image, reveals their affinity to the ‘cinema of attrac-

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tions’ and its practices of immediate shock effects, direct address, acting towards the camera and persistent acknowledgment of the audience.26 Like these devices of early cinema, relief effects, with their specific means based on stereoscopic vision, aimed at sensorial immediacy in order to establish ‘contact at a distance’ with the audience. The impact on the spectator is aptly evoked (in the slightly different context of a discussion of modernist literary tropes of visual perception) by Maurice Blanchot: But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance?27

In order to understand how this ‘contact at a distance’ can be established in film, early cinema scholars such as Antonia Lant, Laura Marks, Giuliana Bruno, Angela Dalle Vacche and David Trotter have recently drawn on art historian Alois Riegl’s well-known concept of ‘haptic visuality’, first developed in his Stilfragen (Problems of Style, 1893).28 Riegl described two kinds of visual experience: on the one hand, the optical, ‘which delivers a survey, an account of … distinguishable objects in deep space’; and on the other, the haptic, ‘which feels its way along or around a world conceived as an infinitively variable surface’, based on texture and surface effects rather than outline and perspectival illusion.29 Riegl used the term ‘haptic’ (from the Greek word hastein: to fasten), rather than ‘tactile’, to avoid being misunderstood as referring to actual touch in its literal sense. ‘[S]o fast in its fastening’, as Trotter succinctly puts it, the haptic was for Riegl a ‘form of attachment’30 – a form of affective attachment, one should add, which implies a strong connection between haptic visuality and a ‘sentimental gaze’ on the side of the spectator, engendered by the somatic exposure to the rich visual field. In relation to early film style, the particular form of attachment between the film image and its spectator can be seen to rest on the contrast and interplay between two regimes of stereoscopic vision: one being the theatricality of the tableau, i.e. the staging, gestures etc., and the other the tangibility of embodied perception, i.e. the visual impression of the objects seemingly protruding from the screen as if they were closing in on the spectator.31 A film style based on stereoscopic vision emphasises surface effects rather than the perspectival illusion of depth, texture rather than outline. It works with a layering of several spaces of action, organising the image into ‘a sequence of receding planes’.32 It plays on a compositional and figurative contrast between background and foreground, e.g. a luminous figure or object ‘standing out’ from a dark backdrop in the tradition of the phantasmagoria. Trotter describes stereoscopic effects as extremely variable and perfectly adjustable to a particular way of staging the action: objects in the middle or far distance appear to be arranged along planes separated from each other by a void; while objects in the foreground, solid enough to touch, assume an astonishing palpability.33

According to Trotter, stereoscopic effects are a ‘product of the assertiveness with which objects in the foreground occupy space’, creating ‘the feeling that one could reach out and touch them, or be touched by them’.34

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Trotter sees this particular impression as being produced by the coexistence of the two visual systems of the haptic and the optical, rather than by the replacement of one with the other, as Crary suggests. In Trotter’s opinion, of the two effects stereoscopy generated, ‘of tableau and of tangibility, the less memorable, the less disturbing, in 1850, or in 1900, or in 1910, must surely have been the former’.35 Trotter points to ‘the violence inherent in the stereoscopic foreground’, as it forcefully penetrates into the perceptual space of the beholder. And he has convincingly demonstrated with specific stereoscopic photographs that low-angle framing is much more effective in this respect than eye-level view: ‘The lower the angle of the shot, the livelier the potential discomfort’.36

Archaeology of cinematic expressionism: haptic attachment and the sentimental mode Tableaux and extreme close-up, low-angle views instead of a balanced vanishing-point perspective – it is no coincidence that one is immediately reminded of Noël Burch’s analysis of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920), with its extreme camera angles, distortions of vision and jumps from tableau-shots to extreme close-ups without intermediate stages.37 And indeed, in his essay ‘Primitivism and the AvantGardes: A Dialectical Approach’, Burch addressed ‘the issue of haptic space’ without, however, fully elaborating the concept. Yet, what he wrote about the ‘ambiguous imagery in Caligari’ as originating from uncertainness concerning the relationship between surface and depth can be understood in the context of stereoscopic vision as a powerful influence on the stylistic paradigm of expressionism. As Burch put it: The film’s famous graphic style presents each shot as a stylized, flat rendition of deep space, with dramatic obliqueness so avowedly plastic, so artificially ‘depth-producing’ that they immediately conjure up the tactile surface of the engraver’s page somewhat in the manner of Méliès. Yet at the same time, the movement of the actors within these frames is systematically perpendicular to the picture plane.38

If there is indeed a close connection between stereoscopic vision and the development of expressionist film style, then, within an archaeology of cinematic expressionism, the theory, technology and cultural practice of stereoscopy could be seen as the ‘missing link’ between German expressionism’s claims to establish film as a visual art in the early 1920s and the metaphor of film as a ‘plastic art in motion’ in the mid-1910s. By triangulating stereoscopy, the plastic arts and early German film style into a culturally specific configuration, a number of contemporary ideas and experiments can be brought into perspective.39 In his book Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst (The Problem of Form In Painting and Sculpture, 1893), a work with a strong influence on Riegl, the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand argued that the eye perceives space in two modes: the optical and the kinaesthetic, the one appropriate to distance from the object, the other to a close-up view. The term Hildebrand found for the kinaesthetic mode was ‘stereoscopic vision’. A painting, he wrote,

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Fig. 1. W. Selke’s ‘shadowing apparatus’ for the production of photo-sculptures (1900).

might belie its own flatness by an appeal to kinaesthetic perception and thus produce a ‘stereoscopic impression’.40 A concrete technological example is the so-called Photoskulptur (‘photo sculpture’), a procedure developed and patented in 1900 by the photographer and sculptor W. Selke in order to ‘remodel a plastic representation of the human body with the help of photography’.41 Selke’s device consisted of a ‘shadowing apparatus’, into which the model to be portrayed was placed, and a film camera, which successively recorded the shadows cast by the apparatus (see Figures 1 and 2). The resulting series of two-dimensional photographs would then be cut out, spliced together and finally

Fig. 2. Schema of successive photo-sculptural recordings by W. Selke (1900).

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Fig. 3. François Willème’s photo-sculpture studio using 24 still cameras to create a 360 degree visual representation of the portrayed object (1861).

Fig. 4. Still photography into sculpture: François Willème’s photo-sculpture.

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Fig. 5. Mass production of François Willème’s photo-sculptures.

modelled out in plaster, bronze or ivory. In retrospect, it seems to prefigure holographic imaging and ‘bullet time’ motion capture à la The Matrix (1999) and may appear to have been influenced by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. However, Selke’s apparatus was modelled on an even earlier French device to turn photographic images into sculptured objects, which had been patented und commercialised under the name of photosculpture by François Willème in the early 1860s – thus predating both Marey’s and Muybridge’s photographical experiments by roughly a decade (see Figures 3–5). Another pre-cinematic technological marvel with some relevance in this context is Pepper’s Ghost, one of the most famous of the nineteenth century phantasmagoria techniques (see Figure 6). In the early 1910s, a cinematic imitation of Pepper’s Ghost was developed and patented in Germany: the Kinoplastikon, promoted as ‘Pepper’s Ghost on the Motion Picture Screen’42 and utilising ‘a partially reflecting screen of glass to conceal the actual location of the movie screen and give the impression of projected actors moving about the real space of the screen’.43 Around the same time, the influential film producer Oskar Messter developed his so-called Alabastra-Theater, which publicly premiered in Berlin in 1910 (see Figure 7). Messter used a similar set-up of partly semi-transparent mirrors to inscribe the filmic space into the space of the auditorium, in order to achieve a synthetic effect of three-dimensionality.44 Such effects were also repeatedly employed by theatre director Max Reinhardt in the early 1910s, e.g. in his productions of Hamlet (1912) and Richard III (1913). In turn, these theatrical experiments held significant interest for film directors and might therefore

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Fig. 6. Pepper’s Ghost.

constitute a useful starting point for reconsidering Reinhardt’s influence on German film style.45 When one sets out to trace the impact such experiments had on contemporary innovations in film style, one discovers many theoretical texts and practitioners’ statements as evidence. For example, Max Mack, director

Fig. 7. Oskar Messter’s Alabastra Theatre (1910).

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of popular genre films, reflected on Messter’s and Reinhardt’s experiments in his article on ‘the conquest of the third dimension’ (1914). Mack acknowledged that filmmakers were already striving for relief effects, but only ‘when it will be feasible to produce truly stereoscopic recordings on film, the plasticity of the image will be far more real, far more tangible’.46 Two years earlier, a comprehensive overview of the artistic possibilities of film direction culminated in a consideration of the ‘question of the plastic, corporeal organisation of the filmic image’.47 While the experiments with the Kinoplastikon may not have had a great technological influence on cinema, the essay argued, directors should nevertheless draw on the options at their disposal, such as mise en scène, lighting and expressive shot compositions, in order to achieve comparable effects of relief and plasticity.48 In the German debates on directors’ styles and film aesthetics, from around 1910 right through to the mid- and late 1920s, the problem of how to create the impression of three-dimensionality emerged time and again. Answers to this question were even sought and found with explicit reference to stereoscopy and the plastic arts, with crucial implications for shaping horizons of experimentation and expectation in the development of a recognisable German film style, in evidence as much in popular genre filmmaking as in art cinema. Among the stylistic devices that contributed to the creation of plasticity for dramatic and aesthetic effects, the interplay between acting, mise-en-scène and lighting was perhaps the most common. As regards lighting, one can generally distinguish two different layouts for the period in question: diffuse lighting and three-point-lighting. As Kristin Thompson explains, diffuse lighting was arranged ‘so as simply to make everything in the shot visible. Walls, actors, furniture, props, all receive an overall, diffuse light, usually coming from the front and top’. In diffuse lighting, ‘the notion of creating atmosphere, depth modelling, and other effects … was distinctly secondary’.49 By contrast, in the layout of three-point-lighting, a primary light or key light would be concentrated on the main actors, whereas the setting, which might be rather busy in its design and hence might draw the eye away from the actors, would be lit with a somehow dimmer … fill light. A slightly darker set would create a sense of greater relief when the brightly-lit actors stood in front of it. Fill light could also be cast on the actors from the side opposite the key light, softening shadows and creating an attractive, modeled look.50

The third point of the system was back-lighting, i.e. lamps could be placed on the top of the set at the rear or directed though windows or other openings in the set; these would project highlights onto the actors’ hair and trace a little outline of light around their bodies, often termed ‘edge light’.51

Back-lighting, or more specifically, edge lighting, was one way ‘in which light could set the figures apart … by emphasising their three-dimensionality’, using highlights on the hair and shoulders to ‘pick their outlines out against the darkness’.52 Fritz Lang, who was a trained painter and former sculptor, often lit his superimposition shots in the phantasmagoria tradition, as in the shot with

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Fig. 8. Hilde Warren und der Tod (Hilde Warren and Death, 1917).

Fig. 9. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria (late eighteenth century).

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Fig. 10. Weihnachtsglocken (Christmas Bells, 1914).

Fig. 11. Unheimliche Geschichten (Uncanny Tales, 1919).

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the highlight on the approaching ghost in Hilde Warren und der Tod (Hilde Warren and Death, 1917)53 (see Figure 8). Such compositions were deliberately evocative of effects created by showmen such as Etienne-Gaspard Robert (aka Robertson) with a mobile projector moving towards the screen to produce the illusion of a ghost coming straight at the audience (see Figure 9). The compositional logic behind this kind of superimposition, which is frequently found in German films of the 1910s, and the symmetrical arrangements which are common, for example, in Franz Hofer’s Weihnachtsglocken (Christmas Bells, 1914), seems less concerned with the creation of a deep space, but rather with the juxtaposition and layering of two or more autonomous planes of action with a visible rupture or void in between. In a signature shot from Christmas Bells, the characters in the extreme foreground (and especially their hands) are evidently lit and arranged in order to achieve a high degree of plasticity (see Figure 10). Moreover, the motif of the arc formed by the hands of the two main characters is echoed by the gestures of the couples in the background – a doubling effect reminiscent of contemporary stereo-photographs.54 In a shot from Richard Oswald’s Unheimliche Geschichten (Uncanny Tales, 1919), there is a similar arrangement and lighting pattern, only this time in closer framing and limited to the foreground action, once more set against a dark background (see Figure 11). Conrad Veidt’s stare, and especially his hand, seem to be reaching beyond the picture plane into a virtual space and towards the spectator. The excess of plasticity is emphasized and enhanced by the contrast to the gaze and posture of the woman, who is safely contained ‘within the image’.55 A director of special interest in this context is William Wauer, who was not only a filmmaker, but also a theatre director, expressionist painter and sculptor, and who wrote extensively on film as an art form born out of visual technologies,56 as well as on lighting practices, corporeality and the perception of plasticity in the theatre.57 In a key scene from Richard Wagner, a film Wauer wrote and co-directed with Carl Froelich in 1913, we once more find an arrangement utilizing separate planes of action, high-contrast setdesign, compositional symmetry and expressive lighting (see Figure 12). The two knights in the right foreground are in high relief, and they mark a compositional trajectory, which the dove – just released from the cup and as shiny as the two knights – is about to reiterate by flying right past the camera and off-screen. The prominence of the columns underscores the sense of spatial expansion, drawing on what Ernest Gombrich in his essay ‘Ambiguities of the Third Dimension’ called the ‘column paradox’, which ‘is caused by the beholder’s difficulty in interpreting the projection of a shape extending in depth but giving no clues as to its orientation’, since ‘Columns or spheres look the same from any angle’ and therefore produce ‘a special case of ambiguity’.58 Similar compositions can be found at other points in Richard Wagner, e.g. in a shot where the lighting picks out the leaves of the bushes on both sides of the foreground, in order to simulate a binocular relief effect (see Figure 13). With respect to another of Wauer’s films from the mid-1910s, So rächt die Sonne (How the Sun Takes Revenge, 1915), it is worth mentioning that

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Fig. 12. Richard Wagner (1913).

Fig. 13. Richard Wagner (1913).

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Fig. 14. So rächt die Sonne (How the Sun Takes Revenge, 1915).

Fig. 15. So rächt die Sonne (How the Sun Takes Revenge, 1915).

Wauer at the time not only collaborated with Axel Gratkjaer, but above all with cameraman and photographer Helmar Lerski (best known today for his portrait photographs of workers from the 1920s and early 1930s).59 Towards the narrative climax of this murderous melodrama, Wauer and his cameraman set up lighting patterns that increasingly divided the space into different planes of action and used this spatial patterning to emphasize an

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Fig. 16. So rächt die Sonne (How the Sun Takes Revenge, 1915).

Fig. 17. So rächt die Sonne (How the Sun Takes Revenge, 1915).

‘impossible’ foreground that seemingly protruded into the space of the auditorium. This spatial logic is especially evident in a shot where the table and the main character in the foreground, emphasized by the lighting, are separated from the deep space by a compositional void across which there is no diagonal character movement (see Figure 14). This pattern is taken up

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again in another shot, with edge lighting not only on the figure on the left, but also on the curved armrest of the chair on the right hand side of the foreground, creating a complex and plastic space (see Figure 15). In another shot from the same film, the poignant edge lighting is again directed on an object, this time a lamp. As in the previous shot, the edge light intensifies what is already foregrounded by the composition (the character holding the lamp); as a result, the lamp appears to protrude from the screen (see Figure 16). When the film finally reaches its violent climax, the axe, as the soon-tobe murder weapon, is represented only as a shadow and therefore rendered as invisible as the act of murder itself. According to the spatial logic, which increasingly collapsed the perspectival deep space for the sake of a virtual space reaching beyond the screen towards the spectator, the haptic surface of the cloth on the wall carries all the ‘material’ weight of the scene’s emotional turmoil and physical violence (see Figure 17). In Wauer’s film-work, the correlation between simulated plasticity modelled on sculpture, stylistic expressiveness and the enhancement of the perceptual and emotional experience of the spectator became most palpable in the Albert Bassermann vehicle Dr. Schotte (1918). The frequent highcontrast back-lighting on Bassermann’s face and body cinematically simulates the emotionally-charged multi-dimensionality of Wauer’s celebrated expressionist bust of Bassermann, which was begun at the time of the shooting of the film and possibly modelled on the actor’s highly expressive acting in a number of the film’s close-ups60 (see Figures 18 and 19).

Conclusion: film style and ‘mental magic’ Wauer’s work can be taken as a particular example for the more general insight that in a particular historical situation – characterised by competing technologies, arts and forms of entertainment, as well as specific creative environments and cultural pressures – stylistic paradigms take shape in variable degrees, depending on current aesthetic debates and generic horizons, but also on personal dispositions and cross-media concerns.61 At the historical intersection between the dominant visual regime of stereoscopy, the rhetoric of film as a ‘plastic art in motion’ and the transition from the ‘cinema of attractions’ to the narrative cinema of dramatic effect and emotional affect, film style, understood as a distinct set of artistic choices given at a particular moment in time, was not an end in itself. It was there to produce certain effects for the audience, which often included the simulation of effects known from other cultural experiences. In the end, any type of visual effect – perspectival, stereoscopic or otherwise – involves the spectator’s sensory perception and mental processing of stimuli. This holds especially true for stereoscopic effects, as both Münsterberg and Eisenstein remind us. Münsterberg’s psychological theory of cinema’s mode of spectatorial address rests on what William Paul once called cinema’s ‘mental magic’:62 Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them.63

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Fig. 18. Albert Bassermann in Dr. Schotte (1918).

For Eisenstein, in turn, cinema’s temporality adds a metaphorical dimension to stereoscopy’s relief effect: If there is a greater divergence between [binocularity’s] two viewpoints – both of angle and of the time of vision – there is a shift in the perception of the resultant image, which thereby forfeits its immediate physical relief in favour of a relief effect that is metaphorical.64

The German film style of the transitional and the early Weimar period has often been called ‘magical’ or ‘metaphorical’ – hence the dual influence of stereoscopic vision and the plastic arts might be taken together as one key

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Fig. 19. Wiliam Wauer, Albert Bassermann (1918).

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to unlock the historical dimension of those attributes. Or, to rephrase Walter Benjamin’s famous characterization of the ‘image space’ as a subjective blend of visual composition, pictorial memory and projective perception, in film style what has been comes together in a flash to form a constellation with what is now.65

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Ricciotto Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History / Anthology, 1907–1939, Vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988): 58–66, quote p. 59. Ibid. Ibid. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 68. Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’, in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’ and Other Writings, ed. by Allan Langdale (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 43–162, quote p. 66. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1990), 127. David Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy: Modernism and the “Haptic”’, Critical Quarterly 4 (December 2004): 38–58, quote p. 38. William Uricchio, ‘Stereography’, in Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 610. Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1879). Quoted from Renzo Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision In Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 204. Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions To the Physiology of Vision’, Philosophical Transactions 128 (1838): 371–394. David Brewster, ‘Account of a New Stereoscope’, Report of the British Association For the Advancement of Science: Report of the Sections (1849): 6–7. Uricchio, ‘Stereography’, 610. Quoted from Nic Leonhardt, ‘“… in die Tiefe des Bildes hineingezogen”: Die Stereofotografie als visuelles Massenmedium des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Christopher Balme and Markus Moninger (eds), Crossing Media: Theater, Film, Fotografie, Neue Medien (München: epodium, 2004), 99–108, quote p. 102. The Crystal Palace was itself a visual spectacle as panoramic as it was immersive. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (New York: Urizen, 1979). David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Morgan & Morgan et al., 1971 [1856]). Quoted from Leonhard, “… in die Tiefe des Bildes hineingezogen”, 103. Laura Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the “Carnal Density of Vision”’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3–41, quote pp. 12–13. Edward W. Earle, The Stereograph in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979), 11. Uricchio, ‘Stereography’, 610. Ibid., 611. See The Tactile Screen / Lo schermo tattile, Cinema & Cie, supplement to no. 2 (Spring 2003). See Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy’, 51. Ernest H. Gombrich, ‘Norm und Form’, in Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (eds), Theorien der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 148–178. Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘Unity of the Image’, in Selected Works, Vol. 2: Towards a Theory of Montage (London: BFI, 1994), 268–280, quote p. 269. On Eisenstein’s later essay ‘O Stereokino’ (1947), see Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2003), 154–155: ‘The ultimate synthesis of all art genres would culminate the imminent realization Stereokino, stereoscopic cinema, which Eisenstein believed humankind had been

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24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE moving toward for centuries and represented a further expression of a deeply human urge to create images. Then, the image, experienced as a “real three-dimensionality” … would “pour” from the screen into the auditorium. … [H]is reflections revolve around rendering images so powerful, with plasticity and movement, that they can tear the audience psychologically out of their actual surroundings and deliver them into the environment of the stereoscopic film.’ Uricchio, ‘Stereography’, 611. See e.g. Barry Salt, ‘Film Form 1900–1906’, 31–44 and Ben Brewster, ‘Deep Staging in French Films 1900–1914’, 45–55 in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990); David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Yuri Tsivian, ‘Cutting and Framing in Bauer’s and Kuleshov’s Films’, Kintop 1 (1993): 103–113. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-garde’, Wide Angle 3–4 (1986): 63–70. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 32. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin, Siemens 1893). English translation: Problems of Style: Foundations For a History of Ornament, trans. by Evelyn Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy’, 39. Ibid. Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 41; see also Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 116–132, esp. 123–124. Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy’, 41. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 48. Noël Burch, ‘Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach’, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 483–506, p. 496: ‘Until around 1912 … the cinema was characterized by a sharp division between two types of pictorial space: 1.) emphasis on linear perspective and the rendering of haptic space in accordance with the model provided by the painting of the Renaissance. 2.) a pictorial approach which on the contrary emphasises the picture plane.’ Ibid., 497. For other examples, mainly taken from the US context, see Gwendolyn Waltz, ‘2-D? 3-D? The Technology and Aesthetics of Dimension in Early Cinema and Turn-of-the-Century Stage Perfomance’, Cinema & Cie 3 (Fall 2003): 26–38. Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Baden-Baden: Heitz, 1961 [1893]); English translation: The Problem of Form In Painting and Sculpture, trans. by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York et al.: Stechert, 1932). Quoted from Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy’, 40. See K. Rohwaldt, ‘Photoskulptur’, Die Umschau 6 (1900): 5–7; reprinted in Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (eds), Medientheorie 1888–1933: Texte und Kommentare (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 57–61. Quoted from William Paul, ‘Uncanny Theater: The Twin Inheritances of the Movies’, Paradoxa 3–4 (1997), 321–347, quote p. 324. Ibid. Paul also identifies the ‘twin inheritance for cinema’ as, on the one hand, the tradition of magic lantern shows (phantasmagoria, the uncanny) and, on the other, the theatrical tradition of Belasco. See ibid., 327. On Messter’s Alabastra theatre and the tradition of 3-D-projection arts, see Ludwig Vogl-Bienek, ‘Die historische Projektionskunst: Eine offene geschichtliche Perspektive auf den Film als Aufführungsereignis’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 3 (1994): 11–32. The classic account of Reinhardt’s importance for filmmakers in Germany is Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Max Mack, ‘Die Eroberung der dritten Dimension’, B.Z. am Mittag 131, supplement 1 (8 June 1914). Otto Th. Stein, ‘Ueber Regiekunst im Lichtbildtheater’, Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung 48 (30 November 1912): 51.

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Chapter 16 Sculpting With Light 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

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Ibid. Kristin Thompson, Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 38. Ibid., 39. Ibid. Ibid., 41. On the phantasmagoria and its impact on fantasy and mental imaging, its strong influence on early cinema’s representation of dreams and subjective visions co-inhabiting the space of the action, not isolated and detached in the form of flashbacks or dream sequences as in classical cinema, see Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry 1 (Autumn 1988), 26–61. On the effects of symmetrical shot compositions in Hofer, see Yuri Tsivian, ‘Two “Stylists” of the Teens: Franz Hofer and Yevgenii Bauer’, 264–275 and Elena Dagrada, ‘The Voyeur at Wilhelm’s Court’, 277–284 in Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel (eds), A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). On the plastic effects of Conrad Veidt’s acting, see Klaus Kreimeier, ‘Notorisch anders – Conradt Veidt: Zur schauspielerischen Repräsentation der Devianz’, in Christiane Rüffert et al. (eds), Unheimlich anders: Doppelgänger, Monster, Schattenwesen im Kino (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2005), 69–76. See William Wauer, ‘Filmkunst: Kunst oder Nicht-Kunst?’, Illustrierte Filmwoche 38 (21 September 1918): 271. See William Wauer, Der Kunst eine Gasse! Kritische Beiträge zur Theaterreform (Berlin: Seemann, 1906), 36–38. Ernest H. Gombrich, ‘Ambiguities of the Third Dimension’, in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 204–244, quote p. 216. On Lerski, see Jan-Christopher Horak, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington and London: Smithsonian, 1997), 55–78. See Michael Wedel, ‘Plastische Psychologie: William Wauers Dr. Schotte (1918)’, Filmblatt 7 (Spring/Summer 1998): 4–7. Similar assumptions generally guide David Bordwell’s concept of a ‘historical poetics’ of cinema. See David Bordwell, ‘Historical Poetics of Cinema’, in Richard B. Palmer (ed.), The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS, 1989), 369–398. Paul, ‘Uncanny Theater’, 326. Münsterberg, ‘The Photoplay’, 78. Eisenstein, ‘Unity of the Image’, 270 (emphasis in the original). Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: ‘A Cinematograph of Feminine Thought’: The Dangerous Age, Cinema and Modern Women Chapter Author(s): Annemone Ligensa Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.20 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 17

‘A Cinematograph of Feminine Thought’: The Dangerous Age, Cinema and Modern Women ‘A Cinematograph

of Feminine

Thought ’

Annemone Ligensa 60,000 copies in five weeks! A literary event! Enthusiastic hymns of praise, bitter protests, sold-out talks, lecture tours, vehement discussions, salacious comments in the parlour, in the ballroom, on the ice skating rink, on the tram. The small book The Dangerous Age by the Danish author Karin Michaelis has caused a veritable uproar among those who are interested in modern literature or in the psychic life of women, but most of all, of course, among women themselves and, particularly, among the women – or rather, ‘ladies’ – upon whom, through the ‘courageous candour’ of this book, has suddenly dawned the tenderly observed mystery of their own souls and bodies, and who only now have become conscious of their interesting condition. But, no, I do not want to make fun of the book, because the affair really is serious and dangerous.1

ndeed, the Danish author Karin Michaëlis (1872–1959) can be counted among the ‘women who moved the world’.2 Her novel Den farlige Alder (The Dangerous Age)3 is not widely read today, but it was the literary sensation of 1910. It was translated into 12 languages and sold over 1 million copies (a high figure at the time). For several years, it afforded its author the status of an international celebrity: Michaëlis was frequently featured in the press and gave lectures in many big cities of several countries. ‘The dangerous age’ became a common term for the novel’s central topic: menopause. The novel was rediscovered several years ago within literary studies, particularly by feminist scholars,4 but, strangely, its filmic adaptations have received hardly any attention at all (even though copies are extant). Analysing the novel’s contemporary reception along with its filmic adaptations provides a unique opportunity for insight into connections between the contemporary media system (literature, press, cinema), several influential discourses (sexology, censorship, Kinodebatte) and public opinion (transnational as well as culturally specific), particularly regarding the challenge to gender norms that emerged with modernisation.5 In the novel, the protagonist Elsie Lindtner tells her story through letters and diary entries. She comments on several of her friends’ experiences and acerbically reflects on relationships in general, but devotes most space to her personal perceptions and feelings, which she describes in great

I

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detail and frankness. In midlife, she suddenly wants to break out of a childless, but comfortable and ‘perfectly happy’ marriage. She accepts no alimony from her husband, even though he is wealthy and this fact was one of the reasons why she married him. She is provided for by a recent inheritance from a much older man to whom she was engaged as a girl, but who broke off the engagement when he came to realise that she is not sexually attracted to him. She intends to spend the rest of her days alone: she moves into a house that was built for her by a young architect, Joergen Malthe, whom she does not tell that she plans a divorce and that the house is to be her future home. It is situated on a lonely island, and her only companions are a cook, a maid and, some time later, a gardener. Joergen falls in love with Elsie, but she pretends not to reciprocate his feelings, because she cannot envision a long-term relationship with a penniless and much younger man. After her divorce, he writes to her, but she ignores his letter. But in her solitude, emotional and sensual longings increasingly reawaken, and finally she invites him to visit her, unmistakably for whatever kind of relationship he wishes, even a short-term affair. Upon seeing her again, however, despite the fact that not much time has passed, it immediately becomes clear that she has lost her attractiveness for him. Joergen, who in the meantime has achieved success in his profession, leaves on the same day. When Elsie, in her despair and humiliation, wants to reconcile with her husband, she learns that he will soon marry a nineteen-year-old girl. The novel ends with Elsie setting off for a trip around the world with her young maid, with whom she has become close friends. From today’s perspective, it may be difficult to understand why The Dangerous Age was a great scandal. The novel does not contain any sexual ‘gratifications’ (much less explicit descriptions of them), but only the expression of a woman’s sexual desire – the fact that it was not connected to the wish for motherhood was the aspect that became the central issue for its most aggressive detractors.6 In Wilhelmine Germany, the ‘dangerous book’ (as it was often called) was also a bestseller, but at the same time provoked the most extreme negative reactions: numerous scholars and journalists commented on the novel, entire books were written as counter-statements, there were protests from diverse groups (e.g. reformers fighting ‘trash and smut in word and image’) against Michaëlis’ public lectures, which were observed by the police and sometimes cancelled, and some went so far as to demand that the novel be forbidden. Even comic forms of critique were remarkably vicious: in Berlin, Michaëlis was parodied by a clown act in a variety theatre, and a shop sold plaster busts that caricatured her cross-eyes.7 Furthermore, it was not just men who were outraged – on the contrary, the most vehement critics were often women. For example, Therese WallnerThurm, a German author of popular romance novels, wrote an open letter to Michaëlis, which was published as a brochure and excerpted in newspapers: The entire content of your book hasn’t the least thing to do with feminine menopause, which you call ‘The Dangerous Age’. … If you had given your book the title ‘Hysterical Women’, or, more appropriately, ‘About Women Seized By Nymphomania’, you would sooner have hit the nail on the head,

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and your book would at least have some justification … If you are portraying the entire world of Danish women, then your nation can only be deeply deplored, and we German women can rightfully say, without having to fear being called Pharisees: ‘We thank you, God, that we are not like Danish women!’ For we are not, after all, so totally decadent and coquettish, so completely deceitful without exception, evil and depraved, that nothing more seems to be truth to us, nothing more worthy of loving! Thank God!8

Literary scholars, concentrating on the novel itself, have made Michaëlis something of a feminist heroine,9 but this needs to be qualified by considering the contemporary discourse that surrounded the novel, i.e. by Michaëlis’ other works and statements along with the contemporary reactions towards them. The context is particularly important in the case of this novel, because Michaëlis uses the ‘modernist’ literary device of an unreliable narrator. In the sequel Elsie Lindtner, the protagonist ‘heals and matures’ by adopting a street urchin – i.e. surrogate motherhood.10 In interviews and lectures, Michaëlis explained that she had only wanted to solicit understanding for the ‘temporary insanity’ of the menopause as a physical illness. She did advocate that women should become more independent through education and work, but regarded the menopause and other ‘female troubles’ as making women unfit for public office.11 In view of Michaëlis’ general nonconformity, outspokenness and courage, this seems not to have been a mere concession to some of the negative reactions, but personal conviction.12 Interestingly, the sequel was commercially less successful than its predecessor.13 In the USA, it was Michaëlis’ lack of feminist agenda that was called an ‘international scandal’: American women in Germany are disgusted by a series of articles appearing in the Vossische Zeitung and other German papers from the pen of Karin Michaelis, the author of The Dangerous Age. Nothing written in this country in recent years is so designed to belittle American womankind in European estimation. Columbia’s daughters are depicted as selfish, vain, and arrogant pleasure fiends, who enslave their husbands in order themselves to lead lives of irresponsible freedom and worse. A well-known Southern woman, who has lived in Germany for several years and has kept abreast of the feministic movement, says Mme. Michaelis’s effusions are nothing short of an international scandal and make every American woman’s blood boil.14

Note that pointing to the complaining woman’s Southern background and to the fact that she had only been keeping abreast of the feminist movement (rather than identifying herself with it), may, perhaps, be interpreted as implying that ‘even our relatively conservative sisters are offended’. Linking the women’s question with ‘national characteristics’ was, of course, part of a larger contemporary discourse on the differing attitudes towards and speeds of adoption of modernisation, with the USA emerging as the ‘world leader’ in this regard at the time and remaining the favourite target for criticism to this day.15 This discourse involved projection to some degree, i.e. whatever a critic disliked about modernisation in general and in his or her own country was often attributed to ‘foreign degeneracy and

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influence’, but at the same time, cultural differences in such matters did exist – as the differing reactions to the novel themselves show. In Germany, Michaëlis’ novel also met with criticism from feminists, but usually with a different argument: that its view of female sexual desire would discredit women who embraced and strove for change in other areas, such as education and politics.16 By contrast, apart from some comments on the ‘particular frankness of Scandinavian women’, the Anglo-American reviews convey little sense of shock concerning its treatment of sexual relations. For example, The New York Times (which reported on the European reaction to the novel and its author’s visit to the USA even before it was translated into English) regarded the novel (upon its US publication) as honest and well-written, but remarked that it contained nothing that was new to a person of any life experience or that one could not read in the ‘women’s pages’ of US newspapers.17 Despite the extensive and favourable press attention, Michaëlis’ Carnegie Hall appearance was a financial failure – due to lack of interest.18 The majority of Wilhelmines obviously lost much of whatever tolerance and ‘modernity’ they could muster when it came to the specific issue of female sexuality – despite significant German contributions to sexology. Even though the mere existence of the discipline of sexology may be regarded as a sign of change, the public suspicion and institutional difficulties that it encountered should not be forgotten. Furthermore, even within German sexology, the dominant view at the time regarding female sexuality reads more like a defence against modernisation, i.e. notions of and demands for equality of the sexes, rather than an intention to promote it. For example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s opinion (1886) was still a locus classicus on the subject at the time: [W]ithout doubt the man has a livelier sexual need than the woman … His love is sensual, his choice is determined by physical attractions. Guided by a powerful natural drive, he is aggressive and stormy in his love-play. And yet the demands of nature do not occupy his entire mental universe. If his need is fulfilled, his love recedes temporarily in favour of other vital and social interests. Woman is quite different. If a woman is mentally normally developed and well-raised, then her sensual desire is scant. If that were not so, the whole world would be a brothel, and marriage and family unthinkable … But the sexual makes itself more evident in the consciousness of woman. The need for love is greater than in man, it is constant, not episodic, but this love is more spiritual than sensual.19

According to Edward Ross Dickinson, few disagreed: The influential Swiss sexologist August Forel, in his classic The Sexual Question (1904), argued that for women sexual desire grew with sexual experience … This modified view of sexual difference appears to have been gaining ground [in Germany] in the years between 1900 and World War I; and certainly in these years, and increasingly after the war, male sex experts came to interpret lack of sexual response in women (‘frigidity’ or ‘sexual coldness’) as a problem and a pathology, rather than simply a fact of sexual difference. Nevertheless, by 1914 this was still not the predominant view.20

Among female theorists, only a few of the most ‘radical’ German feminists

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questioned the prevailing view before 1914. For example, in 1903, Johanna Elberskirchen asserted that also in women, body and soul, the whole person is subject to a single powerful feeling and drive, a single desire floods nerves and blood, cries out through them and drives and thrusts woman with commanding force toward man ... And it is this elemental sexual longing that befuddles the mind of woman, that drives her into the arms of the man, that makes her forget all the threatening dangers for the [unborn] child, that makes her forget all the shame that threatens her and the child, that makes her seek out sexual union – and not the longing for a child.21

In comparison, US sex reformers around this time seem to have been more influential regarding both the ‘double standard’ and the ‘conspiracy of silence’.22 The popular German tracts protesting against The Dangerous Age echoed the dominant academic views on female sexuality, with or without directly referring to them – or, conversely, sexology was not much more ‘advanced’ than general opinion in this regard.23 However, the discourses in written form, whether academic or popular, appear too self-confident, rational and consensual for a subject that not only involved ‘real bodies’, but attitudes that were in flux. Reports (both published and unpublished) of the ‘live’ reception of Michaëlis’ lectures convey a much more vivid impression of how problematic the issue of female sexuality was for Wilhelmines. Firstly, there were widely diverging reactions and extreme ‘mood swings’. In Nürnberg, the author’s talk was cancelled on short notice by the organisers; in Frankfurt it was forbidden by the police; in Munich, one of Germany’s most conservative cities, she was invited back for a second talk, because the first was such a success, but then it was suddenly cancelled. The very same audience sometimes began with boos at the mere mention of the novel – but was won over to frenetically applaud it at the end. Secondly, the police often intervened in reaction to protests of diverse groups (and sometimes even threats of individuals), rather than on its own initiative. Hence, censorship was not simply ‘imposed from above’, but applied on uncertain and varying legal grounds, and it was itself caught up in the general struggle to articulate what the majority’s norms actually were (or should be). Thirdly, concerns were not only voiced about the stance that was taken in these matters, but that they were addressed at all, especially in public. Finally, critics disagreed on whether it was more disreputable to discuss the subject in front of a male or a female audience – one of the few concerns about which most critics agreed was that a mixed audience was out of the question. In one instance, this led to a somewhat comic expression of the worst fears regarding ‘modern gender confusion’: several men were caught cross-dressing to gain entrance to a lecture intended for women.24 Against this background, to choose The Dangerous Age as the basis for the first German longer narrative film might seem like Oskar Messter was also suffering from a bout of ‘temporary insanity’, rather than as a clever investment of a shrewd and successful cinema pioneer. Not only was German cinema particularly beset with protests and censorship restrictions, but according to received scholarly opinion, the significant innovations of

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the international ‘transitional era’,25 such as longer narrative films, nationalisation, subject matter that would appeal to women and picture palaces for the ‘better classes’, were oriented towards increased ‘familiarity’ and ‘respectability’. The French author Marcel Prévost, in his foreword to his French translation of The Dangerous Age, called the novel a ‘cinematograph of feminine thought’. But neither were its thoughts ‘typical’, nor was there an aesthetic affinity in the manner of their ‘depiction’, because first-person narration was difficult to adapt (and still is, even with devices such as text inserts, close-ups, voice-over etc.). Furthermore, a look at the film itself reveals that Messter did not ‘tame’ the subject matter – on the contrary, he heightened it to a point that might seem like parody, but that would certainly not have been a laughing matter for most contemporaries.26 So what was the motivation to immediately film this particular novel in 1911, and for the Danish company Nordisk to produce a pirate version of the German film that very same year, directed by one of the most significant filmmakers of the period, August Blom? My answer is: sensationalism. This may seem trivial or pejorative, but it is neither. Whether or not (media) sensationalism is essentially modern, as Tom Gunning has remarked,27 it was an(other) intensely debated topic around 1900 – and early cinema was regarded as its epitome, well into the era of the longer narrative film. In an expanding and highly competitive media landscape, ‘sensations’ were valuable commodities for attracting attention – in lowbrow, highbrow as well as middlebrow culture (The Dangerous Age could be categorised among the latter). But far from being ‘the lowest common denominator’ and a guarantee for success in itself, media sensationalism was not only severely frowned upon by cultural critics, it did not appeal to all audiences equally. Germany was comparatively more ‘abstinent’ from media sensationalism than several other countries. German cinema exploited sensationalism more than other media, but as long as it did, it was a medium for ‘sensation seekers’ rather than a ‘mainstream’ medium. As one contemporary put it: [The cinematograph] is not a mirror of modern life, but only of its excrescences: the unusual, exciting and sensational. Its ethics are not that of the German people, however pessimistically one judges it.28

Indeed, the authors German cinema chose had nothing much in common regarding ideology, aesthetics or even commercial success, but a conspicuous number of them were from the ‘most wanted list’ of censors (past as well as present). Conversely, the literati publicly advocating cinema, such as the members of the ‘Agitationskomitee der kinematographischen Fachpresse zur Förderung der Kinematographie und zur Bekämpfung des äusseren Feindes’ (‘agitation committee of the cinematographic trade press for furthering cinematography and combating the external enemy’ – the enemy being the German ‘cinema reformers’), founded in 1912, typically included authors such as Marcel Prévost – who had scandalised audiences with his Les Demi-vierges (‘the half-virgins’), a novel about modern, flirtatious, urban girls.29 Furthermore, the target of literary adaptations was probably not even the actual reader of such works or literature in general. By 1912 in Ger-

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Fig. 1. Das gefährliche Alter (Messter, 1911). [Source: Filmmuseum Berlin - Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.]

many, even with only around 10 million cinema-goers per week (of around 65 million inhabitants),30 the total audience of cinema had already far surpassed the contemporary readership of individual bestsellers. The preestablished ‘notoriety’ that was exploited was rather the public image of such works, and the most likely source of this was the dominant medium of the time: newspapers31 – and, in particular, the Boulevardpresse, i.e. the somewhat ‘tamer’ German version of ‘new journalism’, another highly criticised ‘modern innovation’.32 For example, the spearhead of this type of journalism, the BZ am Mittag, presented the novel thus: If Karin Michaëlis succeeds in spreading fear and terror among her contemporaries with her book Das gefährliche Alter on the licentious appetites of a forty-year-old woman, then it is proof of her literary power, of which she can be proud. In former, sterner times, one regarded the years around 30 as a woman’s most dangerous age, today one has become more liberal and allows her 10 more. Frau Karin Michaëlis intrepidly descends into the deepest abyss of a woman’s soul, where she finds horror and hopelessness.33

Messter later (in his autobiography) claimed that neither he nor his screenwriter had read the novel, but that he had simply wanted to capitalise on the drawing power of the well-known title.34 Whether this is exactly true or not, together with the fact that the German film (and also the Danish version) is very different from the book, and that Michaëlis also mentioned having had the impression that many listeners of her lectures had not read her novel,35 it is true to the spirit of such ‘adaptations’. However, not only was Michaëlis’ name mentioned in many advertise-

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ments for the film,36 there are some similarities between the novel and its filmic adaptions that go beyond what was summarised in the reviews of the book and may not be merely accidental. The protagonist of the film seems like a composite character of several women in the novel – of the ‘worst’ kind: the ‘Elsa’ of the film indulges in affairs like Magna Wellmann and ends up in an asylum like Agatha Ussing. Furthermore, the fact that she seduces her daughter’s fiancé is reminiscent of the episode the maid Jeanne relates in the book of how she caught her mother with the man with whom she was infatuated as a girl. Perhaps the filmmakers were more reliant on inspiration than Messter cared to admit (because he had not acquired the film rights from the author), but more importantly, they obviously did not expect their audience to demand a ‘faithful rendition’. Whatever the process was, the strategies are clear enough: firstly, to translate the central conflict into actions rather than ‘thoughts’, and secondly, to exploit the ‘sensation value’ of the subject for all it was worth. Thus, the protagonist is transformed from a complex, troubled and not entirely likeable character into an exaggeration of a ‘modern forty year old woman with licentious appetites’, as the sensationalist press and the most ‘hysterical’ critics described her. Furthermore, the film features another controversial subject, but due to its archaic, rather than modern origin: duelling. When it becomes publicly known that Elsa is cheating on her husband (her daughter’s former fiancé) with an Italian tenor, the two men duel, and the husband is killed. What might seem like a mere ‘melodramatic’ convention (perhaps also to the makers of the Danish version) had particular resonance for German audiences at the time. Kevin Thomas McAleer explains that in Wilhelmine Germany, duels were outlawed, but nevertheless quite common and often condoned, and since they were usually fought with pistols at close range, they had the highest mortality rate of the few European countries where they still existed.37 The ‘aristocratic’ connotations of this and other aspects (e.g. sets and costumes), in contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ milieu of the novel, enhance the protagonist’s ‘decadence’, which several commentators had censured. Hence, German cinema had not yet ‘internalised the censor’ (as Heide Schlüpmann claims),38 but it did not have a critical agenda or a particular ideological loyalty either – it was egalitarian in the sense that it catered to anyone who enjoyed being shocked. That Messter chose a novel by a Danish author is probably not a coincidence, but it was not used as a nationalistic comment along the lines of the contemporary stereotype of ‘Scandinavian women’, because the film characters are not identified as such. As is well known, the German film industry and especially Messter were involved in fierce competition with the Danish film industry at the time. The Danish film Afgrunden (The Abyss, 1910), directed by Urban Gad and starring Asta Nielsen, was very successful in Germany and marked the beginning of its ‘transitional era’: it was a longer narrative film, was distributed as a Monopolfilm (‘exclusive’) to ‘better’ cinemas and created a film star.39 But its most-discussed feature among the public was Nielsen’s provocative dancing.40 With this film and many others, the Danish film industry developed a ‘reputation’ for sophisticated, but scandalous Sittendramen (dramas on social, especially sexual, mores). Hence,

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Messter obviously used a Danish source to attempt to beat the Danish film industry at its own game. That he was regarded as having done so successfully, even by Danish ‘standards’, is expressed by the ironic, indirect compliment of the Danish pirate version: despite the fact that Nordisk acquired the rights to the novel, the Danish film is an almost identical, shot-by-shot remake of the German film.41 Nevertheless, Nordisk offered its film on the German market as well, and its advertisements featured Michaëlis’ name even more prominently (‘authorised by’), to imply that this version was closer to the novel.42 For a while, both versions were actually shown in German cinemas.43 To protect his ‘sensational property’, Messter took the trouble and risk to sue – and won: Nordisk had to pay an astronomic fine. The case was discussed in the trade press and became an important precedent regarding film piracy.44 Unfortunately, there is no box-office data for films of this period, but judging from the number of copies that Messter was able to sell, even at a high metre price,45 to which can be added the copies of the Danish film, at least it can be said that German exhibitors expected their audiences to respond favourably to this ‘sensation’ – and since it was an instance of a larger trend, they probably did.46 Although space and focus does not allow an elaborate discussion of the third adaptation from 1927, directed by Eugen Illés and starring Asta Nielsen, I would like to briefly address this version to demonstrate by example how German cinema changed to become a ‘mainstream’ medium. In the 1920s, according to Dickinson, German sexology now argued that mutually fulfilling sexuality would hold relationships together – as a remedy for marriage, which by then was actually challenged by rising divorce rates. Michaëlis’ novel was reprinted in Germany in 1925; it had lost little of its ‘modernity’, but perhaps it seemed even more melancholy against the cultural background of the youthful ‘jazz age’. Even though Michaëlis gave permission for a new version, and despite the fact that cinema had developed more devices of ‘psychologisation’ and that the film is aesthetically ambitious (it has some interesting expressionist and surrealist touches), it was not only again very different from the novel in terms of plot, it gave the subject matter a highly conventional and conservative treatment. In this film, Elsie is a professor’s wife who loves her husband, but feels emotionally and sexually neglected, and thus has a brief affair with one of his students (of which nothing more explicit than an embrace is depicted). Elsie ‘sensibly but sadly’ ends it, and Joergen quickly turns to a female student who is in love with him. The professor forgives his wife (and his student), and the couple resign themselves to a passionless relationship, because ‘Es gibt kein Gespenst des Alterns, wenn man sich liebt und zusammen alt wird’ (‘Old age loses its horror, if two people love each other and grow old together’). Michaëlis disliked this film so much that she even stressed that she was not responsible for it in lectures that she was asked to give before special screenings.47 In retrospect, seeing Nielsen in this role makes the contrast to early cinema particularly poignant. Hence, at least for the German case, Jennifer M. Bean’s contention that silent cinema was particularly ‘women oriented’ and that ‘early’ cinema and

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‘classical’ silent cinema should thus be regarded as one historiographic period seems problematic.48 However one judges Germany’s degree and speed of ‘modernisation’ regarding sexual relations, one can describe their cinematic depiction largely thus: from a niche medium that shocked by visualising what was almost unspeakable in public, cinema developed into a mainstream medium by showing far less than what could and was being said.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Dora Teleky, ‘Karin Michaelis’ “Das gefährliche Alter”’, Neues Frauenleben 23, 2 (February 1911): 1, 32–35. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. My thanks to Katrin Barkhausen, Joseph Garncarz, Andrea Haller, Andreas Killen, Martin Loiperdinger, Michael Ross, Stephan Michael Schröder and Isak Thorsen, as well as the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Filmmuseum Amsterdam and the Danske Filminstitut. Martha Schad: ‘Karin Michaëlis’, Frauen, die die Welt bewegten (Augsburg: Pattloch 1997), 166–168. I have mainly used the contemporary English translation (The Dangerous Age, trans. anon., New York: Lane, 1911) of the Danish original (Den farlige Alder, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910). It contains a translation of the foreword by Marcel Prévost (9–23) for his French edition (first serialised in La Revue de Paris, then published in book-form as L’age dangereux, Paris: Fayard, 1911), which was based on the German translation (Das gefährliche Alter, trans. anon., Berlin: Concordia, 1910). As far as I know (from my own comparison of the English and German translations and discussions in the secondary literature), there seem to be no major omissions or changes in the three versions. The 1991 English reprint (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press) contains a new foreword by Phyllis Lassner (1–24), which discusses contemporary Anglo-American reviews. For a discussion of Michaëlis’ literary context, particularly the modern attitudes regarding sexual relations in Scandinavian literature, see e.g. Annegret Heitmann, ‘Die Moderne im Durchbruch 1870–1910’, in Jürg Glauser (ed.), Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006), 183–229. My argument may seem to be unduly built on an individual example here, but it stems from the much broader theoretical framework and corpus of my PhD dissertation: ‘The Sensation Machine: Cinema and Sensation Seeking In Wilhelmine Germany, 1895–1914’. Furthermore, I hope to show that it is a particularly rich and important example. On the issue of motherhood among German feminists in general, see e.g. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood In Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). See Beverley Driver Eddy, Karin Michaëlis: Kaleidoskop des Herzens, eine Biographie, trans. by Vibeke Munk and Jörg Zeller (Wien: Praesens, 2003), 91. Danziger Zeitung, 28 March 1911. Translation quoted from Beverley Driver Eddy, ‘The Dangerous Age: Karin Michaëlis and the Politics of Menopause’, Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 491–504, quote p. 500. See e.g. Merete von Eyben, Karin Michaëlis: Incest As Metaphor and the Illusion of Romantic Love, New York et al.: Lang, 2003. Elsie Lindtner (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912); English edition: trans. by Beatrice Marshall (New York: Stangeland, 1912); German edition: trans. by Mathilde Mann (Berlin: Concordia, 1911). Note that the German translation of the sequel was published before the original in its own country, a further indication of the extraordinary attention the predecessor received in Germany. See the summary of Michaëlis’ lecture in Eddy, ‘The Dangerous Age’, 497–498 and ‘Tells Women’s Secrets’, The New York Times (27 April 1912). See Eddy, Karin Michaëlis, for examples. See e.g. ‘Elsie Lindtner a Sad Heroine’, The New York Times (27 August 1911). ‘Insults American Women’, The New York Times (2 August 1914). See e.g. William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century in London (London: The ‘Review of Reviews’ Office, 1902), immediately translated into German as Die Amerikanisierung der Welt (Berlin: Vita, 1902).

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Chapter 17 ‘A Cinematograph of Feminine Thought’ 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

235

See e.g. Eddy, ‘The Dangerous Age’, for examples; Eddy, however, does not discuss the differences between the feminist discourses of different countries. ‘Laying Bare a Woman’s Soul’, The New York Times (3 September 1911). See also The New York Times’s previous articles on the book and its author: ‘New York the Most Polite City in the World’ (8 May 1910), ‘Author of the Latest “Daring” Novel Is in America’ (16 July 1911) and ‘All Heroines Not Youthful’ (30 July 1911). See Eddy, Karin Michaëlis, 113. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (München: Matthes & Seitz, 1984), 12–13. Translation quoted from Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Complete Incomprehension”: The Impossibility of Heterosexual Love In Imperial Germany’, Central European History 40 (2007): 467–497, quote p. 472. Dickinson, ‘“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Incomprehension”’, 473. Johanna Elberskirchen, Die Sexualempfindung bei Weib und Mann, betrachtet vom physiologischsoziologischen Standpunkte (Leipzig: Hegner, 1903), 4. English translation quoted from Dickinson, ‘“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Incomprehension”’, 493. John C. Burnham, ‘The Progressive Era Revolution In American Attitudes Toward Sex’, The Journal of American History 59, 4 (1973): 885–908. See Christine Ruhland, Protest gegen ‘Das gefährliche Alter’ von Karin Michaelis (Halle an der Saale: Nietschmann, 1911); Anon., Wie die Frauen wirklich sind: Eine Antwort auf Karin Michaelis’ ‘Das gefährliche Alter’ (Berlin: Orania, 1911); Anon., Was beim Mann so häßlich ist (Berlin: Orania, 1913). The pamphlets were classified as Aufklärungsliteratur for adults only. Eddy, Karin Michaëlis, 86–101. The Landesarchiv Berlin has a censorship file on Michaëlis that contains correspondence of the Berlin police as well as press clippings. See e.g. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). An explicitly humorous treatment was the film Das gefährliche Alter by Deutsche Mutoskopund Biograph, with comedian Gerhard Dammann as a man who is chased by the three elderly aunts of his fiancée. It was also released in 1911, before the two other films. Tom Gunning, ‘The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde’, in Jacky Bratton et al. (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: BFI, 1994), 50–61, specif. 51–52. Walther Conradt, Kirche und Kinematograph (Berlin: Walther, 1910), 33. Marcel Prévost, Les Demi-vierges (Paris: Lemerre, 1894); German translation (by the author himself): Halbe Unschuld (München: Langen 1901); Paul Samuleit singles out Hanns Heinz Ewers and Marcel Prévost as examples of the ‘unsavoury’ supporters of cinema; see ‘Der Kinematograph als Volks- und Jugendbildungsmittel’, Die Volksbildung 42, 22 (1912): 423–439. Calculated from data mentioned in, e.g., Paul Samuleit, ‘Die Kino-Frage vor der Deutschen Lehrerschaft’, Volksbildung, 42, 12 (1912): 226–228. The number of newspapers (c. 4,200) and total number of copies (c. 25 million) peaked in Germany in 1906. Since sold copies usually had more than one reader (e.g. in homes, reading rooms, pubs), it was estimated that almost everyone read a newspaper at least occasionally. See Rudolf Stöber, Deutsche Pressegeschichte (Konstanz: UVK Medien, 2000), 146 and Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch (München: DTV, 1977), 298. See e.g. Ulrike Dulinski, Sensationsjournalismus in Deutschland (Konstanz: UVK, 2003). Quoted from Manuela Reichart, ‘Strafgesetz für unglückliche Ehen: Karin Michaelis und ihr Bestseller Das gefährliche Alter’, in Karin Michaelis, Das gefährliche Alter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 143–154, quote p. 151. See Oskar Messter, Mein Weg mit dem Film (Berlin: Hesse, 1936), 102. Michaëlis does not mention the films in her memoirs, Little Troll (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946). Messter relates that Nordisk acquired the film rights, but he does not admit that he had not even approached the author. Michaëlis’ resentment about this is expressed on occasion of the 1927 film version in a letter to Nordisk (dated 25 May 1926, in the Nordisk archive in Valby, Denmark). Hence, in contrast to what is sometimes claimed, Michaëlis had nothing to do with the film scripts. See Stephan Michael Schröder, Weiße Wiedergängerkunst, schwarze Buchstaben: Zur Interaktion zwischen dänischer Literatur und Kino bis 1918, unpublished Habilitationsschrift (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2003), 522–523. Eddy, Karin Michaëlis, 95.

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236 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE See e.g. the advertisements in Der Komet 1356 (18 March 1911) and Deutscher LichtbildtheaterBesitzer 15 (13 April 1911). Kevin Thomas McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-De-Siècle Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). See Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990). On German censorship, see e.g. Gabriele Kilchenstein, Frühe Filmzensur in Deutschland: eine vergleichende Studie zur Prüfungspraxis in Berlin und München, 1906–1914 (München: Diskurs Film, 1997). See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘The Power of the Audience: Afgrunden, Cinemagoing and the Arrival of the Feature Film In Germany (1910–1911)’, in Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (eds), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives and Cinemagoing [forthcoming]. See e.g. Heinrich Auer, ‘Zur Kinofrage’, Soziale Revue 13, 1 (1913): 19–36: ‘Asta Nielsen’s dubious manner of exciting the audience’s senses with her bodily contortions’. The only variations are somewhat tighter framing (with the actors playing to the camera a bit more) and slightly different sets and costumes (foregrounding the characters through stronger contrasts, austere in style and thus perhaps more ‘modern’). That the Danish film ends with the duel instead of the daughter’s engagement to a young soldier is the only major difference of plot. It is difficult to say whether this expresses cultural differences or the personal choices of the makers involved (in general, tragic endings were quite common in German films). See e.g. the advertisement in Deutscher Lichtbildtheater-Besitzer 3, 14 (1911). It is not always clear from the cinema programmes which version was shown, because usually little more than the title was stated, but among the four screenings of Das gefährliche Alter documented in the University of Siegen’s sample of German early cinema programmes, there is one definite instance of the Danish version: Vater’s Lichtspiele in Würzburg, Würzburger General-Anzeiger (6 May 1911), which mentions that the drama is ‘played by the premier Royal actors of Copenhagen’ (Siegen Database of Film Programmes, 1905–1914, http://fk615.221b.de/siegen/pr/show/index.php?language=en, 12 October 2008). ‘Gerichtssaal’, Der Kinematograph 226 (26 April 1911). See Corinna Müller, Frühe Deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 140. This can be illustrated with the further example that the most successful German film in terms of copies for a long time was Sündige Liebe (‘sinful love’), also from 1911 – the title says it all (see Müller, Frühe Deutsche Kinematographie, 140). Such films were advertised as ‘for adults only’; age restrictions were more severe in Germany than in many other countries, but exhibitors were notoriously reluctant to enforce them. See Eddy, Karin Michaëlis, 189. See Jennifer Bean, ‘Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema’, in Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader In Early Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–28.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Cinema as a Mode(l) of Perception: Dorothy Richardson’s Novels and Essays Chapter Author(s): Nicola Glaubitz Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.21 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Chapter 18

Cinema as a Mode(l) of Perception: Dorothy Richardson’s Novels and Essays tion

Cinema as a Mode(l) of Percep -

Nicola Glaubitz he notion that perception has a history has been one of the most stimulating ideas in recent research on visual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Or, to put it differently and more precisely: a considerable number of studies rests on the assumption that the conditions of visual perception were subject to historical change on a revolutionary scale between the 1850s and the 1910s. Jonathan Crary argues that a rapid succession of media innovations – panorama, stereoscopy, photography, moving images – and their commodification were accompanied by profound changes in the ways of thinking, writing and feeling about visual experience: ‘capitalist modernity has generated a constant re-creation of the conditions of sensory experience, in what could be called a revolutionizing of the means of perception’.1 Cinema, in particular, has become an integral element in cultural histories of modernity, apparently leaving no aspect of life and thought around 1900 untouched. For example, Laura Marcus, extending the historical and thematic scope of Crary’s argument, refers to the ‘widely held view’ that ‘modernist and modernised consciousness are inflected by, and perhaps inseparable from, cinematic consciousness’.2 Mary Ann Doane identifies the cinema as a point of convergence of wide-ranging epistemological shifts, involving notions of time and space as well as and notions of bodily, perceptual and mental capacities.3 The following considerations will have a much narrower scope: exploring the possibilities of experience that cinema offered for one particular writer, recently canonised as a modernist novelist and as an important voice on cinema – Dorothy Richardson. Born in 1873, Richardson moved to London in 1895, where she joined the increasing number of self-supporting working women, eking out a living as a dentist’s assistant. In her spare time, she explored metropolitan life with immense curiosity and energy. The years between 1895 and 1912 became the subject of her 13-volume novel series Pilgrimage, published between 1915 and 1938. At some point in the 1920s, Richardson became a cinema enthusiast but began writing on film only much later. She was at first reluctant to contribute, at the editors’

T

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request, to the magazine Close Up. Richardson was unsure if her somewhat unusual and ‘non-intellectual’ taste for pre- and non-narrative films, westerns and melodramas would meet the demands of a magazine devoted to film art and edited by avant-garde critics and filmmakers, such as Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), Kenneth Macpherson and modernist poet Hilda Doolittle. But eventually she became one of the most active contributors to Close Up. She alluded to her preferred mode of film programming when she titled her essays ‘Continuous Performance’, after the practice of showing films continuously and to admit spectators at any time. For Richardson as well as for her contemporaries, cinema was more than an exciting new phenomenon – it suggested itself, almost irresistibly, as a model and metaphor for perception and consciousness. The questions addressed here will be, firstly, why cinema began to function as a central metaphor for articulating experience, secondly, what kind of cinema Richardson had in mind, and thirdly, how the forms of articulation Richardson chose – novel and essay – inflected her views. I will argue that even though bodily and partly also cognitive aspects of visual perception remain untouched by historical and cultural changes, the less clear-cut and more comprehensive modes of experience depend, to a large extent, on discursively mediated attitudes. As Miriam Hansen has pointed out, experiences, the forms of their public articulation and their cultural organisation are a promising area of enquiry, which touches upon aspects not covered by empirical research on early cinema. The historical place assigned to individual, contested or contradictory (sense) experiences in a culture has to be inferred on the basis of several sources, one of which are written documents. The same holds true for the degree to which experiences can be articulated, circulated and given public significance within, but also against existing visual structures, discourses, institutions, classes and gender concepts.4 Such factors form ‘structures of feeling’, that is, culturally established modes of selecting, thinking and evaluating, ‘which do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action’.5 The narrative style and semi-autobiographical mode of writing Richardson developed for Pilgrimage was an attempt to capture new and therefore not yet culturally sanctioned dimensions of experience. Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, the novel had been the major cultural domain where tensions between social conventions and the articulation of individual experience were negotiated (albeit mostly within the middle class). Apart from envisioning fictional alternatives to existing social conditions, novels reflected on and argued about their respective discursive contexts. However, the ‘modernist’ novels that emerged around 1900 shifted their emphasis from a predominantly narrative and meaning-oriented engagement with these issues toward a formalist contestation of established ‘structures of feeling’. For many writers of the first two decades of the twentieth century, such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, concerns regarding the social viability of subjective experience retreated to the background, while the phenomenology of perception and its conditions as such gained prominence. For example, the

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Chapter 18 Cinema as a Mode(l) of Perception

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imagist poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle attempted to capture the ‘mere presence’ of perceived objects. In prose, Virginia Woolf developed a style of non-linear and impersonal narration, aiming to eradicate the narrator’s imposition of preconceived cognitive schemata. Woolf writes in her novel The Waves: ‘To see things without attachment, from the outside, and to realise their beauty in themselves – how strange!’6 It has been argued that cinema as a medium that ‘faithfully records reality’ promised a similar mode of ‘direct’ access to phenomena, while at the same time drawing attention to the mediated and selective character of the recording, and that this promise was at the core of cinema’s attractivity to modernist writers and poets.7 Richardson’s Pilgrimage and its protagonist Miriam Henderson’s fascination with the phenomenality of things is a case in point. The semi-autobiographical account uses a single character as a focalizer and presents long and minute descriptions of her sense impressions: objects and rooms perceived in different lights, vistas of London – in various weather conditions, seasons and times of day –, walks and rides through its crowded streets, the English countryside and Swiss mountain landcapes. Richardson was the first writer to develop an episodic, sequential narrative structure combined with free indirect style, which was to become a hallmark of high modernism. The term ‘stream of consciousness’, now commonly used to describe this technique, was coined in a review of Richardson’s first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs (1915) by May Sinclair.8 Sinclair drew a parallel to the American psychologist William James’s concept of human consciousness as a constantly changing succession of sense impressions and thoughts, held together only by a constant effort of will and attention: Consciousness … is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, of subjective life.9

Woolf emphasised another aspect of Richardson’s style when she argued that her sentences (largely unpunctuated in the first editions of Pilgrimage) foregrounded sensual qualities of ordinary things and not their meaning or symbolic significance.10 This ability to focus on mundane and contingent details of the everyday world, and to disjoin them from habitualised schemata of perception was a quality that many of Richardson’s contemporaries also ascribed to cinema. The cinema, Doane writes, established an unprecedented and ‘privileged’ relation of visual representation ‘to contingency and temporality, emancipated from rationalisation’.11 Bryher remembers her first reaction to Richardson’s Backwater in 1916 in such terms, emphasising her ‘life-like’ compression of mobile and contingent aspects of reality into one single description: I realised that modern prose could be as exciting as poetry and as for continuous association, it was stereoscopic, a precursor of the cinema, moving from the window to a face, from a thought back to the room, all in one moment just as it happened in life.12

When Bryher reviewed Richardson’s novels in 1931, she compared the vividness of Richardson’s descriptions of London to film images imprinting themselves on the reader’s memory.13 Temporal progression, movement in

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space and particularly perception in motion are recurring themes in the novels: views of the city and countryside from bus and train windows, crowded streets and city squares seen by Miriam walking or riding a bicycle indeed seem to evoke moving pictures. Both aspects – an emphasis on perception in motion and the transfigured quality of perceived reality – can be found in the following passage from the 1921 volume of Pilgrimage, Deadlock, where Richardson describes Miriam riding a crowded London bus in the early evening: In the dimly lit little interior, moving along through the backward moving mist-screened street-lights, she dropped away from the circling worlds of sound, and sat thoughtless, gazing inward along the bright kaleidoscopic vistas that came unfailing and unchanged whenever she was moving, alone and still, against the moving tide of London. … the bus rumbled on again, and when it had reached Gower Street, she had passed through thoughtless ages. The brown house, and her room in it, called to her recreated.14

Miriam plunges into a state of intense, almost hypnotic concentration on outside phenomena and mental images. For Bryher and a friend, these passages in Richardson’s novels functioned as models for perceiving and experiencing: ‘both of us knew the sudden exhilaration ... as we rode down a London street, like Miriam, on top of a bus ... she was the Baedeker of all our early experiences’.15 What the cinema and Richardson’s specific kind of prose amounts to here is a kind of ‘script’ for a new mode of sensual perception: the possibility of perceiving in this mode that is articulated in writing becomes an actual perceptual act. Richardson herself used the metaphor of the ‘cinematograph show’ to describe the relation of individual consciousness and the world as early as 1914.16 But as far as Pilgrimage is concerned, the connection between cinema, consciousness and perception remains an indirect one. Cinema is not mentioned in the novels, even though the narrated time extends to 1917. This can be taken as evidence for the hypothesis that Richardson knew about cinema in the 1910s, but went to see her first films as late as 1921,17 and that she did not regard it as fitting to have her main character Miriam (who is modelled on herself) visit a cinema before that time. It is equally possible that her interest in cinema had subsided by the time she wrote the last volume of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, in 1937/8, and that the spectrum of new audio and visual media that attracted her protagonist’s attention remained incomplete for that reason. Pilgrimage describes Miriam’s first encounters with the gramophone and the telephone, and in the part of the series referring to the year 1919, she records the almost visionary quality of her first look at a projected Lippmann colour photograph.18 Her memories from childhood and adolescence are structured by experiences with the diorama, stereoscopy and the kaleidoscope.19 The protagonist’s strong fascination with these technical devices and the modifications of perception they allow is reflected on the level of language and narrative, where they figure as metaphors for consciousness. In her writings on film, however, Richardson explored the relations between consciousness and cinema in detail. Written between 1927 and 1931, the film essays move along two seemingly contradictory trajectories:

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on the one hand, Richardson endeavoured to document the variety of contexts in which films were viewed and the different responses she observed, for example, in suburbian cinemas (frequented by housewives), in East End slums or in glamorous West End picture palaces. On the other hand, she developed an aesthetics of cinema experience that, to a certain extent, attempted to break down the heterogeneity of cinema-going as a cultural phenomenon to a few common denominators, namely concepts such as contemplation, concentration, unity, continuity and imagination. These common denominators are core elements of Richardson’s extended notion of art, articulated, for example, in the preface to the 1938 edition of Pilgrimage. Here, she objected to Sinclair’s term ‘stream of consciousness’ and its application to her narrative style, because consciousness, for her, was definitely not an ever-changing stream.20 Human consciousness, she wrote in 1933, ‘sits stiller than a tree’21 and remains unchanged throughout a human life. According to Richardson, what corresponds to this stable consciousness and creates awareness of it is contemplation: a state of intense concentration and heightened awareness principally evoked in the context of art (especially reading literature), religion (meditation in prayer) and also in ordinary situations like bus rides or watching a silent film.22 For Richardson, it involves both distance from the things perceived and a sensation of immediacy. Her notion of contemplation thus contains elements of eighteenth and nineteenth century idealist aesthetics, suggesting distance from desire and emotion, i.e. ‘disinterestedness’ as the proper attitude towards beauty in art or nature. However, Richardson adds a decisively modern element to this notion of contemplation when she finds beauty in motion and in the continuity of sense impressions rather than in a static object.23 For Richardson, it is not so much the unity of the contemplated object but its continuity that creates a state of heightened awareness – and as a consequence, contemplation is no longer restricted to the elitist realm of art or the sphere of religion. This extended notion of contemplation as a combination of aisthesis and imagination, distance and immersion, is already illustrated by the 1919 description of Miriam’s bus ride: distance is created by movement and the bus windows, and immediacy is the result of a suspension of conceptual schemes that normally govern perception. Miriam is twice described as ‘thoughtless’. Richardson’s later writings on film read like rewritings of such moments, illustrating how the experience of cinema ‘fit’ into the new mode of perception prepared by modern transport, urban living and intellectual tendencies, and how this ‘fit’ in turn inflected Richardson’s reconstruction of cinema as a cultural phenomenon. The cinema in general, she writes, has the potential to evoke states of contemplation: [I]n any film of any kind those elements which in full life we see only in fragments as we move amongst them, are seen in full in their own moving reality of which the spectator is the motionless, observing centre. ... In life, we contemplate a landscape from one point, or, walking through it, break it into bits. The film, by setting the landscape in motion and keeping us still, allows it to walk through us.24

For Richardson, viewing a film is comparable to perceiving reality

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while the observer is in motion; but cinema intensifies the ‘reality effect’ of phenomena, because it immobilises the observer and diminishes the fragmented nature of ordinary perception. Like Siegfried Kracauer, Richardson praises the cinema for re-enchanting the habitual world and redeeming a sense of reality. What types of cinema and film, then, corresponded to Richardson’s favoured mode of perception, namely contemplation? In how far can her reflections be taken as representations of contemporary viewing practices, and to what extent are they ‘an imaginary idea of film and The Film’?25 Her deliberate choice of the essay as the genre for writing about film complicates matters, because it allowed her to move freely between journalistic article and statement of a personal point of view, to develop arguments and present carefully researched facts as well as speculation.26 Moreover, Richardson rarely mentions film titles or specifies dates. In any case, an appreciation of the purely spectacular character of moving pictures and a disregard for elements creating narrative continuity and suspense are characteristic for Richardson’s film essays – even though these preferences fuse with more traditional aesthetic attitudes and ‘highbrow’ concerns of modernism. These aspects closely correspond to characteristics that feminist film scholar Jennifer M. Bean has recently identified as, relatively speaking, more typical of silent than of sound cinema and that, in her view, particularly address and appeal to female viewers. Hence, she has even argued for extending the historiographic concept of ‘early cinema’ to the entire silent era, since it is ‘dominated by exhibitionism rather than voyeurism, by surprise rather than suspense, and by spectacle rather than by story’.27 Richardson’s description of her first visit to a cinema is, in this respect, both telling and ambiguous: But photo-plays had begun, small palaces were defacing even the suburbs. … The palaces were repulsive. Their being brought me an uneasiness that grew lively when at last I found myself within one of those whose plaster frontages and garish placards broke a row of shops in a strident, north London street.28

The repulsion she initially feels at the ‘foul air’ quickly changes to fascination when the film begins. She is comforted by an audience of women and small children, relaxing from hard work on washing day, and she remembers being completely absorbed in the ‘scenes’ on the screen – although she only remembers a fragment, a fisherwoman on a beach with waves coming and going, accompanied by a slow waltz.29 It is significant that Richardson does not recall any narrative, but mentions music as a striking aspect of her first encounter with films. Images, she argues in later essays, need music in order to come alive in the spectators’ imagination: music ‘helps create the film and gives the film both colour and sound’30 and maintains a continuous flow of otherwise dispersed and fragmented sense impressions. Richardson’s preference for black-and-white, silent film, as well as her favourite mode of watching film – attending the cinema without paying attention to the programme and without reading the intertitles – is certainly not representative for cinema-goers in general. On the other hand, it is not purely idiosyncratic either. According to a study on (German) cinema audiences conducted by Emilie Altenloh in 1913, women

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particularly cherished the cinema for its combination of music and images, sometimes recalling the music more vividly than a film’s story.31 Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz find more evidence for such a mode of reception in their wide-ranging collection of women’s writing on cinema. These preferences run, to some extent, counter to the narrativisation of cinema under way in the years after 1910 and also to the ‘disinterested’, contemplative attitude towards works of art. Richardson manages to have it both ways in her aesthetics of cinema. The positive social effects she ascribes to cinema are connected with her view of cinema not as a threat to established cultural forms (or as an alternative to it), but as a welcome addition and even enhancement of aesthetic modes of perception. Cinema, she writes, brings ‘the gift of quiet, of attention and concentration’32 to people living in stressful urban conditions. Any kind of film, she believes, exerts ‘a civilising influence more potent and direct than any other form of entertainment’.33 Anticipating Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, she claims that cinema was helping ‘to make the younger generation shock-proof in a manner unthinkable to the majority of their forbears’.34 Benjamin based an argument for the modernity of cinema on a similar observation: he regarded cinema as a training ground for new modes of perception and for developing a defence against speed and shock. Richardson, by contrast, saw the possibility that cinema might become a sanctuary for the ‘older’ cultural practices of contemplation and concentration, and that it might also create a new cultural space for irrational and spiritual dimensions of experience.35 For Richardson, the absence or at least the relative irrelevance of language in silent cinema provided especially female spectators with an unprecedented opportunity to define their own position. Richardson remarks that silent films provide ‘unlimited material upon which the imagination of the onlooker could get to work unhampered by the pressure of a controlling mind that is not his own mind’.36 The seemingly inevitable presence of a controlling mind taking the reader ‘upon a tour amongst the properties’37 is what Richardson objects to most strongly in literature and theatre. Her criticism of nineteenth century fiction is mainly concerned with the omniscient position of mostly male narrators. In the theatre, she argues, spectators are constantly reminded of their social status (class and gender), because there is direct interaction between actors and audience. Benjamin notices the same from another perspective: film actors, he observes, act for the camera apparatus rather than for an audience. The audience consequently adopts a more distanced position, submitting the performance to ‘evaluative tests’ rather than identifying with it.38 Richardson welcomes the distance created by cinema. The cinema, she believes, manages to screen off authorial and authoritarian instances. Young working women may discover an essentially feminine self-awareness beyond words and beyond the socially coded gender roles when they contemplate the female stars of the silent cinema.39 For her, it is not yet a foregone conclusion that films impose a male gaze on actresses as well as female spectators, as Laura Mulvey would later argue. On the contrary: Richardson

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observes that women at the cinema, in contrast to women in an art gallery, do not feel the need to display the submissive, respectful admiration that would be due to a work of art. The film as a new aesthetic artefact, with its still flexible conventions of response, puts its recipients into a less circumscribed, more relaxed and balanced position. For this reason, it is congenial to the newly emerging group of independent, working women: She does not need, this type of woman clearly does not need, the illusions of art to come to the assistance of her own sense of existing. Instinctively she maintains a balance, the thing perceived and herself perceiving.40

Consequently, it is the relative openness of cinema in its early years to a variety of uses and responses to which Richardson feels attracted. Cinemagoing as a practice, she thinks, obliterates distinctions of class, gender and age, and it is therefore a welcome alternative to established, ‘highbrow’ forms of entertainment. Cinema is a refuge, trysting-place, village pump, stimulant, shelter from rain and cold at less than the price of an evening’s light and fire, drunkenness at less than the price of a drink. Instruction. Peeps behind scenes. Sermons. Homethrusts for hims and for hers, impartially. School, salon, brothel, bethel, newspaper, art, science, religion, philosophy, commerce, sport, adventure; flashes of beauty of all sorts. The only anything and everything. And here we all are, as never before. What will it do with us?41

Richardson is quite optimistic about the civilising and socialising power of cinema, which she thinks unfolds below the level of concepts, language, and reflection: it allows its spectators to gain distance from their ordinary living conditions. This is vital for city dwellers, she argues, who may experience a sense of community in the cinema.42 For those living in close-knit country communities, the cinema introduces the cosmopolitan experience of encountering strange people and places.43 The new universality offered by cinema is based, for Richardson, on a new kind of uniformity. According to her, the fundamental civilising effect of cinema unfolds ‘insensibly’, and ‘unawares’.44 It lies in the simple act of synchronising the perception of isolated individuals. The technological and architectural arrangement of the cinema compels spectators to adapt their sense perception to a given pace. Consequently, the cinema creates a new and fundamental form of sociality: being together and contemplating, at the same pace, a spectacle: The film is a social art, a show, something for collective seeing, and even in the day that finds us all owning projectors and rolls of film from the local circulating filmery it still will be so, a small ceremonial prepared for a group, all of whom must adjust their sensibilities at a given moment and at the film’s pace.45

Synchronicity of perceptual rhythms is a very weak precondition for sociality, and Richardson, one could object, underestimated the dangers of using film as a propaganda medium (which she nevertheless prognosticated as its ‘destiny’ in 1932).46 A certain ambivalence, however, is expressed in her statement that the whole power of film rests in ‘the reduction, or elevation of the observer to the condition that is essential to perfect contemplation’,47 and the female star, as we have seen, is objectified into a ‘thing perceived’.48 But on the whole, the self-distance created by cinema is explored in its

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fascinating and positive aspects. Like Benjamin, Richardson emphasises the impersonality of the camera, and the fact that a non-human agency is governing and synchronising perception. Cinema’s synchronising effect hinges (for both writers) on the technological and architectural framework in which film is embedded, with far-reaching consequences for the notion of subjectivity associated with the aesthetics of cinema. Benjamin’s suggestion that material aspects (technology and economy) are the major non-human agencies inherent in film has been celebrated as a definite break with nineteenth century aesthetics and as a step towards later critical media theory. Richardson shares this awareness of non-human, material devices interfering with and modifying human perception. She welcomes the mechanical synchronisation of sense perception as an alternative to discursive and potentially ideological constructions of community.49 But for her, this function does not depend upon cinema’s replacement of ‘aura’ by a more rational attitude. She thinks that individuation necessarily involves moments of active self-estrangement and self-distancing – becoming the ‘thing perceived’ from time to time, and that this is an integral part of, for example, religious meditation practices. If such practices could help suspend conceptual thought throughout history, modern men and women, she believes, can use new media like the cinema for the same ‘archaic’ purpose: for the experience of otherness, which allows a fresh return to the ordinary self and the ordinary world. Hence, Richardson’s professed enthusiasm for contemplating the silent, moving images of cinema does not amount to an absolute break with a pre-modern and pre-industrial culture, including reading and writing, but rather a rearrangement and restructuring of experiential possibilities – with new opportunities for women and underprivileged social classes. But her distrust in language as a potential instrument of control and her vision of images as a viable alternative is not completely convincing. It is difficult to reconcile Richardson’s enormous productivity as a writer with her reservations against language: Pilgrimage amounts to almost 2,000 pages, offering minute descriptions of life in all its facets, and her essays on cinema betray an enthusiasm for elegantly written language and what it can convey. The discursive forms of articulating experiences, it seems, cannot be completely excluded from the picture; they seem to return with a vengeance when moments of silent contemplation, as well as the apparent transparency of filmic images, stimulate verbal articulation, reflection and discursive activity. This aspect of writing as part of a configuration of different media, geared towards creating awareness of new modes of perception, remains largely unreflected in Richardson’s writing. She is unable, in this respect, to move beyond the modernist opposition of language and its absolute limit: silence. When Bryher stubbornly treated Pilgrimage as a ‘guide book to modern life’, as a Baedeker taking readers on a ‘guided tour’ of modernity and cinema’s central role in it, she found a different solution: forms of verbal articulation, for her, lose their uncontested status at the top of the cultural hierarchy, but they remain firmly established – no longer as a dominant, but an integral part of a media configuration and media practice that comprises (moving) images as well as words.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), 13. I am indebted to Annemone Ligensa for many useful suggestions and for her painstaking and encouraging editorial work. Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7, 92–94, 125. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 [1931]), 203. David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden, MA et al.: Blackwell, 2007). See Carol Watts, Dorothy Richardson (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995), 56. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1950 [1890]), 239 (emphasis in original). Deborah Parsons, Theorists of the Modern Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge, 2007), 82. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 31. Reviewers were also struck by Richardson’s apparent transposition and anticipation of ‘cinematic’ techniques like montage and panning into fictional writing, as María Francisca Llantada Díaz shows in Form and Meaning in Dorothy M. Richardson’s Pilgrimage (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 84–86. Bryher, The Heart to Artemis (London: Collins, 1963), 174. She refers to Richardson’s Backwater, Part 2 of Pilgrimage (in Vol. 1 of the 1979 edition; London: Virago, 1979). See also Laura Marcus, ‘Introduction: Reading Close Up, 1927–1933’, in: James Donald et al. (eds), Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998),1–27, quote p. 152. W.B. [Bryher], ‘Dawn’s Left Hand, By Dorothy M. Richardson’, Close Up 8, 4 (1931), quoted from the reprint in: Donald, Close Up 1927–1933, 209–211, quote p. 210. Dorothy Richardson, Deadlock, Part 6 of Pilgrimage, Vol. 3 (London: Virago, 1979 [1921]), 114. Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, 174. This expression is to be found in a book about the Quakers and their meditation practices, a topic that continued to compel her interest and informed her assessment of cinema; see Paul Tiessen, ‘A Comparative Approach to the Form and Function of Novel and Film: Dorothy Richardson’s Theory of Art’, Literature/Film Quarterly 3, 1 (1975): 83–90, specif. 84. Gloria G. Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994 [1977]), 210. Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel, Part 4 of Pilgrimage, Vol. 2 (London: Virago, 1979 [1919]), 107. Richardson apparently went to a lecture given by Gabriel Lippmann at the Royal Institution in London on 17 April 1896; see George Thompson: Notes on Pilgrimage: Dorothy Richardson Annotated (Greensboro, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 86. Watts, Dorothy Richardson, 13, 16, 58–60. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Foreword’, in Pointed Roofs, Part 1 of Pilgrimage, Vol. 1 (London: Virago, 1979), 9–12, specif. 11. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: Narcissus’, Close Up 8, 3 (September 1931): 182–185, quote p. 184. Tiessen, ‘A Comparative Approach’, 88, 89. See Laura Marcus, ‘“A new form of true beauty”: Aesthetics and Early Film Criticism’, Modernism/modernity 13 (April 2006): 267–289, specif. 286. Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: Narcissus’, 185. Susan Gevirtz, Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (New York, Washington, DC: Lang, 1996), 58. See R. Lane Kauffmann, ‘The Skewed Path: Essaying as Unmethodical Method’, in: Alexander J. Butrym (ed.), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (Athens, OH and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), 221–240. Jennifer M. Bean, ‘Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema’, in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader In Early Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–27, quote p. 6.

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Chapter 18 Cinema as a Mode(l) of Perception 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

247

Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance’, Close Up 1, 1 (July 1927), quoted from the reprint in: Donald, Close Up 1927–1933, 160–161, quote p. 160. Ibid. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance II: Musical Accompaniment‘, Close Up 1, 2 (August 1927): 61. Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz, ‘Introduction: Part I’, in Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz (eds), The Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings On the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Verso, 2006), 35–59, quote pp. 40, 41. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: This Spoon-Fed Generation’, Close Up 8, 4 (December 1931): 304–308, quote p. 307. Ibid. Ibid. This is closer to Jonathan Crary’s argument that the surge of diagnoses of shock, disintegration, distraction, nervousness and dispersal around 1900 is a one-sided picture, and that cultural techniques fostering concentration and attention were being established at the same time; see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 49, 51. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance XII: Pictures and Films’, Close Up 4, 1 (January 1929): 51–57, quote p. 56. Richardson, ‘Foreword’, 11. Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 10th ed., 1977), 24. English translation available online at http://web.bentley.edu/ empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communication/benjamin.html (2 September 2008). Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance VIII: Animal Impudens’, Close Up 2, 3 (March 1928): 51–55, specif. 55. Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance VIII’, 52. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance VI: The Increasing Congregation’, Close Up 1, 6 (December 1927), quoted from reprint in: Donald, Close Up 1927–1933, 170–171, quote p. 171. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance X: The Cinema in the Slums’, Close Up 2, 5 (May 1928): 58–62, specif. 60. ‘They become for a while citizens of a world whose every face is that of a stranger. The mere sight of these unknown people is refreshment.’; Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance XII: The Cinema in Arcady’ 3, 1 (July 1928), quoted from reprint in: Donald, Close Up 1927–1933, 184–186; quote p. 185. Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance X’, 60–62. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: Almost Persuaded’, Close Up 4, 6 (June 1929): 31–37, quote p. 34. See Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male’, Close Up 9, 1 (March 1932): 36–38, specif. 38. Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: Narcissus’, Close Up 8, 3 (September 1931): 182–185, quote p. 185. Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance VIII’, 52. See Richardson’s argument that cinemas have a more ‘innocent’ civilising influence than charities; Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance X’, specif. 61.

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Acknowledgements This collection is based on the conference ‘New Paradigms of Perception: Changes in Media and Culture around 1900’ held at the University of Siegen, Germany, in November 2006. It was hosted by the research projects ‘Industrialisation of Perception’ (University of Siegen) and ‘Visual Media in Poor Relief around 1900’ (University of Trier), both sponsored by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Everyone experienced the event as something very special, and we hope that the book conveys its spirit. We thank all the colleagues involved in its organisation, especially Joseph Garncarz, Michael Ross, Katrin Ross and Ingo Köster. We thank the authors for contributing their work with tremendous generosity, great enthusiasm and genuine interest in the exchange of ideas. We thank the publisher John Libbey, a one-man wonder in the field of books on early cinema, for his expertise and patience in the work process. A very special thank you to Andreas Killen, Martin Loiperdinger and Frank Kessler for their kind and wise advice in all matters great and small that arise in the making of such a book. Without all this support, this publication would not have been possible.

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John Libbey Publishing Chapter Title: Biographies of the Authors Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press; John Libbey Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.22 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press and John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Biographies of the Authors

Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has co-curated exhibitions such as Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A) and has produced a BBC2 television series on early cinema, The Last Machine (1995). Publications include: The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design (London: Wallflower, 2008) and (as editor, with Richard Taylor) The film factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema In Documents 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 2002). Scott Curtis is Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University (Evanston) and the current president of Domitor. He has published on film sound technology, animation, and Alfred Hitchcock. He is especially interested in silent cinema and the appropriation of motion pictures by other disciplines, on which a book is forthcoming: Managing Modernity: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press). Thomas Elsaesser is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and since 2005 Visiting Professor at Yale University. Relevant publications include: (as editor) Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), (as editor, with Michael Wedel) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996) and Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (München: edition text + kritik, 2002). Joseph Garncarz, teaches Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Cologne and is head of research in the research project ‘Industrialisation of Perception’ at the University of Siegen. He has published on German film history, popular European cinema, and Hollywood’s role abroad. Publications include: Filmfassungen: Eine Theorie signifikanter Filmvariation (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992) and Maßlose Unterhaltung: Die Etablierung des Kinos in Deutschland 1895-1914 (forthcoming in 2009). Nicola Glaubitz teaches English Literature and is research coordinator at the research center ‘Media Upheavals’ at the University of Siegen. She has published on eighteenth and twentieth century literature and philosophy, Japanese and American computer animated films, and is currently working on Patricia Highsmith. Publications include: (as editor, with Andreas Käuser and Hyunseon Lee) Akira Kurosawa und seine Zeit (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005). Tom Gunning is Professor of Art History and chair of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He has published widely on silent and early cinema. Publications include: D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000). Andrea Haller is an independent scholar and has just completed her dissertation on early German cinema’s programming strategies and the female audience at the University of Trier. She has published on local film history, early cinema programming, female cinemagoing and fandom. Publications include: (as editor, with Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer): Celluloid Goes Digital: Historical-Critical Editions of Films on DVD and the Internet (Trier: WVT, 2003). Frank Kessler is Professor of Film and Television History at Utrecht University. He was president of Domitor and is one of the founders and editors of the yearbook KINtop. He has published widely on silent and early cinema. Publications include: (as editor, with Nanna Verhoeff) Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (London: John Libbey, 2007). Andreas Killen is Associate Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His current work deals with the history of the human sciences, and he has recently co-edited a special volume of the journal Osiris on this topic. Publications include: Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006) and 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006).

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FILM 1900: TECHNOLOGY, PERCEPTION, CULTURE

Klaus Kreimeier was Professor of Media Studies as well as founder and co-head of the research project ‘Industrialisation of Perception’ at the University of Siegen. He has published widely on film history and film criticism. Publications include: The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996 and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999) and Prekäre Moderne: Essays zur Kino- und Filmgeschichte (Marburg: Schüren, 2008). Annemone Ligensa is researcher in the research project ‘Industrialization of Perception’ at the University of Siegen. She has published on stardom, psychoanalytic film theory, narratology, and gender differences in media perception. Publications include: (as editor, with Daniel Müller and Peter Gendolla) Leitmedien: Konzepte, Relevanz, Geschichte (Bielefeld: transcript, forthcoming) and (as editor, with Joseph Garncarz) The Cinema of Germany [24 Frames Series] (London: Wallflower, forthcoming). Martin Loiperdinger is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Trier. He is head of the research project ‘Visual Media in Poor Relief around 1900’ at the University of Trier and co-head of the research project ‘Industrialisation of Perception’ at the University of Siegen. He is one of the founders and co-editors of the yearbook KINtop. He has published widely on early cinema and non-fiction film. Publications include: Film & Schokolade: Stollwercks Geschäfte mit lebenden Bildern (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1999) and (as editor) Travelling Cinema in Europe (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2008). Henning Schmidgen is research scholar at the Max Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Research interests include machine concepts in Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan, as well as the history of experimental physiology and experimental psychology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Publications include: Das Unbewußte der Maschinen: Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan (München: Fink, 1997) and (as editor, with Bernhard J. Dotzler) Parasiten und Sirenen: Zwischenräume als Orte der materiellen Wissensproduktion (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008). Jörg Schweinitz is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zürich. He is co-editor of the journal montage/av. Publications include: (as editor) Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909-1914 (Leipzig: Reclam 1992), (as editor) Hugo Münsterberg: Das Lichtspiel: Eine Psychologische Studie und andere Schriften zum Kino (Wien: Synema, 1996) and Film und Stereotyp: eine Herausforderung für das Kino und die Filmtheorie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2006). John Sedgwick is Professor of Film Economics at London Metropolitan University. Recently, he has been conducting research in Australia and New Zealand, as part of a project about the ‘Reach of Hollywood in the English speaking World’. He is also working on a theory of film consumer risk. Publications include: Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000) and (as editor, with Michael Pokorny) An Economic History of Film (London: Routledge, 2005). Harro Segeberg is Emeritus Professor of German Literature and Film Studies at the University of Hamburg. Publications include: Literatur im Medienzeitalter: Literatur, Technik und Medien seit 1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), (as editor, with Corinna Müller) Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895-1920): Entstehung, Etablierung, Differenzierung (Marburg: Schüren, 2008) and (as editor and co-author) Mediengeschichte des Films, 4 Vols (München: Fink 1996–2008). Ben Singer is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely on early cinema. Publications include: Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) and (as editor, with Charlie Keil) American Cinema of the 1910s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). Pelle Snickars is lecturer and head of research at the Swedish National Library. He has published on early cinema, media archives and the mediation of history. Relevant publications include: Svensk film och visuell masskultur 1900 (Stockholm: Aura Förlag, 2001) and (as editor, with Anders Ekström and Solveig Jülich) 1897: Mediehistorier kring Stockholmsutställningen (Stockholm: SLBA, 2006). Together with Patrick Vonderau, he is currently preparing the anthology A YouTube Reader. Michael Wedel is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on film history, German cinema and contemporary Hollywood cinema. Publications include: Der deutsche Musikfilm: Archäologie eines Genres 1914–1945 (München: edition text + kritik, 2007) and (as editor, with Malte Hagener and Johann N. Schmidt) Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Berlin: Bertz, 2004).

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Indiana University Press John Libbey Publishing

Chapter Title: Back Matter Book Title: Film 1900 Book Subtitle: Technology, Perception, Culture Book Editor(s): Annemone Ligensa, Klaus Kreimeier Published by: Indiana University Press, John Libbey Publishing. (2015) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzngg.23 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press, John Libbey Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film 1900

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Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture Edited by Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier

The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900, a period of rapid and profound cultural change. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explores the institutional and aesthetic characteristics of early cinema as a specific configuration of technology, perception and culture. It situates early cinema in trans-cultural developments, such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, but also addresses cultural differences in the process of modernization. Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture is an important reassessment of early cinema’s position in cultural history. [Cover photo: Heinrich Zille, in Erwartung des Monsters [Expecting the Monster], c. 1900]

Authors: Ian Christie; Scott Curtis; Thomas Elsaesser; Joseph Garncarz; Nicola Glaubitz; Tom Gunning; Andrea Haller; Frank Kessler; Andreas Killen; Klaus Kreimeier; Annemone Ligensa; Martin Loiperdinger; Henning Schmidgen; Jörg Schweinitz; John Sedgwick; Harro Segeberg; Ben Singer; Pelle Snickars; Michael Wedel Editors: Klaus Kreimeier was Professor of Media Studies as well as founder and co-head of the research project ‘Industrialisation of Perception’ at the University of Siegen. He has published widely on film history and film criticism, including The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999) Annemone Ligensa is a researcher in the project ‘Industrialization of Perception’ at the University of Siegen, and she is currently completing her PhD on the sensationalism of early cinema. Together with Joseph Garncarz, she has edited 24 Frames: The Cinema of Germany (London: Wallflower Press, forthcoming).

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