Immediately the terrain transformed: forests became houses,
villages
became deserts, lakes and ravines became charming meadows; and suddenly one could see bustling military personnel engaged in battle.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets.
In order to focus on and fix objects moving through space, such as people, there are two procedures: to shoot and to film.
In the principle of cinema resides mechanized death as it was invented in the nineteenth century: the death no longer of one's immediate opponent but of serial nonhumans.
Colt's revolver aimed at hordes of Indians, Gatling's or Maxim's machine-gun (at least that is what they had originally been de- signed to do) at aboriginal peoples.
33
With the chronophotographic gun, mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun anni- hilated the camera made immortal. During the war in Vietnam, U. S. Ma- rine Corps divisions were willing to engage in action and death only when TV crews from ABC, CBS, and NBC were on location. Film is an immea-
? Andre Malraux, Espoir.
surable expansion of the realms of the dead, during and even before bul- lets hit their targets. A single machine-gun (according to JUnger's obser- vation on Der Arbeiter) finishes off the fraternity-based heroism of entire Langemarck regiments of 1914;34 a single camera does the same with the dying scenes thereafter.
It was then only a matter of combining the procedures of shooting and filming to take Marey's brand name literally. The chronophotographic gun became reality in the cinema of artificial, that is, lethal, bird flights. Reconnaissance pilots of the First World War such as Richard Garros con- structed an on-board machine-gun whose barrel was pointed parallel to the axis of the propeller while they filmed its effects. 35 During the Second World War, which according to General von Fritsch was supposed to have been won by superior reconnaissance, "the construction of recording de- vices within aircraft yielded still better results. " Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, was "especially delighted that Inspector Tan- nenberg was successful in having developed a camera unit that could be built into fighter planes, Stukas, and other aircraft and that, synchronized with the weapon, made possible very impressive combat pictures. "36
As if targeting Inspector Tannenberg and his appropriate name,37 Pyn-
Film 125
? ? '7
Ernst Mach, freeze-frame photos of bullets.
Film 127
chon describes in Gravity's Rainbow "this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries-since Leibniz, in the process of in- venting calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. "38 That is how venerable (in strict accordance with Munsterberg) the prehistory of cinema is. But it makes a difference whether ballistic analysis appears on the paper of a mathematician or on celluloid. Only freeze-frame photographs of flying projectiles, developed in 1 8 8 5 by one no less than Ernst Mach, made visible all interferences, or moin? s, in the medium of the air. Only freeze-frame photographs run au- tomatically and as real-time analysis (since then, TV cameras have re- duced the processing time of pictures to near-zero). Which is why Inspec- tor Tannenberg's propaganda weapon still had or has a future: toward the end of the Second World War, when even 8. 8 millimeter anti-aircraft guns with their teams of operators were ineffective against the Allied carpet bombings of Germany, the first developments toward our strategic present took place-the search by technicians for weapons systems with auto- matic target searching. 39 The chronophotograph was made for that.
Built into aircraft, TV cameras or infrared sensors are no longer the owls of Minerva, lagging behind so-called real history like Hegel's nightly philosophy. The kinds of infinitesimal movement they process through in- tegration and differentiation are much more efficient: with servomotors electrically linked to a missile guidance system, they can hone in on the enemy target. Until camera and target, intercept missile and fighter air- craft, explode in a flash of lightning, a blitz.
Today's cruise missiles proceed in the same fashion, for they compare a built-in film of Europe's topography (from Hessia to Belarus, from Sicily to Ukraine) with their actual flight path in order to correct any possible deviations. Marey's chronophotographic gun has reached its target in all its senses. When a camera blows up two weapons systems simultaneously, and more elegantly than kamikaze pilots did, the analysis and synthesis of movement have become one.
At the end of Gravity's Rainbow, a V2-the first cruise missile in the history of warfare, developed at the Peenemunde Army Test Site-ex- plodes over the Orpheus movie theater in Los Angeles. In grandiose time axis manipulation, which a fictitious drug by the name of Oneirine grants the whole novel,40 the launch is correctly dated March 1945, but the rocket does not hit its target until 1970, when the novel was written. That is how interminably world wars go on, not least because of German- American technological transfer. The off-ground detonator of the V2
128 Film
kicks in, and a ton of Amatol, the rocket's payload, explodes. Shortly thereafter, the image on the screen dissolves, as if the projection bulb were blowing out, but only so that its orphic truth can shine forth. We, "old fans, who've always been at the movies," are finally reached by a film "we have not learned to see"41 but have been hankering after since Muybridge and Marey: the melding of cinema and war.
Nothing, therefore, prevented the weapons-system movie camera from aiming at humans as well. On the three fronts of war, disease, and crimi- nality-the maj or lines of combat of every invasion by media-serial pho- tography entered into everyday life in order to bring about new bodies.
As is widely known, during the First World War the barrels of ma- chine-guns moved away from the black, yellow, and red skins against which they had been developed and started aiming at white targets. Movie cameras, however, kept pace and experienced a boom that might have been a misuse of army property (as with AM radio). At any rate, Miinsterberg, who had to know about it, since he sought to prevent the outbreak of the German-American war in futile fireside chats with Presi- dent Wilson up to the very end (and who, for that reason, remains unac- knowledged by his colleagues at Harvard to this very day)42-Miinster- berg wrote in 19 16:
It is claimed that the producers in America disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and inter- feres too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the move- ments of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost disappeared, the moving picture man has inher- ited all his courage, patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure. 43
And as with the reporters, so with the stars of the new medium. Shortly after the trench war, when the Soul of the Cinema was in demand again, Dr. Walter Bloem, S. ]. , explained what was at the center of the sen- sationalism critiqued by Miinsterberg: "During the war, film actors busily studied the thousands of dead, the results of which we can now admire on the screen. "44
Since April 19 1 7, the founding days of radio entertainment for army radio operators as well, such studies had been resting on a solid founda- tion. The chiefs of the new Army High Command, Hindenburg and Lu-
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dendorff, were serious about total war, and for that reason (among oth- ers) they advanced to the top of Germany's film directors. What evolved in the Grand General Staff was a Bureau of Pictures and Film [BUFA; Bild- und Filmamt] "whose founding and mode of operation was kept rather secret. " Still, it is known that the bureau's "range of operations" included "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters, the placement of war reporters, . . . censoring all films to be imported and exported, as well as providing all censoring agencies with instructions from the governing military censorship authorities. "45
The way Ludendorff justified these changes is more than just memo- rable; it has made film history. A memo by the general quartermaster led via the chain of command to the founding of the UFA. As a major corpo- ration, UFA was to take over the classified assignments of the Bureau of Pictures and Film in a much more public and efficient way-from the end of the First World War until, as is widely known, the end of the Second:
Chief of the General Staff of the Army. HQ. 4 July 19 1 7 M. ]. No. 208SIP.
To the
Imperial War Ministry Berlin
The war has demonstrated the overwhelming power of images and films as a form of reconnaissance and persuasion. Unfortunately, our enemies have exploited their know-how in this area so thoroughly that we have suffered severe damage. Even for the more distant continuation of the war, film will not lose its significance as a political and military means of influence. Precisely for that reason, for a successful conclusion to the war it is absolutely imperative that film have a maximal effect in those areas where German intervention is still possible.
signed Ludendorff46
Thus, film as a means of reconnaissance and persuasion has been ex- plained, or reconnoitered, in the strictest (that is, military) sense of the term. The path leads, as with radio, from interception to reception and mass mediality. And Ludendorff donated 900 of his movie theaters at the front to this reception, making it possible to decode Lieutenant ]Unger's
Combat as Inner Experience.
Positional warfare prohibits inner experience in Goethean terms, that is, sensory substitutions between the lines of literature. In both his title and his subject, Junger announces a very different type of sensuousness: "When red life clashes against the black cliffs of death, what we get are sharp pictures composed of bright colors. . . . There is no time to read
I30 Film
one's Werther with teary eyes. "47 For media-technological reasons, poetry comes to an end in the trenches, those "pure brainmills": "This failure even appears to be a matter of writing," says a fellow officer and friend of Junger whose "intellectual faculties, in the daily rhythm between watch duty and sleep, gradually dwindle toward zero. " Which the troop leader and recipient of the Ordre pour Ie Merite demonstrates and con- firms with his telegram-style answer, "that this war is a chokehold on our literature. " 48
But ghosts, a. k. a. media, cannot die at all. Where one stops, another somewhere begins. Literature dies not in the no-man's-land between the trenches but in that of technological reproducibility. Again and again, Lieutenant Junger asserts how completely the inner experience of the bat- tle has become a matter of neurophysiology. After the "baptism by fire" of I9I4, soldiers had become "so cerebral that the landscape and the events, in retrospect, managed to escape from memory only as dark and dreamlike shadows. "49 Even more clearly, and in terms of radio: "Every brain, from the simplest to the most complicated, vibrated with the waves of the monstrous, which propagated itself over the landscape. "5o The war, even though "it was so palpable, and rested heavily, like lead, on our senses"-as when, for example, "an abandoned group traversed un- known territory under the canopy of night"-was hence and simultane- ously "perhaps only a phantasm of our brains. "51
Brain phantasms, however, "glowing visions"52 that "burden anxious brains"53 like the trenches: they exist only as the correlatives to techno- logical media. The soul becomes a neurophysiological apparatus only when the end of literature draws near. Hence, the "screams from the dark" that "touch the soul most immediately, . . . since all languages and poets, by contrast, are only stammerings," combine the "clamor of fight- ers" with "the automatic play of the barrel-organ. "54 And as with acoustics, so with the optics of war: "Once again, one's individual expe- rience, the individual, . . . was compressed, once again the colorful world rolled like a swift film through the brain. "55
In the days of the founding age of modern media, the neurologist Benedict described how the dying visualize their past as time-lapse pho- tography. Lieutenant Junger could do this without pseudomorphosis. Af- ter one of his "fourteen"56 war injuries, he was, for purposes of reconva- lescence, relocated to Douchy, a village and communications site in Flan- ders, "the headquarters of the 73d [light-infantry regiment]. "57 "There was a reading room, a cafe, and later even a cinema in a large barn skill- fully converted. "58
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Only in Storm of Steel, his fact-based Diary of a German Storm- Troop Officer, does JUnger speak of the BUFA and its work: "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters," and so on. In Combat as Inner Experience, this hymn to the trench worker, he does not so much ignore media technology as translate its effects expres- sionistically. Writing itself relocates in the projection room of Douchy. That is why and why alone "the blossoms of the world, blinding and be- numbing, cities on waters of light, southern coasts where blue waves washed against the shore, women cast in satin, queens of boulevards," and the whole range of feature-film archives of inner experiences, " opened themselves" up to the "wandering brains"59 of soldiers in the trenches, even in their darkest moments of sensory deprivation.
One year before the outbreak of the war, Kurth Pinthus's Movie Book announced: "One has to get used to the thought that kitsch will never be eliminated from the world of humans. After we've been trying for decades to get rid of kitsch in the theater, it resurfaces in cinema. And one is led to believe that the masses have found the kitsch expelled from the stage somewhere else. "60
In a world war, for example: "All hearts pound with excitement when the armies of soldiers line up for battle with desperately harsh faces; when grenades burst, releasing a shower of smoke; and when the camera relentlessly traverses the battlefield, ingesting the stiff and muti- lated bodies of senselessly killed warriors. "61
A prophecy that Junger, the mythic war reporter, realizes or recog- nizes. To recognize combat as an inner experience means (following Lu- dendorff) understanding that the use of film "in those areas where Ger- man intervention is still possible" is "absolutely imperative . . . for a suc- cessful conclusion to the war. " For although historical prose suggests, as is widely known, that the other side won, Junger's camera style drives for- ward German attacks again and again, only to freeze the continuation of history or the movies in a last still. In the final analysis, such a film trick becomes possible simply because in mechanized warfare, machine-gun operators kill without seeing any corpses,62 and storm troopers-Luden- dorff's newly formed precursors to the blitzkrieg63-storm without seeing into enemy trenches.
That is why the British, when their attack tears Junger out of his filmic "castle in the air," appear only "for one second . . . like a vision en- graved . . . on my eyes. "64 That is why the novel succeeds in letting its end, its goal and wish fulfillment-namely, the failed Ludendorff offen- sive of "March 21, 1918"65-succeed in the world of hallucination. As a
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camera shot, and after "an eternity in the trenches,"66 an attack is noth- ing short of redemption:
Only rarely does the enemy appear to us . . . in flesh and blood, even though we are separated only by a narrow, torn-up field strip. We've been hunkering down in the trenches for weeks and months, swarms of projectiles showering down upon us, surrounded by thunderstorms. It happens that we almost forget we are fight- ing against human beings. The enemy manifests itself as the unfolding of a gigan- tic, impersonal power, as fate that thrusts its fist into the unseen.
When we storm forward and climb out of the trenches, and we see the empty, unknown land in front of us where death goes about its business between flaring columns of smoke, it appears as if a new dimension has opened up to us. Then we suddenly see up close, in camouflage coats and in faces covered with mud like a ghostly apparition, what awaits us in the land of the dead: the enemy. That is an unforgettable moment.
How differently one had envisioned the scene. The blooming edge of a for- est, a flowery meadow, and guns banging into the spring. Death as a flurrying back and forth between the two trench lines of twenty-year-olds. Dark blood on green blades of grass, bayonets in the morning light, trumpets and flags, a happy, shimmering dance. 67
But contemporary technologies of the body have done their duty, in military as well as choreographic terms. When war and cinema coincide, a communications zone becomes the front, the medium of propaganda becomes perception, and the movie theater of Douchy the scheme or schemes for an otherwise invisible enemy. "When our storm signals flash across, [the English] get ready for a wrestling match about bits and pieces of trenches, forests, and the edge of villages. But when we clash in the haze of fire and smoke, then we become one, then we become two parts of one force, fused into one body. "68 Lieutenant Junger meets his imagi- nary other, as Lacan will define it in 193 6: as a mirror image that might restore the body of the soldier, dismembered fourteen times, back to wholeness. 69 If only were there no war and the other not a doppelganger. For "all cruelty, all the compilation of the most ingenious brutalities, can- not fill a human being with as much horror as the momentary apparition of his mirror image appearing in front of him, [with] all the fiery marks of prehistory reflected in his distorted face. "70
]Unger's film breaks off at precisely this image, long before Gravity's Rainbow ends in the blackout of a real or filmed rocket hit above Uni- versal Studios of California. For once the enemy was recognized as a dop- pelganger, "then, in the last fire, the dark curtain of horror may well have
? Film I33
lifted in the brains, but what was behind, lying in wait, the rigid mouth could no longer speak. "71
Ludendorff and Jiinger's falling storm troopers are silent, either be- cause (following a hermeneutic tautology) they are falling, or because (following a media-technological analysis) their a priori is the silent film. Now, however, we have war films with sound that can spell out the puz- zle behind the dark curtain of horror. What was lying in wait were first of all facts that Jiinger systematically bypassed: the failure of the Luden- dorff offensive, the retreat to the Siegfried position, and capitulation. Sec- ond, and more horrific still, the film doppelganger harbored the possibil- ity of fiction. A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible en- emies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the novel about the Second World War itself, GI von Held asks celebrated film director Gerhardt von Gall (alias Springer, Lubitsch, Pabst, etc. ) about the fate of a German rocket technologist who had fallen into the hands of the Red Army:
"But what if they did shoot him ? "
"No. They weren't supposed to. "
"Springer. This ain't the fucking movies now, come on. "
"Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday,
when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then. . . "72
Total use of media instead of total literacy: sound film and video cam- eras as mass entertainment liquidate the real event. In Storm of Steel no- body except for the diary keeper survives, in Gravity's Rainbow all the people pronounced dead return, even the rocket technician of Peene- munde. Under the influence of the fictitious drug Oneirine, the writing of world-war novels turns into movie fiction.
It is widely known that war-from the sandbox models of the Prus- sian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans-has become increasingly simulable. "But there, too," as these same general staffs wisely recognized, "the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy cannot 'be factored in realistically. "'73 Friedlaender, media-techno- logically as always, has drawn from this the daring, inverted conclusion: for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.
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SALOMa FRIEDLAENDER, "FATA MORGANA MACHINE" (CA. 1920)
For many years Professor Pschorr had been preoccupied with one of the most interesting problems of film: his ideal was to achieve the optical repro- duction of nature, art, and fantasy through a stereoscopic projection appa- ratus that would place its three-dimensional constructs into space without the aid of a projection screen. Up to this point, film and other forms of pho- tography had been pursued only in one-eyed fashion. Pschorr used stereo- scopic double lenses everywhere and, eventually, indeed achieved three- dimensional constructs that were detached from the surface of the projec- tion screen. When he had come that close to his ideal, he approached the Minister of War to lecture him about it. " But my dear Professor," the Min- ister smiled, "what has your apparatus got to do with our technology of maneuvers and war ? " The Professor looked at him with astonishment and imperceptibly shook his inventive head. It was incredible to him that the Minister did not have the foresight to recognize how important that appara- tus was destined to become in times of war and peace. "Dear Minister, " he insisted, "would you permit me to take some shots of the maneuver so that you can convince yourself of the advantages of my apparatus ? " "I'd rather
not," the Minister contemplated, "but you are trustworthy. You know the dangerous article on high treason, of course, and will surely keep the se- cret. " He granted the Professor unlimited access. A couple of weeks after the maneuver, all the generals gathered in open terrain that was in part rolling, mountainous, and wooded, and that contained several large ponds and ravines, slopes, and a couple of villages. "First, dear Minister and hon- ored generals, allow me to tell you that the whole landscape, including our own bodies, appears as nothing but a single, purely optical phantasmagoria. What is purely optical in it I will make disappear by superimposing projec- tions of other things onto it. " He variously combined beams of floodlights and switched on a film reel, which began to run.
Immediately the terrain transformed: forests became houses, villages became deserts, lakes and ravines became charming meadows; and suddenly one could see bustling military personnel engaged in battle. Of course, as they were stepping or riding into a meadow, they disappeared into a pond or a ravine. Indeed, even the troops themselves were frequently only optical illusions, so that real troops could no longer distinguish them from fake ones, and hence
? Film 135
engaged in involuntary deceptions. Artillery lines appeared as pure optical illusions. "Since the possibility exists of combining, precisely and simultane- ously, optical with acoustic effects, these visible but untouchable cannons can boom as well, making the illusion perfect," said Pschorr. "By the way, this invention is of course also useful for peaceful purposes. From now on, however, it will be very dangerous to distinguish things that are only visible from touchable ones. But life will become all the more interesting for it. " Following this he let a bomber squadron appear on the horizon. Well, the bombs were dropped, but they did their terrible damage only for the eye. Strangely enough, the Minister of War in the end decided against purchas- ing the apparatus. Full of anger, he claimed that war would become an im- possibility that way. When the somewhat overly humanistic Pschorr exalted that effect, the Minister erupted: "You cannot turn to the Minister of War to put a dreadful end to war. That falls under the purview of my colleague, the Minister of Culture. " As the Minister of Culture prepared to buy the apparatus, his plans were vetoed by the Minister of Finance. In brief: the state was unwilling to buy. Now the film corporation (the largest film trust) helped itself. Ever since this moment, film has become all-powerful in the world; but only through optical means. It is, quite simply, nature once again, in all its visibility and audibility. When a storm is brewing, for exam- ple, it is unclear whether this storm is only optically real or a real one through and through. Abnossah Pschorr has been exercising arbitrary tech- nological power over the fata morgana, so that even the Orient fell into confusion when a recent fata morgana produced by solely technical means-conjuring Berlin and Potsdam for desert nomads-was taken for real. Pschorr rents out every desired landscape to innkeepers. Surrounding Kulick's Hotel zur Wehmut these days is the Vierwaldstatter Lake. Herr v. Ohnehin enjoys his purely optical spouse. Mullack the proletarian resides in a purely optical palace, and billionaires protect their castles through their optical conversion into shacks.
Not too long ago, a doppelganger factory was established. . . . In the not too distant future, there will be whole cities made of light; entirely dif- ferent constellations not only in the planetarium, but everywhere in nature as well. Pschorr predicts that we will also be able to have technological con- trol over touch in a similar way: not until then will radio traffic with real bodies set in, which means not just film but life, and which will leave far behind all traffic technologies . . .
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The Minister of War's question about what Pschorr's apparatus has to do with the technology of maneuvers and war is the only fiction in Fried- laender's text. Even in its experimental prehistory, that is, even before it became cinema, film conditioned new bodies. But ministers of war were in touch with current developments.
In 1 89 1 , Georges Demeny, Marey's assistant and anatomist at the In- stitute, began work on his Photography of Speech. Initially, his purpose in conducting this strange exercise was to advance the breakdown of dis- course into separate subroutines. In his experiments, motoric and optic data were to be on an equal footing with the sensory and acoustic data derived from Edison's phonograph. And Marey's silent chronophotograph was the perfect instrument for their storage.
Hence a serial camera with shutter speeds in the milliseconds was aimed at Demeny himself, who adhered to the honor-common during the founding age of modern media-of performing simultaneously as ex- perimenter and subject, priest and victim of the apparatus. A human mouth opened, expectorated the syllables "Vi-ve la Fran-cel " and closed again, while the camera dissected, enlarged, stored, and immortalized its successive positions, including the "fine play of all facial muscles," in ? omponent parts with a frequency of 16 Hz. To contemporaries, "many of these oral movements appeared exaggerated because our eye cannot perceive fleeting movements such as these, but the camera makes them visible by bringing motion to a standstill. "74 But that was precisely the point. Edison was rumored to have been enamored of the enlarged shots of his colleague's mouth. 75
Based on the data of a freeze-framed patriotism, Demeny (fascinated by physical impairments, as is every media technologist) first revolution- ized instruction for deaf and mute people. Patients of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were asked to synthesize acoustically the mouth positions film had analyzed optically. Then they could-in "oral examinations" that proved sensationaF6-scream "Vi-ve la Fran-cel" without ever hearing a syllable. In the material battles soon to come, when the Joffre divisions stormed and died like flies, self-perception was hardly necessary anymore.
"As early as 1 892," Demeny "envisioned all the procedures that have since been in use in so-called cinematographic apparatuses and which are nothing but reversible chronophotographs. "77 One only would have had to follow the principles of the revolver and supplement a rotating photo storage device with a rotating photo projector. But even though Demeny was envious of the Lumieres' success, research into slow motion was more important than the illusions of feature films. He remained faithful
? Demeny says, "Vi-ve la Fran-ee! "
? I38 Film
to the chronophotographic gun and moved from studying single patriotic mouths to masses of patriotic legs. On official assignment from the French army, he filmed the traditional goose step in order to optimize it. 78
What physiologists ofart (of all people) announced in I897 as a new feedback loop between psychophysics, maneuver drills, and the uncon- scious was realized to the letter. Regarding the "condition we call 'think- ing,'" Georg Hirth wrote:
That condition as well becomes automatized following frequent repetitIOn; namely, when optical, acoustic, and other stimuli-which effect every closing ap- perception-recur in roughly periodic intervals and in a known intensity. Recall, for example, the activity of a marksman in a shooting gallery. At the beginning of his service, the man is thoroughly infused with the condition of conscious and prospective attentiveness: gradually, however, he becomes sure and relaxed; after each bullet hits he steps mechanically up front to show the mark. His attention can go for a walk-it returns to business only if the impact is delayed long enough for his automatic-rhythmic feeling to subside. The same is true for the recruit dur- ing his exercises. Indeed, the whole debate surrounding the length of active mili- tary service revolves around the question: how long does it take to automatize the military (moral as well as technical) memory structure of the average twenty-year- old in such a way that the apparatus does not fail in the real-life event and that the attention (attentiveness)-which every man must be equipped with at any time in times of war and peace-is not absorbed by mindless service? 79
Mechanization Takes Command-Sigfried Giedion could not have come up with a better title for a book that retraces the path from Marey's chronophotographic gun via modern art to military-industrial ergonom- ics. The automatized weapons of world wars yet to come demanded sim- ilarly automatized, average people as "apparatuses" whose motions-in terms of both precision and speed-could only be controlled by filmic slow motion. Since they were introduced during revolutionary civil wars, exclamations such as "Vive la France! " had nurtured the death drive only psychologically and had left the reaction time at the gun to a "thinking" that exists only in quotation marks for physiologists of art and film.
Storm-troop leaders such as Junger, however, have since Ludendorff been trained to work in time frames below any threshold of perception. The apparition of the enemy appears to them only "for one second," barely perceptible, but measurable. As Junger notes immediately prior to the Ludendorff offensive, "phosphoric digits are glowing on the watch on my wrist. Watch digits, an unusual word. 80 It is 5:30. We'll begin to storm in one hour. "81 Two common items of today, trench coats (or, literally, "coats for the trenches") and watches with second hands, are the prod-
? ? ? ? Giacomo Balla, Ragazza che carre sui balcone (study), I9 I 2 .
E. J. Marey, "Amplitudes of the Leg While Walking," before I885.
ucts of the First World War. 82 In the standardized jump of the second hand, film transport imposes its rhythm upon average people. No wonder that storm-troop leader JUnger hallucinated the body of the enemy-that unreality hidden for months in the trenches-in the medium of film. The opponent could only be a film doppelganger. Demeny, we recall, had stan- dardized the movements of a whole army through chronophotography.
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And Professor Pschorr, as always, only had to do his excessive share to transform the "bodies" of soldiers and the entire landscape of their maneuver into "a single, purely optical phantasmagoria," which, more- over, could be combined precisely and simultaneously with acoustic effects.
A fata morgana machine that can now be had around the globe. Without war, simply by paying an admission fee. For mechanization has also taken command over so-called times of leisure and peace. Night af- ter night, every discotheque repeats Demeny's goose-step analyses. The stroboscopic effect at the beginning of film has left physiological labs and now chops up dancers twenty times per second into film images of them- selves. The barrage of fire has left the major lines of combat and these days echoes from security systems-including their precise and simulta- neous combination with optical effects. Demeny's photography of speech continues as a videoclip, his "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " as a salad of syllables:
"Dance the Mussolini! Dance the Adolf Hitler! " 83
Deaf, mute, and blind, bodies are brought up to the reaction speed of
World War n+I, as if housed in a gigantic simulation chamber. Comput- erized weapons systems are more demanding than automatized ones. If the joysticks of Atari video games make children illiterate, President Rea- gan welcomed them for just that reason: as a training ground for future bomber pilots. Every culture has its zones of preparation that fuse lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on. Our discos are preparing our youths for a retaliatory strike.
War has always already been madness, film's other subject. Body movements, as they are provoked by the stroboscopes of today's dis- cotheques, went by a psychopathological name a century ago: a "large
hysterical arc. " Wondrous ecstasies, twitchings without end, circus-like contortions of extremities were reason enough to call them up with all the means of hypnosis and auscultation. A lecture hall full of medical stu- dents, as yet all male, was allowed to watch the master, Charcot, and his female patients.
A handwritten note [in the as yet unpublished archives of the Salpetrierel gives an account of the session of November 25, 1 877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman's ovaries. He withdraws the baton, and there is a fresh at- tack, which he accelerates by administering inhalations of amyl nitrate. The af- flicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in words that are devoid of metaphor: " G. is taken away and her delirium continues. " 84
? The Salpetriere makes iconographs o f its hysteria.
But this performance was not, or not any longer, the truth about hys- teria: what was produced by psychopathic media was not allowed simply to disappear in secret memories or documents. Technological media had to be able to store and reproduce it. Charcot, who transformed the Salpetriere from a dilapidated insane asylum into a fully equipped re- search lab shortly after his appointment, ordered his chief technician in 1 8 83 to start filming. Whereupon Albert Londe, later known as the con-
structor of the Rolleiflex camera,85 anatomized (strictly following Muy- bridge and Marey) the "large hysterical are" with serial cameras. A young physiology assistant from Vienna visiting the Salpetriere was watching. 86 But Dr. Freud did not make the historical connection between films of hysteria and psychoanalysis. As in the case of phonography, he clung (in the face of other media) to the verbal medium and its new decomposition into letters.
For this purpose, Freud first stills the pictures that the bodies of his female patients produce: he puts them on his couch in the Berggasse. Then a talking cure is deployed against the images seen or hallucinated. With- out mentioning the gender difference between male obsessive-neurosis and female hysteria, in Studies on Hysteria he observes:
When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a "visual" type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions.
Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with the description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into
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words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the di- rection in which our work is to proceed. "Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared ? " "Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail. " "Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or some- thing will occur to you in connection with it. " When this work has been accom- plished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up an- other picture. On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain ob- stinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid. 87
Naturally, such sequences of images in hysterics or visually oriented people are an inner film: as in the case of psychoanalytical dream theory, a "pathogenic recollection," notwithstanding the patient's "forms of re- sistance and his pretexts, " provokes its optical "reproduction. "88 When Otto Rank subjected The Student of Prague, as the second German au- teur film, to psychoanalytical examination in 1914, he observed that "cinematography . . . in numerous ways reminds us of dream-work. " Which, conversely, meant that internal images were modeled, as with hys- terics, after the "shadowy, fleeting, but impressive scenes" of film. Con- sequently, "the technique of psychoanalysis," which "generally aims at uncovering deeply buried and significant psychic material, on occasion proceeding from the manifest surface evidence, . . . need not shy away from even some random and banal subject"-such as "the film-drama"-
"if the matter at hand exhibits psychological problems whose sources and implications are not obvious. "89
But this rather filmic uncovering, the return from the cinema to the soul, from manifest surface or celluloid skin to unconscious latency, from a technological to a psychic apparatus, only replaces images with words. While optical data in film are storable, they are also "shadowy, fleeting": one cannot look them up, as with books (or today's videotapes). This in- tangibility governs Rank's methodology. "Those whose concern is with literature may be reassured by the fact that the scenarist of this film, The Student of Prague, is an author currently in vogue and that he has ad- hered to prominent patterns, the effectiveness of which has been tested by time. "90 Which is why psychoanalysis (to paraphrase Freud) basically im- itates the doppelganger film by translating it into words. Rank's discus- sion of the doppelganger quotes all available sources from I 800 on and turns movies back into literature. 91
For a talking cure, nothing else is left to do. Still, after attending
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Londe's filmings of hysteria, Freud did just the opposite with it. Literally, psychoanalysis means chopping up an internal film, in steps that are as methodical as they are discrete, until all of its images have disappeared. They break to pieces one by one, simply because female patients have to translate their visions into depictions or descriptions. In the end the me- dium of the psychoanalyst triumphs, because he stills bodily movements and slays the remaining, internal sightings like so many ghosts or Dracu- las. When Freud "unlocks images," he does so not to store them, as Char- cot does, but to decode the puzzles of their signifiers. Thus, the emergence particularly of nonverbal storage technologies around 1900 leads to a dif- ferentiation that establishes discourse as a medium among media. Freud the writer is still willing to admit the competition of the phonograph, be- cause gramophony (despite all its differences with the talking cure and its case-study novels) deals with words. The competition of silent film, how- ever, Freud does not even acknowledge. And even if Abraham and Sachs operate as "psychoanalytical collaborators" on a 1926 project that makes The Mysteries of the Unconscious into a film, and hence teaches contem- poraries "the necessities of modern-day education without pain and job training,"92 Freud himself flatly denies an offer from Hollywood.
This differentiation of storage media decides the fate of madness. Psychoanalytical discourse, which, following Lacan's thesis, is a conse- quence and displacement of hysterical discourse, translates the most beau- tiful pathology into the symbolic. At the same time, the serial photogra- phy of psychiatry, understood as the trace detection it is, stores the real along the "great hysterical arc. " Londe's still shots of each individual twitch and ecstasy travel (due to a lack of opportunities for projecting films) into the multivolume Iconography of the Salphriere. There they rest, but only to emigrate henceforth from the real and to return to the imaginary, for which Freud had no use. For although the "great hysterical arc" can no longer be found in the lecture halls of today's medical schools, the countless jugendstil images of women, with their bows and twists, can only derive from this iconographie photographique. 93 Works of art of the jugendstil did not simply suffer from the age of their techno- logical reproducibility; in their style, they themselves reproduced mea- sured data and hence practiced the precise application Muybridge had as- cribed from the very beginning to his study of Animal Loco? otion.
Hysteria, however, became as omnipresent as it became fleeting. In the real, it gave rise to archives of trace detection that returned in the imaginary of the paintings of the jugendstil; in the symbolic, it gave rise to a science that returned in the female hysterics of Hofmannsthal's dra-
I44 Film
? The Jugendstil makes iconographs of its hysteria.
mas. 94 One reproduction chased the other. With the result that madness might not take place under conditions of high technology. It becomes, like war, a simulacrum.
A successor to Londe, Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bonn, almost managed to figure out this ruse. His treatise on Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry identified only one appropriate medium for the "wealth of hysterical motoric mal- functions": filming. In a manner "more visual and complete than the best
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description" (and presumably photographs as well),95 technological me- dia reproduced psychopathological ones. But since serial photographs could be projected as films by 1909, Hennes went one step beyond Londe. Not until psychiatry was in a position "to convert a rapid succession of movements into a slow one through cinematographic reproduction" was it possible to see things "whose precise observation is, in real life, hardly or not at all possible. "96 As if cinema had enlarged the madness (of both patients and physicians) through the whole realm of unreality and fiction; as if Hennes had, in vague anticipation of McLuhan, understood the me- dium as the message. For "in all cases . . . it was typical that distraction from the symptoms of the disease and the suspension of external stimuli were sufficient to reduce, or almost completely eliminate, [hysterical] movements. By contrast, it is enough to draw attention to phenomena, or for the physician to examine the patient, even just step up to him, in or- der for dysfunctions to appear with greater intensity. "97
That is how psychiatry-whose attention had lately been running on automatic pilot, that is, filmically-itself discovered Charcot's simple se- cret, long before Foucault ever did; namely, that every test produces what it allegedly only reproduces. According to Dr. Hennes, who is fearless about contradicting himself and could even describe the doctor's attention as a contraindication after recommending it a moment before, it is quite likely that there would be no madness without filming it:
How often does it happen to the professor that a patient fails during a lecture, that a manic suddenly changes his mood, a catatonic suddenly fails to perform his stereotyped movements. Although he executed his pathological movements with- out disturbance on the ward, the changed environment of the lecture hall has the effect of not letting him produce his peculiarities-so that he does not display precisely what the professor wanted him to demonstrate. Other patients show their interesting oddities "maliciously," only when there are no lectures, continu- ing education courses, and so on.
With the chronophotographic gun, mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun anni- hilated the camera made immortal. During the war in Vietnam, U. S. Ma- rine Corps divisions were willing to engage in action and death only when TV crews from ABC, CBS, and NBC were on location. Film is an immea-
? Andre Malraux, Espoir.
surable expansion of the realms of the dead, during and even before bul- lets hit their targets. A single machine-gun (according to JUnger's obser- vation on Der Arbeiter) finishes off the fraternity-based heroism of entire Langemarck regiments of 1914;34 a single camera does the same with the dying scenes thereafter.
It was then only a matter of combining the procedures of shooting and filming to take Marey's brand name literally. The chronophotographic gun became reality in the cinema of artificial, that is, lethal, bird flights. Reconnaissance pilots of the First World War such as Richard Garros con- structed an on-board machine-gun whose barrel was pointed parallel to the axis of the propeller while they filmed its effects. 35 During the Second World War, which according to General von Fritsch was supposed to have been won by superior reconnaissance, "the construction of recording de- vices within aircraft yielded still better results. " Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, was "especially delighted that Inspector Tan- nenberg was successful in having developed a camera unit that could be built into fighter planes, Stukas, and other aircraft and that, synchronized with the weapon, made possible very impressive combat pictures. "36
As if targeting Inspector Tannenberg and his appropriate name,37 Pyn-
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? ? '7
Ernst Mach, freeze-frame photos of bullets.
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chon describes in Gravity's Rainbow "this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries-since Leibniz, in the process of in- venting calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. "38 That is how venerable (in strict accordance with Munsterberg) the prehistory of cinema is. But it makes a difference whether ballistic analysis appears on the paper of a mathematician or on celluloid. Only freeze-frame photographs of flying projectiles, developed in 1 8 8 5 by one no less than Ernst Mach, made visible all interferences, or moin? s, in the medium of the air. Only freeze-frame photographs run au- tomatically and as real-time analysis (since then, TV cameras have re- duced the processing time of pictures to near-zero). Which is why Inspec- tor Tannenberg's propaganda weapon still had or has a future: toward the end of the Second World War, when even 8. 8 millimeter anti-aircraft guns with their teams of operators were ineffective against the Allied carpet bombings of Germany, the first developments toward our strategic present took place-the search by technicians for weapons systems with auto- matic target searching. 39 The chronophotograph was made for that.
Built into aircraft, TV cameras or infrared sensors are no longer the owls of Minerva, lagging behind so-called real history like Hegel's nightly philosophy. The kinds of infinitesimal movement they process through in- tegration and differentiation are much more efficient: with servomotors electrically linked to a missile guidance system, they can hone in on the enemy target. Until camera and target, intercept missile and fighter air- craft, explode in a flash of lightning, a blitz.
Today's cruise missiles proceed in the same fashion, for they compare a built-in film of Europe's topography (from Hessia to Belarus, from Sicily to Ukraine) with their actual flight path in order to correct any possible deviations. Marey's chronophotographic gun has reached its target in all its senses. When a camera blows up two weapons systems simultaneously, and more elegantly than kamikaze pilots did, the analysis and synthesis of movement have become one.
At the end of Gravity's Rainbow, a V2-the first cruise missile in the history of warfare, developed at the Peenemunde Army Test Site-ex- plodes over the Orpheus movie theater in Los Angeles. In grandiose time axis manipulation, which a fictitious drug by the name of Oneirine grants the whole novel,40 the launch is correctly dated March 1945, but the rocket does not hit its target until 1970, when the novel was written. That is how interminably world wars go on, not least because of German- American technological transfer. The off-ground detonator of the V2
128 Film
kicks in, and a ton of Amatol, the rocket's payload, explodes. Shortly thereafter, the image on the screen dissolves, as if the projection bulb were blowing out, but only so that its orphic truth can shine forth. We, "old fans, who've always been at the movies," are finally reached by a film "we have not learned to see"41 but have been hankering after since Muybridge and Marey: the melding of cinema and war.
Nothing, therefore, prevented the weapons-system movie camera from aiming at humans as well. On the three fronts of war, disease, and crimi- nality-the maj or lines of combat of every invasion by media-serial pho- tography entered into everyday life in order to bring about new bodies.
As is widely known, during the First World War the barrels of ma- chine-guns moved away from the black, yellow, and red skins against which they had been developed and started aiming at white targets. Movie cameras, however, kept pace and experienced a boom that might have been a misuse of army property (as with AM radio). At any rate, Miinsterberg, who had to know about it, since he sought to prevent the outbreak of the German-American war in futile fireside chats with Presi- dent Wilson up to the very end (and who, for that reason, remains unac- knowledged by his colleagues at Harvard to this very day)42-Miinster- berg wrote in 19 16:
It is claimed that the producers in America disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and inter- feres too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the move- ments of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost disappeared, the moving picture man has inher- ited all his courage, patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure. 43
And as with the reporters, so with the stars of the new medium. Shortly after the trench war, when the Soul of the Cinema was in demand again, Dr. Walter Bloem, S. ]. , explained what was at the center of the sen- sationalism critiqued by Miinsterberg: "During the war, film actors busily studied the thousands of dead, the results of which we can now admire on the screen. "44
Since April 19 1 7, the founding days of radio entertainment for army radio operators as well, such studies had been resting on a solid founda- tion. The chiefs of the new Army High Command, Hindenburg and Lu-
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dendorff, were serious about total war, and for that reason (among oth- ers) they advanced to the top of Germany's film directors. What evolved in the Grand General Staff was a Bureau of Pictures and Film [BUFA; Bild- und Filmamt] "whose founding and mode of operation was kept rather secret. " Still, it is known that the bureau's "range of operations" included "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters, the placement of war reporters, . . . censoring all films to be imported and exported, as well as providing all censoring agencies with instructions from the governing military censorship authorities. "45
The way Ludendorff justified these changes is more than just memo- rable; it has made film history. A memo by the general quartermaster led via the chain of command to the founding of the UFA. As a major corpo- ration, UFA was to take over the classified assignments of the Bureau of Pictures and Film in a much more public and efficient way-from the end of the First World War until, as is widely known, the end of the Second:
Chief of the General Staff of the Army. HQ. 4 July 19 1 7 M. ]. No. 208SIP.
To the
Imperial War Ministry Berlin
The war has demonstrated the overwhelming power of images and films as a form of reconnaissance and persuasion. Unfortunately, our enemies have exploited their know-how in this area so thoroughly that we have suffered severe damage. Even for the more distant continuation of the war, film will not lose its significance as a political and military means of influence. Precisely for that reason, for a successful conclusion to the war it is absolutely imperative that film have a maximal effect in those areas where German intervention is still possible.
signed Ludendorff46
Thus, film as a means of reconnaissance and persuasion has been ex- plained, or reconnoitered, in the strictest (that is, military) sense of the term. The path leads, as with radio, from interception to reception and mass mediality. And Ludendorff donated 900 of his movie theaters at the front to this reception, making it possible to decode Lieutenant ]Unger's
Combat as Inner Experience.
Positional warfare prohibits inner experience in Goethean terms, that is, sensory substitutions between the lines of literature. In both his title and his subject, Junger announces a very different type of sensuousness: "When red life clashes against the black cliffs of death, what we get are sharp pictures composed of bright colors. . . . There is no time to read
I30 Film
one's Werther with teary eyes. "47 For media-technological reasons, poetry comes to an end in the trenches, those "pure brainmills": "This failure even appears to be a matter of writing," says a fellow officer and friend of Junger whose "intellectual faculties, in the daily rhythm between watch duty and sleep, gradually dwindle toward zero. " Which the troop leader and recipient of the Ordre pour Ie Merite demonstrates and con- firms with his telegram-style answer, "that this war is a chokehold on our literature. " 48
But ghosts, a. k. a. media, cannot die at all. Where one stops, another somewhere begins. Literature dies not in the no-man's-land between the trenches but in that of technological reproducibility. Again and again, Lieutenant Junger asserts how completely the inner experience of the bat- tle has become a matter of neurophysiology. After the "baptism by fire" of I9I4, soldiers had become "so cerebral that the landscape and the events, in retrospect, managed to escape from memory only as dark and dreamlike shadows. "49 Even more clearly, and in terms of radio: "Every brain, from the simplest to the most complicated, vibrated with the waves of the monstrous, which propagated itself over the landscape. "5o The war, even though "it was so palpable, and rested heavily, like lead, on our senses"-as when, for example, "an abandoned group traversed un- known territory under the canopy of night"-was hence and simultane- ously "perhaps only a phantasm of our brains. "51
Brain phantasms, however, "glowing visions"52 that "burden anxious brains"53 like the trenches: they exist only as the correlatives to techno- logical media. The soul becomes a neurophysiological apparatus only when the end of literature draws near. Hence, the "screams from the dark" that "touch the soul most immediately, . . . since all languages and poets, by contrast, are only stammerings," combine the "clamor of fight- ers" with "the automatic play of the barrel-organ. "54 And as with acoustics, so with the optics of war: "Once again, one's individual expe- rience, the individual, . . . was compressed, once again the colorful world rolled like a swift film through the brain. "55
In the days of the founding age of modern media, the neurologist Benedict described how the dying visualize their past as time-lapse pho- tography. Lieutenant Junger could do this without pseudomorphosis. Af- ter one of his "fourteen"56 war injuries, he was, for purposes of reconva- lescence, relocated to Douchy, a village and communications site in Flan- ders, "the headquarters of the 73d [light-infantry regiment]. "57 "There was a reading room, a cafe, and later even a cinema in a large barn skill- fully converted. "58
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Only in Storm of Steel, his fact-based Diary of a German Storm- Troop Officer, does JUnger speak of the BUFA and its work: "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters," and so on. In Combat as Inner Experience, this hymn to the trench worker, he does not so much ignore media technology as translate its effects expres- sionistically. Writing itself relocates in the projection room of Douchy. That is why and why alone "the blossoms of the world, blinding and be- numbing, cities on waters of light, southern coasts where blue waves washed against the shore, women cast in satin, queens of boulevards," and the whole range of feature-film archives of inner experiences, " opened themselves" up to the "wandering brains"59 of soldiers in the trenches, even in their darkest moments of sensory deprivation.
One year before the outbreak of the war, Kurth Pinthus's Movie Book announced: "One has to get used to the thought that kitsch will never be eliminated from the world of humans. After we've been trying for decades to get rid of kitsch in the theater, it resurfaces in cinema. And one is led to believe that the masses have found the kitsch expelled from the stage somewhere else. "60
In a world war, for example: "All hearts pound with excitement when the armies of soldiers line up for battle with desperately harsh faces; when grenades burst, releasing a shower of smoke; and when the camera relentlessly traverses the battlefield, ingesting the stiff and muti- lated bodies of senselessly killed warriors. "61
A prophecy that Junger, the mythic war reporter, realizes or recog- nizes. To recognize combat as an inner experience means (following Lu- dendorff) understanding that the use of film "in those areas where Ger- man intervention is still possible" is "absolutely imperative . . . for a suc- cessful conclusion to the war. " For although historical prose suggests, as is widely known, that the other side won, Junger's camera style drives for- ward German attacks again and again, only to freeze the continuation of history or the movies in a last still. In the final analysis, such a film trick becomes possible simply because in mechanized warfare, machine-gun operators kill without seeing any corpses,62 and storm troopers-Luden- dorff's newly formed precursors to the blitzkrieg63-storm without seeing into enemy trenches.
That is why the British, when their attack tears Junger out of his filmic "castle in the air," appear only "for one second . . . like a vision en- graved . . . on my eyes. "64 That is why the novel succeeds in letting its end, its goal and wish fulfillment-namely, the failed Ludendorff offen- sive of "March 21, 1918"65-succeed in the world of hallucination. As a
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camera shot, and after "an eternity in the trenches,"66 an attack is noth- ing short of redemption:
Only rarely does the enemy appear to us . . . in flesh and blood, even though we are separated only by a narrow, torn-up field strip. We've been hunkering down in the trenches for weeks and months, swarms of projectiles showering down upon us, surrounded by thunderstorms. It happens that we almost forget we are fight- ing against human beings. The enemy manifests itself as the unfolding of a gigan- tic, impersonal power, as fate that thrusts its fist into the unseen.
When we storm forward and climb out of the trenches, and we see the empty, unknown land in front of us where death goes about its business between flaring columns of smoke, it appears as if a new dimension has opened up to us. Then we suddenly see up close, in camouflage coats and in faces covered with mud like a ghostly apparition, what awaits us in the land of the dead: the enemy. That is an unforgettable moment.
How differently one had envisioned the scene. The blooming edge of a for- est, a flowery meadow, and guns banging into the spring. Death as a flurrying back and forth between the two trench lines of twenty-year-olds. Dark blood on green blades of grass, bayonets in the morning light, trumpets and flags, a happy, shimmering dance. 67
But contemporary technologies of the body have done their duty, in military as well as choreographic terms. When war and cinema coincide, a communications zone becomes the front, the medium of propaganda becomes perception, and the movie theater of Douchy the scheme or schemes for an otherwise invisible enemy. "When our storm signals flash across, [the English] get ready for a wrestling match about bits and pieces of trenches, forests, and the edge of villages. But when we clash in the haze of fire and smoke, then we become one, then we become two parts of one force, fused into one body. "68 Lieutenant Junger meets his imagi- nary other, as Lacan will define it in 193 6: as a mirror image that might restore the body of the soldier, dismembered fourteen times, back to wholeness. 69 If only were there no war and the other not a doppelganger. For "all cruelty, all the compilation of the most ingenious brutalities, can- not fill a human being with as much horror as the momentary apparition of his mirror image appearing in front of him, [with] all the fiery marks of prehistory reflected in his distorted face. "70
]Unger's film breaks off at precisely this image, long before Gravity's Rainbow ends in the blackout of a real or filmed rocket hit above Uni- versal Studios of California. For once the enemy was recognized as a dop- pelganger, "then, in the last fire, the dark curtain of horror may well have
? Film I33
lifted in the brains, but what was behind, lying in wait, the rigid mouth could no longer speak. "71
Ludendorff and Jiinger's falling storm troopers are silent, either be- cause (following a hermeneutic tautology) they are falling, or because (following a media-technological analysis) their a priori is the silent film. Now, however, we have war films with sound that can spell out the puz- zle behind the dark curtain of horror. What was lying in wait were first of all facts that Jiinger systematically bypassed: the failure of the Luden- dorff offensive, the retreat to the Siegfried position, and capitulation. Sec- ond, and more horrific still, the film doppelganger harbored the possibil- ity of fiction. A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible en- emies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the novel about the Second World War itself, GI von Held asks celebrated film director Gerhardt von Gall (alias Springer, Lubitsch, Pabst, etc. ) about the fate of a German rocket technologist who had fallen into the hands of the Red Army:
"But what if they did shoot him ? "
"No. They weren't supposed to. "
"Springer. This ain't the fucking movies now, come on. "
"Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday,
when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then. . . "72
Total use of media instead of total literacy: sound film and video cam- eras as mass entertainment liquidate the real event. In Storm of Steel no- body except for the diary keeper survives, in Gravity's Rainbow all the people pronounced dead return, even the rocket technician of Peene- munde. Under the influence of the fictitious drug Oneirine, the writing of world-war novels turns into movie fiction.
It is widely known that war-from the sandbox models of the Prus- sian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans-has become increasingly simulable. "But there, too," as these same general staffs wisely recognized, "the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy cannot 'be factored in realistically. "'73 Friedlaender, media-techno- logically as always, has drawn from this the daring, inverted conclusion: for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.
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SALOMa FRIEDLAENDER, "FATA MORGANA MACHINE" (CA. 1920)
For many years Professor Pschorr had been preoccupied with one of the most interesting problems of film: his ideal was to achieve the optical repro- duction of nature, art, and fantasy through a stereoscopic projection appa- ratus that would place its three-dimensional constructs into space without the aid of a projection screen. Up to this point, film and other forms of pho- tography had been pursued only in one-eyed fashion. Pschorr used stereo- scopic double lenses everywhere and, eventually, indeed achieved three- dimensional constructs that were detached from the surface of the projec- tion screen. When he had come that close to his ideal, he approached the Minister of War to lecture him about it. " But my dear Professor," the Min- ister smiled, "what has your apparatus got to do with our technology of maneuvers and war ? " The Professor looked at him with astonishment and imperceptibly shook his inventive head. It was incredible to him that the Minister did not have the foresight to recognize how important that appara- tus was destined to become in times of war and peace. "Dear Minister, " he insisted, "would you permit me to take some shots of the maneuver so that you can convince yourself of the advantages of my apparatus ? " "I'd rather
not," the Minister contemplated, "but you are trustworthy. You know the dangerous article on high treason, of course, and will surely keep the se- cret. " He granted the Professor unlimited access. A couple of weeks after the maneuver, all the generals gathered in open terrain that was in part rolling, mountainous, and wooded, and that contained several large ponds and ravines, slopes, and a couple of villages. "First, dear Minister and hon- ored generals, allow me to tell you that the whole landscape, including our own bodies, appears as nothing but a single, purely optical phantasmagoria. What is purely optical in it I will make disappear by superimposing projec- tions of other things onto it. " He variously combined beams of floodlights and switched on a film reel, which began to run.
Immediately the terrain transformed: forests became houses, villages became deserts, lakes and ravines became charming meadows; and suddenly one could see bustling military personnel engaged in battle. Of course, as they were stepping or riding into a meadow, they disappeared into a pond or a ravine. Indeed, even the troops themselves were frequently only optical illusions, so that real troops could no longer distinguish them from fake ones, and hence
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engaged in involuntary deceptions. Artillery lines appeared as pure optical illusions. "Since the possibility exists of combining, precisely and simultane- ously, optical with acoustic effects, these visible but untouchable cannons can boom as well, making the illusion perfect," said Pschorr. "By the way, this invention is of course also useful for peaceful purposes. From now on, however, it will be very dangerous to distinguish things that are only visible from touchable ones. But life will become all the more interesting for it. " Following this he let a bomber squadron appear on the horizon. Well, the bombs were dropped, but they did their terrible damage only for the eye. Strangely enough, the Minister of War in the end decided against purchas- ing the apparatus. Full of anger, he claimed that war would become an im- possibility that way. When the somewhat overly humanistic Pschorr exalted that effect, the Minister erupted: "You cannot turn to the Minister of War to put a dreadful end to war. That falls under the purview of my colleague, the Minister of Culture. " As the Minister of Culture prepared to buy the apparatus, his plans were vetoed by the Minister of Finance. In brief: the state was unwilling to buy. Now the film corporation (the largest film trust) helped itself. Ever since this moment, film has become all-powerful in the world; but only through optical means. It is, quite simply, nature once again, in all its visibility and audibility. When a storm is brewing, for exam- ple, it is unclear whether this storm is only optically real or a real one through and through. Abnossah Pschorr has been exercising arbitrary tech- nological power over the fata morgana, so that even the Orient fell into confusion when a recent fata morgana produced by solely technical means-conjuring Berlin and Potsdam for desert nomads-was taken for real. Pschorr rents out every desired landscape to innkeepers. Surrounding Kulick's Hotel zur Wehmut these days is the Vierwaldstatter Lake. Herr v. Ohnehin enjoys his purely optical spouse. Mullack the proletarian resides in a purely optical palace, and billionaires protect their castles through their optical conversion into shacks.
Not too long ago, a doppelganger factory was established. . . . In the not too distant future, there will be whole cities made of light; entirely dif- ferent constellations not only in the planetarium, but everywhere in nature as well. Pschorr predicts that we will also be able to have technological con- trol over touch in a similar way: not until then will radio traffic with real bodies set in, which means not just film but life, and which will leave far behind all traffic technologies . . .
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The Minister of War's question about what Pschorr's apparatus has to do with the technology of maneuvers and war is the only fiction in Fried- laender's text. Even in its experimental prehistory, that is, even before it became cinema, film conditioned new bodies. But ministers of war were in touch with current developments.
In 1 89 1 , Georges Demeny, Marey's assistant and anatomist at the In- stitute, began work on his Photography of Speech. Initially, his purpose in conducting this strange exercise was to advance the breakdown of dis- course into separate subroutines. In his experiments, motoric and optic data were to be on an equal footing with the sensory and acoustic data derived from Edison's phonograph. And Marey's silent chronophotograph was the perfect instrument for their storage.
Hence a serial camera with shutter speeds in the milliseconds was aimed at Demeny himself, who adhered to the honor-common during the founding age of modern media-of performing simultaneously as ex- perimenter and subject, priest and victim of the apparatus. A human mouth opened, expectorated the syllables "Vi-ve la Fran-cel " and closed again, while the camera dissected, enlarged, stored, and immortalized its successive positions, including the "fine play of all facial muscles," in ? omponent parts with a frequency of 16 Hz. To contemporaries, "many of these oral movements appeared exaggerated because our eye cannot perceive fleeting movements such as these, but the camera makes them visible by bringing motion to a standstill. "74 But that was precisely the point. Edison was rumored to have been enamored of the enlarged shots of his colleague's mouth. 75
Based on the data of a freeze-framed patriotism, Demeny (fascinated by physical impairments, as is every media technologist) first revolution- ized instruction for deaf and mute people. Patients of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were asked to synthesize acoustically the mouth positions film had analyzed optically. Then they could-in "oral examinations" that proved sensationaF6-scream "Vi-ve la Fran-cel" without ever hearing a syllable. In the material battles soon to come, when the Joffre divisions stormed and died like flies, self-perception was hardly necessary anymore.
"As early as 1 892," Demeny "envisioned all the procedures that have since been in use in so-called cinematographic apparatuses and which are nothing but reversible chronophotographs. "77 One only would have had to follow the principles of the revolver and supplement a rotating photo storage device with a rotating photo projector. But even though Demeny was envious of the Lumieres' success, research into slow motion was more important than the illusions of feature films. He remained faithful
? Demeny says, "Vi-ve la Fran-ee! "
? I38 Film
to the chronophotographic gun and moved from studying single patriotic mouths to masses of patriotic legs. On official assignment from the French army, he filmed the traditional goose step in order to optimize it. 78
What physiologists ofart (of all people) announced in I897 as a new feedback loop between psychophysics, maneuver drills, and the uncon- scious was realized to the letter. Regarding the "condition we call 'think- ing,'" Georg Hirth wrote:
That condition as well becomes automatized following frequent repetitIOn; namely, when optical, acoustic, and other stimuli-which effect every closing ap- perception-recur in roughly periodic intervals and in a known intensity. Recall, for example, the activity of a marksman in a shooting gallery. At the beginning of his service, the man is thoroughly infused with the condition of conscious and prospective attentiveness: gradually, however, he becomes sure and relaxed; after each bullet hits he steps mechanically up front to show the mark. His attention can go for a walk-it returns to business only if the impact is delayed long enough for his automatic-rhythmic feeling to subside. The same is true for the recruit dur- ing his exercises. Indeed, the whole debate surrounding the length of active mili- tary service revolves around the question: how long does it take to automatize the military (moral as well as technical) memory structure of the average twenty-year- old in such a way that the apparatus does not fail in the real-life event and that the attention (attentiveness)-which every man must be equipped with at any time in times of war and peace-is not absorbed by mindless service? 79
Mechanization Takes Command-Sigfried Giedion could not have come up with a better title for a book that retraces the path from Marey's chronophotographic gun via modern art to military-industrial ergonom- ics. The automatized weapons of world wars yet to come demanded sim- ilarly automatized, average people as "apparatuses" whose motions-in terms of both precision and speed-could only be controlled by filmic slow motion. Since they were introduced during revolutionary civil wars, exclamations such as "Vive la France! " had nurtured the death drive only psychologically and had left the reaction time at the gun to a "thinking" that exists only in quotation marks for physiologists of art and film.
Storm-troop leaders such as Junger, however, have since Ludendorff been trained to work in time frames below any threshold of perception. The apparition of the enemy appears to them only "for one second," barely perceptible, but measurable. As Junger notes immediately prior to the Ludendorff offensive, "phosphoric digits are glowing on the watch on my wrist. Watch digits, an unusual word. 80 It is 5:30. We'll begin to storm in one hour. "81 Two common items of today, trench coats (or, literally, "coats for the trenches") and watches with second hands, are the prod-
? ? ? ? Giacomo Balla, Ragazza che carre sui balcone (study), I9 I 2 .
E. J. Marey, "Amplitudes of the Leg While Walking," before I885.
ucts of the First World War. 82 In the standardized jump of the second hand, film transport imposes its rhythm upon average people. No wonder that storm-troop leader JUnger hallucinated the body of the enemy-that unreality hidden for months in the trenches-in the medium of film. The opponent could only be a film doppelganger. Demeny, we recall, had stan- dardized the movements of a whole army through chronophotography.
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And Professor Pschorr, as always, only had to do his excessive share to transform the "bodies" of soldiers and the entire landscape of their maneuver into "a single, purely optical phantasmagoria," which, more- over, could be combined precisely and simultaneously with acoustic effects.
A fata morgana machine that can now be had around the globe. Without war, simply by paying an admission fee. For mechanization has also taken command over so-called times of leisure and peace. Night af- ter night, every discotheque repeats Demeny's goose-step analyses. The stroboscopic effect at the beginning of film has left physiological labs and now chops up dancers twenty times per second into film images of them- selves. The barrage of fire has left the major lines of combat and these days echoes from security systems-including their precise and simulta- neous combination with optical effects. Demeny's photography of speech continues as a videoclip, his "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " as a salad of syllables:
"Dance the Mussolini! Dance the Adolf Hitler! " 83
Deaf, mute, and blind, bodies are brought up to the reaction speed of
World War n+I, as if housed in a gigantic simulation chamber. Comput- erized weapons systems are more demanding than automatized ones. If the joysticks of Atari video games make children illiterate, President Rea- gan welcomed them for just that reason: as a training ground for future bomber pilots. Every culture has its zones of preparation that fuse lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on. Our discos are preparing our youths for a retaliatory strike.
War has always already been madness, film's other subject. Body movements, as they are provoked by the stroboscopes of today's dis- cotheques, went by a psychopathological name a century ago: a "large
hysterical arc. " Wondrous ecstasies, twitchings without end, circus-like contortions of extremities were reason enough to call them up with all the means of hypnosis and auscultation. A lecture hall full of medical stu- dents, as yet all male, was allowed to watch the master, Charcot, and his female patients.
A handwritten note [in the as yet unpublished archives of the Salpetrierel gives an account of the session of November 25, 1 877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman's ovaries. He withdraws the baton, and there is a fresh at- tack, which he accelerates by administering inhalations of amyl nitrate. The af- flicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in words that are devoid of metaphor: " G. is taken away and her delirium continues. " 84
? The Salpetriere makes iconographs o f its hysteria.
But this performance was not, or not any longer, the truth about hys- teria: what was produced by psychopathic media was not allowed simply to disappear in secret memories or documents. Technological media had to be able to store and reproduce it. Charcot, who transformed the Salpetriere from a dilapidated insane asylum into a fully equipped re- search lab shortly after his appointment, ordered his chief technician in 1 8 83 to start filming. Whereupon Albert Londe, later known as the con-
structor of the Rolleiflex camera,85 anatomized (strictly following Muy- bridge and Marey) the "large hysterical are" with serial cameras. A young physiology assistant from Vienna visiting the Salpetriere was watching. 86 But Dr. Freud did not make the historical connection between films of hysteria and psychoanalysis. As in the case of phonography, he clung (in the face of other media) to the verbal medium and its new decomposition into letters.
For this purpose, Freud first stills the pictures that the bodies of his female patients produce: he puts them on his couch in the Berggasse. Then a talking cure is deployed against the images seen or hallucinated. With- out mentioning the gender difference between male obsessive-neurosis and female hysteria, in Studies on Hysteria he observes:
When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a "visual" type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions.
Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with the description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into
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? 142 Film
words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the di- rection in which our work is to proceed. "Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared ? " "Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail. " "Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or some- thing will occur to you in connection with it. " When this work has been accom- plished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up an- other picture. On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain ob- stinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid. 87
Naturally, such sequences of images in hysterics or visually oriented people are an inner film: as in the case of psychoanalytical dream theory, a "pathogenic recollection," notwithstanding the patient's "forms of re- sistance and his pretexts, " provokes its optical "reproduction. "88 When Otto Rank subjected The Student of Prague, as the second German au- teur film, to psychoanalytical examination in 1914, he observed that "cinematography . . . in numerous ways reminds us of dream-work. " Which, conversely, meant that internal images were modeled, as with hys- terics, after the "shadowy, fleeting, but impressive scenes" of film. Con- sequently, "the technique of psychoanalysis," which "generally aims at uncovering deeply buried and significant psychic material, on occasion proceeding from the manifest surface evidence, . . . need not shy away from even some random and banal subject"-such as "the film-drama"-
"if the matter at hand exhibits psychological problems whose sources and implications are not obvious. "89
But this rather filmic uncovering, the return from the cinema to the soul, from manifest surface or celluloid skin to unconscious latency, from a technological to a psychic apparatus, only replaces images with words. While optical data in film are storable, they are also "shadowy, fleeting": one cannot look them up, as with books (or today's videotapes). This in- tangibility governs Rank's methodology. "Those whose concern is with literature may be reassured by the fact that the scenarist of this film, The Student of Prague, is an author currently in vogue and that he has ad- hered to prominent patterns, the effectiveness of which has been tested by time. "90 Which is why psychoanalysis (to paraphrase Freud) basically im- itates the doppelganger film by translating it into words. Rank's discus- sion of the doppelganger quotes all available sources from I 800 on and turns movies back into literature. 91
For a talking cure, nothing else is left to do. Still, after attending
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Londe's filmings of hysteria, Freud did just the opposite with it. Literally, psychoanalysis means chopping up an internal film, in steps that are as methodical as they are discrete, until all of its images have disappeared. They break to pieces one by one, simply because female patients have to translate their visions into depictions or descriptions. In the end the me- dium of the psychoanalyst triumphs, because he stills bodily movements and slays the remaining, internal sightings like so many ghosts or Dracu- las. When Freud "unlocks images," he does so not to store them, as Char- cot does, but to decode the puzzles of their signifiers. Thus, the emergence particularly of nonverbal storage technologies around 1900 leads to a dif- ferentiation that establishes discourse as a medium among media. Freud the writer is still willing to admit the competition of the phonograph, be- cause gramophony (despite all its differences with the talking cure and its case-study novels) deals with words. The competition of silent film, how- ever, Freud does not even acknowledge. And even if Abraham and Sachs operate as "psychoanalytical collaborators" on a 1926 project that makes The Mysteries of the Unconscious into a film, and hence teaches contem- poraries "the necessities of modern-day education without pain and job training,"92 Freud himself flatly denies an offer from Hollywood.
This differentiation of storage media decides the fate of madness. Psychoanalytical discourse, which, following Lacan's thesis, is a conse- quence and displacement of hysterical discourse, translates the most beau- tiful pathology into the symbolic. At the same time, the serial photogra- phy of psychiatry, understood as the trace detection it is, stores the real along the "great hysterical arc. " Londe's still shots of each individual twitch and ecstasy travel (due to a lack of opportunities for projecting films) into the multivolume Iconography of the Salphriere. There they rest, but only to emigrate henceforth from the real and to return to the imaginary, for which Freud had no use. For although the "great hysterical arc" can no longer be found in the lecture halls of today's medical schools, the countless jugendstil images of women, with their bows and twists, can only derive from this iconographie photographique. 93 Works of art of the jugendstil did not simply suffer from the age of their techno- logical reproducibility; in their style, they themselves reproduced mea- sured data and hence practiced the precise application Muybridge had as- cribed from the very beginning to his study of Animal Loco? otion.
Hysteria, however, became as omnipresent as it became fleeting. In the real, it gave rise to archives of trace detection that returned in the imaginary of the paintings of the jugendstil; in the symbolic, it gave rise to a science that returned in the female hysterics of Hofmannsthal's dra-
I44 Film
? The Jugendstil makes iconographs of its hysteria.
mas. 94 One reproduction chased the other. With the result that madness might not take place under conditions of high technology. It becomes, like war, a simulacrum.
A successor to Londe, Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bonn, almost managed to figure out this ruse. His treatise on Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry identified only one appropriate medium for the "wealth of hysterical motoric mal- functions": filming. In a manner "more visual and complete than the best
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description" (and presumably photographs as well),95 technological me- dia reproduced psychopathological ones. But since serial photographs could be projected as films by 1909, Hennes went one step beyond Londe. Not until psychiatry was in a position "to convert a rapid succession of movements into a slow one through cinematographic reproduction" was it possible to see things "whose precise observation is, in real life, hardly or not at all possible. "96 As if cinema had enlarged the madness (of both patients and physicians) through the whole realm of unreality and fiction; as if Hennes had, in vague anticipation of McLuhan, understood the me- dium as the message. For "in all cases . . . it was typical that distraction from the symptoms of the disease and the suspension of external stimuli were sufficient to reduce, or almost completely eliminate, [hysterical] movements. By contrast, it is enough to draw attention to phenomena, or for the physician to examine the patient, even just step up to him, in or- der for dysfunctions to appear with greater intensity. "97
That is how psychiatry-whose attention had lately been running on automatic pilot, that is, filmically-itself discovered Charcot's simple se- cret, long before Foucault ever did; namely, that every test produces what it allegedly only reproduces. According to Dr. Hennes, who is fearless about contradicting himself and could even describe the doctor's attention as a contraindication after recommending it a moment before, it is quite likely that there would be no madness without filming it:
How often does it happen to the professor that a patient fails during a lecture, that a manic suddenly changes his mood, a catatonic suddenly fails to perform his stereotyped movements. Although he executed his pathological movements with- out disturbance on the ward, the changed environment of the lecture hall has the effect of not letting him produce his peculiarities-so that he does not display precisely what the professor wanted him to demonstrate. Other patients show their interesting oddities "maliciously," only when there are no lectures, continu- ing education courses, and so on.
