Rock songs sing of the very media power which
sustains
them.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse dashes into the pilot's right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally continuous series of Morse dots-always exactly in between the dashes-into the left headphone.
As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony (of the type that appeared on the first pop records but has since been dis- carded).
And once the Heinkels were exactly above London or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into one continuous note, which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the very center of the brain.
A hypnotic command that had the pi- lot-or rather, the center of his brain-dispose of his payload.
Histori- cally, he had become the first consumer of a headphone stereophony that today controls us all-from the circling of helicopters or Hendrix's Elec- tric Ladyland all the way to the simulated pseudo-monophony, in the
? ? ? Derby
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midst of the soundspace of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing. 198
The difficulty British intelligence had in countering stereophonic re- mote control is explained by its chief technical officer, Professor Reginald Jones. Because the Luftwaffe's radio beam transmitters operated in fre- quency ranges even beyond VHF, which in 1940 the Secret Service was in- capable of receiving and of which it had no conception, help could only
Gramophone
1 0 1
? Coventry _5Ki/ornetres
1 0 2 Gramophone
? Hughes microphone with recorded fly. The same fly whose footstep was amplified by Hughes's carbon microphone in 1878 to make it audible circles between the left and right channels in Pink Floyd's "Ummagumma. "
come from a profane illumination. An incident occurred on the Farnbor- ough airfield while testing a loudspeaker system attached to a fuselage, which, just as in today's Pentagon project, was designed to blast rebel- lious natives in northwestern India with divine voices. When the officer standing in front of the microphone heard his voice coming from the dis- tant loudspeaker two seconds later, he laughed about this acoustic delay. His laughter, in turn, was returned as another echo until the feedback af- fected all the participants and Farnborough resounded with a noise simi- lar to that heard when rock musicians lean their guitars against the speak- ers. A "system that laughed by itself," Jones called it. But instead of laughing along, he chose to understand: Feedback, the principle of all os- cillators, can also generate centimetric wave frequencies, something the experts refused to believe. 199 Jones ordered the construction of synchro- nized receivers, which, in turn, located the Luftwaffe's radio beam trans-
Gramophone I03
mitters and their targets. The Battle of Britain was won. (Even if the war- lord Churchill, not wanting to reveal to the enemy that his secrets had been revealed, disallowed the evacuation of Coventry, which had already been identified as a target city. )
Survivors and those born later, however, are allowed to inhabit stereophonic environments that have popularized and commercialized the trigonometry of air battles. Ever since EMI introduced stereo records in I957,200 people caught between speakers or headphones have been as con- trollable as bomber pilots. The submarine location duties of aspiring air force officers or the bombing target locations of Heinkel pilots turn into hypnosis, which in Stoker's I897 Dracula still had to be used to solve, without the help of radio technology, a very strategic submarine detection problem. 201 But in I966, following two world wars and surges in innova- tion, hypnosis and recording technology finally coincide: engine noises, hissing steam, and a brass band move across the walls from left to right and back while a British voice sings of the literal chain that linked Liver- pool's submarine crews to postwar rock groups.
In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea and he told us of his life
in the land of submarines.
So we sailed up to the sun
till we found the sea of green and we lived beneath the waves in our yellow submarine.
And our friends are all aboard many more of them live next door and the band begins to play
"We all live in a yellow submarine . . . "202
The Beatles simply transported everybody to that impossible space that once concealed Count Dracula in his black coffin in the black belly of his ship, floating in the Black Sea until he was located, and subsequently de- stroyed, by hypnotic sound detection. Hi-fi stereophony can simulate any acoustic space, from the real space inside a submarine to the psychedelic space inside the brain itself. And should locating that space either fail or be a ruse designed to fool the consumer, it is only because the supervising sound engineer has proceeded as shrewdly as the disinformation cam- paign prior to the Battle of the Bulge.
? 1 04 Gramophone
? Once again, these deceptions were programmed by the admirable Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. By design or accident, his Edison places "his hand on the central control panel of the laboratory," whereupon the tele- phonic voice of his agent in New York "seemed to come from all the cor- ners of the room at once. " A dozen speakers scattered across the labora- tory-obviously modeled on the first soundspace experiments conducted between the Paris Opera and the Palace of Industry in 1 8 8 1-make it possible. 203
With the help of stereo recordings and stereo, VHF acoustic decep- tions can invade operas completely. When, in 1959, John Culshaw pro- duced Solti's beautifully overmodulated Rhinegold, the homelessness of spirits was implemented. Of course the other gods and goddesses, male and female singers, were each assigned their own space between the stereo channels. But Wagner's great technician Alberich, upon tearing the newly completed Tarnhelm out of his brother Mime's hands and demon- strating in hands-on fashion the advantages of invisibility, appears to be coming, like Edison's telegrapher, from all corners at once. "Thus, in scene III, Alberich puts on the Tarnhelm, disappears, and then thrashes the unfortunate Mime. Most stage productions make Alberich sing through a megaphone at this point, the effect of which is often less dom- inating than that of Alberich in reality. Instead of this, we have tried to convey, for thirty-two bars, the terrifying, inescapable presence of Al- berich: left, right, or centre there is no escape for Mime. "204
Culshaw's stereo magic simply puts into practice what the great me- dia technician Wagner had in mind for his dramatic doppelganger. "Everywhere now he lies in wait," sings Alberich, lost in acoustic space, making those he keeps "under guard" "subject to him forever. "205 In other words, Wagner invented the radio play, as Nietzsche immediately realized: "His art always carries him in two directions, out of a world of auditory drama into a mysteriously kindred world of visual drama, and vice versa. "206 The Ring of the Nibelung, that zero series of all word wars, could just as well be called Struggle in the Ether.
Gramophone 1 0 5
To broadcast the ethereal struggle, radio merely had to take over the innovations of the world wars and, in a move that reversed the one fol- lowing the First World War, adapt itself to the standard of records. Be- cause amplitude modulation did not leave enough frequency range, the old AM radio would have been unable to transmit hi-fi songs or stereo ra- dio plays.
The spectacular growth of FM is attributable to its technical superiority to AM, and relative cheapness as an investment medium. In the late fifties, it was found that the great range of FM channels could not only sustain a higher fidelity for single transmissions, but could in fact also be used to broadcast separate signals simultaneously in a process called "multiplexing. " This discovery made possible stereo musical broadcast. Stereo broadcast was particularly attractive to those au- diences discriminating and wealthy enough to prefer high fidelity music. . . . As the rock audience grew in size and sophistication, it came to demand the same sound quality which it could get from records at home (reflected in the tremen- dous increase in the middle and late sixties in the stereo component market), but could not get from AM radio. 207
Frequency modulation and signal multiplexing, the two components of VHF, are of course not a U. S. commercial discovery of the 1950S. Without "his ingenious technical decision" in favor of signal multiplex- ing, General Fellgiebel, chief of Army Communications, would not have been able to control the invasion of Russia, that is, "the most immense task ever faced by any signal corps in the world. "208 Without Colonel Gimmler of Army Ordnance and his refutation of the delusion "that very high frequencies (between 10m and 1m) propagate in a straight line and are therefore of no use in the battle field,"209 Colonel General Guderian, the strategist of the tank blitzkrieg, would have been forced to resort to World-War-I-era carrier pigeons. Instead, his armored wedges, "from the tanks in the most forward position back to divisional, corps, and army command," were, unlike his enemies, equipped with VHF. 21O "The engine is the soul of the tank," Guderian used to say, "and radio," General Nehring added, "its number one. " Then as now VHF radio reduces the leadership vacuum to zero.
On September II, 1944, American tank vanguards liberated the city of Luxembourg and its radio station. Radio Luxembourg returned to its pre- war status as the largest commercial broadcaster and advertiser of records on a continent of postal, telegraphic, and radio state monopo- lies. 211 But four years as an army station had left its traces: traces of a new way of storing traces.
I06 Gramophone
? Electl'o aimant
Basic diagram of Poulsen's telegraphone.
By the early 1940S, German technicians had made some startling advances. Radio monitors who listened to the German broadcasting stations day after day for British and United States intelligence soon realized that many of the programs they were hearing could not possibly derive from live studio broadcasts. Yet there were a fidelity and a continuity of sound, plus an absence of surface scratching, in the German transmissions that ordinary transcription records could never have yielded. The mystery was solved . . . when the Allies captured Radio Luxem- bourg . . . and discovered among the station's equipment a new Magnetophone of extraordinary capabilities. 212
It was not until I940 that technicians at BA5F and AEG had by chance hit upon the technique of radio frequency premagnetizing, thus turning Valdemar Poulsen's experimental telegraphone of I898 into an operational audiotape with a IO kilohertz frequency bandwidth. Up until then, the record-radio media link had operated as a one-way street. Transmitters and gramophone users replayed what Berliner's master disc had once and for all recorded, even if radio stations-in a late vindica- tion of Edison-made use of special phonographs developed for the spe- cific purpose of program storage. 213 But under combat conditions those wax cylinders, which, since I930, were allowed to record parliamentary sessions strictly for "archival purposes," were useless. 214 A propaganda ministry that turned radio into "the cultural 55 of the Third Reich"215 needed a recording and storage medium as modern and mobile as Gude- rian's tank divisions.
Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, recounts:
We were also essentially dependent on developments of the propaganda ministry with regard to radio equipment for war correspondents. That also applied to the
FiI d? a. cier
? c? ,
d enroulemenl
Gramophone 1 07
appropriate vehicles. When it came to tank divisions, the Luftwaffe, or parts of the navy, the opportunities for original combat recordings were hampered by the fact that we could not obtain the stable and horizontal supports necessary for pro- ducing discs. At first, we were forced to make do with belated dispatches.
A significant change occurred after the Magnetophone was invented and thoroughly designed for the purpose of war reports. Original combat reports from the air, the moving armored vehicle, or the submarine, etc. , now became impres- sive firsthand accounts. 216
As Ludendorff had pointed out, it is a truth of Total War that "the mass usage of technological equipment can be tested much better in wartime than would ever be possible in peace. "217 The motorized and mo- bilized audiotape finally delivered radio from disc storage; "Yellow Sub- marine," or "war as acoustic experience," became playable.
But reaching beyond the acoustic experiences of the so-called general public, the magnetic tape also revolutionized secret transmissions. Ac- cording to Pynchon, "operators swear they can tell the individual send- ing-hands. "218 As a consequence, the Abwehr [German Counterintelli- gence Service], as part of the German Army High Command, had the "handwriting" of every single agent recorded at the Wohldorf radio sta- tion close to Hamburg before they went abroad on their secret missions. Only magnetic tapes guaranteed to Canaris and his men that it "was re- ally their agent sitting at the other end and not an enemy operator. "219
Inspired by this success, the Abwehr switched from defense to of- fense. Because the enemy was not yet in possession of magnetic tapes, the Abwehr was in a position to transmit its famous Funkspiele (radio games), which in spite of their name resulted not in the entertainment of millions in front of speakers but in the death of 50 British agents. The Ab- wehr managed to capture and turn around agents who had parachuted into the Netherlands. As if nothing had happened, they were forced to continue their transmissions in their own handwriting. The transmission of German Funkspiel messages to London (or, in one parallel case, to Moscow) lured additional agents into the Abwehr trap. Normally, intelli- gence agencies arrange emergency signals with their agents for such situ- ations, "such as using an old code, making absurd mistakes, or inserting or omitting certain letters of punctuation. "220 Each Morse message of the converted agents was taped, analyzed, and, if need be, manipulated be- fore it was transmitted. This procedure continued uninterrupted for years in the hardly civilian ether.
The world-war audiotape inaugurated the musical-acoustic present. Beyond storage and transmission, gramophone and radio, it created em-
108 Gramophone
pires of simulation. In England, Turing himself considered using a cap- tured German Magnetophone as the storage mechanism for his projected large computer. Like the paper strip of the universal discrete machine, tapes can execute any possible manipulation of data because they are equipped with recording, reading, and erasing heads, as well as with for- ward and reverse motion. 221 Which is why early, cheap pes work with at- tached tape decks.
In a far more practical vein, captured magnetic tapes aroused sleepy U. S. electric and music giants who had, naturally, taken on duties other than commercial ones between 1942 and 194 5 . 222 Inserted into the signal path, audiotapes modernized sound production; by replacing gramo- phones they modernized sound distribution. Tape decks made music con- sumers mobile, indeed automobile, as did the radio producers in the Mag- netophone-equipped German lead tanks of old. Thus, the "American mass market" was "opened up" by "the car playback system. "223 To min- imize the leadership vacuum and exploit the possibilities of stereophony, the only things missing were new VHF stations with rock'n'roll and traf- fic reports on the transmitting end and car radios with FM and decoders on the receiving end. Six-cylinder engines whisper, but the stereo equip- ment roars. Engine and radio are (to paraphrase Guderian and Nehring) also the soul of our tourist divisions, which under so-called postwar con- ditions rehearse or simulate the blitzkrieg.
The central command, however, has moved from general staffs to en- gineers. 224 Sound reproduction revolutionized by magnetic tape has ren- dered orders unnecessary. Storing, erasing, sampling, fast-forwarding, rewinding, editing-inserting tapes into the signal path leading from the microphone to the master disc made manipulation itself possible. Ever since the combat reports of Nazi radio, even live broadcasts have not been live. The delay that in the case of tapes is due to separate head mon- itoring (and that is now more elegantly achieved by digital shift regis- ters)225 suffices for so-called broadcast obscenity policing lines. It appears that listeners, once they have been called by a disc jockey and are on the air, are prone to exhibit an unquenchable desire for obscenities. Today everybody can and (according to Andy Warhol) wants to become famous, if only for two minutes of airtime. In the blind time to which media, as opposed to artists, are subject, chance is principally unpredictable. But the 6. 4 seconds of dead time the broadcast obscenity policing line inserts between telephone call and actual broadcast make censorship (if not art) possible in the data flow of the real.
That is precisely the function of audiotapes in sound processing. Edit-
Gramophone 1 09
ing and interception control make the unmanipulable as manipulable as symbolic chains had been in the arts. With projects and recourses, the time of recurrence organizes pure random sequences; Berliner's primitive recording technology turns into a Magical Mystery Tour. In 1954, Abbey Road Studios, which not coincidentally produced the Beatles' sound, first used stereo audiotapes; by 1970 eight-track machines had become the standard; today discos utilize 3 2 or 64 tracks, each of which can be ma- nipulated on its own and in unison. 226 "Welcome to the machine," Pink Floyd sang, by which they meant, "tape for its own ends-a form of col- lage using sound. "227 In the Funkspiele of the Abwehr, Morse hands could be corrected; in today's studios, stars do not even have to be able to sing anymore. When the voices of Waters and Gilmour were unable to hit the high notes in "Welcome to the Machine," they simply resorted to time axis manipulation: they dropped the tape down half a semitone while recording and then dropped the line in on the track. 228
But neither is tape technology always an end in itself, nor does editing always amount to correction or beautification. If media are anthropolog- ical a prioris, then humans cannot have invented language; rather, they must have evolved as its pets, victims, or subjects. And the only weapon to fight that may well be tape salad. Sense turns into nonsense, govern- ment propaganda into the white noise of Turing's vocoder, impossible fillers like is/or/the are edited out:229 precisely the ingredients of William Burroughs's tape cut-up technique.
"Playback from Eden to Watergate" begins (like all books) with the word, and in the beginning that word was with God. But not only in the shape of speech, which animals, too, have at their command, but also as writing, the storage and transmission of which made culture possible in the first place. "Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write 'Death Traps in Your Warehouse' for the Reader's Digest. "230 Such warnings, or "tactics," are restricted to hu- mans-with the one exception that they were not capable of warning of the warning system of writing, which subsequently turned into a deadly trap. Because apes never mastered writing the "written word" mastered them: a "killer virus" that "made the spoken word possible. The word has not yet been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host," which now seems to be "breaking down. "231 Reconstructing the apes' inner throat, which was not designed for speech, the virus created humans, especially white males, who were stricken with the most malignant infection: they mistook the host itself for its linguistic parasite. Most apes died from sexual frenzy or because the
1 1 0 Gramophone
virus caused "death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. "232 But with two or three survivors the word was able to launch a new beginning.
Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated af- ter Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or, to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH. 233
What began as a media war has to end as a media war so as to close the feedback loop linking Nixon's Watergate tapes to the Garden of Eden. "Basically, there is only one game and that game is war. "234 World war weapons like the Magnetophone have been put to commercial use in the shape of tape recorders, as a result of which ex-writers like Burroughs can take action. The classic rift between the production and reception of
books is replaced by a single military interception. 235
We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder one we will record speeches and conversations, carefully editing in stammers, mispronunciations, in- ept phrases-the worst number one we can assemble. Now, on tape recorder two we will make a love tape by bugging his bedroom. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say, the Senator's teenage daughter. On tape recorder three we will record hateful, dis- approving voices. We'll splice the three recordings in together at very short inter- vals and play them back to the Senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders, but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tape and disapproval tapes together. 236
As simple as any abuse of army equipment. One just has to know what Shannon's and Turing's scrambler or the German Magnetophone can be used for. 237 If "control," or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century,238 then fighting that power requires pos- itive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment pro- duces wild oscillations of the Farnborough type. Play to the powers that be their own melody.
Which is exactly what Burroughs does after having described "a number of weapons and tactics in the war game":239 he joins Laurie An- derson in producing records. Which is exactly what rock music does in the first place: it maximizes all electro-acoustic possibilities, occupies
Gramophone III
recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the writing-induced separation into composers and writers, arrangers and interpreters. When Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and others founded United Artists following the First World War, a movie executive announced that "the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum. " The same thing happened when Lennon, Hendrix, Barrett and others started recording their Gesamtkunstwerke by making full use of the media inno- vations of the Second World War. 240
Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, Magnetophones, submarine lo- cation technologies, air war radio beams, etc. , have released an abuse of army equipment that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War n+I. Radio, the first abuse, lead from World War I to II, rock music, the next one, from II to III. Following a very practical piece of advice from Bur- roughs's Electronic Revolution,241 Laurie Anderson's voice, distorted as usual on Big Science by a vocoder, simulates the voice of a 747 pilot who uses the plane's speaker system to suddenly interrupt the ongoing enter- tainment program and inform passengers of an imminent crash landing or some other calamity. Mass interception media like rock music amount to mobilization, which makes them the exact opposite of Benjamin's dis- traction. 242 In 193 6, only the unique "Reichsautozug Deutschland, a mo- torcade consisting of eighty vehicles," was able to "broadcast party con- gresses and mass rallies without any local help by setting up speaker sys- tems on a giant scale, erecting stands, and so on":243 today, the same is achieved night after night by the trucks and kilowatt systems of any rock group. Filled to the brim with electronics or army equipment, they carry us away to Electric Ladyland. The theme of love, that production secret of the literature for nonreaders, has run its course.
Rock songs sing of the very media power which sustains them.
Lennon and McCartney's stereo submarine is not the only postwar lyric in the literal sense of the word. The Final Cut, Pink Floyd's last record, was written by Roger Waters (born 1944) for Eric Fletcher Wa- ters (1913-1944), that is, for a victim of a world war. It begins, even be- fore the first sound, with tape cut-ups of news broadcasts (on the Falk- lands, NATO fleet transporters, nuclear power stations), which all simply serve to point out that "postwar," both the word and the thing itself, is a "dream," a distortion made to mollify consumer ears. "Post War Dream" is followed by "The Hero's Return. " The cut-up returns to its origins: when army communication equipment, the precursor of the mass me- dium radio, cuts up the symbolic and the real, orders and corpses. A com- memoration that is the flip side of postwar, love and Muzak.
I I 2
Gramophone
Sweetheart, sweetheart, are you fast asleep, good 'cos that's the only time I can really talk to you and there is something that I've locked away
a memory that is too painful
to withstand the light of day.
When we came back from the war
the banners and flags hung on everyone's door we danced and we sang in the street
and the church bells rang.
But burning in my heart
a memory smoulders on
of the gunner's dying words
on the intercom. 244
Interception, chopping, feedback, and amplification of war reports: "Sympathy for the Devil" means nothing else. Legend has it that the Rolling Stones used cut-up techniques to produce the lyrics for Beggars Banquet. They cut out newspaper headlines, pasted them to the studio wall, and shot at them. Every hit was a line. Anticipating modern statis- tics, the precondition of cut-up and signal processing in general, Novalis remarked: "The individual facts are random events-the combination of random events-their concurrence is itself not subject to chance, but to
laws-a result of the most profound systematic wisdom. "245
Thus, the random distribution of newspaper headlines results in the law of information technology and a martial history of rock music. The devil, whose voice is immortalized by "Sympathy for the Devil," was there when the revolutionaries of St. Petersburg killed the czar and, with their radio transmission "CQ-to all," turned army equipment into global AM radio; he was there when television broadcast both Kennedy assassinations, turned "you and me" into murderers, and exorcised all ra- dio magic. But above all, Lucifer screams out that radio specter, ghost
army, or tank general which VHF and rock music are indebted to:
I rode a tank
held a gen'rals's rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. 246
The blitzkrieg, as is well known, raged from I939 to I94I, when Gude- rian rode his lead tank. The bodies stank longer.
From "War Heroes" to Electric Ladyland: a mnemotechnology of rock music. Nietzsche's gods had yet to receive the sacrifice of language;
? ? ? The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland, 1968. (Courtesy of Authentic Hendrix, LLC, and MCA Records, Inc. )
"
Tyrnp . Tymp .
1 . 5
Pistol shot
( Let us know when we go {emit erom eno K . O .
(slow speed)
0 . 0 0 . 6
7 . 0
13 . 6
(slow speed)
AND THE GODS MADE LOVE
jet whistle ----------
By
JIM! HENDRIX
I('\t'r['
21 . 0 backward & forward tapes of speech
29 . 8 Harmonics run up and down at high speed
? ? 5. 6
Tyrnp.
I I4 Gramophone
cut-up techniques have done away with that virus. Before Hendrix, the paratrooper of the IOIst Airborne, cuts his machine-gun-like guitar to the title song, tape technology operates for its own sake: tympana, jet engines, pistol shots. Writing can write nothing of that. The Songbook for Electric Ladyland notes the tape's forward and backward motion as well as its changing speed and the test points of a blind but manipulable time. 247 The title on the cover-that which does not cease not to write itself.
? ? ? FILM
? ? Media cross one another in time, which is no longer history. The recording of acoustic data was accomplished with sound tricks, montage, and cuts; it is with film tricks, montage, and cuts that the recording of optical processes began. Since its inception, cinema has been the manipulation of optic nerves and their time. This is proved, among other ways, by the now-prohibited trick of repeatedly splicing individual frames of a Coca- Cola ad into feature films: because its flashlike appearance for 40 millisec- onds reaches the eyes but not consciousness, the audience develops an in- explicable yet irresistible thirst. A cut has undercut its conscious registra- tion. The same is true of film. Beginning with Eastman in r887, when celluloid superseded Daguerre's photographic glass plates and provided the material basis for feature films, such manipulations became feasible. Cinema, in contrast to sound recording, began with reels, cuts, and splices.
It is said that the Lumiere brothers documented simply and inces- santly what their lens could record and what the type of projection they developed could reproduce. Legend has it, however, that Georges Melies, the great film pioneer, ran out of celluloid while shooting a street scene. He left the tripod and camera in position and loaded a new reel, but in the meantime so-called life naturally went on. Viewing the fully spliced film, its director was consequently surprised by the magical appearance and disappearance of figures against a fixed background. Melies, who as former director of the Theatre Robert Houdin had already projected many a magical trick onto the technological screen,l had accidentally also stumbled upon the stop trick. Hence in May r 89 6, " before the eyes of an astonished and dumbfounded audience," he presented "L'Escamotement d'une dame, the disappearance of a woman from the picture. "2 Techno-
logical media (following Villiers and his Edison) liquidate that "great
II5
? 116 Film
? Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d'un poete, 1930.
Lady, Nature," as it had been described, but never viewed, by the nine- teenth century. Woman's sacrifice.
And castration. For what film's first stop tricks did to women only re- peated what the experimental precursors of cinema did to men. Since 1878 Edward Muggeridge (who changed his name to Eadweard Muy- bridge to commemorate old Saxon kings)3 had been experimenting with twelve special cameras on behalf of the California railroad tycoon and university founder, Leland Stanford. The location was Palo Alto, which later saw the invention of the vacuum tube, and the assignment was the recording of movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter's eye. Racehorses and sprinters dashed past the individually and sequentially positioned cameras, whose shutters were triggered succes- sively by an electromagnetic device supplied by the San Francisco Tele- graph Supply CompanY-1 millisecond for every 40 milliseconds. 4
With such snapshots (literally speaking) Muybridge's handsome vol- umes on Animal Locomotion were meant to instruct ignorant painters in what motion looks like in real-time analysis. For his serial photographs testified to the imaginary element in human perception, as in the positions of horses' legs on canvas or on English watercolor paper. To speak of cin- ema as Muybridge's historical goal would, however, be inaccurate, since celluloid was not yet available. The technological medium was meant to modernize a venerable art form, as indeed happened when impressionists like Degas copied photographs in their paintings. Hence Stanford Univer- sity's fencers, discus throwers, and wrestlers posed as future models for
Film 117
painters, that is, nude-at least as long as they turned their backs to one of the twelve cameras. In all the milliseconds of frontal shots, however, Muybridge reached one last time for the painter's brush in order to prac- tice (long before Melies) the disappearance of the male anatomy with re- touched gymnastic shorts.
Had they been copied onto celluloid and rolled onto a reel, Muy- bridge's glass plates could have anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, the peephole precursor to the Lumieres' cinematic projection. The astonished visitors to the 1 893 World's Fair in Chicago would then have been witness to the first trick film: the jumpy appearance and disappearance of moral remains, which in the age of cinema approximate the condition of pure image-flickering.
The trick film therefore has no datable origin. The medium's possi- bilities for cutting and splicing assail its own historiography. Hugo Miin- sterberg, the private lecturer at the University of Freiburg whom William James called to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, clearly recognized this in 1916 in the first history of cinema written by a professor:
It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into the pictures on a screen? Or did the development begin with the first photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it start with the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the impression of movement resulted? Or was the birthday of the new art when the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such rapidly
passing pictures on a wall? 5
Miinsterberg's questions remain unanswered because the making of films is in principle nothing but cutting and splicing: the chopping up of continuous motion, or history, before the lens. "Discourse," Foucault wrote when he introduced such caesuras into historical methodology it- self, "is snatched from the law of development and established in a dis- continuous atemporality: . . . several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either move- ment, time, or history. "6 As if contemporary theories, such as discourse analysis, were defined by the technological a priori of their media.
Methodological dreams flourish in this complication or implication. Theory itself since Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno has attempted to pseudo-metamorphose into film. 7 It is also possible, however, to under- stand technological a prioris in a technological sense. The fact that cuts stood at the beginning of visual data processing but entered acoustic data
rr8 Film
processing only at the end can then be seen as a fundamental difference in terms of our sensory registration. That difference inaugurated the dis- tinction between the imaginary and the real.
The phonograph permitted for the first time the recording of vibra- tions that human ears could not count, human eyes could not see, and writing hands could not catch up with. Edison's simple metal needle, however, could keep up-simply because every sound, even the most complex or polyphonous, one played simultaneously by a hundred musi- cians, formed a single amplitude on the time axis. Put in the plain lan- guage of general sign theory, acoustics is one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range. 8
The continuous undulations recorded by the gramophone and the au- diotape as signatures of the real, or raw material, were thus passed on in an equally continuous way by sound engineers. Cutting and splicing would have produced nothing but crackling noises, namely, square-curve jumps. Avoiding them presupposes great skill on the part of recording en- gineers, if not the computer algorithms of digital signal processing. Therefore, when pioneers of the radio play such as Breslau's Walter Bischoff were looking for genuinely "radio-specific" (funkisch) means of expression, they studied the parallel medium of silent films and consid- ered only the fade-out, not the cut, as a possible model: "The man work- ing the amplifier, " as Bischoff argued in Dramaturgy of the Radio Play, "is in charge of a function similar to that of the camera man. He fades in and out, as we say in the absence of a radio-specific terminology. By slowly turning down the condenser at the amplifier, he lets the scene, the finished sequence of events, fade into the background, just as he can, by gradually turning the condenser up, give increasing form and shape to the next acoustic sequence. "9 By following such continuity, which is diamet- rically opposed to the film cut, things worked well for thirty years. But ever since VHF radio began transmitting stereophonically, that is, two amplitudes per unit of time, fade-outs have been "more difficult to exe- cute": "the mise-en-scene, invisible yet localizable, cannot be dismantled and replaced by a new one in front of the listener as easily as in the case of a monophonic play. "lo Once tethered, such are the constraints pro- duced by the real.
For one thing, optical data flows are two-dimensional; for another, they consist of high frequencies. Not two but thousands of units of light per unit of time must be transmitted in order to present the eye with a two- or even three-dimensional image. That requires an exponential mag- nification of processing capacities. And since light waves are electromag-
Film 119
netic frequencies in the terahertz range, that is, a trillion times faster than concert pitch (A), they outpace not only human writing hands but even (unbelievably) today's electronics.
Two reasons why film is not directly linked to the real. Instead of recording physical waves, generally speaking it only stores their chemical effects on its negatives. Optical signal processing in real time remains a thing of the future. And even if, following Rudolph Lothar's rather timely metaphysics of the heart, everything from sound to light is a wave (or hertz),ll optical waves still don't have a storage or computing medium- not, at any rate, until fiber technologies running at the speed of light have put today's semiconductors out of business.
A medium that is unable to trace the amplitudes of its input data is permitted a priori to perform cuts. Otherwise, there would be no data. Since Muybridge's experimental arrangement, all film sequences have been scans, excerpts, selections. And every cinematic aesthetic has devel- oped from the 24-frame-per-second shot, which was later standardized. Stop trick and montage, slow motion and time lapse only translate tech- nology into the desires of the audience. As phantasms of our deluded eyes, cuts reproduce the continuities and regularities of motion. Phonog- raphy and feature film correspond to one another as do the real and the Imagmary.
But this imaginary realm had to be conquered. The path of invention, from Muybridge's first serial photographs to Edison's kinetoscope and the Lumiere brothers, does not merely presuppose the existence of celluloid. In the age of organic life stories (as poetry) and organic world histories (as philosophy), even in the age of mathematical continuity, caesuras first had to be postulated. Aside from the material precondition, the spliceable celluloid, there was a scientific one: the system of possible deceptions of the eye had to be converted from a type of knowledge specific to illusion- ists and magicians (such as Houdini) to one shared by physiologists and engineers. Just as the phonograph (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam notwithstand- ing) became possible only after acoustics had been made an object of sci- entific investigation, so "cinematography would never have been in- vented " had not " researchers been occupied with the consequences of the stroboscopic effect and afterimages. "12
Afterimages, which are much more common and familiar than the stroboscopic effect, were already present in Goethe's Theory of Colors- but only, as in Wilhelm Meister's Years ofApprenticeship, to illustrate the effects of Classic-Romantic literature on souls: a woman hovers in front
120 Film
of the inner eye of the hero or the readers as the optical model of perfect alphabetization, even though her beauty simply cannot be recorded in words. Wilhelm Meister observes to himself and his like-minded readers, "If you close your eyes, she will present herself to you; if you open them, she will hover before' all objects like the manifestation which a dazzling image leaves behind in the eye. Was not the quickly passing figure of the Amazon ever present in your imagination? "13 For Novalis, imagination was the miraculous sense that could replace for readers all of their senses.
At least as long as Goethe and his Theory of Colors were alive. For it was Fechner who first examined the afterimage effect with experimental rigor. Experimenter and subject in one, he stared into the sun-with the result that he went blind in 1839 for three years and had to resign from his physics chair at the University of Leipzig. The historical step from psy- chology to psychophysics (Fechner's beautiful neologism) was as conse- quential as the emergence of modern media from the physiological hand- icaps of its researchers was literal.
No wonder, then, that the aesthetics of the afterimage effect is also due to a half-blind person. Nietzsche, the philosopher with -14 diop- ters,14 produced a film theory before its time under the pretext of de- scribing both The Birth of Tragedy in ancient Greece and its German re- birth in the mass spectacles of Wagner. 15 In Nietzsche, the theater perfor- mances that were produced in the shadeless midday sun of an Attic setting were transformed into the hallucinations of inebriated or vision- ary spectators, whose optic nerves quite unconsciously processed white- and-black film negatives into black-and-white film positives: "After an en- ergetic attempt to focus on the sun, we have, by way of remedy almost, dark spots before our eyes when we turn away. Conversely, the luminous images of the Sophoclean heroes-those Apollonian masks-are the nec- essary productions of a deep look into the horror of nature; luminous spots, as it were, designed to cure an eye hurt by the ghastly night. "16
Prior to Fechner's historical self-experiment, blinding was not a mat- ter of desire. An eye hurt by the ghastly night that requires for its remedy inverted afterimage effects is no longer directed toward the stage of the Attic amphitheater but onto the black surface of soon-to-come movie screens, as the Lumiere brothers will develop them in defiance of their name. Nietzsche's ghastly night is the first attempt to christen sensory de- privation as the background to and other of all technological mediaY That the flow of data takes place at all is the elementary fact of Nietz- sche's aesthetic, which renders interpretations, reflections, and valuations of individual beauty (and hence everything Apollonian) secondary. If "the
Film 121
world" can be "justified to all eternity . . . only as an aesthetic product,"18 it is simply because "luminous images" obliterate a remorseless blackness. The Nietzsche movie called Oedipus is technological enough to pre- date the innovation of the Lumieres by a quarter century. According to The Birth ofTragedy, a tragic hero, as inebriated spectators visually hal- lucinate him, is "at bottom no more than a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall, that is to say, appearance through and through. "19 It is pre- cisely this dark wall, which allows actors to turn into the imaginary, or film stars, in the first place, that has been opening theater performances since 1 8 7 6, the year of the inauguration of the theater in Bayreuth, whose prophecy The Birth of Tragedy undertook. Wagner did what no drama- turg before him had dared to do (simply because certain spectators in- sisted on the feudal privilege of being as visible as the actors themselves): during opening night, he began The Ring ofthe Nibelung in total dark- ness, before gradually turning on the ( as yet novel) gaslights. Not even the presence of an emperor, Wilhelm I, prevented Wagner from reducing his audience to an invisible mass sociology and the bodies of actors (such as the Rhine maidens) to visual hallucinations or afterimages against the background of darkness. 2o The cut separating theater arts and media tech- nologies could not be delineated more precisely. Which is why all movie theaters, at the beginning of their screenings, reproduce Wagner's cosmic sunrise emerging from primordial darkness. A 1913 movie theater in Mannheim, as we know from the first sociology of cinema, used the slo-
gan, "Come in, our movie theater is the darkest in the whole city! "21 Already in 1 89 1 , four years prior to the projection screen of the Lu- miere brothers, Bayreuth was technologically up to date. Not for nothing did Wagner joke that he would have to complete his invention of an in- visible orchestra by inventing invisible actors. 22 Hence his son-in-law, the subsequently notorious Chamberlain, planned the performance of sym- phonies by Liszt that would have become pure feature films with equally pure film music: accompanied by the sound of an orchestra sunk in Wag- nerian fashion, and situated in a "nightclad room," a camera obscura was supposed to project moving pictures against a "background" until all spectators fell into "ecstasies. "23 Such enchantments were unthinkable with old-fashioned viewing: eyes did not mix up statues or paintings, or the bodies of actors, for that matter-those basic stage props of the es- tablished arts-with their own retinal processes. Thanks only to Cham- berlain's plans and their global dissemination by Hollywood, the physio- logical theory of perception becomes applied perceptual practice: movie- goers, following Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "respond to the
1 22 Film
projection screen like a retina inverted to the outside that is remotely con- nected to the brain. "24 And each image leaves an afterimage.
In order to implement the stroboscopic effect, the second theoretical condition of cinema, with the same precision, one needs only to illumi- nate moving objects with one of the light sources that have become om- nipresent and omnipotent since the 1 890S. As is widely known, back then Westinghouse won out over Edison, alternating current over direct cur- rent, as a public utility. The glow of light alternates fifty times per second in European lightbulbs, sixty times in American ones: the uncomplicated, and hence imperceptible, rhythm of our evenings and of an antenna called the body.
The stroboscopic illumination transforms the continuous flow of movement into interferences, or moires, as can be seen in the wheeling spokes of every Western. This second and imaginary continuity evolved from discontinuity, a discovery that was first made by physiologists dur- ing the founding age of modern media. We owe a large part of the theory of alternating current to Faraday, as well as to the study On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions ( 1 83 I ). 25 Coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday'S stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient condi- tion for the illusions of cinema. One only had to automatize the cutting mechanism, cover the film reel with a wing disk between moments of ex- posure and with a Maltese cross during moments of projection, and the eye saw seamless motion rather than 24 single and still shots. One perfo- rated rotating disk during the recording and projection of pictures made possible the film trick preceding all film tricks.
Chopping or cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary-the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox. The problem of undermining the threshold of audience perception through Faraday's "deceptions" reflected the inverse problem of undermining the threshold of perception of psychophysics itself to avoid disappointment or reality. Because real motion (above and beyond optical illusions) was to become recordable, the prehistory of the cinema began exactly as that of the gramophone. Etienne-Jules Marey, professor of natural history at the College de France in Paris, and later (following his successful film experi- ments) president of the French photographic society,16 earned his initial fame with a sphygmograph copied from the work of German physiologists that was capable of recording pulse rates onto soot-covered glass plates as curves. 27 In the same way, Weber and Scott had mechanically stored sounds (musical intervals themselves) that were not acoustic illusions.
Beginning with heart muscle contractions, Marey investigated move-
? Marey's chronophotographic gun.
ment in general. His chronographic experiments on humans, animals, birds-published as La machine animaIe (1873), a title that does justice to La Mettrie-inspired Governor Stanford of California to give Muy- bridge his assignment. The professional photographer only had to replace Marey's mechanized form of trace detection with a more appropriate, or professional, optical one-and where eyes had always seen only poetic
Film 123
? 1 24 Film
wing-flaps could begin the analysis of the flight of birds, the precondition for all future aircraft constructions. It was no coincidence that pioneers of photography such as Nadar opted against the montgolfieres of 1783 and in favor of literal airships: for flying machines heavier than air. 2s "Cinema Isn't I See, It's I Fly,"29 says Virilio's War and Cinema, in view of the historically perfect collusion of world wars, reconnaissance squad- rons, and cinematography.
In the meantime, the first photographs from Animal Locomotion had hardly appeared when Marey began work on improving Muybridge's im- provement of his own work. The time was ripe for engineers to work to- gether, for innovations of innovations. Marey also stored motion opti- cally, but he reduced the number of cameras from the twelve of his pre- decessor to one and constructed-first with fixed photo glass plates, and, from 1 8 8 8 on, with modern celluloid30-the first serial-shot camera. In- stead of indulging in what Pynchon called "the American vice of modular repetition,"31 he realized that for moving objects, a single, movable appa- ratus was enough. Its name-the chronophotographic gun-spoke noth- ing but the real truth.
It was in 1 8 6 1 , whilst traveling on a paddle-steamer and watching its wheel, that the future Colonel Gatling hit upon the idea of a cylindrical, crank-driven ma- chine gun. In 1 8 74 the Frenchman Jules Janssen took inspiration from the multi- chambered Colt (patented in 1832) to invent an astronomical revolving unit that could take a series of photographs [when attached to a telescope]. On the basis of this idea, Etienne-Jules Marey then perfected his chronophotographic rifle, which allowed its user to aim at and photograph an object moving through space. 32
The history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets.
? ? ? Derby
15Kilometres ?
Dirutor &am
Fine X-Beams as set for Coventry 14/15. XI. 40.
50 100 ,SO 200
Kilometres
=-=:J
midst of the soundspace of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing. 198
The difficulty British intelligence had in countering stereophonic re- mote control is explained by its chief technical officer, Professor Reginald Jones. Because the Luftwaffe's radio beam transmitters operated in fre- quency ranges even beyond VHF, which in 1940 the Secret Service was in- capable of receiving and of which it had no conception, help could only
Gramophone
1 0 1
? Coventry _5Ki/ornetres
1 0 2 Gramophone
? Hughes microphone with recorded fly. The same fly whose footstep was amplified by Hughes's carbon microphone in 1878 to make it audible circles between the left and right channels in Pink Floyd's "Ummagumma. "
come from a profane illumination. An incident occurred on the Farnbor- ough airfield while testing a loudspeaker system attached to a fuselage, which, just as in today's Pentagon project, was designed to blast rebel- lious natives in northwestern India with divine voices. When the officer standing in front of the microphone heard his voice coming from the dis- tant loudspeaker two seconds later, he laughed about this acoustic delay. His laughter, in turn, was returned as another echo until the feedback af- fected all the participants and Farnborough resounded with a noise simi- lar to that heard when rock musicians lean their guitars against the speak- ers. A "system that laughed by itself," Jones called it. But instead of laughing along, he chose to understand: Feedback, the principle of all os- cillators, can also generate centimetric wave frequencies, something the experts refused to believe. 199 Jones ordered the construction of synchro- nized receivers, which, in turn, located the Luftwaffe's radio beam trans-
Gramophone I03
mitters and their targets. The Battle of Britain was won. (Even if the war- lord Churchill, not wanting to reveal to the enemy that his secrets had been revealed, disallowed the evacuation of Coventry, which had already been identified as a target city. )
Survivors and those born later, however, are allowed to inhabit stereophonic environments that have popularized and commercialized the trigonometry of air battles. Ever since EMI introduced stereo records in I957,200 people caught between speakers or headphones have been as con- trollable as bomber pilots. The submarine location duties of aspiring air force officers or the bombing target locations of Heinkel pilots turn into hypnosis, which in Stoker's I897 Dracula still had to be used to solve, without the help of radio technology, a very strategic submarine detection problem. 201 But in I966, following two world wars and surges in innova- tion, hypnosis and recording technology finally coincide: engine noises, hissing steam, and a brass band move across the walls from left to right and back while a British voice sings of the literal chain that linked Liver- pool's submarine crews to postwar rock groups.
In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea and he told us of his life
in the land of submarines.
So we sailed up to the sun
till we found the sea of green and we lived beneath the waves in our yellow submarine.
And our friends are all aboard many more of them live next door and the band begins to play
"We all live in a yellow submarine . . . "202
The Beatles simply transported everybody to that impossible space that once concealed Count Dracula in his black coffin in the black belly of his ship, floating in the Black Sea until he was located, and subsequently de- stroyed, by hypnotic sound detection. Hi-fi stereophony can simulate any acoustic space, from the real space inside a submarine to the psychedelic space inside the brain itself. And should locating that space either fail or be a ruse designed to fool the consumer, it is only because the supervising sound engineer has proceeded as shrewdly as the disinformation cam- paign prior to the Battle of the Bulge.
? 1 04 Gramophone
? Once again, these deceptions were programmed by the admirable Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. By design or accident, his Edison places "his hand on the central control panel of the laboratory," whereupon the tele- phonic voice of his agent in New York "seemed to come from all the cor- ners of the room at once. " A dozen speakers scattered across the labora- tory-obviously modeled on the first soundspace experiments conducted between the Paris Opera and the Palace of Industry in 1 8 8 1-make it possible. 203
With the help of stereo recordings and stereo, VHF acoustic decep- tions can invade operas completely. When, in 1959, John Culshaw pro- duced Solti's beautifully overmodulated Rhinegold, the homelessness of spirits was implemented. Of course the other gods and goddesses, male and female singers, were each assigned their own space between the stereo channels. But Wagner's great technician Alberich, upon tearing the newly completed Tarnhelm out of his brother Mime's hands and demon- strating in hands-on fashion the advantages of invisibility, appears to be coming, like Edison's telegrapher, from all corners at once. "Thus, in scene III, Alberich puts on the Tarnhelm, disappears, and then thrashes the unfortunate Mime. Most stage productions make Alberich sing through a megaphone at this point, the effect of which is often less dom- inating than that of Alberich in reality. Instead of this, we have tried to convey, for thirty-two bars, the terrifying, inescapable presence of Al- berich: left, right, or centre there is no escape for Mime. "204
Culshaw's stereo magic simply puts into practice what the great me- dia technician Wagner had in mind for his dramatic doppelganger. "Everywhere now he lies in wait," sings Alberich, lost in acoustic space, making those he keeps "under guard" "subject to him forever. "205 In other words, Wagner invented the radio play, as Nietzsche immediately realized: "His art always carries him in two directions, out of a world of auditory drama into a mysteriously kindred world of visual drama, and vice versa. "206 The Ring of the Nibelung, that zero series of all word wars, could just as well be called Struggle in the Ether.
Gramophone 1 0 5
To broadcast the ethereal struggle, radio merely had to take over the innovations of the world wars and, in a move that reversed the one fol- lowing the First World War, adapt itself to the standard of records. Be- cause amplitude modulation did not leave enough frequency range, the old AM radio would have been unable to transmit hi-fi songs or stereo ra- dio plays.
The spectacular growth of FM is attributable to its technical superiority to AM, and relative cheapness as an investment medium. In the late fifties, it was found that the great range of FM channels could not only sustain a higher fidelity for single transmissions, but could in fact also be used to broadcast separate signals simultaneously in a process called "multiplexing. " This discovery made possible stereo musical broadcast. Stereo broadcast was particularly attractive to those au- diences discriminating and wealthy enough to prefer high fidelity music. . . . As the rock audience grew in size and sophistication, it came to demand the same sound quality which it could get from records at home (reflected in the tremen- dous increase in the middle and late sixties in the stereo component market), but could not get from AM radio. 207
Frequency modulation and signal multiplexing, the two components of VHF, are of course not a U. S. commercial discovery of the 1950S. Without "his ingenious technical decision" in favor of signal multiplex- ing, General Fellgiebel, chief of Army Communications, would not have been able to control the invasion of Russia, that is, "the most immense task ever faced by any signal corps in the world. "208 Without Colonel Gimmler of Army Ordnance and his refutation of the delusion "that very high frequencies (between 10m and 1m) propagate in a straight line and are therefore of no use in the battle field,"209 Colonel General Guderian, the strategist of the tank blitzkrieg, would have been forced to resort to World-War-I-era carrier pigeons. Instead, his armored wedges, "from the tanks in the most forward position back to divisional, corps, and army command," were, unlike his enemies, equipped with VHF. 21O "The engine is the soul of the tank," Guderian used to say, "and radio," General Nehring added, "its number one. " Then as now VHF radio reduces the leadership vacuum to zero.
On September II, 1944, American tank vanguards liberated the city of Luxembourg and its radio station. Radio Luxembourg returned to its pre- war status as the largest commercial broadcaster and advertiser of records on a continent of postal, telegraphic, and radio state monopo- lies. 211 But four years as an army station had left its traces: traces of a new way of storing traces.
I06 Gramophone
? Electl'o aimant
Basic diagram of Poulsen's telegraphone.
By the early 1940S, German technicians had made some startling advances. Radio monitors who listened to the German broadcasting stations day after day for British and United States intelligence soon realized that many of the programs they were hearing could not possibly derive from live studio broadcasts. Yet there were a fidelity and a continuity of sound, plus an absence of surface scratching, in the German transmissions that ordinary transcription records could never have yielded. The mystery was solved . . . when the Allies captured Radio Luxem- bourg . . . and discovered among the station's equipment a new Magnetophone of extraordinary capabilities. 212
It was not until I940 that technicians at BA5F and AEG had by chance hit upon the technique of radio frequency premagnetizing, thus turning Valdemar Poulsen's experimental telegraphone of I898 into an operational audiotape with a IO kilohertz frequency bandwidth. Up until then, the record-radio media link had operated as a one-way street. Transmitters and gramophone users replayed what Berliner's master disc had once and for all recorded, even if radio stations-in a late vindica- tion of Edison-made use of special phonographs developed for the spe- cific purpose of program storage. 213 But under combat conditions those wax cylinders, which, since I930, were allowed to record parliamentary sessions strictly for "archival purposes," were useless. 214 A propaganda ministry that turned radio into "the cultural 55 of the Third Reich"215 needed a recording and storage medium as modern and mobile as Gude- rian's tank divisions.
Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, recounts:
We were also essentially dependent on developments of the propaganda ministry with regard to radio equipment for war correspondents. That also applied to the
FiI d? a. cier
? c? ,
d enroulemenl
Gramophone 1 07
appropriate vehicles. When it came to tank divisions, the Luftwaffe, or parts of the navy, the opportunities for original combat recordings were hampered by the fact that we could not obtain the stable and horizontal supports necessary for pro- ducing discs. At first, we were forced to make do with belated dispatches.
A significant change occurred after the Magnetophone was invented and thoroughly designed for the purpose of war reports. Original combat reports from the air, the moving armored vehicle, or the submarine, etc. , now became impres- sive firsthand accounts. 216
As Ludendorff had pointed out, it is a truth of Total War that "the mass usage of technological equipment can be tested much better in wartime than would ever be possible in peace. "217 The motorized and mo- bilized audiotape finally delivered radio from disc storage; "Yellow Sub- marine," or "war as acoustic experience," became playable.
But reaching beyond the acoustic experiences of the so-called general public, the magnetic tape also revolutionized secret transmissions. Ac- cording to Pynchon, "operators swear they can tell the individual send- ing-hands. "218 As a consequence, the Abwehr [German Counterintelli- gence Service], as part of the German Army High Command, had the "handwriting" of every single agent recorded at the Wohldorf radio sta- tion close to Hamburg before they went abroad on their secret missions. Only magnetic tapes guaranteed to Canaris and his men that it "was re- ally their agent sitting at the other end and not an enemy operator. "219
Inspired by this success, the Abwehr switched from defense to of- fense. Because the enemy was not yet in possession of magnetic tapes, the Abwehr was in a position to transmit its famous Funkspiele (radio games), which in spite of their name resulted not in the entertainment of millions in front of speakers but in the death of 50 British agents. The Ab- wehr managed to capture and turn around agents who had parachuted into the Netherlands. As if nothing had happened, they were forced to continue their transmissions in their own handwriting. The transmission of German Funkspiel messages to London (or, in one parallel case, to Moscow) lured additional agents into the Abwehr trap. Normally, intelli- gence agencies arrange emergency signals with their agents for such situ- ations, "such as using an old code, making absurd mistakes, or inserting or omitting certain letters of punctuation. "220 Each Morse message of the converted agents was taped, analyzed, and, if need be, manipulated be- fore it was transmitted. This procedure continued uninterrupted for years in the hardly civilian ether.
The world-war audiotape inaugurated the musical-acoustic present. Beyond storage and transmission, gramophone and radio, it created em-
108 Gramophone
pires of simulation. In England, Turing himself considered using a cap- tured German Magnetophone as the storage mechanism for his projected large computer. Like the paper strip of the universal discrete machine, tapes can execute any possible manipulation of data because they are equipped with recording, reading, and erasing heads, as well as with for- ward and reverse motion. 221 Which is why early, cheap pes work with at- tached tape decks.
In a far more practical vein, captured magnetic tapes aroused sleepy U. S. electric and music giants who had, naturally, taken on duties other than commercial ones between 1942 and 194 5 . 222 Inserted into the signal path, audiotapes modernized sound production; by replacing gramo- phones they modernized sound distribution. Tape decks made music con- sumers mobile, indeed automobile, as did the radio producers in the Mag- netophone-equipped German lead tanks of old. Thus, the "American mass market" was "opened up" by "the car playback system. "223 To min- imize the leadership vacuum and exploit the possibilities of stereophony, the only things missing were new VHF stations with rock'n'roll and traf- fic reports on the transmitting end and car radios with FM and decoders on the receiving end. Six-cylinder engines whisper, but the stereo equip- ment roars. Engine and radio are (to paraphrase Guderian and Nehring) also the soul of our tourist divisions, which under so-called postwar con- ditions rehearse or simulate the blitzkrieg.
The central command, however, has moved from general staffs to en- gineers. 224 Sound reproduction revolutionized by magnetic tape has ren- dered orders unnecessary. Storing, erasing, sampling, fast-forwarding, rewinding, editing-inserting tapes into the signal path leading from the microphone to the master disc made manipulation itself possible. Ever since the combat reports of Nazi radio, even live broadcasts have not been live. The delay that in the case of tapes is due to separate head mon- itoring (and that is now more elegantly achieved by digital shift regis- ters)225 suffices for so-called broadcast obscenity policing lines. It appears that listeners, once they have been called by a disc jockey and are on the air, are prone to exhibit an unquenchable desire for obscenities. Today everybody can and (according to Andy Warhol) wants to become famous, if only for two minutes of airtime. In the blind time to which media, as opposed to artists, are subject, chance is principally unpredictable. But the 6. 4 seconds of dead time the broadcast obscenity policing line inserts between telephone call and actual broadcast make censorship (if not art) possible in the data flow of the real.
That is precisely the function of audiotapes in sound processing. Edit-
Gramophone 1 09
ing and interception control make the unmanipulable as manipulable as symbolic chains had been in the arts. With projects and recourses, the time of recurrence organizes pure random sequences; Berliner's primitive recording technology turns into a Magical Mystery Tour. In 1954, Abbey Road Studios, which not coincidentally produced the Beatles' sound, first used stereo audiotapes; by 1970 eight-track machines had become the standard; today discos utilize 3 2 or 64 tracks, each of which can be ma- nipulated on its own and in unison. 226 "Welcome to the machine," Pink Floyd sang, by which they meant, "tape for its own ends-a form of col- lage using sound. "227 In the Funkspiele of the Abwehr, Morse hands could be corrected; in today's studios, stars do not even have to be able to sing anymore. When the voices of Waters and Gilmour were unable to hit the high notes in "Welcome to the Machine," they simply resorted to time axis manipulation: they dropped the tape down half a semitone while recording and then dropped the line in on the track. 228
But neither is tape technology always an end in itself, nor does editing always amount to correction or beautification. If media are anthropolog- ical a prioris, then humans cannot have invented language; rather, they must have evolved as its pets, victims, or subjects. And the only weapon to fight that may well be tape salad. Sense turns into nonsense, govern- ment propaganda into the white noise of Turing's vocoder, impossible fillers like is/or/the are edited out:229 precisely the ingredients of William Burroughs's tape cut-up technique.
"Playback from Eden to Watergate" begins (like all books) with the word, and in the beginning that word was with God. But not only in the shape of speech, which animals, too, have at their command, but also as writing, the storage and transmission of which made culture possible in the first place. "Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write 'Death Traps in Your Warehouse' for the Reader's Digest. "230 Such warnings, or "tactics," are restricted to hu- mans-with the one exception that they were not capable of warning of the warning system of writing, which subsequently turned into a deadly trap. Because apes never mastered writing the "written word" mastered them: a "killer virus" that "made the spoken word possible. The word has not yet been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host," which now seems to be "breaking down. "231 Reconstructing the apes' inner throat, which was not designed for speech, the virus created humans, especially white males, who were stricken with the most malignant infection: they mistook the host itself for its linguistic parasite. Most apes died from sexual frenzy or because the
1 1 0 Gramophone
virus caused "death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. "232 But with two or three survivors the word was able to launch a new beginning.
Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated af- ter Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or, to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH. 233
What began as a media war has to end as a media war so as to close the feedback loop linking Nixon's Watergate tapes to the Garden of Eden. "Basically, there is only one game and that game is war. "234 World war weapons like the Magnetophone have been put to commercial use in the shape of tape recorders, as a result of which ex-writers like Burroughs can take action. The classic rift between the production and reception of
books is replaced by a single military interception. 235
We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder one we will record speeches and conversations, carefully editing in stammers, mispronunciations, in- ept phrases-the worst number one we can assemble. Now, on tape recorder two we will make a love tape by bugging his bedroom. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say, the Senator's teenage daughter. On tape recorder three we will record hateful, dis- approving voices. We'll splice the three recordings in together at very short inter- vals and play them back to the Senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders, but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tape and disapproval tapes together. 236
As simple as any abuse of army equipment. One just has to know what Shannon's and Turing's scrambler or the German Magnetophone can be used for. 237 If "control," or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century,238 then fighting that power requires pos- itive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment pro- duces wild oscillations of the Farnborough type. Play to the powers that be their own melody.
Which is exactly what Burroughs does after having described "a number of weapons and tactics in the war game":239 he joins Laurie An- derson in producing records. Which is exactly what rock music does in the first place: it maximizes all electro-acoustic possibilities, occupies
Gramophone III
recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the writing-induced separation into composers and writers, arrangers and interpreters. When Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and others founded United Artists following the First World War, a movie executive announced that "the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum. " The same thing happened when Lennon, Hendrix, Barrett and others started recording their Gesamtkunstwerke by making full use of the media inno- vations of the Second World War. 240
Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, Magnetophones, submarine lo- cation technologies, air war radio beams, etc. , have released an abuse of army equipment that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War n+I. Radio, the first abuse, lead from World War I to II, rock music, the next one, from II to III. Following a very practical piece of advice from Bur- roughs's Electronic Revolution,241 Laurie Anderson's voice, distorted as usual on Big Science by a vocoder, simulates the voice of a 747 pilot who uses the plane's speaker system to suddenly interrupt the ongoing enter- tainment program and inform passengers of an imminent crash landing or some other calamity. Mass interception media like rock music amount to mobilization, which makes them the exact opposite of Benjamin's dis- traction. 242 In 193 6, only the unique "Reichsautozug Deutschland, a mo- torcade consisting of eighty vehicles," was able to "broadcast party con- gresses and mass rallies without any local help by setting up speaker sys- tems on a giant scale, erecting stands, and so on":243 today, the same is achieved night after night by the trucks and kilowatt systems of any rock group. Filled to the brim with electronics or army equipment, they carry us away to Electric Ladyland. The theme of love, that production secret of the literature for nonreaders, has run its course.
Rock songs sing of the very media power which sustains them.
Lennon and McCartney's stereo submarine is not the only postwar lyric in the literal sense of the word. The Final Cut, Pink Floyd's last record, was written by Roger Waters (born 1944) for Eric Fletcher Wa- ters (1913-1944), that is, for a victim of a world war. It begins, even be- fore the first sound, with tape cut-ups of news broadcasts (on the Falk- lands, NATO fleet transporters, nuclear power stations), which all simply serve to point out that "postwar," both the word and the thing itself, is a "dream," a distortion made to mollify consumer ears. "Post War Dream" is followed by "The Hero's Return. " The cut-up returns to its origins: when army communication equipment, the precursor of the mass me- dium radio, cuts up the symbolic and the real, orders and corpses. A com- memoration that is the flip side of postwar, love and Muzak.
I I 2
Gramophone
Sweetheart, sweetheart, are you fast asleep, good 'cos that's the only time I can really talk to you and there is something that I've locked away
a memory that is too painful
to withstand the light of day.
When we came back from the war
the banners and flags hung on everyone's door we danced and we sang in the street
and the church bells rang.
But burning in my heart
a memory smoulders on
of the gunner's dying words
on the intercom. 244
Interception, chopping, feedback, and amplification of war reports: "Sympathy for the Devil" means nothing else. Legend has it that the Rolling Stones used cut-up techniques to produce the lyrics for Beggars Banquet. They cut out newspaper headlines, pasted them to the studio wall, and shot at them. Every hit was a line. Anticipating modern statis- tics, the precondition of cut-up and signal processing in general, Novalis remarked: "The individual facts are random events-the combination of random events-their concurrence is itself not subject to chance, but to
laws-a result of the most profound systematic wisdom. "245
Thus, the random distribution of newspaper headlines results in the law of information technology and a martial history of rock music. The devil, whose voice is immortalized by "Sympathy for the Devil," was there when the revolutionaries of St. Petersburg killed the czar and, with their radio transmission "CQ-to all," turned army equipment into global AM radio; he was there when television broadcast both Kennedy assassinations, turned "you and me" into murderers, and exorcised all ra- dio magic. But above all, Lucifer screams out that radio specter, ghost
army, or tank general which VHF and rock music are indebted to:
I rode a tank
held a gen'rals's rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. 246
The blitzkrieg, as is well known, raged from I939 to I94I, when Gude- rian rode his lead tank. The bodies stank longer.
From "War Heroes" to Electric Ladyland: a mnemotechnology of rock music. Nietzsche's gods had yet to receive the sacrifice of language;
? ? ? The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland, 1968. (Courtesy of Authentic Hendrix, LLC, and MCA Records, Inc. )
"
Tyrnp . Tymp .
1 . 5
Pistol shot
( Let us know when we go {emit erom eno K . O .
(slow speed)
0 . 0 0 . 6
7 . 0
13 . 6
(slow speed)
AND THE GODS MADE LOVE
jet whistle ----------
By
JIM! HENDRIX
I('\t'r['
21 . 0 backward & forward tapes of speech
29 . 8 Harmonics run up and down at high speed
? ? 5. 6
Tyrnp.
I I4 Gramophone
cut-up techniques have done away with that virus. Before Hendrix, the paratrooper of the IOIst Airborne, cuts his machine-gun-like guitar to the title song, tape technology operates for its own sake: tympana, jet engines, pistol shots. Writing can write nothing of that. The Songbook for Electric Ladyland notes the tape's forward and backward motion as well as its changing speed and the test points of a blind but manipulable time. 247 The title on the cover-that which does not cease not to write itself.
? ? ? FILM
? ? Media cross one another in time, which is no longer history. The recording of acoustic data was accomplished with sound tricks, montage, and cuts; it is with film tricks, montage, and cuts that the recording of optical processes began. Since its inception, cinema has been the manipulation of optic nerves and their time. This is proved, among other ways, by the now-prohibited trick of repeatedly splicing individual frames of a Coca- Cola ad into feature films: because its flashlike appearance for 40 millisec- onds reaches the eyes but not consciousness, the audience develops an in- explicable yet irresistible thirst. A cut has undercut its conscious registra- tion. The same is true of film. Beginning with Eastman in r887, when celluloid superseded Daguerre's photographic glass plates and provided the material basis for feature films, such manipulations became feasible. Cinema, in contrast to sound recording, began with reels, cuts, and splices.
It is said that the Lumiere brothers documented simply and inces- santly what their lens could record and what the type of projection they developed could reproduce. Legend has it, however, that Georges Melies, the great film pioneer, ran out of celluloid while shooting a street scene. He left the tripod and camera in position and loaded a new reel, but in the meantime so-called life naturally went on. Viewing the fully spliced film, its director was consequently surprised by the magical appearance and disappearance of figures against a fixed background. Melies, who as former director of the Theatre Robert Houdin had already projected many a magical trick onto the technological screen,l had accidentally also stumbled upon the stop trick. Hence in May r 89 6, " before the eyes of an astonished and dumbfounded audience," he presented "L'Escamotement d'une dame, the disappearance of a woman from the picture. "2 Techno-
logical media (following Villiers and his Edison) liquidate that "great
II5
? 116 Film
? Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d'un poete, 1930.
Lady, Nature," as it had been described, but never viewed, by the nine- teenth century. Woman's sacrifice.
And castration. For what film's first stop tricks did to women only re- peated what the experimental precursors of cinema did to men. Since 1878 Edward Muggeridge (who changed his name to Eadweard Muy- bridge to commemorate old Saxon kings)3 had been experimenting with twelve special cameras on behalf of the California railroad tycoon and university founder, Leland Stanford. The location was Palo Alto, which later saw the invention of the vacuum tube, and the assignment was the recording of movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter's eye. Racehorses and sprinters dashed past the individually and sequentially positioned cameras, whose shutters were triggered succes- sively by an electromagnetic device supplied by the San Francisco Tele- graph Supply CompanY-1 millisecond for every 40 milliseconds. 4
With such snapshots (literally speaking) Muybridge's handsome vol- umes on Animal Locomotion were meant to instruct ignorant painters in what motion looks like in real-time analysis. For his serial photographs testified to the imaginary element in human perception, as in the positions of horses' legs on canvas or on English watercolor paper. To speak of cin- ema as Muybridge's historical goal would, however, be inaccurate, since celluloid was not yet available. The technological medium was meant to modernize a venerable art form, as indeed happened when impressionists like Degas copied photographs in their paintings. Hence Stanford Univer- sity's fencers, discus throwers, and wrestlers posed as future models for
Film 117
painters, that is, nude-at least as long as they turned their backs to one of the twelve cameras. In all the milliseconds of frontal shots, however, Muybridge reached one last time for the painter's brush in order to prac- tice (long before Melies) the disappearance of the male anatomy with re- touched gymnastic shorts.
Had they been copied onto celluloid and rolled onto a reel, Muy- bridge's glass plates could have anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, the peephole precursor to the Lumieres' cinematic projection. The astonished visitors to the 1 893 World's Fair in Chicago would then have been witness to the first trick film: the jumpy appearance and disappearance of moral remains, which in the age of cinema approximate the condition of pure image-flickering.
The trick film therefore has no datable origin. The medium's possi- bilities for cutting and splicing assail its own historiography. Hugo Miin- sterberg, the private lecturer at the University of Freiburg whom William James called to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, clearly recognized this in 1916 in the first history of cinema written by a professor:
It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into the pictures on a screen? Or did the development begin with the first photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it start with the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the impression of movement resulted? Or was the birthday of the new art when the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such rapidly
passing pictures on a wall? 5
Miinsterberg's questions remain unanswered because the making of films is in principle nothing but cutting and splicing: the chopping up of continuous motion, or history, before the lens. "Discourse," Foucault wrote when he introduced such caesuras into historical methodology it- self, "is snatched from the law of development and established in a dis- continuous atemporality: . . . several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either move- ment, time, or history. "6 As if contemporary theories, such as discourse analysis, were defined by the technological a priori of their media.
Methodological dreams flourish in this complication or implication. Theory itself since Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno has attempted to pseudo-metamorphose into film. 7 It is also possible, however, to under- stand technological a prioris in a technological sense. The fact that cuts stood at the beginning of visual data processing but entered acoustic data
rr8 Film
processing only at the end can then be seen as a fundamental difference in terms of our sensory registration. That difference inaugurated the dis- tinction between the imaginary and the real.
The phonograph permitted for the first time the recording of vibra- tions that human ears could not count, human eyes could not see, and writing hands could not catch up with. Edison's simple metal needle, however, could keep up-simply because every sound, even the most complex or polyphonous, one played simultaneously by a hundred musi- cians, formed a single amplitude on the time axis. Put in the plain lan- guage of general sign theory, acoustics is one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range. 8
The continuous undulations recorded by the gramophone and the au- diotape as signatures of the real, or raw material, were thus passed on in an equally continuous way by sound engineers. Cutting and splicing would have produced nothing but crackling noises, namely, square-curve jumps. Avoiding them presupposes great skill on the part of recording en- gineers, if not the computer algorithms of digital signal processing. Therefore, when pioneers of the radio play such as Breslau's Walter Bischoff were looking for genuinely "radio-specific" (funkisch) means of expression, they studied the parallel medium of silent films and consid- ered only the fade-out, not the cut, as a possible model: "The man work- ing the amplifier, " as Bischoff argued in Dramaturgy of the Radio Play, "is in charge of a function similar to that of the camera man. He fades in and out, as we say in the absence of a radio-specific terminology. By slowly turning down the condenser at the amplifier, he lets the scene, the finished sequence of events, fade into the background, just as he can, by gradually turning the condenser up, give increasing form and shape to the next acoustic sequence. "9 By following such continuity, which is diamet- rically opposed to the film cut, things worked well for thirty years. But ever since VHF radio began transmitting stereophonically, that is, two amplitudes per unit of time, fade-outs have been "more difficult to exe- cute": "the mise-en-scene, invisible yet localizable, cannot be dismantled and replaced by a new one in front of the listener as easily as in the case of a monophonic play. "lo Once tethered, such are the constraints pro- duced by the real.
For one thing, optical data flows are two-dimensional; for another, they consist of high frequencies. Not two but thousands of units of light per unit of time must be transmitted in order to present the eye with a two- or even three-dimensional image. That requires an exponential mag- nification of processing capacities. And since light waves are electromag-
Film 119
netic frequencies in the terahertz range, that is, a trillion times faster than concert pitch (A), they outpace not only human writing hands but even (unbelievably) today's electronics.
Two reasons why film is not directly linked to the real. Instead of recording physical waves, generally speaking it only stores their chemical effects on its negatives. Optical signal processing in real time remains a thing of the future. And even if, following Rudolph Lothar's rather timely metaphysics of the heart, everything from sound to light is a wave (or hertz),ll optical waves still don't have a storage or computing medium- not, at any rate, until fiber technologies running at the speed of light have put today's semiconductors out of business.
A medium that is unable to trace the amplitudes of its input data is permitted a priori to perform cuts. Otherwise, there would be no data. Since Muybridge's experimental arrangement, all film sequences have been scans, excerpts, selections. And every cinematic aesthetic has devel- oped from the 24-frame-per-second shot, which was later standardized. Stop trick and montage, slow motion and time lapse only translate tech- nology into the desires of the audience. As phantasms of our deluded eyes, cuts reproduce the continuities and regularities of motion. Phonog- raphy and feature film correspond to one another as do the real and the Imagmary.
But this imaginary realm had to be conquered. The path of invention, from Muybridge's first serial photographs to Edison's kinetoscope and the Lumiere brothers, does not merely presuppose the existence of celluloid. In the age of organic life stories (as poetry) and organic world histories (as philosophy), even in the age of mathematical continuity, caesuras first had to be postulated. Aside from the material precondition, the spliceable celluloid, there was a scientific one: the system of possible deceptions of the eye had to be converted from a type of knowledge specific to illusion- ists and magicians (such as Houdini) to one shared by physiologists and engineers. Just as the phonograph (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam notwithstand- ing) became possible only after acoustics had been made an object of sci- entific investigation, so "cinematography would never have been in- vented " had not " researchers been occupied with the consequences of the stroboscopic effect and afterimages. "12
Afterimages, which are much more common and familiar than the stroboscopic effect, were already present in Goethe's Theory of Colors- but only, as in Wilhelm Meister's Years ofApprenticeship, to illustrate the effects of Classic-Romantic literature on souls: a woman hovers in front
120 Film
of the inner eye of the hero or the readers as the optical model of perfect alphabetization, even though her beauty simply cannot be recorded in words. Wilhelm Meister observes to himself and his like-minded readers, "If you close your eyes, she will present herself to you; if you open them, she will hover before' all objects like the manifestation which a dazzling image leaves behind in the eye. Was not the quickly passing figure of the Amazon ever present in your imagination? "13 For Novalis, imagination was the miraculous sense that could replace for readers all of their senses.
At least as long as Goethe and his Theory of Colors were alive. For it was Fechner who first examined the afterimage effect with experimental rigor. Experimenter and subject in one, he stared into the sun-with the result that he went blind in 1839 for three years and had to resign from his physics chair at the University of Leipzig. The historical step from psy- chology to psychophysics (Fechner's beautiful neologism) was as conse- quential as the emergence of modern media from the physiological hand- icaps of its researchers was literal.
No wonder, then, that the aesthetics of the afterimage effect is also due to a half-blind person. Nietzsche, the philosopher with -14 diop- ters,14 produced a film theory before its time under the pretext of de- scribing both The Birth of Tragedy in ancient Greece and its German re- birth in the mass spectacles of Wagner. 15 In Nietzsche, the theater perfor- mances that were produced in the shadeless midday sun of an Attic setting were transformed into the hallucinations of inebriated or vision- ary spectators, whose optic nerves quite unconsciously processed white- and-black film negatives into black-and-white film positives: "After an en- ergetic attempt to focus on the sun, we have, by way of remedy almost, dark spots before our eyes when we turn away. Conversely, the luminous images of the Sophoclean heroes-those Apollonian masks-are the nec- essary productions of a deep look into the horror of nature; luminous spots, as it were, designed to cure an eye hurt by the ghastly night. "16
Prior to Fechner's historical self-experiment, blinding was not a mat- ter of desire. An eye hurt by the ghastly night that requires for its remedy inverted afterimage effects is no longer directed toward the stage of the Attic amphitheater but onto the black surface of soon-to-come movie screens, as the Lumiere brothers will develop them in defiance of their name. Nietzsche's ghastly night is the first attempt to christen sensory de- privation as the background to and other of all technological mediaY That the flow of data takes place at all is the elementary fact of Nietz- sche's aesthetic, which renders interpretations, reflections, and valuations of individual beauty (and hence everything Apollonian) secondary. If "the
Film 121
world" can be "justified to all eternity . . . only as an aesthetic product,"18 it is simply because "luminous images" obliterate a remorseless blackness. The Nietzsche movie called Oedipus is technological enough to pre- date the innovation of the Lumieres by a quarter century. According to The Birth ofTragedy, a tragic hero, as inebriated spectators visually hal- lucinate him, is "at bottom no more than a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall, that is to say, appearance through and through. "19 It is pre- cisely this dark wall, which allows actors to turn into the imaginary, or film stars, in the first place, that has been opening theater performances since 1 8 7 6, the year of the inauguration of the theater in Bayreuth, whose prophecy The Birth of Tragedy undertook. Wagner did what no drama- turg before him had dared to do (simply because certain spectators in- sisted on the feudal privilege of being as visible as the actors themselves): during opening night, he began The Ring ofthe Nibelung in total dark- ness, before gradually turning on the ( as yet novel) gaslights. Not even the presence of an emperor, Wilhelm I, prevented Wagner from reducing his audience to an invisible mass sociology and the bodies of actors (such as the Rhine maidens) to visual hallucinations or afterimages against the background of darkness. 2o The cut separating theater arts and media tech- nologies could not be delineated more precisely. Which is why all movie theaters, at the beginning of their screenings, reproduce Wagner's cosmic sunrise emerging from primordial darkness. A 1913 movie theater in Mannheim, as we know from the first sociology of cinema, used the slo-
gan, "Come in, our movie theater is the darkest in the whole city! "21 Already in 1 89 1 , four years prior to the projection screen of the Lu- miere brothers, Bayreuth was technologically up to date. Not for nothing did Wagner joke that he would have to complete his invention of an in- visible orchestra by inventing invisible actors. 22 Hence his son-in-law, the subsequently notorious Chamberlain, planned the performance of sym- phonies by Liszt that would have become pure feature films with equally pure film music: accompanied by the sound of an orchestra sunk in Wag- nerian fashion, and situated in a "nightclad room," a camera obscura was supposed to project moving pictures against a "background" until all spectators fell into "ecstasies. "23 Such enchantments were unthinkable with old-fashioned viewing: eyes did not mix up statues or paintings, or the bodies of actors, for that matter-those basic stage props of the es- tablished arts-with their own retinal processes. Thanks only to Cham- berlain's plans and their global dissemination by Hollywood, the physio- logical theory of perception becomes applied perceptual practice: movie- goers, following Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "respond to the
1 22 Film
projection screen like a retina inverted to the outside that is remotely con- nected to the brain. "24 And each image leaves an afterimage.
In order to implement the stroboscopic effect, the second theoretical condition of cinema, with the same precision, one needs only to illumi- nate moving objects with one of the light sources that have become om- nipresent and omnipotent since the 1 890S. As is widely known, back then Westinghouse won out over Edison, alternating current over direct cur- rent, as a public utility. The glow of light alternates fifty times per second in European lightbulbs, sixty times in American ones: the uncomplicated, and hence imperceptible, rhythm of our evenings and of an antenna called the body.
The stroboscopic illumination transforms the continuous flow of movement into interferences, or moires, as can be seen in the wheeling spokes of every Western. This second and imaginary continuity evolved from discontinuity, a discovery that was first made by physiologists dur- ing the founding age of modern media. We owe a large part of the theory of alternating current to Faraday, as well as to the study On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions ( 1 83 I ). 25 Coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday'S stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient condi- tion for the illusions of cinema. One only had to automatize the cutting mechanism, cover the film reel with a wing disk between moments of ex- posure and with a Maltese cross during moments of projection, and the eye saw seamless motion rather than 24 single and still shots. One perfo- rated rotating disk during the recording and projection of pictures made possible the film trick preceding all film tricks.
Chopping or cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary-the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox. The problem of undermining the threshold of audience perception through Faraday's "deceptions" reflected the inverse problem of undermining the threshold of perception of psychophysics itself to avoid disappointment or reality. Because real motion (above and beyond optical illusions) was to become recordable, the prehistory of the cinema began exactly as that of the gramophone. Etienne-Jules Marey, professor of natural history at the College de France in Paris, and later (following his successful film experi- ments) president of the French photographic society,16 earned his initial fame with a sphygmograph copied from the work of German physiologists that was capable of recording pulse rates onto soot-covered glass plates as curves. 27 In the same way, Weber and Scott had mechanically stored sounds (musical intervals themselves) that were not acoustic illusions.
Beginning with heart muscle contractions, Marey investigated move-
? Marey's chronophotographic gun.
ment in general. His chronographic experiments on humans, animals, birds-published as La machine animaIe (1873), a title that does justice to La Mettrie-inspired Governor Stanford of California to give Muy- bridge his assignment. The professional photographer only had to replace Marey's mechanized form of trace detection with a more appropriate, or professional, optical one-and where eyes had always seen only poetic
Film 123
? 1 24 Film
wing-flaps could begin the analysis of the flight of birds, the precondition for all future aircraft constructions. It was no coincidence that pioneers of photography such as Nadar opted against the montgolfieres of 1783 and in favor of literal airships: for flying machines heavier than air. 2s "Cinema Isn't I See, It's I Fly,"29 says Virilio's War and Cinema, in view of the historically perfect collusion of world wars, reconnaissance squad- rons, and cinematography.
In the meantime, the first photographs from Animal Locomotion had hardly appeared when Marey began work on improving Muybridge's im- provement of his own work. The time was ripe for engineers to work to- gether, for innovations of innovations. Marey also stored motion opti- cally, but he reduced the number of cameras from the twelve of his pre- decessor to one and constructed-first with fixed photo glass plates, and, from 1 8 8 8 on, with modern celluloid30-the first serial-shot camera. In- stead of indulging in what Pynchon called "the American vice of modular repetition,"31 he realized that for moving objects, a single, movable appa- ratus was enough. Its name-the chronophotographic gun-spoke noth- ing but the real truth.
It was in 1 8 6 1 , whilst traveling on a paddle-steamer and watching its wheel, that the future Colonel Gatling hit upon the idea of a cylindrical, crank-driven ma- chine gun. In 1 8 74 the Frenchman Jules Janssen took inspiration from the multi- chambered Colt (patented in 1832) to invent an astronomical revolving unit that could take a series of photographs [when attached to a telescope]. On the basis of this idea, Etienne-Jules Marey then perfected his chronophotographic rifle, which allowed its user to aim at and photograph an object moving through space. 32
The history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets.
