No More Learning

When we storm forward and climb out of the trenches, and we see the empty, unknown land in front of us where death goes about its business between flaring columns of smoke, it appears as if a new dimension has opened up to us. Then we suddenly see up close, in camouflage coats and in faces covered with mud like a ghostly apparition, what awaits us in the land of the dead: the enemy. That is an unforgettable moment.
How differently one had envisioned the scene. The blooming edge of a for- est, a flowery meadow, and guns banging into the spring. Death as a flurrying back and forth between the two trench lines of twenty-year-olds. Dark blood on green blades of grass, bayonets in the morning light, trumpets and flags, a happy, shimmering dance. 67
But contemporary technologies of the body have done their duty, in military as well as choreographic terms. When war and cinema coincide, a communications zone becomes the front, the medium of propaganda becomes perception, and the movie theater of Douchy the scheme or schemes for an otherwise invisible enemy. "When our storm signals flash across, [the English] get ready for a wrestling match about bits and pieces of trenches, forests, and the edge of villages. But when we clash in the haze of fire and smoke, then we become one, then we become two parts of one force, fused into one body. "68 Lieutenant Junger meets his imagi- nary other, as Lacan will define it in 193 6: as a mirror image that might restore the body of the soldier, dismembered fourteen times, back to wholeness. 69 If only were there no war and the other not a doppelganger. For "all cruelty, all the compilation of the most ingenious brutalities, can- not fill a human being with as much horror as the momentary apparition of his mirror image appearing in front of him, [with] all the fiery marks of prehistory reflected in his distorted face. "70
]Unger's film breaks off at precisely this image, long before Gravity's Rainbow ends in the blackout of a real or filmed rocket hit above Uni- versal Studios of California. For once the enemy was recognized as a dop- pelganger, "then, in the last fire, the dark curtain of horror may well have
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lifted in the brains, but what was behind, lying in wait, the rigid mouth could no longer speak. "71
Ludendorff and Jiinger's falling storm troopers are silent, either be- cause (following a hermeneutic tautology) they are falling, or because (following a media-technological analysis) their a priori is the silent film. Now, however, we have war films with sound that can spell out the puz- zle behind the dark curtain of horror. What was lying in wait were first of all facts that Jiinger systematically bypassed: the failure of the Luden- dorff offensive, the retreat to the Siegfried position, and capitulation. Sec- ond, and more horrific still, the film doppelganger harbored the possibil- ity of fiction. A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible en- emies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the novel about the Second World War itself, GI von Held asks celebrated film director Gerhardt von Gall (alias Springer, Lubitsch, Pabst, etc. ) about the fate of a German rocket technologist who had fallen into the hands of the Red Army:
"But what if they did shoot him ? "
"No. They weren't supposed to. "
"Springer. This ain't the fucking movies now, come on. "
"Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday,
when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then. . . "72
Total use of media instead of total literacy: sound film and video cam- eras as mass entertainment liquidate the real event. In Storm of Steel no- body except for the diary keeper survives, in Gravity's Rainbow all the people pronounced dead return, even the rocket technician of Peene- munde. Under the influence of the fictitious drug Oneirine, the writing of world-war novels turns into movie fiction.
It is widely known that war-from the sandbox models of the Prus- sian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans-has become increasingly simulable. "But there, too," as these same general staffs wisely recognized, "the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy cannot 'be factored in realistically. "'73 Friedlaender, media-techno- logically as always, has drawn from this the daring, inverted conclusion: for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.
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SALOMa FRIEDLAENDER, "FATA MORGANA MACHINE" (CA. 1920)
For many years Professor Pschorr had been preoccupied with one of the most interesting problems of film: his ideal was to achieve the optical repro- duction of nature, art, and fantasy through a stereoscopic projection appa- ratus that would place its three-dimensional constructs into space without the aid of a projection screen. Up to this point, film and other forms of pho- tography had been pursued only in one-eyed fashion. Pschorr used stereo- scopic double lenses everywhere and, eventually, indeed achieved three- dimensional constructs that were detached from the surface of the projec- tion screen. When he had come that close to his ideal, he approached the Minister of War to lecture him about it. " But my dear Professor," the Min- ister smiled, "what has your apparatus got to do with our technology of maneuvers and war ? " The Professor looked at him with astonishment and imperceptibly shook his inventive head. It was incredible to him that the Minister did not have the foresight to recognize how important that appara- tus was destined to become in times of war and peace. "Dear Minister, " he insisted, "would you permit me to take some shots of the maneuver so that you can convince yourself of the advantages of my apparatus ? " "I'd rather
not," the Minister contemplated, "but you are trustworthy. You know the dangerous article on high treason, of course, and will surely keep the se- cret. " He granted the Professor unlimited access. A couple of weeks after the maneuver, all the generals gathered in open terrain that was in part rolling, mountainous, and wooded, and that contained several large ponds and ravines, slopes, and a couple of villages. "First, dear Minister and hon- ored generals, allow me to tell you that the whole landscape, including our own bodies, appears as nothing but a single, purely optical phantasmagoria. What is purely optical in it I will make disappear by superimposing projec- tions of other things onto it. " He variously combined beams of floodlights and switched on a film reel, which began to run. Immediately the terrain transformed: forests became houses, villages became deserts, lakes and ravines became charming meadows; and suddenly one could see bustling military personnel engaged in battle. Of course, as they were stepping or riding into a meadow, they disappeared into a pond or a ravine. Indeed, even the troops themselves were frequently only optical illusions, so that real troops could no longer distinguish them from fake ones, and hence
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engaged in involuntary deceptions. Artillery lines appeared as pure optical illusions. "Since the possibility exists of combining, precisely and simultane- ously, optical with acoustic effects, these visible but untouchable cannons can boom as well, making the illusion perfect," said Pschorr. "By the way, this invention is of course also useful for peaceful purposes. From now on, however, it will be very dangerous to distinguish things that are only visible from touchable ones. But life will become all the more interesting for it. " Following this he let a bomber squadron appear on the horizon. Well, the bombs were dropped, but they did their terrible damage only for the eye. Strangely enough, the Minister of War in the end decided against purchas- ing the apparatus. Full of anger, he claimed that war would become an im- possibility that way. When the somewhat overly humanistic Pschorr exalted that effect, the Minister erupted: "You cannot turn to the Minister of War to put a dreadful end to war. That falls under the purview of my colleague, the Minister of Culture. " As the Minister of Culture prepared to buy the apparatus, his plans were vetoed by the Minister of Finance. In brief: the state was unwilling to buy. Now the film corporation (the largest film trust) helped itself. Ever since this moment, film has become all-powerful in the world; but only through optical means. It is, quite simply, nature once again, in all its visibility and audibility. When a storm is brewing, for exam- ple, it is unclear whether this storm is only optically real or a real one through and through. Abnossah Pschorr has been exercising arbitrary tech- nological power over the fata morgana, so that even the Orient fell into confusion when a recent fata morgana produced by solely technical means-conjuring Berlin and Potsdam for desert nomads-was taken for real. Pschorr rents out every desired landscape to innkeepers. Surrounding Kulick's Hotel zur Wehmut these days is the Vierwaldstatter Lake. Herr v. Ohnehin enjoys his purely optical spouse. Mullack the proletarian resides in a purely optical palace, and billionaires protect their castles through their optical conversion into shacks.
Not too long ago, a doppelganger factory was established. . . . In the not too distant future, there will be whole cities made of light; entirely dif- ferent constellations not only in the planetarium, but everywhere in nature as well. Pschorr predicts that we will also be able to have technological con- trol over touch in a similar way: not until then will radio traffic with real bodies set in, which means not just film but life, and which will leave far behind all traffic technologies . . .
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The Minister of War's question about what Pschorr's apparatus has to do with the technology of maneuvers and war is the only fiction in Fried- laender's text. Even in its experimental prehistory, that is, even before it became cinema, film conditioned new bodies. But ministers of war were in touch with current developments.
In 1 89 1 , Georges Demeny, Marey's assistant and anatomist at the In- stitute, began work on his Photography of Speech. Initially, his purpose in conducting this strange exercise was to advance the breakdown of dis- course into separate subroutines. In his experiments, motoric and optic data were to be on an equal footing with the sensory and acoustic data derived from Edison's phonograph. And Marey's silent chronophotograph was the perfect instrument for their storage.
Hence a serial camera with shutter speeds in the milliseconds was aimed at Demeny himself, who adhered to the honor-common during the founding age of modern media-of performing simultaneously as ex- perimenter and subject, priest and victim of the apparatus. A human mouth opened, expectorated the syllables "Vi-ve la Fran-cel " and closed again, while the camera dissected, enlarged, stored, and immortalized its successive positions, including the "fine play of all facial muscles," in ? omponent parts with a frequency of 16 Hz. To contemporaries, "many of these oral movements appeared exaggerated because our eye cannot perceive fleeting movements such as these, but the camera makes them visible by bringing motion to a standstill. "74 But that was precisely the point. Edison was rumored to have been enamored of the enlarged shots of his colleague's mouth. 75
Based on the data of a freeze-framed patriotism, Demeny (fascinated by physical impairments, as is every media technologist) first revolution- ized instruction for deaf and mute people. Patients of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were asked to synthesize acoustically the mouth positions film had analyzed optically. Then they could-in "oral examinations" that proved sensationaF6-scream "Vi-ve la Fran-cel" without ever hearing a syllable. In the material battles soon to come, when the Joffre divisions stormed and died like flies, self-perception was hardly necessary anymore.
"As early as 1 892," Demeny "envisioned all the procedures that have since been in use in so-called cinematographic apparatuses and which are nothing but reversible chronophotographs. "77 One only would have had to follow the principles of the revolver and supplement a rotating photo storage device with a rotating photo projector. But even though Demeny was envious of the Lumieres' success, research into slow motion was more important than the illusions of feature films. He remained faithful
? Demeny says, "Vi-ve la Fran-ee! "
? I38 Film
to the chronophotographic gun and moved from studying single patriotic mouths to masses of patriotic legs. On official assignment from the French army, he filmed the traditional goose step in order to optimize it. 78
What physiologists ofart (of all people) announced in I897 as a new feedback loop between psychophysics, maneuver drills, and the uncon- scious was realized to the letter. Regarding the "condition we call 'think- ing,'" Georg Hirth wrote:
That condition as well becomes automatized following frequent repetitIOn; namely, when optical, acoustic, and other stimuli-which effect every closing ap- perception-recur in roughly periodic intervals and in a known intensity. Recall, for example, the activity of a marksman in a shooting gallery. At the beginning of his service, the man is thoroughly infused with the condition of conscious and prospective attentiveness: gradually, however, he becomes sure and relaxed; after each bullet hits he steps mechanically up front to show the mark. His attention can go for a walk-it returns to business only if the impact is delayed long enough for his automatic-rhythmic feeling to subside. The same is true for the recruit dur- ing his exercises. Indeed, the whole debate surrounding the length of active mili- tary service revolves around the question: how long does it take to automatize the military (moral as well as technical) memory structure of the average twenty-year- old in such a way that the apparatus does not fail in the real-life event and that the attention (attentiveness)-which every man must be equipped with at any time in times of war and peace-is not absorbed by mindless service? 79
Mechanization Takes Command-Sigfried Giedion could not have come up with a better title for a book that retraces the path from Marey's chronophotographic gun via modern art to military-industrial ergonom- ics. The automatized weapons of world wars yet to come demanded sim- ilarly automatized, average people as "apparatuses" whose motions-in terms of both precision and speed-could only be controlled by filmic slow motion. Since they were introduced during revolutionary civil wars, exclamations such as "Vive la France! " had nurtured the death drive only psychologically and had left the reaction time at the gun to a "thinking" that exists only in quotation marks for physiologists of art and film.
Storm-troop leaders such as Junger, however, have since Ludendorff been trained to work in time frames below any threshold of perception. The apparition of the enemy appears to them only "for one second," barely perceptible, but measurable. As Junger notes immediately prior to the Ludendorff offensive, "phosphoric digits are glowing on the watch on my wrist. Watch digits, an unusual word. 80 It is 5:30. We'll begin to storm in one hour. "81 Two common items of today, trench coats (or, literally, "coats for the trenches") and watches with second hands, are the prod-
? ? ? ? Giacomo Balla, Ragazza che carre sui balcone (study), I9 I 2 .
E. J. Marey, "Amplitudes of the Leg While Walking," before I885.
ucts of the First World War. 82 In the standardized jump of the second hand, film transport imposes its rhythm upon average people. No wonder that storm-troop leader JUnger hallucinated the body of the enemy-that unreality hidden for months in the trenches-in the medium of film. The opponent could only be a film doppelganger. Demeny, we recall, had stan- dardized the movements of a whole army through chronophotography.
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And Professor Pschorr, as always, only had to do his excessive share to transform the "bodies" of soldiers and the entire landscape of their maneuver into "a single, purely optical phantasmagoria," which, more- over, could be combined precisely and simultaneously with acoustic effects.
A fata morgana machine that can now be had around the globe. Without war, simply by paying an admission fee. For mechanization has also taken command over so-called times of leisure and peace. Night af- ter night, every discotheque repeats Demeny's goose-step analyses. The stroboscopic effect at the beginning of film has left physiological labs and now chops up dancers twenty times per second into film images of them- selves. The barrage of fire has left the major lines of combat and these days echoes from security systems-including their precise and simulta- neous combination with optical effects. Demeny's photography of speech continues as a videoclip, his "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " as a salad of syllables:
"Dance the Mussolini! Dance the Adolf Hitler! " 83
Deaf, mute, and blind, bodies are brought up to the reaction speed of
World War n+I, as if housed in a gigantic simulation chamber. Comput- erized weapons systems are more demanding than automatized ones. If the joysticks of Atari video games make children illiterate, President Rea- gan welcomed them for just that reason: as a training ground for future bomber pilots. Every culture has its zones of preparation that fuse lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on. Our discos are preparing our youths for a retaliatory strike.
War has always already been madness, film's other subject. Body movements, as they are provoked by the stroboscopes of today's dis- cotheques, went by a psychopathological name a century ago: a "large
hysterical arc. " Wondrous ecstasies, twitchings without end, circus-like contortions of extremities were reason enough to call them up with all the means of hypnosis and auscultation. A lecture hall full of medical stu- dents, as yet all male, was allowed to watch the master, Charcot, and his female patients.
A handwritten note [in the as yet unpublished archives of the Salpetrierel gives an account of the session of November 25, 1 877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman's ovaries. He withdraws the baton, and there is a fresh at- tack, which he accelerates by administering inhalations of amyl nitrate. The af- flicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in words that are devoid of metaphor: " G. is taken away and her delirium continues. " 84
? The Salpetriere makes iconographs o f its hysteria.
But this performance was not, or not any longer, the truth about hys- teria: what was produced by psychopathic media was not allowed simply to disappear in secret memories or documents. Technological media had to be able to store and reproduce it. Charcot, who transformed the Salpetriere from a dilapidated insane asylum into a fully equipped re- search lab shortly after his appointment, ordered his chief technician in 1 8 83 to start filming. Whereupon Albert Londe, later known as the con-
structor of the Rolleiflex camera,85 anatomized (strictly following Muy- bridge and Marey) the "large hysterical are" with serial cameras. A young physiology assistant from Vienna visiting the Salpetriere was watching. 86 But Dr. Freud did not make the historical connection between films of hysteria and psychoanalysis. As in the case of phonography, he clung (in the face of other media) to the verbal medium and its new decomposition into letters.
For this purpose, Freud first stills the pictures that the bodies of his female patients produce: he puts them on his couch in the Berggasse. Then a talking cure is deployed against the images seen or hallucinated. With- out mentioning the gender difference between male obsessive-neurosis and female hysteria, in Studies on Hysteria he observes:
When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a "visual" type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions.
Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with the description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into
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? 142 Film
words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the di- rection in which our work is to proceed. "Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared ? " "Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail. " "Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or some- thing will occur to you in connection with it. " When this work has been accom- plished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up an- other picture.
On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain ob- stinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid. 87
Naturally, such sequences of images in hysterics or visually oriented people are an inner film: as in the case of psychoanalytical dream theory, a "pathogenic recollection," notwithstanding the patient's "forms of re- sistance and his pretexts, " provokes its optical "reproduction. "88 When Otto Rank subjected The Student of Prague, as the second German au- teur film, to psychoanalytical examination in 1914, he observed that "cinematography . . . in numerous ways reminds us of dream-work. " Which, conversely, meant that internal images were modeled, as with hys- terics, after the "shadowy, fleeting, but impressive scenes" of film. Con- sequently, "the technique of psychoanalysis," which "generally aims at uncovering deeply buried and significant psychic material, on occasion proceeding from the manifest surface evidence, . . . need not shy away from even some random and banal subject"-such as "the film-drama"-
"if the matter at hand exhibits psychological problems whose sources and implications are not obvious. "89
But this rather filmic uncovering, the return from the cinema to the soul, from manifest surface or celluloid skin to unconscious latency, from a technological to a psychic apparatus, only replaces images with words. While optical data in film are storable, they are also "shadowy, fleeting": one cannot look them up, as with books (or today's videotapes). This in- tangibility governs Rank's methodology. "Those whose concern is with literature may be reassured by the fact that the scenarist of this film, The Student of Prague, is an author currently in vogue and that he has ad- hered to prominent patterns, the effectiveness of which has been tested by time. "90 Which is why psychoanalysis (to paraphrase Freud) basically im- itates the doppelganger film by translating it into words. Rank's discus- sion of the doppelganger quotes all available sources from I 800 on and turns movies back into literature. 91
For a talking cure, nothing else is left to do. Still, after attending
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Londe's filmings of hysteria, Freud did just the opposite with it. Literally, psychoanalysis means chopping up an internal film, in steps that are as methodical as they are discrete, until all of its images have disappeared. They break to pieces one by one, simply because female patients have to translate their visions into depictions or descriptions. In the end the me- dium of the psychoanalyst triumphs, because he stills bodily movements and slays the remaining, internal sightings like so many ghosts or Dracu- las. When Freud "unlocks images," he does so not to store them, as Char- cot does, but to decode the puzzles of their signifiers. Thus, the emergence particularly of nonverbal storage technologies around 1900 leads to a dif- ferentiation that establishes discourse as a medium among media. Freud the writer is still willing to admit the competition of the phonograph, be- cause gramophony (despite all its differences with the talking cure and its case-study novels) deals with words. The competition of silent film, how- ever, Freud does not even acknowledge. And even if Abraham and Sachs operate as "psychoanalytical collaborators" on a 1926 project that makes The Mysteries of the Unconscious into a film, and hence teaches contem- poraries "the necessities of modern-day education without pain and job training,"92 Freud himself flatly denies an offer from Hollywood.
This differentiation of storage media decides the fate of madness. Psychoanalytical discourse, which, following Lacan's thesis, is a conse- quence and displacement of hysterical discourse, translates the most beau- tiful pathology into the symbolic. At the same time, the serial photogra- phy of psychiatry, understood as the trace detection it is, stores the real along the "great hysterical arc. " Londe's still shots of each individual twitch and ecstasy travel (due to a lack of opportunities for projecting films) into the multivolume Iconography of the Salphriere. There they rest, but only to emigrate henceforth from the real and to return to the imaginary, for which Freud had no use. For although the "great hysterical arc" can no longer be found in the lecture halls of today's medical schools, the countless jugendstil images of women, with their bows and twists, can only derive from this iconographie photographique. 93 Works of art of the jugendstil did not simply suffer from the age of their techno- logical reproducibility; in their style, they themselves reproduced mea- sured data and hence practiced the precise application Muybridge had as- cribed from the very beginning to his study of Animal Loco? otion.
Hysteria, however, became as omnipresent as it became fleeting. In the real, it gave rise to archives of trace detection that returned in the imaginary of the paintings of the jugendstil; in the symbolic, it gave rise to a science that returned in the female hysterics of Hofmannsthal's dra-
I44 Film
? The Jugendstil makes iconographs of its hysteria.
mas. 94 One reproduction chased the other. With the result that madness might not take place under conditions of high technology. It becomes, like war, a simulacrum.
A successor to Londe, Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bonn, almost managed to figure out this ruse. His treatise on Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry identified only one appropriate medium for the "wealth of hysterical motoric mal- functions": filming. In a manner "more visual and complete than the best
Film 145
description" (and presumably photographs as well),95 technological me- dia reproduced psychopathological ones. But since serial photographs could be projected as films by 1909, Hennes went one step beyond Londe. Not until psychiatry was in a position "to convert a rapid succession of movements into a slow one through cinematographic reproduction" was it possible to see things "whose precise observation is, in real life, hardly or not at all possible. "96 As if cinema had enlarged the madness (of both patients and physicians) through the whole realm of unreality and fiction; as if Hennes had, in vague anticipation of McLuhan, understood the me- dium as the message. For "in all cases . . . it was typical that distraction from the symptoms of the disease and the suspension of external stimuli were sufficient to reduce, or almost completely eliminate, [hysterical] movements. By contrast, it is enough to draw attention to phenomena, or for the physician to examine the patient, even just step up to him, in or- der for dysfunctions to appear with greater intensity. "97
That is how psychiatry-whose attention had lately been running on automatic pilot, that is, filmically-itself discovered Charcot's simple se- cret, long before Foucault ever did; namely, that every test produces what it allegedly only reproduces. According to Dr. Hennes, who is fearless about contradicting himself and could even describe the doctor's attention as a contraindication after recommending it a moment before, it is quite likely that there would be no madness without filming it:
How often does it happen to the professor that a patient fails during a lecture, that a manic suddenly changes his mood, a catatonic suddenly fails to perform his stereotyped movements. Although he executed his pathological movements with- out disturbance on the ward, the changed environment of the lecture hall has the effect of not letting him produce his peculiarities-so that he does not display precisely what the professor wanted him to demonstrate. Other patients show their interesting oddities "maliciously," only when there are no lectures, continu- ing education courses, and so on. Such occurrences, which are frequently dis- turbing to the clinical lecturer, are almost completely corrected by the cinemato- graph. The person doing the filming is in a position to wait calmly for the best possible moment to make the recording. Once the filming is done, the pictures are available for reproduction at any moment. Film is always "in the mood. " There are no failures. 98
That means that films are more real than reality and that their so- called reproductions are, in reality, productions. A psychiatry beefed up by media technologies, a psychiatry loaded with scientific presumptions, flips over into an entertainment industry. In view of the "rapid dissemi- nation of this invention and the unmatched popularity it has attained in
? such a short time,"99 Hennes advises his profession to create, "through collective participation and collaboration, a cinematographic archive analogous to the phonographic one. "lOO
Hence it is no wonder that the " great hysterical arc" disappears from nosology or the world shortly after its storage on film. Since there are "no failures" and mad people on film are "always 'in the mood,'" inmates of insane asylums can forgo their performances and withhold their "inter- esting oddities 'maliciously'" from all storage media. At the same time, psychiatrists no longer have to hunt for their ungrateful human demon- stration material. The only thing they have to do is shoot silent films, which as such (through the isolation of movements from the context of all speech) already envelop their stars in an aura of madness. To say noth- ing of the many possible film tricks that could chop up and reassemble these body movements, until the simulacrum of madness was perfect.
The age of media (not just since Turing's game of imitation) renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is mad and who is faking it. If cinematographers can "correct in an almost perfect way" disturbing occurrences of non-madness, they might as well film paid actors instead of asylum inmates. Although the historiography of film presumes a line of development from fairground entertainment to ex- pressionist film art, it is closer to the truth to speak of an elegant leap from experimental setups into an entertainment industry. Actors, that is, the doppelgangers of the psychiatrically engineered insane, visited the mOVle screen.
Certainly, Dr. Robert Wiene's Cabinet ofDr. Caligari ( 1920) seems to see cinema itself as part of the genealogy of the circus. The action as a whole confronts small-town life and vagrants. The titular hero appears as a traveling circus artist accompanied by a somnambulist medium who predicts the future for Caligari's paying customers. But the paths leading from the fairgrounds to Caligari are as tenuous as those leading (accord- ing to Siegfried Kracauer's simplified sociological reading) From Caligari to Hitler. In film and/or history, mass hysterias are, rather, the effect of massively used media technologies, which in turn have solid scientific foundation in theories of the unconscious. Caligari's wagon moves to- ward the motorcade of the Third Reich.
That is why Caligari's title of "Dr. " remains the vacuous presump- tion of a charlatan only in Carl Mayer's and Hans Janowitz's draft of the screenplay, a charlatan who misuses his medium Cesare as a remote- controlled murder weapon and who ends up in a straitjacket in an insane asylum once his ruse has been found out. The fairground is conquered by
? ? ? Film 147
an order whose disruptions not coincidentally have cost the lives of a mu- nicipal office worker and a youthful aesthete, two people, moreover, who are interested in books. As if screenplays as well had to defend script as their medium.
Following an idea of the great Fritz Lang,101 however, the completed film frames the action in a way that represents not only the transvalua- tion of all values but also their enigmatization. Citizens and mad people exchange their roles. In the framed story, the youthful hero kills Caligari and in the process underscores his bourgeois media love for female read- ers and books. In the framing story, he turns mad, and driven by his crazed love he stalks another person in the asylum, the alleged lover of the female reader. His private war against Caligari shrinks to the optical hallucination of a paranoid. As if the film attempted to uncover the pathology of a medium that entwined reading and loving but has abdi- cated its power to film. The madwoman simply does not register loving glances anymore.
Caligari, however (or, at any rate, a face that looks just like his), tow- ers above the insane asylum of the framing story as director and psychia- trist. No murder charges can prevail against his power to make a diagno- sis such as paranoia. Apparently, "while the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority," the eventual film "glorified authority" simply because it "convicted its antagonist of madness. "102 But Kracauer's attack against undefined authorities fails to take into account a psychiatry whose effects have produced new beings, not just Carl Mayer's biograph- ical experiences with German military psychiatrists during the war. 103
It is precisely this indistinguishability between framed and framing story, between insanity and psychiatry, that does justice to film technol- ogy. Nothing prevents the asylum director in the narrative frame to act si- multaneously as the mad Caligari. It is only that such ascriptions are communicated via the symbolic order of doctoral titles or the stories of patients, which are not part of the silent film. The identity between psy- chiatrist and murderer remains open-ended because it is offered to the eyes only and is not institutionalized by any word. A never-commented- upon similarity between faces renders all readings indistinguishable.
That is how faithfully Wiene's film follows cinematographically mod- ernized psychiatry. When professorial media technologists of the found- ing age conduct their experiments, they simultaneously play project di- rector and subject, murderer and victim, psychiatrist and madman, but storage technologies do not want to, and cannot, record this difference. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson's fictitious doppelganger pair of
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1 8 8 6, are only the pseudonyms of actual privy councilors. A gramophone records the words of Stransky, the psychiatrist, as a salad of syllables; a chronophotograph records the patriotic grimacing of Demeny. The situa- tion in Wiene's feature film is no different. Filmed psychiatrists go mad of necessity, especially if they, like the director of the asylum, declare an old book explicable in psychiatric as well as media-technological terms.
Somnambulism. A Compendium of the University of Uppsala. Pub- lished in the year I726: Thus reads the Fraktur-Iettered title of the book that the asylum director studies in order to learn everything about a his- torical "mystic, Dr. Caligari," and his "somnambulist by the name of Ce- sare. " Likewise, Charcot and his assistants studied dust-covered files on witches and the obsessed as they were transforming mysticism into a psy- chiatrically proper diagnosis of hysteria. lo4 The researchers of hypnosis, Dr. Freud and Dr. Caligari, are thus doppelgangers. lOS The one "found" the Oedipus complex for purposes of diagnosis and therapy initially "in my own case";106 the other, according to the film's subtitle, "under the domination of a hallucination" reads a sentence in white letters written on the walls of the asylum: "YOU MUST BECOME CALIGARI. " Charges that
"the director" must, for one, be mad and, second, "be Caligari" are to no avail, because modern experimenters say or do the same thing much more clearly-namely, immorally-than bourgeois heroes do. The similarity between psychiatrists and madmen, an enigma throughout the whole film, originates from research strategies and technologies.
The fact that an asylum director is directed by hallucinated writings to become Caligari in the framed story is simply a film trick. An actor plays both roles. With celluloid and cuts (the weapons of Dr. Wiene) Dr. Caligari or his official doppelganger emerges victorious.
It is only because of a life-size puppet that simulates Cesare sleeping in somnambulist stiffness that the title hero can provide his medium with protective alibis while executing nightly murders under the influence of hypnotic orders. The puppet deceives the bourgeois hero (as contempo- rary theories On the Psychology of the Uncanny predicted). 107 Prior to the introduction of stuntmen (and much to the dismay of aesthetes), films engaged in the "frequently used practice of replacing the artist with a puppet in particularly dangerous scenes. "108 Thus, Cesare is always al- ready a silent movie medium, and it is for this reason alone that he can be a somnambulistic and murderous medium. The photograph taken with a camera obscura (the cabinet in the title of the film itself) learns to move; the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere enters into Albert Londe's filming stage. As the mobilization of his puppet alibi, Cesare
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walks stiffly and with raised arms; he stumbles, tries to regain his balance, and finally rolls down a slope. Dr. Hennes describes in virtually identical terms the "accident hysteria" of his patient Johann L. , who is "6I years old" and a "workhorse" : "He walks in straddle-legged and stiff fashion, and often tilts as he turns around; moreover, he patters and walks in small steps; this gait is accompanied by grotesque ancillary movements of his arms, and is, in general, so bizarre that it appears artificially exagger- ated. " Nothing but indescribables, for which, however, "the cinemato- graphic image presented a very vivid illustration and supplement. " 109
And that-when bizarreness and artificial exaggeration originate in a hypnotic command-is above all when pathology and experiment co- incide once again. Cesare operates as the weapon of Caligari the artist. Psychiatrists constructed the first cruise missile systems, reusable systems to boot, long before cyberneticists did. With the serial murders of Cesare (and his numerous descendants in cinema), the seriality of film images enters plot itself. That is why his hypnosis hypnotizes moviegoers. In Wiene's pictures, they fall victim to a trompe l'oeil whose existence Lacan demonstrated through historical periods of painting: the incarnate look of a power that affected pictures long before it created them,l1O or that even produced that look as pictures. Yesterday the accident hysteric Johann L. , today Cesare, tomorrow movie fans themselves. With the somnambulism of his medium, Dr. Caligari already programs "the collective hypnosis" into which the "darkness of the theatre and the glow of the screen"111 transport an audience.
Film doppelgangers film filming itself. They demonstrate what happens to people who are in the line of fire of technological media. A motorized mirror image travels into the data banks of power.
Barbara La Marr, the subtitle heroine of a novel by Arnolt Bronnen with the cynical title Film and Life (I927), experienced it herself. She had just finished doing her first screen tests for Hollywood and was sitting next to the director Fitzmaurice in the darkened projection room while film buyers were examining her body.
Barbara suddenly got frightened. She stopped breathing. She clutched her chest; was her heart still beating; what happened on the screen? Something terrible stared at her, something strange, ugly, unknown; that wasn't she, that couldn't be she who stared at her, looked to the left, to the right, laughed, cried, walked, fell, who was that? The reel rolled, the projectionist switched on the light. Fitzmaurice looked at her.
"Well? " She regained her composure, smiled. "Oh. That is how angels up in
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heaven must look down upon us, the way I look in this picture. " Fitzmaurice dis- agreed laughingly: "I would never have thought of you as an angel. But that is not bad at all. In fact, just the opposite. Better than I thought. Much better. " But she got up, trembling, it erupted from within her, almost screaming: "totally bad," she screamed, "terrible, ghastly, mean, I am completely untalented, nothing will become of me, nothing, nothing! "112
Film transforms life into a form of trace detection, just as literature during Goethe's time transformed truth into an educational discipline. Media, however, are ruthless, while art glosses over. One does not have to be hypnotized, like the mad Cesare, to become strange, ugly, unknown, terrible, ghastly, mean, in brief, "nothing" on the screen. It happens to each and everyone, at least before the plots of feature films (following the logic of phantasms and the real) begin to obscure the undesirable. A pro- tagonist of one of Nabokov's novels goes to the movies with his girlfriend, unexpectedly sees his "doppelganger" (following his brief engagement as a movie extra months earlier), and feels "not only shame but also a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life. "J13 Bronnen's title Film and Life hence repeats the classic line of the stick-up man, "Your money or your life ! " Whoever chooses money loses his life anyway; whoever chooses life without money will die shortly thereafter. ll4
The reason is technological: films anatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans (in contrast to animals) with a borrowed I and, for that reason, remains their great love. Precisely because the cam- era operates as a perfect mirror, it liquidates the fund of stored self-images in La Marr's psychic apparatus. On celluloid all gesticulations appear more ridiculous, on tapes, which bypass the skeletal sound transmission from larynx to ear, voices have no timbre, on ID cards (according to Pyn- chon, of whom no photo exists) a "vaguely criminal face" appears, "its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell. "115 And all that not because media are lying but because their trace detection undermines the mirror stage. That is to say: the soul itself, whose techno- logical rechristening is nothing but Lacan's mirror stage. In Bronnen's work, budding starlets must experience that, too.
Film is not for tender souls, Miss, . . . just like art in general. If you insist on showing your soul-which nobody else is interested in, by the way; we are far more interested in your body-you need to have a tough and hard-boiled soul; otherwise it won't work. But I don't think you will achieve any particularly great footage with your little indication of a soul. Let go of your soul without getting bent out of shape. I had to learn it myself, to let go of my inner self. Today I do films; back then I was poet. 116
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The true words of a deserter who has grasped the difference between media and the arts. Even the most poetic of words could not store bodies. The soul, the inner self, the individual: they all were only the effects of an illusion, neutralized through the hallucination of reading and widespread literacy. (Alphabetise, as Lacan put it.