No More Learning

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
150 Film
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
Film 151
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. )117 When, in the last romantic com- edy, Buchner's King Peter of the kingdom of Popo searched for his son Leonce, who was at large, he put the police of the Archduchy of Hessia once more in an embarrassing situation. They could only go by "the 'wanted poster,' the description, the certificate" of a "person," "subject," "individual," "delinquent," and so on: "walks on two feet, has two arms, also a mouth, a nose, two eyes. Distinguishing features: a highly danger- ous individual. "118
That is how far literature went when it came to storing bodies-to the point of individual generality, but no further. Which is why literary doppelgangers, which began to show up in Goethe's time, appeared prin- cipally to readers. In Goethe, Novalis, Chamisso, Musset-the unspeci- fied warrant of the book's protagonist, whose appearance the texts leave open, always merged with the unspecified warrant of a reader, whom the texts addressed simply as a literate human being. 119
In 1 8 80, however, Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Parisian Office of Identification, blesses the criminal police forces of the earth with his an- thropometric system: I I measurements of diverse body parts, all with a rather constant, lifelong length, are sufficient for an exact registration, since they already afford 177,147 possible combinations or individual- izations. Furthermore, the police archive documents the name, surname, pseudonym, age, as well as two photos (front and side). From which Moravagine, Cendrars's protagonist, deduces consequences for literature three days before the outbreak of war in 1914. He starts on a flight around the globe, naturally plans a film about himself, and chides the cameraman for not coming along:
I can understand your wanting to rest and get back to your books. . . . You always needed time to think about a whole pile of things, to look, to see, to compare and record, to take notes on the thousand things you haven't had a chance to classify in your own mind. But why don't you leave that to the police archives? Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past and that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed COpS? 120
When Bertillon's police archive and Charcot's iconography, those two complementary recording technologies, chop up the human being of phi- losophy into countless criminals and lunatics, what results are doppel-
152 Film
gangers on doppelgangers. And one only needs (as in Moravagine's case) to supplant still photographs with a combination of motorization and film to teach doppelgangers how to move. One no less than Mallarme already celebrated the view through a moving car as that of a camera on wheels;121 one no less than Schreber, during his relocation from the insane asylum at Coswig to the one at Sonnenstein, "mistakes" all the "human forms [that he] has seen on the drive and in the station in Dresden for miraculous 'fleeting men. "'l22 Traffic in the age of motorization always means encountering doppelgangers, schematically and serially.
The shapes that come to the surface these days out of the depths of mobile mirrors no longer have anything to do with literature and educa- tion. In 1 8 8 6, Professor Ernst Mach described how he had recently seen a stranger on a bus and had thought, "'what a shabby-looking school- master that is, who just got on. "'123 It took even the great theorist of per- ception a couple of practical milliseconds before he could identify that stranger as his own mirror image. And Freud, who recapitulates Mach's uncanny encounter in 19 19, can offer a traveling story of his own:
I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet, and an el- derly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a traveling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead, therefore, of being frightened by our "doubles," both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the "double" to be something uncanny? 124
The horror of starlets like Barbara La Marr affects theorists as well. At a hundred kilometers per hour, as soon as they participate in motorized traffic, everyday life necessarily becomes cinematic. From the cabinet of Dr. Freud emerges his other. In the archive of Bertillon or Charcot, profes- sors appear as dirty old men who remind even the father of psychoanaly- sis of his bodily functions. But the psychoanalysis of the uncanny does not touch upon modern technologies of trace detection with as much as a sin- gle word. Freud and Rank, in their hunt for the remainders of an archaic reaction, return mobile mirrors to stationary ones once again, turn cinema and railroad into the romantic world of books. The one deciphers the dop- pelganger in E. T. A. Hoffmann, the other, in Chamisso and Musset.
Tzvetan Todorov observes that "the themes of fantastic literature
Film 153
? Scheme for a doppelganger shot.
have literally become the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years. . . . We need merely mention that the double was even in Freud's time the theme of a classic study (Otto Rank's Der Dop- pelganger). "125 As a science of unconscious literalities, psychoanalysis in- deed liquidates phantoms such as the doppelganger, whom romantic read- ers once hallucinated between printed lines. In modern theory and litera- ture "words have gained an autonomy which things have lost. "126 But to ascribe the death of "the literature of the fantastic" solely to a "psycho- analysis" that has "replaced" it and thereby made it "useless"127 is Todorov's critical-theoretical blind spot. Writers know better that theo- ries and texts are variables dependent upon media technologies:
The writer of yesteryear employed "images" in order to have a "visual" effect. Today language rich in images has an antiquated effect. And why is it that the im- age disappears from front-page articles, essays, and critiques the way it disappears from the walls of middle-class apartments? In my judgment: because with film we have developed a language that has evolved from visuality against which the vi- suality developed from language cannot compete. Finally, language becomes pure, clean, precise. 128
Only in the competition between media do the symbolic and the imaginary bifurcate. Freud translates the uncanny of the Romantic period into science, Melies, into mass entertainment. It is precisely this fantasiz- ing, anatomized by psychoanalysis, that film implements with powerful effect. This bilateral assault dispels doppelgangers from their books, which become devoid of pictures. On-screen, however, doppelgangers or their iterations celebrate the theory of the unconscious as the technology of cinematic cutting, and vice versa.
The doppelganger trick is nothing less than uncanny. Half of the lens is covered with a black diaphragm while the actor acts on the other half
154 Film
TheEiffelTowerfromOctober14, r888,toMarch3r,r889.
of the picture frame. Then, without changing the camera's position, the exposed film is rewound, the other half of the lens is covered up, and the same actor, now in his role as the doppelganger, acts on the opposite side of the frame. Put differently, Melies only had to record his stop trick onto the same roll of celluloid twice. "A trick applied with intelligence," he declared, "can make visible that which is supernatural, invented, or unreal. " 129
That is how the imaginary returned, more powerful than it could ever be in books, and as if made to order for writers of entertainment litera- ture. In 19 1 2, Heinz Ewers wrote: "I hate Thomas Alva Edison, because we owe to him one of the most ghastly of inventions: the phonograph! Yet I love him: he redeemed everything when he returned fantasy to the matter-of-fact world-in the movies ! " 130
These are sentences of media-technological precision: whereas the grooves of records store ghastly waste, the real of bodies, feature films take over all of the fantastic or the imaginary, which for a century has gone by the name of literature. Edison; or, the splitting of discourse into white noise and imagination, speech and dream (not to mention hatred and love). From then on neo-Romantic writers interested in love had it easy. One year later, Ewers wrote the screenplay for The Student of Prague by drawing on all of the book-doppelgangers in his library. ! 3! The film trick to end all film tricks (or, as a contemporary review put it, "the cinematic problem to end all cinematic problems")! 32 conquered the screen.
? ? ? The Student of Prague (Paul Wegener) next to his beloved (Grete Berger) and in front of his doppelganger, in a Jewish cemetery in Prague.
Ewers's Student, Gerhart Hauptmann's Phantom, Wiene's Caligari, Lindau's Anderer, Wegener's Golem: a doppelganger boom. Books (since Moses and Mohammed) have been writing writing; films are filming film- ing. Where art criticism demands expressionism or self-referentiality, me- dia have always been advertising themselves. Finally, motorists, train trav- elers, and professors, starlets and criminals, madmen and psychiatrists- they, too, recognized that camera angles are their everyday reality. Doppelganger films magnify the unconscious in mobile mirrors; they dou- ble doubling itself. The feature film transforms the "shock"133 of the mo- ment of recognition in Bronnen, Nabokov, Mach, and Freud into slow- motion trace detection: for 50 minutes, until his eventual disintegration and suicide, the student of Prague must see how the "horrifically un- changing apparition of the 'other'" sees him. 134 Notwithstanding Walter Bloem's The Soul of Cinema, cinema is what kills the soul. Precisely be- cause "humans" are not "worms, for whom something like" division or doubling "is a piece of cake, . . . the notion of a unified artistic personal- ity" disintegrates. Mimes become stars because human beings or civil ser-
Film 155
? 156 Film
vants have been made into guinea pigs. When executing the doppelganger trick, "mechanics becomes a coproducer. "135
On October II, 1893, The Other: A Play in Four Acts had its pre- miere in Munich. In 1906, Paul Lindau's horror play was published by the Reclam Universal Library only to land on the desks of the Royal Police Force in Munich, from whose copy I must of necessity quote. For on February IS, 1913, change overtook all libraries: The Other, consisting of " 2,000 meters" and "five acts," appeared as the first German auteur film. 136
"Men such as Paul Lindau," Gottfried Benn wrote, "have their mer- its and their immortality. "137 They are among the first to make the change from the pen to the typewriter and thus to produce texts suitable for film- ing (the script of The Student ofPrague was a typescript, toO). 138 They are among the first to make the change from the soul to mechanics and thus to produce subject matter suitable for film; that is, doppelgangers. With Lindau and Ewers, cinema in Germany becomes socially acceptable.
Except that Lindau's protagonist, Mr. HaIlers, J. D. , has not yet achieved wide cultural acceptance, for which poetic-filmic justice simply compensates him with a double. In order to abolish a superannuated civil-service ethos, HaIlers (just like Dr. Hyde or the student of Prague) must first become the other of the title. At the beginning, late at night, the prosecutor is in the process of dictating The Constraints of Willpower in Light ofCriminality to one of the last male secretaries, who takes it down in shorthand. Lacking Lindau's typewriter, he also lacks any knowledge of psychiatry. Hypnosis, suggestion, hysteria, the unconscious, split per- sonality-the civil servant wants to take out of circulation all of these terms, which have been in common usage "since Hippolyte Taine's study on the intellect. "139
Hallers (dictating).
Where would that eventually lead? It would lead to felons in every serious case quoting a physician to es- cape justice . . . to medicine being in stark contrast to justice. Let us be on guard against such insidious . . . (interrupting himself) no, change that to: against such highly disconcerting false teachings. (Short break. He walks behind the desk chair and gradually lapses un- thinkingly into the rhetorical tone of argumentation. ) Let u s not destroy the consciousness o f moral self-deter- mination, of the responsibility of the individual for his own actions, through the misconstrued practical appli- cation . . . (interrupting himself) How did I put it?
Film 157
Kleinchen (reads without emphasis). Let us not destroy the consciousness of moral self-determination, of the responsibility of the
Hailers (interrupting).
individual for his own actions . . .
Through the misconstrued practical application of an intelligent, if you will, but yet highly dubious deduc- tion . . . theoretical deduction. Let us eliminate, as far as possible, the " Constraints of Willpower" from our court proceedingsP40
A highly rhetorical performance, whose refutation begins with Freudian slips and fills all four acts. Hallers's slips alone refute his dicta- tion and his plaint, which turns into complete nonsense in its mechanical reproduction (the gramophone function of all secretaries, from Lindau to Valery). 141 Foucault would have described historical ruptures no less de- risively: justice ceding to medicine, law (with writing as the medium of civil service) ceding to biotechnologies that are media technologies as well. The same year, Senate President Schreber of the Regional Court of Appeals in Dresden disappears into an asylum simply because a "con- spiracy" of psychiatrists "denied" him (a lawyer) "professions, like that of a nerve specialist, that lead to a closer proximity to God. "142 Hence Hallers, too, breaks off his dictation, because "pathologically strained nerves"143 are in dire need of the "testimony of an available nerve spe- cialist and psychiatrist. "144
Professor Feldermann makes a nightly house call, cannot convince his patient of his split personality even by telling of classic case studies, and concludes that his "dull, gnawing headache" is attributable to Hallers's " fall from a horse . . . last fall. " 145 What must remain taboo in Light of Criminality becomes an epistemic matter of course in Guyau's "Memory and Phonograph": consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive. In the depths of his brain engrams, the disciple of free will is listening to the dictates of the unconscious.
That is how the inevitable comes about. What the consciousness of the lawyer denies, his body enacts. The other appears (as does, in Schre- ber's case, a female other: a "sexually dependent woman" who appears in the same position as the president of the senate). 146 Hallers falls asleep as a prosecutor only to wake up immediately as a criminal. His movements become "automaton-like,"147 "strained," "belabored and heavy, as if against his Will. "148 Consequently, the other is (as in Caligari's case) the same once again, but this time as a cinematographic guinea pig.
"A bur- glar" 149 has possessed the civil servant / person and, consequently, plans
158 Film
to break in to Hallers's own villa together with some crooks from Berlin. For whereas the lawyer half of his split personality surmises darkly only that "I no longer am I am,"! 50 the criminal half proudly announces, in the unparalleled phrase of Yahweh, "I am . . . what I am. "! 5! As in all cases of split personality since Dr. Azam's Felida and Wagner's Kundry, uncon- scious knowledge overreaches conscious knowledge, not the other way round. ! 52 The other, with all of his complications, knows and steals from Hallers's villa, while the prosecutor (who returns as such after falling asleep a second time) only appears as an unintentional comedian when he interrogates his accomplice. It is not until he is confronted with Professor Feldermann's knowledge of psychiatry that he is brought up to par on contemporary developments and brought to his renunciation of all unre- strained willpower in the civil-service sector. A happy ending, not least because Hallers is rewarded with a bourgeois girl as well.
However, the exponential burglar, who invades both the personality and the villa of the lawyer, loves not the bourgeois girl but rather her maid (or stenotypist, had Lindau written a couple of years later), who was let go for disgraceful behavior. The civil-service domain of 1900 dreams, in terms criminal and erotic, male and female, of all its underbel- lies and doppelgangers. This dream, however, resides precisely in the mid- dle ground between film and anthropometries. The only indication that both sides of Hallers's double life are relayed is a photograph of the wait- ress Amalie. He receives the photograph as a criminal and finds it again, having changed back into the prosecutor, in his jacket pocket, at which point he can (following Bertillon) identify the woman he worships at night. But this photo materializes in the imaginary, even before the first transformation, during Feldermann's diagnosis.
Feldermann.
HaIlers . Feldermann.
HaIlers (reluctantly).
Feldermann. Hallers.
Are your dreaming at all? Ye s
Of what?
Of uncomfortable things. I feel as if my dreams ap- peared in a kind of sequence, as if I returned to the same haunts every once in a while.
What haunts are you talking about?
I can't recall the details. (More quietly. ) I always
see . . . something reddish . . . the gleam of a light . . .
? Feldermann. Hailers.
Film 159
something (pointing to the fireplace) like the embers in the fireplace . . . and, inside the reddish lighting (yet more quietly), the head of a woman . . .
The head of a woman.
It's always the same one . . . always a bit red . . . like a drawing with red chalk. . . . The face of the girl is also pursuing me while awake. . . . As soon as I try to visu- alize it in detail, it falls apart, I cannot put it
together. . . . If I should ever see her again, I will ask her for her picture.
Feldermann (turning toward him further and looking at him attentively).
Hailers . Feldermann.
What is it you are saying here?
It bothers me that the face with the red shine always hovers in front of me and that I cannot stabilize it.
I understand that. But I do not understand what you could be expecting of a photograph produced in your dreams of a dream image from your waking life. Is3
Film projection as internal theater exists two years prior to its intro- duction. Reason enough for Lindau, the writer, to forsake writing for cin- ema as quickly as possible. As with Freud or Rank, dreams are films and vice versa. One only has to have a nervous disorder like HaIlers's to trig- ger the shutter while dreaming instead of surrendering to the "shadowy, fleeting . . . scenes of the film drama" and making literature again, as does Rank. Madness is cinematographic not only in motoric and phys- iognomic terms; cinema implements its psychic mechanisms itself.
That was precisely Miinsterberg's insight. The Photoplay: A Psycho- logical Study, the slender, revolutionary, and forgotten theory of the fea- ture film, was published in New York in 19 16. While psychiatrists contin- ued to concentrate on pathologies of motion and psychoanalysts continued to consume films and retranslate them into books, the director of the Har- vard Psychological Laboratory went past consumption and usage. His American fame opened the New York studios to him; hence he could ar- gue both from the producer's standpoint and from the elementary level that relates film and the central nervous system. That is the whole difference be- tween Rank and Miinsterberg, psychoanalysis and psychotechnology.
Psychotechnology, a neologism coined by Miinsterberg, describes the
I 60 Film
science of the soul as an experimental setup. Basics ofPsychotechnology, published in I9I4, reframes in 700 pages the collected results of experi- mental psychology in terms of their feasibility. What began the pioneer- ing work of Wundt in Leipzig and what brought Miinsterberg to Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, was the insight (dispelling presumptions in elitist labs to the contrary) that everyday reality itself, from the workplace to leisure time, has long been a lab in its own right. Since the motor and sen- sory activities of so-called Man (hearing, speaking, reading, writing) have been measured under all conceivable extreme conditions, their ergonomic revolution is only a matter of course. The second industrial revolution en- ters the knowledge base. Psychotechnology relays psychology and media technology under the pretext that each psychic apparatus is also a tech- nological one, and vice versa. Miinsterberg made history with studies on assembly-line work, office data management, combat training.
Hence his theory was fully absorbed by the film studios (which had not yet migrated to Hollywood). From film technology and film tricks, knowledge only extracted what it had invested in the studies of optical il- lusions since Faraday. With the indirect consequence that film technology itself (as with phonography in Guyau's case) became a model of the soul- initially as philosophy and, eventually, as psychotechnology.
In I907, Bergson's Creative Evolution culminated in the claim that the philosophically elementary functions of "perception, intellection, lan- guage" all fail to comprehend the process of becoming. "Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind. " Instead of registering change as such, "we take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality," which-once it is "recomposed . . . artificially," like a film-yields the illusion of movement. 154 What that means in concrete physiological terms is beyond the philosopher Bergson, who is solely in- terested that film mark a historical difference: In antiquity, "time com- prises as many undivided periods as our natural perception and our language cut out in it successive facts. " By contrast, modern science, as if Muybridge were its founding hero, isolates (following the model of differential equations) the most minute time differentials. "It puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes," rather than (as "on the
frieze of the Parthenon") "massing itself into a single attitude, which is
Film r6r
supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and illuminate a whole period. "155
Bergson does not want to reverse this panning shot from art to me- dia, but his philosophy of life does envision a kind of knowledge that could register becoming itself, independent of antique and modern tech- nologies of perception: the redemption of the soul from its cinemato- graphic illusion.
Psychotechnology proceeds exactly the other way around. For Miin- sterberg, a sequence of stills, that is, Bergson's cinematographic illusion of consciousness, is by no means capable of evoking the impression of move- ment. Afterimages and the stroboscopic effect by themselves are necessary but insufficient conditions for film. Rather, a series of experimental and Gestalt-psychological findings demonstrates-contra Bergson-that the perception of movement takes place as "an independent experience. " 156
The eye does not receive the impressions of true movement. It is only a suggestion of movement, and the idea of motion is to a high degree the product of our own reaction. . . . The theater has both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our mental mechanism. 1s7
One cannot define film more subjectively than Miinsterberg does, but only to relay these subjective ideas to technology. Cinema is a psycholog- ical experiment under conditions of everyday reality that uncovers un- conscious processes of the central nervous system. Conversely, traditional arts such as theater, which Miinsterberg (following Vachel Lindsay)158 continuously cites as a counterexample, must presuppose an always-al- ready functioning perception without playing with their mechanisms. They are subject to the conditions of an external reality that they imitate: "Space, time, causality. "159 On the other hand, Miinsterberg's demonstra- tion that the new medium is completely independent aesthetically and need not imitate theater suggests that it assembles reality from psycho- logical mechanisms. Rather than being an imitation, film plays through what "attention, memory, imagination, and emotion" perform as uncon- scious acts. 160 For the first time in the global history of art, a medium in- stantiates the neurological flow of data. Although the arts have processed the orders of the symbolic or the orders of things, film presents its spec- tators with their own processes of perception-and with a precision that is otherwise accessible only to experiment and thus neither to conscious- ness nor to language.
162 Film
Miinsterberg's errand to the film studios was worth it. His psy- chotechnology, instead of merely assuming similarities between film and dreams as does psychoanalysis, can ascribe a film trick to each individual, unconscious mechanism. Attention, memory, imagination, emotion: they all have their technological correlative.
Naturally, this analysis begins with attention, because in the age of media facts are generally defined by their signal-to-noise ratio. "The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection,"161 which, in turn, can either be voluntary or involuntary. But because voluntary selection would separate spectators from the spell of the medium, it is not considered. What counts is solely whether and how the different arts control involuntary attention and hence "play on the keyboard of our mind. "162 Of
the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit the crime. Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. . . . Everything else sinks into a general vague back- ground, while that one hand shows more and more details. The more we fixate [on] it, the more its clearness and distinctness increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater has there its limits.
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. . . . In the language of the photoplay producer it is a "close- up. " Theclose-uphasobjectifiedinourworldofperceptionourmentalactofat- tention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power ofany theater stage. 163
Miinsterberg's patient gaze, which we have long since unlearned, focuses not for nothing on the revolver: its drum stands at the origin of cinema. When it appears as a close-up, film films involuntary and tech- nological mechanisms at the same time. Close-ups are not just "objec-
Film I63
tivizations" of attention; attention itself appears as the interface of an apparatus.
This is true of all the involuntary mechanisms Miinsterberg investi- gates. Whereas each of the temporal arts, in "the most trivial case," pre- supposes the storage of past events, "the theater can do no more than suggest to our memory this looking backward"-namely, with words, for which "our own material of memory ideas" must "supply the pic- ture [sJ . " 164 In the " slang" and practice of photo artists, by contrast, there are cut-backs or flashbacks, which are "really an objectivation of our memory function. " 165 The same is true of the imagination as unconscious expectation and of associations in general. Aside from flashbacks and flash-forwards, cinematic montage conquers "the whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections. "166 According to the film theory of Bela Balazs, who unknowingly furthered Miinsterberg's work, unconscious processes "can never be rendered so visually in words as in cinematic montage-be they the words of a physician or a poet. Pri- marily because the rhythm of montage can reproduce the original speed of the process of association. (Reading a description takes much longer than the perception of an image). "167
And yet, literature-whose power film infinitely exceeds or "tran- scends," according to Miinsterberg-attempts the impossible. Schnitzler's novellas simulate processes of association in phonographic real time,168 Meyrink's novels in filmic real time. The Golem appears in I9I5 as a dop- pelganger novel in ostensible competition with Ewers's and Lindau's suc- cesses on the screen; as a simulation of film, however, it unknowingly an- ticipates Miinsterberg's theory. Meyrink's framing narrative begins with a nameless I, who is transformed by his half-asleep associations into the doppelganger of the framed story. As if in a flashback, this person, Per- nath, reappears in the Prague ghetto, long since torn down, only to en- counter in turn a Golem who is expressly called Pernath's "negative,"169 that is, the doppelganger of the doppelganger. This iteration of mirror sit- uations, associations, transformations follows the techniques of film so closely that Meyrink's framing narrative even sacrifices the time-honored past tense of the novel to it. It is not just since Gravity's Rainbow that novels have been written in the present tense to suggest the flow of asso- ciation and easy filmability.
Which makes interpretation meaningless and only invites the rewrit- ing of Meyrink's beginning as a screenplay. Well, here is the first chapter (the narrative frame) of The Golem once more, this time in two columns with Miinsterbergian instructions for the camera.
r 64 Film
Fade-out to dream
SLEEP
The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.
As the shape of the new moon begins to dwindle, and its left side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It tor- ments me.
r cannot sleep; r cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that inter- mingle, and penetrate my thought.
Before r went to bed, r had been reading from the life of Buddha; one particular passage now seeks me out and haunts me, drumming its phrases into my ears over and over and over again from the beginning, in every possi- ble permutation and combination:
"A crow flew down to a stone that looked, as it lay, like a lump of fat.
Thought the crow, 'Here is a toothsome morsel for my dining'; but finding it to be nothing of the kind, away it flew again. So do we crows, having drawn near to the stone, even so do we, would-be seekers after truth, aban- don Gautama the Anchorite, so soon as in him we cease to find our pleasure. "
This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat as- sumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain.
r am stumbling along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up smoothed pebbles.
Now they are grayish-blue, coated in a fine, sparkling dust; persistently r grub them up in handfuls, without in the least knowing what use r shall make of them; now they are black, with sulfury spots, like the strivings of a child to create in stone squab, spotty, prehistoric monsters.
r strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes from me, but always they drop out of my
Caption (text)
Close-up (= attention) Moving camera
Close-ups
(= involuntary attention)
Cut-back ( =
Film 165 hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there,
within my sight.
involuntary memory) Whereupon every stone that my life has ever contained seems to rise into existence and compass me around.
Numbers of them labor painfully to raise themselves out of the sand towards the light-like monstrous, slaty- hued crayfish when the tide is at the full-and all rivet their gaze upon me, as though agonizing to tell me tid- ings of infinite importance.
Others, exhausted, fall back spent into their holes, as if once for all abandoning their vain search for words.
Fading
Fade-out to everyday Time and again do I start up from this dim twilight of dreams, and for the reality space of a moment experience once more the moonshine on the end of my billowing counterpane, like a large, flat, bright stone, only to sink blindly back into the realms of semi-consciousness, there to grope and grope in my painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of my memory in the guise of a lump of fat. . .