No More Learning

The other happy news concerns the inventor of film, who brought the same rolling process to optics that the endless paper machine provided for the newspaper printing press. Pynchon once wrote about the protagonist of his novel, Slothrop, whose devout American ances- tors were either the founders of a cnlt or paper manufacturers - and paper is now the material basis for dollars, bathrooms, and Bibles, that is, money, shit, and the Word of God. However, according to Pynchon's analysis the same thing is now true of the power of the
135
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
media that historically superseded the word or book: lt was a prIest who bestowed roll film upon us. Celluloid itself had to be invented first, and this was accomplished by three Americans who wanted to use nitrocellulose to reduce the cost of the rather expensive and scarce elephant ivory used in billiard balls at that time. And nitrocellulose or so-called gunpowder must have been bestowed upon us? even earlier than that; instead of the old monastic black powder, which I attempted to correlate with perspective itself, this was done by a Swiss chemist and an Austrian field marshal lieutenant named Franz von Uchatius, who will also be presented m the next lecture as the direct forefather of film technology. As the name already implies, gunpowder was not intended to serve cinematic Or peaceful goals, but after its metamorphosis into the modern billiard ball Reverend Han- nibal Goodwin, an enthusiastic amateur photographer who hated the heavy, unwieldy glass plates, was able to register his patent for roll film on May 2,1887. The government's approval of the patent - along with a reimbursement of several million dollars - was not granted until 11 years later, though, because in the meantime the Eastman- Kodak company had already founded its billion-dollar fortune on the exploitation of Goodwin's patent.
We finally come to the era of high capitalism, and we are ready for the invention of film, which I will address in the next lecture. However, because I do not want to interrupt the technical connec- tions again today, I would like to digress for a moment and outline a side of photography that is often left out: before the actual history of film I would like to examine the impact of photography as a storage medium on nineteenth-century culture and aesthetics.
3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs
After 1836, there were two possible options available to everyone (and not only Napoleonic general staffs): either to write letters or books or else to send telegraphic signals. After 1839, there were also two options for images: either to paint or to photograph them. Arago's eulogy for Daguerre, which primarily emphasized the pos- sible scientific applications of the first mediumfor storing images and completely denied that it would also exert competitive pressure on painters - particularly portrait painters since the arrival of the photo- graphic portraits of Draper and Morse - was the understatement of the century. As everyone knows by now, the once massive business of painted portraits passed almost entirely over to photography, and under the competitive pressure of technology painters were only left
136
? OPTiCAL MEDIA
wIth two optIOns that essentially differenTIated (to use Niklas Luhmann's term) them from photography. The first option was to change their style by no longer supplying image material from eye- sight or from an old camera obscura, but rather from photographs. The long history of photo-realism - from Ingres (whose La Source, as I mentioned, was based on a nude photograph) to Gerhard Richter - is left to art bistorians. I will only say, as is clearly obvious in the work of Degas and his ballennas, that the photograph as the new source material for painting replaced the imaginary (and there- fore conventional pamting's fixation on recognizing figures) with the reality of absolutely instantaneous contingencies and absolutely asymmetrical image fragments.
When viewed systematically, the problem with this first option is that it is only possible as long as other painters are unable to master the mimicry of certain photographic effects as well as those who introduced the new style. The other and historically more success- ful option for the painter was actually to differentiate between the artistic and the technical medium, and thus to only paint images that could not be photographed, such as images that do not represent any objects at all, but rather the act of painting itself. It is not necessary to emphasize that this option represented the mainstream of so-called modernist painting and historically it had practically no effects on everyday life. .
With respect to everyday life, it is better to return to simple media like lithography, which will further our discussion of the politics of images, which is one of the leitmotifs of these lectures. In 1800, the romantic Navalis demanded - completely without reference to optotechnical media - that the as yet absolntist monarchy, and espe- cially the Prussian monarchy here in Berlin, become more effective through reforms, and to become more effective it must arouse"belief and love" among its subjects. This eliminated baroque portraits that presented the prince's frightening yet also fascinating resplendence, as well as portraits that presented the prince in his lordly seclusion. Pictures of the solitary "Old Fritz" were immediately replaced with pictures of a king shown intimately or familiarly together with his wife, the proverbial queen Luise, as a married couple. And because the king's subjects had in the meantime also been remodelled into happy families, pictures of the rnler coincided with those of the ruled for the first time in history.
It was only later recognized that Flaubert, in his Sentimental Education - a novel about painters, dealers, and the revolution of 1848 relates with all the cynicism available to him how the Prussian
137
? ? ? ? "
"
OPTICAL MEDIA
example became the accepted thing. According to Flaubert, King Louis Philippe (the very king to whom Daguerre owed his life-long pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor) circulated countless lithographs on which he modestly appeared as a member of one of millions of bourgeois families:
Then the talk came round to the dinner at Arnoux's.
"The picture-dealer? " asked Senecal [in the novel he is initially pas-
sionate about the revolution, but then he becomes its worst traitor], "He's a fine fellow if you like. l )
"What do you mean? " said Pellerin.
Senecal replied:
"He's a man who makes money by political skulduggery. "
And he went on to talk about a well-known lithograph which
showed the entire royal family engaged in edifying occupations: Louis-
Philippe had a copy of the Code in his hand, the Queen a prayer-book;
the Princesses were doing embroidery; the [young] Due de Nemour was buckling on a sword; Monsieur de Joinville was showing his young brothers a map; and in the background could be seen a bed with two compartments. This picture, which was entitled" A Good Family," had been a source of delight to the middle classes, but the despair of the patriots. (Flaubert, 1964, p. 62)
It seems to me that this straightforward text needs no interpreta- tion, but I would like to emphasize two points: first, it shows how effectively the politics of images functioned after the switch to infi- nitely reproducible and printable lithographs, and second it shows that media have repercussions on what they represent. In the mass medium of lithography, the royal family cast off all of its sover- eign attributes and aligned itself with the mass of French bourgeois families.
As an automated form of lithography, photography only strength- ened this trend. In Dessau, in one of the smallest German palaces, portrait photography caused members of the aristocracy to present themselves no longer in full dress with uniform and decorations, as they had for portrait painters, but rather they wanted to appear on their photographs wearing the simple black suits of normal citizens (Buddemeier, 1970, p. 86). Bourgeois realism was thus not only a style in literature and painting, but also in everyday life. From this, one can also infer the complementary need for media, which will compensate the aristocracy for this loss of face in the eyes of their secret bourgeois admirers. A first, harmless example are feature films like Sissy. A second example, which McLuhan brilliantly discovered,
138
? OPTICAL MEDIA
is the monocle, which became fashionable around 1850: an aristocrat would endure being photographed in the simple black suit of the nineteenth century, rather than portrayed in royal clothing; however, in revenge he wore a type of glasses that ensured even more brutally than the hand-made camera obscura in Brockes' Rahmenschau that in contrast to the monocle wearer, all others were reduced to the sub- iects of an optical media technology. Actors like Erich von Stroheim only needed to export or rather prostitute this trick of aristocratic German officers' eyes to Hollywood and a new film genre was born: the Nazi film (McLuhan, 1964, p. 170).
On the other hand, true bourgeoisation was implemented by the citizens themselves. The role played by photography (in contrast to Diderot's fictional warts) can be seen by looking at literary realism. Balzac, whose novels contributed the most towards the populariza- tion of this new bourgeois realism, wrote in the foreword to The Human Comedy that his entire cycle of novels was like a daguerreo- type of contemporary French society. As usual in the century of sci- ences, literature thus obtained its validation for the first time from a technical medium, which it could do more easily than painting because the medium appeared only as a metaphorical and not a real competitor.
As a metaphorical model, however, photography also appears to have had real effects on writing: Flaubert's equally magnificent and dismal Madame Bovary repeatedly mentions a cure de platre or plaster priest that initially stands intact in the Bovary's garden like a garden gnome, which is similarly mass-produced. It receives a few scratches during the first move, and finally, when the marriage col- lapses, it also falls to pieces. This priest does not serve the slightest function in the narrative other than to prove that the novel has not forgotten any visual detail within its fictional world - a forgetting that, in contrast to the realist Flaubert, actually principally befell his predecessors, such as Goethe and other classical writers. Against the backdrop of photography, literature therefore no longer simply pro- duces inner pictures for the camera obscura that Hoffmann's solitary romantic readers became; rather, it begins to create objective and consistent visual leitmotifs that could later easily be filmed.
This does not mean that realistic writers (like painters) did not describe photography as a threat. The same Balzac who claimed to have drawn up all of his fictional figures like daguerreotypes also said to his friend Nadar, France's first and most famous portrait photo- grapher, that he himself would dread being photographed. Balzac's mystical tendencies led him to conclude that every person consists of
139
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
many optical layers - like an onion peel - and every daguerreotype captures and stores the outermost layel; thus removing it from the person being photographed. With the next photograph, the next layer is lost, and so on and so on until the subject disappears or becomes a disembodied ghost (see Nadar, 1899). Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote about photography as one of tbe wonders of the world, made this phantasm universal by positing the thesis that images in general are deadly for their object (Poe, 1965, pp. 245-9). Poe's painter creates a portrait of his beloved without noticing that she grows increasingly pale the more that her oil painting acquires the color of human flesh. Painting, with its extensively discussed handicap of aging pigment, thus uses a photochemical effect against people as if it had become photography. As soon as Poe's fictional painting is completed, the painter's beloved drops dead. Media analysis can only emphasize once again how historical phantasms and collective symbols (as Jiirgen Link would say) are directly based on technolo- gies. The fears of Balzac or Poe merely illustrate the fact, as Arnheim theorized, that photography represents the emergence for the first time of a storage medium capable of reproducing the unimaginable materiality of the person being depicted.
This does not mean that the phantasm should be explained away, but rather just that it should be acknowledged as a fact, because the phantasmagorical fears of so-called humans - a category that accord- ing to Foucault was not invented until around 1800 as the subject of all possible fields of knowledge - had definite technological con- sequences. To begin with, all of the ghosts created using the lanterna magica since Schropfer and Robertson, which Balzac eventually iden- tified with the human itself, passed on to the new medium. A favorite pastime of occultism, which emerged around 1850 and which initially mimicked the electric telegraph, was to hunt for spirit photographs. The camera shutter was left open when there was nothing to be seen, such as in the dark, and these non-images were then developed in the Arnheim-like hope, so to speak, that a ghost invisible to the eye had materialized on the photographic film all by itself. This process was more successfnl than one could possibly imagine today, and it proves the half-truth of Adorno's dictum that spirits historically appeared at exactly the same time as the spirit of philosophical ideal- ism was destroyed by media technologies. I say half-truth because the Counter-Reformation ghosts existing since Kircher's lanterna magica did not take a single syllable of Adorno into consideration.
Second, and this is the decisive point, what befell ghosts with so- called ecto-photography could also be applied to humans. An evil
140
? OPTICAL MEDIA
power, which was not always as fictional as in Chamisso's tale of poor Schlemihl, bought their shadows from them. As photography made advances towards snapshot photography, it became increas- mgly easier to capture people without their permission or even their knowledge. Balzac's nightmare proved well-founded in 1880 at the latest, when Alphonse Bertillon - whose brother, by the way, was notably the director of the statistical bureau of Paris at that time - became director of the Parisian police's identification bureau. Bertillon aslced himself which visible and measurable features of a person remained constant for the remainder of one's life despite the changes caused by age or intentional disguise. He identified the fol- lowing characteristics: the length of the head, the width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the foot, the underarm length, and the length of the little finger. If the police were to store all these measurements on cards along with a careful description of race and any scars, birthmarks, and tattoos, the probability of mistaking the relevant individual for someone else would become virtually zero. Eleven measurements alone would already allow for 177,147 differ- ent combinations.
That is as far as we will go into statistics, and now we return to photography. In the age of literary realism, it Was self-evident that Bertillon replaced these necessarily imprecise descriptions with pho- tographs. From this time onwards, two portrait photographs were immediately taken of every arrested criminal or suspect, one from the front and the other in profile. Originally, the criminal even had to hold a ruler beside his face (Busch, 1995, p. 316). The criminal, with an example of the revolutionary international prototype meter in hand, thus measures himself. He is transformed into a test device of the new technique, just as Arago predicted. Even if this did not happen voluntarily, it was still an innovation. Photography, accord- ing to Arnheim's excellent definition, means that something real (whatever that may be, criminal or otherwise) leaves its traces in a storage medium. The user, in other words, no longer needed to create imprints, as was unavoidable under aesthetic conditions. Bertillon did not begin in a historical no man's land, but rather through the photographic recording of criminals he replaced older procedures such as the branding of criminals. In 1831, only eight years before Daguerre's invention, the last criminal was reportedly branded in Europe, while the search for new storage technologies had already started. Bertillon's criminalistics was an answer to exactly this search, as it replaced the arbitrary writing of the old European powers with modern scientific reading, which was far more efficient. The writing
141
? ? '.
OPTICAL MEDIA
of brands, when they were read again a few years later, only gave the authorities the tautological information that someone had inscribed them, while the reading of criminal photographs, despite its apparent passivity, provided the authorities with non-redundant data about subjects for the first time. In a more realistic way even than Diderot's warts, which allegedly could not have been made up, criml- nal photographs produced identities.
As if this were not enough, Bertillon also successfully pressed for the international standardization of his so-called anthropometry, and he enforced this procedure not only against recidivist criminals, but against everyone: "It also proves useful in regard to law, forensic medicine, etc. as soon as it is a matter of allaying doubt about the identity of a person (legal identification cards, passports, personal descriptions on warrants, the identification of escaped lunatics, casu- alties, fished up corpses, and many others)" ("Bertillonsches System," 1905, p. 732). The model of the criminal nevertheless became part of our everyday life, which prompted Thomas Pynchon, who refuses every photo shoot and interview, to ask his readers: "Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by tbe government camera as the guillotine shutter fell? " (Pynchon, 1973, p. 134).
It must he pointed out again how right Manfred Frank is (although probably unintentionally) when he celebrates the human - freely quoting Schleiermacher and Sartre - as a collective individual. In the age of the monopoly of writing, Goethe could explain that individu- als do not exist at all, but rather only genera or types. In spite of all attempts to project the protagonists of novels before the inner eye like a lanterna magica, no one knew what they actually looked like. Because language belongs to everyone, according to Hegel's insight, descriptions always already transform individuals into universals. The most glaring literary example of this transubstantiation was the arrest warrant that Georg Buchner inserted into his comedy Leonce and Lena after his own bitter experiences with the Hessian police in 1835:
FIRST POLICEMAN. Gentlemen, we are looking for someone, a
subject, an individual, a person, a delinquent, an interrogatee, a
rogue. (To the SECOND POLICEMAN. ) Have a look, is either of
them blushing?
SECOND POLICEMAN. Neither of them is blushing.
FIRST POLICEMAN. So we must try something else. Where is the
"wanted" poster, the description, the certificate? (The SECOND POLICEMAN takes a paper from his pocket and hands it to him. ) Scrutinise the subjects while I read: "A man . . . "
142
? OPTICAL MEDIA
SECOND POLICEMAN. No good, there are two of them.
FIRST POLICEMAN. Numbskull! ". . . walks on two feet, has two arms, also a mouth, a nose, two eyes, two ears. Distinguishing fea-
tures: a highly dangerous individual. "
SECOND POLICEMAN. That fits both of them. Shall I arrest them
both? (Btichner, 1987, p. 129)
So much for the comical aspect of old European warrants. Now for the sad part: the actual warrant for the fugitive Georg Biichner that the Grand Duchy of Hessen pubhshed m the Frankfurter Journal on June 18, 1835 contained little more:
Arrest warrant. Georg Buchner, student of medicine from Darmstadt, has fled the fatherland to evade criminal invesigation of his participa- tion in acts of treason against the state. Public authorities both at home and abroad therefore request that he be arrested and turned over to Councillor Georgi, the examining magistrate appointed by the Grand Ducal court of the province of Upper Hesse. Darmstadt, June 13, 1835. Personal description. Age: 21 years. Size: 6 feet, 9 inches according to new Hessian measurements. Hair: blonde. Forehead: very arched. Eyebrows: blonde. Eyes: grey. Nose: str()ng. Mouth: small. Beard: blonde. Chin: round. Face: oval. Complexion: fresh. Stature: strong, thin. Distinguishing features: near-sighted. (Buchner, 1985, p. 92)
In Biichner's ingenious simplification, the literary warrant reveals how the high absolutist authorities had invented him very literally as a single subject, which means that it conflated so to speak all actual subjects into one subject. In the empirical press, like the Frankfurter Journal, things were only marginally more complicated: Biichner's warrant did not actually describe all the subjects of the Grand Duchy of Hessen, but rather it only pertained to the ideal of a healthy, blond student, and there were at least a few hundred real students who fitted this literary model. Modern forensic evidence, on the other hand, works with media rather than arts - its correlate, therefore, is nothing but statistically singularized individuals who (as in Poe's famous tale The Man in the Crowd) can themselves still be fished out of the masses.
Two photographic examples related to modern forensic evidence now follow. The first is fictional, and the second is its historical confirmation.
The literary and therefore fictional example is taken from a book by Gerhard Plumpe with the entitled Der tote Blick (The Dead Look). In a slightly redundant way, this book shows how nineteenth-century
143
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
photography legally disrupted the copyright law concerning images (at that time, this of course meant hand-painted images), which had only just recently been introduced. Despite this preoccupation with laws (and not with media technologies), Der tote Blick contains several observations for which one can be grateful.
Plumpe summarizes the content of a comedy that the high pros- ecutor and forgotten poet Apollonius von Maltitz produced in 1865 under the title Photography and Revenge:
The arrival of a traveling photographer at a bathing resort causes a disturbance, as the photographed guests feel that their portraits are an imposition in every respect. "That's how I should look? " - complains a young woman - "not simply ugly enough to horrify people, but mali- cious, like an ex-convict [. . . ], That is my poor deceased father's favor- ite child! Could you love these grimaces, my unfortunate Rudolph? - Everyone who looks at me this way must see me as the crooked daughter of a wealthy factory owner, who married an aristocrat only because of his money. " Aod her mothe~ who is also photographed, is appalled: "Led to the altar from the nursery, beautifully named, deified by painters [. . . Jsculpted in marble by Thorwaldsen - now in the hands of a charlatan. " It continues this way for a while longer, and the confused indignation of the bathing guests is made complete when an "art expert" confirms the success of the portraits. "Do you find a faint similarity? " the expert is asked, and he answers: "It is not ideal, but rather perfect.
It is not similar, but rather absolutely the same! " The horror of the guests eventually becomes so extreme that the doctor of the resort forbids the photographer from practicing his trade. The story takes its first turn of events when the photographer accidentally succeeds in photographing a criminal who is up to some mischief at the resort and is stealing from the guests. With the help of "realistic" photography, the thief is arrested. Photography is thus rehabilitated and the guests ultimately praise the mastery of his "art. "
(Plumpe, 1990, p. 193)
So much for the comedy Photography and Revenge. Mediocre poets c;n therefore also be good lawyers and even better media theorists. On the one hand, the media technique of photography destroys pre- cisely the "ideal" or imaginary, which sculptors or painters repro- dnced again and again when they dutifully "deified" their models, because it manifests for the first time something real that makes even the noblest daughter suddenly look like an ex-con (guillotine grimaces, as Pynchon said). (For this reason, by the way, there has been a law in the German Reich since 1902 that gives every man and woman the "right to one's own image," which protects them against
144
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the mIsuse of photography. ) On the other hand, however, photogra- phy also demonstrates the completely new ability to recognize and thus produce real convicts. And third, the fact that it did not become famous as "art" (in the old European understanding of the term) until or rather precisely after this criminalistic success proves - and here I deviate from Plumpe's thesis - that all talk about photography as art actually serves to conceal its strategic functions.
To conclude this digression concerning the cultural effects of the new medium, I would only like to point out that photography as legal retributIOn not only celebrated Its tnumph in literary fiction. As early as 1883, "a rapid photographic printing process" for arrest warrants, which Bertillon reportedly took over and standardized, enabled the arrest of "the dangerous anarchist Stellmacher" in Vienna (Eder, 1978, p. 441). As you may remember, nitrocellulose can be used to make either bombs, like the anarchists, or roll film, like the Viennese police. Between these two barrages, the anarchistic and the photo- graphic, the human as collective individual explodes.
3. 2 Film
3. 2. 1 Preludes
Now we come unceremoniously to the prehistory of film. For the storage of moving images it is just not enough to make a donnish assistant like Morse stand still for half an hour, as Draper did for the first photographic portrait, or to bind a criminal during an anthro- pometric sitting, as Bertillon did. Rather, it involves fixing the object or target precisely while it is fleeing and being able to reproduce this fixed movement again anywhere. For these two reasons, I will begin the prehistory of film with an American ship's boy named Samuel Colt. His history is actually slightly mythical and it will need to be expanded more correctly and precisely in a future lecture on the history of weapons technology, but it will suffice for today. In 1828, the ship's boy went to the East Indies and on the way he had a technical epiphany - namely, the revolver that is now named after him. Colt revolvers, as celebrated and not by accident in all western films, no longer aim their six shots from one man to another, but rather from one white man to six Indians or Mexicans at virtually the same time. This was the reason why Colt, whose factory almost bankrnpted him, did not become a wealthy arms supplier until the American-Mexican War of 1847.
145
? ? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
The colt not only introduced the Innovation of being able to
shoot six moving targets in quick succession at a time when contem-
porary soldiers still needed a full minute to load the next round in their muzzle-loaded rifles, but rather it fundamentally revolutionized the process of industrial manufacturing. For promotional purposes, Colonel Colt was always fond of demonstrating to his astonished visi- tors that it was possible to disassemble six colts on a table, jnmble up their component parts, and in the end - despite this artificial introduc- tion of statistics or noise - reassemble six fully functional colts once again from the individual pieces. I do not need to delve any further into the complicated prehistory of this trick, which can be traced from Ludwig XVI's artillery to the almost forgotten but not unim- portant British-American War of 1812 and the US Army Ordnance Office. It is enough to say that even though Colt did not invent the principle of the industrial serial production of interchangeable parts, he still publicized it very successfully. The series of shots in time and the series of devices in space were two equally important aspects of one single innovation. The arms supplier of Napoleon's great army worked on similar standardizations at practically the same time, as did the English computer pioneer Charles Babbage, particularly with regard to screws and other precision mechanics. As you know, however, Colt's model prevailed in America - and this was actually for the simple reason that every conceivable emigrant with every conceivable occupation that was not demanded elsewhere streamed into the country of unlimited serialism. There were only two groups
of workers who did not emigrate from Europe, where they enjoyed much better working conditions: skilled labor and the military. And behold: the manufacturing technology of Colt's revolver compen- sated for the first shortage and the weapons technology compensated for the second.
Both of these aspects were also crucial for film. First, conceruing the seriality of the production process, film distinguishes itself from photography in that the sender's finished product - the film in reels - is entirely useless if a projector with precisely the same specifications is not available on the receiver side. The purchaser of a photograph does not himself need a camera, but the purchaser of a film needs a projection room and a projection device. While Shannon's channel concept is rather anachronistic and unsuitable for photography, as I have said, film comes considerably closer to this concept and thus requires highly industrial conditions. It is no coincidence that many early film producers carne from the sphere of precision engineering (Faulstich, 1979, p. 159).
146
? OI)TICAL MEDIA
The seriality of shootmg a revolver, on the other hand, naturally corresponds to the serial time in film, into which the movements of the filmed object must be broken down. In terms of pure mathemat- ics, this has not been a problem since Aristotle's theory of movement was adopted in the early modern period. In tbe fourteentb century, as I have mentioned, Nicolas Oresme already sketched the individual phases of the flight of a missile on paper, and Leibniz developed dif- ferential calculus around 1690 in order to calculate the ballistics of cannonballs. dy over dt means analyzing the results of an arbitrary mathematical fnnctlon m extremely small intervals of time t, and these intervals eventually approach zero until the differential quotient indicates the tangent and that means the change of the relevant func- tion itself at all individual points in time.
Technically, however, this border crossing is simply impossible because (according to Shannon) there are no infinite scanning speeds. It was thus replaced with the problem of how small the segments of time must be made in order to provide at least the appearance of such a border crossing. At the same time that Charles Babbage constructed his first proto-computer, which converted Leibniz' differential equa- tions into technically realizable difference equations, the nineteenth century developed a machine that operated even below the smallest difference that would still be physiologically perceptible. But that suddenly changed the technical question into a physiological question and the construction of machines thus changed into the measurement of human senses.
To identify this new physiology of the senses, it will suffice first of all to point out in general that its scientific structure would have been inconceivable prior to the nineteenth century. In his remark- able book about the techniques of the observer, Jonathan Crary even postulated the thesis (inspired by Foucault's historiography) that the turn away from physically natural optics, as represented by Lambert, for example, towards physiologically embodied optics was a veritable scientific paradigm shift. The principle support for Crary's thesis is no less than Goethe, whose theory of colors was fundamentally based on the phenomenon of optical after-images. Someone looks at something red for a few minutes, then closes the eyes - and suddenly the complementary color green appears to these closed eyes. Goethe boldly concluded from this, as I already men- tioned at the very beginning of these lectures, that the eye is like the sun: out of its own creative activity it generates a suitable complement to every passively pre-existing color, and the end sum is always a totality.
147
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Crary's thesis reduces many events in the history of science that led to photography and film to a hrilliant denominator. Nevertheless, I would like to raise two objections. The first concerns Crary's over- emphasis on the body, which is fashionable among contemporary scholars. There seem to be entire branches of scholarship today that believe they have not said anything at all if they have not said the word"body" a hundred times. There is no doubt that in the nine- teenth century the geometric model of optics, which prevailed from the time of Brunelleschi to Lambert, was replaced with a materialis- tic one, but that by no way means that the material effects of light always impact on human bodies and eyes. It can just as easily be, as we have seen, Schulze's photochemical effect on silver salts and, even more conclusively, Herschel and Ritter's history of infrared and ultraviolet. Crary's thesis would therefore be more precise if he had not spoken about physiology but rather about material effects in general, which can impact on human bodies just as well as on technical storage media.
Second, I do not see how Crary can equate Goethe's gentle experi- ments with the more brutal and in my eyes first true physiological experiments and self-experiments of his successors. Goethe himself boasted of his "delicate empiricism," and he surely never caused pain for the sake of his theory of colors. However, the Weber brothers, to whom the sciences of motion (as they were called in the nineteenth century) owe much, falsified the alleged creative power of Goethe's eye by simply delivering a mechanical blow to their own eyes: what then emerged as an after-image or lighting on the retina was no longer a totality, but rather the trace of a shock (Crary, 1991).
The Leipzig scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner was even worse than the Webers because he first attempted to prove Goethe's pre- cious theory of after-images experimentally. As a physicist, Fechner also wanted to determine the measurable quantities and measurable periods of this after-image effect, and he spent three years reading all the relevant books on the subject and then staring into the sun. At the end of this series of experiments, which exposed his eyes to two rather opposed extremes, he was blind and fit only for a mental institution (see Lasswitz, 1910). You can see that in the nineteenth century the physiology of the senses did not simply ruin experimen- tal rabbits - or rats, like today - but rather it ruined the research pioneers themselves. Media always presuppose disabilities, and thus
optical media also presuppose the blindness of their researchers (in addition to a lack of natural pigments). Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot or Condorcet had only postulated theories about the
148
? OPTICAL MEDIA
blIndness of others, because the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be pure light. Fechner, on the other hand, was able to write the general mathematical formula of all sensory perception, the so-called basic law of psychophysics, precisely because he sacrificed his eyes to research his subject and then only managed to improve his condition again through sheer force of will. According to this basic law, a linear increase in objective stimulation only corresponds to a logarithmic increase in subjective sensation; by the same token, an exponential increase in stimulation is necessary for a linear increase in sensation - in Fechner's tragic case, therefore, the sun must shine four times hrighter to blind twice as much. With such optimistic and also not undisputed assumptions about sensory resistance, one can imagine how much solar power Fechner exposed his eyes to.
Fechner is admittedly less important for the physiology of film than another hlind man, to whom we will shortly come. Fechner only serves to illustrate a research field that began making numerical state- ments about perceptual processes and above all stimulus thresholds. It is clear that eyes can only believe in the apparent continuity of film movements when the projected images change quickly enough that the sequence of individual frames drops below a certain temporal threshold. The so-called positive after-image then takes effect. In contrast to Goethe's celebrated concept of the negative after-image, the positive after-image occurs when the eye continues to see an object in the same place a moment after it has already disappeared or moved away. This happens because the stimnlation of the nerve fibers only wears off gradually, and the after-image remains in the same color as the original image rather than the complementary color, as with a negative after-image. Since about 1750, it has been known (or rather rediscovered, as Ptolemy'S Optics was reportedly aware of the after-image effect) that the positive after-image lasts for an eighth of a second. The eye is therefore no longer able to differen- tiate movements faster than this from one another. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that researchers proceeded to take advantage of this effect with small technical devices that produced
illusionistic effects as toys. In 1824, for example, Sir John Herschel, the son of the aforementioned astronomer and discoverer of infrared, rotated a coin so quickly that by all appearances the front and the back, the number and the emblem, were visible at the same time as a single image (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 109).
And yet the after-image effect alone is still not enough to make cinema possible. It only supports the cinematic illusion in one respect: it dampens the flickering during the film advance and completely
149
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
suppresses it upon reaching the flicker fusion threshold. But to produce the illusion that one and the same object has moved from the place it occupied on frame A to another place on frame B, another optical effect must be added: the stroboscope effect. Hopefully, it IS not necessary to say much about the effectiveness of this effect, as all of the better discos employ stroboscopic lights so that people's dance movements can be cut up into their individual phases, much like film editing. The twentieth century, in other words, has successfully reimported a film effect into everyday life. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, had to first discover the stroboscope effect to make film possible at all.
It is a great pleasure to inform you that the great physicist Michael Faraday was among these discoverers. Faraday will appear later in these lectures as a genius at theater lighting, but in 1831 he also discovered electromagnetic induction or the possibility of produc- ing voltage and ultimately alternating current through the circular motion of an electric circuit in a magnetic field. What he discov- ered for optics is not so very far from induction, because it already prepared for the possibility of one day electrifying optical media like film and television. As in the case of the rotation press or the revolver, circular motion once again plays the decisive role, which will culminate in roll film. Through his fundamental electromagnetic discovery, Faraday took notice of circular motion in general, and he reportedly observed two gears in a mine whose motion was normally not perceptible at all because of speed and thus because of the after- image effect (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 114). On the basis of this observa- tion, Faraday constructed purely experimental gear couplings, until he determined a new optical law: the periodic breaks in the equally p. eriodic images - which occur approximately when the front gear allows the viewer to see the individual teeth of the rear wheel but then conceals them again - leads to the lovely illusion that the eye mistakenly identifies tooth A from image 1 with another tooth B from image 2 with a third tooth C from image 3, etc. A virtual movement thus emerges, and at certain rotation speeds or frequencies the gears even virtually stop. Electro-technicians and information theorists like Shannon would say that the sampling frequency together with the frequency of the samples produces an aliasing effect, which is perhaps a free English translation of Brecht's alienation effect. The possibility of this aliasing effect is only present when the sampling frequency is not at least twice as large as the maximum frequency in the signal of interest. For this reason, sophisticated filter chains provide for a meticulously precise observation of Shannon's sampling theorem
i I
I
150
< 'j
? OPTICAL MEDIA
during the digital recording and playback of compact discs. And the fact that the stroboscope effect does not hinder but is actually neces- sary for film says everything about the difference between film and electro-acoustics, the imaginary and the real (this is already a slight anticipation of statements that are yet to come). It only becomes obtrusive and disruptive when film scenes themselves demonstrate the very effect on which they are based. You all know that when a western is shown at 24 frames per second and the famous covered wagons of the American pioneers have exactly the right frequency, their spokes appear to be standing still or even running backwards.
So much for Faraday, who admittedly appears to have been more mterested in a basic theory of frequency than in its media-technical applications. The physicist neglected to demonstrate his stroboscope effect not only with the teeth of gears and slits but rather with images, which was a small but decisive step in the development of film. However, Joseph Plateau, the Belgian professor of experimental physics and astronomy at Ghent University, was working on optical illusions at the same time and completely independent of Faraday. In 1832, he thought of feeding the stroboscope with 16 drawings of a dancer, presenting her in successive phases of movement and ending once again in the initial position.
On the outer edge of the disk and between the individual images there were 16 slits. When the spectator positioned the disk in front of a mirror, set it in motion, and continued looking through the same slit into the mirror, the dancer herself would proceed to perform endless pirouettes or circular movements. For the first time, a tecbni- cal trick had changed the zero frequency, which was the rate at which all representative artworks had been displayed ever since the Stone Age, into frequencies as high as one likes. This must have so deeply fascinated Plateau that he was no longer able to leave his optical experiment alone and he gradually went blind; in contrast to his col- league Fechner, however, his blindness was permanent.
Perhaps the extent of the sacrifice that Plateau made enables us to appreciate the advance that his stroboscope represented. If one thinks back to Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope, which was able to present the 14 Stations of the Cross one after another, the first important difference is the novelty of Plateau's representation of the successive phases of the dancer's movements. The 14 Stations of the Cross were 14 different images as such, one on the Mount of Olives, one with Pilate, one on Golgatha, etc. , from the night before Good Friday until the famous sixth hour. The 16 drawings of the dancer, on the other hand, are absolute snapshots of one and the same object - and
151
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
this was done seven years before Daguerre was able to reduce photo- graphic recording time to two to three minutes. Imagine if the devout Jesuit Kircher had presented the passion playas endless pirouettes. With his virtual circular motion, Plateau is a worthy contemporary of all the acoustic experimenters between 1830 and 1880, or between Weber and Edison, who made analogous attemps to achieve millisec- ond recordings of sound and speech periods, which finally culminated in Edison's phonograph in 1877.
That means at the same time that film was not yet techmcally possible during Plateau's lIfetime simply because mstantaneous pho- tography lagged far behind the rotation speeds that were attainable with the stroboscope. For this reason, only scientific deVices and toys were initially developed from the stroboscope. The device was sng- gested by Doppler, who also discovered the acoustic effect that was named after him: to analyze motion, whose speed strips it of every visual perception, Doppler employed a systematic reversal of the stroboscope, which did not set images and slits into periodic motion but rather the light source itself - as a rapid snccession of electrical sparks, for example (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 120). This is precisely what in the meantime is employed in discos, most likely to train the speed of our perception - in defiance of all physiology - for the extreme requirements of a technical war.
The development of toys also proceeds in a similarly militaristic way. You may recall that one of the reasons why Leibniz developed his wonderful differential calculus was to make missile trajectories calculable. Now in 1811, a certain Franz von Uchatius came into the world, which at that time still had an Austrian Empire. In 1829, Uchatius voluntarily joined the second field artillery regiment as an artillery gunner. After graduating from the Bombardier Corps Academy iu 1837, he was promoted to sergeant and commissioned to teach physical chemistry. In 1841, he began his - at least for the Austrian artillery - groundbreaking research on canuon casting, which ultimately led him to the invention of steelbronze and also of the aforementioned explosive Uchatius powder, which is chemically closely related to old roll film. As a reward, Kaiser Franz Joseph pro- moted him to Field Marshal Lieutenant and at the same time, because this promotion would have otherwise been impossible, made him a
baron. In the symbolic world, on which monarchies are based, things fell into place very well, but Austria-Hungary did not have the least interest in the technical real world. After walking a great distance, a certain Mitterhofer from South Tyrol was permitted to present his wooden typewriter - the very first that we know of - to this same
152
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Kaiser. He received a personal donatIOn, but hIS machine dId not go into production. Uchatius fared even worse: due to bureaucratic difficultIes with the introduction of Uchatius cannons in the impe- rial army, the artilleryman and Field Marshal Lieutenant became his own target. On June 4, 1881 he shot himself in the head (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 130-5).
After this requiem we now return to the history of film. Before Field Marshal Lieutenant Franz von Uchatius took aim at himself, it must have been important to him to teach all cadets and officer candidates the principle of artilleristic shooting. Plateau's newly dis- covered stroboscope lent itself easily to this purpose. Like Edison's kinetoscope, it also admittedly had the one crucial disadvantage that it was not a mass medium, but rather it always only allowed a single viewer to look through the observation slit. For his lectures on weapons technology, therefore, Uchatius spent his scarce free time first combining the well-known lanterna magica witb the strobo- scope. And behold: all of the cadets were immediately able to watch Uchatius' sketches of projectiles flying through the air at the same time, as they were projected onto the wall of the auditorium. The lanterna magica thus no longer produced merely virtual motion, like Schriipfer's curtains of smoke, but by means of a crank - much like early cinema - made successive images really dance in front of a fixed light source. It is no wonder, then, that Uchatius' constructions were purchased by a carnival showman, who gave magical performances that turned the weapon back into money, as Schriipfer or Robertson had once done (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 133).
What is interesting here is not this reversion, but rather the fact that the individual technical elements of film - the recording device, the storage medium, the projection apparatus - were combined with one another very gradually and in stages. Technical media are never the inventions of individual geniuses, but rather they are a chain of assemblages that are sometimes shot down and that sometimes crys- tallize (to quote Stendhal). After Uchatius combined the stroboscope and the lanterna magica, the only element that was still missing was the camera obscura that Talbot had already automated. However, its inclusion in the communication system known as film not only encountered technical obstacles, such as exposure times that were much too long, but also the traditionalism of an entire artistic epoch. As contemporaries of these experiments, draughtsmen like Toepfer in Geneva and Wilhelm Busch in his village near Giittingen were actu- ally quick enough to grasp the new method of drawing in phases as an art form, which means quite simply that they invented the comic
153
? OPTICAL MEDIA
strip, which led in turn to the animated cartoon. However, it was precisely because painters learned to break motion down into suc- cessive phases in the oineteenth century that they did not want to relinquish this new art form once again and replace it with technical media. On December 1, 1888, a certain Emile Reynaud received the French patent number 194 482 for his projection praxinoscope. As the name already suggests, this device projects moving stories, which Reynaud drew on perforated and flexible ribbons as animated films. All of these features, but above all the interplay between the perfora- tions and a gripping mechanism, guaranteed perfect synchronization. The musical accompaniment synchronized with the projection also practically anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, except that throughout his lifetime Reynaud stubbornly refused to replace his "artistic" drawings with photographs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 136). As Hiilderlin so accurately wrote, it is hard to leave a place when one lives near the source. And what lives closer to the source than art according to European tradition?
3. 2. 2 Implementation
It was thus left to a European emigrant to the US to take the last step. Edward Muggeridge from Kingston-on-Thames, who changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge either out of Anglo-Saxon pride or an American desire for self-promotion, combined for the first time all the elements of film: instantaneous photography, iantema magica, and stroboscope. Muybridge's zoopraxiscope of 1879 showed, as its name claims, life (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 175).
The key word "life" naturally compels us to disregard momen- tarily this lecture's physical image of the world and to touch upon nineteenth-century zoology. However, to understand Muybridge's feat we are now in the same fortunate position as film history: we only need to combine the already existing or already recounted ele- ments. Colt's revolver, Daguerre's photography, Weber's acoustic experiments - all of these elements recur once again.
The initial push was supplied by acoustics.