Long before Edison's Black Mary - his film studio
illuminated
by light bulbs - it was the first theatrical piece developed on the basis of spotlights.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
3 Silent Film
We no longer need, as in previons lectnres, to represent the history of this industrialization as a detailed acconnt of individual inventions. Up until now, the presentation of these individual inventions illus- trated the simplest, namely earliest attempts to solve the fundamental problems of optical media technology. This no longer applies, as the individual inventions and patents related to film began to explode in 1890: while there were only around 200 film-related patents issued worldwide between 1875 and 1890, this number had already risen to 500 between 1890 and 1910. In the age of indnstry, therefore, film emerged from pure teamwork. That is why I will only make rough cuts that treat silent film, sound film and color film as epochal structures. The two world wars will also serve as crude landmarks.
Before discussing the actual development of silent film, I want to point out again how far Marey had already come conceptually despite the fact that he failed to project his sequences of images. In 1891, his assistant, the aforementioned Georges Demeny, developed the won- drous photography of speech or photographie de la parole. Precisely like the earlier telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Demeny
160
? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
also wanted to cure a physiological handicap, namely deaf-muteness, through media technology: he combined a photographic gun afa Marey with one of Edison's phonographs, turned the experimental apparatus towards himself, as was usual at the time, and shouted two very significant sentences into both devices at the same time: first "Vi ve la Fran ee! " and second "Je vous ai me. " It was the first declaration of love in history that was no longer directed at women, but rather at the medium of film, which has since become the norm. At the same time, however, it was also a lesson for deaf-mutes, whose mouths reportedly managed to produce audible declarations of love to no one at all by imitating Demeny's individual mouth positions.
We can see, then, how desperately the couplmg of optical and acoustic media technology was sought from the very beginning, long before the introduction of sound film. This is even truer of the inven- tor who actually applied it to commercial cinema: Thomas Alva Edison himself.
Edison worked as a telegraph operator during the American Civil War, which made him partially deaf but also provided him with technical know-how and money. On this double basis, his laboratory - which was trnly the first laboratory in the history of technology - first realized two dreams of the century: the mechanical record- ing of sound, namely the phonograph, and the perfect light source, namely the light bulb. The phonograph, as the first form of visible speech capable of also being played back, was developed in 1877 as a byproduct of Edison's attempt to accelerate the transmission of telegraph signals. It therefore shows that the opposition between discrete and analog media was already beginning to become fluid in Edison's time. The light bulb, which in turn led to the tubes that were the basis of all electronics for a long time, emerged from the search for a light source that would avoid the smoke and fumes (and thus the signal noise) of ancient candles. At the same time, it was also supposed to avoid the short life span of carbon arc lamps and the rather deadly dangers of gaslight - the two light sources that had immediately preceded the electric ligbt bulb in the nineteenth century.
It is important to note here that Edison's kinetoscope - the immedi- ate predecessor of film - was directly connected to these two previous inventions. To begin with, this is true biographically. The phono- graph and the light bulb made Edison renowned, so to speak, for being able to invent as if on command. One ofthe first to bow to his fame was the great Berlin physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, the founding hero of all eye and ear physiology. His acquaintance with Muybridge provided Edison with the same fame
161
? oPTICAL MEDIA
in America. During his trip to France in 1881, where hIS attempts to meet the science-fiction novelist Villiers de elsIe-Adam unfortu- nately fell through, Edison also made the acquaintance precisely not of poets but rather of fellow researchers like Marey. After both of these meetings, nothing seemed more obvious to Edison than turning a scientific experiment into a money-making entertainment medium.
After the phonograph and the light bulb, therefore, Edison also developed the first commercial film system. And hecause entertain- ment media had to be sold and distributed worldwide, Edison's stroke of genius was standardizing the serial instantaneous photogra- phy of Muybridge and Marey, just as Colonel Colt had standardized the revolver as the first serial murder weapon. After he had become acquainted with Marey in Paris, Edison found Eastman-Kodak's cel- luloid film. By choosing the 35 mm format and furnishing the film roll with perforations, which have remained the standard practically ever since, Edison solved all of Marey's problems of film synchroni- zation in one fell swoop. He subsequently constructed a component called the kinetograph, which recorded moving pictures, as well as a compatible or standardized component called the kinetoscope, which could play back the developed film.
One year later, Edison finally acquired the patent for the so-called escapement disc mechanism from another American, which ensured that the individual frames of the film stood beautifully still during the sixteenth of a second in which they were recorded or observed, while all further transport between the individual frames fell pre- cisely in the pauses in between. Since this fundamental solution, at the very latest, film has been a hybrid medium that combines analog or continuous single frames with a discontinuous or discrete image sequence; this will be amplified even further in connection with tele- vision. In 1888, Edison placed this entire digital-analog construction in a box that was essentially an electrified version of the peep show cabinets at eighteenth-century fairs: an electric motor pulled the film roll, which was illuminated from behind by a light bulb, past a mag- nifying glass, through which the primarily individual observer, upon inserting a coin, was supposed to follow the moving film and experi- ence the illusion of continuous motion. Edison's sales success was so great that nickelodeons, as they were called, sprang up everywhere in America (they are predecessors, so to speak, of contemporary arcades). William Fox, among others, later made his money as the inventor of Movietone talking newsreels (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 208).
In addition to the financial effect of this new illusion, it is also important to point out its technical basis: the acoustics of telegraph
162
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
sIgnals also provided apparent continuity on the basIs of actual discontinuity, which was no longer humanly controllable, and this had originally inspired Edison's phonograph. For this reason, he was justified in writing: "the idea occurred to me that it was pos- sible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and tbat by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultane- ously" (Clark, 1977, p. 171). Edison's kinetoscope was accordingly also called the optICal phonograph. This fact is not only significant for EdIson's practical kinetoscope, but It is also theoretically sigmficant: as with Demeny, the first experiments in the direction of multimedia were already happening at the end of tbe nineteenth century. After the individual sensory channels had been physiologically measured and technically replaced, what followed was the systematic creation of multimedia systems, which all media have since become. What emerged were simulations or virtual realities, as tbey are now called, which reach as many sensory channels as possible at the same time.
Edison built the first film studio in the history of media, his so- called Black Mary, precisely for this purpose. This Black Maria was, in memory of the camera obscura, a large box, which could be turned in the direction of the sun for tbe purpose of lighting, which was equipped with light bulbs for the same reason, and which had black interior walls so that the illuminated and recorded actors - the first in the history of film who actually performed short, fictional scenes - could act in front of a uniform background. In contrast to the arts, media always play against the backdrop of noise, which in the case of Edison's optics was a black painted wall. The acoustics were more of a problem, as Edison wanted to record the picture and sound at the same time. Without microphones he had difficulty in bridging the distance between the actors' mouths and the phonograph trumpets without disruptive acoustic background noise. The synchronization of "movies," as Edison already called them, with the phonograph cylinder also created problems during playback. Apparently, it was historically still too early for the audiovisual Gesamtmedienwerk. Edison also confirmed this after several kinetoscope experiments, when he told students that instruction through film and vision (and not through gramophony) would soon replace instruction through
books.
Film, in other words, began at least technically as silent film, and
it did not combine all three of Edison's innovations - film, light bulb, and phonograph. It is probably a historical rule of post-print media technologies that individual and isolated sensory channels must first
163
? OPTICAL MEDIA
be completely and thoroughly tested before any thought about con- necting them is at all possible. The mulumerua system of kinetoscope and light bulb was thus the only one that took hold - first in Berlin, with a rather inconsequential film presentation by the Skladanowsky brothers on November 1, 1895, and soon thereafter, namely on December 28, 1895, in the Indian Salon of the Grand Caf" on the Boulevard des Capncines in Paris, where the brothers Augnste and Louis Lumiere gave their first pnblic film demonstration before a paying audience with worldwide resnlts.
The two Lumi"res - whose surname has already been commented npon thonsands of times - really brought light to film. This was for the simple reason that they npgraded the equipment, which had been purchased from Edison along with Edison's film standard, in one small way: they projected films onto a large screen for a paying mass andience, who gathered aronnd a single vision like in the old theater. Above all, however, they developed along with what has since been called the cinematographe, or cinema for short, a device that can record, copy, and play back moving images. The cinematograph recorded films when it worked with a lens like a camera obscura, it copied films when the lens was replaced with simple sunlight, and finally it projected films when sunlight was replaced with a light bulb behind the film roll. Every spectator paid one franc, and in exchange they simultaneously saw exactly what the other spectators saw. With the phonograph, such distribution was more or less natural due to the fact that the ear cannot be closed, but with film it had to be constructed. The Lumi"res typically employed front projection with a strong lamp illuminating the celluloid from behind, which has since become standard practice. Once, at the Exposition Internatiol1ale in Paris, they successfully experimented with front and back projection at the same time. Iu an enormous hall with spectators sitting every- where, they were all supposedly able to see the film well. For this reason, a screen was first submerged in water before every showing and stretched across the middle of the room - then half of the audi- ence was able to watch the film projected from the front and the other half from the back due to the water.
If this switch between front and back projection reminds you of someone, so much the better, for the logical coherence of film history then becomes clear. Daguerre's diorama of Vesuvius had switched between day and night views by switching between front and back projection in precisely the same way. Already for this reason it could be no coincidence that film, despite Edison, did not originate in the USA. The conversion of the representative arts into optical media
164
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
took place ill a country that had long known the arts as such. I mean, to quote The Song o f Roland, "la dulce France. " Like Daguerre, the father of the Lumiere brothers was also originally a painter who became a photographer. But it was precisely because of this techniza- tion of his prior handwork that he was concerned that the technology could do without him as a professional photographer simply because people would go on to photograph themselves. Lumiere thus directed himself and his sons away from photography and towards the manu- facturing of photographic materials . . .
The history of the development of this medium in one genera- tion was continued by his sons, who proceeded no longer simply to take photographs, but also to supply their father and the business in general with better photographic negatives (Telerama). They were therefore both scientists and industrialists who developed a method of storing and projecting moving and thus living people, as well as the first technique of making corpses imperishable and thus storable using formaldehyde. There is no better way to illustrate the connec- tion between media technology and physiology that existed in the nineteenth century.
The contents of the films that the paying spectators on the Boule- vard des Capuciues saw also resulted from the Lumieres' occupation. The first film to be privately screened, which to my knowledge is now lost, was shown at an annual meeting of the French society for photography, where President Marey and all the other scientists were able to watch themselves (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 171). The first film to be publicly shown, on the other hand, showed the employee side of this science, as it presented the Lumieres' workers streaming out of the factory gate in Lyon during a shift change. It is characteristic for the difference between media and arts that this film did not present an infantile or humorous but still planned and composed American plot, as with Edison, but rather it was taken purely from everyday life. The Lumieres had no Black Mary to bring fictions into the world, but rather at the beginning they only made daylight recordings, which made them the founders of documentary film.
Another confrontation, which was more in keeping with the Grand Cafe's Indian Salon (the name implies that it was designed for exotic wonders), was experienced by the 35 spectators at the public pre- miere. Among the Lumieres' documentary films was L'arrivee d'un train ala Ciotat, or the arrival of a train at the station of a French city on the Mediterranean, which has since become famous. The favorite toy of the nineteenth century thus entered, the old Renais- sance perspective went into effect as usual, and the locomotive on
165
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the screen became larger and less well defined until the spectators reportedly fled the Parisian cafe in fear. Without planning it, the Lumieres had actually transformed the spectators not into targets of their fixed camera, but rather into (as Virilio formulates it) targets of the imaginary locomotive. When the American director Griffith later proceeded to put the film camera itself into apparent motion and directly approach the actors with it, this shock effect supposedly increased: the spectators could allegedly only explain the enormous close-ups of faces that filled the screen by concluding that Griffith had literally decapitated the actors' heads.
In the eyes of these deceived spectators, and behind the back of silent film producers who did not have such shocks and murders in mind at all, cinema thus transformed from the very beginning into an illusionary medium. In contrast to the scientific experiments of a Muybridge, which were supposed to replace everything imaginary or figurative in the eyes of people with the real, and in contrast to the phonograph as well, which could only reproduce the reality of noise for lack of cutting or editing possibilities, a new imaginary sphere emerged. It was no longer literary, as in the Romantic period, but rather technogenic. Tzvetan Todorov's theory that the fantastic in literature died after it was elucidated by Freud and psychoanalysis (Todorov, 1973, pp. 160-2) is partly false: the fantastic experienced a triumphant resurrection through film.
Nothing could attest to this more perfectly than the fact that a certain Georges Melies, who had once been the director of the Robert-Boudin theater, was among the many people who pur- chased a cinematograph from the Lumieres. Robert-Boudin, whom Bans Magnus Enzensberger had appropriately evoked in one of his mausoleum poems, was neither a playwright nor a director, but rather the most famous magician and escape artist of the nineteenth century. His grandson consequently transformed magical artworks into modern tourism by inventing the French specialty of son et tumi! ;re, a Bengal sound and light show for old castles that designates tourism as the worthy heir of absolutist lighting effects. As the heir of Houdin, Melies consequently transformed the documentary film into the modern fantastic. He invented a vast number of fihn tricks, but I will only focus on two elementary ones: backwards projection and the stop trick.
Melies employed backwards projection perhaps most success- fully in his film Charcuterie mecanique (Mechanical Delicatessen). A pair of scenes were filmed in a butcher's shop, and they recorded in sequence the slaughtering of a pig, its dismemberment, and the
166
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
production of a finished sausage. These same scenes were shown at the screening, except that within each scene the last frame had heen made the first and the first had been made the last. In the spellbound eyes of the spectators, the resulting film showed a finished sausage transforming back into the corpse of a pig and the corpse then transforming back into a living pig. For the first time in history, the resurrection of the flesh - this 2,OOO-year-old proclamation - actually came to pass in real life. The ability of film to visually produce appar- ent continUIty could not be demonstrated more triumphantly, as his working principle - the cutting up of living movements into lifeless, static frames - was blatantly disclosed in the form of the mechani- cal butcher shop, yet the process was nevertheless reversed again in the imaginary sphere. It is therefore precisely because film works in physical time, unlike the arts, that it is in a position to manipulate time. According to a wonderful dictum of the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the irreversibility of physical time or the constant increase of entropy, which is a result of the second law of thermodynamics, is shown by the impossibility of films like Charcuterie mi! canique, which reverse the time axis.
The time reversal trick could also be performed with a sound recording on cylinder or record instead of a film, as Edison had already experimented with playing noises or voices backwards. However, no sound storage device prior to the tape recorder would have been able to keep up with the second trick introduced by MeIies. He apparently discovered the so-called stop trick by accident while filming a Parisian street scene with a hearse. He always filmed with a tripod, which represented for him the unchangeable and therefore illusionary position of the spectator. The celluloid roll ran out in the middle of the scene, however, as the length of these rolls was still not sufficient for feature films before the turn of the century. Without moving the camera from the tripod, a new roll was inserted and the filming continued. Upon projecting the finished product, MeIies was astonished to find that the spectator did not notice the temporal dis- ruption at all (which would be entirely out of the question with the abrupt interruption of a recorded noise). The pedestrians and vehicles passing by on the street had been removed as if by magic, and they had been replaced with other pedestrians in other positions on the street. M"lies immediately incorporated this principle or trick into his next film: L'escamotement d'une dame, or the vanishing lady, dem- onstrated that under media-technical conditions a Robert-Houdin is no longer necessary to conjure people and more specifically ladies away from the stage. And if "lady" is interpreted as Mother Nature,
167
? OPTICAL MEDIA
as would be appropriate in classICal-romantic literature, then film tricks signify simply a female sacrifice, which has since liquidated all of nature. With the stop trick, film incorporated its own working principle, namely placing cuts in sequence, into its narrative. All that remained was to explain Mohos' technical discovery as the focus of a particular profession, and the job of cutter was born.
So much for the origin of silent film, which from the start had already measured out the entire range of possibilities between acci- dental realism and illusionary theater, and between documentary and feature film. The only element that was still missing in order to plumb all these possibilities was a moving camera. This task was left primarily to American directors like Porter and Griffith. Zglinicb showed insight for once when he noted that the moving camera, with the possibility of tracking in for close-ups and tracking other moving objects, gave birth to the urcinematic genre of the western (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 492). Classical western scenes that depict enemies, primar- ily Indians on moving horses, from the point of view of a moving wagon, completely dismiss Melios' fixed theatrical perspective; they sacrifice the constraint of the spectator's gaze, which was necessary for them to be deceived by stop tricks, in exchange for another and more mobile illusion, which Einstein had described not by chance at the same time, namely in 1905, in his special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory begins with the impossibility of determining, when two movements are relative to each another, such as when two trains pass each other, which movement is virtual and which is real.
The mobile illusion called film thus changed thinking and feeling. Stephane Mallarme, who traced literature back to its 24 naked letters without any optical or acoustic illusions, was once asked in a survey what he thought of illustrated books. The answer: he did not think much of them, because readers of Mallarme, unlike readers of Hoffmann, were not supposed to hallucinate, but rather simply to read; whoever needed illustrations should put away their books and go to the cinema instead (Mallarme, 1945, p. 878). In another interview, the same Mallarme was asked how art could improve technology, and he answered by suggesting that the driver's seat in the recently invented automobile be relocated to the rear, behind the automobile owners, who at that time were upper class, and the front windshield be enlarged as much as possible. Without perceiving their own move- ment at all, and without any visual obstacles such as the driver, these automobile owners would then be fully immersed in the illusion that the streets and landscapes in front of them were opening up and increasing in size as they rode past (Mallarme, 1945, p. 880).
168
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Mallarme had correspondingly written a prose poem that Immor- talized this automobile in the poetic or overly poetic disguise of a self-rowing boat. The aforementioned boat floats down the river where Mallarme's own country home in Valvins was located, slips through white water lilies (from which the poem takes its title), at first with the practical goal of carrying the rower, Mallarme, to a lady friend. The visual spectacle of a gliding perspective delights the poet so much, however, that he soon abandons his visit and instead celebrates the lady as the "absent one" - Mallarme's most solemn poetical category (Mallarme, 1945, pp. 283-6). Mallarme's poem thus does exactly what Meissonier (presumably his neighbor) did with his mobile railroad carriage, which proves that 15 years before the first tracking shots were made the dream of them already existed. The mobile images of film are inextricably linked with the new automobiles and the only slightly older railroad journey. Further evi- dence, namely from instantaneous photographer Ernst Mach and the originator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Frend, will follow later today.
The systematics of optical mobilization is in the first instance more important. First, the step from a static to a mobile camera had elimi- nated every similarity between film and the ancient art of theater. From Plato's cave to the peep show theater, spectators were and are fixed in place - not out of old Enropean sadism, but rather becanse before the invention of computers the calculation of moving gazes would have exceeded all computational capacities. Macroscopically, film does not actually alter the fixed position of the spectators' bodies. Microscopically, on the other hand, an apparatus representing their own eyes performs random cuts and movements, from which the spectators cannot distance themselves as they have no other possibili- ties of optical control in the darkness of the cinema. For this reason, according to Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "the spectator reacts before the screen as before an external retina telelinked to his
brain" (Morin, 2005, pp. 134-5; italics in original).
Before continuing with the actnal history of film, I wonld like to follow another thread through to the end. The cinema that the Lumiere brothers created on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris was not simply an apparatus composed of the cinematograph and a projection wall, but rather it was one of the many child kidnappers of Hamelin. The question remains what raised the cinema as pied piper above the old desires of theater. This question leads us back to
lighting technology.
The peep show theater, this baroque translation of the lanterna
magica, was illuminated, heated, and filled with smoke thanks to 169
? OPTICAL MEDIA
wax candles, and the duration of its pieces were thus very limited. The wish for a brighter and cleaner light sonrce arose as soon as chemists first began mannfactnring flammable gases and Robertson discovered the carbon arc lamp for special effects. The introdnction of gaslight in nineteenth-centnry tbeaters not only had the effect of increasing the number of theater fires and deaths to an historically unheard of degree, until the introduction of the iron curtain, which was supposed to protect against such disasters, but it also posed a theoretical problem. It was no longer necessary to be stingy with ligbt, and the stage could be made as bright as desired. The question was thus whether there should still be chandeliers in the auditorium, which was a centuries-old tradition, even though they were no longer necessary for people to see the drama or the opera. The answer given
by the well-known architect Garnier as he was building the new Grand Opera House in Paris is noteworthy: according to Garnier, a dimming of the auditorium would be possible, as it already existed in a few Italian opera houses, but it was not feasible. First, opera visitors had to be able to read along during the dazzlingly incompre- hensible songs in the libretto of the cnrrent opera in order to under- stand at least some of the plot. Second, as a social event people go to the theater not only to see but also to be seen. (Princes, above all, were always illuminated in their boxes, because for them everything depended on conrtly representation or glamor rather than bonrgeois illusion. ) Third, Garnier argued that it is crucial for actors and the artistic quality of their performance that they see all of the audience's reactions; they thus perform in an optical feedback loop. Fourth, a darkened auditorinm would also have the disadvantage that it would not be controllable down to the last corner. Opera visitors who no longer read along in the libretto during a love aria might resort to quite different thoughts or actions.
The morality of the gaslight theater thus immediately bears com- parison to the new morality or rather immorality of the cinema. While the new technical light sonrces were not permitted to change anything in the auditorium at first, there were still experiments with new stage effects. I want to cite two particularly magnificent exam- ples to provide evidence of the training of a cinematic gaze.
In the nineteenth centnry, England had a very practical math- ematician. In 1830, Charles Babbage constructed a forerunner of the first computer, which he actnally did not complete but which he employed as leverage to bring British precision mechanics to the same industrial standards as Colonel Colt. In 1846, Babbage sat in the German Opera House in London next to a lady wearing a hat.
170
? ? ? OpTICAL MEDIA
The gaslight over the stage and auditorium went on, and the lady's hat and program changed color with a slight tinge of pink. This technogenic accident gave Babbage a revolutionary idea for a revolu- tionary theater lighting system. He got together with none other than Michael Faraday, the discoverer of the stroboscope effect that had made film possihle, to create together a simple new ballet. Babbage and Faraday illuminated the stage with dazzlingly brilliant limelight lamps, which an English lieutenant had invented for the purpose of sending military signals, and in front of each lamp they built rotating glass filters in various different colors. Babbage then wrote a ballet ahout natural science research and the rainbow, put all the dancers in white tricots for the duration of the piece, darkened the auditorium, and illuminated the white tricots with changing colors according to each phase in the ballet's narrative. You can and must imagine the result: the dancers' tricots could alternately shine in all the colors of the rainbow without a costume change.
Long before Edison's Black Mary - his film studio illuminated by light bulbs - it was the first theatrical piece developed on the basis of spotlights. And unfortu- nately, Babbage's piece can only be imagined because the impressario dropped the ballet from the schedule shortly before its premiere for fear of a fire and an audience in flames.
For this reason, the history of spotlight effects, which introduced virtual and thus proto-cinematic movement into the theater, contin- ued in Germany. A dramatist and opera composer lived there who, for anarchistic reasons, loved the thought of a hurning theater and audience. I am speaking of Richard Wagner, and unfortunately I will have to spare you countless details. In short, Wagner's newly founded opera house in Bayreuth truly achieved the transition from traditional art to media technology. I will merely point to the many stage directions in the Ring that provide for smooth cinematic scene changes and for the burning of the entire theatrical fortress of the gods, Valhalla, at the end of the entire tetralogy, which recalls Bab-
bage's ballet. Another similarity to Babbage's piece is the rainbow that Wagner's gods conjure on the ceiling of the stage at the end of The Rhine Gold after a metaphysical fog had previously submerged them in the most terribly deadly grey. Nothing else signifies The Twilight of the Gods. In addition to the coloring of scenes through spotlights, there was also a kind of virtual automobility in Wagner's opera even at its first premiere in 1876: in the libretto, only the new Valkyries ride on old-fashioned, proto-Germanic horses; in techni- cal positivity, on the other hand, a moving lanterna magica projects automobile phantoms of Valkyries onto the rear backdrop. The same
171
? OPTICAL MEDIA
happens at the end of the second act of The Valkyrie, where Wotan and Briinnhilde appear as shadows on the cyclorama over the two fighters, Siegmund and Hunding (Ranke, 1982, p. 47- this scene is preserved in an image in the Illustrirte Zeitung of 1876). In the hal- lucination scenes, the controllability of theater light, which was first made possible through gaslight, escalates to iantema magica effects (Ranke, 1982, p. 42).
And because Wagner pushed both the acoustic and the optical effects of theater equally to the extreme, the opera house that he built on a green hill overlooking Bayreuth, which looks like an enormous factory for producing arts and crafts, represented a decisive step beyond the nineteenth century in general and Garnier's Grand Opera House in Paris in particular. In the words of a contemporary eye- witness (or rather earwitness) of the first Ring premiere:
In Bayreuth the darkened room became the objective. It was also an entirely surprising stylistic device at that time. "A completely dark night was made in the house, so that it was impossible to recognize one's neighbors, and the wonderful orchestra began in the depths. " (Wieszner, 1951, p. 115)
If media technology mnst first isolate and incorporate individual sensory channels and then connect them together to form multime- dia systems, then Wagner's Bayrenth opera was the first historical realization of this principle. To highlight the music of The Rhine Gold overture, there was nothing and no one to see either in the auditorium or on stage. Not to mention the fact that the opera musi- cians were not visible at all, as Wagner had sunk them in an invis- ible orchestra pit following the unique model of the theater built by von Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in Besan<;on around 1770. Even when the curtain was raised over the huge gas-lit stage, the lights in the auditorium remained off - a practice that still continues today. This no longer shocks contemporary cinemagoers, who only purchase Bayreuth tickets in exceptional cases. However, it was a scandal in 1876, as a newly crowned German Kaiser was among the audience at the first premiere. Wilhelm I thus had the privilege of being the first prince whose absolutist self-representation was confined to his box by Wagner's anarchism. The age of democracy, or rather the age of prevailing illiteracy, had begun. For spectators who wanted to continne reading the opera text, as Garnier suggested, Wagner had to distribute a flyer prior to the first premiere to warn them that they should already read through the text, as it would be too late
172
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
and too dark during the performance. The Ring of the Nibelung thus ran as a total film, which was not once interrupted by superimposed intertitles as in old silent films. It was therefore no wonder that Wagner's notorious son-in-law Houston Steward Chamberlain sug- gested that symphonies should also be performed in the complete darkness of Wagner's opera house, meaning that even the actors who were not yet entirely invisible in Wagner's musical dramas should be cut out and instead only large-format lanterna magica effects should be projected, as had been done with the valkyries. Through the elimi- nation of all empirical human bodies, a multimedia show would thus emerge.
Hopefully, this overselling of the theater, which Babbage and Wagner had already achieved in the old peep show theater, sheds more light on Edison's light bulb and the Lumieres' film projection. It is clear that electric light made the difference between bright and dark consistently controllable, and therefore in this case it could be set absolutely; it is also clear that it had minimized the danger of theater fires or later also cinema fires. From then on, there were only explosions and catastrophes (provided that we are allowed to ignore the ending of Gravity's Rainbow) when celluloid films - whose chemistry is for good reason narrowly related to explosives - caught fire under the heat of projector light bulbs. However, the projection of electric light through an otherwise darkened room seems to be the most important thing. It not only established the aesthetics and social pathology of cinema, but it also created a new militaristic way of perceiving the world. It was not until the invention of klieg lights around 1900 that film studios, following the model of Edison's Black Mary, could finally bid farewell to daylight recording. After the rise of film, the theater could also shift its lighting to virtual
effects and klieg lights, as Max Reinhardt did in Berlin. The fact that actors today almost always stand in spotlights is therefore an imitation of cinema. And finally, light projection could also mod- ernize warfare. In the Russo-Japanese War, for example, the Tsar's army employed spotlights for the first time to protect Port Arthur, Russia's last eastern Siberian fortress. When the Japanese attacked at night, these spotlights transformed battlefields into lethal film studios (Virilio, 1989, p. 68). If bedazzlement, as I have already said, was a privilege of princes and the powerful during absolutism, enabling them to humble their subjects, it has since 1904 become an actively armed eye that no longer simply optimizes its own perception, like
the telescope and the microscope, but also reduces the perception of the enemy to zero.
173
? OPTICAL MEDIA
We will return later to the nexus between war and cmema. For the historical moment of silent film, however, it is sufficient to study the aesthetics of this actively armed eye and the sociology of its subjects. As we are pressed for time, I will skip over countless opmions on silent film that range from Georg Lukacs to Bela Balazs and limit myself instead to a very early silent film theory: Hugo Miinster- berg's slender book The Photoplay, which was published in New York in 1916 and which connects most elegantly to my questIOns about cinema, theater, and lighting. Our last session ended with Edgar Morin's aphorism that the cinemagoer catches sight of his own immeasurablymagnifiedretinaontheprojectIOnscreen Miinsterberg had proved precisely that already in 1916.
Hugo Miinsterberg, to introduce him briefly, was a lecturer in experimental psychology in Freiburg im Breisgau and thus a col- league of all those like Fechner, Helmholtz, and Marey, who were present at the birth of film. William James, the donnish brother of novelist Henry James, became acquainted with the young lecturer at a psychology congress in Leipzig, which at that time was still a leader in science thanks to Wundt. Out of pure enthusiasm, James offered him the directorship of the newly founded experimental psychology laboratory at Harvard. At the turn of the century, in other words, universities followed the solitary example of Edison, the self-made man. In his laboratory, for example, Miinsterberg had already taught the young student Gertrude Stein experimentally about automatic or surrealistic writing 20 years before she achieved literary fame. But writing was only one of countless cultural techniques that he measured according to all manner of psychological and physiological parameters, with the actual goal of optimizing all of these techniques ergonomically. The upcoming assembly-line work, as it was imple- mented by Henry Ford during World War I, required that every bodily movement, even inconspicuous movements like writing, proceed opti- mally. I would add here that Gilbreth, an American colleague of Miinsterberg's, conducted such ergonomic measurements with the help of slow-motion films. The ex-Freiburger was not as practical. He only went to film studios, which at that time were located in New York rather than under Hollywood's sun, and were as an excep- tion opened to him because of his fame in America. The book The Photoplay was Miinsterberg's last success, however, because one year later the German Empire declared war on the United States. Miinsterberg had tried to prevent this war through fireside chats with President Wilson, but his efforts were in vain. In 1918, he mourned the fact that no president, professor, or American would greet him any
174
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
longer, and he died of a heart attack while presenting a lecture later that year.
His film book provides an example of applied psychotechnics, as Miinsterberg dubbed his new science. In order to explain a modern media technique, Miinsterberg cleverly employed an older counter- example: the peep show theater. The result of the aesthetic compari- son is that the theater can actually awaken many illusions among spectators, but none of them are physiological. The stage disrupts neither the physical place nor the physical time of the events; in fact, it must simply accept them. (This is the reason why the three unities became a theoretical problem for theater. ) On the other hand, the photoplay or feature film is a true psychotechnique, which attacks and modifies the unconscious psychological states of the cinemagoer using strictly technical means.
The examples for this thesis come from the realm of film tricks and montage techniques, which had already been achieved at that time. As if to prove the objective and not just the etymological connection between the notion of montage in film and the notion of montage on the assembly line, the first film theory deals with the effects that close-ups, flashbacks, flashforwards, and reverse shots have on spectators. In the unconscious and therefore uncontrollable act of spectating, psychic acts correspond to all of these effects. The most obvious is Miinsterberg's example of the close-up: the protagonist of a film wants to shoot someone, so he takes hold of Colonel Colt's revolver. However, the film camera - the historical descendant of this same revolver - is not satisfied with simply carrying on looking at the hero, which would be the only available possibility in the theater. In fact, as an actively armed eye it tracks in on the hero until only the hand and the revolver fill the entire image in the lens. According to Miinsterberg, all unconscious attention functions in the same way: it filters out completely irrelevant image components without noticing. In a similar way, the flashback realizes or implements unconscious memory (which Proust was investigating in literature at exactly the same time), the flashforward realizes or implements unconscious fan- tasies of the future, and the montage of temporally or spatially sepa- rated scenes realizes or implements the functioning of unconscious association in general. All the irresistible and uncontrollable shock effects unleashed by Lumiere, Melies, and Griffith are thus explained using psychotechnics.
Miinsterberg's theory thus completes, at least for us, a scientific- historical circuit. As I have repeatedly emphasized, media technologies emerged in the nineteenth century from psychological and physiological
175
? OPTICAL MEDIA
research on a very empirical and no longer transcendental human subject. When Miinsterberg was writing in 1916, on the other hand, these media technologies were perfect and could, in turn, provide models for psychology and physiology. If unconscious attention is nothing more than a film trick, then humans can be built and opti- mized instead of being further idolized idealistically. Pynchon's cited film director was indeed mistaken when he provided the comforting assurance that we do not yet entirely live in film. In technical actual- ity, the scientific experimental film above all changed the realities of life itself. People working on an assembly line perform movements taught them by a film.
Miinsterberg's admirable theory also completes a literary-historical circuit. As you may remember, romantic literature demanded - to quote Navalis directly - a "right reader" who develops a real, visual, and also audible inner world based on the words on the page. Navalis' wondrons novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen depicts this process, as someone tells the hero abont a wondrous blue flower, which the hero never gets to see throughout the entire novel. Under conditions of silent reading, however, the hero lapses into a dream upon hearing the tale, and this dream places the blue flower in front of an inner or hallncinatory eye. At the end of the dream, the flower's petals become clothing and the center of the flower becomes a woman's face. The hero cannot help but remain faithful to that hallucinatory beloved even after her death, for the duration of a romantic's life or at least for the duration of the novel.
Miinsterberg responds to this scientifically, and that means scathingly:
Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on the stage every
fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we
really see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl.
[. . ? JEvery dream becomes real. (Miinsterberg, 1970, p. 15)
If film, according to Miinsterberg's clear words, simply surpasses lit- erature and theater, then this new media aesthetic has consequences that people other than myself would call sociological. The fact that theater and novel publishing have experienced a crisis in popularity and profitability as a result of the rise of film is still harmless com- pared to another threat. If film tricks can actually appear to make flowers out of women rather than merely in the reader's imagina- tion, the ideal beloved of all romantic authors and readers dies out. Navalis' Mathilde and Hoffmann's Aurelia, who were only
176
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
seducible as readers, disappear simply because they eXist in the nec- essary blurring of descriptions and thus as a single indistinguishable ideal figure. They were replaced, to put it simply and dramatically, with empirical-statistical women.
The film star - who, as Georg Lukacs already recognized in 1913, actually has no soul or doesn't need one, but who is simply an unmis- takable human anatomy - is naturally first and foremost an empirical woman. The Kinogirl, as starlets were called in the leading German film magazine in 1911, "constitutes a morally delightful companion to theater actresses, as they have vegetated in Europe since 1650 without receiving Christian funerals during the first centuries of their existence. " The magazine Kinematograph takes an opposing view:
How a young woman comes to the theater is clear to everyone inter- ested in either the theater or the young woman. People seldom worry about how a young woman holds her ground on the stage. But the public should know how many sad dramas of life the photograph hinders by showing dramas from the life of the public. Then the old accusation that the cinema restricts the life blood of the stage would no longer be heard for a long time, and those who perish on the stage would be offered a rescue. (quoted in Schliipmann, 1990, p. 19)
This grandiose argument is implicitly between women's bodies and the illustrations of women's bodies. Film stars are actually just as erotic as theater actresses, but they merely have to prostitute their images rather than their bodies. For media-technical reasons, there- fore, chastity or sanctity dwells within them, which in Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs was only true of the painted Rosalia and not of her fleshly double Aurelia. In other words, the cinematic pin-up girl deflects palpability just like three-dimensional technologies in two- dimensional space. For this very reason, however, the borders of palpability are no longer drawn. Everyone knows the famous story of how Howard Hughes, the multi-millionaire constructor of military aircraft, also constructed a special bra for Jane Russell's unmistakable anatomy for the purpose of making films.
What is more forgettable and more important, however, is that empirical-statistical women were also cinemagoers. At precisely the same time as Germany's universities first accepted women, and thus the Faustian ideal love, Gretchen, was historically set aside, early silent film cinema was considered to be women's entertainment. This is powerfully shown in Heide Schliipmann's habilitation treatise, which examines spectator statistics as well as the content of films
177
? OPTICAL MEDIA
m Germany pnor to 1913. I will only add that accordmg to quite a number of historical witnesses it appears that secretaries in particular went to the cinema. Women's emancipation had not only invented the student as a new profession for women, but also the typist. After the media-technical collapse of literary illusions, all that remained for these typists was the dry and - for male writers in general- too trivial task of working ten hours a day with bare, meaningless letters. Such secretaries escaped the daily grind of their office jobs, as they them- selves testified in magazine surveys in the 1920s, sImply by seemg a boyfriend andlor going to the cmema every evening, where they were guaranteed not to be threatened by any texts other than the intertitles.
If anyone wants to have printed evidence of the hIstorical primacy of women cinemagoers, they should read Jean-Paul Sartre's autobi- ography The Words. In this book, the old philosopher recalls the equally child-like and literary con-artist that he was as the grandson of an all-powerful writer. Of course, his grandfather, like all of his bourgeois friends, attended the Parisian theater as often as possible in order, as Sartre so beautifully formulated, to be "insidiously prepared for ceremonious destinies" (Sartre, 1967, p. 75). It would have been easy for Sartre to become a Stalinist revolutionary, however, if his young mother had not dragged him into her own passion for film. Women, children, and welfare cases - not only among the Sartres - were thus the principle audience for films until about 1910, when men developed such a fear of this literary desertion that they either introduced film censorship or they invented the masculine auteur film, which essentially amounts to the same thing.
Film censorship was demanded by diverse moral organizations and was ultimately anchored in the law of an empire, although its reigning technophile was naturally also a film fan. There were two different reasons for its existence: the content of films and the social space of the cinema itself. The social space of the cinema realized all of Garnier's fears and all of Wagner's hopes. A cinema in Mannheim, which was the subject of a dissertation written by an early female student of none other than Max Weber in 1913, advertised with the slogan: "Come in, our cinema is the darkest in the entire city! " My task is not to present a lecture on the social history of petting, but I would like to direct your attention to Gottfried Benn's enthusiasm for this darkness (in the early novella The Journey) and at the same time articulate a warning: early cinema can certainly be schema- tized as a feedback loop between erotic film content and the erotic practices of cinemagoers in the same way that romantic literature served as such a feedback loop, but we should always question, as
178
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Pynchon does, what authority programmed such loops. As Zglinicki reportedly heard from the mouth of a direct participant, the most famous naturist film, which was made by the UFA (Universal Film AG) after World War I, was intentionally supposed to have only an indirectly eroticizing function; its main purpose was rather to show healthy souls in healthy bodies immediately after a lost war and thus contribute "to military fitness" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 576). The armed forces had assisted in making the film.
But now I am getting ahead of myself. To understand how a UFA could come mto existence at all, we will return once more to the individual stages by which film fell again under state control.
The first stage, as I have said, was the auteur film, which did not emerge in Germany until 1913 at a time when the country was rather dependent on film imports. In France, the comedie franc;aise had already pounced earlier. After a few years of wild polemics, which Anton Kaes has replicated in his volume on cinema debates (Kaes, 1978), theater people and novelists decided to make peace with the new competitive medium just before the start of World War I. In 1912, the largest German film company and the writers' union signed a joint agreement concerning royalties and copyrights (Schliipmann, 1990, p. 247). One year later, in 1913, the famous actor Albert Bassermann, who had previously refused every photo- graphic portrait out of the same fear of the camera as Balzac, was persuaded to perform in the first German auteur film, Paul Lindau's The Other, in which he played his own double. This culturalization of cinema, in turn, was supposed to abolish everything that films had inherited from fairs and magic shows, as well as some aspects of the social space of the cinema that it had inherited from Wagner's opera and the chambre separee. Following the models of New York, Paris, and London, Berlin also began to develop film palaces, which were hybrid architectures that combined features of both the cinema and the theater. To provide appropriate film content for these palaces, in which both the educated middle-class and the cultural set were able to set foot, novelists had to write screenplays, and theater actors had to be filmed. The two most famous cases were the novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers and the actor Paul Wegener, who made the second German auteur film, The Student of Prague, in 1913.
The work of the screenplay consisted first of all in turning liter- ary hallucinations into cinematic positivities. With his typewritten screenplay - a text that was thus reduced to naked letter sequences - Ewers did this brilliantly, while Gerhard Hauptmann reportedly failed at the same task. Second, it naturally involved replacing all of
179
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
the fallen or servant women of early women's films with a man - preferably an educated one. The sciences that had historically made film possible were thus incorporated back into it again. For example, Ewers' student suffers from a hallucination of a doppelganger that, as early psychoanalysis immediately recognized, can only be explained through psychoanalysis. Other auteur films, like The Other or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, feature sciences like criminology, which since Bertillon focused on securing photographic evidence, and psv- chiatry, which had already in Marey's time produced the first serial photographic snapshots of patients. Miinsterberg would have had no problem in finding his own experimental psychological premises realized or even implemented in The Student of Prague.
Beyond the reconciliation between literature, science, and film, however, the auteur film also had to mend the rupture between film and theater. The famous theater actor Paul Wegener thus gave his first experiment in front of the camera the lovely title The Seduced. His cameraman Seeber, the son of a Chemnitz photographer, experi- mented systematically with Georges Melies' stop tricks and all sorts of double exposures to create what he called "absolute film":
Naturally [Seeber wrote in 1925 in absolute unison with Miinsterberg]
an entire film will never be absolute, but certain scenes within a large film that depict an internal procedure - a legendary, fairytale~like or fantastic procedure - can be produced on the way to absolute film. Such a film . . . demands a complete conversion of the screenwriter - for once the word "poet" can really be used here - and actually a poet who also understands how to translate his fantasies into technology. He must be able to conceive of the different parts of an absolute film image. He must not only specify the procedures objectively, but they must also be fixed temporally. The screenwriter of the future - and I am firmly convinced that absolute film has a future - will have to write like a musician writes his score. And just as a musician orchestrates his acoustic creation, the film author will also have to write a kind of technical score that enables the photographer to follow his fantasy.
(Seeber, 1925, p. 95)
In The Student of Prague, Seeber's "absolute film" consequently amounted to the presentation of film as film. All of the double expo- sures and stop tricks that Seeber had learned from Melies, which he augmented through his passion for American klieg lights, only served the goal of confronting the theater actor Wegener with himself as an "other" or double. This "other" looked completely the same, but he was missing any inwardness or facial expression. In this way, he
180
? ? ? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
seemed like the idiotic and that means cinematic negative of the posi- tive theater star. In other words, the doppelganger trick represented a film of making a film. A famous actor died simply because there was a copy of him on the screen. Remember why Garnier had refused to dim the lights in the auditorium: with invisible spectators the actors could no longer exchange any optical or gestural signs of approval or understanding. But this interruption of all feedback loops between a body and its doubles - whether in the mirror, in one's own internally stored body image, or in the approving eye of the other - precisely defines technical media. You do not recognize tape recordings of your own voice because only the acoustics of the exterior space remain, while the feedback loop between the larynx, Eustachian tube, and inner ear does not work in front of the microphone. The number of early horrified witnesses appropriately shows that people did not recognize their own moving doubles. Maltitz' comedy Photography and Revenge had already demonstrated how the camera replaces beautified portraits with the faces of criminals; cinema pushed this alienation effect even further. The protagonists of novels by Vladi- mir Nabokov and Arnolt Bronnen, who had become film extras or even stars, experienced the shock of seeing themselves on screen in the cinema. For men like Freud, who neither went to the cinema nor read about it in his books, the same experience could happen in a train compartment.
We no longer need, as in previons lectnres, to represent the history of this industrialization as a detailed acconnt of individual inventions. Up until now, the presentation of these individual inventions illus- trated the simplest, namely earliest attempts to solve the fundamental problems of optical media technology. This no longer applies, as the individual inventions and patents related to film began to explode in 1890: while there were only around 200 film-related patents issued worldwide between 1875 and 1890, this number had already risen to 500 between 1890 and 1910. In the age of indnstry, therefore, film emerged from pure teamwork. That is why I will only make rough cuts that treat silent film, sound film and color film as epochal structures. The two world wars will also serve as crude landmarks.
Before discussing the actual development of silent film, I want to point out again how far Marey had already come conceptually despite the fact that he failed to project his sequences of images. In 1891, his assistant, the aforementioned Georges Demeny, developed the won- drous photography of speech or photographie de la parole. Precisely like the earlier telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Demeny
160
? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
also wanted to cure a physiological handicap, namely deaf-muteness, through media technology: he combined a photographic gun afa Marey with one of Edison's phonographs, turned the experimental apparatus towards himself, as was usual at the time, and shouted two very significant sentences into both devices at the same time: first "Vi ve la Fran ee! " and second "Je vous ai me. " It was the first declaration of love in history that was no longer directed at women, but rather at the medium of film, which has since become the norm. At the same time, however, it was also a lesson for deaf-mutes, whose mouths reportedly managed to produce audible declarations of love to no one at all by imitating Demeny's individual mouth positions.
We can see, then, how desperately the couplmg of optical and acoustic media technology was sought from the very beginning, long before the introduction of sound film. This is even truer of the inven- tor who actually applied it to commercial cinema: Thomas Alva Edison himself.
Edison worked as a telegraph operator during the American Civil War, which made him partially deaf but also provided him with technical know-how and money. On this double basis, his laboratory - which was trnly the first laboratory in the history of technology - first realized two dreams of the century: the mechanical record- ing of sound, namely the phonograph, and the perfect light source, namely the light bulb. The phonograph, as the first form of visible speech capable of also being played back, was developed in 1877 as a byproduct of Edison's attempt to accelerate the transmission of telegraph signals. It therefore shows that the opposition between discrete and analog media was already beginning to become fluid in Edison's time. The light bulb, which in turn led to the tubes that were the basis of all electronics for a long time, emerged from the search for a light source that would avoid the smoke and fumes (and thus the signal noise) of ancient candles. At the same time, it was also supposed to avoid the short life span of carbon arc lamps and the rather deadly dangers of gaslight - the two light sources that had immediately preceded the electric ligbt bulb in the nineteenth century.
It is important to note here that Edison's kinetoscope - the immedi- ate predecessor of film - was directly connected to these two previous inventions. To begin with, this is true biographically. The phono- graph and the light bulb made Edison renowned, so to speak, for being able to invent as if on command. One ofthe first to bow to his fame was the great Berlin physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, the founding hero of all eye and ear physiology. His acquaintance with Muybridge provided Edison with the same fame
161
? oPTICAL MEDIA
in America. During his trip to France in 1881, where hIS attempts to meet the science-fiction novelist Villiers de elsIe-Adam unfortu- nately fell through, Edison also made the acquaintance precisely not of poets but rather of fellow researchers like Marey. After both of these meetings, nothing seemed more obvious to Edison than turning a scientific experiment into a money-making entertainment medium.
After the phonograph and the light bulb, therefore, Edison also developed the first commercial film system. And hecause entertain- ment media had to be sold and distributed worldwide, Edison's stroke of genius was standardizing the serial instantaneous photogra- phy of Muybridge and Marey, just as Colonel Colt had standardized the revolver as the first serial murder weapon. After he had become acquainted with Marey in Paris, Edison found Eastman-Kodak's cel- luloid film. By choosing the 35 mm format and furnishing the film roll with perforations, which have remained the standard practically ever since, Edison solved all of Marey's problems of film synchroni- zation in one fell swoop. He subsequently constructed a component called the kinetograph, which recorded moving pictures, as well as a compatible or standardized component called the kinetoscope, which could play back the developed film.
One year later, Edison finally acquired the patent for the so-called escapement disc mechanism from another American, which ensured that the individual frames of the film stood beautifully still during the sixteenth of a second in which they were recorded or observed, while all further transport between the individual frames fell pre- cisely in the pauses in between. Since this fundamental solution, at the very latest, film has been a hybrid medium that combines analog or continuous single frames with a discontinuous or discrete image sequence; this will be amplified even further in connection with tele- vision. In 1888, Edison placed this entire digital-analog construction in a box that was essentially an electrified version of the peep show cabinets at eighteenth-century fairs: an electric motor pulled the film roll, which was illuminated from behind by a light bulb, past a mag- nifying glass, through which the primarily individual observer, upon inserting a coin, was supposed to follow the moving film and experi- ence the illusion of continuous motion. Edison's sales success was so great that nickelodeons, as they were called, sprang up everywhere in America (they are predecessors, so to speak, of contemporary arcades). William Fox, among others, later made his money as the inventor of Movietone talking newsreels (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 208).
In addition to the financial effect of this new illusion, it is also important to point out its technical basis: the acoustics of telegraph
162
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
sIgnals also provided apparent continuity on the basIs of actual discontinuity, which was no longer humanly controllable, and this had originally inspired Edison's phonograph. For this reason, he was justified in writing: "the idea occurred to me that it was pos- sible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and tbat by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultane- ously" (Clark, 1977, p. 171). Edison's kinetoscope was accordingly also called the optICal phonograph. This fact is not only significant for EdIson's practical kinetoscope, but It is also theoretically sigmficant: as with Demeny, the first experiments in the direction of multimedia were already happening at the end of tbe nineteenth century. After the individual sensory channels had been physiologically measured and technically replaced, what followed was the systematic creation of multimedia systems, which all media have since become. What emerged were simulations or virtual realities, as tbey are now called, which reach as many sensory channels as possible at the same time.
Edison built the first film studio in the history of media, his so- called Black Mary, precisely for this purpose. This Black Maria was, in memory of the camera obscura, a large box, which could be turned in the direction of the sun for tbe purpose of lighting, which was equipped with light bulbs for the same reason, and which had black interior walls so that the illuminated and recorded actors - the first in the history of film who actually performed short, fictional scenes - could act in front of a uniform background. In contrast to the arts, media always play against the backdrop of noise, which in the case of Edison's optics was a black painted wall. The acoustics were more of a problem, as Edison wanted to record the picture and sound at the same time. Without microphones he had difficulty in bridging the distance between the actors' mouths and the phonograph trumpets without disruptive acoustic background noise. The synchronization of "movies," as Edison already called them, with the phonograph cylinder also created problems during playback. Apparently, it was historically still too early for the audiovisual Gesamtmedienwerk. Edison also confirmed this after several kinetoscope experiments, when he told students that instruction through film and vision (and not through gramophony) would soon replace instruction through
books.
Film, in other words, began at least technically as silent film, and
it did not combine all three of Edison's innovations - film, light bulb, and phonograph. It is probably a historical rule of post-print media technologies that individual and isolated sensory channels must first
163
? OPTICAL MEDIA
be completely and thoroughly tested before any thought about con- necting them is at all possible. The mulumerua system of kinetoscope and light bulb was thus the only one that took hold - first in Berlin, with a rather inconsequential film presentation by the Skladanowsky brothers on November 1, 1895, and soon thereafter, namely on December 28, 1895, in the Indian Salon of the Grand Caf" on the Boulevard des Capncines in Paris, where the brothers Augnste and Louis Lumiere gave their first pnblic film demonstration before a paying audience with worldwide resnlts.
The two Lumi"res - whose surname has already been commented npon thonsands of times - really brought light to film. This was for the simple reason that they npgraded the equipment, which had been purchased from Edison along with Edison's film standard, in one small way: they projected films onto a large screen for a paying mass andience, who gathered aronnd a single vision like in the old theater. Above all, however, they developed along with what has since been called the cinematographe, or cinema for short, a device that can record, copy, and play back moving images. The cinematograph recorded films when it worked with a lens like a camera obscura, it copied films when the lens was replaced with simple sunlight, and finally it projected films when sunlight was replaced with a light bulb behind the film roll. Every spectator paid one franc, and in exchange they simultaneously saw exactly what the other spectators saw. With the phonograph, such distribution was more or less natural due to the fact that the ear cannot be closed, but with film it had to be constructed. The Lumi"res typically employed front projection with a strong lamp illuminating the celluloid from behind, which has since become standard practice. Once, at the Exposition Internatiol1ale in Paris, they successfully experimented with front and back projection at the same time. Iu an enormous hall with spectators sitting every- where, they were all supposedly able to see the film well. For this reason, a screen was first submerged in water before every showing and stretched across the middle of the room - then half of the audi- ence was able to watch the film projected from the front and the other half from the back due to the water.
If this switch between front and back projection reminds you of someone, so much the better, for the logical coherence of film history then becomes clear. Daguerre's diorama of Vesuvius had switched between day and night views by switching between front and back projection in precisely the same way. Already for this reason it could be no coincidence that film, despite Edison, did not originate in the USA. The conversion of the representative arts into optical media
164
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
took place ill a country that had long known the arts as such. I mean, to quote The Song o f Roland, "la dulce France. " Like Daguerre, the father of the Lumiere brothers was also originally a painter who became a photographer. But it was precisely because of this techniza- tion of his prior handwork that he was concerned that the technology could do without him as a professional photographer simply because people would go on to photograph themselves. Lumiere thus directed himself and his sons away from photography and towards the manu- facturing of photographic materials . . .
The history of the development of this medium in one genera- tion was continued by his sons, who proceeded no longer simply to take photographs, but also to supply their father and the business in general with better photographic negatives (Telerama). They were therefore both scientists and industrialists who developed a method of storing and projecting moving and thus living people, as well as the first technique of making corpses imperishable and thus storable using formaldehyde. There is no better way to illustrate the connec- tion between media technology and physiology that existed in the nineteenth century.
The contents of the films that the paying spectators on the Boule- vard des Capuciues saw also resulted from the Lumieres' occupation. The first film to be privately screened, which to my knowledge is now lost, was shown at an annual meeting of the French society for photography, where President Marey and all the other scientists were able to watch themselves (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 171). The first film to be publicly shown, on the other hand, showed the employee side of this science, as it presented the Lumieres' workers streaming out of the factory gate in Lyon during a shift change. It is characteristic for the difference between media and arts that this film did not present an infantile or humorous but still planned and composed American plot, as with Edison, but rather it was taken purely from everyday life. The Lumieres had no Black Mary to bring fictions into the world, but rather at the beginning they only made daylight recordings, which made them the founders of documentary film.
Another confrontation, which was more in keeping with the Grand Cafe's Indian Salon (the name implies that it was designed for exotic wonders), was experienced by the 35 spectators at the public pre- miere. Among the Lumieres' documentary films was L'arrivee d'un train ala Ciotat, or the arrival of a train at the station of a French city on the Mediterranean, which has since become famous. The favorite toy of the nineteenth century thus entered, the old Renais- sance perspective went into effect as usual, and the locomotive on
165
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the screen became larger and less well defined until the spectators reportedly fled the Parisian cafe in fear. Without planning it, the Lumieres had actually transformed the spectators not into targets of their fixed camera, but rather into (as Virilio formulates it) targets of the imaginary locomotive. When the American director Griffith later proceeded to put the film camera itself into apparent motion and directly approach the actors with it, this shock effect supposedly increased: the spectators could allegedly only explain the enormous close-ups of faces that filled the screen by concluding that Griffith had literally decapitated the actors' heads.
In the eyes of these deceived spectators, and behind the back of silent film producers who did not have such shocks and murders in mind at all, cinema thus transformed from the very beginning into an illusionary medium. In contrast to the scientific experiments of a Muybridge, which were supposed to replace everything imaginary or figurative in the eyes of people with the real, and in contrast to the phonograph as well, which could only reproduce the reality of noise for lack of cutting or editing possibilities, a new imaginary sphere emerged. It was no longer literary, as in the Romantic period, but rather technogenic. Tzvetan Todorov's theory that the fantastic in literature died after it was elucidated by Freud and psychoanalysis (Todorov, 1973, pp. 160-2) is partly false: the fantastic experienced a triumphant resurrection through film.
Nothing could attest to this more perfectly than the fact that a certain Georges Melies, who had once been the director of the Robert-Boudin theater, was among the many people who pur- chased a cinematograph from the Lumieres. Robert-Boudin, whom Bans Magnus Enzensberger had appropriately evoked in one of his mausoleum poems, was neither a playwright nor a director, but rather the most famous magician and escape artist of the nineteenth century. His grandson consequently transformed magical artworks into modern tourism by inventing the French specialty of son et tumi! ;re, a Bengal sound and light show for old castles that designates tourism as the worthy heir of absolutist lighting effects. As the heir of Houdin, Melies consequently transformed the documentary film into the modern fantastic. He invented a vast number of fihn tricks, but I will only focus on two elementary ones: backwards projection and the stop trick.
Melies employed backwards projection perhaps most success- fully in his film Charcuterie mecanique (Mechanical Delicatessen). A pair of scenes were filmed in a butcher's shop, and they recorded in sequence the slaughtering of a pig, its dismemberment, and the
166
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
production of a finished sausage. These same scenes were shown at the screening, except that within each scene the last frame had heen made the first and the first had been made the last. In the spellbound eyes of the spectators, the resulting film showed a finished sausage transforming back into the corpse of a pig and the corpse then transforming back into a living pig. For the first time in history, the resurrection of the flesh - this 2,OOO-year-old proclamation - actually came to pass in real life. The ability of film to visually produce appar- ent continUIty could not be demonstrated more triumphantly, as his working principle - the cutting up of living movements into lifeless, static frames - was blatantly disclosed in the form of the mechani- cal butcher shop, yet the process was nevertheless reversed again in the imaginary sphere. It is therefore precisely because film works in physical time, unlike the arts, that it is in a position to manipulate time. According to a wonderful dictum of the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the irreversibility of physical time or the constant increase of entropy, which is a result of the second law of thermodynamics, is shown by the impossibility of films like Charcuterie mi! canique, which reverse the time axis.
The time reversal trick could also be performed with a sound recording on cylinder or record instead of a film, as Edison had already experimented with playing noises or voices backwards. However, no sound storage device prior to the tape recorder would have been able to keep up with the second trick introduced by MeIies. He apparently discovered the so-called stop trick by accident while filming a Parisian street scene with a hearse. He always filmed with a tripod, which represented for him the unchangeable and therefore illusionary position of the spectator. The celluloid roll ran out in the middle of the scene, however, as the length of these rolls was still not sufficient for feature films before the turn of the century. Without moving the camera from the tripod, a new roll was inserted and the filming continued. Upon projecting the finished product, MeIies was astonished to find that the spectator did not notice the temporal dis- ruption at all (which would be entirely out of the question with the abrupt interruption of a recorded noise). The pedestrians and vehicles passing by on the street had been removed as if by magic, and they had been replaced with other pedestrians in other positions on the street. M"lies immediately incorporated this principle or trick into his next film: L'escamotement d'une dame, or the vanishing lady, dem- onstrated that under media-technical conditions a Robert-Houdin is no longer necessary to conjure people and more specifically ladies away from the stage. And if "lady" is interpreted as Mother Nature,
167
? OPTICAL MEDIA
as would be appropriate in classICal-romantic literature, then film tricks signify simply a female sacrifice, which has since liquidated all of nature. With the stop trick, film incorporated its own working principle, namely placing cuts in sequence, into its narrative. All that remained was to explain Mohos' technical discovery as the focus of a particular profession, and the job of cutter was born.
So much for the origin of silent film, which from the start had already measured out the entire range of possibilities between acci- dental realism and illusionary theater, and between documentary and feature film. The only element that was still missing in order to plumb all these possibilities was a moving camera. This task was left primarily to American directors like Porter and Griffith. Zglinicb showed insight for once when he noted that the moving camera, with the possibility of tracking in for close-ups and tracking other moving objects, gave birth to the urcinematic genre of the western (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 492). Classical western scenes that depict enemies, primar- ily Indians on moving horses, from the point of view of a moving wagon, completely dismiss Melios' fixed theatrical perspective; they sacrifice the constraint of the spectator's gaze, which was necessary for them to be deceived by stop tricks, in exchange for another and more mobile illusion, which Einstein had described not by chance at the same time, namely in 1905, in his special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory begins with the impossibility of determining, when two movements are relative to each another, such as when two trains pass each other, which movement is virtual and which is real.
The mobile illusion called film thus changed thinking and feeling. Stephane Mallarme, who traced literature back to its 24 naked letters without any optical or acoustic illusions, was once asked in a survey what he thought of illustrated books. The answer: he did not think much of them, because readers of Mallarme, unlike readers of Hoffmann, were not supposed to hallucinate, but rather simply to read; whoever needed illustrations should put away their books and go to the cinema instead (Mallarme, 1945, p. 878). In another interview, the same Mallarme was asked how art could improve technology, and he answered by suggesting that the driver's seat in the recently invented automobile be relocated to the rear, behind the automobile owners, who at that time were upper class, and the front windshield be enlarged as much as possible. Without perceiving their own move- ment at all, and without any visual obstacles such as the driver, these automobile owners would then be fully immersed in the illusion that the streets and landscapes in front of them were opening up and increasing in size as they rode past (Mallarme, 1945, p. 880).
168
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Mallarme had correspondingly written a prose poem that Immor- talized this automobile in the poetic or overly poetic disguise of a self-rowing boat. The aforementioned boat floats down the river where Mallarme's own country home in Valvins was located, slips through white water lilies (from which the poem takes its title), at first with the practical goal of carrying the rower, Mallarme, to a lady friend. The visual spectacle of a gliding perspective delights the poet so much, however, that he soon abandons his visit and instead celebrates the lady as the "absent one" - Mallarme's most solemn poetical category (Mallarme, 1945, pp. 283-6). Mallarme's poem thus does exactly what Meissonier (presumably his neighbor) did with his mobile railroad carriage, which proves that 15 years before the first tracking shots were made the dream of them already existed. The mobile images of film are inextricably linked with the new automobiles and the only slightly older railroad journey. Further evi- dence, namely from instantaneous photographer Ernst Mach and the originator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Frend, will follow later today.
The systematics of optical mobilization is in the first instance more important. First, the step from a static to a mobile camera had elimi- nated every similarity between film and the ancient art of theater. From Plato's cave to the peep show theater, spectators were and are fixed in place - not out of old Enropean sadism, but rather becanse before the invention of computers the calculation of moving gazes would have exceeded all computational capacities. Macroscopically, film does not actually alter the fixed position of the spectators' bodies. Microscopically, on the other hand, an apparatus representing their own eyes performs random cuts and movements, from which the spectators cannot distance themselves as they have no other possibili- ties of optical control in the darkness of the cinema. For this reason, according to Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "the spectator reacts before the screen as before an external retina telelinked to his
brain" (Morin, 2005, pp. 134-5; italics in original).
Before continuing with the actnal history of film, I wonld like to follow another thread through to the end. The cinema that the Lumiere brothers created on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris was not simply an apparatus composed of the cinematograph and a projection wall, but rather it was one of the many child kidnappers of Hamelin. The question remains what raised the cinema as pied piper above the old desires of theater. This question leads us back to
lighting technology.
The peep show theater, this baroque translation of the lanterna
magica, was illuminated, heated, and filled with smoke thanks to 169
? OPTICAL MEDIA
wax candles, and the duration of its pieces were thus very limited. The wish for a brighter and cleaner light sonrce arose as soon as chemists first began mannfactnring flammable gases and Robertson discovered the carbon arc lamp for special effects. The introdnction of gaslight in nineteenth-centnry tbeaters not only had the effect of increasing the number of theater fires and deaths to an historically unheard of degree, until the introduction of the iron curtain, which was supposed to protect against such disasters, but it also posed a theoretical problem. It was no longer necessary to be stingy with ligbt, and the stage could be made as bright as desired. The question was thus whether there should still be chandeliers in the auditorium, which was a centuries-old tradition, even though they were no longer necessary for people to see the drama or the opera. The answer given
by the well-known architect Garnier as he was building the new Grand Opera House in Paris is noteworthy: according to Garnier, a dimming of the auditorium would be possible, as it already existed in a few Italian opera houses, but it was not feasible. First, opera visitors had to be able to read along during the dazzlingly incompre- hensible songs in the libretto of the cnrrent opera in order to under- stand at least some of the plot. Second, as a social event people go to the theater not only to see but also to be seen. (Princes, above all, were always illuminated in their boxes, because for them everything depended on conrtly representation or glamor rather than bonrgeois illusion. ) Third, Garnier argued that it is crucial for actors and the artistic quality of their performance that they see all of the audience's reactions; they thus perform in an optical feedback loop. Fourth, a darkened auditorinm would also have the disadvantage that it would not be controllable down to the last corner. Opera visitors who no longer read along in the libretto during a love aria might resort to quite different thoughts or actions.
The morality of the gaslight theater thus immediately bears com- parison to the new morality or rather immorality of the cinema. While the new technical light sonrces were not permitted to change anything in the auditorium at first, there were still experiments with new stage effects. I want to cite two particularly magnificent exam- ples to provide evidence of the training of a cinematic gaze.
In the nineteenth centnry, England had a very practical math- ematician. In 1830, Charles Babbage constructed a forerunner of the first computer, which he actnally did not complete but which he employed as leverage to bring British precision mechanics to the same industrial standards as Colonel Colt. In 1846, Babbage sat in the German Opera House in London next to a lady wearing a hat.
170
? ? ? OpTICAL MEDIA
The gaslight over the stage and auditorium went on, and the lady's hat and program changed color with a slight tinge of pink. This technogenic accident gave Babbage a revolutionary idea for a revolu- tionary theater lighting system. He got together with none other than Michael Faraday, the discoverer of the stroboscope effect that had made film possihle, to create together a simple new ballet. Babbage and Faraday illuminated the stage with dazzlingly brilliant limelight lamps, which an English lieutenant had invented for the purpose of sending military signals, and in front of each lamp they built rotating glass filters in various different colors. Babbage then wrote a ballet ahout natural science research and the rainbow, put all the dancers in white tricots for the duration of the piece, darkened the auditorium, and illuminated the white tricots with changing colors according to each phase in the ballet's narrative. You can and must imagine the result: the dancers' tricots could alternately shine in all the colors of the rainbow without a costume change.
Long before Edison's Black Mary - his film studio illuminated by light bulbs - it was the first theatrical piece developed on the basis of spotlights. And unfortu- nately, Babbage's piece can only be imagined because the impressario dropped the ballet from the schedule shortly before its premiere for fear of a fire and an audience in flames.
For this reason, the history of spotlight effects, which introduced virtual and thus proto-cinematic movement into the theater, contin- ued in Germany. A dramatist and opera composer lived there who, for anarchistic reasons, loved the thought of a hurning theater and audience. I am speaking of Richard Wagner, and unfortunately I will have to spare you countless details. In short, Wagner's newly founded opera house in Bayreuth truly achieved the transition from traditional art to media technology. I will merely point to the many stage directions in the Ring that provide for smooth cinematic scene changes and for the burning of the entire theatrical fortress of the gods, Valhalla, at the end of the entire tetralogy, which recalls Bab-
bage's ballet. Another similarity to Babbage's piece is the rainbow that Wagner's gods conjure on the ceiling of the stage at the end of The Rhine Gold after a metaphysical fog had previously submerged them in the most terribly deadly grey. Nothing else signifies The Twilight of the Gods. In addition to the coloring of scenes through spotlights, there was also a kind of virtual automobility in Wagner's opera even at its first premiere in 1876: in the libretto, only the new Valkyries ride on old-fashioned, proto-Germanic horses; in techni- cal positivity, on the other hand, a moving lanterna magica projects automobile phantoms of Valkyries onto the rear backdrop. The same
171
? OPTICAL MEDIA
happens at the end of the second act of The Valkyrie, where Wotan and Briinnhilde appear as shadows on the cyclorama over the two fighters, Siegmund and Hunding (Ranke, 1982, p. 47- this scene is preserved in an image in the Illustrirte Zeitung of 1876). In the hal- lucination scenes, the controllability of theater light, which was first made possible through gaslight, escalates to iantema magica effects (Ranke, 1982, p. 42).
And because Wagner pushed both the acoustic and the optical effects of theater equally to the extreme, the opera house that he built on a green hill overlooking Bayreuth, which looks like an enormous factory for producing arts and crafts, represented a decisive step beyond the nineteenth century in general and Garnier's Grand Opera House in Paris in particular. In the words of a contemporary eye- witness (or rather earwitness) of the first Ring premiere:
In Bayreuth the darkened room became the objective. It was also an entirely surprising stylistic device at that time. "A completely dark night was made in the house, so that it was impossible to recognize one's neighbors, and the wonderful orchestra began in the depths. " (Wieszner, 1951, p. 115)
If media technology mnst first isolate and incorporate individual sensory channels and then connect them together to form multime- dia systems, then Wagner's Bayrenth opera was the first historical realization of this principle. To highlight the music of The Rhine Gold overture, there was nothing and no one to see either in the auditorium or on stage. Not to mention the fact that the opera musi- cians were not visible at all, as Wagner had sunk them in an invis- ible orchestra pit following the unique model of the theater built by von Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in Besan<;on around 1770. Even when the curtain was raised over the huge gas-lit stage, the lights in the auditorium remained off - a practice that still continues today. This no longer shocks contemporary cinemagoers, who only purchase Bayreuth tickets in exceptional cases. However, it was a scandal in 1876, as a newly crowned German Kaiser was among the audience at the first premiere. Wilhelm I thus had the privilege of being the first prince whose absolutist self-representation was confined to his box by Wagner's anarchism. The age of democracy, or rather the age of prevailing illiteracy, had begun. For spectators who wanted to continne reading the opera text, as Garnier suggested, Wagner had to distribute a flyer prior to the first premiere to warn them that they should already read through the text, as it would be too late
172
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
and too dark during the performance. The Ring of the Nibelung thus ran as a total film, which was not once interrupted by superimposed intertitles as in old silent films. It was therefore no wonder that Wagner's notorious son-in-law Houston Steward Chamberlain sug- gested that symphonies should also be performed in the complete darkness of Wagner's opera house, meaning that even the actors who were not yet entirely invisible in Wagner's musical dramas should be cut out and instead only large-format lanterna magica effects should be projected, as had been done with the valkyries. Through the elimi- nation of all empirical human bodies, a multimedia show would thus emerge.
Hopefully, this overselling of the theater, which Babbage and Wagner had already achieved in the old peep show theater, sheds more light on Edison's light bulb and the Lumieres' film projection. It is clear that electric light made the difference between bright and dark consistently controllable, and therefore in this case it could be set absolutely; it is also clear that it had minimized the danger of theater fires or later also cinema fires. From then on, there were only explosions and catastrophes (provided that we are allowed to ignore the ending of Gravity's Rainbow) when celluloid films - whose chemistry is for good reason narrowly related to explosives - caught fire under the heat of projector light bulbs. However, the projection of electric light through an otherwise darkened room seems to be the most important thing. It not only established the aesthetics and social pathology of cinema, but it also created a new militaristic way of perceiving the world. It was not until the invention of klieg lights around 1900 that film studios, following the model of Edison's Black Mary, could finally bid farewell to daylight recording. After the rise of film, the theater could also shift its lighting to virtual
effects and klieg lights, as Max Reinhardt did in Berlin. The fact that actors today almost always stand in spotlights is therefore an imitation of cinema. And finally, light projection could also mod- ernize warfare. In the Russo-Japanese War, for example, the Tsar's army employed spotlights for the first time to protect Port Arthur, Russia's last eastern Siberian fortress. When the Japanese attacked at night, these spotlights transformed battlefields into lethal film studios (Virilio, 1989, p. 68). If bedazzlement, as I have already said, was a privilege of princes and the powerful during absolutism, enabling them to humble their subjects, it has since 1904 become an actively armed eye that no longer simply optimizes its own perception, like
the telescope and the microscope, but also reduces the perception of the enemy to zero.
173
? OPTICAL MEDIA
We will return later to the nexus between war and cmema. For the historical moment of silent film, however, it is sufficient to study the aesthetics of this actively armed eye and the sociology of its subjects. As we are pressed for time, I will skip over countless opmions on silent film that range from Georg Lukacs to Bela Balazs and limit myself instead to a very early silent film theory: Hugo Miinster- berg's slender book The Photoplay, which was published in New York in 1916 and which connects most elegantly to my questIOns about cinema, theater, and lighting. Our last session ended with Edgar Morin's aphorism that the cinemagoer catches sight of his own immeasurablymagnifiedretinaontheprojectIOnscreen Miinsterberg had proved precisely that already in 1916.
Hugo Miinsterberg, to introduce him briefly, was a lecturer in experimental psychology in Freiburg im Breisgau and thus a col- league of all those like Fechner, Helmholtz, and Marey, who were present at the birth of film. William James, the donnish brother of novelist Henry James, became acquainted with the young lecturer at a psychology congress in Leipzig, which at that time was still a leader in science thanks to Wundt. Out of pure enthusiasm, James offered him the directorship of the newly founded experimental psychology laboratory at Harvard. At the turn of the century, in other words, universities followed the solitary example of Edison, the self-made man. In his laboratory, for example, Miinsterberg had already taught the young student Gertrude Stein experimentally about automatic or surrealistic writing 20 years before she achieved literary fame. But writing was only one of countless cultural techniques that he measured according to all manner of psychological and physiological parameters, with the actual goal of optimizing all of these techniques ergonomically. The upcoming assembly-line work, as it was imple- mented by Henry Ford during World War I, required that every bodily movement, even inconspicuous movements like writing, proceed opti- mally. I would add here that Gilbreth, an American colleague of Miinsterberg's, conducted such ergonomic measurements with the help of slow-motion films. The ex-Freiburger was not as practical. He only went to film studios, which at that time were located in New York rather than under Hollywood's sun, and were as an excep- tion opened to him because of his fame in America. The book The Photoplay was Miinsterberg's last success, however, because one year later the German Empire declared war on the United States. Miinsterberg had tried to prevent this war through fireside chats with President Wilson, but his efforts were in vain. In 1918, he mourned the fact that no president, professor, or American would greet him any
174
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
longer, and he died of a heart attack while presenting a lecture later that year.
His film book provides an example of applied psychotechnics, as Miinsterberg dubbed his new science. In order to explain a modern media technique, Miinsterberg cleverly employed an older counter- example: the peep show theater. The result of the aesthetic compari- son is that the theater can actually awaken many illusions among spectators, but none of them are physiological. The stage disrupts neither the physical place nor the physical time of the events; in fact, it must simply accept them. (This is the reason why the three unities became a theoretical problem for theater. ) On the other hand, the photoplay or feature film is a true psychotechnique, which attacks and modifies the unconscious psychological states of the cinemagoer using strictly technical means.
The examples for this thesis come from the realm of film tricks and montage techniques, which had already been achieved at that time. As if to prove the objective and not just the etymological connection between the notion of montage in film and the notion of montage on the assembly line, the first film theory deals with the effects that close-ups, flashbacks, flashforwards, and reverse shots have on spectators. In the unconscious and therefore uncontrollable act of spectating, psychic acts correspond to all of these effects. The most obvious is Miinsterberg's example of the close-up: the protagonist of a film wants to shoot someone, so he takes hold of Colonel Colt's revolver. However, the film camera - the historical descendant of this same revolver - is not satisfied with simply carrying on looking at the hero, which would be the only available possibility in the theater. In fact, as an actively armed eye it tracks in on the hero until only the hand and the revolver fill the entire image in the lens. According to Miinsterberg, all unconscious attention functions in the same way: it filters out completely irrelevant image components without noticing. In a similar way, the flashback realizes or implements unconscious memory (which Proust was investigating in literature at exactly the same time), the flashforward realizes or implements unconscious fan- tasies of the future, and the montage of temporally or spatially sepa- rated scenes realizes or implements the functioning of unconscious association in general. All the irresistible and uncontrollable shock effects unleashed by Lumiere, Melies, and Griffith are thus explained using psychotechnics.
Miinsterberg's theory thus completes, at least for us, a scientific- historical circuit. As I have repeatedly emphasized, media technologies emerged in the nineteenth century from psychological and physiological
175
? OPTICAL MEDIA
research on a very empirical and no longer transcendental human subject. When Miinsterberg was writing in 1916, on the other hand, these media technologies were perfect and could, in turn, provide models for psychology and physiology. If unconscious attention is nothing more than a film trick, then humans can be built and opti- mized instead of being further idolized idealistically. Pynchon's cited film director was indeed mistaken when he provided the comforting assurance that we do not yet entirely live in film. In technical actual- ity, the scientific experimental film above all changed the realities of life itself. People working on an assembly line perform movements taught them by a film.
Miinsterberg's admirable theory also completes a literary-historical circuit. As you may remember, romantic literature demanded - to quote Navalis directly - a "right reader" who develops a real, visual, and also audible inner world based on the words on the page. Navalis' wondrons novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen depicts this process, as someone tells the hero abont a wondrous blue flower, which the hero never gets to see throughout the entire novel. Under conditions of silent reading, however, the hero lapses into a dream upon hearing the tale, and this dream places the blue flower in front of an inner or hallncinatory eye. At the end of the dream, the flower's petals become clothing and the center of the flower becomes a woman's face. The hero cannot help but remain faithful to that hallucinatory beloved even after her death, for the duration of a romantic's life or at least for the duration of the novel.
Miinsterberg responds to this scientifically, and that means scathingly:
Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on the stage every
fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we
really see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl.
[. . ? JEvery dream becomes real. (Miinsterberg, 1970, p. 15)
If film, according to Miinsterberg's clear words, simply surpasses lit- erature and theater, then this new media aesthetic has consequences that people other than myself would call sociological. The fact that theater and novel publishing have experienced a crisis in popularity and profitability as a result of the rise of film is still harmless com- pared to another threat. If film tricks can actually appear to make flowers out of women rather than merely in the reader's imagina- tion, the ideal beloved of all romantic authors and readers dies out. Navalis' Mathilde and Hoffmann's Aurelia, who were only
176
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
seducible as readers, disappear simply because they eXist in the nec- essary blurring of descriptions and thus as a single indistinguishable ideal figure. They were replaced, to put it simply and dramatically, with empirical-statistical women.
The film star - who, as Georg Lukacs already recognized in 1913, actually has no soul or doesn't need one, but who is simply an unmis- takable human anatomy - is naturally first and foremost an empirical woman. The Kinogirl, as starlets were called in the leading German film magazine in 1911, "constitutes a morally delightful companion to theater actresses, as they have vegetated in Europe since 1650 without receiving Christian funerals during the first centuries of their existence. " The magazine Kinematograph takes an opposing view:
How a young woman comes to the theater is clear to everyone inter- ested in either the theater or the young woman. People seldom worry about how a young woman holds her ground on the stage. But the public should know how many sad dramas of life the photograph hinders by showing dramas from the life of the public. Then the old accusation that the cinema restricts the life blood of the stage would no longer be heard for a long time, and those who perish on the stage would be offered a rescue. (quoted in Schliipmann, 1990, p. 19)
This grandiose argument is implicitly between women's bodies and the illustrations of women's bodies. Film stars are actually just as erotic as theater actresses, but they merely have to prostitute their images rather than their bodies. For media-technical reasons, there- fore, chastity or sanctity dwells within them, which in Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs was only true of the painted Rosalia and not of her fleshly double Aurelia. In other words, the cinematic pin-up girl deflects palpability just like three-dimensional technologies in two- dimensional space. For this very reason, however, the borders of palpability are no longer drawn. Everyone knows the famous story of how Howard Hughes, the multi-millionaire constructor of military aircraft, also constructed a special bra for Jane Russell's unmistakable anatomy for the purpose of making films.
What is more forgettable and more important, however, is that empirical-statistical women were also cinemagoers. At precisely the same time as Germany's universities first accepted women, and thus the Faustian ideal love, Gretchen, was historically set aside, early silent film cinema was considered to be women's entertainment. This is powerfully shown in Heide Schliipmann's habilitation treatise, which examines spectator statistics as well as the content of films
177
? OPTICAL MEDIA
m Germany pnor to 1913. I will only add that accordmg to quite a number of historical witnesses it appears that secretaries in particular went to the cinema. Women's emancipation had not only invented the student as a new profession for women, but also the typist. After the media-technical collapse of literary illusions, all that remained for these typists was the dry and - for male writers in general- too trivial task of working ten hours a day with bare, meaningless letters. Such secretaries escaped the daily grind of their office jobs, as they them- selves testified in magazine surveys in the 1920s, sImply by seemg a boyfriend andlor going to the cmema every evening, where they were guaranteed not to be threatened by any texts other than the intertitles.
If anyone wants to have printed evidence of the hIstorical primacy of women cinemagoers, they should read Jean-Paul Sartre's autobi- ography The Words. In this book, the old philosopher recalls the equally child-like and literary con-artist that he was as the grandson of an all-powerful writer. Of course, his grandfather, like all of his bourgeois friends, attended the Parisian theater as often as possible in order, as Sartre so beautifully formulated, to be "insidiously prepared for ceremonious destinies" (Sartre, 1967, p. 75). It would have been easy for Sartre to become a Stalinist revolutionary, however, if his young mother had not dragged him into her own passion for film. Women, children, and welfare cases - not only among the Sartres - were thus the principle audience for films until about 1910, when men developed such a fear of this literary desertion that they either introduced film censorship or they invented the masculine auteur film, which essentially amounts to the same thing.
Film censorship was demanded by diverse moral organizations and was ultimately anchored in the law of an empire, although its reigning technophile was naturally also a film fan. There were two different reasons for its existence: the content of films and the social space of the cinema itself. The social space of the cinema realized all of Garnier's fears and all of Wagner's hopes. A cinema in Mannheim, which was the subject of a dissertation written by an early female student of none other than Max Weber in 1913, advertised with the slogan: "Come in, our cinema is the darkest in the entire city! " My task is not to present a lecture on the social history of petting, but I would like to direct your attention to Gottfried Benn's enthusiasm for this darkness (in the early novella The Journey) and at the same time articulate a warning: early cinema can certainly be schema- tized as a feedback loop between erotic film content and the erotic practices of cinemagoers in the same way that romantic literature served as such a feedback loop, but we should always question, as
178
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Pynchon does, what authority programmed such loops. As Zglinicki reportedly heard from the mouth of a direct participant, the most famous naturist film, which was made by the UFA (Universal Film AG) after World War I, was intentionally supposed to have only an indirectly eroticizing function; its main purpose was rather to show healthy souls in healthy bodies immediately after a lost war and thus contribute "to military fitness" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 576). The armed forces had assisted in making the film.
But now I am getting ahead of myself. To understand how a UFA could come mto existence at all, we will return once more to the individual stages by which film fell again under state control.
The first stage, as I have said, was the auteur film, which did not emerge in Germany until 1913 at a time when the country was rather dependent on film imports. In France, the comedie franc;aise had already pounced earlier. After a few years of wild polemics, which Anton Kaes has replicated in his volume on cinema debates (Kaes, 1978), theater people and novelists decided to make peace with the new competitive medium just before the start of World War I. In 1912, the largest German film company and the writers' union signed a joint agreement concerning royalties and copyrights (Schliipmann, 1990, p. 247). One year later, in 1913, the famous actor Albert Bassermann, who had previously refused every photo- graphic portrait out of the same fear of the camera as Balzac, was persuaded to perform in the first German auteur film, Paul Lindau's The Other, in which he played his own double. This culturalization of cinema, in turn, was supposed to abolish everything that films had inherited from fairs and magic shows, as well as some aspects of the social space of the cinema that it had inherited from Wagner's opera and the chambre separee. Following the models of New York, Paris, and London, Berlin also began to develop film palaces, which were hybrid architectures that combined features of both the cinema and the theater. To provide appropriate film content for these palaces, in which both the educated middle-class and the cultural set were able to set foot, novelists had to write screenplays, and theater actors had to be filmed. The two most famous cases were the novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers and the actor Paul Wegener, who made the second German auteur film, The Student of Prague, in 1913.
The work of the screenplay consisted first of all in turning liter- ary hallucinations into cinematic positivities. With his typewritten screenplay - a text that was thus reduced to naked letter sequences - Ewers did this brilliantly, while Gerhard Hauptmann reportedly failed at the same task. Second, it naturally involved replacing all of
179
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
the fallen or servant women of early women's films with a man - preferably an educated one. The sciences that had historically made film possible were thus incorporated back into it again. For example, Ewers' student suffers from a hallucination of a doppelganger that, as early psychoanalysis immediately recognized, can only be explained through psychoanalysis. Other auteur films, like The Other or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, feature sciences like criminology, which since Bertillon focused on securing photographic evidence, and psv- chiatry, which had already in Marey's time produced the first serial photographic snapshots of patients. Miinsterberg would have had no problem in finding his own experimental psychological premises realized or even implemented in The Student of Prague.
Beyond the reconciliation between literature, science, and film, however, the auteur film also had to mend the rupture between film and theater. The famous theater actor Paul Wegener thus gave his first experiment in front of the camera the lovely title The Seduced. His cameraman Seeber, the son of a Chemnitz photographer, experi- mented systematically with Georges Melies' stop tricks and all sorts of double exposures to create what he called "absolute film":
Naturally [Seeber wrote in 1925 in absolute unison with Miinsterberg]
an entire film will never be absolute, but certain scenes within a large film that depict an internal procedure - a legendary, fairytale~like or fantastic procedure - can be produced on the way to absolute film. Such a film . . . demands a complete conversion of the screenwriter - for once the word "poet" can really be used here - and actually a poet who also understands how to translate his fantasies into technology. He must be able to conceive of the different parts of an absolute film image. He must not only specify the procedures objectively, but they must also be fixed temporally. The screenwriter of the future - and I am firmly convinced that absolute film has a future - will have to write like a musician writes his score. And just as a musician orchestrates his acoustic creation, the film author will also have to write a kind of technical score that enables the photographer to follow his fantasy.
(Seeber, 1925, p. 95)
In The Student of Prague, Seeber's "absolute film" consequently amounted to the presentation of film as film. All of the double expo- sures and stop tricks that Seeber had learned from Melies, which he augmented through his passion for American klieg lights, only served the goal of confronting the theater actor Wegener with himself as an "other" or double. This "other" looked completely the same, but he was missing any inwardness or facial expression. In this way, he
180
? ? ? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
seemed like the idiotic and that means cinematic negative of the posi- tive theater star. In other words, the doppelganger trick represented a film of making a film. A famous actor died simply because there was a copy of him on the screen. Remember why Garnier had refused to dim the lights in the auditorium: with invisible spectators the actors could no longer exchange any optical or gestural signs of approval or understanding. But this interruption of all feedback loops between a body and its doubles - whether in the mirror, in one's own internally stored body image, or in the approving eye of the other - precisely defines technical media. You do not recognize tape recordings of your own voice because only the acoustics of the exterior space remain, while the feedback loop between the larynx, Eustachian tube, and inner ear does not work in front of the microphone. The number of early horrified witnesses appropriately shows that people did not recognize their own moving doubles. Maltitz' comedy Photography and Revenge had already demonstrated how the camera replaces beautified portraits with the faces of criminals; cinema pushed this alienation effect even further. The protagonists of novels by Vladi- mir Nabokov and Arnolt Bronnen, who had become film extras or even stars, experienced the shock of seeing themselves on screen in the cinema. For men like Freud, who neither went to the cinema nor read about it in his books, the same experience could happen in a train compartment.
