No More Learning

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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. As the mirrored door of a first-class bathroom, which at that time was still reserved for the upper class, suddenly moved, Prof. Sigmund Freud saw according to his own confession "an elderly genteman" whose appearance he "thoroughly disliked" yet only later painfully recognized as his own mirror image (Freud,
1953-74, XVII, p. 248).
Beyond all examples of historical scientific anecdotes, this fear of
the double functioned as the social Darwinist principle of selection. To begin with, the actors who survived it became film actors, while the others dwindled away together with their medium until they even- tually became the subsidized elite they are today. Second, Stevenson's novella about doppelganger, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, became one of the most frequently adapted stories of all time. Third, media-technical selection principles never remain limited to the art establishment. The conditioning of new technogenic perceptual worlds not only concerns producers, but also consumers. Michael Herr, the drugged war correspondent, reports that during the Vietnam War there were entire companies of an elite American unit, the marines, that were only prepared to go into battle on the rice fields, and that means to go to their deaths, when one of the countless television teams from
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ABC, NBC, or CBS were already there waitmg and ready for actiOn (Herr, 1978).
World War I had already invented this beautiful death of a double, which the evening news would then celebrate before the eyes of astonished parents. This was the second phase of the domestication of film. For literary scholars, I can only point out in passing that whenever Lientenant Ernst Junger describes an encounter With the enemy in his war journals and novels, which was extremely rare in the trenches, he names this enemy his own double. The historical reason for such hallucinations is even more significant: namely, Junger was only one of millions of other trench warfare soldiers that World War I made into the first masculine mass film audience (and into the first mass radio audience). The phase of women's films was thus in the past. In the communications zone located directly behind the three trench systems, entertainment films were shown for all of the armies during World War I, which also led to film stars like Henny Porten moving into dugouts as pin-ups (Virilio, 1989, pp. 25-6). Without film recordings, the sensory deprivation of soldiers, who were only permitted to see tiny sections of the sky over their trenches for four years (if they survived that long), would have resulted in very cin- ematic psychoses. It was only through the artificial storage and input of moving pictures that armies of millions were supplied with morale boosters.
Behind the new eroticism (the so-called male fantasies, to quote Klaus Theweleit) there was thus a new war technology. To begin with, it soon became clear to all of the participating nations that world wars could no longer be won without the support of world opinion, or at least pnblished opinion. This publicity dimension of world war strategy benefited the allies, because Great Britain, France, Italy (after 1916) and the leading film-makers, the USA (after 1917), all belonged to the opponents of the so-called central powers. Films
presenting a world-destroying and virgin-defiling image of Kaiser Wilhelm II were thus exported to all the neutral countries. These films did not really bother the Supreme Army Commanders of the German Empire, who were still very Prussian and proper, but it did worry the new, technologically savvy team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who were ordered to turn the deadlocked war around in 1916. As the strategic head of the Third Supreme Command, Ludendorff thank- fully took the advice of a Leipzig industrialist, who in the interest of the "Made in Germany" brand and his own Illustrirte Zeitung had already been demanding worldwide film propaganda for the emperor and the empire for years (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 389). Unfortunately, it
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still remains uncertain whether Ludendorff also Ilstened to Ewers, the successful novellst and screenwriter who was traveling in the USA during World War I and was eventually interned. In a long and still unpublished typescript, Ewers had criticized the idea of German foreign propaganda as pure idiocy. In 1917, however, things sud- denly changed: an office for images and films (Bild-ul1d-Filrn-Arnt) was founded within the Supreme Army Command - the most sacred Prusslan military tradition since Scharnhorst and Gneisenau - which was given the name BUFA dne to the fashion for abbreviations during World War I, which has since become the norm. In its 900 cinemas on the front line, BUFA commandeered all the films, projectors, and pro- jectionists that had delighted Lieutenant Jiinger in his Belgian base.
But that was not enough. In his capacity as Quartermaster General, Ludendorff wrote an official letter on July 4, 1917 to change BUFA to UFA through the omission of a single, unimportant letter (UIum- portant since the advent of film). In his general staff-like clarity, Lndendorff sent the following plea "to the Imperial Ministry of War in Berlin":
The war has demonstrated the overwhelming power of the image and of film as instruments of enlightenment and propaganda. Unfor- tunately, our enemies have exploited their advances in this area so fundamentally that we have suffered heavy losses. For the further duration of the war, film will not lose its significance as a tool of politi- cal and military propaganda. To ensure a happy ending to the war, therefore, it is absolutely necessary for film to have the greatest impact everywhere that German influence is still possible. [, . . JWhat means are to be employed? Because only the absolute majority is required to influence a corporation, it is not always necessary to purchase all of the shares [of a company]. It must not be known, however, that the state is the buyer. The entire financial transaction must be performed by a competent, influential and reliable bank that is unconditionally loyal to the government. The negotiators should not be permitted to know the true identity of the agent's client. (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 394)
Nothing more carne of Ludendorff's strategic goal - a happy ending to the war - even though Junger's world war novels rave about pre- cisely such a resolution. However, the tactical goal of the Supreme Army Command was achieved. Without the state being recognized as the string puller, two apparently private institutions - the Deutsche Bank and the gramophone company Lindstrom, where Kafka's eternal fiancee Felice Bauer had risen np the ranks from typist to authorized representative - created a company out of various private
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German and Danish film companies, whICh they named "Umversal Film AG" or UFA for short. The military industrial complex thus per- formed its own metamorphosIs: BUFA, a branch of the general staff, became UFA, a large-scale industrial film company that appeared to be privately owned on paper, yet was at the same time always half state-owned. UFA continued to produce war and peace propaganda in Babelsberg just south of Berlin until March 1945, when Marshal Zhukov's last offensive at dawn at the Oder front began to blmd the remaining German defenses witb antI-aircraft spotlIghts (a tactIC reminiscent of the Russo-Japanese War). But even after the Red Army marched into Babelsberg, UFA only needed to change two more letters in its name to start producll1g film propaganda for the German Democratic Republic as DEFA. That is how long-lived or lifeless the power of the state is . . .
So much for propaganda or the face of a war that did not end until November 1989. The history of propaganda, which we have traced from a papal institution in 1662 to a military agency in 1917, still does not deal with the real problem of war and cinema. The fact that it was ever necessary to entertain soldiers in their dugouts or influence neutral countries in their indecision is only a negative and therefore indirect way of saying that modern wars are no longer visually reproducible. At the same historical moment when film made the motion of a bullet in flight visible, no matter how fast it was going, the technologies that had made film itself possible in the first place disappeared into strategic invisibility. It was the machine gun, this generalization of Colt's revolver, which imposed this invisibility dUl'ing World War I. This serial killing machine, which had originally been developed and employed only against reds, blacks, and yellows, now turned on its white inventors. Due to the danger of being imme- diately shot in the head, soldiers were forced to disappear under cam- ouflage and into trenches, and they no longer saw anything between the fronts except for their piece of sky and possibly hallucinations of a Madonna or pin-up figure. The epoch of silent film thus comprised not only millions of spectators, but also millions of invisible people. A world war that demanded worldwide and thus analphabetic and thus silent film propaganda, had no propaganda material to offer at all. To film its material battles, one would also have to be able to film white noise.
This fact frustrated Griffith, the most famous American director of his time. He landed in Europe, planned one of his crowd scene propaganda films, went to the trenches, and saw that the battle- fields were empty (Virilio, 1989, pp. 14-15). So Griffith then built a
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gIgantIc studio wIth gIgantIc but perfectly filmable trenches and simu- lated a world war as if national or civil wars were still the order of the day. From the very outset, the fictional battle scenes Griffith recorded from the obsolete panoramic perspective of a field com- mander laid themselves open to the jndgment of Schlieffen, who had already prophesied in 1909 as chief of staff of the imperial German army that there is nothing more to see in contemporary wars: the front had become vast and mcalculable, and for security reasons field commanders had already had to exchange their hill for a bunker.
In Germany, the sltnatton was much the same for the Berlin entre- preneur and film director Oskar Messter,8 an "old master of cinema technology" as ZglmickI so old-masterfully describes him. Messter came to film as the son of a precision mechanic and optician, who had constrncted (entirely in our sense of the words) electrical spotlight installations for military parades and theaters. Messter himself began mannfacturing the newly invented X-ray equipment for invisible light that was beyond even ultraviolet. After becoming acquainted with the Lumiere apparatus, Messter proceeded to set np a German film industry and an artificial light workshop, acquired 70 patents, and founded various firms that were ready to go into production, which all merged into UFA in 1918. While it was normal in the age of silent film to record films at horribly slow speeds and then project them in the cinema at much faster speeds to save time, Messter fonght for a standard frame rate of 24 hertz for recording as well as playback, which sound film was then supposed to enforce (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 256-66).
Oskar Messter's film company became historically significant when World War I broke out, as Messter's various firms were made into snbdivisions of BUFA. Their rather monopolistic orders from the gov- ernment were to film newsreels of the war front and then project them on the home front to boost the morale of workers and the wounded. This order led to similar difficulties as Griffith had experiences. Even though there was nothing to see or film in the trenches, the military prohibited shooting on location simply because they did not want to supply the enemy with free intelligence reconnaissance. Like Griffith,
therefore, Messter's newsreels had to simulate battle scenes at the base, which unfortnnately lacked the desired propaganda effect. As a military hospital chief wrote to Ludendorff, "watching the German war newsreels has an important medicinal effect on the wounded.
8 In the original German text, Kittler incorrectly refers to Oskar Messter as "Oskar Meester. "
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These gentlemen tell me that they have never heard such thunderous laughter as when those cinematographic images from the trenches and 'from the front' are shown - but laughter is an important remedy" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 390).
Unlike Griffith, however, Messter learned a lesson about experi- mental film from this propaganda film disaster. If the trenches simply could not be perceived optically and were also not permitted to be perceived militarily, the only remaining path for film was the vertical path. With the failure of Schlieffen's plan at the battle of the Marne, French Marshal Joffre led a successful counter-strike in August 1914 on the basis of photographic records made bv reconnaissance air- craft. After this battle, when the enemy armies disappeared into their trenches, the need for air reconnaissance became even more pressing. A few photographic and film records from the vertical could disclose invisible soldiers, camouflaged artillery positions, and unnoticed rear- ward connections to the enemy. For this reason, the reconnaissance pilots of World War I represented the origin of all air forces long before bombers and fighters.
In order to help German reconnaissance pilots, Messter constructed his patented "target practice device for the detection of deviations by means of photographic records" (German Reich Patent Office, Patent Specification No. 309108, Class 72 f, Group 7, July 18, 1916). According to the patent, this device was placed in the exact position of the machine gun in a fighter plane, with the aim of helping to monitor the precision of the machine gunners in real time for each individual shot. As Messter put it so beautifully, he employed "a cin- ematographic recording apparatus whose running gear was propelled by clockwork and whose visual field carries crosshairs, whereby a targeting set-up like that of the machine gun is to be arranged paral- lel to the visual axis. " As you can see, the structural correspondence
between perspective and ballistics became a technological reality by World War I at the latest. Messter's ingenious construction, which photographed at least 7. 2 million square kilometers of combat area using millions of kilometers of roll film' (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 273), could only be improved by combining shooting and filming, serial death and serial photography, into a single act. This was accom- plished by a French reconnaissance pilot who relocated the visual and ballistic axis of both the machine gun and the camera to the axis of the propeller (Virilio, 1989, p. 18).
9 Kittler misquotes Zglinicki when he says that "millions of kilometers" of film were used in World War I. Zglinicki's actual figure was only 950,000 km,
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This coupling also took place in Germany. Guido Seeber, who built the Babelsberg studios in 1911 and filmed The Student of Prague there in 1913, was drafted two years later in 1915 and sent to the experimental seaplane station in Warnemiinde (not to say Peen- emiinde). There, he established at the same time a central educational film and photography hire service. Their first successful scientific film showed with the help of X-ray photography that countless airplane crashes were caused by lead balls built into the wooden propellers for balance; at high speeds these balls fly out and smash through the airplanes like bullets.
In a positive inversion of this negative test result, so to speak, Seeber also constructed a machine gun sight for fighter planes, which was supposed to optimize the machine gun firing rate. And just like the French reconnaissance pilot, Seeber combined this machine gun sight with a small film camera, which also shot film frames whenever the machine gun fired.
Strategically, therefore, filming and flying coincide. McLuhan sums this up succinctly in Understanding Media: "It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 174). There was a reason why Marey had also studied the movements of bird wings and why photographers like Nadar had taken pictures from hot-air ballooons and passionately fought against zeppelins, supporting instead bird-like - or "heavier than air," as it was called at that time - plane constructions. Gabriele D'Annunzio, the decadent novelist and fighter pilot, already dem- onstrated in 1909 to a woman sitting next to him on an airplane that by approaching from the air the cathedrals and castles of Italy could be magnified or reduced by any amount and thus also visu- ally destroyed. This discovery, just before the outbreak of the First World War, which D'Annunzio himself only turned into a novel, also unleashed the tracking shots of the first world-famous period film Cabiria, which D'Annunzio contributed to as adviser and allegedly also screenwriter. During the war, his flight squadron "La Serenis- sima" proceeded to fly from Venice across the Alps (which was quite dangerous at that time) to mount an attack on Vienna. These attacks did not consist of bombs, as D'Annunzio explained to the Viennese on propaganda flyers dropped on the city, but rather the Austrians were permitted to remain alive so that they would be able to over- throw their emperor more effectively.
Historians only later recognized that the Viennese-Venetian air war scenario had already been attempted half a century before D'Annunzio, only I I I reverse. You will recall that Field Marshal
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Lieutenant Baron von Uchatius started projecting stroboscope draw- ings in 1841, and somewhat later he also began manufacturing explo- sive Uchatius powder. In 1849, after a civil revolution that also promised freedom to the Italian and especially the Venetian subjects of Austria-Hungary, an Austrian General based in Mestre besieged the rebellious Venetian republic of Serenissima. To the general's chagrin, it appeared that Venice's lagoon prevented it from being captured or even fired on by the artillery. That is, until Uchatius and his brother, two artillery lieutenants from Vienna, then made the world-historical suggestion of attacking from the air: bombs "were to be carried over the city in hot-air-filled balloons made of paper, which would be made to rise if wind conditions were favorable. Prior to being released from the balloon, the 30 pound bomb was supposed to be set [with a time fuse] according to the strength of the wind at that moment. If everything went according to plan, therefore, the impact of the explosives had to take place ronghly where it was expected," becanse the "range" of the bombs "far exceeded the range of artillery at that time" (Knrzel-Runtscheiner, 1937, p. 48). The wind actually very rarely helped, bnt between June and July 1849 a few of the 110 Uchatins bombs manufactured in Vienna did indeed explode over the astonished Venetians. A field marshal lieutenant, who invented cinematic projection, thus also had to invent the projection or throw- ing of projectiles.
Once these bombs or later planes were manned, the cinematic high-angle shot was born. So World War I not only produced the new professions of reconnaissance and bomber pilots, bnt also a new kind of film director. These directors had all previously been fighter pilots, and on the basis of their technologically altered visual perception they also revolntionized the entertainment medium of film. Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusion, was a fighter pilot, just like Howard Hawks, who filmed his war memories in 1930 as Dawn Patrol. The clearest example of this nexus between air combat and cinema, however, was Dziga Vertov, the Soviet director, film theorist and above all Lenin's propaganda conductor. Vertov's so-called "rules" for experimental film, which cancelled out all bourgeois infatuation with images, began first with a "General instruction for all tech- niques: the invisible camera. " Eight individual points then followed. No. 1 was: "Filming unawares - an old military rule: gauging speed, attack. " No. 6: "Filming at a distance. " No. 7: "Filming in motion. " And finally No. 8: "Filming from above" (Vertov, 1984, pp. 162-3).
So much for Vertov's combat rules as general staff officer - and now, in a free adaptation of Ernst Junger, the aerial combat film as
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mner expenence of a Vertov demoted to become his own front-line soldier:
I am the camera's eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today, I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. r. . . ] I approach and draw away from things - I crawl under them - I climb on them - Jam on the head of a galloping horse - I burst at full speed ioto a crowd - I run before running soldiers - I throw myself down on my back - I rise up with the aeropianes - I fall and 1 fly at one with the bodies falling or rising through the air. (Virilio, 1989, p. 20)
In other words, the experimental and entertainment films made with a camera that was no longer only mobile, like Griffith's, but also truly unleashed through tracking shots, simply converted the perceptual world of World War I into mass entertainment. The same thing also happened incidentally in the new media art form known as the radio play, which European civilian radio developed in 1924. And because the war dead returned as an acoustic barrage in postwar radio plays and optical air combat in postwar films, the large cinema palaces between Hollywood and Berlin were also constructed like giant mau- soleums. After the European monarchies fell and the old conspiracy between state and church propaganda disintegrated, these cinema palaces became churches of state propaganda that no longer praised a king by the grace of God, but rather (to adapt Lenin freely) war technology and electrification (Virilio, 1989, p. 28).
But it seems to be a law of media history (at least for Berliners) that new applications are secondary compared to new circuit technology. The lessons that film directors learned from World War I pale before the lessons learned by electrical engineers.
The lesson was that film could stop being silent. The technologies of World War I led to sound film, which leads us to the next chapter of these lectures.
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
The history of sound film has to begin with the assertion that silent film was never silent. Edison had already designed a link between the kinetoscope and the phonograph, which could have been built at a pinch despite problems with sound recording from a distance and synchronization. Many hobbyists and tinkerers followed Edison's lead and attempted to couple a half-mechanical, half-electrical optics
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with a purely mechanical acoustics prior to World War I, but without any appreciable results. There were also experiments that attempted to connect silent film and electromagnetic sound recording, namely Poulsen's telegraphone. Although these experiments did not yield any concrete snccesses, they were theoretically significant because they established the principle of magnetic audiotape, which was ready to go into production during World War II. With the audiotape and the cassette, sound recording acquired for the first time the same material format as film: as a roll that allowed variable time axis manipulation, unlike the phonograph and the gramophone. Not only are time rever- sals possible, as with Edison, but also stop tricks, cuts, and montages, as with Melies. The simple manipulable acoustics of audiotape led to rock music, as you know, which could then in tum be coupled with manipulable videotapes, and the video clip was born.
But for us, those are all still musical dreams of the future. In the non-experimental everyday lives of people prior to 1929, silent film was never silent simply because films were never presented without some form of accompaniment. The cheapest form was the film explainer, who was often recruited (as we can gather from contem- porary adverts) from among the academic proletariat, and who would explain the plot of the film to the spectators while it was playing. Cinemagoers, who had always already been listeners and readers, needed training in the new semiotics of film, which essentially con- sisted of cuts and montages and thus empty spaces. Kurt Pinthus' Das Kinobuch (The Cinema Book), which was published by the expression- ist in 1913 and is full of screenplay proposals by his novelist friends, shows what an intellectual step it was to demand films suitable to the medium - film plots, in other words, that were intelligible based on image sequences alone without any intertitles or film explainers. But this I'art pour I'art of silent film had not been commercially successful. More expensive forms of sound accompaniment saw to that: music either from records or living musicians, who often also had the honor of generating theatrical sound effects fitted to the scene in addition to sounds on the piano. As a synthesis of two contradictory elements, Greek atmosphere and media-technical noise, Richard Wagner in particular triumphed in the cinema. Wagner not only invented the darkening of the auditorium, but also a kind of music that was itself noise. Printed piano score excerpts from Wagner's works, such as
Liebestod and The Ride of the Valkyries, accompanied films long before Apocalypse Now, where The Ride of the Valkyries was no longer shown as a lanterna magica effect, as it was in Wagner's opera in 1876, but rather as a helicopter attack in the Vietnam War.
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This brings us back to war and its innovations. In a word: World War I transformed Edison's simple light bulb into the electron tube, which made the live musical accompaniment of silent films obsolete. I am interested in the historical development of this technical wonder because the tube allowed for the possibility of synchronized film soundtracks and television up to the present day. It was not replaced until the development of contemporary LCD displays and other semi- conductor technologies.
The electron tube, as I said, emerged from Edison's simple light bulb, which allows me to bring the history of lighting to a close. Edison had methodically searched for a cheap and safe light - so methodically that he brought every conceivable type of tropical wood to his laboratory asa possible filament for his bulb. The acciden- tal combination, on which Daguerre had still subsisted, was thus systematically eradicated. Edison would have been able to electrify America after a couple years of research if a considerably more pow- erful competitor named Westinghouse had not replaced his direct current system with an alternating current system. On the other hand, Edison's discovery that light bulbs also work as electron tubes, as they emit ions under electrical voltage, was made entirely in passing. He was also unable to do anything more than have this so-called "Edison effect" named after him simply because he knew nothing about theoretical physics.
For this reason, a physics professor at the new and very modern Reichsuniversitiit in Strasbourg named Ferdinand Braun was the first to discover a possible application of the Edison effect in 1897. He deflected the electron beam inside the tube with electromagnets, which were in turn attached to the general alternating voltage of the Strasbourg power grid, and sent it to a phosphorescent screen. The controlled beam - the last and most precise variant of the actively armed eye - then inscribed the visible graphic sine wave of an alter- nating power supply on the screen. Braun had invented the oscil- loscope. When his assistants later suggested to him that the electron beam should project beautiful images rather than mathematical func- tions, Braun rejected this first notion of television receiver tubes. He was "personally surprised" that Westinghouse's alternating power grid had not generated any ugly jagged peaks or rectangles, but rather an "ideal sine wave" (Kurylo, 1965, p. 137). Oscillograph means "vibration writer," and it is therefore the electronically per- fected variant of all the movement writers, from Scott to Marey, that led to the writing of sounds and images. You will notice that the television played back equations rather than film characters when
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it first began with Ferdinand Braun. It will possIbly do so again at the end.
Braun's tube was not crucial for film and radio tecbnology, however, but rather another tube variant: the so-called triode. Lee de Forest in Palo Alto and Robert von Lieben in Vienna simultaneously conceived the idea of building tubes out of two electrical circuits, one controlling and the other controlled. Two mputs were needed along with a general ground return, and it was therefore called a triode or three-way in the artificial Greek of technology. According to Pynchon's brilliant commentary, this separation of control circuit and output circuit in 1906 solved a fundamental problem of the twentieth century: that of control. Triodes were actually more bulky, they were more sensitive to heat, and they required more voltage than the transistors that have replaced them since 1947, but they were also unbeatably economical. In other words, a variably small control current, which assumed the function of Braun's electromagnets, could switch variably large output currents on or off, thus amplifying or weakening it. Thus, the electron tube first decoupled the concept of power from that of physical effort.