No More Learning

The phonograph permitted for the first time the recording of vibra- tions that human ears could not count, human eyes could not see, and writing hands could not catch up with. Edison's simple metal needle, however, could keep up-simply because every sound, even the most complex or polyphonous, one played simultaneously by a hundred musi- cians, formed a single amplitude on the time axis. Put in the plain lan- guage of general sign theory, acoustics is one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range. 8
The continuous undulations recorded by the gramophone and the au- diotape as signatures of the real, or raw material, were thus passed on in an equally continuous way by sound engineers. Cutting and splicing would have produced nothing but crackling noises, namely, square-curve jumps. Avoiding them presupposes great skill on the part of recording en- gineers, if not the computer algorithms of digital signal processing. Therefore, when pioneers of the radio play such as Breslau's Walter Bischoff were looking for genuinely "radio-specific" (funkisch) means of expression, they studied the parallel medium of silent films and consid- ered only the fade-out, not the cut, as a possible model: "The man work- ing the amplifier, " as Bischoff argued in Dramaturgy of the Radio Play, "is in charge of a function similar to that of the camera man. He fades in and out, as we say in the absence of a radio-specific terminology. By slowly turning down the condenser at the amplifier, he lets the scene, the finished sequence of events, fade into the background, just as he can, by gradually turning the condenser up, give increasing form and shape to the next acoustic sequence. "9 By following such continuity, which is diamet- rically opposed to the film cut, things worked well for thirty years. But ever since VHF radio began transmitting stereophonically, that is, two amplitudes per unit of time, fade-outs have been "more difficult to exe- cute": "the mise-en-scene, invisible yet localizable, cannot be dismantled and replaced by a new one in front of the listener as easily as in the case of a monophonic play. "lo Once tethered, such are the constraints pro- duced by the real.
For one thing, optical data flows are two-dimensional; for another, they consist of high frequencies. Not two but thousands of units of light per unit of time must be transmitted in order to present the eye with a two- or even three-dimensional image. That requires an exponential mag- nification of processing capacities. And since light waves are electromag-
Film 119
netic frequencies in the terahertz range, that is, a trillion times faster than concert pitch (A), they outpace not only human writing hands but even (unbelievably) today's electronics.
Two reasons why film is not directly linked to the real. Instead of recording physical waves, generally speaking it only stores their chemical effects on its negatives. Optical signal processing in real time remains a thing of the future. And even if, following Rudolph Lothar's rather timely metaphysics of the heart, everything from sound to light is a wave (or hertz),ll optical waves still don't have a storage or computing medium- not, at any rate, until fiber technologies running at the speed of light have put today's semiconductors out of business.
A medium that is unable to trace the amplitudes of its input data is permitted a priori to perform cuts. Otherwise, there would be no data. Since Muybridge's experimental arrangement, all film sequences have been scans, excerpts, selections. And every cinematic aesthetic has devel- oped from the 24-frame-per-second shot, which was later standardized. Stop trick and montage, slow motion and time lapse only translate tech- nology into the desires of the audience. As phantasms of our deluded eyes, cuts reproduce the continuities and regularities of motion. Phonog- raphy and feature film correspond to one another as do the real and the Imagmary.
But this imaginary realm had to be conquered. The path of invention, from Muybridge's first serial photographs to Edison's kinetoscope and the Lumiere brothers, does not merely presuppose the existence of celluloid. In the age of organic life stories (as poetry) and organic world histories (as philosophy), even in the age of mathematical continuity, caesuras first had to be postulated. Aside from the material precondition, the spliceable celluloid, there was a scientific one: the system of possible deceptions of the eye had to be converted from a type of knowledge specific to illusion- ists and magicians (such as Houdini) to one shared by physiologists and engineers. Just as the phonograph (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam notwithstand- ing) became possible only after acoustics had been made an object of sci- entific investigation, so "cinematography would never have been in- vented " had not " researchers been occupied with the consequences of the stroboscopic effect and afterimages. "12
Afterimages, which are much more common and familiar than the stroboscopic effect, were already present in Goethe's Theory of Colors- but only, as in Wilhelm Meister's Years ofApprenticeship, to illustrate the effects of Classic-Romantic literature on souls: a woman hovers in front
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of the inner eye of the hero or the readers as the optical model of perfect alphabetization, even though her beauty simply cannot be recorded in words. Wilhelm Meister observes to himself and his like-minded readers, "If you close your eyes, she will present herself to you; if you open them, she will hover before' all objects like the manifestation which a dazzling image leaves behind in the eye. Was not the quickly passing figure of the Amazon ever present in your imagination? "13 For Novalis, imagination was the miraculous sense that could replace for readers all of their senses.
At least as long as Goethe and his Theory of Colors were alive. For it was Fechner who first examined the afterimage effect with experimental rigor. Experimenter and subject in one, he stared into the sun-with the result that he went blind in 1839 for three years and had to resign from his physics chair at the University of Leipzig. The historical step from psy- chology to psychophysics (Fechner's beautiful neologism) was as conse- quential as the emergence of modern media from the physiological hand- icaps of its researchers was literal.
No wonder, then, that the aesthetics of the afterimage effect is also due to a half-blind person. Nietzsche, the philosopher with -14 diop- ters,14 produced a film theory before its time under the pretext of de- scribing both The Birth of Tragedy in ancient Greece and its German re- birth in the mass spectacles of Wagner. 15 In Nietzsche, the theater perfor- mances that were produced in the shadeless midday sun of an Attic setting were transformed into the hallucinations of inebriated or vision- ary spectators, whose optic nerves quite unconsciously processed white- and-black film negatives into black-and-white film positives: "After an en- ergetic attempt to focus on the sun, we have, by way of remedy almost, dark spots before our eyes when we turn away. Conversely, the luminous images of the Sophoclean heroes-those Apollonian masks-are the nec- essary productions of a deep look into the horror of nature; luminous spots, as it were, designed to cure an eye hurt by the ghastly night. "16
Prior to Fechner's historical self-experiment, blinding was not a mat- ter of desire. An eye hurt by the ghastly night that requires for its remedy inverted afterimage effects is no longer directed toward the stage of the Attic amphitheater but onto the black surface of soon-to-come movie screens, as the Lumiere brothers will develop them in defiance of their name. Nietzsche's ghastly night is the first attempt to christen sensory de- privation as the background to and other of all technological mediaY That the flow of data takes place at all is the elementary fact of Nietz- sche's aesthetic, which renders interpretations, reflections, and valuations of individual beauty (and hence everything Apollonian) secondary. If "the
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world" can be "justified to all eternity . . . only as an aesthetic product,"18 it is simply because "luminous images" obliterate a remorseless blackness. The Nietzsche movie called Oedipus is technological enough to pre- date the innovation of the Lumieres by a quarter century. According to The Birth ofTragedy, a tragic hero, as inebriated spectators visually hal- lucinate him, is "at bottom no more than a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall, that is to say, appearance through and through. "19 It is pre- cisely this dark wall, which allows actors to turn into the imaginary, or film stars, in the first place, that has been opening theater performances since 1 8 7 6, the year of the inauguration of the theater in Bayreuth, whose prophecy The Birth of Tragedy undertook. Wagner did what no drama- turg before him had dared to do (simply because certain spectators in- sisted on the feudal privilege of being as visible as the actors themselves): during opening night, he began The Ring ofthe Nibelung in total dark- ness, before gradually turning on the ( as yet novel) gaslights. Not even the presence of an emperor, Wilhelm I, prevented Wagner from reducing his audience to an invisible mass sociology and the bodies of actors (such as the Rhine maidens) to visual hallucinations or afterimages against the background of darkness. 2o The cut separating theater arts and media tech- nologies could not be delineated more precisely. Which is why all movie theaters, at the beginning of their screenings, reproduce Wagner's cosmic sunrise emerging from primordial darkness. A 1913 movie theater in Mannheim, as we know from the first sociology of cinema, used the slo-
gan, "Come in, our movie theater is the darkest in the whole city! "21 Already in 1 89 1 , four years prior to the projection screen of the Lu- miere brothers, Bayreuth was technologically up to date. Not for nothing did Wagner joke that he would have to complete his invention of an in- visible orchestra by inventing invisible actors. 22 Hence his son-in-law, the subsequently notorious Chamberlain, planned the performance of sym- phonies by Liszt that would have become pure feature films with equally pure film music: accompanied by the sound of an orchestra sunk in Wag- nerian fashion, and situated in a "nightclad room," a camera obscura was supposed to project moving pictures against a "background" until all spectators fell into "ecstasies. "23 Such enchantments were unthinkable with old-fashioned viewing: eyes did not mix up statues or paintings, or the bodies of actors, for that matter-those basic stage props of the es- tablished arts-with their own retinal processes. Thanks only to Cham- berlain's plans and their global dissemination by Hollywood, the physio- logical theory of perception becomes applied perceptual practice: movie- goers, following Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "respond to the
1 22 Film
projection screen like a retina inverted to the outside that is remotely con- nected to the brain. "24 And each image leaves an afterimage.
In order to implement the stroboscopic effect, the second theoretical condition of cinema, with the same precision, one needs only to illumi- nate moving objects with one of the light sources that have become om- nipresent and omnipotent since the 1 890S. As is widely known, back then Westinghouse won out over Edison, alternating current over direct cur- rent, as a public utility. The glow of light alternates fifty times per second in European lightbulbs, sixty times in American ones: the uncomplicated, and hence imperceptible, rhythm of our evenings and of an antenna called the body.
The stroboscopic illumination transforms the continuous flow of movement into interferences, or moires, as can be seen in the wheeling spokes of every Western. This second and imaginary continuity evolved from discontinuity, a discovery that was first made by physiologists dur- ing the founding age of modern media. We owe a large part of the theory of alternating current to Faraday, as well as to the study On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions ( 1 83 I ). 25 Coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday'S stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient condi- tion for the illusions of cinema. One only had to automatize the cutting mechanism, cover the film reel with a wing disk between moments of ex- posure and with a Maltese cross during moments of projection, and the eye saw seamless motion rather than 24 single and still shots. One perfo- rated rotating disk during the recording and projection of pictures made possible the film trick preceding all film tricks.
Chopping or cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary-the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox. The problem of undermining the threshold of audience perception through Faraday's "deceptions" reflected the inverse problem of undermining the threshold of perception of psychophysics itself to avoid disappointment or reality. Because real motion (above and beyond optical illusions) was to become recordable, the prehistory of the cinema began exactly as that of the gramophone. Etienne-Jules Marey, professor of natural history at the College de France in Paris, and later (following his successful film experi- ments) president of the French photographic society,16 earned his initial fame with a sphygmograph copied from the work of German physiologists that was capable of recording pulse rates onto soot-covered glass plates as curves. 27 In the same way, Weber and Scott had mechanically stored sounds (musical intervals themselves) that were not acoustic illusions.
Beginning with heart muscle contractions, Marey investigated move-
? Marey's chronophotographic gun.
ment in general. His chronographic experiments on humans, animals, birds-published as La machine animaIe (1873), a title that does justice to La Mettrie-inspired Governor Stanford of California to give Muy- bridge his assignment. The professional photographer only had to replace Marey's mechanized form of trace detection with a more appropriate, or professional, optical one-and where eyes had always seen only poetic
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? 1 24 Film
wing-flaps could begin the analysis of the flight of birds, the precondition for all future aircraft constructions. It was no coincidence that pioneers of photography such as Nadar opted against the montgolfieres of 1783 and in favor of literal airships: for flying machines heavier than air. 2s "Cinema Isn't I See, It's I Fly,"29 says Virilio's War and Cinema, in view of the historically perfect collusion of world wars, reconnaissance squad- rons, and cinematography.
In the meantime, the first photographs from Animal Locomotion had hardly appeared when Marey began work on improving Muybridge's im- provement of his own work. The time was ripe for engineers to work to- gether, for innovations of innovations. Marey also stored motion opti- cally, but he reduced the number of cameras from the twelve of his pre- decessor to one and constructed-first with fixed photo glass plates, and, from 1 8 8 8 on, with modern celluloid30-the first serial-shot camera. In- stead of indulging in what Pynchon called "the American vice of modular repetition,"31 he realized that for moving objects, a single, movable appa- ratus was enough. Its name-the chronophotographic gun-spoke noth- ing but the real truth.
It was in 1 8 6 1 , whilst traveling on a paddle-steamer and watching its wheel, that the future Colonel Gatling hit upon the idea of a cylindrical, crank-driven ma- chine gun. In 1 8 74 the Frenchman Jules Janssen took inspiration from the multi- chambered Colt (patented in 1832) to invent an astronomical revolving unit that could take a series of photographs [when attached to a telescope]. On the basis of this idea, Etienne-Jules Marey then perfected his chronophotographic rifle, which allowed its user to aim at and photograph an object moving through space. 32
The history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets. In order to focus on and fix objects moving through space, such as people, there are two procedures: to shoot and to film. In the principle of cinema resides mechanized death as it was invented in the nineteenth century: the death no longer of one's immediate opponent but of serial nonhumans. Colt's revolver aimed at hordes of Indians, Gatling's or Maxim's machine-gun (at least that is what they had originally been de- signed to do) at aboriginal peoples. 33
With the chronophotographic gun, mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun anni- hilated the camera made immortal. During the war in Vietnam, U. S. Ma- rine Corps divisions were willing to engage in action and death only when TV crews from ABC, CBS, and NBC were on location. Film is an immea-
? Andre Malraux, Espoir.
surable expansion of the realms of the dead, during and even before bul- lets hit their targets. A single machine-gun (according to JUnger's obser- vation on Der Arbeiter) finishes off the fraternity-based heroism of entire Langemarck regiments of 1914;34 a single camera does the same with the dying scenes thereafter.
It was then only a matter of combining the procedures of shooting and filming to take Marey's brand name literally. The chronophotographic gun became reality in the cinema of artificial, that is, lethal, bird flights. Reconnaissance pilots of the First World War such as Richard Garros con- structed an on-board machine-gun whose barrel was pointed parallel to the axis of the propeller while they filmed its effects. 35 During the Second World War, which according to General von Fritsch was supposed to have been won by superior reconnaissance, "the construction of recording de- vices within aircraft yielded still better results. " Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, was "especially delighted that Inspector Tan- nenberg was successful in having developed a camera unit that could be built into fighter planes, Stukas, and other aircraft and that, synchronized with the weapon, made possible very impressive combat pictures. "36
As if targeting Inspector Tannenberg and his appropriate name,37 Pyn-
Film 125
? ? '7
Ernst Mach, freeze-frame photos of bullets.
Film 127
chon describes in Gravity's Rainbow "this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries-since Leibniz, in the process of in- venting calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. "38 That is how venerable (in strict accordance with Munsterberg) the prehistory of cinema is. But it makes a difference whether ballistic analysis appears on the paper of a mathematician or on celluloid. Only freeze-frame photographs of flying projectiles, developed in 1 8 8 5 by one no less than Ernst Mach, made visible all interferences, or moin? s, in the medium of the air. Only freeze-frame photographs run au- tomatically and as real-time analysis (since then, TV cameras have re- duced the processing time of pictures to near-zero). Which is why Inspec- tor Tannenberg's propaganda weapon still had or has a future: toward the end of the Second World War, when even 8. 8 millimeter anti-aircraft guns with their teams of operators were ineffective against the Allied carpet bombings of Germany, the first developments toward our strategic present took place-the search by technicians for weapons systems with auto- matic target searching. 39 The chronophotograph was made for that.
Built into aircraft, TV cameras or infrared sensors are no longer the owls of Minerva, lagging behind so-called real history like Hegel's nightly philosophy. The kinds of infinitesimal movement they process through in- tegration and differentiation are much more efficient: with servomotors electrically linked to a missile guidance system, they can hone in on the enemy target. Until camera and target, intercept missile and fighter air- craft, explode in a flash of lightning, a blitz.
Today's cruise missiles proceed in the same fashion, for they compare a built-in film of Europe's topography (from Hessia to Belarus, from Sicily to Ukraine) with their actual flight path in order to correct any possible deviations. Marey's chronophotographic gun has reached its target in all its senses. When a camera blows up two weapons systems simultaneously, and more elegantly than kamikaze pilots did, the analysis and synthesis of movement have become one.
At the end of Gravity's Rainbow, a V2-the first cruise missile in the history of warfare, developed at the Peenemunde Army Test Site-ex- plodes over the Orpheus movie theater in Los Angeles. In grandiose time axis manipulation, which a fictitious drug by the name of Oneirine grants the whole novel,40 the launch is correctly dated March 1945, but the rocket does not hit its target until 1970, when the novel was written. That is how interminably world wars go on, not least because of German- American technological transfer. The off-ground detonator of the V2
128 Film
kicks in, and a ton of Amatol, the rocket's payload, explodes. Shortly thereafter, the image on the screen dissolves, as if the projection bulb were blowing out, but only so that its orphic truth can shine forth. We, "old fans, who've always been at the movies," are finally reached by a film "we have not learned to see"41 but have been hankering after since Muybridge and Marey: the melding of cinema and war.
Nothing, therefore, prevented the weapons-system movie camera from aiming at humans as well. On the three fronts of war, disease, and crimi- nality-the maj or lines of combat of every invasion by media-serial pho- tography entered into everyday life in order to bring about new bodies.
As is widely known, during the First World War the barrels of ma- chine-guns moved away from the black, yellow, and red skins against which they had been developed and started aiming at white targets. Movie cameras, however, kept pace and experienced a boom that might have been a misuse of army property (as with AM radio). At any rate, Miinsterberg, who had to know about it, since he sought to prevent the outbreak of the German-American war in futile fireside chats with Presi- dent Wilson up to the very end (and who, for that reason, remains unac- knowledged by his colleagues at Harvard to this very day)42-Miinster- berg wrote in 19 16:
It is claimed that the producers in America disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and inter- feres too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the move- ments of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost disappeared, the moving picture man has inher- ited all his courage, patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure. 43
And as with the reporters, so with the stars of the new medium. Shortly after the trench war, when the Soul of the Cinema was in demand again, Dr. Walter Bloem, S. ]. , explained what was at the center of the sen- sationalism critiqued by Miinsterberg: "During the war, film actors busily studied the thousands of dead, the results of which we can now admire on the screen. "44
Since April 19 1 7, the founding days of radio entertainment for army radio operators as well, such studies had been resting on a solid founda- tion. The chiefs of the new Army High Command, Hindenburg and Lu-
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dendorff, were serious about total war, and for that reason (among oth- ers) they advanced to the top of Germany's film directors. What evolved in the Grand General Staff was a Bureau of Pictures and Film [BUFA; Bild- und Filmamt] "whose founding and mode of operation was kept rather secret. " Still, it is known that the bureau's "range of operations" included "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters, the placement of war reporters, . . . censoring all films to be imported and exported, as well as providing all censoring agencies with instructions from the governing military censorship authorities. "45
The way Ludendorff justified these changes is more than just memo- rable; it has made film history. A memo by the general quartermaster led via the chain of command to the founding of the UFA. As a major corpo- ration, UFA was to take over the classified assignments of the Bureau of Pictures and Film in a much more public and efficient way-from the end of the First World War until, as is widely known, the end of the Second:
Chief of the General Staff of the Army. HQ. 4 July 19 1 7 M. ]. No. 208SIP.
To the
Imperial War Ministry Berlin
The war has demonstrated the overwhelming power of images and films as a form of reconnaissance and persuasion. Unfortunately, our enemies have exploited their know-how in this area so thoroughly that we have suffered severe damage. Even for the more distant continuation of the war, film will not lose its significance as a political and military means of influence. Precisely for that reason, for a successful conclusion to the war it is absolutely imperative that film have a maximal effect in those areas where German intervention is still possible.
signed Ludendorff46
Thus, film as a means of reconnaissance and persuasion has been ex- plained, or reconnoitered, in the strictest (that is, military) sense of the term. The path leads, as with radio, from interception to reception and mass mediality. And Ludendorff donated 900 of his movie theaters at the front to this reception, making it possible to decode Lieutenant ]Unger's
Combat as Inner Experience.
Positional warfare prohibits inner experience in Goethean terms, that is, sensory substitutions between the lines of literature. In both his title and his subject, Junger announces a very different type of sensuousness: "When red life clashes against the black cliffs of death, what we get are sharp pictures composed of bright colors. . . . There is no time to read
I30 Film
one's Werther with teary eyes. "47 For media-technological reasons, poetry comes to an end in the trenches, those "pure brainmills": "This failure even appears to be a matter of writing," says a fellow officer and friend of Junger whose "intellectual faculties, in the daily rhythm between watch duty and sleep, gradually dwindle toward zero. " Which the troop leader and recipient of the Ordre pour Ie Merite demonstrates and con- firms with his telegram-style answer, "that this war is a chokehold on our literature. " 48
But ghosts, a. k. a. media, cannot die at all. Where one stops, another somewhere begins. Literature dies not in the no-man's-land between the trenches but in that of technological reproducibility. Again and again, Lieutenant Junger asserts how completely the inner experience of the bat- tle has become a matter of neurophysiology. After the "baptism by fire" of I9I4, soldiers had become "so cerebral that the landscape and the events, in retrospect, managed to escape from memory only as dark and dreamlike shadows. "49 Even more clearly, and in terms of radio: "Every brain, from the simplest to the most complicated, vibrated with the waves of the monstrous, which propagated itself over the landscape. "5o The war, even though "it was so palpable, and rested heavily, like lead, on our senses"-as when, for example, "an abandoned group traversed un- known territory under the canopy of night"-was hence and simultane- ously "perhaps only a phantasm of our brains. "51
Brain phantasms, however, "glowing visions"52 that "burden anxious brains"53 like the trenches: they exist only as the correlatives to techno- logical media. The soul becomes a neurophysiological apparatus only when the end of literature draws near. Hence, the "screams from the dark" that "touch the soul most immediately, . . . since all languages and poets, by contrast, are only stammerings," combine the "clamor of fight- ers" with "the automatic play of the barrel-organ. "54 And as with acoustics, so with the optics of war: "Once again, one's individual expe- rience, the individual, . . .
was compressed, once again the colorful world rolled like a swift film through the brain. "55
In the days of the founding age of modern media, the neurologist Benedict described how the dying visualize their past as time-lapse pho- tography. Lieutenant Junger could do this without pseudomorphosis. Af- ter one of his "fourteen"56 war injuries, he was, for purposes of reconva- lescence, relocated to Douchy, a village and communications site in Flan- ders, "the headquarters of the 73d [light-infantry regiment]. "57 "There was a reading room, a cafe, and later even a cinema in a large barn skill- fully converted. "58
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Only in Storm of Steel, his fact-based Diary of a German Storm- Troop Officer, does JUnger speak of the BUFA and its work: "supplying the inland and the front with films, setting up field movie theaters," and so on. In Combat as Inner Experience, this hymn to the trench worker, he does not so much ignore media technology as translate its effects expres- sionistically. Writing itself relocates in the projection room of Douchy. That is why and why alone "the blossoms of the world, blinding and be- numbing, cities on waters of light, southern coasts where blue waves washed against the shore, women cast in satin, queens of boulevards," and the whole range of feature-film archives of inner experiences, " opened themselves" up to the "wandering brains"59 of soldiers in the trenches, even in their darkest moments of sensory deprivation.
One year before the outbreak of the war, Kurth Pinthus's Movie Book announced: "One has to get used to the thought that kitsch will never be eliminated from the world of humans. After we've been trying for decades to get rid of kitsch in the theater, it resurfaces in cinema. And one is led to believe that the masses have found the kitsch expelled from the stage somewhere else. "60
In a world war, for example: "All hearts pound with excitement when the armies of soldiers line up for battle with desperately harsh faces; when grenades burst, releasing a shower of smoke; and when the camera relentlessly traverses the battlefield, ingesting the stiff and muti- lated bodies of senselessly killed warriors. "61
A prophecy that Junger, the mythic war reporter, realizes or recog- nizes. To recognize combat as an inner experience means (following Lu- dendorff) understanding that the use of film "in those areas where Ger- man intervention is still possible" is "absolutely imperative . . . for a suc- cessful conclusion to the war. " For although historical prose suggests, as is widely known, that the other side won, Junger's camera style drives for- ward German attacks again and again, only to freeze the continuation of history or the movies in a last still. In the final analysis, such a film trick becomes possible simply because in mechanized warfare, machine-gun operators kill without seeing any corpses,62 and storm troopers-Luden- dorff's newly formed precursors to the blitzkrieg63-storm without seeing into enemy trenches.
That is why the British, when their attack tears Junger out of his filmic "castle in the air," appear only "for one second . . . like a vision en- graved . . . on my eyes. "64 That is why the novel succeeds in letting its end, its goal and wish fulfillment-namely, the failed Ludendorff offen- sive of "March 21, 1918"65-succeed in the world of hallucination. As a
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camera shot, and after "an eternity in the trenches,"66 an attack is noth- ing short of redemption:
Only rarely does the enemy appear to us . . . in flesh and blood, even though we are separated only by a narrow, torn-up field strip. We've been hunkering down in the trenches for weeks and months, swarms of projectiles showering down upon us, surrounded by thunderstorms. It happens that we almost forget we are fight- ing against human beings. The enemy manifests itself as the unfolding of a gigan- tic, impersonal power, as fate that thrusts its fist into the unseen.
When we storm forward and climb out of the trenches, and we see the empty, unknown land in front of us where death goes about its business between flaring columns of smoke, it appears as if a new dimension has opened up to us. Then we suddenly see up close, in camouflage coats and in faces covered with mud like a ghostly apparition, what awaits us in the land of the dead: the enemy. That is an unforgettable moment.
How differently one had envisioned the scene. The blooming edge of a for- est, a flowery meadow, and guns banging into the spring. Death as a flurrying back and forth between the two trench lines of twenty-year-olds. Dark blood on green blades of grass, bayonets in the morning light, trumpets and flags, a happy, shimmering dance. 67
But contemporary technologies of the body have done their duty, in military as well as choreographic terms. When war and cinema coincide, a communications zone becomes the front, the medium of propaganda becomes perception, and the movie theater of Douchy the scheme or schemes for an otherwise invisible enemy. "When our storm signals flash across, [the English] get ready for a wrestling match about bits and pieces of trenches, forests, and the edge of villages. But when we clash in the haze of fire and smoke, then we become one, then we become two parts of one force, fused into one body. "68 Lieutenant Junger meets his imagi- nary other, as Lacan will define it in 193 6: as a mirror image that might restore the body of the soldier, dismembered fourteen times, back to wholeness. 69 If only were there no war and the other not a doppelganger. For "all cruelty, all the compilation of the most ingenious brutalities, can- not fill a human being with as much horror as the momentary apparition of his mirror image appearing in front of him, [with] all the fiery marks of prehistory reflected in his distorted face. "70
]Unger's film breaks off at precisely this image, long before Gravity's Rainbow ends in the blackout of a real or filmed rocket hit above Uni- versal Studios of California. For once the enemy was recognized as a dop- pelganger, "then, in the last fire, the dark curtain of horror may well have
? Film I33
lifted in the brains, but what was behind, lying in wait, the rigid mouth could no longer speak. "71
Ludendorff and Jiinger's falling storm troopers are silent, either be- cause (following a hermeneutic tautology) they are falling, or because (following a media-technological analysis) their a priori is the silent film. Now, however, we have war films with sound that can spell out the puz- zle behind the dark curtain of horror. What was lying in wait were first of all facts that Jiinger systematically bypassed: the failure of the Luden- dorff offensive, the retreat to the Siegfried position, and capitulation. Sec- ond, and more horrific still, the film doppelganger harbored the possibil- ity of fiction. A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible en- emies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the novel about the Second World War itself, GI von Held asks celebrated film director Gerhardt von Gall (alias Springer, Lubitsch, Pabst, etc. ) about the fate of a German rocket technologist who had fallen into the hands of the Red Army:
"But what if they did shoot him ? "
"No. They weren't supposed to. "
"Springer. This ain't the fucking movies now, come on. "
"Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday,
when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then. . . "72
Total use of media instead of total literacy: sound film and video cam- eras as mass entertainment liquidate the real event. In Storm of Steel no- body except for the diary keeper survives, in Gravity's Rainbow all the people pronounced dead return, even the rocket technician of Peene- munde. Under the influence of the fictitious drug Oneirine, the writing of world-war novels turns into movie fiction.
It is widely known that war-from the sandbox models of the Prus- sian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans-has become increasingly simulable. "But there, too," as these same general staffs wisely recognized, "the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy cannot 'be factored in realistically. "'73 Friedlaender, media-techno- logically as always, has drawn from this the daring, inverted conclusion: for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.
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SALOMa FRIEDLAENDER, "FATA MORGANA MACHINE" (CA. 1920)
For many years Professor Pschorr had been preoccupied with one of the most interesting problems of film: his ideal was to achieve the optical repro- duction of nature, art, and fantasy through a stereoscopic projection appa- ratus that would place its three-dimensional constructs into space without the aid of a projection screen. Up to this point, film and other forms of pho- tography had been pursued only in one-eyed fashion. Pschorr used stereo- scopic double lenses everywhere and, eventually, indeed achieved three- dimensional constructs that were detached from the surface of the projec- tion screen. When he had come that close to his ideal, he approached the Minister of War to lecture him about it. " But my dear Professor," the Min- ister smiled, "what has your apparatus got to do with our technology of maneuvers and war ? " The Professor looked at him with astonishment and imperceptibly shook his inventive head. It was incredible to him that the Minister did not have the foresight to recognize how important that appara- tus was destined to become in times of war and peace. "Dear Minister, " he insisted, "would you permit me to take some shots of the maneuver so that you can convince yourself of the advantages of my apparatus ? " "I'd rather
not," the Minister contemplated, "but you are trustworthy. You know the dangerous article on high treason, of course, and will surely keep the se- cret. " He granted the Professor unlimited access. A couple of weeks after the maneuver, all the generals gathered in open terrain that was in part rolling, mountainous, and wooded, and that contained several large ponds and ravines, slopes, and a couple of villages. "First, dear Minister and hon- ored generals, allow me to tell you that the whole landscape, including our own bodies, appears as nothing but a single, purely optical phantasmagoria. What is purely optical in it I will make disappear by superimposing projec- tions of other things onto it. " He variously combined beams of floodlights and switched on a film reel, which began to run. Immediately the terrain transformed: forests became houses, villages became deserts, lakes and ravines became charming meadows; and suddenly one could see bustling military personnel engaged in battle. Of course, as they were stepping or riding into a meadow, they disappeared into a pond or a ravine. Indeed, even the troops themselves were frequently only optical illusions, so that real troops could no longer distinguish them from fake ones, and hence
? Film 135
engaged in involuntary deceptions. Artillery lines appeared as pure optical illusions. "Since the possibility exists of combining, precisely and simultane- ously, optical with acoustic effects, these visible but untouchable cannons can boom as well, making the illusion perfect," said Pschorr. "By the way, this invention is of course also useful for peaceful purposes. From now on, however, it will be very dangerous to distinguish things that are only visible from touchable ones. But life will become all the more interesting for it. " Following this he let a bomber squadron appear on the horizon. Well, the bombs were dropped, but they did their terrible damage only for the eye. Strangely enough, the Minister of War in the end decided against purchas- ing the apparatus. Full of anger, he claimed that war would become an im- possibility that way. When the somewhat overly humanistic Pschorr exalted that effect, the Minister erupted: "You cannot turn to the Minister of War to put a dreadful end to war. That falls under the purview of my colleague, the Minister of Culture. " As the Minister of Culture prepared to buy the apparatus, his plans were vetoed by the Minister of Finance. In brief: the state was unwilling to buy. Now the film corporation (the largest film trust) helped itself. Ever since this moment, film has become all-powerful in the world; but only through optical means. It is, quite simply, nature once again, in all its visibility and audibility. When a storm is brewing, for exam- ple, it is unclear whether this storm is only optically real or a real one through and through. Abnossah Pschorr has been exercising arbitrary tech- nological power over the fata morgana, so that even the Orient fell into confusion when a recent fata morgana produced by solely technical means-conjuring Berlin and Potsdam for desert nomads-was taken for real. Pschorr rents out every desired landscape to innkeepers. Surrounding Kulick's Hotel zur Wehmut these days is the Vierwaldstatter Lake. Herr v. Ohnehin enjoys his purely optical spouse. Mullack the proletarian resides in a purely optical palace, and billionaires protect their castles through their optical conversion into shacks.
Not too long ago, a doppelganger factory was established. . . . In the not too distant future, there will be whole cities made of light; entirely dif- ferent constellations not only in the planetarium, but everywhere in nature as well. Pschorr predicts that we will also be able to have technological con- trol over touch in a similar way: not until then will radio traffic with real bodies set in, which means not just film but life, and which will leave far behind all traffic technologies . . .
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The Minister of War's question about what Pschorr's apparatus has to do with the technology of maneuvers and war is the only fiction in Fried- laender's text. Even in its experimental prehistory, that is, even before it became cinema, film conditioned new bodies. But ministers of war were in touch with current developments.
In 1 89 1 , Georges Demeny, Marey's assistant and anatomist at the In- stitute, began work on his Photography of Speech. Initially, his purpose in conducting this strange exercise was to advance the breakdown of dis- course into separate subroutines. In his experiments, motoric and optic data were to be on an equal footing with the sensory and acoustic data derived from Edison's phonograph. And Marey's silent chronophotograph was the perfect instrument for their storage.
Hence a serial camera with shutter speeds in the milliseconds was aimed at Demeny himself, who adhered to the honor-common during the founding age of modern media-of performing simultaneously as ex- perimenter and subject, priest and victim of the apparatus. A human mouth opened, expectorated the syllables "Vi-ve la Fran-cel " and closed again, while the camera dissected, enlarged, stored, and immortalized its successive positions, including the "fine play of all facial muscles," in ? omponent parts with a frequency of 16 Hz. To contemporaries, "many of these oral movements appeared exaggerated because our eye cannot perceive fleeting movements such as these, but the camera makes them visible by bringing motion to a standstill. "74 But that was precisely the point. Edison was rumored to have been enamored of the enlarged shots of his colleague's mouth. 75
Based on the data of a freeze-framed patriotism, Demeny (fascinated by physical impairments, as is every media technologist) first revolution- ized instruction for deaf and mute people. Patients of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were asked to synthesize acoustically the mouth positions film had analyzed optically. Then they could-in "oral examinations" that proved sensationaF6-scream "Vi-ve la Fran-cel" without ever hearing a syllable. In the material battles soon to come, when the Joffre divisions stormed and died like flies, self-perception was hardly necessary anymore.
"As early as 1 892," Demeny "envisioned all the procedures that have since been in use in so-called cinematographic apparatuses and which are nothing but reversible chronophotographs. "77 One only would have had to follow the principles of the revolver and supplement a rotating photo storage device with a rotating photo projector. But even though Demeny was envious of the Lumieres' success, research into slow motion was more important than the illusions of feature films. He remained faithful
? Demeny says, "Vi-ve la Fran-ee! "
? I38 Film
to the chronophotographic gun and moved from studying single patriotic mouths to masses of patriotic legs. On official assignment from the French army, he filmed the traditional goose step in order to optimize it. 78
What physiologists ofart (of all people) announced in I897 as a new feedback loop between psychophysics, maneuver drills, and the uncon- scious was realized to the letter. Regarding the "condition we call 'think- ing,'" Georg Hirth wrote:
That condition as well becomes automatized following frequent repetitIOn; namely, when optical, acoustic, and other stimuli-which effect every closing ap- perception-recur in roughly periodic intervals and in a known intensity. Recall, for example, the activity of a marksman in a shooting gallery. At the beginning of his service, the man is thoroughly infused with the condition of conscious and prospective attentiveness: gradually, however, he becomes sure and relaxed; after each bullet hits he steps mechanically up front to show the mark. His attention can go for a walk-it returns to business only if the impact is delayed long enough for his automatic-rhythmic feeling to subside. The same is true for the recruit dur- ing his exercises. Indeed, the whole debate surrounding the length of active mili- tary service revolves around the question: how long does it take to automatize the military (moral as well as technical) memory structure of the average twenty-year- old in such a way that the apparatus does not fail in the real-life event and that the attention (attentiveness)-which every man must be equipped with at any time in times of war and peace-is not absorbed by mindless service? 79
Mechanization Takes Command-Sigfried Giedion could not have come up with a better title for a book that retraces the path from Marey's chronophotographic gun via modern art to military-industrial ergonom- ics. The automatized weapons of world wars yet to come demanded sim- ilarly automatized, average people as "apparatuses" whose motions-in terms of both precision and speed-could only be controlled by filmic slow motion. Since they were introduced during revolutionary civil wars, exclamations such as "Vive la France! " had nurtured the death drive only psychologically and had left the reaction time at the gun to a "thinking" that exists only in quotation marks for physiologists of art and film.
Storm-troop leaders such as Junger, however, have since Ludendorff been trained to work in time frames below any threshold of perception. The apparition of the enemy appears to them only "for one second," barely perceptible, but measurable. As Junger notes immediately prior to the Ludendorff offensive, "phosphoric digits are glowing on the watch on my wrist. Watch digits, an unusual word. 80 It is 5:30. We'll begin to storm in one hour. "81 Two common items of today, trench coats (or, literally, "coats for the trenches") and watches with second hands, are the prod-
? ? ? ? Giacomo Balla, Ragazza che carre sui balcone (study), I9 I 2 .
E. J. Marey, "Amplitudes of the Leg While Walking," before I885.
ucts of the First World War. 82 In the standardized jump of the second hand, film transport imposes its rhythm upon average people. No wonder that storm-troop leader JUnger hallucinated the body of the enemy-that unreality hidden for months in the trenches-in the medium of film. The opponent could only be a film doppelganger. Demeny, we recall, had stan- dardized the movements of a whole army through chronophotography.
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? 140 Film
And Professor Pschorr, as always, only had to do his excessive share to transform the "bodies" of soldiers and the entire landscape of their maneuver into "a single, purely optical phantasmagoria," which, more- over, could be combined precisely and simultaneously with acoustic effects.
A fata morgana machine that can now be had around the globe. Without war, simply by paying an admission fee. For mechanization has also taken command over so-called times of leisure and peace. Night af- ter night, every discotheque repeats Demeny's goose-step analyses. The stroboscopic effect at the beginning of film has left physiological labs and now chops up dancers twenty times per second into film images of them- selves. The barrage of fire has left the major lines of combat and these days echoes from security systems-including their precise and simulta- neous combination with optical effects. Demeny's photography of speech continues as a videoclip, his "Vi-ve la Fran-ce! " as a salad of syllables:
"Dance the Mussolini! Dance the Adolf Hitler! " 83
Deaf, mute, and blind, bodies are brought up to the reaction speed of
World War n+I, as if housed in a gigantic simulation chamber. Comput- erized weapons systems are more demanding than automatized ones. If the joysticks of Atari video games make children illiterate, President Rea- gan welcomed them for just that reason: as a training ground for future bomber pilots.