No More Learning

Of uncomfortable things. I feel as if my dreams ap- peared in a kind of sequence, as if I returned to the same haunts every once in a while.
What haunts are you talking about?
I can't recall the details. (More quietly. ) I always
see . . . something reddish . . . the gleam of a light . . .
? Feldermann. Hailers.
Film 159
something (pointing to the fireplace) like the embers in the fireplace . . . and, inside the reddish lighting (yet more quietly), the head of a woman . . .
The head of a woman.
It's always the same one . . . always a bit red . . . like a drawing with red chalk. . . . The face of the girl is also pursuing me while awake. . . . As soon as I try to visu- alize it in detail, it falls apart, I cannot put it
together. . . . If I should ever see her again, I will ask her for her picture.
Feldermann (turning toward him further and looking at him attentively).
Hailers . Feldermann.
What is it you are saying here?
It bothers me that the face with the red shine always hovers in front of me and that I cannot stabilize it.
I understand that. But I do not understand what you could be expecting of a photograph produced in your dreams of a dream image from your waking life. Is3
Film projection as internal theater exists two years prior to its intro- duction. Reason enough for Lindau, the writer, to forsake writing for cin- ema as quickly as possible. As with Freud or Rank, dreams are films and vice versa. One only has to have a nervous disorder like HaIlers's to trig- ger the shutter while dreaming instead of surrendering to the "shadowy, fleeting . . . scenes of the film drama" and making literature again, as does Rank. Madness is cinematographic not only in motoric and phys- iognomic terms; cinema implements its psychic mechanisms itself.
That was precisely Miinsterberg's insight. The Photoplay: A Psycho- logical Study, the slender, revolutionary, and forgotten theory of the fea- ture film, was published in New York in 19 16. While psychiatrists contin- ued to concentrate on pathologies of motion and psychoanalysts continued to consume films and retranslate them into books, the director of the Har- vard Psychological Laboratory went past consumption and usage. His American fame opened the New York studios to him; hence he could ar- gue both from the producer's standpoint and from the elementary level that relates film and the central nervous system. That is the whole difference be- tween Rank and Miinsterberg, psychoanalysis and psychotechnology.
Psychotechnology, a neologism coined by Miinsterberg, describes the
I 60 Film
science of the soul as an experimental setup. Basics ofPsychotechnology, published in I9I4, reframes in 700 pages the collected results of experi- mental psychology in terms of their feasibility. What began the pioneer- ing work of Wundt in Leipzig and what brought Miinsterberg to Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, was the insight (dispelling presumptions in elitist labs to the contrary) that everyday reality itself, from the workplace to leisure time, has long been a lab in its own right. Since the motor and sen- sory activities of so-called Man (hearing, speaking, reading, writing) have been measured under all conceivable extreme conditions, their ergonomic revolution is only a matter of course. The second industrial revolution en- ters the knowledge base. Psychotechnology relays psychology and media technology under the pretext that each psychic apparatus is also a tech- nological one, and vice versa. Miinsterberg made history with studies on assembly-line work, office data management, combat training.
Hence his theory was fully absorbed by the film studios (which had not yet migrated to Hollywood). From film technology and film tricks, knowledge only extracted what it had invested in the studies of optical il- lusions since Faraday. With the indirect consequence that film technology itself (as with phonography in Guyau's case) became a model of the soul- initially as philosophy and, eventually, as psychotechnology.
In I907, Bergson's Creative Evolution culminated in the claim that the philosophically elementary functions of "perception, intellection, lan- guage" all fail to comprehend the process of becoming. "Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind. " Instead of registering change as such, "we take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality," which-once it is "recomposed . . . artificially," like a film-yields the illusion of movement. 154 What that means in concrete physiological terms is beyond the philosopher Bergson, who is solely in- terested that film mark a historical difference: In antiquity, "time com- prises as many undivided periods as our natural perception and our language cut out in it successive facts. " By contrast, modern science, as if Muybridge were its founding hero, isolates (following the model of differential equations) the most minute time differentials. "It puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes," rather than (as "on the
frieze of the Parthenon") "massing itself into a single attitude, which is
Film r6r
supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and illuminate a whole period. "155
Bergson does not want to reverse this panning shot from art to me- dia, but his philosophy of life does envision a kind of knowledge that could register becoming itself, independent of antique and modern tech- nologies of perception: the redemption of the soul from its cinemato- graphic illusion.
Psychotechnology proceeds exactly the other way around. For Miin- sterberg, a sequence of stills, that is, Bergson's cinematographic illusion of consciousness, is by no means capable of evoking the impression of move- ment. Afterimages and the stroboscopic effect by themselves are necessary but insufficient conditions for film. Rather, a series of experimental and Gestalt-psychological findings demonstrates-contra Bergson-that the perception of movement takes place as "an independent experience. " 156
The eye does not receive the impressions of true movement. It is only a suggestion of movement, and the idea of motion is to a high degree the product of our own reaction. . . . The theater has both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our mental mechanism. 1s7
One cannot define film more subjectively than Miinsterberg does, but only to relay these subjective ideas to technology. Cinema is a psycholog- ical experiment under conditions of everyday reality that uncovers un- conscious processes of the central nervous system. Conversely, traditional arts such as theater, which Miinsterberg (following Vachel Lindsay)158 continuously cites as a counterexample, must presuppose an always-al- ready functioning perception without playing with their mechanisms. They are subject to the conditions of an external reality that they imitate: "Space, time, causality. "159 On the other hand, Miinsterberg's demonstra- tion that the new medium is completely independent aesthetically and need not imitate theater suggests that it assembles reality from psycho- logical mechanisms. Rather than being an imitation, film plays through what "attention, memory, imagination, and emotion" perform as uncon- scious acts. 160 For the first time in the global history of art, a medium in- stantiates the neurological flow of data. Although the arts have processed the orders of the symbolic or the orders of things, film presents its spec- tators with their own processes of perception-and with a precision that is otherwise accessible only to experiment and thus neither to conscious- ness nor to language.
162 Film
Miinsterberg's errand to the film studios was worth it. His psy- chotechnology, instead of merely assuming similarities between film and dreams as does psychoanalysis, can ascribe a film trick to each individual, unconscious mechanism. Attention, memory, imagination, emotion: they all have their technological correlative.
Naturally, this analysis begins with attention, because in the age of media facts are generally defined by their signal-to-noise ratio. "The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection,"161 which, in turn, can either be voluntary or involuntary. But because voluntary selection would separate spectators from the spell of the medium, it is not considered. What counts is solely whether and how the different arts control involuntary attention and hence "play on the keyboard of our mind. "162 Of
the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit the crime. Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. . . . Everything else sinks into a general vague back- ground, while that one hand shows more and more details. The more we fixate [on] it, the more its clearness and distinctness increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater has there its limits.
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. . . . In the language of the photoplay producer it is a "close- up. " Theclose-uphasobjectifiedinourworldofperceptionourmentalactofat- tention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power ofany theater stage. 163
Miinsterberg's patient gaze, which we have long since unlearned, focuses not for nothing on the revolver: its drum stands at the origin of cinema. When it appears as a close-up, film films involuntary and tech- nological mechanisms at the same time. Close-ups are not just "objec-
Film I63
tivizations" of attention; attention itself appears as the interface of an apparatus.
This is true of all the involuntary mechanisms Miinsterberg investi- gates. Whereas each of the temporal arts, in "the most trivial case," pre- supposes the storage of past events, "the theater can do no more than suggest to our memory this looking backward"-namely, with words, for which "our own material of memory ideas" must "supply the pic- ture [sJ . " 164 In the " slang" and practice of photo artists, by contrast, there are cut-backs or flashbacks, which are "really an objectivation of our memory function. " 165 The same is true of the imagination as unconscious expectation and of associations in general. Aside from flashbacks and flash-forwards, cinematic montage conquers "the whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections. "166 According to the film theory of Bela Balazs, who unknowingly furthered Miinsterberg's work, unconscious processes "can never be rendered so visually in words as in cinematic montage-be they the words of a physician or a poet. Pri- marily because the rhythm of montage can reproduce the original speed of the process of association. (Reading a description takes much longer than the perception of an image). "167
And yet, literature-whose power film infinitely exceeds or "tran- scends," according to Miinsterberg-attempts the impossible. Schnitzler's novellas simulate processes of association in phonographic real time,168 Meyrink's novels in filmic real time. The Golem appears in I9I5 as a dop- pelganger novel in ostensible competition with Ewers's and Lindau's suc- cesses on the screen; as a simulation of film, however, it unknowingly an- ticipates Miinsterberg's theory. Meyrink's framing narrative begins with a nameless I, who is transformed by his half-asleep associations into the doppelganger of the framed story. As if in a flashback, this person, Per- nath, reappears in the Prague ghetto, long since torn down, only to en- counter in turn a Golem who is expressly called Pernath's "negative,"169 that is, the doppelganger of the doppelganger. This iteration of mirror sit- uations, associations, transformations follows the techniques of film so closely that Meyrink's framing narrative even sacrifices the time-honored past tense of the novel to it. It is not just since Gravity's Rainbow that novels have been written in the present tense to suggest the flow of asso- ciation and easy filmability.
Which makes interpretation meaningless and only invites the rewrit- ing of Meyrink's beginning as a screenplay. Well, here is the first chapter (the narrative frame) of The Golem once more, this time in two columns with Miinsterbergian instructions for the camera.
r 64 Film
Fade-out to dream
SLEEP
The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.
As the shape of the new moon begins to dwindle, and its left side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It tor- ments me.
r cannot sleep; r cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that inter- mingle, and penetrate my thought.
Before r went to bed, r had been reading from the life of Buddha; one particular passage now seeks me out and haunts me, drumming its phrases into my ears over and over and over again from the beginning, in every possi- ble permutation and combination:
"A crow flew down to a stone that looked, as it lay, like a lump of fat.
Thought the crow, 'Here is a toothsome morsel for my dining'; but finding it to be nothing of the kind, away it flew again. So do we crows, having drawn near to the stone, even so do we, would-be seekers after truth, aban- don Gautama the Anchorite, so soon as in him we cease to find our pleasure. "
This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat as- sumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain.
r am stumbling along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up smoothed pebbles.
Now they are grayish-blue, coated in a fine, sparkling dust; persistently r grub them up in handfuls, without in the least knowing what use r shall make of them; now they are black, with sulfury spots, like the strivings of a child to create in stone squab, spotty, prehistoric monsters.
r strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes from me, but always they drop out of my
Caption (text)
Close-up (= attention) Moving camera
Close-ups
(= involuntary attention)
Cut-back ( =
Film 165 hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there,
within my sight.
involuntary memory) Whereupon every stone that my life has ever contained seems to rise into existence and compass me around.
Numbers of them labor painfully to raise themselves out of the sand towards the light-like monstrous, slaty- hued crayfish when the tide is at the full-and all rivet their gaze upon me, as though agonizing to tell me tid- ings of infinite importance.
Others, exhausted, fall back spent into their holes, as if once for all abandoning their vain search for words.
Fading
Fade-out to everyday Time and again do I start up from this dim twilight of dreams, and for the reality space of a moment experience once more the moonshine on the end of my billowing counterpane, like a large, flat, bright stone, only to sink blindly back into the realms of semi-consciousness, there to grope and grope in my painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of my memory in the guise of a lump of fat. . . . What happens next I cannot say. Whether, of my own free will, I abandon all resistance; whether they over-
power and stifle me, those thoughts of mine . . .
I only know that my body lies sleeping in its bed, while my mind, no longer part of it, goes forth on its wander- mgs.
Who am I? That is the question I am suddenly beset with a desire to ask; but at the same instant do I become conscious of the fact that I no longer possess any organ to whom this query might be addressed; added to which, I am in mortal terror lest that idiotic voice should reawaken and begin all over again that never-ending business of the stone and the lump of fat.
Fade-out (onto doppelganger) I capitulate. 17o
The Golem begins as film; more precisely, as a silent film. Only films make it possible to present all the mechanisms of madness, to run through chains of associations in real time, and to jump continually from a metaphoric stone at the bedside to a real stone in the ghetto of the dop- pelganger. (Immediately after the capitulation of the "I," Pernath begins his life history in the past tense as the I of the framed story. )
? 166 Film
And only silent films command the robbing of the narrative I of all its organs of speech. In lieu of reflexive introspections we have neurolog- ically pure data flows that are always already films on the retina. All- powerful optical hallucinations can flood and sever a body, and eventu- ally make it into an other. Pernath and Golem, the substitutes of the nar- rative I in the framed story, are the positive and negative of a celluloid ghost.
Fading of consciousness itself . . . simply as a sequence of film tricks.
"Our psychic apparatus reveals itself in these transformations," wrote Balazs. "If fading, distorting, or copying could be executed with- out any specific image, that is, if the technique could be divorced from any particular object, then this 'technique as such' would represent the mind as SUCh. "171
But as Munsterberg demonstrated, the transformation of a psychic apparatus into film-trick transformations is lethal for the mind [Geist] as such. Mathematical equations can be solved in either direction, and the title "psychotechnology" already suggests that film theories based on ex- perimental psychology are at the same time theories of the psyche (soul) based on media technologies. In The Golem, Proust's beloved souvenir in- volontaire becomes a flashback, attention a close-up, association a cut, and so on. Involuntary mechanisms, which hitherto existed only in hu- man experiments, bid their farewell to humans only to populate film stu- dios as the doppelgangers of a deceased soul.
One Golem as tripod or muscles, one as celluloid or a retina, one as cut-back or random access memory . . .
Golems, however, possess the level of intelligence of cruise missiles, and not only those in Meyrink's novel or Wegener's film. They can be pro- grammed with conditional jump instructions, that is, first to execute everything conceivable and then to counter the danger of the infinite spi- rals praised by Goethe. Precisely for that reason, in Munsterberg's succinct words, "every dream becomes real" in film. 172 All the historical attributes of a subject who around 1 800 celebrated his or her authenticity under the title literature can around 1900 be replaced or bypassed by Golems, these programmed subjects. And above all, dreams as a poetic attribute.
The romantic novel par excellence, Novalis's Henry von Ofterdingen, programmed the poetic calling of its hero with media-technological pre- cision: as a library-inspired fantasy and a dream of words. As if by chance, Ofterdingen was allowed to discover an illustrated manuscript with neither name nor title, but which dealt "with the wondrous fortunes of a poet. "173 Its pictures "seemed wonderfully familiar to him, and as he
Film r 67
looked more sharply, he discovered a rather clear picture of himself among the figures. He was startled and thought he was dreaming"174- the wonder of the dream was the necessity of the system. In r 8 0 r , the re- cruitment of new authors was, after all, achieved through literarily vague doppelgangers, in whom bibliophile readers could recognize (or not) their similarly unrecordable "Gestalt. " And Ofterdingen promptly decided to merge with the author and hero of the book he found.
This mix-up of speech and dream was programmed at the novel's be- ginning. There Ofterdingen listened to the "stories" of a stranger that told of "the blue flower" that nobody had ever seen or heard of. But because prospective writers needed to be able to change words into optical- acoustic hallucinations, Ofterdingen quickly fell asleep and began dream- ing. Poetic wonder did not wait: words became an image, and the image a subject, Ofterdingen's future beloved.
But what attracted him with great force [in the dream) was a tall, pale blue flower, which stood beside the spring and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. Around this flower were countless others of every hue, and the most deli- cious fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed upon it long with inexpressible tenderness. Finally, when he wanted to approach the flower, it all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening and cuddled up to the growing stem; the flower leaned towards him and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate face hoveredYs
No word, no book, no writer can write what women are. That is why that task was performed during the age of Goethe by poetic dreams, which, with the help of psychotricks, produced an ideal woman and hence a writer from the word "flower. " The trick film (following Miin- sterberg's insight) makes such internal theater of subjects or literate peo- ple as perfect as it is superfluous.
No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the camera they are not difficult. . . . Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on the stage every fair play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which the skill of the experts invents. The divers jump, feet first, out of the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man has sim- ply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real. 176
A medium that turns moonspots into stones or, better still, flowers into girls no longer allows for any psychology. The same machinelike per- fection can make flowers into a so-called I. That is precisely the claim of
168 Film
? Concave mirror
. . . . \ \\\,
- - - - - - - - . . - - - . . . . . . . . '> :. I Plane . . . . .
- - - 7"''::' " ,
,
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
I, . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
. . . . , . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . . . ",. ? y'
Lacan's scheme of the inverted vase. (From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (C) 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil; English translation (C) 198 8 by Cambridge University Press)
Lacan's theory, which, especially as an anti-psychology, is up to date with contemporary technological developments. The symbolic of letters and numbers, once celebrated as the highest creation of authors or geniuses: a world of computing machines. The real in its random series, once the sub- ject of philosophical statements or even "knowledge": an impossibility that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the future) can bring under their control. Finally, the imaginary, once the dream produced by and coming out of the caverns of the soul: a simple optical trick.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the positivistic "suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photo- graphic apparatus, or something of the kind. "177 Lacan's theory of the imaginary is an attempt truly to "materialize"178 such models. As a result of which, cinema-the repressed of Freud's year at the Salpetriere-re- turns to psychoanalysis. Lacan's optical apparatuses show a complexity that can only derive from cinematic tricks. Step by step, they go beyond the simple mirror and the (mis)recognition that induces in the small child a first but treacherous image of sensory-motoric wholeness.
Following Bouasse's Photometrie of 1934, a concave mirror initially projects the real image of a hidden vase into the same room where, in be- tween x and y, it is expected by its actual flowers. If the optic beams com-
. . . . , . . . . , . . . . ,. .
"
- vs', . . . .
,I ,
,
? Messter's Alabastra Theater.
ing out of the parabola, however, are also deflected by a plane mirror per- pendicular to the eye, then the vase, miraculously filled with flowers, ap- pears to the subject S next to its own, but only virtual, mirror image VS. "That is what happens in man," who first achieves "the organization of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed networks"179 and then lives through his identification with virtual doppelgangers. Nar- cissism is duplicated.
Lacan, however, did not need to search for his optical tricks in the science of Bouasse. Film pioneers, who have always been dreaming of 3 -D cinema without glasses, built apparatuses of a similar nature. In 19 10 Oskar Messter, the founder of the German film industry and the person in charge of all photography and film footage taken at the front during the First World War,180 introduced his Alabastra Theater in Berlin. He re- placed the concave mirror of Bouasse and Lacan with a film projector C
Film 1 69
? 170 Film
that nevertheless had the same function as the mirror: his lenses projected real images of actors that were allowed to act only against the black back- ground of all media-on a screen E located below the stage A. The audi- ence, however, only saw the virtual image of this screen, projected by the plane mirror B. With the result that filmed female dancers appeared on the stage of the Alabastra Theater itself and gave the impression of mov- ing through three dimensions. l S I
"Hence," Lacan said, addressing his seminar participants as well as the audience of the Alabastra Theater, "you are infinitely more than you can imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds-ranging from the microscope to radio and television-that will become elements of your being. "lS2
What's missing now is for the plane mirror B to become a psychoan- alyst and, prompted by the remote control of language that occupies him,183 turn by 90 degrees, so that the subject S sacrifices all its imaginary doppelgangers to the symbolic. Then, three dimensions or media-the nothing called a rose, the illusion of cinema, and discourse-will have been separated in a technologically pure way. The end of psychoanaly- sis/es is depersonalization. ls4
Consequently, Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars, Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television.
Media-technological differentiations opened up the possibility for media links. After the storage capacities for optics, acoustics, and writing had been separated, mechanized, and extensively utilized, their distinct data flows could also be reunited. Physiologically broken down into fragments and physically reconstructed, the central nervous system was resurrected, but as a Golem made of Golems.
Such recombinations became possible no later than the First World War, when media technologies, reaching beyond information storage, be- gan to affect the very transmission of information. Sound film combined the storage of acoustics and optics; shortly thereafter, television combined their transmission. Meanwhile, the text storage apparatus of the type- writer remained an invisible presence, that is to say, in the bureaucratic background. Lacan's final seminars all revolve around possibilities of con- necting and coupling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
Engineers, however, had been planning media links all along. Since everything from sound to light is a wave or a frequency in a quantifiable,
? Film 171
nonhuman time, signal processing i s independent o f any one single medium. Edison perceived this very clearly when he described the de- velopment of his kinetoscope in 1894: "In the year 1887, the idea oc- curred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combi- nation of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. " 1 8 5
Cinema as an add-on to the phonograph-in theory, this applied only to storage and not to the systemic differences between one- and two-di- mensional signal processing; in practice, however, the analogy had far- reaching implications. Edison's Black Mary, the very first film studio, si- multaneously recorded sound and motion, that is, phonographic and kinetographic traces. In other words, sound film preceded silent film. But the synchronization of data streams remained a problem. Whereas in the optical realm, processing was a matter of equidistant scanning, which television was to increase to millions of points per second, in the acoustic dimension processing was based on analogies in a continuous stream of time. As a result, there arose synchronization problems similar to those of goose-stepping French regiments, problems more difficult to amend than Demeny's. Which is why Edison's master-slave relationship was turned on its head, and film, with its controllable time, took the lead. Mass-media research, with stacks of books on film and hardly any on gramophony, followed in its wake.
But pure silent film hardly ever existed. Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche. Acoustic accompaniment in the shape of words and music came out of every fairground, variety show, and circus corner. Wagner pieces like the Liebestod or the "Ride of the Valkyries" posthumously proved that they had been composed as sound tracks. At first, solo piano or harmonium players fought for image- sound synchronicity in movie houses; from 1910 on, so did entire ensem- bles in urban centers. When the literati Diiubler, Pinthus, Werfel, Hasen- clever, Ehrenstein, Zech, and Lasker-Schuler saw The Adventures of Lady Glane in Dessau in 19 1 3 , the "dismal background piano clinking" was "drowned out by the voice of a narrator commenting on the action in a broad Saxon: 'And 'ere on a dark and stormy night we see Lady Glahney . . . "' 1 86 The repulsion in the progressive literati triggered by the Saxon dialect gave rise to their Movie Book. It "incited extensive and far- reaching discussions about the misguided ambitions of the newly emerg- ing silent film to imitate the word- or stage-centered theatrical drama or the ways in which novels use narrative language instead of probing the
172 Film
new and infinite possibilities inherent in moving images, and [Pinthus] raised the question what each of us, if asked to write a script, would come up with. "187
Pinthus et al. thus turned the handicaps of contemporary technology into aesthetics. Sound, language, and even intertitles were all but purged from the literary scripts they (rather unsuccessfully) offered to the film in- dustry. For the medium of silent film as for the writing medium, the guid- ing motto was appropriateness of material. (The fact that the Movie Book itself linked the two was missed by Pinthus. ) As if the differentiation of distinct storage media had called for theoretical overdetermination, early film analyses all stressed l'art pour l'art for the silent film. According to Bloem, "the removal of silence would dissolve the last and most impor- tant barrier protecting films from their complete subjugation to the de- piction of plain reality. An utterly unbridled realism would crush any re- maining touch of stylization that yet characterizes even the most impov- erished film. "188 Even Miinsterberg's psychotechnology discerned insoluble aesthetic rather than mechanical problems in the media link of film and phonograph.
A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theatre, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theatre performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the con- versation of the spoken word is as disturbing as colour would be on the clothing of a marble statue. 189
The "invention of the sound film came down like a landslide" on these theories. In 1930, at the end of the silent film era, Balazs saw "a whole rich culture of visual expression in danger. "19o The International Artists Lodge as well as the Association of German Musicians, the human interfaces of the silent movie palaces, agreed and went even further in their labor dispute, turning Miinsterberg's arguments into a pamphlet "To the Audience! ": "Sound film is badly conserved theater at a higher price! " 19 1
Literature as word art, theater as theater, film as the filmic and radio as the radiophonic: all these catchwords of the 1920S were defensive mea- sures against the approaching media links. "A voluntary restriction of the artist to the technical material at hand-that results in the objective and immutable stylistic laws of his art.