No More Learning

Film 139
? 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. Every culture has its zones of preparation that fuse lust and power, optically, acoustically, and so on. Our discos are preparing our youths for a retaliatory strike.
War has always already been madness, film's other subject. Body movements, as they are provoked by the stroboscopes of today's dis- cotheques, went by a psychopathological name a century ago: a "large
hysterical arc. " Wondrous ecstasies, twitchings without end, circus-like contortions of extremities were reason enough to call them up with all the means of hypnosis and auscultation. A lecture hall full of medical stu- dents, as yet all male, was allowed to watch the master, Charcot, and his female patients.
A handwritten note [in the as yet unpublished archives of the Salpetrierel gives an account of the session of November 25, 1 877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman's ovaries. He withdraws the baton, and there is a fresh at- tack, which he accelerates by administering inhalations of amyl nitrate. The af- flicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in words that are devoid of metaphor: " G. is taken away and her delirium continues. " 84
? The Salpetriere makes iconographs o f its hysteria.
But this performance was not, or not any longer, the truth about hys- teria: what was produced by psychopathic media was not allowed simply to disappear in secret memories or documents. Technological media had to be able to store and reproduce it. Charcot, who transformed the Salpetriere from a dilapidated insane asylum into a fully equipped re- search lab shortly after his appointment, ordered his chief technician in 1 8 83 to start filming. Whereupon Albert Londe, later known as the con-
structor of the Rolleiflex camera,85 anatomized (strictly following Muy- bridge and Marey) the "large hysterical are" with serial cameras. A young physiology assistant from Vienna visiting the Salpetriere was watching. 86 But Dr. Freud did not make the historical connection between films of hysteria and psychoanalysis. As in the case of phonography, he clung (in the face of other media) to the verbal medium and its new decomposition into letters.
For this purpose, Freud first stills the pictures that the bodies of his female patients produce: he puts them on his couch in the Berggasse. Then a talking cure is deployed against the images seen or hallucinated. With- out mentioning the gender difference between male obsessive-neurosis and female hysteria, in Studies on Hysteria he observes:
When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a "visual" type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions.
Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with the description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into
Film 141
? 142 Film
words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the di- rection in which our work is to proceed. "Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared ? " "Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail. " "Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or some- thing will occur to you in connection with it. " When this work has been accom- plished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up an- other picture. On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain ob- stinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid. 87
Naturally, such sequences of images in hysterics or visually oriented people are an inner film: as in the case of psychoanalytical dream theory, a "pathogenic recollection," notwithstanding the patient's "forms of re- sistance and his pretexts, " provokes its optical "reproduction. "88 When Otto Rank subjected The Student of Prague, as the second German au- teur film, to psychoanalytical examination in 1914, he observed that "cinematography . . . in numerous ways reminds us of dream-work. " Which, conversely, meant that internal images were modeled, as with hys- terics, after the "shadowy, fleeting, but impressive scenes" of film. Con- sequently, "the technique of psychoanalysis," which "generally aims at uncovering deeply buried and significant psychic material, on occasion proceeding from the manifest surface evidence, . . . need not shy away from even some random and banal subject"-such as "the film-drama"-
"if the matter at hand exhibits psychological problems whose sources and implications are not obvious. "89
But this rather filmic uncovering, the return from the cinema to the soul, from manifest surface or celluloid skin to unconscious latency, from a technological to a psychic apparatus, only replaces images with words. While optical data in film are storable, they are also "shadowy, fleeting": one cannot look them up, as with books (or today's videotapes). This in- tangibility governs Rank's methodology. "Those whose concern is with literature may be reassured by the fact that the scenarist of this film, The Student of Prague, is an author currently in vogue and that he has ad- hered to prominent patterns, the effectiveness of which has been tested by time. "90 Which is why psychoanalysis (to paraphrase Freud) basically im- itates the doppelganger film by translating it into words. Rank's discus- sion of the doppelganger quotes all available sources from I 800 on and turns movies back into literature. 91
For a talking cure, nothing else is left to do. Still, after attending
? Film 143
Londe's filmings of hysteria, Freud did just the opposite with it. Literally, psychoanalysis means chopping up an internal film, in steps that are as methodical as they are discrete, until all of its images have disappeared. They break to pieces one by one, simply because female patients have to translate their visions into depictions or descriptions. In the end the me- dium of the psychoanalyst triumphs, because he stills bodily movements and slays the remaining, internal sightings like so many ghosts or Dracu- las. When Freud "unlocks images," he does so not to store them, as Char- cot does, but to decode the puzzles of their signifiers. Thus, the emergence particularly of nonverbal storage technologies around 1900 leads to a dif- ferentiation that establishes discourse as a medium among media. Freud the writer is still willing to admit the competition of the phonograph, be- cause gramophony (despite all its differences with the talking cure and its case-study novels) deals with words. The competition of silent film, how- ever, Freud does not even acknowledge. And even if Abraham and Sachs operate as "psychoanalytical collaborators" on a 1926 project that makes The Mysteries of the Unconscious into a film, and hence teaches contem- poraries "the necessities of modern-day education without pain and job training,"92 Freud himself flatly denies an offer from Hollywood.
This differentiation of storage media decides the fate of madness. Psychoanalytical discourse, which, following Lacan's thesis, is a conse- quence and displacement of hysterical discourse, translates the most beau- tiful pathology into the symbolic. At the same time, the serial photogra- phy of psychiatry, understood as the trace detection it is, stores the real along the "great hysterical arc. " Londe's still shots of each individual twitch and ecstasy travel (due to a lack of opportunities for projecting films) into the multivolume Iconography of the Salphriere. There they rest, but only to emigrate henceforth from the real and to return to the imaginary, for which Freud had no use. For although the "great hysterical arc" can no longer be found in the lecture halls of today's medical schools, the countless jugendstil images of women, with their bows and twists, can only derive from this iconographie photographique. 93 Works of art of the jugendstil did not simply suffer from the age of their techno- logical reproducibility; in their style, they themselves reproduced mea- sured data and hence practiced the precise application Muybridge had as- cribed from the very beginning to his study of Animal Loco? otion.
Hysteria, however, became as omnipresent as it became fleeting. In the real, it gave rise to archives of trace detection that returned in the imaginary of the paintings of the jugendstil; in the symbolic, it gave rise to a science that returned in the female hysterics of Hofmannsthal's dra-
I44 Film
? The Jugendstil makes iconographs of its hysteria.
mas. 94 One reproduction chased the other. With the result that madness might not take place under conditions of high technology. It becomes, like war, a simulacrum.
A successor to Londe, Dr. Hans Hennes of the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bonn, almost managed to figure out this ruse. His treatise on Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry identified only one appropriate medium for the "wealth of hysterical motoric mal- functions": filming. In a manner "more visual and complete than the best
Film 145
description" (and presumably photographs as well),95 technological me- dia reproduced psychopathological ones. But since serial photographs could be projected as films by 1909, Hennes went one step beyond Londe. Not until psychiatry was in a position "to convert a rapid succession of movements into a slow one through cinematographic reproduction" was it possible to see things "whose precise observation is, in real life, hardly or not at all possible. "96 As if cinema had enlarged the madness (of both patients and physicians) through the whole realm of unreality and fiction; as if Hennes had, in vague anticipation of McLuhan, understood the me- dium as the message. For "in all cases . . . it was typical that distraction from the symptoms of the disease and the suspension of external stimuli were sufficient to reduce, or almost completely eliminate, [hysterical] movements. By contrast, it is enough to draw attention to phenomena, or for the physician to examine the patient, even just step up to him, in or- der for dysfunctions to appear with greater intensity. "97
That is how psychiatry-whose attention had lately been running on automatic pilot, that is, filmically-itself discovered Charcot's simple se- cret, long before Foucault ever did; namely, that every test produces what it allegedly only reproduces. According to Dr. Hennes, who is fearless about contradicting himself and could even describe the doctor's attention as a contraindication after recommending it a moment before, it is quite likely that there would be no madness without filming it:
How often does it happen to the professor that a patient fails during a lecture, that a manic suddenly changes his mood, a catatonic suddenly fails to perform his stereotyped movements. Although he executed his pathological movements with- out disturbance on the ward, the changed environment of the lecture hall has the effect of not letting him produce his peculiarities-so that he does not display precisely what the professor wanted him to demonstrate. Other patients show their interesting oddities "maliciously," only when there are no lectures, continu- ing education courses, and so on. Such occurrences, which are frequently dis- turbing to the clinical lecturer, are almost completely corrected by the cinemato- graph. The person doing the filming is in a position to wait calmly for the best possible moment to make the recording. Once the filming is done, the pictures are available for reproduction at any moment. Film is always "in the mood. " There are no failures. 98
That means that films are more real than reality and that their so- called reproductions are, in reality, productions. A psychiatry beefed up by media technologies, a psychiatry loaded with scientific presumptions, flips over into an entertainment industry. In view of the "rapid dissemi- nation of this invention and the unmatched popularity it has attained in
? such a short time,"99 Hennes advises his profession to create, "through collective participation and collaboration, a cinematographic archive analogous to the phonographic one. "lOO
Hence it is no wonder that the " great hysterical arc" disappears from nosology or the world shortly after its storage on film. Since there are "no failures" and mad people on film are "always 'in the mood,'" inmates of insane asylums can forgo their performances and withhold their "inter- esting oddities 'maliciously'" from all storage media. At the same time, psychiatrists no longer have to hunt for their ungrateful human demon- stration material. The only thing they have to do is shoot silent films, which as such (through the isolation of movements from the context of all speech) already envelop their stars in an aura of madness. To say noth- ing of the many possible film tricks that could chop up and reassemble these body movements, until the simulacrum of madness was perfect.
The age of media (not just since Turing's game of imitation) renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is mad and who is faking it. If cinematographers can "correct in an almost perfect way" disturbing occurrences of non-madness, they might as well film paid actors instead of asylum inmates. Although the historiography of film presumes a line of development from fairground entertainment to ex- pressionist film art, it is closer to the truth to speak of an elegant leap from experimental setups into an entertainment industry. Actors, that is, the doppelgangers of the psychiatrically engineered insane, visited the mOVle screen.
Certainly, Dr. Robert Wiene's Cabinet ofDr. Caligari ( 1920) seems to see cinema itself as part of the genealogy of the circus. The action as a whole confronts small-town life and vagrants. The titular hero appears as a traveling circus artist accompanied by a somnambulist medium who predicts the future for Caligari's paying customers. But the paths leading from the fairgrounds to Caligari are as tenuous as those leading (accord- ing to Siegfried Kracauer's simplified sociological reading) From Caligari to Hitler. In film and/or history, mass hysterias are, rather, the effect of massively used media technologies, which in turn have solid scientific foundation in theories of the unconscious. Caligari's wagon moves to- ward the motorcade of the Third Reich.
That is why Caligari's title of "Dr. " remains the vacuous presump- tion of a charlatan only in Carl Mayer's and Hans Janowitz's draft of the screenplay, a charlatan who misuses his medium Cesare as a remote- controlled murder weapon and who ends up in a straitjacket in an insane asylum once his ruse has been found out. The fairground is conquered by
? ? ? Film 147
an order whose disruptions not coincidentally have cost the lives of a mu- nicipal office worker and a youthful aesthete, two people, moreover, who are interested in books. As if screenplays as well had to defend script as their medium.
Following an idea of the great Fritz Lang,101 however, the completed film frames the action in a way that represents not only the transvalua- tion of all values but also their enigmatization. Citizens and mad people exchange their roles. In the framed story, the youthful hero kills Caligari and in the process underscores his bourgeois media love for female read- ers and books. In the framing story, he turns mad, and driven by his crazed love he stalks another person in the asylum, the alleged lover of the female reader. His private war against Caligari shrinks to the optical hallucination of a paranoid. As if the film attempted to uncover the pathology of a medium that entwined reading and loving but has abdi- cated its power to film. The madwoman simply does not register loving glances anymore.
Caligari, however (or, at any rate, a face that looks just like his), tow- ers above the insane asylum of the framing story as director and psychia- trist. No murder charges can prevail against his power to make a diagno- sis such as paranoia. Apparently, "while the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority," the eventual film "glorified authority" simply because it "convicted its antagonist of madness. "102 But Kracauer's attack against undefined authorities fails to take into account a psychiatry whose effects have produced new beings, not just Carl Mayer's biograph- ical experiences with German military psychiatrists during the war. 103
It is precisely this indistinguishability between framed and framing story, between insanity and psychiatry, that does justice to film technol- ogy. Nothing prevents the asylum director in the narrative frame to act si- multaneously as the mad Caligari. It is only that such ascriptions are communicated via the symbolic order of doctoral titles or the stories of patients, which are not part of the silent film. The identity between psy- chiatrist and murderer remains open-ended because it is offered to the eyes only and is not institutionalized by any word. A never-commented- upon similarity between faces renders all readings indistinguishable.
That is how faithfully Wiene's film follows cinematographically mod- ernized psychiatry. When professorial media technologists of the found- ing age conduct their experiments, they simultaneously play project di- rector and subject, murderer and victim, psychiatrist and madman, but storage technologies do not want to, and cannot, record this difference. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson's fictitious doppelganger pair of
148 Film
1 8 8 6, are only the pseudonyms of actual privy councilors. A gramophone records the words of Stransky, the psychiatrist, as a salad of syllables; a chronophotograph records the patriotic grimacing of Demeny. The situa- tion in Wiene's feature film is no different. Filmed psychiatrists go mad of necessity, especially if they, like the director of the asylum, declare an old book explicable in psychiatric as well as media-technological terms.
Somnambulism. A Compendium of the University of Uppsala. Pub- lished in the year I726: Thus reads the Fraktur-Iettered title of the book that the asylum director studies in order to learn everything about a his- torical "mystic, Dr. Caligari," and his "somnambulist by the name of Ce- sare. " Likewise, Charcot and his assistants studied dust-covered files on witches and the obsessed as they were transforming mysticism into a psy- chiatrically proper diagnosis of hysteria. lo4 The researchers of hypnosis, Dr. Freud and Dr. Caligari, are thus doppelgangers. lOS The one "found" the Oedipus complex for purposes of diagnosis and therapy initially "in my own case";106 the other, according to the film's subtitle, "under the domination of a hallucination" reads a sentence in white letters written on the walls of the asylum: "YOU MUST BECOME CALIGARI. " Charges that
"the director" must, for one, be mad and, second, "be Caligari" are to no avail, because modern experimenters say or do the same thing much more clearly-namely, immorally-than bourgeois heroes do. The similarity between psychiatrists and madmen, an enigma throughout the whole film, originates from research strategies and technologies.
The fact that an asylum director is directed by hallucinated writings to become Caligari in the framed story is simply a film trick. An actor plays both roles. With celluloid and cuts (the weapons of Dr. Wiene) Dr. Caligari or his official doppelganger emerges victorious.
It is only because of a life-size puppet that simulates Cesare sleeping in somnambulist stiffness that the title hero can provide his medium with protective alibis while executing nightly murders under the influence of hypnotic orders. The puppet deceives the bourgeois hero (as contempo- rary theories On the Psychology of the Uncanny predicted). 107 Prior to the introduction of stuntmen (and much to the dismay of aesthetes), films engaged in the "frequently used practice of replacing the artist with a puppet in particularly dangerous scenes. "108 Thus, Cesare is always al- ready a silent movie medium, and it is for this reason alone that he can be a somnambulistic and murderous medium. The photograph taken with a camera obscura (the cabinet in the title of the film itself) learns to move; the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere enters into Albert Londe's filming stage. As the mobilization of his puppet alibi, Cesare
Film I49
walks stiffly and with raised arms; he stumbles, tries to regain his balance, and finally rolls down a slope. Dr. Hennes describes in virtually identical terms the "accident hysteria" of his patient Johann L. , who is "6I years old" and a "workhorse" : "He walks in straddle-legged and stiff fashion, and often tilts as he turns around; moreover, he patters and walks in small steps; this gait is accompanied by grotesque ancillary movements of his arms, and is, in general, so bizarre that it appears artificially exagger- ated. " Nothing but indescribables, for which, however, "the cinemato- graphic image presented a very vivid illustration and supplement. " 109
And that-when bizarreness and artificial exaggeration originate in a hypnotic command-is above all when pathology and experiment co- incide once again. Cesare operates as the weapon of Caligari the artist. Psychiatrists constructed the first cruise missile systems, reusable systems to boot, long before cyberneticists did. With the serial murders of Cesare (and his numerous descendants in cinema), the seriality of film images enters plot itself. That is why his hypnosis hypnotizes moviegoers. In Wiene's pictures, they fall victim to a trompe l'oeil whose existence Lacan demonstrated through historical periods of painting: the incarnate look of a power that affected pictures long before it created them,l1O or that even produced that look as pictures. Yesterday the accident hysteric Johann L.
, today Cesare, tomorrow movie fans themselves. With the somnambulism of his medium, Dr. Caligari already programs "the collective hypnosis" into which the "darkness of the theatre and the glow of the screen"111 transport an audience.
Film doppelgangers film filming itself. They demonstrate what happens to people who are in the line of fire of technological media. A motorized mirror image travels into the data banks of power.
Barbara La Marr, the subtitle heroine of a novel by Arnolt Bronnen with the cynical title Film and Life (I927), experienced it herself. She had just finished doing her first screen tests for Hollywood and was sitting next to the director Fitzmaurice in the darkened projection room while film buyers were examining her body.
Barbara suddenly got frightened. She stopped breathing. She clutched her chest; was her heart still beating; what happened on the screen? Something terrible stared at her, something strange, ugly, unknown; that wasn't she, that couldn't be she who stared at her, looked to the left, to the right, laughed, cried, walked, fell, who was that? The reel rolled, the projectionist switched on the light. Fitzmaurice looked at her.
"Well? " She regained her composure, smiled. "Oh. That is how angels up in
150 Film
heaven must look down upon us, the way I look in this picture. " Fitzmaurice dis- agreed laughingly: "I would never have thought of you as an angel. But that is not bad at all. In fact, just the opposite. Better than I thought. Much better. " But she got up, trembling, it erupted from within her, almost screaming: "totally bad," she screamed, "terrible, ghastly, mean, I am completely untalented, nothing will become of me, nothing, nothing! "112
Film transforms life into a form of trace detection, just as literature during Goethe's time transformed truth into an educational discipline. Media, however, are ruthless, while art glosses over. One does not have to be hypnotized, like the mad Cesare, to become strange, ugly, unknown, terrible, ghastly, mean, in brief, "nothing" on the screen. It happens to each and everyone, at least before the plots of feature films (following the logic of phantasms and the real) begin to obscure the undesirable. A pro- tagonist of one of Nabokov's novels goes to the movies with his girlfriend, unexpectedly sees his "doppelganger" (following his brief engagement as a movie extra months earlier), and feels "not only shame but also a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life. "J13 Bronnen's title Film and Life hence repeats the classic line of the stick-up man, "Your money or your life ! " Whoever chooses money loses his life anyway; whoever chooses life without money will die shortly thereafter. ll4
The reason is technological: films anatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans (in contrast to animals) with a borrowed I and, for that reason, remains their great love. Precisely because the cam- era operates as a perfect mirror, it liquidates the fund of stored self-images in La Marr's psychic apparatus. On celluloid all gesticulations appear more ridiculous, on tapes, which bypass the skeletal sound transmission from larynx to ear, voices have no timbre, on ID cards (according to Pyn- chon, of whom no photo exists) a "vaguely criminal face" appears, "its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell. "115 And all that not because media are lying but because their trace detection undermines the mirror stage. That is to say: the soul itself, whose techno- logical rechristening is nothing but Lacan's mirror stage. In Bronnen's work, budding starlets must experience that, too.
Film is not for tender souls, Miss, . . . just like art in general. If you insist on showing your soul-which nobody else is interested in, by the way; we are far more interested in your body-you need to have a tough and hard-boiled soul; otherwise it won't work. But I don't think you will achieve any particularly great footage with your little indication of a soul. Let go of your soul without getting bent out of shape. I had to learn it myself, to let go of my inner self. Today I do films; back then I was poet. 116
Film 151
The true words of a deserter who has grasped the difference between media and the arts. Even the most poetic of words could not store bodies. The soul, the inner self, the individual: they all were only the effects of an illusion, neutralized through the hallucination of reading and widespread literacy. (Alphabetise, as Lacan put it. )117 When, in the last romantic com- edy, Buchner's King Peter of the kingdom of Popo searched for his son Leonce, who was at large, he put the police of the Archduchy of Hessia once more in an embarrassing situation. They could only go by "the 'wanted poster,' the description, the certificate" of a "person," "subject," "individual," "delinquent," and so on: "walks on two feet, has two arms, also a mouth, a nose, two eyes. Distinguishing features: a highly danger- ous individual. "118
That is how far literature went when it came to storing bodies-to the point of individual generality, but no further. Which is why literary doppelgangers, which began to show up in Goethe's time, appeared prin- cipally to readers. In Goethe, Novalis, Chamisso, Musset-the unspeci- fied warrant of the book's protagonist, whose appearance the texts leave open, always merged with the unspecified warrant of a reader, whom the texts addressed simply as a literate human being. 119
In 1 8 80, however, Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Parisian Office of Identification, blesses the criminal police forces of the earth with his an- thropometric system: I I measurements of diverse body parts, all with a rather constant, lifelong length, are sufficient for an exact registration, since they already afford 177,147 possible combinations or individual- izations. Furthermore, the police archive documents the name, surname, pseudonym, age, as well as two photos (front and side). From which Moravagine, Cendrars's protagonist, deduces consequences for literature three days before the outbreak of war in 1914. He starts on a flight around the globe, naturally plans a film about himself, and chides the cameraman for not coming along:
I can understand your wanting to rest and get back to your books. . . . You always needed time to think about a whole pile of things, to look, to see, to compare and record, to take notes on the thousand things you haven't had a chance to classify in your own mind. But why don't you leave that to the police archives? Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past and that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed COpS? 120
When Bertillon's police archive and Charcot's iconography, those two complementary recording technologies, chop up the human being of phi- losophy into countless criminals and lunatics, what results are doppel-
152 Film
gangers on doppelgangers. And one only needs (as in Moravagine's case) to supplant still photographs with a combination of motorization and film to teach doppelgangers how to move. One no less than Mallarme already celebrated the view through a moving car as that of a camera on wheels;121 one no less than Schreber, during his relocation from the insane asylum at Coswig to the one at Sonnenstein, "mistakes" all the "human forms [that he] has seen on the drive and in the station in Dresden for miraculous 'fleeting men. "'l22 Traffic in the age of motorization always means encountering doppelgangers, schematically and serially.
The shapes that come to the surface these days out of the depths of mobile mirrors no longer have anything to do with literature and educa- tion. In 1 8 8 6, Professor Ernst Mach described how he had recently seen a stranger on a bus and had thought, "'what a shabby-looking school- master that is, who just got on. "'123 It took even the great theorist of per- ception a couple of practical milliseconds before he could identify that stranger as his own mirror image. And Freud, who recapitulates Mach's uncanny encounter in 19 19, can offer a traveling story of his own:
I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet, and an el- derly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a traveling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead, therefore, of being frightened by our "doubles," both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the "double" to be something uncanny? 124
The horror of starlets like Barbara La Marr affects theorists as well. At a hundred kilometers per hour, as soon as they participate in motorized traffic, everyday life necessarily becomes cinematic. From the cabinet of Dr. Freud emerges his other. In the archive of Bertillon or Charcot, profes- sors appear as dirty old men who remind even the father of psychoanaly- sis of his bodily functions. But the psychoanalysis of the uncanny does not touch upon modern technologies of trace detection with as much as a sin- gle word. Freud and Rank, in their hunt for the remainders of an archaic reaction, return mobile mirrors to stationary ones once again, turn cinema and railroad into the romantic world of books. The one deciphers the dop- pelganger in E. T. A. Hoffmann, the other, in Chamisso and Musset.
Tzvetan Todorov observes that "the themes of fantastic literature
Film 153
? Scheme for a doppelganger shot.
have literally become the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years. . . . We need merely mention that the double was even in Freud's time the theme of a classic study (Otto Rank's Der Dop- pelganger). "125 As a science of unconscious literalities, psychoanalysis in- deed liquidates phantoms such as the doppelganger, whom romantic read- ers once hallucinated between printed lines. In modern theory and litera- ture "words have gained an autonomy which things have lost. "126 But to ascribe the death of "the literature of the fantastic" solely to a "psycho- analysis" that has "replaced" it and thereby made it "useless"127 is Todorov's critical-theoretical blind spot. Writers know better that theo- ries and texts are variables dependent upon media technologies:
The writer of yesteryear employed "images" in order to have a "visual" effect. Today language rich in images has an antiquated effect. And why is it that the im- age disappears from front-page articles, essays, and critiques the way it disappears from the walls of middle-class apartments? In my judgment: because with film we have developed a language that has evolved from visuality against which the vi- suality developed from language cannot compete. Finally, language becomes pure, clean, precise. 128
Only in the competition between media do the symbolic and the imaginary bifurcate. Freud translates the uncanny of the Romantic period into science, Melies, into mass entertainment. It is precisely this fantasiz- ing, anatomized by psychoanalysis, that film implements with powerful effect. This bilateral assault dispels doppelgangers from their books, which become devoid of pictures. On-screen, however, doppelgangers or their iterations celebrate the theory of the unconscious as the technology of cinematic cutting, and vice versa.
The doppelganger trick is nothing less than uncanny. Half of the lens is covered with a black diaphragm while the actor acts on the other half
154 Film
TheEiffelTowerfromOctober14, r888,toMarch3r,r889.
of the picture frame. Then, without changing the camera's position, the exposed film is rewound, the other half of the lens is covered up, and the same actor, now in his role as the doppelganger, acts on the opposite side of the frame. Put differently, Melies only had to record his stop trick onto the same roll of celluloid twice. "A trick applied with intelligence," he declared, "can make visible that which is supernatural, invented, or unreal. " 129
That is how the imaginary returned, more powerful than it could ever be in books, and as if made to order for writers of entertainment litera- ture. In 19 1 2, Heinz Ewers wrote: "I hate Thomas Alva Edison, because we owe to him one of the most ghastly of inventions: the phonograph! Yet I love him: he redeemed everything when he returned fantasy to the matter-of-fact world-in the movies ! " 130
These are sentences of media-technological precision: whereas the grooves of records store ghastly waste, the real of bodies, feature films take over all of the fantastic or the imaginary, which for a century has gone by the name of literature. Edison; or, the splitting of discourse into white noise and imagination, speech and dream (not to mention hatred and love). From then on neo-Romantic writers interested in love had it easy. One year later, Ewers wrote the screenplay for The Student of Prague by drawing on all of the book-doppelgangers in his library. ! 3! The film trick to end all film tricks (or, as a contemporary review put it, "the cinematic problem to end all cinematic problems")! 32 conquered the screen.
? ? ? The Student of Prague (Paul Wegener) next to his beloved (Grete Berger) and in front of his doppelganger, in a Jewish cemetery in Prague.
Ewers's Student, Gerhart Hauptmann's Phantom, Wiene's Caligari, Lindau's Anderer, Wegener's Golem: a doppelganger boom. Books (since Moses and Mohammed) have been writing writing; films are filming film- ing. Where art criticism demands expressionism or self-referentiality, me- dia have always been advertising themselves. Finally, motorists, train trav- elers, and professors, starlets and criminals, madmen and psychiatrists- they, too, recognized that camera angles are their everyday reality. Doppelganger films magnify the unconscious in mobile mirrors; they dou- ble doubling itself. The feature film transforms the "shock"133 of the mo- ment of recognition in Bronnen, Nabokov, Mach, and Freud into slow- motion trace detection: for 50 minutes, until his eventual disintegration and suicide, the student of Prague must see how the "horrifically un- changing apparition of the 'other'" sees him. 134 Notwithstanding Walter Bloem's The Soul of Cinema, cinema is what kills the soul. Precisely be- cause "humans" are not "worms, for whom something like" division or doubling "is a piece of cake, . . . the notion of a unified artistic personal- ity" disintegrates. Mimes become stars because human beings or civil ser-
Film 155
? 156 Film
vants have been made into guinea pigs. When executing the doppelganger trick, "mechanics becomes a coproducer. "135
On October II, 1893, The Other: A Play in Four Acts had its pre- miere in Munich. In 1906, Paul Lindau's horror play was published by the Reclam Universal Library only to land on the desks of the Royal Police Force in Munich, from whose copy I must of necessity quote. For on February IS, 1913, change overtook all libraries: The Other, consisting of " 2,000 meters" and "five acts," appeared as the first German auteur film. 136
"Men such as Paul Lindau," Gottfried Benn wrote, "have their mer- its and their immortality. "137 They are among the first to make the change from the pen to the typewriter and thus to produce texts suitable for film- ing (the script of The Student ofPrague was a typescript, toO). 138 They are among the first to make the change from the soul to mechanics and thus to produce subject matter suitable for film; that is, doppelgangers. With Lindau and Ewers, cinema in Germany becomes socially acceptable.
Except that Lindau's protagonist, Mr. HaIlers, J. D. , has not yet achieved wide cultural acceptance, for which poetic-filmic justice simply compensates him with a double. In order to abolish a superannuated civil-service ethos, HaIlers (just like Dr. Hyde or the student of Prague) must first become the other of the title. At the beginning, late at night, the prosecutor is in the process of dictating The Constraints of Willpower in Light ofCriminality to one of the last male secretaries, who takes it down in shorthand. Lacking Lindau's typewriter, he also lacks any knowledge of psychiatry. Hypnosis, suggestion, hysteria, the unconscious, split per- sonality-the civil servant wants to take out of circulation all of these terms, which have been in common usage "since Hippolyte Taine's study on the intellect. "139
Hallers (dictating).
Where would that eventually lead? It would lead to felons in every serious case quoting a physician to es- cape justice . . . to medicine being in stark contrast to justice. Let us be on guard against such insidious . . . (interrupting himself) no, change that to: against such highly disconcerting false teachings. (Short break. He walks behind the desk chair and gradually lapses un- thinkingly into the rhetorical tone of argumentation. ) Let u s not destroy the consciousness o f moral self-deter- mination, of the responsibility of the individual for his own actions, through the misconstrued practical appli- cation . . . (interrupting himself) How did I put it?
Film 157
Kleinchen (reads without emphasis). Let us not destroy the consciousness of moral self-determination, of the responsibility of the
Hailers (interrupting).
individual for his own actions . . .
Through the misconstrued practical application of an intelligent, if you will, but yet highly dubious deduc- tion . . . theoretical deduction. Let us eliminate, as far as possible, the " Constraints of Willpower" from our court proceedingsP40
A highly rhetorical performance, whose refutation begins with Freudian slips and fills all four acts. Hallers's slips alone refute his dicta- tion and his plaint, which turns into complete nonsense in its mechanical reproduction (the gramophone function of all secretaries, from Lindau to Valery). 141 Foucault would have described historical ruptures no less de- risively: justice ceding to medicine, law (with writing as the medium of civil service) ceding to biotechnologies that are media technologies as well. The same year, Senate President Schreber of the Regional Court of Appeals in Dresden disappears into an asylum simply because a "con- spiracy" of psychiatrists "denied" him (a lawyer) "professions, like that of a nerve specialist, that lead to a closer proximity to God. "142 Hence Hallers, too, breaks off his dictation, because "pathologically strained nerves"143 are in dire need of the "testimony of an available nerve spe- cialist and psychiatrist. "144
Professor Feldermann makes a nightly house call, cannot convince his patient of his split personality even by telling of classic case studies, and concludes that his "dull, gnawing headache" is attributable to Hallers's " fall from a horse . . . last fall. " 145 What must remain taboo in Light of Criminality becomes an epistemic matter of course in Guyau's "Memory and Phonograph": consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive. In the depths of his brain engrams, the disciple of free will is listening to the dictates of the unconscious.
That is how the inevitable comes about. What the consciousness of the lawyer denies, his body enacts. The other appears (as does, in Schre- ber's case, a female other: a "sexually dependent woman" who appears in the same position as the president of the senate). 146 Hallers falls asleep as a prosecutor only to wake up immediately as a criminal.