Our
attention
is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
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. His movements become "automaton-like,"147 "strained," "belabored and heavy, as if against his Will. "148 Consequently, the other is (as in Caligari's case) the same once again, but this time as a cinematographic guinea pig. "A bur- glar" 149 has possessed the civil servant / person and, consequently, plans
158 Film
to break in to Hallers's own villa together with some crooks from Berlin. For whereas the lawyer half of his split personality surmises darkly only that "I no longer am I am,"! 50 the criminal half proudly announces, in the unparalleled phrase of Yahweh, "I am . . . what I am. "! 5! As in all cases of split personality since Dr. Azam's Felida and Wagner's Kundry, uncon- scious knowledge overreaches conscious knowledge, not the other way round. ! 52 The other, with all of his complications, knows and steals from Hallers's villa, while the prosecutor (who returns as such after falling asleep a second time) only appears as an unintentional comedian when he interrogates his accomplice. It is not until he is confronted with Professor Feldermann's knowledge of psychiatry that he is brought up to par on contemporary developments and brought to his renunciation of all unre- strained willpower in the civil-service sector. A happy ending, not least because Hallers is rewarded with a bourgeois girl as well.
However, the exponential burglar, who invades both the personality and the villa of the lawyer, loves not the bourgeois girl but rather her maid (or stenotypist, had Lindau written a couple of years later), who was let go for disgraceful behavior. The civil-service domain of 1900 dreams, in terms criminal and erotic, male and female, of all its underbel- lies and doppelgangers. This dream, however, resides precisely in the mid- dle ground between film and anthropometries. The only indication that both sides of Hallers's double life are relayed is a photograph of the wait- ress Amalie. He receives the photograph as a criminal and finds it again, having changed back into the prosecutor, in his jacket pocket, at which point he can (following Bertillon) identify the woman he worships at night. But this photo materializes in the imaginary, even before the first transformation, during Feldermann's diagnosis.
Feldermann.
HaIlers . Feldermann.
HaIlers (reluctantly).
Feldermann. Hallers.
Are your dreaming at all? Ye s
Of what?
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.
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. His movements become "automaton-like,"147 "strained," "belabored and heavy, as if against his Will. "148 Consequently, the other is (as in Caligari's case) the same once again, but this time as a cinematographic guinea pig. "A bur- glar" 149 has possessed the civil servant / person and, consequently, plans
158 Film
to break in to Hallers's own villa together with some crooks from Berlin. For whereas the lawyer half of his split personality surmises darkly only that "I no longer am I am,"! 50 the criminal half proudly announces, in the unparalleled phrase of Yahweh, "I am . . . what I am. "! 5! As in all cases of split personality since Dr. Azam's Felida and Wagner's Kundry, uncon- scious knowledge overreaches conscious knowledge, not the other way round. ! 52 The other, with all of his complications, knows and steals from Hallers's villa, while the prosecutor (who returns as such after falling asleep a second time) only appears as an unintentional comedian when he interrogates his accomplice. It is not until he is confronted with Professor Feldermann's knowledge of psychiatry that he is brought up to par on contemporary developments and brought to his renunciation of all unre- strained willpower in the civil-service sector. A happy ending, not least because Hallers is rewarded with a bourgeois girl as well.
However, the exponential burglar, who invades both the personality and the villa of the lawyer, loves not the bourgeois girl but rather her maid (or stenotypist, had Lindau written a couple of years later), who was let go for disgraceful behavior. The civil-service domain of 1900 dreams, in terms criminal and erotic, male and female, of all its underbel- lies and doppelgangers. This dream, however, resides precisely in the mid- dle ground between film and anthropometries. The only indication that both sides of Hallers's double life are relayed is a photograph of the wait- ress Amalie. He receives the photograph as a criminal and finds it again, having changed back into the prosecutor, in his jacket pocket, at which point he can (following Bertillon) identify the woman he worships at night. But this photo materializes in the imaginary, even before the first transformation, during Feldermann's diagnosis.
Feldermann.
HaIlers . Feldermann.
HaIlers (reluctantly).
Feldermann. Hallers.
Are your dreaming at all? Ye s
Of what?
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.
