(From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by
permission
of W.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
His psy- chotechnology, instead of merely assuming similarities between film and dreams as does psychoanalysis, can ascribe a film trick to each individual, unconscious mechanism.
Attention, memory, imagination, emotion: they all have their technological correlative.
Naturally, this analysis begins with attention, because in the age of media facts are generally defined by their signal-to-noise ratio. "The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection,"161 which, in turn, can either be voluntary or involuntary. But because voluntary selection would separate spectators from the spell of the medium, it is not considered. What counts is solely whether and how the different arts control involuntary attention and hence "play on the keyboard of our mind. "162 Of
the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit the crime. Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. . . . Everything else sinks into a general vague back- ground, while that one hand shows more and more details. The more we fixate [on] it, the more its clearness and distinctness increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater has there its limits.
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. . . . In the language of the photoplay producer it is a "close- up. " Theclose-uphasobjectifiedinourworldofperceptionourmentalactofat- tention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power ofany theater stage. 163
Miinsterberg's patient gaze, which we have long since unlearned, focuses not for nothing on the revolver: its drum stands at the origin of cinema. When it appears as a close-up, film films involuntary and tech- nological mechanisms at the same time. Close-ups are not just "objec-
Film I63
tivizations" of attention; attention itself appears as the interface of an apparatus.
This is true of all the involuntary mechanisms Miinsterberg investi- gates. Whereas each of the temporal arts, in "the most trivial case," pre- supposes the storage of past events, "the theater can do no more than suggest to our memory this looking backward"-namely, with words, for which "our own material of memory ideas" must "supply the pic- ture [sJ . " 164 In the " slang" and practice of photo artists, by contrast, there are cut-backs or flashbacks, which are "really an objectivation of our memory function. " 165 The same is true of the imagination as unconscious expectation and of associations in general. Aside from flashbacks and flash-forwards, cinematic montage conquers "the whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections. "166 According to the film theory of Bela Balazs, who unknowingly furthered Miinsterberg's work, unconscious processes "can never be rendered so visually in words as in cinematic montage-be they the words of a physician or a poet. Pri- marily because the rhythm of montage can reproduce the original speed of the process of association. (Reading a description takes much longer than the perception of an image). "167
And yet, literature-whose power film infinitely exceeds or "tran- scends," according to Miinsterberg-attempts the impossible. Schnitzler's novellas simulate processes of association in phonographic real time,168 Meyrink's novels in filmic real time. The Golem appears in I9I5 as a dop- pelganger novel in ostensible competition with Ewers's and Lindau's suc- cesses on the screen; as a simulation of film, however, it unknowingly an- ticipates Miinsterberg's theory. Meyrink's framing narrative begins with a nameless I, who is transformed by his half-asleep associations into the doppelganger of the framed story. As if in a flashback, this person, Per- nath, reappears in the Prague ghetto, long since torn down, only to en- counter in turn a Golem who is expressly called Pernath's "negative,"169 that is, the doppelganger of the doppelganger. This iteration of mirror sit- uations, associations, transformations follows the techniques of film so closely that Meyrink's framing narrative even sacrifices the time-honored past tense of the novel to it. It is not just since Gravity's Rainbow that novels have been written in the present tense to suggest the flow of asso- ciation and easy filmability.
Which makes interpretation meaningless and only invites the rewrit- ing of Meyrink's beginning as a screenplay. Well, here is the first chapter (the narrative frame) of The Golem once more, this time in two columns with Miinsterbergian instructions for the camera.
r 64 Film
Fade-out to dream
SLEEP
The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.
As the shape of the new moon begins to dwindle, and its left side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It tor- ments me.
r cannot sleep; r cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that inter- mingle, and penetrate my thought.
Before r went to bed, r had been reading from the life of Buddha; one particular passage now seeks me out and haunts me, drumming its phrases into my ears over and over and over again from the beginning, in every possi- ble permutation and combination:
"A crow flew down to a stone that looked, as it lay, like a lump of fat.
Thought the crow, 'Here is a toothsome morsel for my dining'; but finding it to be nothing of the kind, away it flew again. So do we crows, having drawn near to the stone, even so do we, would-be seekers after truth, aban- don Gautama the Anchorite, so soon as in him we cease to find our pleasure. "
This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat as- sumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain.
r am stumbling along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up smoothed pebbles.
Now they are grayish-blue, coated in a fine, sparkling dust; persistently r grub them up in handfuls, without in the least knowing what use r shall make of them; now they are black, with sulfury spots, like the strivings of a child to create in stone squab, spotty, prehistoric monsters.
r strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes from me, but always they drop out of my
Caption (text)
Close-up (= attention) Moving camera
Close-ups
(= involuntary attention)
Cut-back ( =
Film 165 hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there,
within my sight.
involuntary memory) Whereupon every stone that my life has ever contained seems to rise into existence and compass me around.
Numbers of them labor painfully to raise themselves out of the sand towards the light-like monstrous, slaty- hued crayfish when the tide is at the full-and all rivet their gaze upon me, as though agonizing to tell me tid- ings of infinite importance.
Others, exhausted, fall back spent into their holes, as if once for all abandoning their vain search for words.
Fading
Fade-out to everyday Time and again do I start up from this dim twilight of dreams, and for the reality space of a moment experience once more the moonshine on the end of my billowing counterpane, like a large, flat, bright stone, only to sink blindly back into the realms of semi-consciousness, there to grope and grope in my painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of my memory in the guise of a lump of fat. . . . What happens next I cannot say. Whether, of my own free will, I abandon all resistance; whether they over-
power and stifle me, those thoughts of mine . . .
I only know that my body lies sleeping in its bed, while my mind, no longer part of it, goes forth on its wander- mgs.
Who am I? That is the question I am suddenly beset with a desire to ask; but at the same instant do I become conscious of the fact that I no longer possess any organ to whom this query might be addressed; added to which, I am in mortal terror lest that idiotic voice should reawaken and begin all over again that never-ending business of the stone and the lump of fat.
Fade-out (onto doppelganger) I capitulate. 17o
The Golem begins as film; more precisely, as a silent film. Only films make it possible to present all the mechanisms of madness, to run through chains of associations in real time, and to jump continually from a metaphoric stone at the bedside to a real stone in the ghetto of the dop- pelganger. (Immediately after the capitulation of the "I," Pernath begins his life history in the past tense as the I of the framed story. )
? 166 Film
And only silent films command the robbing of the narrative I of all its organs of speech. In lieu of reflexive introspections we have neurolog- ically pure data flows that are always already films on the retina. All- powerful optical hallucinations can flood and sever a body, and eventu- ally make it into an other. Pernath and Golem, the substitutes of the nar- rative I in the framed story, are the positive and negative of a celluloid ghost.
Fading of consciousness itself . . . simply as a sequence of film tricks.
"Our psychic apparatus reveals itself in these transformations," wrote Balazs. "If fading, distorting, or copying could be executed with- out any specific image, that is, if the technique could be divorced from any particular object, then this 'technique as such' would represent the mind as SUCh. "171
But as Munsterberg demonstrated, the transformation of a psychic apparatus into film-trick transformations is lethal for the mind [Geist] as such. Mathematical equations can be solved in either direction, and the title "psychotechnology" already suggests that film theories based on ex- perimental psychology are at the same time theories of the psyche (soul) based on media technologies. In The Golem, Proust's beloved souvenir in- volontaire becomes a flashback, attention a close-up, association a cut, and so on. Involuntary mechanisms, which hitherto existed only in hu- man experiments, bid their farewell to humans only to populate film stu- dios as the doppelgangers of a deceased soul. One Golem as tripod or muscles, one as celluloid or a retina, one as cut-back or random access memory . . .
Golems, however, possess the level of intelligence of cruise missiles, and not only those in Meyrink's novel or Wegener's film. They can be pro- grammed with conditional jump instructions, that is, first to execute everything conceivable and then to counter the danger of the infinite spi- rals praised by Goethe. Precisely for that reason, in Munsterberg's succinct words, "every dream becomes real" in film. 172 All the historical attributes of a subject who around 1 800 celebrated his or her authenticity under the title literature can around 1900 be replaced or bypassed by Golems, these programmed subjects. And above all, dreams as a poetic attribute.
The romantic novel par excellence, Novalis's Henry von Ofterdingen, programmed the poetic calling of its hero with media-technological pre- cision: as a library-inspired fantasy and a dream of words. As if by chance, Ofterdingen was allowed to discover an illustrated manuscript with neither name nor title, but which dealt "with the wondrous fortunes of a poet. "173 Its pictures "seemed wonderfully familiar to him, and as he
Film r 67
looked more sharply, he discovered a rather clear picture of himself among the figures. He was startled and thought he was dreaming"174- the wonder of the dream was the necessity of the system. In r 8 0 r , the re- cruitment of new authors was, after all, achieved through literarily vague doppelgangers, in whom bibliophile readers could recognize (or not) their similarly unrecordable "Gestalt. " And Ofterdingen promptly decided to merge with the author and hero of the book he found.
This mix-up of speech and dream was programmed at the novel's be- ginning. There Ofterdingen listened to the "stories" of a stranger that told of "the blue flower" that nobody had ever seen or heard of. But because prospective writers needed to be able to change words into optical- acoustic hallucinations, Ofterdingen quickly fell asleep and began dream- ing. Poetic wonder did not wait: words became an image, and the image a subject, Ofterdingen's future beloved.
But what attracted him with great force [in the dream) was a tall, pale blue flower, which stood beside the spring and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. Around this flower were countless others of every hue, and the most deli- cious fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed upon it long with inexpressible tenderness. Finally, when he wanted to approach the flower, it all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening and cuddled up to the growing stem; the flower leaned towards him and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate face hoveredYs
No word, no book, no writer can write what women are. That is why that task was performed during the age of Goethe by poetic dreams, which, with the help of psychotricks, produced an ideal woman and hence a writer from the word "flower. " The trick film (following Miin- sterberg's insight) makes such internal theater of subjects or literate peo- ple as perfect as it is superfluous.
No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the camera they are not difficult. . . . Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on the stage every fair play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which the skill of the experts invents. The divers jump, feet first, out of the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man has sim- ply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real. 176
A medium that turns moonspots into stones or, better still, flowers into girls no longer allows for any psychology. The same machinelike per- fection can make flowers into a so-called I. That is precisely the claim of
168 Film
? Concave mirror
. . . . \ \\\,
- - - - - - - - . . - - - . . . . . . . . '> :. I Plane . . . . .
- - - 7"''::' " ,
,
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
I, . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
. . . . , . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . . . ",. ? y'
Lacan's scheme of the inverted vase.
(From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (C) 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil; English translation (C) 198 8 by Cambridge University Press)
Lacan's theory, which, especially as an anti-psychology, is up to date with contemporary technological developments. The symbolic of letters and numbers, once celebrated as the highest creation of authors or geniuses: a world of computing machines. The real in its random series, once the sub- ject of philosophical statements or even "knowledge": an impossibility that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the future) can bring under their control. Finally, the imaginary, once the dream produced by and coming out of the caverns of the soul: a simple optical trick.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the positivistic "suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photo- graphic apparatus, or something of the kind. "177 Lacan's theory of the imaginary is an attempt truly to "materialize"178 such models. As a result of which, cinema-the repressed of Freud's year at the Salpetriere-re- turns to psychoanalysis. Lacan's optical apparatuses show a complexity that can only derive from cinematic tricks. Step by step, they go beyond the simple mirror and the (mis)recognition that induces in the small child a first but treacherous image of sensory-motoric wholeness.
Following Bouasse's Photometrie of 1934, a concave mirror initially projects the real image of a hidden vase into the same room where, in be- tween x and y, it is expected by its actual flowers. If the optic beams com-
. . . . , . . . . , . . . . ,. .
"
- vs', . . . .
,I ,
,
? Messter's Alabastra Theater.
ing out of the parabola, however, are also deflected by a plane mirror per- pendicular to the eye, then the vase, miraculously filled with flowers, ap- pears to the subject S next to its own, but only virtual, mirror image VS. "That is what happens in man," who first achieves "the organization of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed networks"179 and then lives through his identification with virtual doppelgangers. Nar- cissism is duplicated.
Lacan, however, did not need to search for his optical tricks in the science of Bouasse. Film pioneers, who have always been dreaming of 3 -D cinema without glasses, built apparatuses of a similar nature. In 19 10 Oskar Messter, the founder of the German film industry and the person in charge of all photography and film footage taken at the front during the First World War,180 introduced his Alabastra Theater in Berlin. He re- placed the concave mirror of Bouasse and Lacan with a film projector C
Film 1 69
? 170 Film
that nevertheless had the same function as the mirror: his lenses projected real images of actors that were allowed to act only against the black back- ground of all media-on a screen E located below the stage A. The audi- ence, however, only saw the virtual image of this screen, projected by the plane mirror B. With the result that filmed female dancers appeared on the stage of the Alabastra Theater itself and gave the impression of mov- ing through three dimensions. l S I
"Hence," Lacan said, addressing his seminar participants as well as the audience of the Alabastra Theater, "you are infinitely more than you can imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds-ranging from the microscope to radio and television-that will become elements of your being. "lS2
What's missing now is for the plane mirror B to become a psychoan- alyst and, prompted by the remote control of language that occupies him,183 turn by 90 degrees, so that the subject S sacrifices all its imaginary doppelgangers to the symbolic. Then, three dimensions or media-the nothing called a rose, the illusion of cinema, and discourse-will have been separated in a technologically pure way. The end of psychoanaly- sis/es is depersonalization. ls4
Consequently, Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars, Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television.
Media-technological differentiations opened up the possibility for media links. After the storage capacities for optics, acoustics, and writing had been separated, mechanized, and extensively utilized, their distinct data flows could also be reunited. Physiologically broken down into fragments and physically reconstructed, the central nervous system was resurrected, but as a Golem made of Golems.
Such recombinations became possible no later than the First World War, when media technologies, reaching beyond information storage, be- gan to affect the very transmission of information. Sound film combined the storage of acoustics and optics; shortly thereafter, television combined their transmission. Meanwhile, the text storage apparatus of the type- writer remained an invisible presence, that is to say, in the bureaucratic background. Lacan's final seminars all revolve around possibilities of con- necting and coupling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
Engineers, however, had been planning media links all along. Since everything from sound to light is a wave or a frequency in a quantifiable,
? Film 171
nonhuman time, signal processing i s independent o f any one single medium. Edison perceived this very clearly when he described the de- velopment of his kinetoscope in 1894: "In the year 1887, the idea oc- curred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combi- nation of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. " 1 8 5
Cinema as an add-on to the phonograph-in theory, this applied only to storage and not to the systemic differences between one- and two-di- mensional signal processing; in practice, however, the analogy had far- reaching implications. Edison's Black Mary, the very first film studio, si- multaneously recorded sound and motion, that is, phonographic and kinetographic traces. In other words, sound film preceded silent film. But the synchronization of data streams remained a problem. Whereas in the optical realm, processing was a matter of equidistant scanning, which television was to increase to millions of points per second, in the acoustic dimension processing was based on analogies in a continuous stream of time. As a result, there arose synchronization problems similar to those of goose-stepping French regiments, problems more difficult to amend than Demeny's. Which is why Edison's master-slave relationship was turned on its head, and film, with its controllable time, took the lead. Mass-media research, with stacks of books on film and hardly any on gramophony, followed in its wake.
But pure silent film hardly ever existed. Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche. Acoustic accompaniment in the shape of words and music came out of every fairground, variety show, and circus corner. Wagner pieces like the Liebestod or the "Ride of the Valkyries" posthumously proved that they had been composed as sound tracks. At first, solo piano or harmonium players fought for image- sound synchronicity in movie houses; from 1910 on, so did entire ensem- bles in urban centers. When the literati Diiubler, Pinthus, Werfel, Hasen- clever, Ehrenstein, Zech, and Lasker-Schuler saw The Adventures of Lady Glane in Dessau in 19 1 3 , the "dismal background piano clinking" was "drowned out by the voice of a narrator commenting on the action in a broad Saxon: 'And 'ere on a dark and stormy night we see Lady Glahney . . . "' 1 86 The repulsion in the progressive literati triggered by the Saxon dialect gave rise to their Movie Book. It "incited extensive and far- reaching discussions about the misguided ambitions of the newly emerg- ing silent film to imitate the word- or stage-centered theatrical drama or the ways in which novels use narrative language instead of probing the
172 Film
new and infinite possibilities inherent in moving images, and [Pinthus] raised the question what each of us, if asked to write a script, would come up with. "187
Pinthus et al. thus turned the handicaps of contemporary technology into aesthetics. Sound, language, and even intertitles were all but purged from the literary scripts they (rather unsuccessfully) offered to the film in- dustry. For the medium of silent film as for the writing medium, the guid- ing motto was appropriateness of material. (The fact that the Movie Book itself linked the two was missed by Pinthus. ) As if the differentiation of distinct storage media had called for theoretical overdetermination, early film analyses all stressed l'art pour l'art for the silent film. According to Bloem, "the removal of silence would dissolve the last and most impor- tant barrier protecting films from their complete subjugation to the de- piction of plain reality. An utterly unbridled realism would crush any re- maining touch of stylization that yet characterizes even the most impov- erished film. "188 Even Miinsterberg's psychotechnology discerned insoluble aesthetic rather than mechanical problems in the media link of film and phonograph.
A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theatre, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theatre performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the con- versation of the spoken word is as disturbing as colour would be on the clothing of a marble statue. 189
The "invention of the sound film came down like a landslide" on these theories. In 1930, at the end of the silent film era, Balazs saw "a whole rich culture of visual expression in danger. "19o The International Artists Lodge as well as the Association of German Musicians, the human interfaces of the silent movie palaces, agreed and went even further in their labor dispute, turning Miinsterberg's arguments into a pamphlet "To the Audience! ": "Sound film is badly conserved theater at a higher price! " 19 1
Literature as word art, theater as theater, film as the filmic and radio as the radiophonic: all these catchwords of the 1920S were defensive mea- sures against the approaching media links. "A voluntary restriction of the artist to the technical material at hand-that results in the objective and immutable stylistic laws of his art. "l92 In strict accordance with Mal- larmes model, the filmic and the radiogenic were to import ['art pour ['art
? Film 173
into the optical and acoustic realms. But the radiogenic art o f the radio play was not killed off by the mass-media link of television; already at its birth it was not as wholly independent of the optical as the principle of appropriate material demanded. With its "accelerated dreamlike succes- sion of colorful and rapidly passing, jumping images, its abbreviations and superimpositions-its speed-its change from close-up to long shot with fade-in, fade-out, fade-over," the early radio play "consciously transferred film technology to radio. "193
The reverse passage from sound to image, or from gramophone to film, was taken less consciously, maybe even unconsciously. But only once records emanate from their electric transmission medium of radio does the rayon girl decide to "write her life like a movie. " In Bronnen's Holly- wood novel, Barbara La Marr learns from the record player all the move- ments that will make her a movie star. " We have a gramophone, that's all. Sometimes I dance to it. But that is all I know about large cities and singers and variety shows, of movies and Hollywood. "194 In turn, the gramophone (and some jazz bands) felt compelled to technologically syn- chronize a woman's body: while making love,195 inventing the strip tease,l96 taking screen tests,197 and so on. The future movie star Barbara La Marr was acoustically preprogrammed.
Two entertainment writers with Nobel prizes, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, followed the beaten track. Immediately prior to the in- troduction of sound film, links connecting cinema and gramophone, espe- cially when they stayed in the realm of the fantastic, were the best adver- tisement. Hesse's Steppenwolfculminates in a "Magic Theater," evidently the educated circumscription of a movie theater that uses radio records to produce its optical hallucination. From the "pale cool shimmer" of an "ear" that, as with Bell and Clarke's Ur-telephone, belongs to a corpse, emerges the music of Handel in "a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call radio. " But it is precisely this music that conjures up an optically hal- lucinated Mozart whose interpretation of Handel's music encourages con- sumers to perceive the latter's everlasting value behind the medium. 198 The stage is set for sound tracks.
Thomas Mann could already look back on one film version of Bud- denbrooks when a "very good Berlin producer" approached him in 1927 with plans for turning The Magic Mountain into a movie. Which was
"not surprising" to Mann. Ever since December 28, 1895, when the Lu- mieres presented their cinema projector, non-filmability has been an un- mistakable criterion for literature. "What might not have been made" of
174 Film
entertainment novels, particularly of the "chapter 'Snow,' with its Mediterranean dream of humanity! " 199 Dreams of humans and human- ity, whether the results of meteorological snow or of the powder of the same name, stage the mirror stage and are therefore cinema from the start. 200
The particular human in question, after escaping his dismemberment, embarks on a career in a lung sanatorium. The Magic Mountain already has at its disposal a stereoscope, a kaleidoscope, and, though demoted to the status of an amusing diversion, Marey's cinematographic cylinder. 201 In the end, however, and shortly before the First World War and its trenches, the so-called engineer Castorp also receives a modern Polyhym- nia gramophone, which he proceeds to administer as "an overflowing cor- nucopia of artistic enjoyment. "202 Opportunities for self-advertisement follow swiftly, even though pathology once again stands in for future technology. The sanatorium's own psychoanalyst and spiritualist is un- able to conjure up the spirit of Castorp's deceased cousin until the gramo- phone administrator comes up with the obvious solution. Only when prompted by the phonographic reproduction of his favorite tune does the spirit appear,203 thus revealing this media link to be a sound-film repro- duction. Nothing remains to keep The Magic Mountain from being made into a movie.
Entertainment writers in particular, who insist on playing Goethe even under advanced technological conditions,204 know fully well that Goethe's "writing for girls"205 is no longer sufficient: the girls of the Magic Mountain have deserted to the village movie theatre, their "ignorant red. face[s] . . . twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment. "206
That, too, is a media link, but an ordinary and unassuming one be- neath the dignity of Nobel Prize winners. Since 1 8 80, literature no longer has been able to write for girls, simply because girls themselves write. They are no longer taken by imagining sights and sounds between poetic lines, for at night they are at the movies and during the day they sit at their typewriters. Even the Magic Mountain has as its "business center" a "neat little office" with "a typist busy at her machine. "207
The media link of film and typewriter thoroughly excludes literature. In 1929, the editor and German Communist Party member Rudolf Braune published a miscellany on the empirical sociology of readers in the litera- ture section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Pursuing the question "What They Read," Braune had approached "Three Stenographers" and re- ceived answers that triggered his public outcry: Colette, Ganghofer, Edgar Wallace, Hermann Hesse . . . Not even Braune's desperate attempt to in-
Film 175
terest the three office workers i n literature loyal to the party line met with success. Five weeks later, however, on May 26, 1929, the typists received a boost. Nameless female colleagues wrote or typed letters to the editors and readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, informing them what is different about modern women:
If we stenographers read little or nothing, do you know why? Because at night we are much too tired and exhausted, because to us the rattling of the typewriters, which we have to listen to for eight hours, keeps ringing in our ears throughout the evening, because each word we hear or read breaks down into letters four hours later. That is why we cannot spend evenings other than at the movies or go- ing for walks with our inevitable friend. 20s
Whereas social engagement queries the reception or non-reception of lit- erature in sociological terms, the test subjects respond in technological terms. Typewriters that break down their input into single letters in order to deliver an output in the shape of series and columns of standardized block letters also determine historical modes of reception. As selective as a band-pass filter, the machine positions itself between books and speeches on the one hand and eyes or even ears on the other. As a result, language does not store or transmit any meaning whatsoever for stenog- raphers, only the indigestible materiality of the medium it happens to be. Every night the movie-continuum has to treat the wounds that a discrete machine inflicts upon secretaries during the day. An entanglement of the imaginary and the symbolic. The new media link that excludes literature was nevertheless committed to paper: in the shape of a screenplay that was never filmed. Pinthus's Movie Book printed plain text on cinema, books, and typewriters.
RICHARD A. BERMANN, " LYRE AND TYPEWRITER" ( 19 1 3 )
Returning home from her beloved movies, a swarthy little typist should tell her smiling friend about a movie thus:
Now there's a movie that clearly shows how important we typists are- we who copy and sometimes also occasion your poems. You see, first they showed what you poets are like when we're not around. One of you-with long hair and big tie, lots of attitude for no reason-he's sitting at home chewing on a huge pen. Maybe he's got nothing to eat, and why should he? Is he working? He nervously runs around the room. He writes a verse on a
? 176 Film
piece of paper folded in a funny way. He stands in front of the mirror, re- cites the verse, and admires himself. In a very satisfied mood, he lies down on the sofa. He gets up again and goes on chewing-he can think of ab- solutely nothing. Angrily he rips up the piece of paper. You can tell he feels ignored because he doesn't get anything done. He puts on a romantic coat and hurries to a literary cafe. It's summer, so he can sit outside on the street. Then she walks by-a very blond energetic muse. He quickly calls the waiter and with great ado does not pay for the melange. He hurries after the muse. She takes the tube. As luck has it he's got ten cents left, so he takes a ride too. He approaches her when she leaves the station, but she's not one of those and sends him packing. Well, he still follows her. She enters her house, grabs the elevator key, and takes a ride upstairs. He runs up the stairs like a madman and arrives just as she closes her door. But there's a sign on the door:
MINNIE TIPP
Typing Service Transcription ofLiterary Works D ictation
He rings the bell. The door opens. Minnie Tipp is already typing away. She wants to throw him out but he claims to be a customer with a dictation. He assumes a pose and dictates: "Miss, I love you! " She types it and the writing appears on the white screen. But she throws the scrap of paper at his feet, sits down again, and writes: "I have no time for idle sluggards. Come back when you have some literary work that needs copying. Goodbye ! "
Like, what can he do in the face ofso much virtue? He goes back home really dejected and despairs in front of the mirror. He gets paper, lots of paper, and plans to write like there's no tomorrow. But he can't do any more than chew the pen, which by now is quite short. He reclines on his infamous sofa. Suddenly, the image of Minnie appears-the upright, diligent, ener- getic typist. She shows him a perfectly typed page that reads: "I would love you, too, if you could get some real work done ! " The image vanishes and he returns to his desk. And now, you see, the boy with bow and quiver appears in a dark corner of the room. He darts to the desk at which the brooding poet is sitting and pours a quiver full of ink into his sterile inkwell. Then the boy sits down with crossed legs on the sofa and watches. The poet dips his pen-now it's running all by itself. As soon as the pen touches the paper, it is full of the most beautiful verses and whisked away.
Naturally, this analysis begins with attention, because in the age of media facts are generally defined by their signal-to-noise ratio. "The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection,"161 which, in turn, can either be voluntary or involuntary. But because voluntary selection would separate spectators from the spell of the medium, it is not considered. What counts is solely whether and how the different arts control involuntary attention and hence "play on the keyboard of our mind. "162 Of
the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit the crime. Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. . . . Everything else sinks into a general vague back- ground, while that one hand shows more and more details. The more we fixate [on] it, the more its clearness and distinctness increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater has there its limits.
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. . . . In the language of the photoplay producer it is a "close- up. " Theclose-uphasobjectifiedinourworldofperceptionourmentalactofat- tention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power ofany theater stage. 163
Miinsterberg's patient gaze, which we have long since unlearned, focuses not for nothing on the revolver: its drum stands at the origin of cinema. When it appears as a close-up, film films involuntary and tech- nological mechanisms at the same time. Close-ups are not just "objec-
Film I63
tivizations" of attention; attention itself appears as the interface of an apparatus.
This is true of all the involuntary mechanisms Miinsterberg investi- gates. Whereas each of the temporal arts, in "the most trivial case," pre- supposes the storage of past events, "the theater can do no more than suggest to our memory this looking backward"-namely, with words, for which "our own material of memory ideas" must "supply the pic- ture [sJ . " 164 In the " slang" and practice of photo artists, by contrast, there are cut-backs or flashbacks, which are "really an objectivation of our memory function. " 165 The same is true of the imagination as unconscious expectation and of associations in general. Aside from flashbacks and flash-forwards, cinematic montage conquers "the whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections. "166 According to the film theory of Bela Balazs, who unknowingly furthered Miinsterberg's work, unconscious processes "can never be rendered so visually in words as in cinematic montage-be they the words of a physician or a poet. Pri- marily because the rhythm of montage can reproduce the original speed of the process of association. (Reading a description takes much longer than the perception of an image). "167
And yet, literature-whose power film infinitely exceeds or "tran- scends," according to Miinsterberg-attempts the impossible. Schnitzler's novellas simulate processes of association in phonographic real time,168 Meyrink's novels in filmic real time. The Golem appears in I9I5 as a dop- pelganger novel in ostensible competition with Ewers's and Lindau's suc- cesses on the screen; as a simulation of film, however, it unknowingly an- ticipates Miinsterberg's theory. Meyrink's framing narrative begins with a nameless I, who is transformed by his half-asleep associations into the doppelganger of the framed story. As if in a flashback, this person, Per- nath, reappears in the Prague ghetto, long since torn down, only to en- counter in turn a Golem who is expressly called Pernath's "negative,"169 that is, the doppelganger of the doppelganger. This iteration of mirror sit- uations, associations, transformations follows the techniques of film so closely that Meyrink's framing narrative even sacrifices the time-honored past tense of the novel to it. It is not just since Gravity's Rainbow that novels have been written in the present tense to suggest the flow of asso- ciation and easy filmability.
Which makes interpretation meaningless and only invites the rewrit- ing of Meyrink's beginning as a screenplay. Well, here is the first chapter (the narrative frame) of The Golem once more, this time in two columns with Miinsterbergian instructions for the camera.
r 64 Film
Fade-out to dream
SLEEP
The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.
As the shape of the new moon begins to dwindle, and its left side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It tor- ments me.
r cannot sleep; r cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that inter- mingle, and penetrate my thought.
Before r went to bed, r had been reading from the life of Buddha; one particular passage now seeks me out and haunts me, drumming its phrases into my ears over and over and over again from the beginning, in every possi- ble permutation and combination:
"A crow flew down to a stone that looked, as it lay, like a lump of fat.
Thought the crow, 'Here is a toothsome morsel for my dining'; but finding it to be nothing of the kind, away it flew again. So do we crows, having drawn near to the stone, even so do we, would-be seekers after truth, aban- don Gautama the Anchorite, so soon as in him we cease to find our pleasure. "
This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat as- sumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain.
r am stumbling along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up smoothed pebbles.
Now they are grayish-blue, coated in a fine, sparkling dust; persistently r grub them up in handfuls, without in the least knowing what use r shall make of them; now they are black, with sulfury spots, like the strivings of a child to create in stone squab, spotty, prehistoric monsters.
r strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes from me, but always they drop out of my
Caption (text)
Close-up (= attention) Moving camera
Close-ups
(= involuntary attention)
Cut-back ( =
Film 165 hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there,
within my sight.
involuntary memory) Whereupon every stone that my life has ever contained seems to rise into existence and compass me around.
Numbers of them labor painfully to raise themselves out of the sand towards the light-like monstrous, slaty- hued crayfish when the tide is at the full-and all rivet their gaze upon me, as though agonizing to tell me tid- ings of infinite importance.
Others, exhausted, fall back spent into their holes, as if once for all abandoning their vain search for words.
Fading
Fade-out to everyday Time and again do I start up from this dim twilight of dreams, and for the reality space of a moment experience once more the moonshine on the end of my billowing counterpane, like a large, flat, bright stone, only to sink blindly back into the realms of semi-consciousness, there to grope and grope in my painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of my memory in the guise of a lump of fat. . . . What happens next I cannot say. Whether, of my own free will, I abandon all resistance; whether they over-
power and stifle me, those thoughts of mine . . .
I only know that my body lies sleeping in its bed, while my mind, no longer part of it, goes forth on its wander- mgs.
Who am I? That is the question I am suddenly beset with a desire to ask; but at the same instant do I become conscious of the fact that I no longer possess any organ to whom this query might be addressed; added to which, I am in mortal terror lest that idiotic voice should reawaken and begin all over again that never-ending business of the stone and the lump of fat.
Fade-out (onto doppelganger) I capitulate. 17o
The Golem begins as film; more precisely, as a silent film. Only films make it possible to present all the mechanisms of madness, to run through chains of associations in real time, and to jump continually from a metaphoric stone at the bedside to a real stone in the ghetto of the dop- pelganger. (Immediately after the capitulation of the "I," Pernath begins his life history in the past tense as the I of the framed story. )
? 166 Film
And only silent films command the robbing of the narrative I of all its organs of speech. In lieu of reflexive introspections we have neurolog- ically pure data flows that are always already films on the retina. All- powerful optical hallucinations can flood and sever a body, and eventu- ally make it into an other. Pernath and Golem, the substitutes of the nar- rative I in the framed story, are the positive and negative of a celluloid ghost.
Fading of consciousness itself . . . simply as a sequence of film tricks.
"Our psychic apparatus reveals itself in these transformations," wrote Balazs. "If fading, distorting, or copying could be executed with- out any specific image, that is, if the technique could be divorced from any particular object, then this 'technique as such' would represent the mind as SUCh. "171
But as Munsterberg demonstrated, the transformation of a psychic apparatus into film-trick transformations is lethal for the mind [Geist] as such. Mathematical equations can be solved in either direction, and the title "psychotechnology" already suggests that film theories based on ex- perimental psychology are at the same time theories of the psyche (soul) based on media technologies. In The Golem, Proust's beloved souvenir in- volontaire becomes a flashback, attention a close-up, association a cut, and so on. Involuntary mechanisms, which hitherto existed only in hu- man experiments, bid their farewell to humans only to populate film stu- dios as the doppelgangers of a deceased soul. One Golem as tripod or muscles, one as celluloid or a retina, one as cut-back or random access memory . . .
Golems, however, possess the level of intelligence of cruise missiles, and not only those in Meyrink's novel or Wegener's film. They can be pro- grammed with conditional jump instructions, that is, first to execute everything conceivable and then to counter the danger of the infinite spi- rals praised by Goethe. Precisely for that reason, in Munsterberg's succinct words, "every dream becomes real" in film. 172 All the historical attributes of a subject who around 1 800 celebrated his or her authenticity under the title literature can around 1900 be replaced or bypassed by Golems, these programmed subjects. And above all, dreams as a poetic attribute.
The romantic novel par excellence, Novalis's Henry von Ofterdingen, programmed the poetic calling of its hero with media-technological pre- cision: as a library-inspired fantasy and a dream of words. As if by chance, Ofterdingen was allowed to discover an illustrated manuscript with neither name nor title, but which dealt "with the wondrous fortunes of a poet. "173 Its pictures "seemed wonderfully familiar to him, and as he
Film r 67
looked more sharply, he discovered a rather clear picture of himself among the figures. He was startled and thought he was dreaming"174- the wonder of the dream was the necessity of the system. In r 8 0 r , the re- cruitment of new authors was, after all, achieved through literarily vague doppelgangers, in whom bibliophile readers could recognize (or not) their similarly unrecordable "Gestalt. " And Ofterdingen promptly decided to merge with the author and hero of the book he found.
This mix-up of speech and dream was programmed at the novel's be- ginning. There Ofterdingen listened to the "stories" of a stranger that told of "the blue flower" that nobody had ever seen or heard of. But because prospective writers needed to be able to change words into optical- acoustic hallucinations, Ofterdingen quickly fell asleep and began dream- ing. Poetic wonder did not wait: words became an image, and the image a subject, Ofterdingen's future beloved.
But what attracted him with great force [in the dream) was a tall, pale blue flower, which stood beside the spring and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. Around this flower were countless others of every hue, and the most deli- cious fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed upon it long with inexpressible tenderness. Finally, when he wanted to approach the flower, it all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening and cuddled up to the growing stem; the flower leaned towards him and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate face hoveredYs
No word, no book, no writer can write what women are. That is why that task was performed during the age of Goethe by poetic dreams, which, with the help of psychotricks, produced an ideal woman and hence a writer from the word "flower. " The trick film (following Miin- sterberg's insight) makes such internal theater of subjects or literate peo- ple as perfect as it is superfluous.
No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the camera they are not difficult. . . . Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on the stage every fair play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which the skill of the experts invents. The divers jump, feet first, out of the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man has sim- ply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real. 176
A medium that turns moonspots into stones or, better still, flowers into girls no longer allows for any psychology. The same machinelike per- fection can make flowers into a so-called I. That is precisely the claim of
168 Film
? Concave mirror
. . . . \ \\\,
- - - - - - - - . . - - - . . . . . . . . '> :. I Plane . . . . .
- - - 7"''::' " ,
,
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
I, . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
. . . . , . . . . ,
. . . .
. . . . ,
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . . . ",. ? y'
Lacan's scheme of the inverted vase.
(From Lacan 1988a, 139; reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (C) 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil; English translation (C) 198 8 by Cambridge University Press)
Lacan's theory, which, especially as an anti-psychology, is up to date with contemporary technological developments. The symbolic of letters and numbers, once celebrated as the highest creation of authors or geniuses: a world of computing machines. The real in its random series, once the sub- ject of philosophical statements or even "knowledge": an impossibility that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the future) can bring under their control. Finally, the imaginary, once the dream produced by and coming out of the caverns of the soul: a simple optical trick.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the positivistic "suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photo- graphic apparatus, or something of the kind. "177 Lacan's theory of the imaginary is an attempt truly to "materialize"178 such models. As a result of which, cinema-the repressed of Freud's year at the Salpetriere-re- turns to psychoanalysis. Lacan's optical apparatuses show a complexity that can only derive from cinematic tricks. Step by step, they go beyond the simple mirror and the (mis)recognition that induces in the small child a first but treacherous image of sensory-motoric wholeness.
Following Bouasse's Photometrie of 1934, a concave mirror initially projects the real image of a hidden vase into the same room where, in be- tween x and y, it is expected by its actual flowers. If the optic beams com-
. . . . , . . . . , . . . . ,. .
"
- vs', . . . .
,I ,
,
? Messter's Alabastra Theater.
ing out of the parabola, however, are also deflected by a plane mirror per- pendicular to the eye, then the vase, miraculously filled with flowers, ap- pears to the subject S next to its own, but only virtual, mirror image VS. "That is what happens in man," who first achieves "the organization of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed networks"179 and then lives through his identification with virtual doppelgangers. Nar- cissism is duplicated.
Lacan, however, did not need to search for his optical tricks in the science of Bouasse. Film pioneers, who have always been dreaming of 3 -D cinema without glasses, built apparatuses of a similar nature. In 19 10 Oskar Messter, the founder of the German film industry and the person in charge of all photography and film footage taken at the front during the First World War,180 introduced his Alabastra Theater in Berlin. He re- placed the concave mirror of Bouasse and Lacan with a film projector C
Film 1 69
? 170 Film
that nevertheless had the same function as the mirror: his lenses projected real images of actors that were allowed to act only against the black back- ground of all media-on a screen E located below the stage A. The audi- ence, however, only saw the virtual image of this screen, projected by the plane mirror B. With the result that filmed female dancers appeared on the stage of the Alabastra Theater itself and gave the impression of mov- ing through three dimensions. l S I
"Hence," Lacan said, addressing his seminar participants as well as the audience of the Alabastra Theater, "you are infinitely more than you can imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds-ranging from the microscope to radio and television-that will become elements of your being. "lS2
What's missing now is for the plane mirror B to become a psychoan- alyst and, prompted by the remote control of language that occupies him,183 turn by 90 degrees, so that the subject S sacrifices all its imaginary doppelgangers to the symbolic. Then, three dimensions or media-the nothing called a rose, the illusion of cinema, and discourse-will have been separated in a technologically pure way. The end of psychoanaly- sis/es is depersonalization. ls4
Consequently, Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars, Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television.
Media-technological differentiations opened up the possibility for media links. After the storage capacities for optics, acoustics, and writing had been separated, mechanized, and extensively utilized, their distinct data flows could also be reunited. Physiologically broken down into fragments and physically reconstructed, the central nervous system was resurrected, but as a Golem made of Golems.
Such recombinations became possible no later than the First World War, when media technologies, reaching beyond information storage, be- gan to affect the very transmission of information. Sound film combined the storage of acoustics and optics; shortly thereafter, television combined their transmission. Meanwhile, the text storage apparatus of the type- writer remained an invisible presence, that is to say, in the bureaucratic background. Lacan's final seminars all revolve around possibilities of con- necting and coupling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
Engineers, however, had been planning media links all along. Since everything from sound to light is a wave or a frequency in a quantifiable,
? Film 171
nonhuman time, signal processing i s independent o f any one single medium. Edison perceived this very clearly when he described the de- velopment of his kinetoscope in 1894: "In the year 1887, the idea oc- curred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combi- nation of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. " 1 8 5
Cinema as an add-on to the phonograph-in theory, this applied only to storage and not to the systemic differences between one- and two-di- mensional signal processing; in practice, however, the analogy had far- reaching implications. Edison's Black Mary, the very first film studio, si- multaneously recorded sound and motion, that is, phonographic and kinetographic traces. In other words, sound film preceded silent film. But the synchronization of data streams remained a problem. Whereas in the optical realm, processing was a matter of equidistant scanning, which television was to increase to millions of points per second, in the acoustic dimension processing was based on analogies in a continuous stream of time. As a result, there arose synchronization problems similar to those of goose-stepping French regiments, problems more difficult to amend than Demeny's. Which is why Edison's master-slave relationship was turned on its head, and film, with its controllable time, took the lead. Mass-media research, with stacks of books on film and hardly any on gramophony, followed in its wake.
But pure silent film hardly ever existed. Wherever media were unable to connect, human interfaces filled the niche. Acoustic accompaniment in the shape of words and music came out of every fairground, variety show, and circus corner. Wagner pieces like the Liebestod or the "Ride of the Valkyries" posthumously proved that they had been composed as sound tracks. At first, solo piano or harmonium players fought for image- sound synchronicity in movie houses; from 1910 on, so did entire ensem- bles in urban centers. When the literati Diiubler, Pinthus, Werfel, Hasen- clever, Ehrenstein, Zech, and Lasker-Schuler saw The Adventures of Lady Glane in Dessau in 19 1 3 , the "dismal background piano clinking" was "drowned out by the voice of a narrator commenting on the action in a broad Saxon: 'And 'ere on a dark and stormy night we see Lady Glahney . . . "' 1 86 The repulsion in the progressive literati triggered by the Saxon dialect gave rise to their Movie Book. It "incited extensive and far- reaching discussions about the misguided ambitions of the newly emerg- ing silent film to imitate the word- or stage-centered theatrical drama or the ways in which novels use narrative language instead of probing the
172 Film
new and infinite possibilities inherent in moving images, and [Pinthus] raised the question what each of us, if asked to write a script, would come up with. "187
Pinthus et al. thus turned the handicaps of contemporary technology into aesthetics. Sound, language, and even intertitles were all but purged from the literary scripts they (rather unsuccessfully) offered to the film in- dustry. For the medium of silent film as for the writing medium, the guid- ing motto was appropriateness of material. (The fact that the Movie Book itself linked the two was missed by Pinthus. ) As if the differentiation of distinct storage media had called for theoretical overdetermination, early film analyses all stressed l'art pour l'art for the silent film. According to Bloem, "the removal of silence would dissolve the last and most impor- tant barrier protecting films from their complete subjugation to the de- piction of plain reality. An utterly unbridled realism would crush any re- maining touch of stylization that yet characterizes even the most impov- erished film. "188 Even Miinsterberg's psychotechnology discerned insoluble aesthetic rather than mechanical problems in the media link of film and phonograph.
A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theatre, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theatre performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the con- versation of the spoken word is as disturbing as colour would be on the clothing of a marble statue. 189
The "invention of the sound film came down like a landslide" on these theories. In 1930, at the end of the silent film era, Balazs saw "a whole rich culture of visual expression in danger. "19o The International Artists Lodge as well as the Association of German Musicians, the human interfaces of the silent movie palaces, agreed and went even further in their labor dispute, turning Miinsterberg's arguments into a pamphlet "To the Audience! ": "Sound film is badly conserved theater at a higher price! " 19 1
Literature as word art, theater as theater, film as the filmic and radio as the radiophonic: all these catchwords of the 1920S were defensive mea- sures against the approaching media links. "A voluntary restriction of the artist to the technical material at hand-that results in the objective and immutable stylistic laws of his art. "l92 In strict accordance with Mal- larmes model, the filmic and the radiogenic were to import ['art pour ['art
? Film 173
into the optical and acoustic realms. But the radiogenic art o f the radio play was not killed off by the mass-media link of television; already at its birth it was not as wholly independent of the optical as the principle of appropriate material demanded. With its "accelerated dreamlike succes- sion of colorful and rapidly passing, jumping images, its abbreviations and superimpositions-its speed-its change from close-up to long shot with fade-in, fade-out, fade-over," the early radio play "consciously transferred film technology to radio. "193
The reverse passage from sound to image, or from gramophone to film, was taken less consciously, maybe even unconsciously. But only once records emanate from their electric transmission medium of radio does the rayon girl decide to "write her life like a movie. " In Bronnen's Holly- wood novel, Barbara La Marr learns from the record player all the move- ments that will make her a movie star. " We have a gramophone, that's all. Sometimes I dance to it. But that is all I know about large cities and singers and variety shows, of movies and Hollywood. "194 In turn, the gramophone (and some jazz bands) felt compelled to technologically syn- chronize a woman's body: while making love,195 inventing the strip tease,l96 taking screen tests,197 and so on. The future movie star Barbara La Marr was acoustically preprogrammed.
Two entertainment writers with Nobel prizes, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, followed the beaten track. Immediately prior to the in- troduction of sound film, links connecting cinema and gramophone, espe- cially when they stayed in the realm of the fantastic, were the best adver- tisement. Hesse's Steppenwolfculminates in a "Magic Theater," evidently the educated circumscription of a movie theater that uses radio records to produce its optical hallucination. From the "pale cool shimmer" of an "ear" that, as with Bell and Clarke's Ur-telephone, belongs to a corpse, emerges the music of Handel in "a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call radio. " But it is precisely this music that conjures up an optically hal- lucinated Mozart whose interpretation of Handel's music encourages con- sumers to perceive the latter's everlasting value behind the medium. 198 The stage is set for sound tracks.
Thomas Mann could already look back on one film version of Bud- denbrooks when a "very good Berlin producer" approached him in 1927 with plans for turning The Magic Mountain into a movie. Which was
"not surprising" to Mann. Ever since December 28, 1895, when the Lu- mieres presented their cinema projector, non-filmability has been an un- mistakable criterion for literature. "What might not have been made" of
174 Film
entertainment novels, particularly of the "chapter 'Snow,' with its Mediterranean dream of humanity! " 199 Dreams of humans and human- ity, whether the results of meteorological snow or of the powder of the same name, stage the mirror stage and are therefore cinema from the start. 200
The particular human in question, after escaping his dismemberment, embarks on a career in a lung sanatorium. The Magic Mountain already has at its disposal a stereoscope, a kaleidoscope, and, though demoted to the status of an amusing diversion, Marey's cinematographic cylinder. 201 In the end, however, and shortly before the First World War and its trenches, the so-called engineer Castorp also receives a modern Polyhym- nia gramophone, which he proceeds to administer as "an overflowing cor- nucopia of artistic enjoyment. "202 Opportunities for self-advertisement follow swiftly, even though pathology once again stands in for future technology. The sanatorium's own psychoanalyst and spiritualist is un- able to conjure up the spirit of Castorp's deceased cousin until the gramo- phone administrator comes up with the obvious solution. Only when prompted by the phonographic reproduction of his favorite tune does the spirit appear,203 thus revealing this media link to be a sound-film repro- duction. Nothing remains to keep The Magic Mountain from being made into a movie.
Entertainment writers in particular, who insist on playing Goethe even under advanced technological conditions,204 know fully well that Goethe's "writing for girls"205 is no longer sufficient: the girls of the Magic Mountain have deserted to the village movie theatre, their "ignorant red. face[s] . . . twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment. "206
That, too, is a media link, but an ordinary and unassuming one be- neath the dignity of Nobel Prize winners. Since 1 8 80, literature no longer has been able to write for girls, simply because girls themselves write. They are no longer taken by imagining sights and sounds between poetic lines, for at night they are at the movies and during the day they sit at their typewriters. Even the Magic Mountain has as its "business center" a "neat little office" with "a typist busy at her machine. "207
The media link of film and typewriter thoroughly excludes literature. In 1929, the editor and German Communist Party member Rudolf Braune published a miscellany on the empirical sociology of readers in the litera- ture section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Pursuing the question "What They Read," Braune had approached "Three Stenographers" and re- ceived answers that triggered his public outcry: Colette, Ganghofer, Edgar Wallace, Hermann Hesse . . . Not even Braune's desperate attempt to in-
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terest the three office workers i n literature loyal to the party line met with success. Five weeks later, however, on May 26, 1929, the typists received a boost. Nameless female colleagues wrote or typed letters to the editors and readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, informing them what is different about modern women:
If we stenographers read little or nothing, do you know why? Because at night we are much too tired and exhausted, because to us the rattling of the typewriters, which we have to listen to for eight hours, keeps ringing in our ears throughout the evening, because each word we hear or read breaks down into letters four hours later. That is why we cannot spend evenings other than at the movies or go- ing for walks with our inevitable friend. 20s
Whereas social engagement queries the reception or non-reception of lit- erature in sociological terms, the test subjects respond in technological terms. Typewriters that break down their input into single letters in order to deliver an output in the shape of series and columns of standardized block letters also determine historical modes of reception. As selective as a band-pass filter, the machine positions itself between books and speeches on the one hand and eyes or even ears on the other. As a result, language does not store or transmit any meaning whatsoever for stenog- raphers, only the indigestible materiality of the medium it happens to be. Every night the movie-continuum has to treat the wounds that a discrete machine inflicts upon secretaries during the day. An entanglement of the imaginary and the symbolic. The new media link that excludes literature was nevertheless committed to paper: in the shape of a screenplay that was never filmed. Pinthus's Movie Book printed plain text on cinema, books, and typewriters.
RICHARD A. BERMANN, " LYRE AND TYPEWRITER" ( 19 1 3 )
Returning home from her beloved movies, a swarthy little typist should tell her smiling friend about a movie thus:
Now there's a movie that clearly shows how important we typists are- we who copy and sometimes also occasion your poems. You see, first they showed what you poets are like when we're not around. One of you-with long hair and big tie, lots of attitude for no reason-he's sitting at home chewing on a huge pen. Maybe he's got nothing to eat, and why should he? Is he working? He nervously runs around the room. He writes a verse on a
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piece of paper folded in a funny way. He stands in front of the mirror, re- cites the verse, and admires himself. In a very satisfied mood, he lies down on the sofa. He gets up again and goes on chewing-he can think of ab- solutely nothing. Angrily he rips up the piece of paper. You can tell he feels ignored because he doesn't get anything done. He puts on a romantic coat and hurries to a literary cafe. It's summer, so he can sit outside on the street. Then she walks by-a very blond energetic muse. He quickly calls the waiter and with great ado does not pay for the melange. He hurries after the muse. She takes the tube. As luck has it he's got ten cents left, so he takes a ride too. He approaches her when she leaves the station, but she's not one of those and sends him packing. Well, he still follows her. She enters her house, grabs the elevator key, and takes a ride upstairs. He runs up the stairs like a madman and arrives just as she closes her door. But there's a sign on the door:
MINNIE TIPP
Typing Service Transcription ofLiterary Works D ictation
He rings the bell. The door opens. Minnie Tipp is already typing away. She wants to throw him out but he claims to be a customer with a dictation. He assumes a pose and dictates: "Miss, I love you! " She types it and the writing appears on the white screen. But she throws the scrap of paper at his feet, sits down again, and writes: "I have no time for idle sluggards. Come back when you have some literary work that needs copying. Goodbye ! "
Like, what can he do in the face ofso much virtue? He goes back home really dejected and despairs in front of the mirror. He gets paper, lots of paper, and plans to write like there's no tomorrow. But he can't do any more than chew the pen, which by now is quite short. He reclines on his infamous sofa. Suddenly, the image of Minnie appears-the upright, diligent, ener- getic typist. She shows him a perfectly typed page that reads: "I would love you, too, if you could get some real work done ! " The image vanishes and he returns to his desk. And now, you see, the boy with bow and quiver appears in a dark corner of the room. He darts to the desk at which the brooding poet is sitting and pours a quiver full of ink into his sterile inkwell. Then the boy sits down with crossed legs on the sofa and watches. The poet dips his pen-now it's running all by itself. As soon as the pen touches the paper, it is full of the most beautiful verses and whisked away.
