CHAPTER 1
Movement, Fragmentation, and the Uncanny
The body in films is also moments, intensities, outside a single constant unity of the body as a whole, the property of a some one; films are full of fragments, bits of bodies, gestures, desirable traces, fetish points ... —Stephen Heath
Early speculations concerning the nature of film hovered uneasily around the subject of movement, around issues of life and lifelessness, body and soul, the fantastic and the uncanny effect. "The essence of cinema," Georg Lukács wrote in 1913, "is movement itself," and he was already reflecting a widespread belief. Earlier, a Grand Café program advertising films by the Lumière brothers describes in detail what these films record, namely, "all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen." Wildly affirmative of cinema, in which he saw the basis of all new directions in the arts, the Expressionist poet Yvan Goll proclaimed in 1920 that cinematic movement would have the catalytic effect of ozone or radium upon all media and genres, which for the moment were "dead and mute." With Viking Eggeling and perhaps Hans Arp in mind, GoIl speculated that the future would soon bring Kinomalerei or "movie-painting" into existence. A year earlier, another German writer, Carl Hauptmann, theorizing about Rodin against the historical backdrop of the Laocoön controversy, made the claim that sculpture's manifest desire to suggest movement—indeed, the desire of all of the visual arts to transcend the moment—could now be realized in cinema.
But the introduction of movement into the realm of visual representation was thought to have negative consequences also. Cinematic bodies—the human figures subjected to motion in films—were generally perceived as attenuated, as "merely" the sum of their actions and movements, and were often contrasted negatively with so-called theatrical bodies. Eleonora Duse's is a frequently cited example of the stage actor's body, the theatrical body capable of projecting "full presence" or "soul," or—as even Lukács put it—a body in which being and acting were indissolubly one. As observed in theatrical performances, the actor's body was thought to be redolent of fate, mystery, and tragedy, whereas, according to Lukács, bodies in films should not even be considered human, but rather as constituting life of a wholly new and fantastic kind. Thus, cinematic representations of the human body were adjudged to be unmetaphysical and soulless, to constitute one-dimensional creatures whose life is one of pure surface—to be somehow monstrous, unnatural, precisely because visual representations, whose stillness the limits of technology had made to seem natural, were now capable of being subjected to movement. Still, Lukács's reading differs from some insofar as he felt that the cinematic representation of human beings ought not to be perceived as inadequate, as founded upon a lack, but rather simply as a consequence of the principium stilisationis of cinema. According to Lukács, neither fate nor causality determines cinematic life; since, he believes, movement alone constitutes or defines the cinema, he is able to argue that while the human figures represented on the screen may have lost their souls, they have precisely for this reason regained their bodies.
During this period of silent cinema, it comes as no surprise that the body language of pantomime and gesture occupied a central position in the discussion concerning the place of film with regard to the established arts. For some, the presence of the body on stage, contrasted with its actual absence from the cinematic frame, ensures the primacy of even theatrical pantomime over film, not to mention the primacy of drama, with its access to the spoken word. Others, like Carl Hauptmann, claim that the human soul is best expressed in body language, seeing in the foregrounding of gesture (Gebärde) a primal, privileged domain of signification available to film. Usually, however, it is suggested that the silent cinema's muteness—and even the facial expression of cinematic figures, whether exaggerated or blank and, in either case, mask-like—contributes to the uncanniness and "soullessness" of its figures. It is this effect, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, that Charlie Chaplin uses to such advantage; his "mask of uninvolvement" makes Chaplin into a "marionette in a fair sideshow." Contributing to this marionette-like effect are Chaplin's body movements, his "exercises in fragmentation," as Miriam Hansen puts it; utterly self-conscious about the effects of the cinematic apparatus on the representation of his body, Chaplin is the film actor par excellence who, by "chopping up expressive body movement into a sequence of minute mechanical impulses ... renders the law of the apparatus visible as the law of human movement." But Chaplin's recuperative strategy of exposing the fragmentation imposed upon the body by cinema was a personal solution to a perceived threat, not a strategy that could find universal application.
Unnatural Conjunctions: The Heterogeneous Text
In 1916, Paul Wegener's lecture, "The Artistic Possibilities of the Cinema," with its emphasis on the "kinetic lyricism" of the cinema and on the play of pure motion for its own sake, established him as a forerunner among the artists and filmmakers—including Hans Richter—who would develop the abstract film in Germany. Wegener's interest is in what he calls the "fantastic domain" of "optical lyricism," a term perhaps not as far from Gilles Deleuze's concept of the "movement-image" as the nearly seventy years that separate their two texts might suggest; for Deleuze, too, the lure of filmmaking lies in the possibility of reproducing pure movement "extracted from bodies or moving things," movement as a function of a series of equidistant instants reproduced in a sequence of shots. Not surprisingly, it was the tantalizing implication of movement suggested by series photography—comic photographs of a man fencing with himself and playing cards alone—that originally drew Wegener to the cinematic medium in 1913, and that, at one and the same time, suggested to him the suitability of the cinema for transmitting the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
The significance of series photography to the development of cinema is well documented. In the United States, Eadweard Muybridge published photo sequences to illustrate his studies of animal locomotion, and was already using an invention of his own, the zoopraxiscope, to project short sequences during his lectures in 1880. Thus living bodies, especially human figures, came to be linked with movement—indeed, were vehicles for portraying movement—in series photography from its very inception. It is probable that the images of the fencer that Wegener saw were very much like those produced by Muybridge, and that they demonstrated the graceful postures assumed by the human body while fencing, postures that the camera could record in sequence. What Wegener saw additionally, however, is the absence of an opponent in these photographs, prompting him to make the connection between this uncanny absence in the photographic frame and the potential of film to express uncanny effects. We shall return to the nature of these effects later.
While I shall be concerned here with the conjunction of Wegener's interest in cinematic motion and his representation of the body by means of what Deleuze calls the "fixed primitive image," it is nevertheless clear that Wegener's interest in itself is of a more abstract order. There is one particular aspect of the fascination with the play of shapes dissolving into one another, with motion subjected to temporal rhythms such as that found in the films of Richter, that fixes Wegener's attention, and that is the possibility of conjoining the natural with the artificial: "I can imagine," he writes, "a kind of cinema which would use nothing but moving surfaces, against which there would impinge events that would still participate in the natural world but transcend the lines and volumes of the natural." The images produced by the conjunction of the organic and the inorganic—of the natural or "living" and the artificial or "dead"—could, by means of the camera and of montage, become moving images emphasized as such. For Wegener, it is pure motion, divorced from the actual status of the object as inherently animate or inanimate that is of interest—the kind of motion, in other words, that cinema is innately capable of rendering. Further examples that Wegener puts forward—as when he suggests that "microscopic particles of fermenting chemical substances could be filmed together with small plants of various sizes"—strongly confirm the impression that the ontological status of such composite images, liberated from the binary link of being to life and nonbeing to death, is at least in part the object of his fascination. It is, furthermore, precisely the potential for such a juxtaposition of natural and artifical in Hanns Heinz Ewers's script for The Student of Prague that Wegener claims to have found so compelling: "The Student of Prague, with its strange mixture of the natural and artificial ... interested me enormously."
The pairing and the permutations of the natural and artificial take on a particular resonance for this film on several levels, including, of course, the thematic one (to be pursued later) that is suggested by the various "supernatural" elements of the plot. Intriguingly, it finds expression in the manner in which the film is an assemblage of varying spaces, spaces that, while not atypical of films of this period, do not often coexist jarringly in later narrative cinema. Kracauer's distinction, in Theory of Film, between the "two tendencies" of cinema—the "Lumière tendency," with its documentary interest in the natural, recording the details of the physical world, and the "Méliès tendency," with its formative interest in the artificial, in theatrical vision—is illustrated aptly by several different sequences of The Student of Prague, pointing to the way in which the cinema, in its desire for a uniquely cinematic space, appropriates the spaces and modes of as many of the arts as it can press into service, with the consequence of presenting itself repeatedly as a mixed mode, a heterogeneous text.
Not surprisingly, given such emphases, The Student of Prague is utterly self-conscious about its position vis-à-vis the more established arts; for example, the opening images, which constitute a setpiece made up of nineteenth century mourning pictures, including a weeping willow with a tombstone. On this tombstone is inscribed the text of Alfred de Musset's "La nuit de Décembre," a poem that establishes themes of mimetic artifice, of the double, and of death. To say nothing of its recognizable allusion to the visual arts, the literary space that this short sequence announces—the poem as epitaph, the space of writing at the moment at which it most obviously marks an absence, a text "signed" by the poet, as one might find it in an anthology—appears again at the end of the film, as though to enclose the cinematic narrative in literary brackets, to frame the moving images of its narrative with the static spaces at once of writing and of death. (In some prints this opening sequence survives only as the text of the poem itself, which is then less clearly distinguishable from the film's title cards, but nevertheless still serves to stress the status of the literary as writing.) Since its function in the narrative is to foreshadow his tragic end, the student Baldwin is able to enter this preliminary scene, and the melancholy movements of his body and that of the willow itself, staged and stagy, suggest that the scene as a whole is more than a mere illustration of the poem. It is meant pointedly to predict that the film will animate writing, will bring it to life.
Immediately following this sequence, a theatrical prologue points to the stage as a space in which all movement must be generated either by the bodies of the actors or by overtly mechanical means—by such mechanisms, for example, as the swing used for the deus ex machina, mechanisms that had become sophisticated in the nineteenth century but that would suddenly seem archaic in the cinema. In this connection a further speculation of Wegener's seems pertinent: he hoped that film would make it possible to use "marionettes or small three-dimensional models which could be animated image by image, in slow or rapid motion depending on the speed of the montage," thus giving rise "to fantastic images which would provoke absolutely novel associations of ideas in the spectator." In this passage, Wegener restates his fascination with the frisson produced by film's capacity to animate the inanimate. Though this effect was experienced more intensely during an earlier period in the development of cinema, it is still produced today; as one critic has recently noted, "the experience of film involves a mysterious equivocation between terror and the sense of a Utopia in which divisions between life and death are effaced."
One might well see in the marionettes mentioned by Wegener equivalents of the automata that recur in Hoffmann's stories, uncanny figures connected with crises of perception and desire. Wegener's formulations imply not only that film offers technical possibilities for the animation of puppets, but also that the apparatus of cinema naturalizes the movements of the marionettes because, once they become images in a film, their movements—"animated image by image"—seem no more mechanically produced than the movements of human actors. From this perspective, Wegener's remark gestures towards Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater," an essay to which we shall return.
For today's spectator, the rapid juxtapositon of The Student of Prague's two opening sequences—the literary-painterly space with the theatrical space—occasions a feeling of Brechtian distancing no doubt already experienced while reading the two cards following the film's title, the first announcing "A Romantic Drama in 6 Acts," the second that the film was shot on location "in Castle Belvedere in Prague, Palace Fiirstenberg, Lobkovitz and other historic places." Once again, the claim of romance, with its Méliès-like insistence on artifice and the film's self-proclaimed generic identity as drama are relativized by the counterclaim of photographed reality reminiscent of Lumière, a reality that, moreover, is overtly situated within history. The narrative itself, which opens with a short series of genre scenes of student life, is thus placed within a series of brackets that raise conflicting expectations and make contesting claims about the status of the text and its generic identity.
As Thomas Elsaesser points out, Wegener, Wiene, Murnau, Lang, and many others involved in this phase of German filmmaking deliberately addressed themselves to the task of elevating cinema to the status of an art form, and he astutely observes that it is within the confines of the German art cinema that the forms of the fantastic flourish. In a later essay, Elsaesser again addresses the historically specific predominance of aesthetic self-consciousness in German silent cinema, noting that its typical foregrounding of the act of narration resulted in "a profusion of nested narratives, framed tales, flashbacks, en abîme constructions and interlacing of narrative voices." One explanation for this phenomenon lies precisely in the self-conscious attempt to develop a new art form as noted by Elsaesser in his earlier text. We can see its consequences in the barely formulated theoretical issues that lie buried in essays and films such as Wegener's—issues expressed, for example, in formulations suggesting transgressive boundary crossings between the natural and artificial. Such passages suggest that film, at the moment of flaunting its capacity to introduce movement into the visual arts on the one hand and to give visual expression to narrative on the other, is at pains to contain an uneasiness about its hybrid nature, an uneasiness that nevertheless leaves its mark upon these texts.
For the contemporary spectator—and perhaps also for the spectator of 1913—there is one scene in The Student of Prague that stands out most vividly for the juxtaposition of its spaces and for the intricacy with which it poses the problem of the interrelation of the arts. Identified by a title as the "Preparation for the Hunt," the space of this sequence resembles a stage set whose back wall is covered from floor to ceiling by tapestry-like paintings. For a few instants only the eye is allowed to linger upon the two figures in riding attire that occupy the foreground, whereupon a third figure enters through the door. At this moment the space of the scene is radically disrupted. What had been a typical tableau scene, appropriate to its theatrical space, is relegated to being "merely that," for when the door in the center of this wall opens, it reveals another space—an actual birch wood, not a set. Since the door opens into nature without the mediation of an architectural space, the spectator has the impression of a theater set imposed directly upon a natural scene; there is a distinct awareness of the conjunction of ontologically disparate spaces. Startling as it is, this effect is heightened when all three characters leave through the door, which remains open to reveal the receding figures as they wend their way among the trees. Tellingly, the shot is held another few seconds, thus emphasizing the juxtaposition of natural scene and tapestry-like mural whose subject is the hunt.
