Stupor, appreciation, expectation. Since its invention, film has provoked debate about its significance and much speculation about what it might contribute to the new century. The conviction soon emerged that film could make us look at the world anew. It taught us not only to take a second look at the world, but to look in a different way. Film set our sense of vision free, restoring it to us with an invigorating potential.
This idea became a leitmotif of film criticism in the 1920s. Bela Balázs summed it up in a formulation that would become popular:
From the invention of printing, the word became the principal channel of communication between men … in the culture of words, the spirit—once so conspicuous—became almost invisible…. Now film is impressing on culture a change as radical as that of the invention of the press. Millions of people each night experience with their own eyes, sitting before the screen, the destinies of men, their personalities and feelings, states of mind of every sort, without needing words…. Man will go back to being visible.1
Balázs said it clearly: film restores human visibility, and gives reality back to the gaze. Some of his contemporaries expressed it similarly. For example, Sebastiano A. Luciani:
The art of film has rendered us sensitive to the dynamic beauty of the face, in the same manner in which the theater made us sensitive to the voice. Where we once saw—in art and in life—only partially expressive masks, today we can say that we see faces.2
Or Jean Epstein:
The lens of the camera is an eye without prejudice, without morals, untouched by any influence; it sees in the face and in gesture features that we, consumed with our likes and dislikes, habits and thoughts, are no longer able to see.3
And for Abel Gance, this notion assumed a jubilant tone:
The cinema will endow man with a new sense. He will see through his eyes. He will be sensitive to brilliant versification as he has been to prosody. He will see the birds and the wind come to rest. A ray will shine down. A street will seem as beautiful as a Greek temple.4
Film taught us to look at the world as we had never been able to before. This idea recurs in many contemporary works.5 It is supported by another belief that in some ways clarifies and radicalizes it: if film reconquered and recast our manner of seeing, it was not only because it embodied the gaze of the human eye, but because it embodied the gaze of the twentieth century. The camera captured what lay before it in forms that revealed the attitudes and orientations with which people were compelled to look at the world around them. On the screen, more than a reality objectively recorded, we saw reality in the spirit of the time.6
Frequently, the same scholars who emphasized the renewal of vision with film became its chief interpreters as well. Luciani, for example, goes on to comment:
The telephone, automobile, airplane and radio have so altered the limits of time and space within which civilizations have developed, that today man has ended up acquiring not so much a quickness of understanding unknown to the ancients, as a kind of ubiquity. Film seems the artistic reflection of this new condition of life, both material and spiritual.7
Scholars from related fields also seized onto film’s power to reclaim the visual dimension and thus to interpret its time. Only a few years later, Erwin Panofsky stressed the way in which the figurative and plastic arts “start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter, and not with the objects that constitute the physical world.” This journey from the abstract to the concrete allows them to transmit an “idealistic conception” that is no longer in line with their times. With bodies and things at its point of departure, “it is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization.”8 Film’s tendency to lay bare the spirit of its age did not, however, necessarily require that it function merely as a mirror. Siegfried Kracauer, who gave careful attention to the typical themes running through early cinema, pointed out that even the most fantastic of these “reveal how society wants to see itself.”9 The pervasive thought is that film, in its complexity, is a sign of its time. Léon Moussinac observed in 1925: “Within the great modern upheaval, an art is born, develops, discovers its laws one by one, moves slowly toward its perfection, an art that will be the very expression—bold, powerful original—of the ideal of the new age.”10
Keeping all of this in mind, let us move ahead to the German cultural theorist and critic Walter Benjamin and his canonical essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”11
According to Benjamin, every phase of the history of man grasps reality in its own way: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.”12 The kind of gaze that a historical period adopts manifests the concerns and interests of that period, and refers back in turn to the underlying social processes that feed these concerns. Benjamin suggests that twentieth-century modernity is dominated by two tendencies, “both linked to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life.”13 The two tendencies are “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.”14 We see here on the one hand an attempt to overcome distance, a need for nearness; on the other, a sense of universal sameness. With their emphasis on proximity and equality, these two tendencies legitimate a novel stance: what surrounds us must be captured in a plain and direct manner, without hindrance or restraint—even if, by necessity, through mechanical reproduction.
Film is an exemplary tool for attaining this end. Its gaze breaks down conventional barriers between ourselves and reality:
Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.15
Its gaze is able to draw us into the very fabric of things:
Just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly “in any case,” but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them.16
This is a gaze that can astonish us with the rapidity of its insight. While the traditional arts stimulated contemplation, floods of filmic images provoke continuous shock.17 The filmic gaze is a leveling gaze that can reframe everything and everyone within a principle of equality. Benjamin writes: “the newsreel offers everyone the chance to rise from passer-by to movie extra.”18 Finally, it is a gaze that can dispense with the uniqueness that characterizes the traditional work of art, since it can be replicated on every film print and during every projection. Speaking about actors, Benjamin notices: “now the mirror image has become detachable from the person mirrored and is transportable.”19 Of course, there are contrary impulses as well. Cinematic technology operates as a filter; habit leads to inattention; the “optical unconscious,” giving the spectator the knowledge of things that could never be seen previously,20 complicates the relationship between observer and what is observed. Nevertheless it is true that film celebrates and manifests the nearness and the sameness of things. It does so in conjunction with an age that privileges these values by stripping any “aura” from the work of art, which is transformed from an object of veneration to a mere object of display.21
Here it becomes important to define more precisely film and its relation to the century it represents. If these two spheres really do converge, at what points do they meet? And how does this convergence mutually condition each? What kind of film and what kind of modernity does this convergence produce? In short, what made film an interlocutor for modernity?
I will try to answer these questions by following three parallel paths. To begin with, it is film’s power as a medium that played a decisive role in creating the convergences we have identified. It acted primarily as a means of communication—even more than as a means of expression. And it did this in an age which saw the media, rather than the traditional arts, as the preferred instrument for exploring and unifying experience. Film was the medium of choice in a profoundly “mediated” era. It was significant too that film not only highlighted the questions of its time, but recast them, making them its own, and at the same time giving them an iconic value in the eyes of all. It did this in a period when cultural institutions charged with elaborating social values and concerns were in deep crisis. Cinema redefined the conceptual field at a time when this function was partly unfilled. Yet film would not have been so successful as a medium if it had not been able to resolve contradictory impulses and negotiate compromises between them. Let us remember that this was an age that had numerous and distressing conflicts in need of mediation. Film is a space of reconciliation: it forces us into contact with reality, but is simultaneously grounded in distraction. It offers fantastical images and ideas but reincorporates them in plausible scenarios. It provokes and stimulates, but also organizes and disciplines.
First, film is a medium for the exhibition and exchange of proposals; second, it is a sphere in which the impulses of its time can be reworked and made iconic; and third, it is a space in which these contradictory impulses can come to the negotiating table. In the remainder of this chapter I will elaborate on these three theses with the help of three essays by Louis Delluc as well as other theoretical texts from the 1920s. I have privileged the 1920s here because the debate of this decade is highly interesting. It occurred after two decades of examining film as a surprising modern experience, and it came before the “standardization” of film’s linguistic and expressive devices in the 1930s. The 1920s constitute an essential hinge between moments of utopian euphoria and subsequent systematization. What unfolds in this decade is the attempt to gradually transform a novelty into an institution.22 We have various positions scattered over various geographical poles (Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, America), but also a largely common concern. In this framework, Delluc’s relevance lies in his basic attitude: suspended between the defense of traditional values and attention to the clashes within them, he is more subtly contradictory than most early critics, and shows the complicated way in which awareness of cultural change often develops.
It quickly became clear that film was, more than anything else, an instrument of communication in the broad sense of the term. Undeniably, film also claimed for itself a place in the field of aesthetics: the terms “fifth art,” “eighth art,” and even “seventh art” prove this (the last, coined by Ricciotto Canudo, having come into everyday use).23 But however much its expressive possibilities were extolled, its masterpieces enumerated, or its influence on other arts recognized, the aspects of film that stood out most prominently were its popular appeal, the universality of its language, and the industrial quality of its production. Critics sometimes seemed uncomfortable acknowledging these latter characteristics of film as an object of mass consumption. Rather than recognize them, they recycled old categories from the field of art history such as authorship. Yet even those who most wished to incorporate film into the aesthetic traditions of the past (beginning with Canudo himself)24 had to realize it was a new form of experience that demanded new critical canons.
Louis Delluc’s short essay, “The Fifth Art” (“Le cinquième art,” 1919),25 seems exemplary of this critical dilemma. Delluc begins the piece with his usual mélange of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the cinema and hope for what it could be: “An art, of course it will be an art.” He goes on, however, to list a series of characteristics that point to a different line of criticism. First he points out film’s spatial diffusion: “Film goes everywhere. Theater halls are built by the thousands in every country, films have been shot all over the world.” Next, he acknowledges its extraordinary power of persuasion: “The screen … has more impact on the international masses than a political speech.” He notes as well the instant stardom that film offers its actors: “A year—even six months—is sufficient for a name, a grimace, a smile to compel recognition from the world.” And similarly, the attention it stirs in the public: “It is a powerful means to get the people to speak.” Finally, he stresses the importance of not only the commercial but also the technical dimension of cinema. American supremacy in the field, he argues, is linked to the “technical improvement of the image, lighting, sets, and scripts, which gives a harmonious nature to their science.” In the conclusion of the piece Delluc revises his opening thoughts: “We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art: perhaps the only modern art that already has a place apart and one day will have astonishing glory; for it—and it alone, I tell you—is son of the mechanical and the human ideal.” Delluc echoes here, in more positive terms, the withering definition of cinema that he provided some lines earlier: “This expressive industry is heading toward the simultaneous perfection of art and traffic.”
Art and traffic. In this biting characterization, Delluc not only expresses the need to draw attention to a dimension other than—though linked to—the artistic; he also offers a powerful image of what makes a medium. What, in fact, do we normally mean by this term? A medium is, above all, a means of transmitting sensations, thoughts, words, sounds, and images. Its main objective is the spreading of information and, in the case of mass media, the widest spreading of information that technology will allow (“film goes everywhere”). The pursuit of this objective gives rise to three closely interrelated features which define all media. In order to spread information, a medium must also be able to gather, readapt, and conserve it: a medium works on content in order to render it consumable (the happy fate of “a name, a grimace, a smile”). By spreading information, a medium grants its audience the opportunity to enter into contact with the information being offered, the source or agent offering that information, and finally its other audiences; it works to produce a system of relationships that is as interactive as possible. Finally, a medium cannot distribute information without the appropriate technical apparatus: it depends on a host of reproductive technologies, from which it seeks the greatest possible efficiency (the role played in an “expressive industry,” by “the improvement of image, lighting, sets,” etc.). A medium, then, is a conjunction of content, interaction, and technology that is locally optimal for information transfer. From this we can deduce that a medium is always and necessarily representative, relational, and technological.26 The ground for these subsequent determinations is, in every case, communicability.
Delluc, perhaps unintentionally, paints just such a picture. In fact the faces of the medium (implicating representation, relationship, and technology), together with its primary vocation (communicability), have a strategic value in any society. In one way, they allow three branches of activity to be interconnected: the construction of images of real or possible worlds, the definition of interpersonal and group relationships, and the fine-tuning of a device may all join together in a single communicative gesture. In another respect, they permit the medium to enter into the nerve center of a society. The action of a medium overtly influences the sphere of symbolic, social, and technological procedures, and thus touches the most delicate nodes of a human community. It is in this connection that Marshall McLuhan would speak, years later, of the means of communication as the “nervous system” of a society: they elaborate information, share it, and channel it into technological equipment, just as nerve endings and synapses expand and distribute impulses in the human body. In both cases, the organism becomes dependent on its communicative network.
Returning to Delluc, it is clear that we search his criticism in vain for a full treatment of what constitutes a medium. It is interesting, however, that in trying to define film, he juxtaposes the word “art” with terms like “expressive industry,” “efficiency,” “conversation,” “mechanical” and above all, “traffic.” Film can be many things, but it is what it is because it marries the ability to fine-tune content, the capacity to kindle relationships, and the capability to set a machine in motion. It does so by virtue of its vocation as a means of transport and exchange—the very site of “traffic.” Herein lies film’s distinctiveness, as well as its modernity.
If Delluc was not fully conscious of the nature of the medium, Benjamin certainly was. The term medium in fact recurs in Benjamin’s work, though he intends it in a sense slightly different from the one elaborated here.27 In his pages, the medium’s central feature—its commitment to constructing consumable representations, interactive relations, and efficient technologies—is paired with a historical period that revolutionizes at a stroke social relationships, systems of production, and indeed man’s very way of seeing the world, under the triple sign of immediacy, equality, and industrial organization. Mass media can contain the conflicted dimensions of the modern age, while traditional forms of art find themselves unable to confront these dimensions. The inevitable conclusion is that in an age that Benjamin identifies with mechanical reproduction, what is exemplary are visual media, since they seek increasingly to share their content, broaden their reception, and accelerate the development of their technological base. Conversely, traditional art is held at a distance, and worshipped without any true reason.28 It is much better to recognize that traditional art set itself off from the contemporary scene,29 and to ask it to abandon its “aura” and to become a communicative medium itself.30
Benjamin wrote extensively about this transformation of art into something that fits the term medium. I will not summarize all of his argument here. Yet is it evident that in modernity—an age of desacralization—the communicative substitutes for the aesthetic. The aesthetic, if it is to survive, seeks refuge elsewhere—for example, in the experimental fields where meaning is formed before it becomes “common sense.”31 It may also fold itself, with the artist’s apparent reluctance, into the communicative realm of commodified media. Within this frame film’s role becomes clear. No longer simply art—or not sufficiently art—it is exposed as a medium, and as a medium it displays the best of itself. Film offers its content in the broadest and most practical form possible; at the same time, it creates collective cultural ties of enormous strength and employs a technology of previously unimagined probative power. Film embodies the modern age precisely because it comprehends the dimensions and exigencies of that age to the fullest extent possible.
Though film’s manner of recording the world evinces a strong synchronicity with its time, this should not be understood as a passive absorption of signs. Neither what we see on screen, nor the affect that it inspires in us, is a simple imitation of what lies before the camera. On the contrary, the depictions of the world in a film are often quite idiosyncratic. Films are therefore active contributors to the world they represent.
We can explore this mutual transference by returning for a moment to the 1920s debate regarding the widespread popularity of the cinema. In particular, the lecture Louis Delluc gave at the Colisée cinema in January 1921, entitled “Cinema, the popular art” (“Le cinéma, art populaire”),32 is instructive. The talk began with the legendary phrase, “Ladies and gentlemen, the cinema does not exist”—a further expression of Delluc’s constant concern for what he thought of as the unrealized artistic potential of the medium. As usual, however, his attention also pointed elsewhere: specifically, to the universal audience which film had won. The reasons for this rampant enthusiasm were threefold. Above all, film, as already mentioned, speaks a “universal language” and thus speaks to all. Next, film cultivates a “universal taste,” based on the affirmation of ostensibly universal values, such as love, duty, and revenge. Finally, film promotes what we might call a “universal synchrony” through the collective and simultaneous viewing of the same spectacle by thousands. Delluc posed: “Film spectators gather in the amphitheater of the whole world. The most diverse and extreme beings witness the same film at the same time the world over. Isn’t this magnificent?” These elements of film as a phenomenon allowed Delluc to make a connection that is only initially surprising. Film recapitulates the defining characteristics of Greek tragedy on a global scale. It has the same popular character: it promotes broad access, a common idiom, and collective participation. Moreover, it exhibits the images and deeds an entire people regard as their own—the myths and rites of an entire community. In this sense, there is a continuity between the new theaters and the ancient amphitheaters. Rio Jim, the protagonist of a western played by William Hart, is a direct descendent of Orestes, just as Louise Glaum and Bessie Love are, respectively, those of Clytemnestra and Electra.33
Delluc’s curious intuition further illuminates—through reference to film’s ability to resuscitate myths and rituals—a film’s fundamental characteristic as a mode of communication. We are confronted with a source of images and socially relevant behaviors that function as “models.” Now let us take a closer look at its underlying processes.
Every medium assumes control over what it transmits, even if only through its transmission. Whenever it receives external stimuli—pieces of reality, social discourse, fragments of latent drives—a medium always “adapts” them to fit its own demands. In making them its own, it selects and reorders them, often paraphrasing or even blending them with one another. These elements combine to form a new shape. A medium never simply transmits preexisting contents without in some way reforming them. The same holds for the social relationships that it engenders. Here as well, despite the best efforts of a medium to replicate existing relations in an adequate way (as the telephone replicates the mode of face-to-face communication), it inevitably privileges one sensory channel over another (the aural over the visual), or alters the spatiotemporal circumstances of the act (by the sacrifice of real presence), or alters the intent of its actors. We are not dealing with a copy here, but with a reformulation.
This “rewriting” has a strong interpretive value, and in this sense it constitutes a true redefinition of the reality to which the medium refers. But this “rewriting” goes so far as to define reality. By establishing this reality for a series of recipients, it also fixes the traits with which it will be interpreted. From this point of view, the “filtering” action that a medium carries out is an action that “guides” perception and behavior: when a medium speaks to me or causes me to act, it suggests what I must (and must not) take into consideration, and how I must (must not) do so (this reality or action instead of that one; this feature or mode instead of another). Thus, on the one hand it gives me a key to reading existence, while on the other it binds me to a certain line of conduct. In establishing a reality or behavior, a medium offers a “formula” for understanding or interpreting the world, and at the same time a “standard” to which my interpretation must conform. Herein lies the medium’s power of definition. This power is directly proportional to both its capacity for producing adequate images of things and to the breadth of currency that these images enjoy in my cultural context.
This is, in broad outline, the process by which the medium gives a form to its context.34 Let us now return to Delluc. His essay on the new medium captures not only film’s power to engender interest and participation in its fantasies but also its ability to construct imaginary symbols and behavioral patterns in which a society is able to see itself. Delluc brought to the fore film’s nascent capacity for just this sort of “putting into form.” It is in this aspect of filmic communication that Delluc finds parallels with Greek tragedy. Rio Jim—and his embodiment of the mythological cowboy figure—epitomizes the sentiments, desires, and values by which contemporary society wished to live. In the same way, the dilemmas that pervaded ancient Athenian society were condensed and revealed for the benefit of all. In the modern age film is the most appropriate medium for a reproposal of myths and rituals, a set of symbols and deeds that trace and condition collective experience. Film is a machine that exposes what stirs beneath social surfaces. But it is also party to the process: through its suggestions, it advances new models of understanding and behavior (that is, new categories of mind and action). It is at once a witness and a fully active protagonist.
Film’s ability to find new forms in the spirit of its time began to constitute a fundamental principle of the medium in the 1910s and 1920s. Film’s most essential moments were those in which it retranscribed the real, offering a new image of it, which became ours as well. A striking American article by Rollin Summers, which appeared ten years before Delluc’s, sets the parameters of the issue:
Every art has its peculiar advantages and disadvantages growing out of the particular medium in which it expresses itself. It is the limitations and the advantages of its particular means of expression that give rise to its particular technique. An observation of the limitations and advantages of motion photography will suggest the particular technical laws of the moving picture play.35
Summers points out that every medium is characterized by a set of possibilities and limitations. The more a medium works on these possibilities and limitations, the better it obeys its internal “laws.” What follows is an immediate approval for all of those moments in which film gives form to the real, using the processes that conform to its “laws.” A film gives the best of itself when it widens the radius of its visual exploration, puts rapid scene exchange into play, and drives actors to naturalistic acting. Conversely, it shows its worst when—imitating the theater—it aims to express thoughts, uses fixed scenes, and accepts contrived acting. This evaluation formula, which David Bordwell36 rightly posits as the basis for the traditional theoretical canon, had many followers. We find it again in the work of scholars such as Eugenio Giovannetti, who underscored the “predilections of film,”37 or Erwin Panofsky, who demanded that cinematographic style respond “to the specific conditions of the medium.”38 It found its clearest formulation in Rudolf Arnheim, particularly in his 1932 Film (Film als Kunst): “In order that the film artist may create a work of art it is important that he consciously stress the peculiarities of his medium. This, however, should be done in such a manner that the character of the objects represented should not thereby be destroyed but rather strengthened, concentrated, and interpreted.”39 The cinema must follow its own inclinations: only this allows it to speak clearly.
I have had good reasons for beginning this discussion with Delluc. His work is devoted to both filmic representation and forms of reception. In this light, Delluc’s examination of myths and rites is interesting. But this work of “giving form” is not limited to the medium’s technological dimension. Technology must also measure itself against social and symbolic needs that are often overdetermined. It is indicative that Delluc called these key elements of society rites and myths. This work of “giving form” does not merely have an aesthetic value: on the contrary, it extends into “everyday” production and fruition. Film is a medium that operates precisely in the everyday. It is a “laboratory” of new symbols and practices; indeed, it is an open laboratory—an unending process—and a common laboratory, belonging to all. In this sense, the reference to Delluc’s myths and rites acquires additional weight.
We have already seen how film is able to gather the signs of its age, reorganize them according to its own principles, and make them worthy of this new form as recognizable and recognized models. Film cannot be considered, though, a simple mirror of its time. In shaping the themes and behaviors that pervade social space, it became also a source for new ideas. As a medium, it carried out this action in everyday reality, competing with other communicative channels: from newspapers to light fiction, from popular music, illustrations, and theater to etiquette guides (in addition, naturally, to the traditional arts, scientific research, and behavioral guidelines proposed by large institutions, etc.). In other words, film elaborated mental models and behavioral canons in a larger network of social discourses.40 In this network, film occupied a role of utmost importance for its ability to set out and circulate its own ideas, for the perceptiveness with which it operates, and finally for a third characteristic that I will now address.
We should return to a piece by Delluc, “The Photo-plastique in Film” (“La photoplastique au cinema,” 1918).41 I return to Delluc—the ambiguity of his position notwithstanding, suspended as it was between a nostalgia for high expression and the understanding of the radical change in progress—for it is precisely this ambiguity that is fruitful. Not surprisingly, its opening is striking: “Nudity in film will one day assert and establish itself. Nothing is more photogenic. Haven’t you noticed how it is already used? Film heroines spend all their time in evening gowns.” Film is an exhibition space for bodies, so much so that to satisfy this need, films require that their characters wear clothes that are not always appropriate to the narrative situation. This passion for the unclothed body can be malicious as well: the reference is to Max Sennett, whose films seem deliberately set at a pool’s edge, on the beach, or in a ballroom; they are “all fantasy, filled with an almost cubist brusqueness that conjures away the knowing debauchery.” And yet film seems to redeem such a display of nudity. “This penchant for the skin’s effect … never offers anything ugly.” Film avoids vulgarity, even when it seems to threaten the screen, for at least two reasons. First, it transforms the bodies it (even shamelessly) displays. Nudity is photogenic: and the photogeneity redeems and exalts. Next, because film tolerates neither the immediate nor the excessive: it has internal measure. In this regard, it is interesting to note how actors learn from watching their own images on the screen: “The first films in which women, such as Francesca Bertini, showed their arms and breasts were awful films. Nevertheless, the physical beauty of the performer appeared as genuine—at least—as it does now. The years have taught it to measure its grace.” The conclusion is unavoidable: “Film notices, conserves, advises. Having for once been delivered from ugliness (or else all the ugliness of which it is capable), it often creates an intelligent and new beauty.”
Delluc again offers a useful starting point to widen our frame. In the game that he describes, we see how film is situated before two possibilities: it can pursue libertinism (perhaps seasoned with an “almost cubist brusqueness” that gives the body further plastic starkness), or it can bring the representation of nudity back to more classical standards (thanks to the filmic image’s power to transform what it captures). The two paths subtly conflict: one can lead to pornography, the other risks becoming abstraction. Film however pursues both: it accepts one as a necessary attraction, and gives a strong pedagogical importance to the other. What is realized is then a more “inclusive” rewriting: the screen glows with the display of skin, but will avoid ugliness, in favor of a bright and gratuitous beauty.
Film often carries out this job of assessment and rewriting. Or, to put it better, it negotiates between its various permeating impulses. It does this not only between ugliness and beauty but also with many other opposites it inevitably encounters, whether they be aesthetic or moral choices, courses of action or basic values, personal opinions or collective attitudes. Film measures itself against a large spectrum of alternatives, alternatives that it, in turn, moves to measure against each other. The age it faces is, moreover, marked by a great variety of currents. Let us take, for example, the phenomena and subsequent changes in the years of its birth and development: the scientific discoveries and their application to industry, the broadening of the market and necessity for new products, the demographic upheaval and the explosion on the scene of new ranks and social classes, the construction of networks of transport and communication, the intensification of movement and contact, etc. An entire frame of life changed, and with it, the traditional frames of reference.42 It is precisely here that the Benjaminian need for availability, nearness, and efficiency emerged. Also pushing to the foreground was an appreciation for novelty, activeness, speed, repetition, individualism, etc. Perhaps as a reaction, or a sense of nostalgia, there was also the need for withdrawal, placing distance, naturalness, stability, and slowness. Meanwhile, despite the increasing closeness of the world, a subtle sense of the loss of reality asserted itself in the background; it was accompanied by a sense that the self was somehow lost, even as all individuals seemed propelled toward the center of history.
Film calls this variety of references to account; it summons them to its table, and puts them side by side; it readapts them, if necessary, searching for a form that might make them appear compatible. The cinema shapes the stances that it encounters, and in doing that it negotiates. In the essay that spurred this discussion, Benjamin offers some fine examples of this complexity—a complexity that remains to be clarified. After noticing that films “jolt the viewer” with “an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound,”43 he also remarks that they produce a “distracted perception,” one in which shock effects are transformed into habit: “Reception in distraction—the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception—finds in film its true training ground.”44 Even as he points out film’s ability to exalt the powers of sight, he notes how the camera introduces a new kind of gaze: at the moment in which the world is filmed, “a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.”45 Finally (and in some ways the weightiest detail) though he emphasizes film’s tendency to put us in contact with things, Benjamin concludes that its apparatus unavoidably veils the direct gaze of the world: “The vision of immediate reality [has become] the Blue Flower in the land of technology”46
Film is thus able to work with seemingly opposite impulses: it seizes them, draws them together, and reassembles them. It succeeds in holding together excitement and habit, consciousness and unconsciousness, immediacy and mediation. What is more: it is even able to negotiate between the aesthetic and the communicative. For if it is true that the age demands that the communicative enforce its own principles, it is also true that it cannot—or will not—completely give up the aesthetic, with its traditional values. Here we have the significance of Delluc: his battle for art is indeed a step backward with respect to Benjamin’s considerations on the age of mechanical reproduction (but also to Kracauer who, in an extraordinary essay on Berlin’s cinemas, condemns the increasing desire to return film to the dignity of the traditional masterpieces, instead of allowing them to express the superficiality, breakdown, and fragmentation consonant with mass society).47 This battle of his, however, indicates the necessity of continuing to bring to account certain traditional categories; if for no other reason, it is through them that the new medium can appear a socially positive, socially legitimated phenomenon. Film plays along: it is a medium, but one able to cloak itself in art (perhaps the promise of art, or of a popular art). In this way, it puts forth the new, while equally demonstrating its power to call the old into account, to salvage some of its worth, to graft itself onto tradition, to carry on its inheritance. Raymond Spottiswoode, seventeen years later, would determine the point of compromise: “communication is an indispensable objective of works of art”; moreover, “the spectator will … establish perfect contact with the artist if he is aware of each detail in theme and technique which the artist made a vehicle of communication.”48 The best comes from the marriage of these two fronts.
So film negotiates, and it negotiates its own basic limits as well. This effort of rewriting is often related to the search for compromise. Often, in fact, the convergence in film has the effect of rendering “innocuous” solutions that might otherwise seem too unilateral or dogmatic. In these cases, choices contemplated within social space (such as, to use Delluc’s words, the “rough” representations of cubism, but also the tensions of a crowd that seem to smooth themselves out in the cinema) are recovered and softened, weakened even: the cinematographic medium can, in this way, become more easily and more abundantly their bearer. Yet, though film aims at compromise, it is equally able to practice radicalism: perhaps not in mainstream production, distinguished by a broad acceptance of ideas, but at least in circles where it promotes experimentation, authorship, and the pursuit of expressivity. Even in these cases, however, we are confronted with an exercise of negotiation: a careful consideration of the different forces that hold claim to film rightly results in exasperation. At the same time, even the simplest choices can reveal an element of radicalism: created from compromise, they seem completely innocuous, yet seethe with the passions from which they are born. It is not by chance then that the most advanced cinema (as, moreover, often happens in the avant-garde) makes choices that, though seemingly “scandalous,” soon reveal themselves to be perfectly practical. In the same way, it is not by chance that a closer look at classical Hollywood (which best represents mainstream production) reveals a cinema that is much less classical and much more risqué than most reconstructions would have us believe.49
I would add that film carries out this work of negotiation both in the broad space of culture, as well as in the more specific space of its own reception. I mean that comparison and rewriting concern both the dynamics that are at the very foundation of the construction of a filmic text (and that lead precisely to one solution or another, chosen from various possibilities), and the dynamics of consumption (in which the reciprocal comparison lies between the filmic text, with its points of view, and the spectator, with his/her expectations, abilities, knowledge, etc.). The cinema “regulates itself,” both in the circuit of social discourse and within its own vision. In this “auto-regulation,” film finds a point of equilibrium, claims it, and puts it into view. There it is ready, as such, to turn its own proposal into the next element at stake, which must be balanced against the situation created as soon as it is put into public circulation.50
Thus, a negotiation takes place during a filmic text’s preparation and consumption, sometimes in the name of compromise, sometimes under the weight of exasperation. This negotiation accompanies a rewriting of the drives that run through the social space maintained by the film, demanding that—in accompanying this work—they nourish and feed on it, too. There is, in fact, a total complicity between film’s attempt to “give form” to what it encounters, and its ability to “negotiate” among the different forces and counterforces enveloping it. In short, film “gives form” to its own time, and in doing so—indeed, in order to do so—it negotiates; it negotiates in light of this “giving of form” and uses its own form for further negotiation. Its third advantage (being, additionally, a means of communication and a medium capable of articulating persuasion) is precisely its capacity for dialogue; and this at a time more tumultuous than ever, in an age that discovers a renewed need for mediation, since its traditional means—entrusted to institutions and processes rendered obsolete—are clearly inadequate.
We can therefore return to the problem posed earlier. If film embodies the gaze of the twentieth century, what guarantees this convergence? What nourishes their coming together? And what effects does this have on the participants?
Film comes to this meeting with three features. It is a medium, in an age that looks to the media rather than art. It is a medium that “gives form” to the ideas that circulate in the social space, in an age searching for new forms of representation and relation—new myths and rituals. And it is a medium that negotiates between often contradictory demands, in an age when the conflict between differing values is open and often dramatic—an age when traditional clearinghouses seem to fail. These three characteristics directly influence the type of gaze that film adopts. At stake is a gaze with the power to give evidence and circulate what it fixes in its lens: film, as medium, displays and shares its proposals. Once again, it is a gaze able to clarify and guide: film—as a device that “gives form”—offers models of interpretation and behavior. These models become, in turn, canonical, despite a certain levity granted by the quotidian nature of its actions. Finally, we are dealing with a syncretic gaze, which measures itself against various positions and, at the same time, seeks to individuate feasible resolutions. Film, as a device of negotiation, seeks to rewrite what it encounters. Vividness, exemplarity, practicability, syncretism: these are, after all, the dimensions in which film works to “tune in” to its times. Many of the recent definitions that have tried to focalize the role and action of film within the frame of modernity (as, for example, the idea that it acts as a “public sphere,” or the idea that it supplies a “vernacular” language) could find more precise answers by looking to these features.51
It remains to be said that we are obviously not talking about “all” cinema, but a “certain” cinema. In particular, we are talking about a cinema that looked to and could assume the form of a real social institution: that is, a system both recognized and recognizable, given recurrent features, and well ensconced in its own context. Moreover, it is precisely the cinema that criticism—represented here by Delluc—attempted to “institutionalize,” beginning with the early postwar years. It was a cinema that would see its greatest moment in mainstream production and the so-called classical age; but it was also a cinema that knew, both within and beyond this production, how to articulate its ideals, making them assume shapes that, with time, would best respond to the needs of society. No institution is static: even cinema—even this cinema—must know how to modify its art for communicability and its points of negotiation.
Accordingly, it has been a certain cinema—certainly not cinema “in itself”—that has embodied the gaze of modernity; similarly, it has been a certain modernity that has found in film its embodiment. This meeting has relegated other possible trajectories and realities to the background: “other” cinemas—perhaps only imagined, only potential—and “another” twentieth-century modernity—perhaps only hinted at, or rendered invisible. Every convergence is also the story of omissions and rejections. To follow the ties between film and its time, it is therefore necessary to work at two levels, both onstage and off. In the previous pages, we brought to light the cinema that characterized the stage. We will go on, aware that even the backstage has its importance. But it is on the stage itself—if only by convention—that the main performance takes place.