“A hand that turns the handle”—so says Serafino Gubbio, operator at the Kosmograph film company and narrator of Pirandello’s early twentieth-century novel The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio.1 He feels like “A hand that turns the handle”: a person so connected to a machine—the camera—that he becomes a mere appendage. This machine is, in appearance, a “little device,” yet its action is nonetheless devastating. It consumes and changes the shape of whatever passes before it. “The machine is made to act, to move, it swallows up our soul, devours our life. And how do you expect them to be given back to us, our life and soul, in a centuplicated and continuous output, by the machines? Let me tell you: in bits and morsels, all of one pattern, stupid and precise.”2 The “little device” separates the person being recorded from the real world, transporting him to a sort of other world. The actors, removed from direct contact with the audience, Gubbio goes on, “feel as though they were in exile. In exile, not only from the stage, but also in a sense from themselves. Because their action, the live action of their live bodies, here, on the screen of the cinematograph, no longer exists: it is their image alone, caught in a moment, in a gesture, an expression, that flickers and disappears.”3 Finally, the “little device” demands true servitude from the person controlling it, in this way confirming what seems the vocation of all mechanical devices, “these monsters, which ought to have remained instruments, and have instead become, perforce, our masters.”4 To devour, to separate, to subdue: the final effect is an emptying one. The filmed body “[is] so to speak subtracted, suppressed, deprived of [its] reality, of breath, of voice, of the sound that [it] makes in moving about, to become only a dumb image which quivers for a moment on the screen and disappears, in silence, in an instant, like an unsubstantial phantom, the play of illusion upon a dingy sheet of cloth.”5 The operator in the camera’s service similarly loses all feeling. An operator must have “impassivity in face of the action that is going on in front of the camera.” This impassivity makes him, in the end, like a thing (“I was a thing: why, perhaps the thing that was resting on my knees, wrapped in a black cloth”), rendering him machine-like (“I ceased to be Gubbio and became a hand”).6
The “little device” is not unique in doing this. The world is populated with mechanical devices that subdue those they should serve, that swallow up life and reduce it to mere semblance. Pirandello offers more than one example: Zeme the astronomer’s telescope (“You imagine that it is your instrument. Not a bit of it! It is your God, and you worship it!”); the monotype that substitutes for the old printing presses (“a monstrous beast which eats lead and voids books”); and, above all, the player piano “the man with the violin” must play alongside, which represents the very negation of freedom and creativity (so much so that the musician is forced—along with his instrument—to “accompany a roll of perforated paper running through the belly of this other machine!”).7 After all, the world itself has become a “clamorous and dizzy machinery … which from day to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater speed.” This is a machinery that offers a series of strong and overwhelming stimuli. At the very onset of the novel, the ironic description of the “mechanism” of modern life offers proof: “Today, such-and-such, this-and-that to be done hurrying to one place, watch in hand, so as to be in time at another. ‘No, my dear fellow, thank you: I can’t!’ ‘No, really lucky fellow! I must be off … ’ At eleven, luncheon. The paper, the house, the office, school …” 8 Here, everyone risks becoming a “doll,” moved by a “too obvious spring in its chest,” whose arms can be made to open and close at will. Everyone is required to renounce his or her person, in order to become puppets called to act a part that is a pale “metaphor” of the self.9
The cinema, then, does not constitute an exception. In a world of machines—in a world reduced to machines—the cinema obeys a general rule. If anything, it brings this situation’s paradoxes to light. In one way, in fact, it covers the deceit: thanks to photographic reproduction, it makes its representations look perfectly real. Those who work at Kosmograph can stage the most vague and improbable events, for example. The “little device” perfidiously “gives an appearance of reality to all their fictions.”10 In another way, however, the cinema renders our gaze even more acute. In truth, it will perhaps never succeed in doing what the painter Giorgio Mirelli does in his portraits of Varia Nestorova—that is, it will never reveal the profound personality of those around us (on canvas, Varia is truly herself, while onscreen she is another person whom she neither recognizes nor knows).11 The cinema succeeds in laying bare the subtle logic at the foundation of the “mechanism” of the modern world. It has only impassively gathered “life as it comes, without selection and without any plan.” The cinema succeeds in “presenting to men the ridiculous spectacle of their heedless actions, an immediate view of their Passions, of their life as it is. Of this life without rest, which never comes to an end.”12 On the screen, in spite of everything, we see what we have become.
The cinema can do even more: it can, in fact, embody the logic of the “mechanism” in which we are caught up. It is enough to let the camera move as it knows how to do: here, a vision of things from a mechanism’s point of view will emerge; here, new ways of looking at the world will be revealed, which we can make our own. There is a famous moment in Pirandello’s novel, in which a description of a car passing a carriage is drawn by contrasting two “takes” from the two vehicles. This passage offers a splendid demonstration of how the cinema can mobilize a new kind of mechanical gaze, which may become a shared form of perception:
A slight swerve. There is a one-horse carriage in front. ‘Peu, pepeeeu, peeeu.’ What? The horn of the motor-car is pulling it back? Why, yes! It does really seem to be making it run backwards, with the most comic effect. The three ladies in the motor-car laugh, turn round, wave their arms in greeting with great vivacity, amid a gay, confused flutter of many-coloured veils; and the poor little carriage, hidden in an arid, sickening cloud of smoke and dust, however hard the cadaverous little horse may try to pull it along with his weary trot, continues to fall behind, far behind, with the houses, the trees, the occasional pedestrians, until it vanishes down the long straight vista of the suburban avenue. Vanishes? Not at all! The motor-car has vanished. The carriage, meanwhile, is still here, still slowly advancing, at the weary, level trot of its cadaverous horse. And the whole of the avenue seems to come forward again, slowly, with it. You have invented machines, have you? And now you enjoy these and similar sensations of stylish pace.13
On the screen, besides seeing how the “mechanism” of the world has reduced us to a series of images, we can see how this “mechanism” permits us—even demands us—to see.
The cinema appropriates life, transforms it, and empties it. But in the meantime, it gives rise to a gaze that is renewed in its precision. It swallows us, it sends us into exile, it renders us insensitive, yet it helps us see things in their reality and from a new perspective. In this sense, it is an ambiguous machine. Pirandello wrote Shoot! at a moment in which the technological explosion (less evident in Italy, though no less shocking)14 led to questions on the nature of machines. Industrial technologies cease to be simple “tools” at the service and the direct command of man, and become “machinery,” almost fully autonomous devices that force man to adapt to their functioning; and at times they even become “technical macrosystems,” an integrated and autonomous apparatus in which man completely disappears.15 They bring about a transformation of man from master to slave, as well as the transformation of the surrounding world from natural to artificial. Pirandello points out this dual destiny in his parallel descriptions of Serafino Gubbio’s “little device” and the “mechanism” of life. It is at the heart of numerous critical observations of the period. I will limit myself to mentioning only two, which are different but complementary. The first, Letters from Lake Como by Romano Guardini, is a sorrowful reflection on the sunset of an old culture: “the human world tied to nature, the natural world filled with humanity, is waning away.”16 The second, Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford, is a broad and acclaimed history of the development leading to the culture of the machine. Mumford writes: “From the beginning, the most durable conquests of the machine lay not in the instruments themselves, which quickly became outmoded, nor in the goods produced, which quickly were consumed, but in the modes of life made possible via the machine and in the machine. The machine challenged thought and effort as no previous system of techniques had done.”17 Both authors put forth urgent concerns. Both conclude—albeit with quite divergent motivations and emphases—that one can and must reorient technological development, rewriting it into a new culture. In this way, it can be utilized to the end, without defeating man or the environment.
Let us return to the cinema. It is evident that a Pirandellian reflection on the camera leads us directly to the problem of who is the “subject” (though it would be better to call it “agent”) controlling the filmic gaze. In the preceding chapter, we asked if on the screen we see facts in their immediacy or perceptions, reelaborations, and memories. The lure of the machine leads us to consider the nature of what seems to “filter” our relationship with the world. Can it be said that what we see on the screen is “someone’s” perception, if it is a mechanical eye that does the perceiving? What is the relationship of this mechanical eye to that of man? Does it exonerate his real participation, or does it embolden his decisions and actions? Does it change the representation into a pure and simple copy, or does it leave room for creativity? Does it contribute to the mechanization of the world, or does it aid in its rehumanization? In other words, do subjectivity and agency even exist in the age of the “machine”? Or do we need to reformulate these concepts?
Three years after the publication of Shoot!, an article by Enrico Toddi appeared in the film journal In Penombra, suggesting that the camera-eye works at the mandate of the human one. “The viewfinder goes where the spectator’s gaze cannot directly go. Just as the agent was called the longa manus of the mandant in the volumes of dusty university memory, the cinema can call itself the longus oculus of the spectator.”18 Fifteen years after Pirandello, Eugenio Giovannetti wrote a surprising book entitled Cinema and the Mechanical Arts (Il cinema e le arti meccaniche). In it, he reminds us that the cinema is doubly tied to technology, both in its creative moment (in which the artist makes use of a machine that has “unconquerable likes and dislikes”) and at the time of the work’s distribution (the mechanical reproduction of copies). Yet this double dependency does not constitute a limitation: the cinema gives man back his gaze or, rather, it restores it as a modern gaze. On the one hand, Giovannetti says, “the world is becoming, thanks to the mechanical arts, a single immense artistic democracy.”19 This means that we cannot think of a social subject in traditional terms. On the other hand, “the cinema admirably took care of two antithetical necessities of modern life: seeing with scientific precision and placing itself in and broadening a vague medium.”20 We need to think of the gaze in a different way as well. Between a mandate and a modernization, a bond of faith and a step ahead: the camera-eye is suspended between these two fronts.
I will articulate these questions posed by the mechanical nature of the cinematographic eye, going through some films that center on some close relatives—if not actual brothers—of Serafino Gubbio: operators, or operator-directors. Struggling with their “little device,” they tell us how the cinema reacts to the tensions that we have just illustrated.
The first among these relatives to Serafino Gubbio might be Luke, the protagonist of The Cameraman (E. Sedgwick, USA, 1928). The character played by Buster Keaton is, in fact, a newsreel operator. He has taken on this occupation for his love of Sally, the secretary of the production company, after quitting his former job as a roving photographer. The change is symptomatic, and refers to a profound shift in the field of images. Before, Luke made fixed photos; now, he takes snapshots. Then, he handled semi-rigid medium-tintypes, which were in some way the legacy of daguerreotypes; now he deals with the flexible medium of film. His work was once that of an artist-artisan; now, he works in an industrial environment, the MGM Newsreel production company.21 First, his product was an object, the photo; today, it is an experience that consists in viewing or re-viewing current events on the screen. Last, at first the “receivers” were single individuals; now, it is an audience. Thus, from photographer to film operator, the material, the context, and the end of the work have changed. We are passing into a new era of the cinema.
These profound differences notwithstanding, there is a strong element of continuity. In both instances, the image produced must help in identifying a part of the world. In the case of photography, it is clear: Luke takes portraits, images in which the individual depicted must recognize him or herself, as well as be recognizable to others. His tintypes can also be used as ashtrays, as one man maliciously reminds him. Yet the fact remains that, in reproducing an individual’s face, the tintypes put into play the identity of the person depicted. In this way, they are the direct descendants of both André Desderi’s photographic “calling cards” and Alphonse Bertillon’s photo-kits, two practices that highlighted the connection between the photograph and individual identity.22 They respond to a need that Benjamin articulated so well around the time of The Cameraman’s release: in an age of profound political and social changes “coming from right or left, it will be necessary to get used to being looked in the face in order to know from where we come. On our part, it will be necessary to get used to looking others in the face for the same purpose.”23 Citing August Sander, Benjamin points out that the photograph helps in this task like “a training manual.”24
This is the case of film, as well. MGM Newsreel asks its operators for reportages that allow us to “recognize” the depicted events. In order to do this, the takes must foreground two features, comparable in some way to the characteristics of a portrait: the event captured must appear to be something that has actually occurred in a determinate place and time; and it must also be significant with respect to everyday life. It is the “reality” and the “relevance” of an event that define “what happened.” The newsreel can and must bring to light both of these elements: in doing so, it is able to carry out work on and about “identity.”
The camera’s ability to identify subjects and events makes it a medium that restores the real to us, instead of taking it away. In this light, The Cameraman continues and overthrows the analysis of Shoot! When the filmic image clarifies the “who is?” and the “what happened?” we are able to meet the world again on the screen. In Keaton’s film, this conviction is attributed to the MGM Newsreel bosses, and explains their reaction to Luke’s tests. He shoots three films with different results. The first is a work in which—through editing and seemingly casual superimposition—reality reveals a strange face: town streets plow through ships, the metropolis explodes into a thousand perspectives, unrelated actions find themselves in parallel. The work has a dazzling beauty worthy of the best of the artistic avant-garde, between constructivism and surrealism. Yet the MGM Newsreel managers ridicule and refuse the film, attributing it to Luke’s inexperience. They cannot do any different. For them, the camera is not a magic eye that rewrites reality according to a personal map, changing its coordinate. It is, instead, an eye that recognizes reality and makes it recognizable, restoring it to us with its essential facts. Staying close to things is its goal, not transforming them into a fantasy. These managers do not know it, but the same dialectic had emerged some years before in a debate between the well-known director Marcel L’Herbier and the influential Le Temps critic, Émile Vuillermoz:25 is the cinema a “machine that prints life,” as the former maintained, or a “machine that prints dreams,” as the latter believed? Can it simply gather the appearance of reality, or can it also push itself beyond these appearances into fantastic universes that reveal the manner in which artists approach the real? The MGM bosses, partisans of the first solution, need an impassive operator. (Serafino Gubbio could have been one. He would have done equally well for L’Herbier, who is also theoretically in the first camp. Perhaps for this reason, L’Herbier would honor Pirandello with an adaptation of The Late Mattia Pascal.26 But here we are entering into Borgesian philology.) Luke/Keaton is impassive; but at his first audition, not enough so. He “manipulates” reality. Consequently, he is fired.
He makes up for it in his second film, however. His service on the Tong wars is perfectly in line with the criteria that render a current event “identifiable.” The battle between the two Chinese gangs shines onscreen in all its reality and relevance. It is a shame that, in order to “perfectly” capture reality, Luke must intervene in a thousand little ways (but therein lies the episode’s comedy): he puts himself in the middle to intensify the fire on both sides, allows the camera’s tripod to be hit in order capture the events from a better visual angle, and finally ends up putting a knife in the hand of one of the rivals in order to heighten the drama of the clash. The operator is not really impassive: he takes part in the events and influences their unfolding. “I do not operate anything,” Serafino Gubbio says. Luke becomes like Serafino in his second audition. He becomes an eye that is limited to verifying reality. He proves, however, that to be an operator, one must indeed operate a bit. What is important is that this manipulation does not show: it is enough to leave it implied, hidden under the depicted events. Reality can then reappear as it is (or at least as we believe it to be, since there is so much to say on these Tong wars—full of shots but lacking in deaths—which broke out during Carnival and are indeed carnivalesque themselves). The fact remains that the real returns. And the enthusiastic MGM Newsreel managers have Luke return as well. They hire him, this time for good.
There is also a third film by Luke that ends up in the company’s hands. It is the report of a nautical accident involving Sally. Luke saves her from drowning, bringing her back to shore, but she thinks that someone else saved her. Seeing the rescue on the screen, she finally understands how things really took place. This third film corresponds to the rule of rendering an event identifiable: what happened is brought back with all its objective features. It is a shame that, this time, Luke is not the cameraman. When he dives in to save Sally, a monkey replaces him. The monkey turns the handle, and the camera-eye belongs to it. What does this substitution of the monkey for the man really mean? It brings us back to Serafino Gubbio’s fear that one day the cinema will function on its own, without our hand (or eye).27 Such a moment would represent the perfection of impassiveness, but also the end of humanity: the camera would be a pure machine. It would be out of our control, and man would lose all power. In turning the handle itself, the monkey in fact exonerates man from even being present. This happens, however, not under the auspices of a posthuman machine, but a prehuman beast. With this action, the monkey brings out primitive motivations that are decidedly primordial. Are monkeys not the emblem of the imitation of a gesture, its copy and replication? Luke’s monkey not only replicates the action of her owner, but she also replicates an action that allows for the replication of the world. A pure game of reproduction emerges. In this game, there is a certain passiveness (if to film means to capture and reactivate the world, it is enough to let the real reveal itself), but there is also a reward (the world reappears, and the man is ready to be celebrated in a copy). It is not by chance that Luke—abandoning his role as operator—is now on the screen, carrying out an action that will immortalize him as a hero.
This cue leads us to Bazin’s extraordinary insight: at the foundation of the cinema lies a need to reproduce appearances, in order to protect a part of life from the violence of death. This need does not pass through the artist’s mediation. The filmic image is made by itself, automatically. In exchange, this need brings us back to something that is even more profoundly human—it is part of our intimate nature to try to keep with us an image of what is no more. From this point of view, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”28 could paradoxically function as a commentary on Luke’s third film—there is an absent operator, the risk of death, the real and symbolic rescue, and the restitution of reality. Rather than insisting on Bazin, I will quote instead a piece dated one year before The Cameraman, which is written, however, in Bazinian tones. An Italian scholar, Alberto Luchini, writes: “The cinema satisfies an ancient and universal desire for reproduction and complete, exact representation; in other words, mechanical…. I want to call it … the eternal cinema of the human soul.”29
Cinema is a machine that encourages impassivity, ready to exonerate man from responsibility. But it is also a machine that fulfills a profoundly anthropological desire, and is thus very human. The idea that emerges in Luke’s third film represents a sort of ideal. The MGM bosses naturally appreciate this film, but they let it function as a seal on Luke and Sally’s love. Perhaps they are a bit afraid of it: they preferred the second film, with its astute compromise between passivity and intervention, reproduction and subtle falsification. And perhaps the first film, refused by them, which spoke of a cinema able to re-create the real, would be accepted by another division of MGM.
Let us try then, to discuss these various faces of the cinematographic machine, with the help of some other films.
“An excerpt from the diary of a cameraman” is how Dziga Vertov defined his The Man with the Movie Camera (Celovek s kinoapparatom, USSR, 1929), as he introduced it before an audience of workers.30 An operator and a diary once again: we are still in the Pirandellian wake with which we began. We are most certainly dealing with a different director and different intentions, yet there is something significant that returns. Beginning with an intersection that is so beautifully summarized in Dziga Vertov’s introduction: “The material is interpreted and moves along the film according to three basic intersecting lines: ‘life as it is’ on the screen, ‘life as it is’ on the filmstrip, and simply ‘life as it is.’” Cinema and life: Serafino Gubbio would have approved.
Let us get to the heart of this intersection, which brings to light three distinct conditions of life. Vertov begins with life on the screen. Unlike Pirandello’s world, we are not dealing with only the semblance of life that is to be viewed with nostalgia with respect to an irreparably stolen “real” one. We are dealing with an existence parallel to the other two. It has an equal dignity, and enters into a fruitful dialectic with them.
In the first place, the “life as it is” on the screen registers and gathers both life itself and life on the filmstrip. It observes some recurrent moments in everyday life:
Besides the theme of the cameraman, you’ll see the theme of “labor and leisure,” of “woman workers,” of the “workers of club and the pub,” of “cinema about cinema,” and many other themes woven together. Negative moments of life are also shown in the film, which are necessary to achieve a more sharply accented emphasis upon the rest of the material.31
Yet the life on the screen recovers the life on (and in) the film as well. There are numerous passages in which we see onscreen frames of film alongside the things that they captured. There are even more moments in which we see the editor work on the spools, ordering, cutting, connecting the given materials. The editor’s presence is featured alongside other forms of work, which are also moments of “intervention” in the real. Thus, the “life as it is” onscreen reflects both everyday existence and film existence: it puts the two in contact.
Yet life on the screen is also selective with respect to the other two. In fact, as Vertov writes, the film’s attention for the world, “does not mean that all of life as it is is shown. In our experiment only those moments of life that coincide with the productive moments of the cameraman’s work are displayed.”32 The activity that unfolds around the construction of the film becomes a kind of filter for the surrounding world: beginning with the presence of an operator and a camera, it is decided where the gaze will or will not look.
Finally, life on the screen gives everyday existence a new order and face. Vertov writes: “While showing and selecting these moments of life, we submitted in our assignment to one fundamental form: the diary of a cameraman or examples of a cameraman’s work outside the studio.”33 Film therefore models the surrounding universe, literally giving it a form. It does so, once more, starting from its own abilities and efforts: the capacity of a machine, but also work guided by a profoundly human end.
This last point is decisive, and brings us to the heart of the problem. Which eye is that of the cinema? How does it behave? Whom does it make behave? Let us move some years back in time and read some passages from the manifesto “Kinoks: A Revolution,” published by Vertov in Lef in 1923. Vertov writes: “The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye.”34 This difference lies in the fact that the camera possesses a freedom of action, as well as an uncommon acuity:
I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies.35
This capacity of the kino-eye can aspire to be something more than the simple recording of the real to which we are accustomed. “Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of our eye. And the better the copy, the better the shooting was thought to be. Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction—away from copying.”36 The world will be observed in a new way. It is always the camera-eye that “speaks”: “Freed from the rule of sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them.” And it is always the camera-eye that explains its own intentions: “My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”37 Thus, it is a matter of following reality in order to find within it “the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the space,”38 the nexuses that hold it together. Better still, it is a matter of reconstructing reality, in order to understand it more clearly. (“I am kino-eye. From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head—and through montage I create a new, perfect man.”)39 The camera is not alone in this mission: “Aiding the machine-eye is the kinok-pilot, who not only controls the camera’s movements, but entrusts himself to it during experiments in space.” The point of arrival cannot be anything but remarkable: “The result of this concerted action of the liberated and perfected camera and the strategic brain of man directing, observing, and gauging—the presentation of even the most ordinary things will take on an exceptionally fresh and interesting aspect.”40
The Man with the Movie Camera applies these principles to all its different levels (perhaps with less radicalness than the Kinoglaz film series immediately before, but with a systematic nature that renders the operation even more didactic). It does so, for example, by putting forward a direct point of view of the world that makes the camera’s presence “felt,” countering the narrative tendencies that usually erase that presence.41 It also constructs a series of visual associations that “rearticulate” the reality offered—in the divorce sequence, for example, the idea of separation finds new definitions and echoes. The basic principles are equally pursued by facing classic themes like life and death—filmed with insistence and without shame—but also by reinterpreting the camera’s work, which is presented to us in the triple guise of a mechanical device in itself, an instrument of the operator’s work, and as an almost human subject able to move and react by itself. In all this, Vertov never escapes the field of vision. His film must not be “read” but “seen.” As he instructs, “It is impossible to read this film, and it is very desirable that, during a viewing of the film, the conceptual content of the visual phrases NOT be translated into words (as usually happens when watching theatrical-fictional films).”42 Simply, to see is not only to observe. It is also to seek to enter into the logic and dynamic of reality.43
This basic assumption (which, I say jokingly, corrects and integrates the convictions of the MGM Newsreel managers and would force them to accept Luke’s first film that they instead reject) clearly shows us how Dziga Vertov redefines the problem with which we began. The camera is able to restore the world to us, not because it simply establishes its appearance, but because it understands its mechanism. The camera’s eye is associated with the presence of an operator (or, if you will, an operator-editor-director: it is not by chance that the first manifesti are signed by “The Council of Three,” referring to Mikhail Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova, and Dziga Vertov).44 It explores the world in its apparent chaos, identifies its essential nexus, and reconstructs its functioning. In this sense, it is right to surprise things “in the act”; but the fact must be explained, not simply revealed. To do this, we must go beyond simple ascertainment: one’s own impressions must be “retranscribed.” One can then identify things completely, ascribing their place and role in the world.
Such a principle obviously leads us to the conviction, widespread in the period, that art (and cinema in particular) has an analytical value. Aesthetic work serves also to lay bare the functioning of things (and, in parallel, critical activity serves to lay bare the functioning of texts; I am thinking here of the formalists). The cinema embraces a similar vocation. We understand this, for example, in a 1927 article that appeared in the Italian journal Solaria. The author, Alberto Luchini, after underscoring the cinema’s capacity to satisfy “an ancient and universal desire for reproduction and complete, exact representation,” points out another feature: “The electric rapidity of the consecutive recordings gives the cinema, and the cinema only, the ability to surprise, repeat, demonstrate, exhibit, show that complexity and variety, and simultaneity, and separation, and reciprocal indifference of life, which art itself and poetry cannot but suggest the feeling.”45 Luchini ties the cinema’s analytical capacity to a sort of profound need. Vertov instead connects it to the sociopolitical work established by communism: “The establishing of a class bond that is visual (kino-eye) and auditory (radio-ear) between the proletarians of all nations and all lands, based on the platform of the communist decoding of the world—that is our objective.”46 The difference is not insignificant, and it reflects the opposite leanings of the two authors. It does not, however, eliminate a certain way of looking at the machine and at the cinema-machine as an instrument for the understanding of things.
It is perhaps useful to recall that, in Vertov’s 1929 presentation, he defined his film an experiment: “The workers of the Kino Eye group decided to carry out a scientific experiment, an experiment in production, specially directed toward the improvement of [film] language, toward perfecting it.”47 Two ideas converge in the notion of an experiment: aesthetic experimentation, aimed at enriching the filmic language, and scientific research, aimed at an analysis of the world and an understanding of its laws. For Vertov, both sides are essential, and must be kept together. Within this perspective, the diary represents a point of juncture: on the one hand, it refers to the notebook of a poet-operator in search of inspiration and, on the other, the protocol of observation of a scientist-operator conducting a systematic investigation of a phenomenon. The cinema as technology and the technology of the cinema favor this union of art and science.
The experimental nature of the film certainly demands a particular vision: “I would appeal to the audience with a request to watch our experiment with special attention, inasmuch as it conveys itself with suddenness and in uninhibited form. As a consequence, its unusualness demands your full concentration.”48 From here, we can easily return to the Benjaminian idea that the filmic image functions as a test, ready to defy the spectator’s perception.49 To watch a film is not a satisfaction for one’s curiosity or a consolation for one’s nostalgias (as it could have been in Luke’s films, and in Lumière before him). To watch a film is to challenge one’s senses. Similarly, it does not entail finding evidence: it entails facing a judicial process. The fact remains that it is film’s experimental nature that allows for the intersection of language, analysis, methodology, self-awareness, and finally education of the public. Presenting the Kinoglaz film series in 1924, Vertov had understood this nexus: “Kino-eye as the union of science with newsreel to further the battle for the communist decoding of the world, as an attempt to show the truth on the screen—Film-truth.”50 Here is the cinema-eye, the eye of a machine: it has a life of its own (“away from copying”),51 but also a vocation: that of the truth, a cine-truth.
If we tried to read The Man with the Movie Camera as a reversal (and a completion) of The Cameraman, why not read King Kong (M. C. Cooper and E. B. Schoedsack, USA, 1933)52 as a reversal of both? Why not reflect here as well on the relationship between the cinema and the machine—between cinema and the producing machine?
In order to foreground this topic, I must perform a small act of cruelty. For the moment, I will leave aside the film’s two unforgettable sequences: the one in which the Great Ape kidnaps the White Virgin, brings her to the jungle, and tries to seduce her, and the one in which he breaks free from his restraints, escapes into the urban jungle, and climbs the Empire State Building, before being defeated for good. I will start at the beginning, at the moment in which a group of people gather in a ship’s wardroom. They are getting ready to set sail for a mysterious island to film something never seen before, something extraordinary, “the eighth wonder of the world.” Among them, there is the producer-director, Carl Denham, also an heir to Serafino Gubbio—though not at all “impassive.” The skipper and the first mate express doubts and perplexity, to which he responds with confidence: their undertaking will be a certain success.
An undertaking. The trip is presented as such.53 On second thought, it is an undertaking in the double sense of the term. The producer-director prepares himself to face an adventure that is significant, and also fascinating: he is like the Knight leaving in search of the Holy Grail, save the fact that his mission is motivated by ambition more than desire, and his Grail is a prehistoric beast—not a holy goblet. Yet the voyage on which he embarks has clear commercial implications: to film the never-before-seen assures precious material to offer up to theaters around the world, and the long journey will have a confirmation at the box office. The producer-director, besides being a Knight, is also an Entrepreneur.
The second face of the undertaking soon becomes dominant. The heroic and glorious deed gives prestige, but one must compete for the business activity. The gossip in the wardroom confirms it. All the foreseen conditions must be in place: in particular, the necessary resources must be available, and the much-researched project without holes. This is what lends confidence.
What emerges is a productive organization, with its instruments and ends. The instruments are the necessary tools and devices: the ship, the tenders, the gifts for the natives, the arms for protection, the cameras, the actors, the workmen, etc. The end is that of every industrial undertaking—to obtain the “raw materials” needed in order to transform them into “commodities” to be offered on the market.54 For our knight-entrepreneur, unpredictable and unexpected realities make up the “natural resources,” never before seen onscreen, which he will find on an unexplored island. Likewise, the “commodity” is the visual documentation of this reality. It is a collection of images that audiences around the world will run to see with curiosity and trepidation. The undertaking is set within this picture. A picture that explains with absolute certainty that to film the world is not only to copy it (as Luke believed), nor is it to simply reconstruct its underlying logic (as Dziga Vertov wanted to believe): it is also to produce, to produce a show.
Let us see more clearly what this final product—the spectacle—really is. As we said, it centers around a series of shots that the troupe will take on Skull Island. Through them, the spectator will be able to make an otherwise impossible journey, and witness events from which he or she would be otherwise barred. The cinema is a formidable witness that allows the person watching a film to become a witness as well. We are, once again, meeting up with some of the convictions that drove the MGM Newsreel bosses in their choice of news materials to offer the public: on the screen, what matters is an accurate record of the event. It is also clear that we are facing one of the most solid convictions accompanying the advent of cinema: the idea that it can assure us direct contact with what is distant, in terms of both space and time. A 1907 piece lyrically reminds us (with unspoken references to Jules Verne’s science fictions):
Though old and decrepit himself, every lover or husband who has for years visited his beloved at the cemetery will finally see her for himself, when he most wants or desires her before his eyes, alive and young, with words and a smile, intent on the housework. So it will be when someone dear crosses oceans, continents, and distant seas; we will be able to follow, to see, to move and act, to converse from afar as if we were there. So it will be that we will know of his or her needs in order to satisfy them, his or her joys to share them, the fulfillment of his or her dreams of riches and glory to exalt them.55
The cinema allows us to stay in touch with the world.
It is, however, a strange connection. If, thanks to the film image, the spectator can feel him or herself in the place and time of the event depicted onscreen, it is also true that this participation is neither complete nor total. He or she continues to be separated from what is onscreen. He or she is in a different place: a theater, a screening. Hence, there is one important consequence: in order to shoot “the real” found on Skull Island, the producer-director will have to represent completely the amazement and fear that this mysterious reality provokes in the viewer. He is there to capture emotion. Yet these shots, however fear-inducing, do not risk the spectator’s life like that mysterious reality might have: the viewer is struck by the film, but remains safe.56 We have emotion without danger. The Great Ape, once taken from his environment, is put in chains precisely to ensure this sort of safety. Thus, we can say that what the spectator is offered—the spectacle that he or she is sold—is, in good part, a visual experience marked by attraction and protection, by pleasure and domination. In other words, it is a purely voyeuristic experience. It is not by chance that, when the producer-director displays the enchained Great Ape to the public, he affirms that “he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show, to gratify your curiosity.” Nor is it a coincidence that a contemporary review of King Kong commemorating its screening at Radio City Music Hall notes the subtle contradiction of “an audience enjoying all the sensations of primitive terror and fascination within the scientifically air-cooled temple of baroque modernism that is Mr. Rockefeller’s contribution to contemporary culture.”57 The commodity of cinema is a visual pleasure consumed in maximum comfort. It is the satisfaction of spying from a safely adjoining room. In this light, the film’s conclusion seems almost more explosive: freeing himself from his chains, King Kong (the actual living Great Ape, not the one that was thought to have been brought in effigy: the director in the film is able to present his audience with reality itself, fetishizing it) threatens this shameless voyeurism. The living Kong forces the spectator to flee his refuge, to pour into the streets, to go back to being a helpless citizen. He compels him—once a peeping Tom—to become prey.
If the voyeuristic situation constitutes the final product offered to the consumer, the production process that is put into action remains to be examined. Let us return to the beginning of the film. In the wardroom, on the eve of the expedition, the captain and the officers check if all the instruments for the undertaking are ready. Among them, there are arms. The expedition, in fact, will not be peaceful. It will require the use of force, precisely at the moment in which the crew will seize the “raw materials” from which the spectacle will be drawn—in which the men will appropriate the “natural resources” that will be transformed into commodities. The production process involves a coerced submission. It is an oppressive exploitation, something of a kidnapping. Such a manner of intervention has a dual effect: it changes the relationship to nature, and more precisely it breaks the sense of equilibrium with the environment from which the “raw materials” come (an equilibrium that, incomprehensible to the white men’s mentality, seems instead to inspire offerings or rituals that are celebrated by the natives).58 At the same time, it spurs resistance on the part of nature itself, which, once injured, must react in some way. This is what happens at the film’s conclusion: King Kong’s revolt represents a gesture of resistance to appropriation, in addition to an unmasking of voyeurism. The Beast rebels against his capture (for which the Beauty is used as bait). He summons all the energy of which he is capable, and that no chain is able to contain, and it pours out in the form of counterviolence toward those who, through violence, tried to cage him. In this sense, the film becomes a sort of disaster movie, not dissimilar to those about earthquakes or volcanoes, in which nature—damaged and exploited—reacts, breaking through shackles and reversing the power relationship with those who had unscrupulously thought to subdue it.
The violence connected to the production process has yet another face that is more subtle and seemingly innocuous. Let us return once again to the beginning of the film. The producer-director in the wardroom needs a last element for his undertaking: a young woman to entrust for a part in the film, that of the white woman who encounters a prehistoric animal. There will not only be shots of the “real” on Skull Island—they will also film a “story.” This superimposition of the narrative and documentary dimensions makes at least two features emerge: on the one hand, the production is directed toward consumption; on the other, it requires significant manipulation.
Within the context of consumption, the story works as an attraction. In fact, it might appeal to the pleasure that great events offer, beyond a curiosity for what is remote in terms of space and time. And this will be a great event: it is nothing less than a story of love and death between the Beauty and the Beast. The audience will have a true myth that appeals to its imagination. At the same time, there is a reference to everyday reality, thanks to an actress who has nothing remarkable about her but a “pretty face to look at”; thus, it is easy to identify with her. Imagination and identification: as Alberto Abruzzese argued in his passionate study of the Great Ape,59 these two elements render the “machine-story” in some way infallible. Better still, they orient the modern cultural product directly to its consumption. It is from this viewpoint that, in 1908, an Italian scholar justified the abandonment of reality for narration:
The history of cinema has two paths that are distinct and quasi-antithetical. It was at first an ingenious and faithful mechanical reconstruction of reality in movement, a slightly tremulous reality … but one that is sincere, and as such pleasing to the cultured souls and artists, but not very much by the masses. The ardent love of the masses was born when cinema abandoned reality and became artificial, when with the help of imagination, scenic illusion, mime, disguising it imitated nature: it created farces and tragedies, idylls and comedies, visions and mysteries, when it positioned itself, in other words, on the same paths as art, when it became its cheaper facsimile.60
A narrative also implies a manipulation. To tell a story does not simply mean to adapt or reorganize facts, but to superimpose a fantasy onto them. In this sense, Carl Denham—knight, entrepreneur, but also a storyteller—has to go forward with respect to Luke/Keaton and Dziga Vertov. Luke/Keaton and Vertov influence the captured reality, in order to give a more vivid description, or to understand relationships between things. Carl Denham transforms the events in order to clear a space for imagination.61
Manipulation could have a justification in and of itself: we have already mentioned the polemic between L’Herbier and Vuillermoz on the reproductive nature of the cinema. The problem is recurrent between the first and third decades of the century: if film is a simple copy of the real (a machine à imprimer la vie, or “machine to print life,” as L’Herbier said), then it cannot claim to be an art. Paul Souday, one year before in 1917, had called attention to this: “The cinema, like the photograph—of which it is a perfection—is limited to faithfully and mechanically following reality, while art is not a mechanical copy, but an intelligent interpretation of this reality.”62 Ten years before, in 1908, Canudo had already clarified the problem: “Now it is necessary to ask ourselves if the cinema is art. I say that it is not yet art, since it lacks the elements of characteristic choice, plastic interpretation, and not of a copy of a subject, which will always mean that photography will not be an art.”63 Many others would confirm the argument. Therefore, some manipulation is necessary to free the “mechanical eye” from its passivity and bring it into the aesthetic domain. With a story, though, this manipulation risks becoming excessive. There is the danger of altering real information, superimposing on it the elements that obey only the order of the narration. Reality would be caged in a preestablished and abstract mold, which is precisely what every story is. The semblances of a real world would appear on the screen, but it would only be a possible world, imaginable and imagined. Only the return to reality (or a story that becomes perfect mimesis, as Bazin hoped in his battle for realism, which began in the 1940s) can save the cinema from this risk.
The two features connected to narration—its orientation toward consumption and the presence of manipulation—make us fully understand how the picture has changed with respect to the two preceding films. Here, the camera no longer seems able to give back to us what its eye captures. On the contrary, it seems called to truly “devour” the world and transform it into a “semblance of reality,” almost to confirm Pirandello’s pessimistic preoccupations. In other words, the camera participates in a process (a production process, in which the reproduction is pressed into the production) that makes it impossible to ascertain the authenticity of what we see. The onscreen world has become an artificial universe, and we ourselves—immersed in a game of the frenetic satisfaction of our curiosity and imagination—become wheels in the economic mechanism of the circulation of a commodity. A machine-world for the machine-spectators, in which the cinema—machine among machines—exercises the power to cancel out nature. The latter—the one surrounding us, as well as the one still cherished in our hearts—seems to vanish. Swallowed up and voided out, Pirandello would say, canceled out in an existence that has by now become a “clamorous and dizzy machinery” that crushes us like a merciless machine. Nature is no longer around nor inside us. All that remain are “bits and morsels” of life on the screen, in the theater, on the streets. Here, the “mechanical eye” of cinema shows its ambiguous nature. Yet there is hope on the horizon. A story may respect the real, as Bazin would contend. A film may break its own “mechanism,” especially in order to explore new possibilities. This is what unconventional works do, if for no reason other than to witness the dream of a utopia. This is what King Kong does in the film’s final sequences.
Let us go back to these sequences, which were previously interpreted as an unmasking of the voyeurism carried out by the object of scopic desire, and nature’s resistance to its own imprisonment. We can, in fact, see in them the anger of he who grows aware of having become prisoner of the machine, as well as the creation of a martyr who will make us regret the loss of nature. The Great Ape who crosses New York destroying everything in his wake and faces death clinging to the top of the Empire State Building illustrates both positions. King Kong behaves like a borderline subject who, suffocated by the established order, reverses his rage on the surrounding world by tearing it to pieces. If you will, he is a metropolitan hooligan who rebels against an environment that seems alien to him. He also behaves, in contrast, like a modern testimonial for ecological causes: he climbs the tallest skyscraper in the world as if it were a tropical peak. He faces the airplanes flying around him with the same determination he battles the pterodactyls of the island. He suffers what is, in the end, an unjust death, showing his valor to the end. In other words, he shows everyone what beings like him—who have lived in the heart of nature—are made of. Before the new triumph of the machine culture, he reminds us of what we have lost. Thanks to him, we have access once more to a dream. May he rest in peace—he has our regrets.
But what if King Kong, instead of rebelling, had let himself be tamed? What if he had become a perfect dancer on the Broadway stage? If he had given up his primitive island and adapted to living in a Manhattan loft, eating hamburgers and drinking Coca Cola? And if he placed himself in the service of the processes of production and consumption, replicating to his best ability the actions of millions of machine-men? What would happen if the subtle operation of the cinema—that of taking possession of the world to make a spectacle—reached its conclusion? What if nature disappeared once and for all from our horizon, and we found ourselves moving about in an environment that is finally and happily artificial?
Let us imagine that there are no longer things to film, but only images; there are no longer human bodies, only clones; no longer a primitive universe, but only copies. In other words, let us imagine that there is no longer any jungle to reach, but only a museum with beautiful works on display. It would be interesting to see how the cinema-eye behaves. Would it experience a Pirandellian pleasure at this eclipse of reality, this emptying of essence? Would it suspend its own inevitable violence (to shoot, to frame), since every violence has already been carried out? Or does it go down, with pride, some other path, and search for a Beauty, though this could end in martyrdom as it does for the Beast? Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (France, 1982), forty-three years after King Kong, offers us both the opportunity to pose these questions, as well as some clues for possible answers.
This film too is centered around a direct descendant of Serafino Gubbio: Jerzi, a director involved in building and filming a complex and costly set. He is not, however, chasing after the capture of a never-before-seen reality, in order to transform it into images of mass appeal. What attracts him is the reconstruction of great artistic masterpieces of the past, in particular the paintings of Rubens, Goya, and Delacroix. He translates these paintings into tableaux vivants, which are featured in his film. Many surrounding events weigh on his personal and private life. The majority of his extras live around him, and bring their everyday problems to the set. In the adjoining village, a group of workers risks losing their jobs, and the matter has consequences for the making of the film. He finds himself drawn into a difficult relationship with a married woman, a fact that further complicates his life. But despite these demands, Jerzi shows an absolute dedication to his project. He works ceaselessly on the reconstruction of these masterpieces from the past, trying to reproduce every infinitesimal detail. His surrounding reality does not concern him. Yet the cinema is made of reality: of light, bodies, and objects. The material world can sometimes be put on hold, but it inevitably returns. And it is precisely the real that, resurfacing, places the director’s efforts in jeopardy: the lighting that he tries to use does not work; the actors’ bodies never fully adapt themselves; their postures and gestures always have some small imperfection. All of this renders useless his attempt to remake the masterpieces. The difficulties are evident, and the film is abandoned.
This is the story told in Passion, retold perhaps in a tendentious manner. It contains a reflection on the status of art in contemporary times: we find the obstinacy of an aesthetic search, the nostalgia for a inheritance that risks being lost, the frustration of an expressive accuracy never reached.64 Yet there are other points that interest us, and that can help us bring this exploration to a conclusion.
The first is clearly an indifference for the real. The world around Jerzi is full of tension and turbulence, but the director ignores the everyday petites Passions for the grandes Passions staged by art. The fact that he is a film director does not seem to help him pay attention to the world around him. What is, in fact, the cinema? Or at least, what has it become? A voice-over at the beginning of the film explains, “It isn’t a lie, but something imagined, which is never the exact truth, but neither is it its opposite … and that, in any case, is separated by the external real, by the deeply calculated ‘approximations’ of seeming.” The cinema is something that must never call the external world to account; it seeks a center of interest beyond the real. In this light, the mechanical eye seems exonerated from the need to pursue and restore things: the camera is simply not taken up in order to capture the real.
The second point relates to images. If the cinema’s task, as Jerzi interprets it, is an engagement with the tradition of visual representation in order to circulate some of its fundamental features, it must draw its materials and inspiration from this tradition. This carries an important consequence, however: the filmic images cannot be but reelaborations of something that is, in turn, a reelaboration of reality. They are second-degree representations, in which objects, bodies, and postures are mediated by the painter’s treatment of them. We will have only images of images in a game of mirrors that can be extended ad infinitum. In this game, to shoot can only mean to replicate: to offer copies of copies. This is, moreover, precisely what Jerzi wants to do. For this reason, he paradoxically ignores the suggestion to follow Rembrandt and observe “human beings, carefully and at length, their lips and in their eyes”; for Jerzi, bodies are only masses to be rearranged as they had once been displayed, in either a given picture or its possible variants, real or imaginary. In this infinite repetition—in these images of images—it is obvious that it no longer makes sense to look for “an original,” a source for everything65 (least of all in the reality that provided the basis for the first representation). Man’s Museum contains only pictures in dialogue with each other. Nature has vanished, once and for all, from its rooms.
And finally, once again, the real. This filming—like a continuous game of mirrors, this shooting without catching hold, ready only to offer a replica—runs up, in fact, against something belonging to the order of reality. Or better, with something that constitutes the basis of the real, before it is determined in any concrete way: light. “The camera is always there to witness the light. That’s what I admire in painting: painters can create their own light.” Jerzi could appropriate this assertion from Godard.66 Perhaps this is why he tries to remake the great painted masterpieces: because he is envious of artists who could always have the light that they wanted. On his set, the lighting is never what he needs it to be. No matter how he works with his great tableaux vivants, there is always an area in which the chiaroscuro, colors, and refraction of the bodies leave him profoundly dissatisfied. He never has the “right” light. He does have, however, an authentic, concrete light. This is a light that does not let itself be adapted, subdued, or caged, precisely because it is what it is—a real element. In an otherwise completely artificial set, its presence reminds us how nature is ready to reappear, even within the folds of a machine. This resistance against a mechanical eye—the camera-eye—forces the latter to contend with the real, and to give in to its subtle presence. But Jerzi does not accept this concrete light, nor does he accept that reality enters into his copying of copies. For this reason, he gives up and abandons the film.
But while Jerzi carries out his defeat, beaten by the resistance of the light, the person making Passion (Serafino Godard?) offers us a lesson on how one could have gotten out of this jeopardy.67 The film we have before us, which speaks of a film that cannot be realized, is presented as a most sensitive seismograph of the smallest details of life. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that the characters who cross Jerzi, even peripherally, are then pursued in their everyday hesitations, seemingly unrelated reflections, family confrontations, in their chatterings about themselves and their own lives. They are often filmed almost by surprise, as if to recover through them some tranches de vie. In telling the story of a director closed up in his museum, Passion wants to be a place in which the surrounding universe is itself a protagonist. So, the passing of existence becomes an essential factor; it is immediately recorded, it leaves its traces in the film. Passion is a film of the trace—often of pure trace. Let us think of the film’s opening images of airplane tracks: these are nothing else but image-imprints. And let us contrast them with the complex figures orchestrated by Jerzi, which instead follow the law of the image-machine. If the film to be made is locked into theatrical devices, Passion opens itself to the real, pursuing it and submitting to it.
In this contested dialogue between a film and the film it recounts, Passion constructs an extraordinary reflection on a moment in film history almost one hundred years after cinema’s birth. But it advances a response to some legitimate doubts. Nature still exists beyond the great museum, and it is still ready to come forward. We can see it because—in spite of everything—there is a mechanical eye sensitive to it, which gathers its progress and records its traces. Only traces, perhaps nothing more. Yet these traces leave a door open that might have already seemed closed. The cinema—the cinema-machine—still deals with the real.
With Passion, we complete the range of positions that the cinema articulates with regard to itself, the nature of the machine, its relationship to the person who handles it, and its rapport with the real that constitutes the filmed object. To film can mean to recover the world around us in order to bear witness (The Cameraman), to unravel it in order to explain it (The Man with the Movie Camera), to capture it for a spectacle (King Kong), to ignore it in favor of other images (Jerzi’s film), or to perceive it in the viewfinder and feel compelled to record its traces (Passion). The cinema-eye is a symptom of the transformation of human existence into a great mechanism in which the artificial dimension erodes and even edges out the natural. It is also true that this eye is still able to relate to reality—including natural reality—and record its presence. On the screen, there is a continuous coming and going of the image-artifice and the image-imprint. And artifice will never completely conquer the field.
We clearly refer to the dialectic that began with the “civilization of the machines,” previously touched upon by Pirandello, Guardini, and Mumford. Does technology, used almost constantly, continue to be at the service of a respectful acquisition of the world’s resources, or does it carry with it a measure of violence with which it inflicts irreparable wounds on nature? And is this action exercised through technology still guided by man, or does it follow its own logic, which reverses traditional criteria? Finally, does the landscape that this technology makes up still contain natural elements, or has it become only an archive of signs, a warehouse of commodities, an artificial setting? The cinema, with its mechanical eye, seems to advance different responses embodying various positions. We have seen how the shot can be a recording of the real (The Cameraman) or a revisiting that brings hidden elements and nexuses to light (The Man with the Movie Camera), but also its violent conquest (King Kong), or a simple exercise in remaking (Jerzi’s film in Passion). The cinema vacillates between having a grasp on the world, having too much of it, and not having any left at all. Similarly, we have seen how the operator can disappear (The Cameraman), or else hold the reins of the game in his hands (The Man with the Movie Camera). He can exploit technology and, through it, Nature (King Kong), or find himself defeated by an indefatigable Nature (Jerzi’s film). The cinema vacillates between offering itself as a tool extending man’s action, and becoming an automatic device that does not need any human intervention. Last, we have seen how the background world can reappear onscreen in all its density (The Cameraman); it can rewrite its underlying design (The Man with the Movie Camera); present itself as a “resource” to be captured and exploited (King Kong); and, once emptied, it cannot but vanish through a game of mirrors (Jerzi’s film). The films vacillate between the recapturing of reality and its definitive loss. And yet, the final film of this analysis (Passion) speaks about the resistance of the light, and with it, the real. The cinema does not succeed in canceling out the real: perhaps it gives up. In any case, it marks this presence. Even the most artificial image—a tableau vivant that depicts only other images—is, in the end, crossed by the breath of things.
The cinema offers many responses, but primarily it looks for a negotiation. From film to film, we have discovered that the mechanical eye, in its status as our ocular prosthesis—a technical device, but also a sensory organ—constitutes an extraordinary point of juncture between man and machine, artifice (or artifact) and nature, filter and bridge for things. When the operator disappears, he is celebrated, and vice versa. When the machine dominates, it shows its weakness, and vice versa. When the real seems to vanish, it resurfaces, and vice versa. More than a vacillation, there is a continuous circularity between the different poles, which confirms, once again, the fact that the cinema offers itself as a point of convergence and compromise. In this sense, the mechanical eye is still a site in which various criteria converge and are superimposed.
I would like to conclude with an exciting sequence that fully demonstrates this sense of circularity. It is the famous moment in Metropolis (F. Lang, Germany, 1927), in which the device invented by Rotwang, the mad scientist, transfers the life of the Real Maria into the False Maria. We are given a young woman whose pureness represents the natural absolute (the Real Maria), and an automaton whose perfection represents the artificial absolute (the False Maria). We have a mechanical apparatus as well, Rotwang’s invention, which allows the life force of one creature to pass into another. This machinery, not coincidently, is run by electricity (that is, an element that moves devices and bodies, in some way giving them life, and in another, generating light and giving life to film images). We face two polar opposites (nature/artifice), as well as the possibility of their continuity. This continuity is assured by the absolute likeness between the Real Maria and the False Maria: the exact same body lends itself to both woman and automaton. What comes to mind are the words that Italian scholar Eugenio Giovannetti dedicated in 1930 to the bifurcated body and the actress playing the dual role:
Brigit Helm is the demonical figure of the new metropolitan underworld, the flickering daughter of electricity and steel…. She has taken all that is feminine in the machine, and has given to the female an extreme mechanicity. She has no nerves: she has thin bands of steel; she has no heart: she has a fiery oven; she has no brain: she has a terrible electric lamp in her skull, perpetually running day and night. And with all this, she still has the flesh of a woman; here and there, her skin still shines with the iridescent freshness of primordial Eden.68
In this passage, Giovannetti gathers the full convergence of nature and artifice realized in the cinema. On the screen, we can have something that belongs both to the order of pure reality (“primordial Eden”), as well as the order of artificial reality (the bands, the oven, the lamp). We are able to stare an uncontaminated world in the face—which opens up to our eyes as if for the first time—as well as at a reconstructed and remade world, which has lost all connection to its origins. Cinema has a particular status. It is a machine, and thus it is able to enter into perfect harmony with all that is artificial. But, as a machine, it is also able to penetrate the heart of things, to understand them fully. According to Giovannetti, it is a “mechanical art”: its eye has the power and exactitude of a technical device; but its eye is equally able to recover the intimate organic-ness still governing the modern world and exhibit the pantheistic richness of the real.
There is circularity and synthesis between nature and artifice. The negotiation changes the terms of the problem (Giovannetti’s idea of cinema as mechanical art is exactly a rearticulation of both the concept of art and mechanism). At the same time, it assures the active presence of both sides. Each pole of the dialectic has something that has to be preserved. Let’s go for a moment to Heinrich von Kleist and his About the Marionette Theater (Über das Marionettentheater).69 Von Kleist speaks of two parallel and contrasting graces: on the one hand, that of the being uncorrupted by civilization and, on the other, that of being transformed into pure mechanical device. For him, the respective examples are the swordfighter bear with which the protagonist of his novel crosses lances, and the jointed marionette that arouses his most profound admiration. Analogies with our films are easy. In Metropolis there is the Real Maria, in whom the son of the city’s founder sees what his father’s invention destroyed, and the False Maria, who ignites everyone’s passions dancing at the Folies Bergère dressed in Erté. In King Kong and Passion, respectively, there is the sublime Beast who knows what love is, even in times of danger, and Jerzi’s scenic contrivances, which seduce the director to defeat. Yes, there is grace in all these extremes. Cinema is able to gather each kind, show it, compare it with its opposite, make it circulate, and infuse it with the others. It is able to take these extremes, give them value, and gather them into a single vision that, filled with pleasure, embraces them.
Machine, artifice, nature, human: film does not hide the contrast between these elements. But its eye—so mechanical, yet anthropomorphic—is able to promote a productive compromise.