INTENSIFICATION OF THE NERVOUS LIFE
In one of his most significant contributions of the 1920s, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,”1 Siegfried Kracauer invites us to consider the cinema not only as the building in which films are projected, but as an actual place of worship. The religion practiced is that of entertainment. But what are the principles of this religion? And what are its collective rites? Kracauer’s response is clear: “Elegant surface splendor is the hallmark of these mass theaters.”2 There is no search for intimacy, depth, or origins. The splendor of superficial appeal, immediate attraction, and appearances is majestically displayed. The style of these theaters says it all. As Kracauer remarks, “The architecture does perhaps bombard the patrons in its attempt to create an atmosphere.”3 The space, the furnishings, the “stylistic excesses” all serve to astonish those who enter, to stir the senses rather than offer symbols such as in traditional theaters. The performances that take place in the cinema are also indicative of this excess. They are characterized by a “well-wrought grandiosity,” born from both the exasperation of the elements at play (all brought to their maximum splendor) and a complexity that places film alongside live performances and concerts. Both this richness of stimuli and well-constructed composition serve to create what Kracauer, in a parody of Wagner, defines as the total artwork of effects:
This total artwork of effects assaults all the senses using every possible means. Spotlights shower their beams into the auditorium, sprinkling across festive drapes or rippling through colorful, organic-looking glass fixtures. The orchestra asserts itself as an independent power, its acoustic production buttressed by the responsory of the lighting. Every emotion is accorded its own acoustic expression and its color value in the spectrum—a visual and acoustic kaleidoscope that provides the setting for the physical activity on stage: pantomime and ballet. Until finally the white surface descends and the events of the three-dimensional stage blend imperceptibly into two-dimensional illusion.4
If the cult of entertainment is consecrated for the sake of appearances, if its temples and rites focus on immediate effects, the rule governing all this remains to be understood. Why seek out a splendor that is based on a pure cascade of sensations? Why create a complex work, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and rob it of any mythic dimension? Why choose performances in which “the stimulations of the senses succeed each other with such rapidity that there is no room left for even the slightest contemplation”?5 Kracauer is peremptory in response: “This emphasis on the external has the advantage of being sincere.”6 The picture palaces faithfully mirror a fragmented society, a confused and excited mass. The cinemas and the films they show—with their pursuit of accumulation, disintegration, and superficiality—directly evoke society’s disorder.7 It is not, then, a coincidence that Berlin audiences “increasingly shun art events …, preferring instead the surface glamour of the stars, films, revues and spectacular shows. Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions.”8 Just as, when one tries to return to traditional performances, “amalgamating the wide range of the effects … into an ‘artistic’ unity,”9 the film proves “inappropriate and hence remains unsuccessful.”10 It ceases to offer “distraction—which is meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world.”11 It ceases to be capable of “expos[ing] distintegration instead of masking it.” It ceases to communicate with the masses, “who so easily allow themselves to be stupefied only because they are so close to the truth.”12
And so we have outward appearance, an assault of impressions, the optical and acoustic kaleidoscope of the temples of entertainment. Conversely, there is the disorder, confusion, and stimulation of mass society. It is not difficult to jump backwards from Kracauer some twenty years, to the portrait that Simmel had then created of the new living conditions mirrored in the metropolis, living conditions centering around an “intensification of nervous stimulation.”13 Metropolitan inhabitants are subjected to a “swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.” Their existence is marked by a constant exposure to stimuli coming from within and without. They become immersed in situations that are the source of infinite provocation. “With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity14 they feel the pressure of all that surrounds them. Such an engagement requires some countermeasures: being drawn in with such violence, one risks, in fact, getting lost. Simmel indicates two remedies. The first is tied to the growing development of the intellect—that is, a practical and calculating reason that evaluates opportunities presented to the individual as something to be exploited.
The metropolitan type of man (which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants) develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment, which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart…. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man.15
The second remedy is the inverse, and consists in adopting a careless attitude, with which one can adapt to the most complicated situations. This spirit is blasé:
The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and different values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other.16
Here we have intellect and carelessness: the suspension of one’s sensibility and its intentional dulling. Yet, if one can respond to the excess of stimuli, it must also be said that one cannot do without the excitement of the senses. For example, when the metropolitan man tries to break out of the anonymity into which the big city seems to drive him, he usually “is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness.”17 In fact, he feels like someone only when stimulating the interest of others. It is only by catching the attention of those around him that he can save “some modicum of self-esteem and the sense of filling a position.”18
Simmel helps us to understand precisely how sensory excitement is a widespread phenomenon, and thus to gather together the origins of an entertainment based on strong external appeal. Indeed, everything seems to offer intense stimulation to us. Dwelling for a moment in the metropolis, let us think of how modern constructions are placed next to historical buildings, housing developments next to no-man’s-land, churches next to factories, the bourgeoisie next to the Lumpenproletariat, the autochthon next to new immigrants. All are heaped together in a way that cannot be but striking.19 Moreover, the various elements often tend to assume spectacular forms, becoming in this way the source of further wonder: such is the case of big department stores or shopping malls, windows that are ever more luxurious, seasonal displays, buildings rising up to skyscrapers, or streets that widen to become veritable set designs (as in the case of boulevards). The most characteristic element of every metropolis—the crowd—embodies this power of appeal. It is a concentration of the most diverse varieties of man, impressive for its composition and breadth, but having something picturesque about it, too. It envelops, frightens, and intrigues. More than the metropolis in itself, it is modernity as a whole that tends to surprise. We have only to think of how the continuous innovations represented by scientific discoveries and their application to industry open unexpected and unthinkable new scenarios; or how the profound transformations in production and social structures lead all people to probe themselves to find an identity or position; or how the extraordinary expansion of horizons, permitted by new methods of transportation and communication, establishes contact with previously inaccessible realities. In modernity, nothing remains in its place. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is unreachable any longer. Everyone is directly involved, and forced to hold his or her antennae up. Under these new demands, those who are endowed with an extreme sensitivity—such as those often described by Poe (Roderick Usher, or the anonymous murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who begins his self-portrait with the words “TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am”)20—are exemplary heroes.
But Simmel tells us something else as well. In the metropolis (and, more generally, in modern life), internal and especially external stimuli have an aggressive quality. They are not simple pieces of information presented to the consciousness; they function instead as true provocations. The “outer and inner stimuli,” flowing intensely and uninterruptedly, end up irritating and harming. From here comes a change in perceptual activity, which confronts a true shock. It was Benjamin (starting from Baudelaire and recovering Freud) who pointed out the traumatic nature of sensory stimuli:21 whether walking at the center of a crowd or working in a factory, it is like finding oneself on a battleground. Since the sensory stimuli are shocks, they necessitate a defense. Simmel indicates two possible paths: recourse to the intellect or the indifference of the blasé. The first brings with it a shrewd calculation of advantages, the second the assumption of an outward separation from the world. Both permit the reduction and weakening of the provocations with which one competes. Other modes of defense exist, however. Benjamin reminds us of the “protective screen” formulated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Not coincidentally, this essay ties the notion of pleasure and displeasure to the respective decrease or increase of excitement present in the psychic life. In it, Freud compares the living organism to an undifferentiated “vesicle” that, under the incessant impact of external stimuli, forms a kind of “crust” able to resist and repel those very stimuli. The “enormous energies at work in the external world” must compete with this “crust”: due to its filter they can penetrate the living organism, yet they have “only a fragment of their original intensity.”22 In this way, they do not put it in danger, as they might have had their strength remained intact. When, despite this “protective shield,” the excitement opens a gap, we have a trauma that can assume, for example, the form of a fright. But the “cortical layer” tends to work: it reduces the quantity of excitement (and thus avoids situations of displeasure), and at the same time allows the organism “to take small specimens of the external world.”23 Freud connects the theory of the anti-stimulus shield to a series of other elements that I must overlook right now. His work does, however, constitute an interesting suggestion for the shock/defense dynamic. I would add only that, in the same essay, Freud suggests a second way to confront an excess of excitement: play. Babies can, thanks to ludic activity, “repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation.”24 This second hypothesis is interesting for the shock/defense dynamic. It reminds us that, in addition to what we can call “organic” responses (such as that offered by the formation of a “crust”), there are other responses that humans develop at a behavioral level. Yet it also suggests that the various responses have a common basis, seeing that both game and the protective screen call for repetition (it is in replicating the strong impression that the baby learns to dominate it, and it is in sustaining blow after blow that the vesicle forms its own crust). Repetition foretells habit. Thus, we have many interconnected modes of coping with shock: the use of practical reason, the assuming of indifference, the formation of an anti-stimulus shield, and the ludic exercise.
Now let us return to film. It seems evident that the cinema finds itself entangled in a well-structured dialectic. We began by pointing out how the filmic spectacle is closely connected to sensory excitement. It offers a bombardment of impressions, a cascade of appeal. This is primarily true for early cinema, which according to Tom Gunning offers itself as precisely a “cinema of attractions.”25 Yet it extends to subsequent cinema as well, which is certainly not lacking in visual excitement. This crush of stimuli is not an end in itself: it gives us back a society characterized by the intensification of the nervous life, a society thus rendered suddenly more complicated and disordered. In such a society, to perceive means to expose oneself to shock while inevitably seeking protection from it. The cinema takes both elements into account, particularly in its “institutional” or “classical” form. In one way, it excites, and, in the process of excitement, it destabilizes. It is not by chance that, some years after Kracauer, Epstein speaks of possible spectator “strain” (“fatigue”).26 In another way, however, the cinema seeks forms of protection against provocations coming from the world that are too violent. It excites, but never in a way that makes the spectator feel truly, definitively lost. It is an excited gaze, a gaze open to risks, and a gaze that is perhaps reparative. The cinema is tuned in to its age on this frequency, as well.
We can pose some questions while keeping in mind film’s capacity to follow this dialectic so consonant with its age. What is it about the cinema that stirs its gaze in particular? When it produces a vision with its heart in its throat? What risks are associated with an excited gaze? What is placed at risk? Finally, how does the cinema react to sensory excitement? How does it keep it under control? I will look for answers, starting once again with films that, though outwardly dissimilar, will hopefully prove revealing.
An automobile is zooming at top speed in pursuit of a train. The wife and friends of a condemned man have found proof of his innocence and must reach the governor to obtain a stay of execution. In ancient Babylon, the Child of the Mountains rushes in her carriage toward the city, followed by Cyrus’s army. She must warn King Belshazzar that invaders are arriving. The car goes quickly, but so does the train. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, Queen Catherine’s soldiers chase the Huguenots, looking to kill them one by one. Christ ascends Golgotha. The car overtakes the train and blocks its path. The massacre of the Huguenots continues in a gruesome twist of bodies. Cyrus’s army reaches the city, and King Belshazzar faces death alongside the Princess. The governor orders a stay of execution, but the car must reach a telephone booth to communicate the news to the prison. The Passion of Christ is fulfilled. The condemned man is on the gallows; a jailer receives the telephone call, and runs to the executioner, who does not want to stop. The car has finally reached the prison, and the wife and friends rush to the scaffold. The executioner reads the injunction and suspends the execution. The wife and friends throw themselves on the condemned, who is freed.
The conclusion of David W. Griffith’s Intolerance (USA, 1916) is characterized by feverish movement. It is a movement that implicates everyone and everything: it is reflected in the car chase and the acceleration of the carriages, in the train pursuit and the tumult of the crowds, in the frenzy of the executioners and the escape of the victims. It spreads from Babylon to Golgotha, and from Golgotha to the night of Saint Bartholomew, climaxing in the contemporary story. It is not undermined but intensified by the presence of a recurring image, that of a cradle rocking, this time slowly.27 Such a movement, so accentuated and pervasive, is able to transmit a shock to the onscreen image. It reflects not only the drama of the stories recounted in the film but also celebrates the thrill of speed.
I will not spend time arguing how speed is a significant feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture.28 I will only say that it assumes different faces, as Intolerance (and the “Modern Story” in particular) attests. It is thanks to the speed of machines (and to ever more powerful engines) that faraway points are connected in ever-shorter periods of time. The very protagonists of the filmic episode are, in fact, a train and an automobile. Then there is the speed of men, who move ever more quickly—thanks to machines and in competition with them—as accelerating their “natural” motors makes their bodies ever quicker and more reactive. In the “Modern Story,” we have the race of the condemned’s wife and friends. Speed, moreover, is not only a transition of bodies in space but also rapidity in the execution of a task—a performance ability. The locomotive’s velocity depicted on the screen refers us inevitably to the power of all mechanical devices: metonymically, it recalls their predisposition to produce ever more merchandise in ever less time, just as human speed refers us back to the idea of a body capable of extraordinary feats, ready for Olympic records. Finally, there is the speed of progress, the continuous changing of situations and overlapping of facts in an age in which the pendulum of human events seems to oscillate wildly. The “Modern Story,” presenting us with an unstoppable chain of circumstances, also speaks of a History that advances in double time. Thus there is movement, and an ever-faster movement at that. “More quickly” becomes not only an invocation but also an imperative.
Speed, however, has something ambiguous about it as well.29 It is profoundly engaging to us, and offers up a new and intense pleasure. We are undeniably reminded of this, for example, by the Futurist manifesto written by Marinetti in 1909: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of the Samothrace.”30 Yet speed is also indicative of danger (in both the real and figurative senses). The acceleration of bodies and things directly threatens their safety: going fast, too fast, means putting oneself at risk. Modernity is dotted with tragedies as a result of speed: from train disasters, which Schivelbusch reminds us had an enormous resonance on growing public opinion,31 to automobile and airplane crashes often stemming from races or sporting events, which give the victim the aura of martyrdom (to say nothing of the sinking of the Titanic, itself caused by the desire to arrive sooner).32 In the second place, speed obscures the exact perception of things: it prevents the precise calculation of distances and time, and tends to make one lose one’s way. It risks carrying us out of the world. Excitement alters the senses, and with altered senses, we can end up losing ourselves.
Thus, we are dealing with an intense pleasure, but also the risk of losing oneself. Let us return to Intolerance, where speed’s two faces reflect each other perfectly. On the one hand, we can apply to Griffith’s film what Hugo Münsterberg said in the same year: “The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity…. This heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator. He feels as if he were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal energies.”33 On the other hand, is it not curious that two episodes out of four feature a race toward disaster (or three, if you add Golgotha, setting aside the greater solemnity of the mise-en-scène)? In Intolerance, the stories advance at breakneck speed. We enjoy it, but we are flying toward tragedy. It is legitimate then to ask ourselves, beginning with Griffith’s film, in what way the cinema’s gaze is able to confront the vortex of the modern world. How does it respond to the acceleration of things, deriving its advantages without exposing itself to risks? How does it measure itself against speed: how does it appropriate the excitement that it transmits, yet avoid disappearing? In other words, what form of vision seems to be necessary?
In the first place, it takes a gaze able to grasp the mobility of things, to foresake all forms of fixity and contemplation. As Vachel Lindsay said, one year before Griffith’s film, speaking of the Action Photoplay, “Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.”34 Intolerance presents an extraordinary richness of camera movements, a true catalogue of the ways in which the dynamics of bodies can be exalted. I have in mind the push in framing Belshazzar’s palace under enemy attack; the pans following the fighting on the palace steps; the cranes accompanying the ritual dances at the Babylonian bacchanal; the camera car shooting the frenetic race of the train and the chariots; and finally, the backward camera car framed upon the condemned, followed by the camera on the automobile, tying together the destinies of the two situations in a shared moment. The cinema-eye is always able to stay on objects and bodies without losing sight of them.
But a gaze measured by speed can never be content to follow one single event: it must be able to operate simultaneously upon a multiplicity of backdrops. The crosscutting technique, previously tested by Griffith, finds its apex in Intolerance: the camera frames a situation, moves to another, then it returns to the first, and so on. Allowing us to witness different moments in real time, it transports us through space with such rapidity that we become ubiquitous without ever losing our sense of position.35 This transfer does not only take place through space: Intolerance does not simply apply the crosscutting techniques within the single episodes that make up the film. These are also applied between various episodes. The “Babylonian Story,” the “French Story,” the “Judean Story,” and the “Modern Story” are interwoven to form what Griffith himself called a “cinematic fugue.” The effect created, besides one of being carried instantly from one place to another, is one of being transported from one age to another, achieving a spatial and temporal ubiquity, which nevertheless lets us retain our own position. As the film’s reviews would point out immediately, its dizzying movement causes a veritable “mental exhaustion” in its spectator (“The universally-heard comment from the highbrow or nobrow who has tried to get it all in an evening: ‘I’m so tired’”).36 Yet this game of keeping up with the film never loses direction (“There is never a moment’s lack of clarity”).37 The cinema-eye is granted movement beyond that of bodies and objects: it easily does away with the spaces to which such things are still bound. Without a doubt, this draws us into a kind of whirlwind—yet it prevents us from getting lost.
A truly fast gaze, however, must do even more. Besides moving quickly, besides taking away the spaces, it must be able to anticipate events. In Intolerance the structure of the suspense (mixed with and overlapping the process of crosscutting) serves to project us beyond the moment we are watching: we see someone in danger, but we also see that someone else is trying to save him. Fearing the worst, yet hoping that escape is around the corner, we also see in our mind’s eye what is about to happen: the moment in which the dilemma between life and death will melt away.38 In other words, suspense serves to make us see what is happening, as well as imagine what might happen. It forces us to keep up with the protagonists of the story, before the irrevocable happens. It also clarifies the fatal moment, as if it were already going on (in the hope, however, that it will not, or in the perverse pleasure that it may happen). In this way, the cinema-eye is a provident eye: it is so quick that it is a step ahead of things.
Thus, we have mobility, ubiquity, and foresight: the film eye is able to deal with speed. Eight years before Intolerance, Ricciotto Canudo wrote in “Triumph of Cinema” (“Trionfo del cinematografo”) what might have served as a review of Griffith’s film: “We have created a new goddess for our Olympus, and this goddess is Speed.”39 The cinema seems a celebration of this new divinity. In the “new temple” of the theater, “a marvelous movement made up of photographic images and light is realized, life is depicted at the height of action in a true convulsive burst.”40 We have only to think of the acts represented: “The most tumultuous and incredibly exciting scenes develop at a breakneck speed impossible in reality.” Yet just as significant is the way in which it passes from one place to another: “No theater could ever offer such an astonishing speed in scene changes, no matter what marvelous machines it employed.” And last, the spectator is even projected into the performance. The cinema offers “a vision of the most faraway countries, unknown men and human expressions, all moving, acting, and pulsating before the gaze of the contemplator, spellbound in the speed of the representation.” Before the screen, our eye is compelled to take flight. According to Canudo, what we have is an “excess of movement of film in front and inside the light.”41
The cinema takes on elements of speed, yet it is also able to avoid its dangers. I have already said that its processes allow the spectator to hold onto his sense of direction. He will always (as though he were a “motorist who witnesses a cinematographic spectacle coupled with a mad dash through spaces,” once again in Canudo’s words)42 have the sense of being within the whirlwind of events without ever losing contact with them, finding himself caught unaware, or feeling late. This ability to face the challenge of speed—one of the typical obsessions of modernity—is exemplified in Intolerance by the race against time in which the condemned man’s wife and friends engage. They are forced to compete with a situation that is coming to a head, and determined to arrive before the execution takes place. It is worthwhile to remember that the arbiter of this race is something that, while barely glimpsed in the film, constitutes a looming presence: the clock. It reduces temporality to an objective and common standard (the adoption of a universal time occurs contemporaneous to the birth of the cinema),43 and it demonstrates the implacable advancing of time. There is no escape from the milimetrical progression of the second hand. Each instant is replaced by the next, in a never-ending succession. This unrelenting movement of the hands warns us that time does not flow—it runs. Events press on, and the appointment with death (the death of the condemned, and indeed our own) draws nearer. From this stream stems the fear of not having enough time: the sensation that things move more quickly than we do, that they irreparably leave us behind, and that, in the end, the mad dash is futile. Too late. But from this stream also stems the decision to speed up one’s action: to adapt one’s movement to that of the imagination—to floor the engine, accelerate the flight toward the gallows, and be able to arrive one moment before the execution. Just in time. Too late, or just in time. This formula, which has always been present in human stories, becomes a radical dilemma in modernity.44 To be left behind by the course of events, or succeed in keeping pace with them? To let oneself be swept into the whirlwind, or remain inside its flow? To stay behind or resist from the get-go? The cinematic gaze, as Intolerance illustrates, assures a positive outcome: its capacity to keep pace with events, to jump between places, and to project itself toward the fatal moment, ensures that the eye (and thus, ideally, the observer) arrives at the place of the tragedy before it occurs—perhaps with a wildly beating heart, but certain of rescue.
In speaking of Griffith, Pudovkin recalled with admiration that “the whole aim of this method is to create in the spectator a maximum tension of excitement by the constant forcing of a question, such as, in this case: Will they be in time? Will they be in time?”45 Victor O. Freeburg noted with irony: “There is not a chance in a thousand that the pardon will be too late, and yet we are at palpitant attention until the boy is safe.”46 These are precisely the emotional dynamics of Intolerance.
We must add that the cinema, and the “the last-minute rescue” film in particular (for which Griffith’s contribution is so important), highlights other attitudes that are well worth discussing, at least in brief. The first is waiting. At the moment in which the drama’s conclusion is prefigured, in a twist of hope and fear, one must wait. In Intolerance we wait as The Dear One is received by the Governor; when he signs the pardon; when the car arrives at the prison; when the executioner makes a decision. During this waiting the pace, which in actuality moves so quickly, seems paradoxically to go too slowly: the solution is at hand, but never arrives. From this tension springs a certain excitement. It is an anguish that eats away at the soul, and that will only dissolve with the final joy.47 The last-minute rescue is precisely this: a peril, a possible salvation, an acceleration, and above all a wait before stillness can fall once again.
The race against time implies another attitude: the temptation to flee. If the world is rushing by, it does not necessarily need to be recaptured. On the contrary, it can be useful to evade its pursuit. One must simply reverse the direction of the race, and instead of swiftly speeding after the events, you have only to escape from them. The chase film—whose structure, as we have seen, underlies a part of Intolerance—can help in this regard. We can read it inversely, and see in it a game between guards and thieves that presents not so much the attempt (from the guards’ point of view) to catch someone before he gets away, as the attempt (from the thief’s point of view) to escape the clutches of the law. The “Babylonian Story” confirms this reading: a protagonist who flees before Cyrus’s carriages, unlike in the “Modern Story,” in which it is the protagonist who gives chase.48 In the case of escape, we are dealing with anguish: even before avoiding danger, one escapes because the very speed with which things move generates fear. The fascination that lies in keeping up with events gives way to an even greater dizziness, this time marked by depression.
The last attitude elicited by speed is the temptation to stop. It is a question, once again, of the longing to escape the flow of things. This time, this desire is expressed through a sort of indifference that allows one to avoid dealing with the surrounding world. This means putting a stop to all forms of excitement and welcoming boredom. Boredom is a strange state of mind—it presents itself as a blank space in the vortex of existence, an emptiness and a renunciation that is nonetheless tinged with a certain pathos. In this sense, it can seem to be the awareness of death. Benjamin reminds us in a striking aphorism:” Boredom is the grating before which the courtesan teases death.”49 The state of boredom can seem just as much a refuge of consolation: “Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks.”50 And finally, it can seem like a stopping point from which one can always start over: “Boredom is the threshold of great deeds.”51 The cinema courts the arrest of movement, and thus challenges boredom. I am thinking of the suspension of narration represented by the presence of dead time. I am thinking of the deliberate slowing down of action. I am thinking of the photostop.52 I am thinking of the recurring image of the cradle in Intolerance: a perfect interruption to the whirlpool of life, continuing without end.
Let us continue our exploration of the excited eye, aided by a new example: Sergei Eisenstein’s Old and New (Staroe i novoe, USSR, 1926).
There is a violent conflict between the peasants of Marfa Lapkina’s village: some fight, on the wave of USSR government reforms, for the creation of a kolkhoz, while others resist, carrying on with traditional production methods. The kolkhoz supporters send for a new machine—a cream separator—that will separate milk in a more efficient way. The machine is installed and turned on. Driven by the cogs, the central bowl begins to spin with mounting speed. The peasants watch, caught between perplexity and hope. Marfa is next to the machine, observing it with more intensity than the others. They begin to glimpse a single hesitant droplet of cream coming from the separator spouts. The gears step up their rhythm. A drop breaks free from the spout, then another, then still another. The cream begins to fall, at first in a weak trickle, then in a more decisive spurt. Marfa has drawn closer: the cream falls on her hands, on her face—it pours down her. The spurt becomes a jet, and the cream gushes like a fountain. On the screen, the jets become like a symphony. Numbers fill the screen, with figures that grow larger and characters that get bigger, indicating a rise in production. Marfa is enraptured. We see a plane with an abundant flock, and a calf superimposed upon the sky. Jets, clouds, whirling.
The “cream separator sequence” in Old and New is celebrated for its beauty, for its subtle craziness (the erotic inflection is clear, with cream that represents sperm), and for its programmatic nature (not coincidentally, the clip is used by Eisenstein himself as an example in his theoretical writings).53 Here I would emphasize the pervasive excitement that finds its climax in Marfa’s final ecstasy and in the almost oneiric images that act as a counterpoint. It is an excitement linked not so much to the growing speed of the creamer, as to the effect of its action. There is a mutation at play, first of milk into cream, but also against the backdrop of life itself in the village, which can (with the cream separator) offer better working conditions and a way of life that is less severe and unjust. The fever pervading the sequence is that which grants these transformations: the euphoria we see on the characters’ faces and in the dance of images is the euphoria of change.
Let us take a closer look at the way the cream separator is the protagonist of this change. This device is the bearer of innovation: the centrifuge breaks old habits and opens an unexplored horizon. In particular, it replaces forms of production and consequently replaces social roles within the community and in the entire group of peasants: a fresh new world dawns, represented by the kolkhoz and its values and laws. We could say that the creamer has an authentic inaugural function. Second, the machine is the guarantor of progress. The new world it marks is, in fact, one that is characterized by greater availability of goods, greater rationality in behavior, and greater work satisfaction. The result is a total improvement in the life of the village and, metonymically, the USSR, the nation so committed to agricultural reform. In this sense, we can say that the creamer constitutes a step forward in the history of humanity. Finally, it is an object that references, and belongs to, the revolution. Everything is changing and improving. In order for this to happen, it is necessary to clean the slate, clear the past, open a new phase. The cream separator asks the peasants to choose sides: the priest or Marfa, the small business-owners or the kolkhoz, the old society or the new one. And it therefore asks all to overturn previous boundaries and to adopt both a different social organization and a different mentality. In this sense, it is almost unnecessary to keep in mind that the new world it marks is the one born in Russia in October 1917.
Change, and with it, innovation, progress, and revolution. These elements directly recall some of the grand themes that punctuate modernity. It is an age (or a form of experience, if you will) openly obsessed with the new. We have only to think of the role played by technical innovations, the re-sorting of merchandise, exchange of ideas, artistic avantgardes, succession of trends, etc. This obsession is so pervasive that it ends up creating a paradox. As Antoine Compagnon points out, if one continues to seek out the new, this search no longer constitutes a novelty. It instead winds up being a true “tradition.”54 At any rate, the passion for renewal carries with it a constant opening to the possible: the existing and, in particular, the preexisting are no longer enough. What is needed is precisely what can be, but never has been, given. From here, there is both attention to the present (as the time in which the possible is occurring) and the tension toward the future (as the time in which the possible will find its full realization).55
But modernity is also the celebration of progress: the proof is in the great World Expositions and the success of the ballet “Excelsior,”56 the positivistic faith in scientific discovery and the pride marking advertising, the institution of the Nobel Prize, and the introduction of new social and political behaviors. With progress, attention to the possible also becomes faith in reason. Innovations are not enough: they must render the world fairer and more efficient, closer to the one that humans desire. In this light, progress seems connected to some preexisting plan—perhaps only abstract or ideal—and presents itself as its realization. There is one plan guiding history, and it guarantees that innovation constitutes improvement.
Modernity is also a time of revolutions. There is upheaval on a variety of levels: the economic-productive (“the industrial revolution”), the aesthetic-expressive (“the surrealist revolution”), the ethical-cultural (“the revolution of customs”), in addition to the sociopolitical (the October revolution, the twentieth century’s most celebrated revolution, would begin and end within the century). The defining characteristic of revolution is its dialectic component: the appearance of the new is tied to the negation of the old; only by overturning the “what is” can the “what might be” emerge. It follows that revolutionary change is never bloodless: killing must occur for life to emerge. As Benjamin suggested, fashion—the locus par excellence for continued renewal—plays hide-and-seek with death.57 More radically, in revolution death is promoted to principal agent. After change—change guided by reason—a history emerges that requires violence to move forward.
This picture undoubtedly demands a much more extensive analysis: I simply hope to point out that we are dealing with some of modernity’s most essential junctures. I would add that the idea of change—with its connotations of innovation, progress, and revolution—puts into play a temporality that is different, though complementary, from that temporality which is nourished by the idea of speed. Time is not a current, advancing unstoppable second after second. Here, it is a point of passage, which divides heterogeneous and antagonistic phases. It is not a succession of moments overlapping and merging in continuity; here, a radical distinction emerges between a “before” and an “after.” It is not an accumulation of lined-up instants; here, there is a jump. From this point of view, the cream separator of Old and New represents the exact opposite of the clock appearing in Intolerance. The one embodies the image of time passing, while the other incarnates time flipping through the pages of history, meeting a different chapter at every turn.58
Let us return once again to the cinema. What is its response to the change and the excitement that it generates? What limits does its eye adopt? In order to respond, it might be useful to continue with Old and New and examine Marfa’s gaze. It is a curious gaze—Marfa repeatedly assumes the initiative and goes in search of what the kolkhoz needs; she identifies first the centrifuge, then the bull, and finally the tractor as necessary purchases for the village. In this sense, her gaze proves perfectly able to deal with the new: it recognizes, grasps, and finally forsakes it in the name of something else. Moreover, it is a utopian gaze: Marfa dreams of a world that is wonderful, orderly, and rich, only to discover that all this indeed does exist, that the land of plenty is no other than the Central Cooperative. In this sense, her gaze has made the logic of progress its own: it foresees what will then be realized. Finally, it is a discriminating gaze. We need only to think of the force with which Marfa opposes the selfish peasants (and in particular her anger toward the bureaucrats) to understand that she does not perceive everything in the same way. On the contrary, she is able to allow for conflict and violence. Her gaze is imbued with the spirit of the revolution: for her, seeing also means subduing, canceling out.
Old and New also presents the opposite of Marfa’s gaze. The larger part of the village rejects change. The traditional peasants are not able to understand the approach of the new. They do not accept the path to progress and refuse all revolution. They are dominated by fear of the unknown—a fear in some ways justified, considering the individual’s risk of becoming lost in a totally new world. Continual transformation dissolves what had seemed to be well established, and it prohibits a full understanding of what is going on. From here stems an anxiety that attacks one’s sense of orientation. The abandonment of the old forms leaves one exposed. A world dies, and the new one is no longer familiar. The response is then inevitable. The people seek refuge within the gates of nostalgia, represented in the film by the renewal of traditional religious rites. They dream of a return, as seen in the killing of the young bull on which the kolkhoz had placed so much hope. They express skepticism in the face of the new, in the conviction that history knows the game of the eternal return, rather than the leap forward.59
In addition to celebrating change, Old and New effectively poses the problem of the “catastrophe of forms” connected with all radical transformation. It affirms the necessity of change, on the social, political, and aesthetic levels, but it also questions the risks of this change. How can we assimilate the unfamiliarity of the new and accept it? Does the new not become unrecognizable and thus non-recognized? The response rests on the implementation of a practice of refiguration. Eisenstein put forward formal structures in a nascent state,60 and at the same time he attempted to recover well-established materials and give them new meaning. This is the case for all those moments that trigger the erotic isotopy appearing in the creamer sequence. There, the cream that comes from the machine spouts brings ejaculation to mind. This visual metaphor enables the film to represent the act of impregnating a new society. The following sequence presents a similar dynamic. The peasants attempt to regain the money collected by the kolkhoz; Marfa is opposed, and is surrounded by some suspicious characters, cornered, and thrown to the ground. We see a rape—the violence we see perpetrated, however, is not against her body, but a budding idea. Later on, the young bull mates with a heifer: the encounter is transformed, in an ironic shift, into a marriage celebration, the two animals dressed as bride and groom. What is at stake is the idea of a new family. Even further along, the kolkhoz’s precious tractor breaks down. To repair it, the driver reclines on the hood and reaches into the motor, all the while leaning on one side toward the machine and assuming positions worthy of the Kama Sutra. Marfa offers her skirt to the driver, who needs a rag (and is tempted to use the Red flag). The skirt is ripped piece by piece, in a kind of striptease. Eisenstein was never a particularly reserved director, but here we are getting to the bottom of his game: it consists in creating new forms from the old, exploiting them, getting their substance, changing their orientation, but also letting them support the new meaning that emerges. In this way, the new sends the old to its death, but only after having used it to the fullest (and precisely because the old has been used up completely, it is able to change and support the new). Marfa’s “adventures” become the destiny of communism, and the latter becomes clear precisely by means of the former.
This process of refiguration (or transfiguration) finds a perfect illustration also in Eisenstein the theorist. I am thinking in particular of his last great theoretical work, Nonindifferent Nature, which centers on the relationship between organic-ness and pathos. A work of art (a film, a picture, a poem) is organic when it presents a coherent and perfect composition. To rephrase this in terms used later by structuralism, when all of its elements “hold tightly,” it gives us a “sense of sutured whole.” Yet organicness does not mean closure: such a work also knows how to grow and tends to become something else. In fact, a particularly “solid” composition can open itself to mutation: it is typical for all “mature” organisms to be ready to pass to a superior stage. From here, it follows that all organic works have true “qualitative leaps.” Their system of representation sees ruptures intervene, particularly at points of suture, which push them toward a more advanced system of representation. From this comes the creation of an authentic state of ecstasy. At the moment in which the work reaches the height of its intensity, it seems to go outside itself and transform its own features (ecstasy is precisely going out of the self). This provokes a state of extraordinary emotional intensity, a moment of absolute pathos.61 The cinema is able to negotiate this dynamic between organic-ness and pathos superbly. When an image or a sequence reaches structural perfection on the screen, it always says more than it shows. In these cases, the camera-eye, together with the eye of the spectator, cease to “fix” reality before them. They no longer contemplate it, nor do they lock it in. On the contrary, they find its lines of tension, follow its development, get hold of its transformation. The gaze opens onto a world that is transfigured, transfiguring it in turn.
In his Nonindifferent Nature, Eisenstein gave many examples of a similar dynamic. He analyzed El Greco’s paintings, as well as Loyola’s spiritual exercises. In some pages, he went back to the cream separator sequence in Old and New. He notices that as Marfa reaches ecstasy at the episode’s climax, the film “goes out of itself,” and passes from “realistic” images to entirely “abstract” ones. What I would like to suggest is that the entire “erotic” sequence functions in the same way. Owing precisely to its systematic nature, which lives within the organic-ness of the film, the sequence ends up functioning as a point of passage: the images go beyond their apparent meaning (we are not speaking of Marfa’s “adventures,” but of the revolution), yet they allow the meaning of these “materials of departure” to reverberate (the revolution is, in the end, an “adventure”). The result is a representation in a continuous state of becoming, characterized by the constant comings and goings on different levels of meaning. It is also a representation that fails to put the spectator into check, making sure to accompany him toward the shores of the new, while staying entirely legible.
In this light, if I had to choose an image that best exemplifies Old and New’s capacity to work with refiguration (and more generally, the cinema’s capacity to give us the ecstasy of change without making us feel lost), I would choose the final scene. We see a driver on a tractor, with pants and a leather jacket, a helmet and goggles, as well as lipstick and a smooth face. It is Marfa, and she is finally in the driver’s seat of the machine for which she struggled so long. It is Marfa, whom we suddenly recognize now that she has taken off the goggles and smiles with her usual candor. It is Marfa, and yet it is no longer Marfa. Woman, but no longer just a woman. She is also a man, even a machine. She is even more ecstatic than she was in front of the cream separator. Marfa, and more than Marfa. She is “beside herself,” in the dizziness of transformation, refiguring what she was and what she will be. Woman-man-machine. Here is Marfa’s sex.
Gold Diggers of 1933 (M. LeRoy, USA, 1933) recounts the quasi-canonical experience of the backstage musical. A theatrical show is cancelled owing to lack of funds; a romance blossoms between a singer and a dancer; some money flows in by surprise; and the new staging becomes a hit.62 What is interesting, however, is that the film begins and ends with two diametrically opposed musical numbers. The first (“We’re in the Money”) sees the singer and dancers in line—in dresses made of coins and a backdrop of blown-up dollars—singing an ode to riches and abundance. The thread of the last (“Remember My Forgotten Man”) is a long song—almost a lament—which evokes the sorrow of the war and the poverty stemming from the economic crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, while images pass in succession from a lost woman singing the melody, to soldiers at the front marching toward battle, then to a bread line of the unemployed, and ending with the crowd advancing on and closing in around the singer.
There is not only a contrast in contents: the first number celebrates the abundance of money (that is, apparent abundance, seeing as the song and dance are interrupted by the onstage intrusion of the police, who announce that the soon-to-open show is drowning in debt), while the second exposes the misery of the times (creating a great success for the new show put on by the company). Nor is it simply an opposition of modes: the first number is, in its own way, linear (the song and dance develop in continuity), while the second seems much more complex (“Remember My Forgotten Man” is constructed by accumulation, progression, and leaps). I have always thought that Eisenstein would have liked its essentially “pathetic” quality, which allows it not only to be a Hollywood version of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth State (Il Quarto Stato)63 but also a spin on the theme of pain and redemption. The contrast is more subtle, but in some way decisive.
Let’s take “We’re in the Money”: the number’s title expresses a physical sense of immersion in money (indeed, the chorus girls are” showered” by dollars, like the cartoon Scrooge McDuck). There is the idea of direct contact with the sparkling coins of the material, and thus the reference to pleasure connected to the presence of strong and immediate sensations. In fact, the musical number presents a richness of perceptive stimuli, on the levels of visuals as well as sound. Choreography, scenography, and melody run into each other and overlap, making up a whole that overflows. The cadence that permeates the performance gives this whole an additional intensity. A sensory thrill—or really, a rhythmic one—comes from this: the onscreen world pulsates, and we go along with it. “We’re in the Money” is a good example of Kracauer’s “total artwork of effects”: everything catches our attention, and it is the provocation of attention that is truly at stake.
“Remember My Forgotten Man” seems to work on another level. The sensory intensity is no lower here than in the preceding example. Again, we have choreography, scenography, and melody which intermingle, creating a decisive whole. In addition, the variety of situations renders the whole even more charged. However, as the title of the number suggests, we are dealing not only with a great wealth of sensory stimuli but also with memory, and thus with commemoration and consciousness. Remember my forgotten man. Remember and understand him. It is no longer just a cascade of sensations coming into close-up (let’s say the presence of an extreme “sensoriality”), but also the need to give meaning to what surrounds us (in a word, the need for good sense).
Sensations and sense, sensoriality and meanings. This contrast brings us back to one of the essential nodes of twentieth-century modernity. On the one hand, we have a growing excitement of the senses (it is the Simmelian “intensification of nervous stimulation”),64 and with it, the desire to open ourselves to all the stimuli coming from the outside world. Such a desire expresses the need “to be there,” in the heart of things, in order to “feel” them fully. Only when we notice the uproar of reality can we say that we are in contact with it. And if the “being there” cannot actually come to pass, we ask that the stimuli be reproduced artificially, in order to have the impression of an “almost” real contact. Here, what emerges is an equation between having our senses touched and having a full experience. On the other hand, we have the indistinct fear of not understanding what is happening, of not grasping its logic and meanings. In that case, then, “being there,” in the heart of things, becomes counterproductive. To understand reality, a certain physical and mental detachment is necessary, which is tied to the possibility of reworking the information. In other words, a critical distance is needed. Stimuli that are too vivid render such distance difficult: they involve, seize, and overwhelm. It becomes crucial to defend oneself from it, at the cost of breaking the equation between sensation and experience, making the latter (contrary to the preceding case) the place of a strong reflexivity. Thus, there are two poles, two options, and consequently a dilemma. To be overcome by the fullness of sensations or to try to regain meaning? To expose oneself to the world in all its chaos or pass through language with its meanings? To think of experience as direct contact with things, as Erlebnis, or a slow personal recovery, as Erfahrung? To see in order to feel, or to see in order to understand?
Gold Diggers of 1933 offers a response to this dilemma with the passage from its first musical number to its last. Let us go over the film, starting once more from the beginning. The rhythmic thrill of “We’re in the Money” possesses an internal fragility, despite the euphoria it induces: at the same moment in which it expresses a physical contact with the material, it also seems to make us lose an actual understanding of the facts. “The Depression, dearie”: so says one of the chorus girls regarding the forced interruption of the rehearsals. In doing so, she implicitly recognizes that the performance in which she was just involved was not dealing with the concrete social situation outside the theater. This reality is not avoidable, not even by the most escapist of performances: it imposes both its presence and its purposes. Here, the film will try to make room for this presence and these purposes. It will have to move on two parallel paths, which will lead us to add the persistence of meaning to sensory density.
The first path consists in the weaving of an “external” situation, which reflects and explains the developments of an “internal” situation, centered on the realization of a theatrical show. In Gold Diggers, the external situation is that of the love between the singer and the dancer: it unravels through a series of events that find an echo in those of the internal situation.65 The two lovers court, and begin to dance the number “Petting in the Park.” This frame is enough for the dance to cease being a moment of simple delight. It reveals its connections to social rituals and, by analogy, its subtle nature as an act of seduction in regard to the spectator. Let us add that this overlapping of levels is quite familiar in the backstage musical, a genre in which the presentation of a show is accompanied by the illustration of its staging. Yet the formula is always productive: through it, moments of pure perceptive excitement—the song and dance numbers—find their motivation and, more generally, lead the film to open itself to a sort of self-awareness.
The second path is somehow more radical. It consists in putting on-stage the reality that led to the interruption of the opening number, transforming it from forgotten presence to clear information. Here the Great Depression rises again to the stage, this time as a theme of the show itself. It is precisely what happens with “Remember My Forgotten Man”: Joan Blondell sings all the unease of a woman who has lost her love as well as herself, while the chorus recalls the causes that led to such defeat, and the choreography illustrates what the song’s verses tell us. The effect is that of giving an even deeper dimension to perceptive excitement. It acquires not only a self-reflexive component but also some chance to cognitively grasp the world. The situation offered by “We’re in the Money” is thus redeemed: the film’s subsequent numbers now have an explanation. The closing in particular shows how the thrill of rhythm does not necessarily preclude an understanding of the real. Sensations and meanings can be joined, and the pleasure of the senses can also become a moment of consciousness.
Both these paths implicate the recovery of a narrative: on the one hand, it is a story (that of the two lovers and the theater company), and on the other history (that of a nation).66 If the sensations assume significance, it is because there is a narration that moves forward. The narration indeed has an extraordinary capacity to bring out the “logic” that moves the reality it touches. It draws attention to the connections between events, and thus brings the plot to light. It also brings back the single event to similar and recurrent situations, and thus helps to generalize and abstract. Finally, it defines what is relevant and what has to be focused upon, and in this way it helps in making a choice. Narration is thus an instrument that foregrounds the meaning of events. Although it works with meanings, the narration never disregards sensations. Its strength, in fact, rests on the presence of a series of provocations directed at the receiver’s senses. Let us think of the key scenes, those in which the characters’ various destinies come to the surface, clarifying the substance and forms of all their behaviors. They are often scenes of great perceptive intensity as well, in which the action and musical tracks seem quite literally to explode. Here, meaning does not obliterate sensation—if anything, it integrates it.
This point is an important one. There is, indeed, a widespread historical-critical approach that holds filmic narration to be a moment of deprivation.67 The adoption of such an approach by the cinema of the late ’ teens and early 1920s would have spawned a renunciation of the variety of references directed at the spectator so typical of early film, in which the presence of genuine “attractions” was what counted.68 Its centrality in mainstream cinema would have undermined the visual dimension, which is only enriched in experimental cinema, where pure image functions as the focus. Concentrating on the “logic” of the facts, narration would not have left space for other types of signs that do not serve to clarify the string of events. Such a historical-critical approach has some merits. It is, in fact, true that narrative does not involve the spectator as the “attractions” did: it implicates him more than strikes him. Still, it is true that narrative operated a monopoly, impeding the adoption of paths that might have been more attentive to the perceptive dimension (film theory would play host to these countercurrents, such as the “cinemelografia” invoked by Pirandello).69 Finally, it is true that narrative often offered schematic solutions, which justifies a poverty of originality. Yet, I repeat, narration has never ignored sensoriality. We have only to think of the use of the close-up or the detail, which undoubtedly serve to fix the spectator’s attention in narrative film, but do not lose all their primitive function of visual shock. I am also thinking of certain elementary symbols such as the turning of calendar pages, which serves to transmit a narrative idea but constitutes nevertheless another small perceptive provocation. These moments of surprise are not always “tucked away” in the story’s motivations. They are often occasions to call into question the diegetic dimension. The close-up serves to make one see and understand better, but it also changes the objects’ familiar features. The turning pages of the calendar give us an idea of passing time, but it tells us also that the world may always surprise us. Sensation often interrogates meaning.70 Thus, the narrative is a point of convergence of the sensitive and the sensible. It is a locus of circularity between two poles, in light of both a refunctioning of the sensorial components and a requestioning of their significance. Beyond the example of Gold Diggers, the musical genre is particularly indicative in this regard. The musical numbers scattered throughout appeal to sensoriality, yet they are also posed to circulate within a narration that gives them meaning. This narration, on its part, obeys a logic, but thanks to the numbers, it maintains an extraordinary air of excess, freedom, and subversion.71 The parade, which often brings musicals to a close (the number that closes Gold Diggers is, in part, a parade), might be the emblem of this unstable equilibrium. It celebrates the pomp of the nation, but with dancing, fanfare, masks, and costumes. It unites the taste for attraction with a lesson in history. It provokes and teaches, admonishes and excites. It presents itself as the runway on which the sensitive and sensible can go hand in hand: “National Reconciliation.”
Let us try to join the threads of this issue. The three films analyzed revolve around one of modernity’s most essential junctures, what Simmel called the “intensification of nervous stimulation.” The world becomes richer in provocations, and the sensitivity of its inhabitants increases. Each film has shed some light on a particular form of sensory excitement: the thrill of movement, the thrill of change, and the thrill of rhythm, respectively. The dangers associated with such sensory excitement have likewise emerged: the risk of losing one’s way (the world is moving forward, and I don’t know where I am); the risk of not understanding the new forms (the world is changing, and I do not recognize it, nor do I recognize myself); and the risk of losing the meaning of things (the world is following a rhythm, and I do not understand why). In such a situation, the cinema develops a dual line of behavior. It puts into play an excited gaze that gathers stimuli and boosts them, yet it also gives this gaze adequate defenses, which protect it from possible dangers. It is here, in front of a fast-moving reality, that the filmic gaze reveals itself just as fast: it moves, it jumps between different scenarios, it anticipates the next step. At the same time, it does not get lost: the observer knows where he or she is and goes along with the flow of events, instead of being overwhelmed by or excluded from them. The race against time is the key image of this challenge to speed, but the cinema registers and appropriates attitudes such as the wait, the escape, or immobility. The filmic gaze is also able to open up to the new, to dream it as well, and finally to separate it from the old. At the same time, it prepares itself against the fear of the unknown: the process of figuration and refiguration carried out by the films allows the new to appear as the effect of a regeneration, and on this basis, as something acceptable and accepted. The cinema adopts a similar behavior with the world as pure rhythmic pulsation. On the one hand, its gaze is able to gather all provocation (it can “dance” in rhythm to the material and bodies). On the other, it can also put itself back on the path to meaning (that meaning that seems lost in the stupefaction of impressions, and that narration is able to reconquer). In short, the cinema is able to compete with the excited world. Better still, it gives an image of this excitement and thus contributes to making it perceptible: it enjoys the thrill that it brings, but it is also able to face the catastrophe that hangs over all excitement. The dialectic between the intensification of the nervous life and a defense from sensory excess finds a point of equilibrium in the cinema.
There is clearly a dynamic of negotiation, directed at finding convergences among different stimuli and needs. This dynamic intersects with a process of putting in form, of shaping, keeping in mind that this excitement without risks has the ability to establish itself in exact images or procedures, even at different levels (crosscutting; suspense; iconographic contamination; the parade). Among these negotiations, the most interesting is undoubtedly the one that takes place between the fullness of sensations and a recapturing of meaning, for at least three reasons.
The first is that the convergence of the sensitive and the sensible makes it clear that cinema has a dual relationship: it belongs to two “families.” On one hand, cinema is a relative of the devices that worked on sensory stimuli. I am thinking, for example, of the machines that create an “excited” experience between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: amusement park attractions like the roller coaster or the Ferris wheel, the tunnel of love or the funhouse, the haunted house or the merry-go-round. Yet the cinema is also connected to devices in which perception is transformed into knowledge: instruments of scientific observation, such as the microscope, the telescope, microphotography, etc. The references go on and on. In the early twentieth century, there was experimentation in the field of painting directed more toward stimulating the observer’s senses than capturing the world. The canvases were mere surfaces to be perceived in their materiality. Yet we also have experimentation, particularly in the field of literature, directed at understanding uncertain regions of reality, through a systematic extension of one’s own expressive instruments. The cinema can make reference to one side as well as the other. Sometimes it is a merry-go-round, sometimes it is a telescope, sometimes it is an experimental painting, sometimes a self-reflexive novel. It is each of these things, in forms that are often extreme, and it is a place in which the opposite poles meet, until they are finally fit.
Second, cinema’s attention to both sensation and meaning allows it to create a double story. It is not a coincidence that the cinema was able to follow the path of the “attractions,” especially at the beginning, and then to veer toward the methods of narration characteristic of mainstream cinema. Its destiny could have gone either way. The technical innovations that have punctuated its life offer one final confirmation. Let us take, for example, sound. The adoption of sound allowed us to acquire a new sensory channel, and thus to induce an additional source of perceptive excitement. It also represented the entry of a new expressive dimension into the field, thanks to which a discourse on reality altogether more complete and complex is created.72 Film approached the Wagnerian ideal of a “total artwork” in which perceptual intensity and symbolic density may converge.73 Or, let us take color. Color further stimulated sight and often created a state of stupor. Yet it mobilized a new semantic code, thanks to which themes otherwise hidden and meanings otherwise submerged came into view. The “yellow rhapsody,” Eisenstein‘s extraordinary description appearing in one of his most famous essays,74 is a perfect example of rereading reality through the colors with which it is depicted.
Third, the convergence of the sensitive and the sensible, beyond bringing to light the dual threads tying the cinema together, helps us understand how the essential problem consists in the organization of sensory excitement. Narrative order is one of these ways. The story organizes, connects, and renders reciprocally functional sensory stimuli: its gives them a meaning. But we can also extend and perhaps shift our attention, and take into consideration the problem of the organization of “sensoriality” in general. In a somewhat heretical move, I would yoke together two theoretical texts from the 1920s, which are quite different in importance and quality. The first, almost forgotten (and perhaps not wrongly), has a meaningful title and placement: Léon Pierre-Quint’s “Meaning of Film” (“Signification du cinema”) appeared in the splendid collection The Art of Cinematography (L’art cinématographique).75 Pierre-Quint, after a brief digression, makes a rather decisive reference: he calls into question the “scientific inventions that extend the range of our senses,” whose distinctiveness consists in creating “an excitation previously unknown to our consciousness.”76 The cinema is directly connected to these inventions: “Through changes of field, close-ups, dissolves, superimposition, the slow motion and high speed motion shots, tricks and distortions, the cinema brings new sensations to our senses.” It is precisely these impressions that constitute the general material of film art. If a film expresses something, it does so departing “not from an idea, but from an immediate emotion.” For such an expressive capacity to be affirmed, it is necessary that these impressions be “multiplied, organized, and take on a rhythmic progression that they wind up evoking great human feeling.” Only proceeding from this fact can the cinema find its own path and become a form of original art. Only in this way can it redeem its first uncertain steps. Thus, what we have is a technology that stresses the senses, a set of impressions, and an orchestration of stimuli that orchestrates meaning. Pierre-Quint‘s formula is, all things considered, precisely this.
We find almost the same terms in the second text, published two years earlier. In his famous essay “The Montage of Film Attractions,”77 Eisenstein takes up a path already experimented in the theater, and sees in it the perfect applicability to the cinema. At the heart of every film there is always a series of sensory provocations, a series of attractions. Action is not, however, an end in itself, but instead serves to orient the spectator within the facts being represented. To achieve this orientation, it is necessary to connect these attractions with the other elements at play, arriving in this way at a complete reorganization. Eisenstein writes:
An attraction is in our understanding any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that, combined with others, possesses the characteristics of concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose.78
Three observations will clarify the picture. First, Eisenstein thinks that the organization of attractions can engage, and rests on an accurate calculation of the pressures exerted upon the spectator. It is only such a calculation that can guarantee a film’s effective action. Second, the organization of attractions orients the spectator’s emotion. Here, a “psychological modeling” is at play, more than the creation of a concept as in Eisenstein’s later writings. Yet this emotion is not separate from meaning. On the contrary, it is precisely because the stimuli sent to the spectator are structured, directed, and translated into a precise attitude that a set of perceptive shocks becomes an emotional whole. This means that the emotion must be created, and this must happen through the same process with which the meaning is elaborated. Only an orchestration of the excitement allows the spectator to be both moved and touched.79 Third, for Eisenstein, the keystone for the organization of attractions is clearly editing. The editing process is what assures the possibility of tying together the discrete cues offered to the spectator.80
Here is not the place to run through the history of this idea, nor to compare Eisenstein’s concept with others. I will only say that the Eisensteinian notion of editing in particular—which emphasizes not so much the technical procedure (the cut-and-paste of the pieces of film), as that of the structural principle of film (the foundation of its formal organization)—is precisely what reveals how editing is the instrument par excellence for negotiating the presence of an excited perception, with its risks and benefits. In the editing, in fact, all elements retain their specific quality as “attractions”: each shot can continue to be put forth as a shock, and thus “strike” the spectator. More specifically, a sequence of shots in particular editing styles such as “flash cutting” further accentuates the “aggressive” value of each segment.81 Editing also gives order to the sequence of shots, and thus reorganizes the sensations as a coordinated whole. In structuring a film, editing can follow different criteria. We have already seen, by analyzing Intolerance and Old and New, how it can distribute different images of reality maintaining a stable reference to the spatial-temporal parameters (Griffith) or, on the contrary, merge these images in a synthesis which exceeds its own limits (Eisenstein). Let us say, more generally, that editing can offer itself as locus of the conflict between shots (the early Eisenstein); as a means for realizing a sequence of takes (Pudovkin); as an instrument for constructing an ideal reality (Balázs); as a simulation of the optical journey of an observer (classic découpage). Whatever the case, it remains that a coordination of shots permits us to take the shocks in hand, to channel them, and to make them functional. Editing (even the least “disciplined”) is in some way the other face of narrative order: it works so that a diversity of cues can be reorganized around a “logic.”
This power of editing recalls the solutions sketched by Simmel in order to resist the “intensification of the nervous life.” On one hand, editing recalls the Simmelian “intellect.” In a situation characterized by the excitement of the senses, stimuli can be measured according to their utility. They will not be let free to strike at any place or time, but they can be chosen and combined on the basis of a calculation (as Eisenstein does). On the other hand, editing may also evoke a Simmelian “blasé.” To seize the stimuli in a structure means to “smooth” them, creating a certain capacity to dull the senses, not keeping them always tense. Editing also leads to a rhetoric of easily recognizable conventions, resulting in habitual attitudes of perception.
I will end here. The cinema is a place of perceptive exaltation. To see a film is to fill the eyes as well as to have the heart in one’s throat. Moreover, this “aggressivity” of the cinema can be related to its inclination toward reality. As André Bazin showed, and Serge Daney after him, at the same moment in which a film investigates the folds of the world and brings them to us without pity, it becomes sometimes “cruel,” sometimes “violent.”82 All film is in part pornographic: it exhibits the body of things and its own body as “wounded” by reality.83 Its perceptive excess finds a justification and a confirmation precisely in this basis. Yet the cinema is also a place in which perceptive shock does not constitute a threat for the equilibrium of the spectator, who can get carried away without necessarily losing him or herself. Film is a construction, and like every construction, it “gives order” to its founding elements, including the provocations directed at its receiver. Stimuli are thus coordinated among themselves, they assume a function, they bend to a design. They complement each other in a story, and in so doing, they get back their coordinates, their recognition, their meaning. The cinema is exactly this: an experience that vacillates between the possibility of an excitement beyond measure, and an adherence to measures that avoid all risk. It is the space between, in which the comings and goings serve to recover a balanced turmoil in order to arrive at what modern man needs: good emotion.