NOTES

A HUNDRED YEARS, A CENTURY

1.   Craquebille (Enrico Thovez), “L’arte di celluloide,” La Stampa 42.209, Turin (July 29, 1908).

2.   Let’s recall some of the most influential contributions: Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995); Dudley Andrew, ed., The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: U of Texas P, 1997); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991); Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986); Tom Gunning, “Le style non continu du cinéma des premiers temps,” Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 29 (1979); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1990); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002); Pierre Sorlin, Les fils de Nadar: Le “siècle” de l’image analogique (Paris: Nathan, 1997); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998); Antonio Costa, I leoni di Schneider: Percorsi intertestuali nel cinema ritrovato (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002); Antonio Costa, Il cinema e le arti visive (Turin: Einaudi, 2002); Alberto Abruzzese, Forme estetiche e società di massa: Arte e pubblico nell’età del capitalismo (Venice: Marsilio, 1973); Alberto Abruzzese, Archeologie dell’immaginario: Segmenti dell’industria culturale tra ’800 e ’900 (Naples: Liguori, 1988); Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinema—The Irresponsible Signifier or The Gamble with History: Film Theory and Cinema Theory,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987); Richard Allen, “The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 225–40.

Besides film studies, debate on modernity has in the last few years been very intense: at least see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983); Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) / Les cinq paradoxes de la modernité (Paris: Seuil, 1990); David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1990).

3.   I refer to the expression “the period eye” (translated as “occhio del Quattrocento” or “oeil du Quattrocento” in Italian and French translations) used by Michael Baxandall in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Baxandall speaks also of “the public eye” of the epoch (109).

4.   On this issue, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990), and Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

5.   Eugenio Giovannetti, Il cinema e le arti meccaniche (Palermo: Sandron, 1930), 39.

6.   See two contributions in the special section devoted to historiography of cinema in Cinema Journal: Charles Musser, “Historiographic Method and the Study of Early Cinema,” Cinema Journal 44.1 (Fall 2004): 101–107, with an open reference to the history of theatrical exhibitions and to the history of moving images, and Janet Staiger, “The Future of the Past, “Cinema Journal 44.1 (Fall 2004): 126–29, with a reference to the history of media.

7.   According to Thovez, this is precisely the reason why film is a mirror of its age: celluloid, “in its seeming and not being, in its deceiving with such glossy ease, in its sweet surrender to every need, it is really the symbol of the modern mentality and life.” Thovez, “L’arte di celluloide.”

8.   Bela Balász, Der Geist des Films (Halle: Verlag Wilhelm Knapp, 1930), reprinted in in Schriften zum Film, vol. 2: 1926–1931 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983), 63.

9.   On this topic, see Rick Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film: Film Theory Today,” in Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, 9–47 (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke UP, 1992). In particular, speaking of the classical novel and its influence on cinema, Altman claims that, “Though the protagonist trajectory may be what holds the novel together, assuring its‘ classical’ nature, the novel’s internal dialectic is completed by the presence of an unpsychologized, dual focus tradition that the protagonist continually confronts.” Altman, “Dickens,” 21.

10. The idea that Hollywood, facing a set of tensions both in terms of social and gender identity as well as stylistic and narrative trends, provided different solutions every decade—some based on convergent and coherent solutions, some others displaying more conflictual patterns—is explored by Veronica Pravadelli in her La grande Hollywood: Stili di vita e di regia nel cinema classico americano (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). See also Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative.

11. On the paradoxical nature of modernity, see Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes.

1. THE GAZE OF ITS AGE

1.   Bela Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Vienna and Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924), reprinted in Schriften zum Film, vol. 1: 1922–1926 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), 51–53 (italics in original).

2.   Sebastiano A. Luciani, L’antiteatro: Il cinematografo come arte (Rome: La Voce Anonima Editrice, 1928), 76.

3.   Jean Epstein, “Le regard du verre,” Les Cahiers du mois 16–17 (1925). The argument will then be continued and developed the following year in Le cinématographe vue de l’Etna (Paris: Les Ecrivains Réunis, 1926).

4.   Abel Gance, “Le temps de l’image est venu,” L’art cinématographique 2:94 (Paris: Alcan, 1927).

5.   The idea would, however, continue on even after the 1920s, and would in some way inspire one of the seminal books of reflection on cinema, Theory of Film by S. Kracauer, a key passage which I would evoke: “Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent. It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera.” Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 300.

6.   I use the expression “spirit of the time,” particularly with regard to the age of modernity, but with the greatest caution, mindful of, if nothing else, what Franco Moretti suggests: “A long way from Hegel’s spirit of the times, in the singular, recurring in every picture, every novel, and every symphony! Literary history is a battlefield—and especially, as we shall see, in the years of modernism.” Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garc’ia Marquez (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 150.

7.   Luciani, L’antiteatro, 76.

8.   Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University (1934), then reprinted in Critique 3 (1947), and in Daniel Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966), and in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 247.

9.   The quotation comes from the famous article “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” (“Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino”), in which Kracauer recalls recurrent themes of the film of the age. The essay, which synthesizes a series of articles appearing in the Frankfurter Zeitung in March 1927, is part of the collection, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1995), 294 (Das Ornament der Masse [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963]). Also memorable is his vast work of film criticism featured in the same journal; the reviews are available in part in the volume Siegfried Kracauer, Kino: Essays, Studien, Glossen zum Film (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).

10.  Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma (Paris: Povolozky, 1925), 7.

11.  The essay, which appeared in various forms (the genesis and rewritings of which were brought to light by Miriam Hansen) has its best-known version in Walter Benjamin, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée,” Zeischrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1936). The Selected Writings volumes present the two main versions of this essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Selected Writings, 1938–1940, vol. 4, 251–82 (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003); and the earlier “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings, 1935–1938, vol. 3, 101–133 (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2002). Here, we may refer to both versions.

12.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 255; “Work of Art: Second Version,” 104. Andrea Pinotti, in Piccola storia della lontananza: Benjamin storico della percezione (Milan: Cortina, 2001), brought to light this Benjaminian idea’s debt to Aloïs Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin.

13.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 255. In the “Second Version” we read: “both linked to the increasing emergence of the masses and the growing intensity of their movements,” 105.

14.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 255; “Third Version” omits a part of the sentence.

15.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 265; “Second Version,” 117.

16.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 265; “Second Version,” 117.

17.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 267; “Second Version,” 119.

18.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 262. In “Second version” we read: “In the case of film, the newsreel demonstrates unequivocally that any individual can be in a position to be filmed,” 114.

19.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 26; “Second Version,” 113.

20.  “Clearly, there is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared with the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.” Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 266; “Second Version,” 117.

21.  For the difference between cultural value and exhibition value, and of the shift of art in age of mechanical reproduction from the first to the second, see Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 257 ff.; “Second Version,” 106 ff.

22.  If I rely on the theoretical texts of the period, it is because I find that here (as well as in the broader picture of the vast web of social discourse) the cinema begins to be perceived as a complex but precise reality. It becomes a common reference; it is “that” thing with which we would reckon for the next seventy years. On the production side, there was a similar “institutionalization” of cinema, analogous in its function, though not always in its contents.

23.  The expression “fifth art” is Delluc’s, while “eighth art” belongs to Canudo, who then opted for the most noted “seventh art.” For more information on the latter, see in particular Ricciotto Canudo, L’usine aux images (Paris: Chiron, 1927).

24.  See Canudo’s “Lettere d’arte: Il trionfo del cinematografo,” Nuovo giornale (November 25, 1908), reprinted in Filmcritica 28.278 (1977): 296–302; a subsequent version of this essay would become his most famous text, “La naissance d’une sixième art: Essai sur le cinématographe,” Les Entretiens Idéalistes (October 25, 1911). The tendency of twentieth-century intellectuals to apply to film categories developed close to the traditional arts, together with their often ambiguous perception that film constitutes a totally new terrain, in which the emergence and development of a cultural industry and a medial system are at stake, has been well emphasized on several occasions by Alberto Abruzzese, beginning with Forme estetiche e società di massa and L’immagine filmica: Materiali di studio (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974). More recently the topic was taken up again in Sergio Brancato, Introduzione alla sociologia del cinema (Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2001).

25.  The essay was published for the first time in 1919 in Le film, and reissued the following year in Cinéma et Cie as “L’art du cinema.” See Louis Delluc, “L’art du cinéma,” reprinted in Écrits cinématographiques vol. 2 (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, Ed. de l’Etoile Cahiers du Cinéma, 1990), 114–18.

26.  For an analysis of the media as instrument of transmission, representation, and relation, see Francesco Casetti, “Lettera ad Enzensberger,” in Alberto Abruzzese and Gabriele Montagano, eds., Caro Enzensberger: Il destino della televisione (Milan: Lupetti, 1992).

27.  Benjamin points out a medium’s ability to organize human sensory perception in a certain way: if it is the representational dimension that is privileged, the context of his discourse provides nevertheless for making clear the other functions of medium as well.

28.  On this subject, we must remember Benjamin’s cutting irony toward film theorists. “Though commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on the question of whether photography was an art—without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art—film theorists quickly adopted the same ill-considered standpoint” (Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 258). Benjamin adds: “It is instructive to see how the desire to annex film to‘ art’ impels these theoreticians to attribute elements of cult to film—with a striking lack of discretion” (259). What Benjamin did not anticipate is that film, sixty years later, would become once again cult object, even before display object.

29.  Let us think for example how elsewhere Benjamin contrasts fashion to art, attributing to the former a greater capacity to understand the processes of the moment, if for nothing else than by virtue of the group of consumers for whom it is intended (and for the fact that it is intended for a group of consumers): “It is well known that art will often—for example, in pictures—precede the perceptible reality by years…. Moreover, the sensitivity of the individual artist to what is coming certainly far exceeds that of the grande dame. Yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the feminine collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP), 63–64; “Das Passagen Werk,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982).

30.  On the “mediazation” of art, see also this biting observation of Benjamin’s: “for the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 256.

31.  Benjamin, at least it seems to me, does not clearly explore this path, which seems especially interesting today. On this new task of both action and aesthetic reflection, see the works of Pietro Montani, in particular L’immaginazione narrativa: Il racconto del cinema oltre i confini dello spazio letterario (Milan: Guerini, 1999).

32.  Louis Delluc, “Le cinéma, art populaire,” reprinted in Écrits cinématographiques 2:279–88.

33.  “Rio Jim … ordinary as Orestes, moves within an eternal tragedy without psychological‘ hitches.’ I spoke to you about Pour sauver sa race. Did the terrible woman who played Louise Glaum not have the fatal splendor of Clytemnestra? Did Bessie Love not evoke the modesty and savage energy of Electra?” Delluc, “Le cinéma, art populaire,” 286.

34.  On the “in-forming” process, carried out by each medium, see Francesco Casetti and Ruggero Eugeni, “I media in forma: Il lavoro della pubblicità dalla réclame alla pubblicità,” in Fausto Colombo, ed., I persuasori non occulti (Milan: Lupetti, 1989).

35.  Rollin Summers, “The Moving Picture Drama and the Acted Drama: Some Points of Comparison as to Technique,” Moving Picture World (September 19, 1908); reprinted in Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell, eds., American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane” (New York: Liveright, 1972), 10.

36.  David Bordwell, On History of Film Style (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1997).

37.  Giovannetti, Il cinema e le arti meccaniche, 23.

38.  Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” in Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology, 240. Let’s recall that, like Summers, Panofsky also speaks of “legitimate, that is, exclusive, possibilities and limitations” of the medium (240).

39.  Rudolf Arnheim, Film (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), then republished with changes as Film as Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 1957); originally, Film als Kunst (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1932). Clearly, it would be Marshall McLu han, in the wake of Innis, who extended the idea of a “specificity” or at least a “characteristic “of each medium.

40.  I have tried to show film’s ties to the more general circuits of social discourse (and social practices) in Casetti, “Adaptations and Mis-adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social discourses, “in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 81–91.

41.  Louis Delluc, “La photoplastique au cinéma,” Paris-Midi, July 6, 1918, reprinted in Écrits cinématographiques 2:210–12.

42.  Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a good introduction to the great processes that mark modernity; see also Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity; Frisby, Fragments of Modernity; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.

43.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 267; “Second Version,” 119.

44.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 269; “Second Version,” 120.

45.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 266; “Second Version,” 117.

46.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 263; “Second Version,” 115.

47.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (“Kult der Zerstreuung” originally published in Frankfurter Allgemeine, March 4, 1926, then included in Das Ornament der Masse, 1963). For a better understanding of Kracauer’s positions and evolution in the years of Frankfurter Zeitung (years that spanned practically the entire second decade of the century), see in particular Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,” in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 363–402.

48.  Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique, (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 257.

49.  On the avant-garde’s deep functionality to mass culture, see Abruzzese, Forme estetiche and L’immagine filmica. On the necessity of a reconsideration of classical cinema in a tone that renders less “classical” its action, see Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (New York: Arnold; London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 332–50. For a rearticulation of the “classical paradigm,” see Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative.

50.  On negotiation in communicative processes, see Francesco Casetti, Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002); see also Christine Gledhill, “Pleasurable Negotiations,” in Sue Thornham, ed., Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York UP, 1999), 166–79.

51.  See Hansen, Babel and Babylon, and “The Mass Production of the Senses.”

2. FRAMING THE WORLD

1.   Balász, Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), reprinted in Schriften zum Film, vol. 1: 1922– 1926 (1982); and Balász, Der Geist des Films (1930), reprinted in Schriften zum Film, vol. 2: 1926–1931 (1983). All quotations are from the reprint volumes. On Balász and his position as film theorist, see Malcom Turvey, “Balász: Realist or Modernist?” October 115 (Winter 2006): 77–87.

2.   Balász, Der sichtbare Mensch, 83.

3.   Balász, Der sichtbare Mensch, 76.

4.   Balász, Der sichtbare Mensch, 83.

5.   Balászv Der sichtbare Mensch, 88. The idea of lining up a series of shots devoted to a fuller perception of the real leads Balász to theorize the Querschnittfilm (“horizontal film”), which gives a cross section of life through a progressive extension of examples. Adding gazes upon gazes, it “can literally become an art of Weltanschauung, as it is able to go over—so quickly, as to give the impression of simultaneity—the contiguities that constitute the most far-ranging faces of life. Balász, “Vorstoβ in eine neue Dimension,” Die literarische Welt 5 (November 1926), reprinted in Schriften zum Film 2:213.

6.   Balász, Der Geist des Films, 70.

7.   Balász, Der Geist des Films, 71.

8.   Balász, Der Geist des Films, 71. See also: “The images captured reveal the director’s intentions with respect to the object that they capture: his sympathy or aversion, his emotion or irony. In this, it is the propagandistic strength of the film that must not demonstrate a thesis conceptually, but must make it be absorbed visually” (73).

9.   Balász, Der Geist des Films, 70–71.

10.  Balász, Der Geist des Films, 146.

11.  Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991); originally, “Die Perspektive als‘ symbolishe Form,’” in Vortäge der Bibliothek Warburg: Voraäge, 1924–25 (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1927). For a new consideration of perspective and point of view, see the excellent introduction by Christopher Wood for the English translation of Panofsky’s work. See also Antonio Somaini, Rappresentazione prospettica e punto di vista: Da Leon Battista Alberti a Abraham Bosse (Milan: CUEM, 2004); and Antonio Somaini, “L’immagine prospettica e la distanza dello spettatore,” in Antonio Somaini, ed., Il luogo dello spettatore (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2005), 53–92.

12.  Panofsky, Perspective, 67. Panofsky adds: “Perspective mathematizes this visual space, and yet it is very much visual space that it mathematizes; it is an ordering, but an ordering of the visual phenomenon” (71).

13.  “Plato condemned [the perspectival view of space] already in its modest beginnings because it distorted the true proportions of things, and replaced reality and the nomos (law) with subjective appearance and arbitrariness; whereas the most modern aesthetic thinking accuses it, on the contrary, of being the tool of a limited and limiting rationalism.” Panofsky, Perspective, 71.

14.  Henry James, “Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–1909),” in Literary Criticism, vol. 2 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1035–1341.

15.  The coincidence between the birth of cinema and the Jamesian theory of the novel has been stressed by many, among them Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979). A revival of the Jamesian theory takes place in years in which Balázs writes his major works: see Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (New Haven: Yale UP, 1918); and Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1929).

16.  In the preface to The Ambassadors, James clarifies this condition: “But Strether’s sense of these things, and Strether’s only, should avail me for showing them; I should know them but through his more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions, and a full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would give me more of the effect I should be most‘ after’ than all other possible observance together. It would give me a large unity, and that in turn crown me with the grace to which the enlightened story-teller will at any time, for his interest, sacrifice if need be all other graces whatever.” James, “Prefaces,” 1313.

17.  James, “Prefaces,” 1075 (Preface to Portrait of a Lady). It goes without saying that Leon Battista Alberti as well, when speaking of perspective, proposes the image of the painting as an open window on the world.

18.  One might call that “a subjective vision”; except, in James’s view, what ensures a story’s objectivity is precisely the fact that it is anchored to information that is in some way certain.

19.  Crary, Techniques of the Observer. I would add that, for Crary, this idea of the eye as a simple passageway finds its principal confirmation in the fifteenth-century camera obscura. In the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a repudiation of this device and the philosophies of knowledge that were reshaped with it (as in Locke or in Descartes). Scientists advanced a new conceptual paradigm that would find its defining moment in new mechanisms such as the stereoscopic device and then the cinema.

20.  An example: Impressionism is inconceivable outside of this epistemological turn. For an analysis of Impressionism in this light, and for a reading of it as film’s forerunner, see Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable: Cinéma et peinture (Paris: Séguier, 1989).

21.  See, in particular, the brief but dense essay “Experience and Poverty,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), 731–36.

22.  E[nrico] Toddi, “Rettangolo-Film (25 x 19),” In Penombra 1.3 (August 25, 1918): 121–23.

23.  Sergei M. Eisenstein, “The Dynamic Square,” Close-Up (March-June 1931).

24.  Even the reduction carried out by the photogram follows a logic analogous to that of the point of view. As Toddi suggests, “we‘ aim at’ an object” even when we have under our vision ample portions of space, and thus in the focusing we construct a point of view within the visual field. Toddi, Rettangolo-Film, 122.

25.  Jean Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” Cinéa (July 22, 1921), then in Bonjour cinéma (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1921), reprinted now in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Cinéma club/Seghers, 1974) 93.

26.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 92–93.

27.  In the vast bibliography on Napoléon, see at least the book written by Gance on his own film (Abel Gance, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance: Épopée cinégraphique en cinq époques, Paris: Plon, 1927), and the book by Kevin Brownlow devoted to the film restored by him, Napoléon: Abel Gance’s Classic Film (London: Cape, 1983). See also Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1919 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984); Abel takes into account the film’s project, as well as its production structure, linguistic construction, reactions to its release, and finally, its successive restorations. Interesting critical remarks are found in Steven Garrett, “Leaving History: Dickens, Gance, Blanchot,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2.2 (Spring 1989): 145–90.

28.  Earlier, the film offered an image of the friars intent on following the snowball fight. They are seen through a glass door, each of them behind a different frame: it is the perfect prefiguration of the split screen

29.  Abel Gance, Napoléon: Épopée cinématographique en cinq époques (Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991; new edition of Gance’s Napoléon vu), 4. On superimposition, see also the superb analysis in Marc Vernet, Figures de l’absence (Paris: Ed. de l’Etoile, 1988).

30.  Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du cinéma (Paris: Les Écrivains réunis, 1926); now in Aujourd’hui, 1917–1929, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Denoël, 1960), 162–66. The text is dated 1917–1921.

31.  Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version” (Selected Writings, vol. 4), 282; see also the “Second Version” (Selected Writings, vol. 3), 132. See also the acute analysis of aerial vision in twentieth-century culture in Franco La Polla, “Il cinema e le arti popolari,” in Stili americani (Bologna: Bonomia UP, 2002).

32.  Blaise Cendrars, “The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema,” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 182–83 (originally, “Modernités—Un nouveau art: le cinéma,” La rose rouge 7.12, [June 1919]: 108). See also in Cendrars: “A hundred worlds, a thousand movements, a million events entering simultaneously into the field of that eye given to man by the cinema. And that eye is more marvelous, though arbitrary, than the faceted eye of a fly” (Cendrars, L’ABC, 164). And also Jean Epstein: “I descended as if through the facets of an immense insect’s eye” (Epstein, Le cinématographe vue de l’Etna [1926], reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:136).

33.  Gance, “Appel adressée le 4 juin 1924 a tous ces collaborateurs,” in Napoléon: Épopée, 8.

34.  As Gance’s companion Nelly Kaplan would remember almost thirty years later in an affectionate posthumous homage: “Only one art exists—the most wonderful as it combines and condenses all of them—that possesses the richness and poetry necessary to translate, reflect and sublimate the movement and becoming of the atomic age, in which speed, ubiquity, and hereto fore unknown sensations become or will become an everyday thing. This art is the cinema.” Nelly Kaplan, Manifeste d’un art nouveau: la Polyvision (Paris : Caractéres, 1955).

35.  Abel, French Cinema, 441, effectively highlights this passage.

36.  Translator’s note: In Italian, to play blindman’s bluff is giocare a mosca cieca (literally, “to play the blind fly”).

37.  Blaise Cendrars, La fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D. (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1919); reprinted in Édition complete, vol. 2 (Paris: Denoël, 1960), 7–50.

38.  Abel, French Cinema, 435.

39.  François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967); originally, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (Paris: R. Laffont, 1966).

40.  Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916), 73–74.

41.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 85.

42.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 89.

43.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 87.

44.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 91.

45.  “The particular, the detail, will be always a synonym of intensification”: Vsevelod I. Pudovkin, Film Technique (London: G. Newnes, 1933), 63; the volume synthesizes two booklets by Pudovkin: Kinorežissër i kinomaterial (Moscow: Kinopeciat, 1926) and Kinoscenari (Moscow: Kinopeciat, 1926). The quoted sentence comes from the former.

46.  Crary, Suspension of Perception.

47.  Crary, Suspension, 4.

48.  Crary, Suspension, 12.

49.  Crary, Suspension, 12.

50.  Crary, Suspension, 17.

51.  Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” in Bonjour cinéma (1921), reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:98.

52.  Beyond the close-up, there is also the iris; in it, most of the image is obfuscated. Only a small portion is left, on which the gaze inevitably concentrates.

53.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 41; the passage belongs to Kinoscenari (1926).

54.  André Bazin, “William Wyler ou le janséniste de la mise en scène,” Revue du Cinema (1948), reprinted in Qu’est ce que le cinéma, vol. 1: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1958). Bazin recognizes that, with découpage, the camera behaves like our eye; it “settles in spatially on the important point of the event … and proceeds on to successive investigations”; this means that a director who uses découpage “takes control of the discrimination that lies with us in real life” (157). Bazin, however, adds that we “unconsciously accept this analysis because it conforms to the laws of attention. Yet it strips us of a privilege equally grounded in psychology, which we have without realizing it: the freedom, at least virtual, to modify in each moment our system of découpage” (158)

55.  Bazin does not know it, but his battle for the active role of the spectator can be read as a response to Benjamin and his idea that a film with excessive pressure provokes a “reception in distraction.” For the latter, see Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 269; “Second Version,” 120.

56.  I would make two observations on modern film’s banalization of the center of the attention. On the one hand, it seems to find compensation in the discovery of an image—any image even—capable of making an entire field of forces converge on it. The image-crystal theorized by Gilles Deleuze in Time-Image (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) is a perfect example. On the other hand, the compensation operates at a theoretical level: in the 1980s the theme of attention would be revived, thanks to studies like those of François Jost, L’oeil-camera: Entre film et roman (Lyon: Presses Universitaries de Lyon, 1987).

57.  In the vast bibliography on M, see at least Tom Gunning, “M: The City Haunted by Demoniac Desire,” The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000); Anton Kaes, M (London: BFI, 2000); and Bernard Eisenschitz, M le maudit, un film de Fritz Lang (Paris: Le Cinématheque Française/Éditions Plume, 1990). See also Stephen Jenkins, ed., Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look (London: BFI, 1981); and Paolo Bertetto and Bernard Eisenschitz, eds., Fritz Lang: La messa in scena (Turin: Lindau, 1993).

58.  Bazin summarizes this double function of the filmic image’s edges, saying that they are both frame (cadre) and mask (cache). André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? 1:164–69; originally, “Peinture et cinéma,” in Qu’est ce que le cinéma 2:127–32.

59.  On the offscreen and its structural role, see the essential Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981); originally, Praxis du cinema (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). On the offscreen as implicit, see also Francesco Casetti, “I bordi dell’immagine,” Versus 29 (May-August 1981): 93–115.

60.  On the composition of classical cinema, see the stimulating pages of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). On the role of the center, see Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982).

61.  On the disappearance of single photograms and interspace, see the classic article by Thierry Kuntzel, “Le defilement du film,” Revue d’estetique 2–4 (1973): 97–110.

62.  Beyond the spatial offscreen, there is also the temporal offscreen: it is the ellipsis, that moment between two actions or two phases of an action that editing often loses to render the story more solid. On the ellipsis, see Casetti, “I bordi dell’immagine”.

63.  On the invisible as the sense horizon to which the filmic image tends, see two works with different accents: Virgilio Melchiorre, L’immaginazione simbolica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), and Elio Franzini, Fenomenologia dell’invisibile (Milan: Cortina, 2001). I cite Franzini in particular to point out the difference, but also a correlation, between the stylistic approach to the offscreen (such as Burch) and a more “philosophical” approach: in the first case, what the image does not offer the spectator’s eye (though evoking it) is considered fundamentally implicit; in Franzini’s study, beyond what we see there is the pre-categorical dimension of the image. Finally, next to an implicit invisible and a pre-categorical invisible, there is also a censured invisible: on the mechanisms that are produced by a “social exclusion” of entire segments of reality to the “emphasis” of others, see Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinema (Paris: Aubier, 1977).

64.  Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918); see in particular ch. 6, “The Appeal to the Imagination,” 90–111.

65.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 94.

66.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 90. The following quotation is from the same page.

67.  Mario Ponzo, “Di alcune osservazioni psicologiche fatte durante rappresentazioni cinematografiche,” Atti della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino 46 (1910–11) (Turin: Vincenzo Bona, 1911), 943–48.

68.  Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 89.

69.  Bresson, Notes, 95.

70.  Bresson, Notes, 55.

71.  Bresson, Notes, 90.

72.  Bresson, Notes, 51.

73.  Bresson, Notes, 56.

74.  I will return to this subject. However, on imagination at the cinema, see the important contribution by Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione narrativa, to which here I am in debt.

75.  It might be useful to reread in this light a contribution such as the one by Rudolf Arnheim, Film. Arnheim emphasizes the filmic image’s incapacity to return the captured object to us as it actually is. Yet it is precisely this incapacity that constitutes the aesthetic basis of film.

76.  The stereoscopic viewer, as common as the player piano, was found in many homes at the second half of the nineteenth century.

77.  The relative bibliography is immense. I will indicate only those in the field of film studies. Antonio Costa, ed., La meccanica del visibile: Il cinema delle origini in Europa (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1983); Laurence Mannoni, Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre: Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1995); and Gian Piero Brunetta, Il viaggio dell’icononauta (Venice: Marsilio, 1997). On optical devices in nineteenth-century culture, see also Lucilla Albano, La caverna dei giganti (Parma: Pratiche, 1982). For a history of lighting in the nineteenth century, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988); originally, Lichtblicke: Zur Geschichte der Künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983). For a history of the railroad, with particular emphasis on the kind of visual experience that it brought, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (New York: Urizen, 1979); originally, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977).

78.  Verlaine describes this sensation in some splendid verses: “The scene behind the carriage window-panes/Goes flitting past in furious flight; whole plains/With streams and harvest-fields and trees and blue/Are swallowed by the whirlpool, whereinto/The telegraph’s slim pillars topple o’er,/Whose wires look strangely like a music-score.” “La bonne chanson” (1870), in Poems of Paul Verlaine, translated by Gertrude Hall (New York: Duffield, 1906). Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, dedicated some extraordinary pages to the “loss of landscape” tied to train voyages.

79.  The field of literature offers significant examples: in Hoffman’s stories, so rich in visual references, Max Milner, La fantasmagorie (Paris: PUF, 1982), shows that the optical instruments crush the idea of visual perception. They are presented as a constant font of deception, perdition, and death; knowledge passes through vision, but vision does not always offer correct and productive knowledge. Milner reminds us that the source of this contradiction lies in an epistemological revolution: “Everything changes—and the revolution began with Kant—when man is no longer conceived as a being who receives knowledge of a world governed by the laws of optics, but as a being who receives, through the different senses, messages to gather and interpret information in order to construct an image of the world that requires the participation of all his being. The eye is not an optical apparatus that transmits to the brain images that exist as they are externally. It is instead an instrument of codification and decodification that transmits information, which must be continually interpreted and whose interpretation varies according to the nature of the signals received and the internal dispositions of the being who receives them.” What Milner relates back to Kant, Crary in Techniques of the Observer relates back to physiologists in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

80.  On décadrage, see Pascal Bonitzer, Décadrages: Peinture et cinéma (Paris: Éditions de l’Etoile/Seuil, 1985).

81.  Serge Daney, Persévérance (Paris: P.O.L. Éditeur, 1994), 26.

82.  The flashbacks are, respectively, those of Thatcher (through written memories), Bernstein, Leland, Susan Alexander, Raymond, in addition to a lost witness, Thompson’s first meeting with Susan, and the newsreel that functions as testimony not reducible to a single subject-narrator.

83.  It is curious to recall that critics of the age had difficulty seeing the name on the sled: “I did not catch it, nor did any other reviewer I have read. On the way home, Mrs Spectator told me about the name on the burning sleigh.” Walford Beaton, in Hollywood Spectator15.7 (May 1, 1941): 7; reprinted in Antony Slide, Selected Film Criticism, 1941–1950 (Metuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1983), 42.

84.  Fausto Maria Martini, “La morte della parola,” La Tribuna (February 16, 1912).

3. DOUBLE VISION

1.   Balász, Der Geist des Films (1930), reprinted in Schriften zum Film, vol. 2 (1983). All quotations are from the reprint version.

2.   Balász, Der Geist, 71.

3.   Balász, Der Geist, 74.

4.   See this passage: “Is it therefore impossible for us to see things as pure and simply as they really are?” The answer is: “The single frames can be a simple documentation of the naked object, but the general principle of form comes from the subject.” Balázs, Der Geist, 124.

5.   Balázs, Der Geist, 125.

6.   Elena Dagrada maintained that the idea of subjectivity at the cinema emerges in relation to the popularization of the story-form. Cf. Elena Dagrada, “Le figure dell’‘io’ e la nascita della soggettiva,” in Lucilla Albano, ed., Modelli non letterari nel cinema (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), 63–80.

7.   René Allendy, “La valeur psychologique de l’image,” in L’art cinématographique, vol. 2 (Paris: Alcan, 1926), 75–103.

8.   Allendy, “La valeur,” 75.

9.   Allendy, “La valeur,” 75.

10.  Allendy, “La valeur,” 77.

11.  Georg Lukács, “Thoughts on an Aesthetic for the Cinema.” Frameworks 14 (Spring 1981); originally, “Gedanken zu einer Ästhetik des‘ Kino,’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 251 (September 10, 1913): 1–2, reprinted in Schriften zur Literatursoziologie (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), 75–80. There is a previous version in Pester Lloyd 90, Budapest (April 16, 1911): 45–46, reprinted in Jörg Schweinitz, ed., Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium, 1909–1914 (Lipsi: Reclam Verlag, 1992), 300–305.

12.  Lukács, Schriften, 77.

13.  Lukács, Schriften, 79.

14.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” Cinéa (July 22, 1921), reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (1974), 85–93. Quotations are from Écrits.

15.  Paul Souday,” Bergsonisme et cinéma,” Paris-Midi (October 12, 1917): 3; reprinted in Pascal-Manuel Heu, Le temps du cinéma: Émile Vuillermoz, père de la critique cinématographique, 1910–1930 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 232–33.

16.  Pierre Deschanel, president of the Chamber of Deputies,” Discours prononcé au banquet de la Chambre syndicale française de cinématographie et des industries s’y rattachant, mars 26, 1914,” in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Corrêa, 1946), 95.

17.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 86.

18.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 91

19.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 91.

20.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 91.

21.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 92.

22.  Epstein, “Le sens 1^bis,” 92. Forty-two years later, Stan Brakhage will echo the idea of the camera as a subject lacking hesitation, scruples, venality, and possible errors, with these words: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (New York: Film Culture, 1963).

23.  Abel, French Cinema, 456. Abel dedicates an insightful analysis to Epstein’s film. On La glace à trois faces, see also Regis Labourdette,” Le Temps de quelques analogies dans La glace à trois faces de Jean Epstein,” in Jacques Aumont, ed., Jean Epstein: Cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: Cinématèque Française, 1998).

24.  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh P, 1956).

25.  Of the many explorations on the subject, I would refer to the study by Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, which connects fin de siècle urban life to the forms of cinematic representation.

26.  Fantasio, “Cinémas,” Le Film (June 12, 1914), reprinted in L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe, 74–77.

27.  Richard Abel notices Epstein’s preoccupation with alternating different styles and opposes it to the idea of an immediate recovery of the real in French cinema. Abel, French Cinema, 458.

28.  On Dark Passage, see Dana Polan, “Blind Insights and Dark Passages: The Problem of Placement in Forties Films,” Velvet Light Trap 20 (Summer 1983): 27–33; and Jay P. Telotte, “Seeing in a Dark Passage,” Film Criticism 9.2 (Winter 1984–85): 15–27. See also Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004).

29.  Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film.

30.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 63; and Arnheim, Film.

31.  Spottiswoode, A Grammar, 170.

32.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 97.

33.  Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” Promenoir 1–2 (February-March 1921), reprinted in Bonjour cinéma (1921), then in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:95 (1974).

34.  Robert Bataille, Le savoir filmer (Lille-Paris: Taffin Lefort, 1944); Robert Bataille, Grammaire cinégraphique (Lille: Taffin-Lefort, 1947). André Berthomieu, Essai de grammaire cinématographique (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1946).

35.  Renato May, Il linguaggio del film (Milan: Il Poligono, 1947); by the same author, see also “Per una grammatica del montaggio,” Bianco e Nero 2.1 (1938): 24–65.

36.  May also adds that “objective shots … are distinguished into the‘ real’ and the‘ unreal,’ according to whether they are seen by points accessible to man’s eye or not.” May, Il linguaggio del film, 99–100.

37.  May, Il linguaggio del film, 100.

38.  On The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, see Jean Luis Leutrat, L’homme qui tua Liberty Valance, John Ford: étude critique (Paris: Nathan, 1995); and Edward Bus combe and Roberta Pearson, Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: BFI, 1998).

39.  For a history of the flashback, see Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); for an analysis of the point-of-view shot, see Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984).

40.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Parts One and Two, trans. George Madison Priest (New York: Knopf, 1941). For a modernist rereading of Faust, see the pages on Goethe of Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and the first part of Franco Moretti, Modern Epic.

41.  Boleslaw Matuszewski, Una Nouvelle Source de l’Histoire historique (Paris: Noisette, 1898). See the following passage: “The‘ family film’ belongs to the future, if not to the present. The fathers and mothers who can, will want to preserve the memory of their children playing with the abandon particular to their age. They will be the true family archives, which will allow us to review years later the ways of living, the particular habits and the dearly departed.” Matuszewski, La Photographie animée: Ce qu’elle est, ce qu’elle doit être (Paris: Noisette, 1898).

42.  Lucio D’Ambra, “Il museo dell’attimo fuggente,” La Tribuna illustrata 22.20, Turin (May 17–24, 1914).

43.  Deschanel, “Discours prononcé,” 95.

44.  Elie Faure, The Art of Cineplastics (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1923); originally, “De la cinéplastique,” in L’Arbre d’ Eden (Paris: Ed. Crès, 1922), reprinted in L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe, 266–78.

45.  André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est ce que le cinéma, vol. 1 (1958).

46.  “Impenetrable if not for poets, and nevertheless those privileged and rare creatures who have a far-reaching gaze and an excellent nose”: Alberto Savinio, Galleria (January 1924), reprinted in Vanni Scheiwiller, ed., Il sogno Meccanico (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, Quaderni della Fondazione Primo Conti, 1981).

47.  Jacques de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma au service d’une humanité meilleure,” Les Cahiers du mois 16–17 (1925; special issue on cinema), reprinted in L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe, 126–27.

48.  Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915). The author takes up the work again in 1922, with some changes. The citation comes from the reissue of 2000 (New York: Modern Library), 183–84.

49.  On the relationship between memory and truth, I would refer to Deleuze and his reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. For Deleuze, memory is not only an exploration of the past or the unraveling of reason; it reflects the desire to interpret and decipher the signs that time has left. It therefore reflects the dimension of a real search for the truth. Memory is knowledge and understanding of the truth of the past, which gives meaning to the present. For this reason, though its function is important, memory intervenes only as an instrument of an apprenticeship that surpasses it in both its aims and principles. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000); originally, Marcel Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).

50.  Jean Painlevé, “Le cinéma au service de la science,” La Revue des Vivants (October 1931), reprinted in L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe, 406. On film’s capacity to restore to us the truth of things, see also the debate on the cinema in the circles of research on witness psychology cited, among others, by Allendy, “La valeur.”

51.  Painlevé, “Le cinema au service de la science,” 407.

52.  On the relationship between the ideology of restoration and film theory, see the excellent chapter in the book by Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001).

53.  For more on the cine-photographic image as a “digital imprint” of reality, see Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image.” For more on the trace-image, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981); originally, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. (Paris: Gallimard–Seuil, 1980). Barthes tends to differentiate between the photographic and filmic image: “In the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever …; but in cinema, something has passed in front of the same tiny hole: the pose has been swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here, though derived from the first one” (78). I would add that Barthes shows some perplexity over the fact that photography can make the past “live again” and, in this sense, can even “remember” it; its functions would be that of simple testimonial: “Photography does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” And yet this “reality in past state” is “at once the past and the real” (82). That notwithstanding, his book is indispensable for the subject at hand.

54.  Anonymous, “La cinematografia dal vero,” Cine-gazzetta 1.52, Rome (September 1, 1917): 4; reprinted with some variations under the signature Gio:livo (Giovanni Livoni) and with the title “Pellicole dal vero,” La cine-fono 376 (September 15–25, 1918) and, from this, now in Tra una film e l’altra (Venice: Marsilio, 1980), 345–47.

55.  See the following passage in particular: “Cinema of the real must be not only beautiful, but interesting as well. One easily perceives that it is much more difficult for it (as opposed to a dramatic, comic, or sentimental piece or, at any rate, one that allows for plot development and performances by a certain number of actors) to present a wide and justifiable concern. The shots that make up‘ the real’ must be brief, and—tied together by the film title, and thus consistent with it—they must each present a particular interest, different from the others.” Anonymous, “La cinematografia.”

56.  Ricciotto Canudo, “L’esthétique du septième art,” Film 180 (April 1921), reprinted in L’usine aux images, 20 (emphasis in the original).

57.  Canudo, “L’esthétique,” 23–24.

58.  Ricciotto Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” in L’usine aux images, 43.

59.  Canudo, “L’esthétique,” 21.

60.  It is not a coincidence that Jean Epstein pays tribute to Canudo when speaking specifically of animism: see Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vue de l’Etna (1926), reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:131–52 (1974).

61.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Ersatz für die Traüme,” Das Tagenuch 2 (1921).

62.  Antonin Artaud, Sorcellerie et cinéma (1927), now in Oeuvres complètes III (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

63.  Let us remember one of the most celebrated definitions of the photogenic quality: “I define as photogenic any aspect of things, beings, and feelings that enhance the moral quality through the cinematographic reproduction”: Jean Epstein, “De quelques conditions de la photogénie,” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous (August 15, 1924), reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:137 (1974).

64.  Epstein, Le Cinématographe, 137.

65.  Luigi Pirandello’s Si gira was published in serial form in Nuova Antologia (June-August 1915). It was published with the same title by Fratelli Treves (Milan, 1916), and finally became Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Florence: Edizioni Bemporad, 1925). My citation comes from the volume Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio: Cinematograph Operator, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).

66.  Epstein, Le Cinématographe.

67.  Pirandello, Shoot!, 319.

68.  On Vertigo, see Charles Barr, Vertigo (London: BFI, 2002), and Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l’aventure de Vertigo: L’invention à Hollywood (Paris: CNRS, 2001). See also Raymond Bellour, L’analyse du film (Paris: Albatros, 1979).

69.  Jean-Pierre Oudart, “L’effet de réel,” Cahiers du cinéma 228 (1971); see also “La suture,” Cahiers du cinéma 211 (1969), and “La suture II,” Cahiers du cinéma 212 (1969).

70.  Edgar Morin, Cinema; Or, the Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), 102; originally, Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Minuit, 1956).

71.  Morin, Cinema, 156.

72.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay.

73.  Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Brittan, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982); originally, Le signifiant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977).

4. THE GLASS EYE

1.   L. Pirandello’s Si gira (Shoot!) was first published in serial form between June and August of 1915 in La Nuova Antologia; it was published under the same name by Treves (Milano, 1916); it was subsequently released under the title Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Operator) by Edizioni Bemporad in 1925. All English translations come from Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).

2.   Pirandello, Shoot!, 9.

3.   Pirandello, Shoot!, 105–106.

4.   Pirandello, Shoot!, 9.

5.   Pirandello, Shoot!, 105–106.

6.   The quotations are from pages 7, 215, and 112, respectively.

7.   The examples are on pages 112, 27, and 28, respectively.

8.   The expression “mechanism of life” recurs frequently in the novel; the first time on page 4 (cited here). For more on the excitation that machines create, see the Kosmograph actresses’ description of the automobile: “the machinery intoxicates them and excites this uncontrollable vivacity in them” (Pirandello, Shoot!, 78). The description of the “the external, that is to say the mechanical framework of the life which keeps us clamorously and dizzily occupied and gives us no rest,” appears on page 4.

9.   Pirandello, Shoot!, 194.

10.  Pirandello, Shoot!, 84.

11.  The six portraits of Varia Nestorova painted by Giorgio Mirelli realize, in fact, “The assumption of that body of hers into a prodigious life, in a light by which she could never, even in her dreams, have imagined herself as being bathed and warmed, in a transparent, triumphant harmony with a nature round about her” (Pirandello, Shoot!, 263). The cinema instead offers a portrait of Varia that has no revelatory power: “She herself remains speechless and almost terror-stricken at her own image on the screen, so altered and disordered. She sees there someone who is herself but whom she does not know. She would like not to recognize herself in this person, but at least to know her” (Pirandello, Shoot!, 61).

12.  Pirandello, Shoot!, 151. The observations are accompanied by a proposal: that of filming “the actions of life as they are performed without a thought, when people are alive and do not know that a machine is lurking in concealment to surprise them”—a sort of candid camera that allows us to see forms of contemporary life, with an intent that is almost pedagogical: “A man who is alive, when he is alive, does not see himself: he lives…. To see how one lived would indeed be a ridiculous spectacle!” (Pirandello, Shoot!, 151).

13.  Pirandello, Shoot!, 77.

14.  It is perhaps interesting to remember this passage written by an intellectual destined to become a successful cineaste: “In less than a century, the creative genius of a few men has given us the railroad and the electric tram, the light and the telephone, the transatlantic liner and the wireless telegraph, the automobile and the airplane, the gramophone and the cinema. All this grace of God has fallen upon us with such simplicity in so few years, and has so quickly and radically transformed our lives, that we have not even had the time to marvel.” Lucio D’Ambra, “Il museo dell’attimo fuggente,” La Tribuna illustrata 22.20, Turin (May 17–24, 1914): 309.

15.  For the difference between tool, machinery, and technical macrosystem, see Alain Gras and Sophie L. Poirot-Delpech, Grandeur et dépendance: Sociologie des macro-systemes techniques (Paris: PUF, 1993). See also the interesting observations in the introduction by Michela Nacci and Peppino Ortoleva to the Italian edition of the book; in addition, Ingo Brown and Bernward Joerges, “Techniques du quotidien et macrosysèmes techniques,” in Alain Gras, Bernward Joerges, Victor Scardigli, eds., Sociologie des techniques de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992).

16.  Romano Guardini published the single letters in the journal Schildgenossen between early 1923 and the fall of 1925; they were republished under the title Briefe vom Comer See (Mainz: Gruenewald, 1927).

17.  Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 323.

18.  Toddi, “Rettangolo-Film (25 x 19),” In Penombra 1.3 (August 25, 1918): 121–23.

19.  Giovannetti, Il cinema e le arti meccaniche, 25.

20.  Giovannetti, Il cinema, 62.

21.  It is evidently an internal game, seeing that The Cameraman is a film produced by MGM. Keaton considered his move to this production house disastrous; thus, it is not difficult to see a ferocious criticism of his producers in the reference. See Buster Keaton and Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); and Robert Knopf, The Theatre and Cinema of Buster Keaton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999).

22.  On photography and personal identification at the birth of cinema, see Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 15–45.

23.  Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Selected Writings 2:520. “A Short History of Photography” is also published, in a different translation, in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); originally, “Eine Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” Die literarische Welt (1931).

24.  “Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.” Benjamin, “Photography,” 520.

25.  The expression “machine à imprimer la vie” appears in Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermès et le silente,” first published in Le Temps (February 23, 1918), then in Mercure de France and republished in its entirety in Intelligence du cinématographe, 199–212 (Paris: Correa, 1946). Émile Vuillermoz responds to L’Herbier in “Hermès et le silence,” Le Temps (March 9, 1918), now in Pascal-Manuel Heu, Le Temps du cinéma, 221–24: “The documentary cinema, faithful witness to our everyday existence, can render the considerable service of mechanically‘ printing’ life; the cinema, however, is not worthy of our interest if it does not become, on the contrary, the‘ machine for printing dreams.’”

26.  Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (New York: New York Review Books, 2005). “Il fu Mattia Pascal” by Pirandello was serialized from April to June 1904 in Nuova Antologia, and then published (Milano: Treves, 1910). Marcel L’Herbier’s Feu Mattia Pascal is from 1925.

27.  “Couldn’t they do without this hand? Couldn’t you be eliminated, replaced by some piece of machinery?” (Pirandello, Shoot!, 7).

28.  Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1.

29.  Alberto Luchini, “Lettera sul cinematografo,” Solaria 3 3.2 (1927; emphasis in the original). The passage continues: “It is certainly a merit of the cinema—negative, though not irrelevant—to have freed the arts from such a nightmare. The production of sensations that correspond to such a congenital and perpetual need belongs exclusively to the Cinema.”

30.  Dziga Vertov, “Vystuplenie na prosmotre dokumental’nogo fil’ma‘ Chelovek s kinoapparatom,’” in RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), f. 2091, op. 2, d. 204, ll. 1–3. The unpublished manuscript of this introduction to the film, prepared by Dziga Vertov in 1929, was discovered by John MacKay; I thank him for his generosity in allowing me to use this citation.

31.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

32.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

33.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

34.  Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), 15; originally, “Kinoki: Perevoròt,” Lef 3 (1923): 139, reprinted in Stat’i, dnevniki, zamysly (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966).

35.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 17.

36.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 16.

37.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 17–18.

38.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 15.

39.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 17.

40.  Vertov, “Kinoks,” 19.

41.  Jacques Aumont underscores this and other points in his “Le film comme site théorique: L’homme à la camera,” in A quoi pensent les films (Paris: Séguier, 1996), 47–67. On the film, see also Annette Michelson, “‘ The Man with the Movie Camera’: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum 10.7 (1972); Jury Tsivian, “L’Homme à la camera en tant que texte constructiviste,” Révue du cinéma (June 1980); and Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: “The Man with the Movie Camera”—A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987).

42.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

43.  Jacques Aumont summarizes this point very well: “Vertov did not want to show the world so much as its functioning, both real and, at another level, imagined or hoped for.” Aumont, “Le film comme site théorique,” 66.

44.  Mikhail Kaufman was Dziga Vertov’s brother and his chief cameraman; Elizaveta Svilova was Vertov’s wife and lifelong collaborator, especially for editing.

45.  Luchini, “Lettera sul cinematografo.”

46.  Dziga Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 50; originally, “Osnovnoe Kinoglaza,” Kino (February 3, 1925).

47.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

48.  Vertov, “Vystuplenie.”

49.  “Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests…. Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera: its approach is that of testing.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version” (Selected Writings, vol. 4), 259 and 260.

50.  Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 41–42; originally, Roždenie Kinoglaza (1924). And from the same text: “Kino-Eye as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted nonacted; making falsehood into truth” (41).

51.  “Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction—away from copying.” Vertov, “Kinoks,” 16.

52.  Among the works in the large bibliography on King Kong, I want to focus upon two excellent close readings of the film. The first is provided by Fatimah Tobing Rony in her “King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema,” in Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke UP, 1996), 157–91. Tobing Rony moves from the idea that “the mode of representation of the‘ ethnographic’ in spectacular commercial cinema takes the form of teratology—the study of monstrosity” (160); she focuses on many issues that I discuss here, among them the self-referentiality of the film.

The second close analysis is provided by James Snead in his “Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look,” in White Screen, Black Images, 1–27 (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Snead unfolds the racial implications in King Kong, highlighting many of the sequences on which I insist. Even though I will limit myself to a specific issue—King Kong as an illustration of the capitalist mode of production in cinema—I deeply agree with Snead’s reading.

53.  It is useful to remember that the name of the ship is Venture.

54.  James Snead points out: “The ship, as we learn in the first few minutes, is leaving with dangerous‘ cargo’ (dynamite, guns, and bombs), and will likely return with tamed‘ cargo’ (in the event, black cargo). This transaction is the very definition of‘ trade,’ and no less of the slave trade. Denham’s expedition, eccentric on the surface, is intimately linked (as in the establishing shots of New York harbor) with the centers of world trade, and the very authority of American commerce and enterprise.” Snead, “Spectatorship and Capture,” 17.

55.  G. Fossa, “Orizzonti cinematografici avvenire,” La Scena Illustrata 43.5, Florence (March 1, 1907).

56.  On the function of the spectacle in modern culture, which offers participation in the action without compromising spectators’ safety, see also the celebrated essay by Erving Goffman, “Where the Action Is,” in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1967).

57.  W. Troy, The Nation, March 22, 1933, reprinted in Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell, eds,, American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane” (New York: Liveright, 1972).

58.  Including human sacrifice. In Skull Island’s premodern system, this constitutes an offering of reparatory value with respect to what they receive, even in terms of self-defense, from the presence of the Great Ape. On the meaning of sacrifice as a form of balancing Nature, countering the savage exploitation carried out by modern technology, see Gras and Poirot-Delpech, Grandeur et dépendance.

59.  Alberto Abruzzese, La grande Scimmia: Mostri, vampiri, automi, mutanti: l’immaginario collettivo dalla letteratura al cinema all’informazione (Rome: R. Napoleone, 1979).

60.  Enrico Thovez, “L’arte di celluloide,” Stampa 42.209 (July 29, 1908).

61.  Many scholars, James Snead among them, insist on the idea that it is precisely this attitude that makes Carl Denham a self-portrait of King Kong’s director and producer, Meriam Cooper.

62.  Paul Souday, “Bergsonisme et cinéma,” Paris-Midi (October 12, 1917): 3; reprinted in Heu, Le temps du cinema, 232–33.

63.  Ricciotto Canudo, “Trionfo del cinematografo,” Nuovo Giornale, Florence (November 25, 1908), reprinted in Filmcritica 278 (1977): 299.

64.  Within the considerable bibliography on the film, see Alberto Farassino, Jean-Luc Godard (Milan: Il Castoro, 2002); see also Joachim Paech, Passion, oder, Die Einbildungen des Jean-Luc Godard (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1989); Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, “To Love to Work and To Work to Love—A Conversation about‘ Passion,’” Discourse 3.15 (Spring 1993): 57–75. For the importance of the film for its themes of modernity, see the vast and detailed reading by Giorgio De Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 1993), in particular ch. 6, “Gli anni Ottanta di Jean Luc Godard: Passione del cinema, architettura dell’anima,” 114–28.

65.  On the dialectic between the copy and the original in modern cinema, see Giorgio Tinazzi, La copia originale: cinema, critica, tecnica (Venice: Marsilio, 1983).

66.  Godard, quoted in Wim Wenders, “On Painters, Montage, and Dustbins: A Conversation between Wim Wenders and Jean-Luc Godard,” in The Act of Seeing: Essay and Conversations (London: Faber & Faber, 2001); originally, Texte und Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1992).

67.  Naturally, the complicated relationship between Godard and his alter ego Jerzi should be analyzed in a more dialectical way. For example, Jerzi, represents the postmodern director who moves in a world that has become a museum. In addition, he likely illustrates the tragic face of the modern poet who does not know how to speak of the unspeakable. For Godard, this is the horror of the concentration camps, which are never made visible for him, as they are radically “obscene.” As Pietro Montani has pointed out, this closing-off in a self-reflexive exercise (that is, his construction of images of images) is the most effective way of constructing a “structure that welcomes the other and the outside”: in waiting for the other, one speaks of the self. I thank Montani for this observation, which coincides with a subject that he investigates splendidly in Il debito del linguaggio (Venice: Marsilio, 1985).

68.  Giovannetti, Il cinema, 132.

69.  Heinrich von Kleist, Über das Marionettentheater (1810), reprinted in Kleists Aufsatz uber das Marionettentheater: Studien und Interpretationen (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1967).

5. STRONG SENSATIONS

1.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” (1926), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, 323–28. For Kracauer’s positions and evolution in the Frankfurter Zeitung years (which includes practically all of the second decade of the twentieth century), see in particular Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps,” in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 363–402.

2.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 323 (emphasis in the original).

3.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 323.

4.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 324.

5.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 326.

6.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 326 (emphasis in the original).

7.   “Indeed the very fact that the shows which aim at distraction are composed of the same mixture of externalities as the world of the urban masses; the fact that these shows lack any authentic and materially motivated coherence, except possibly the glue of sentimentality, which covers up this lack but only in order to make it all the more visible; the fact that these shows convey precisely and openly to thousands of eyes and ears the disorder of the society—this is precisely what would enable them to evoke and maintain the tension that must precede the inevitable and radical change.” Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 326–27.

8.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 326.

9.   Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 327.

10.  Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 328.

11.  Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 327.

12.  Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 328.

13.  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (Thousand Oaks, Calif., and London: Sage, 1997), 175; originally, “Die Groβtädte und das Geistlesleben, “Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung 9 (1903).

14.  Simmel, “The Metropolis, “175.

15.  Simmel, “The Metropolis, “176.

16.  Simmel, “The Metropolis, “178.

17.  Simmel, “The Metropolis, “183.

18.  Simmel, “The Metropolis, “183.

19.  It might be useful to remember the portrait of the new urban universe offered by Robert Musil at the beginning of The Man Without Qualities. In speaking of Vienna (but we are also asked not to limit ourselves too much to such an identification), he writes: “Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole sembled a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.” Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1 (London: Pan Books, 1983), 4.

20.  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840), and “The Tale-Tell Heart,” in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (New York: Redfield and Hall, 1850). Both texts appear in their definitive editions in Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of E.A. Poe, 9 vols. (New York: Sproul, 1902).

21.  Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, “in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968), 155–200; originally, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1–2 (1939).

22.  Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 20–21; originally, Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Leipzig and Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psycoanalytischer Verlag, 1920).

23.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 21. See also: “The main purpose of the reception of stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities” (21). And: “It is characteristic of [the sense organs] that they deal only with very small quantities of external stimulation and only take in samples of the external world. They may perhaps be compared with feelers which are all the time making tentative advances towards the external world and then drawing back from it” (22). For further elaboration, see pages 18–27.

24.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 11.

25.  Tom Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Adam Barker and Thomas Elsaesser, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), 56–62. The relationship between early cinema and “excitement” has been studied exhaustively in the past few years: see also Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 72–99.

26.  Jean Epstein, “Rapidité et fatigue de l’homme spectateur,” in Mercure de France (November 1, 1948); reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 2:45–53.

27.  I am also thinking of the presence in this part of the film of actual narrative suspensions: we have a capital execution that seems to take forever; a courting between Belshazzar and the Princess that goes forward as if nothing were happening; a Crucifixion that suddenly becomes a hieratic icon, even if these suspensions reinforce, by contrast, the sense of movement that pervades the whole. On the film, see Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1990); and William M. Drew, D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: Its Genesis and Its Vision (Jefferson: McFarland, 1986).

28.  Among the numerous contributions on the role of velocity in the modern world, see the exhaustive chapter dedicated to the subject by Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space.

29.  This ambiguity is found, for example, in many of the metaphors of modern life that refer to speed: I am thinking of the idea of the whirlwind, which Marshall Berman discusses in the introduction to his All That Is Solid Melts into Air.

30.  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo,” Figaro (Februrary 20, 1909), reprinted in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 21. The same manifesto reads, “Up to now literature has exalted a pensile immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap” (21). And more: “We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit” (21). See also by Marinetti, “The New Moral-Religion of Speed” (“La nuova religione-morale della velocità”), the 1916 manifesto in which there is a list of “places inhabited by the divinity” of speed, “cinematographic film” among them. See also his film script, “Velocità,” examined by Giovanni Lista in “Un inedito marinettiano: Velocità, film futurista.” Both appear in Fotogenia 2 (1995).

31.  Schivelbusch, Railway Journey.

32.  It was Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, who read the tragedy of the Titanic as a tragedy of speed.

33.  Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 219.

34.  Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 41.

35.  On crosscutting, see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), 210–12. For an appraisal of Bordwell on this point, see Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory (London: BFI, 2001). See also Raymond Bellour, “To Alternate/To Narrate,” in Barker and Elsaesser, eds., Early Cinema, 360–74; André Gaudreault, “Temporality and Narrativity in Early Cinema,” in Roger Holdman, ed., Cinema, 1900–1906: An Analytical Study (Brussels: FIAF, 1982), 201–218; André Gaudreault, “Detours in Film Narrative: Cross-Cutting,” Cinema Journal 19.1 (1979): 39–59; and Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford UP, 1974), originally, Essais sur la signification au cinema (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968). On ubiquity, see Jean Epstein, “Logique du fluide,” in “Alcool et Cinéma” (unpublished manuscript), now in Écrits sur le cinéma 2:210–15; and Blaise Cendrars, “The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema,” in Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism 1:182–83.

36.  J. Johnson, “Intolerance,” in Photoplay 11.1 (December 1916): 78, reprinted in Slide, ed., Selected Film Criticism, 1912–1920, 133.

37.  F.J. Smith, in New York Dramatic Mirror 76.1969 (September 16, 1916): 22, reprinted in Slide, ed., Selected Film Criticism, 140.

38.  On suspense, see Pascal Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 45–71; Xavier Pérez, El suspens cinematogràfic (Barcelona: Portic, 1999); Gordon Gow, Suspense in the Cinema (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1968).

39.  Ricciotto Canudo, “Lettere d’arte: Trionfo del cinematografo” (1908), reprinted in Filmcritica 28.278 (November 1977): 297.

40.  Canudo, “Trionfo,” 297.

41.  Canudo, “Trionfo,” 298 (all quotations).

42.  Canudo, “Trionfo,” 298.

43.  On the adoption of universal time, see Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. On the advent of a collective temporality that eradicates the subjective one, as well as on punctuality and the calculability of the life of the modern metropolitan man, see Simmel, “The Metropolis,” 177: “If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all the economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.”

44.  On the interlacing of “too late” and “just in time” in the “last second rescue” (in particular for Way Down East, David W. Griffith, USA, 1920), see Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), 42–88.

45.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 49.

46.  Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making, 218.

47.  On anguish as tied to waiting, see in particular some texts by Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1948); originally, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1926); and Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: L. and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1930); originally, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930).

48.  Perhaps the most beautiful inversion of a chase film remains Seven Chances by (Buster Keaton, USA, 1925), in which the protagonist, forced to find a wife to collect an inheritance, runs like the wind from hundreds of admirers hot on his heels, from a slave who throws herself on him, and so on.

49.  Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 62.

50.  Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105.

51.  Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105.

52.  For Lyotard, cinema’s apex rests in fireworks or in tableux vivants: Jean-François Lyotard, “L’acinéma,” Revue d’Esthétique 2–4, reprinted in Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973).

53.  See in particular, Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987); originally, Neravnodušnaja priroda, in Izbrannye proizvedenija v šesti tomach, vol. 3 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963–1970).

54.  Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity.

55.  Compagnon explains quite well how modernity experiments with first an approval of what is current, then with the religion of the future (see Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity)—the relationship between art and the current in Stendhal and then in Baudelaire, and the passage from an identification with the present to a projection in the future realized by the avant-garde.

56.  Excelsior, with music by Romualdo Marenco and choreography by Luigi Manzotti, was a highly successful ballet. Composed in 1881, it is a lavish tribute to the scientific and industrial progress of the nineteenth century.

57.  “For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion. And that is why she changes so quickly; she titillates death and is already something different, something new, as he casts about to crush her” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 63). Benjamin returns to the dialectic newness/negation at various moments: for example, in regard to the need for information (“Why does everyone share the newest thing with someone else? Presumably, in order to triumph over the dead. This only where there is nothing really new” (112).

58.  On modern temporality, see the excellent study by Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. On the connection between speed and change, I would like to observe that the two terms bring to light two complementary characteristics of temporality—that is, the rhythmic dimension (the steps that time takes in its racing forward) and the dimension of waiting in the strict sense (the articulation of a “before” and an “after”); we can add that, on the one hand, acceleration is the most evident sign that the world has assumed new trends, and that thus it has changed; on the other hand, that acceleration facilitates change, and renders it in some way indispensable.

59.  Benjamin emphasizes the connections between the idea of change and that of the eternal return: “The belief in progress—in an infinite perfectibility understood as an infinite ethical task—and the representation of eternal return are complementary. They are the indissoluble antimonies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 119.

60.  This element has been sufficiently examined by Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione narrativa, 24–26, particularly through the analysis of the ball sequence in Staroe i novoe.

61.  It must be said that, for Eisenstein, an organic structure’s capacity to go outside itself (ecstasy) and touch the apex of pathos is not a trait exclusive to art; it is found in nature as well, where all organisms develop passing from one mature state to the next, with a growth based on one of the “qualitative leaps,” just as it is found in thought, which proceeds through successive processes, in which each eliminates and reabsorbs the preceding one. In this sense, the organic-pathetic work recalls nature and thought, as well as the processes of transformation of these domains.

62.  For a survey of the musical, and in particular its narrative structure, see Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), which contains an analysis of the “narrative syntax” of Gold Diggers of 1933 (229–30). On the backstage musical, see the still-influential observations by John Belton, “The Backstage Musical,” Movie 24 (Spring 1977). On Gold Diggers of 1933, see James Seymour, Gold Diggers of 1933 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1980). An important reading of the film is offered by Franco La Polla, “Negare il piacere: l’erotismo negli anni ’30 e ’40,” in L’età dell’occhio: Il cinema e la cultura Americana (Turin: Lindau, 1999), 177–85, which emphasizes how Busby Berkeley pursues an “eroticization of the musical.” On this subject, see also Patricia Mellecamp, “The Sexual Economics of‘ Gold Diggers of 1933,’” in Peter Lehman, ed., Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990), 177–99.

63.  Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo was an Italian painter whose The Fourth State (1901) became a “manifesto” for the socialist movement.

64.  Simmel, “The Metropolis,” 175.

65.  We have only to think of two things: the misunderstandings between the two lovers, tied mostly to the fact that he is rich but does not want it known, as well as the confusion that leads to the suspension of the initial show, due to the fact that the dancers thought there was money for the production (which then disappeared).

66.  Translator’s Note: The Italian word storia means both history and story.

67.  This opposition between image and narrative shows the traces of many influences, from Roland Barthes (“The Third Meaning: Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], 41–62), to Gilles Deleuze (Time-Image), to Lyotard (“L’acinéma”). For a good summary of this contrast, see Sandro Bernardi, Introduzione alla retorica del cinema (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994), and Mario Pezzella, Estetica del cinema (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). See also the opposition between “figuratif” and “figurale” in Philippe Dubois, “L’écriture figurale dans le cinéma muet des années vingt,” Art&Fact 18 (1999).

68.  For this cinema, see the essential work by Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions,” 56–62; the formula is, however, borrowed explicitly from Eisenstein. For the passage from the early cinema to the institutional-narrative cinema, see Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990); for a definition of the classical cinema within its relationship to narrativity, see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema.

69.  Luigi Pirandello, “Se il film parlante abolirà il teatro” (“If talking film will eliminate the theater”), Corriere della Sera (June 16, 1929), reprinted in Francesco Callari, Pirandello e il cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 1991), 120–25. On the theoretical hypotheses that the cinema did not follow, see Leonardo Quaresima, ed., “Dead Ends/Impasses,” Cinema & Cie 2 (Spring 2003).

70.  On the subject (which I would summarize in another way as the problem of “sense” of filmic discourse beginning from the dimension of “as-yet-sensible” and “no-longer-sensible”), Montani has written some essentials, in particular his L’immaginazione narrativa. For a reflection on the subject that extends beyond the cinema, see Franzini, Fenomenologia dell’invisibile.

71.  For this reading of the musical, see in particular a classical work such as Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” Movie 24 (1977), part of Steven Cohan, ed., Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Dyer suggests that the genre’s uniqueness lies precisely in “working on the level of sensitivity,” using signs both representational and nonrepresentational, and to bury its utopian design on this level.

72.  The bibliography on the passage from silent to sound is immense: I would like to cite the series of essays by Rick Altman, precisely because they validate my argument: “Toward a Theory of the History of Representational Technology,” Iris 2.2 (1984); “The Technology of Voice,” Iris 3.1 (1985); “The Technology of Voice,” Iris 4.1 (1986). See also Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routledge and the American Film Institute, 1992); and Rick Altman, “The State of Sound Studies/Le son au cinéma, état de la recherche,” Iris 27 (1999).

73.  On the subject, see Francesco Casetti, “Tra l’opera d’arte totale e il mondo quotidiano: I paradossi del cinema sonoro,” La valle dell’Eden 1 (1999): 7–21.

74.  Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Vertical Montage,” in Selected Works 2:327–99 (London: BFI, 1991; and Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991); the section devoted to the “yellow rhapsody” appears on 350ff.; originally, “Vertikal’nyi montaž, stat’ja vtoraja,” Iskusstovo kino 12 (1940): 27–35. On color, see also Eisenstein, Cvet in Izbrannye proizvedenija v šesti tomach 3.

75.  Léon Pierre-Quint, “Signification du cinéma, “in L’art cinématographique 2:1–28 (Paris: Alcan, 1926).

76.  Pierre-Quint, “Signification du cinéma, “20. The following quotations come from pages 20, 21 and 26. I would emphasize that, for Pierre-Quint, this situation pushes the cinema towards an expression of extreme and instinctive emotions, and makes the fantastic its chosen land.

77.  Sergei M. Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Selected Works, vol. 1, 1922–34 (London: BFI, 1988; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988); originally, “Montaž kino-attrakcionov” (October 1924).

78.  Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film,” 40–41.

79.  It might be useful to compare Eisenstein’s suggestion with Barthes’ reflection in “The Third Meaning” (Le troisième sens). It seems to me that Barthes’ lesson consists in telling us that emotions, in fact, involve the senses, but it is not for this that they eliminate meaning: if anything, they question it on another level, that of its capacity “to make felt,” beyond its capacity “to make known” and “to make understood.” From this perspective, they bring out its “obtuse” form, which is added to the denotative and the symbolic. In Barthes, this action can seem “punctual” (I am referring to his notion of punctum); otherwise, it is random and disorganized.

80.  “We must fully recall the characteristics of cinema’s effect … that establish the montage approach as the essential, meaningful, and sole possible language of cinema, completely analogous to the role of the word in spoken material” (Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film,” 46). For the notion of editing in Eisenstein (on which there is an exhaustive bibliography), see the entire corpus of writings: “Towards a Theory of Montage,” in Selected Works, vol. 2. An insightful reading of Eisenstein’s concept can be found in Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Albatros, 1979).

81.  The filmic flow’s capacity (and a changing flow, thanks also to editing) to accentuate the shock value of the onscreen images is well understood by Benjamin: “the train of associations in the person contemplating these images is immediately interrupted by new images. This constitutes the shock effect of film, which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art: Third Version,” 267.

82.  See the dense reflection on this topic in Serge Daney, Persévérance, especially in the chapter “The Travelling of Kapò,” 15–39.

83.  “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer). Pornographic films are thus only the potentation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.” Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 1.

6. THE PLACE OF THE OBSERVER

1.   Epstein, Le cinématographe vue de l’Etna (1926), reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:131–52 (quotations from Écrits). For a recent study of the work of Jean Epstein, see Jacques Aumont, ed., Jean Epstein. On this specific text, see Stuart Liebman, “Visiting of Awful Promise: The Cinema Seen from Etna,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2003).

2.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 131; the following quotation is from the same page.

3.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 133.

4.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 134.

5.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 133.

6.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 134; the following quotation is from the same page

7.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 135.

8.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 136; the two following quotations are from the same page.

9.   Epstein, Le cinématographe, 135.

10.  Epstein, Le cinématographe, 136.

11.  Epstein, Le cinématographe, 136.

12.  Epstein, Le cinématographe, 137; the following quotation is from the same page

13.  Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); originally, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer: Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).

14.  In this line of interpretation, see also the introduction by Remo Bodei to Blumenberg’s Italian translation, Naufragio con spettatore: Paradigma di una metafora dell’esistenza (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001).

15.  PauI’s film is also recorded as The Country Man and the Cinematograph (R. W. Paul, Great Britain, 1901).

16.  Though, as Epstein shows, it obviously gives it an interpretation of its own or, if you will, its own symbolic coding. Every description is also an interpretation and a definition: to describe is always to transcribe things as they are seen, just as it is of course to prescribe a certain way of seeing things.

17.  On Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (E. Porter, USA, 1902), see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 321–22, in which the self-publicizing value of film is also emphasized.

18.  Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making. The description is in chapter 2, “The Psychology of the Cinema Audience” (7–25).

19.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 11.

20.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 12. Freeburg insists on the idea that “the eye is especially pleased by certain types of physical movement which the motion picture can transmit, and which cannot be transmitted through any other medium” (11).

21.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 14.

22.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 15.

23.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 15.

24.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 18.

25.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 19.

26.  Freeburg concludes the chapter affirming: “Let us learn how best to please the eye, how to stir the self-emotion of the individual in the crowd, how to arouse and maintain his social sympathies, how to give him intellectual entertainment without mental fatigue; and let us constantly remember that if our photoplay is to become a classic it must possess beneath the attractive surface which appeals to the crowd the permanent values of illuminating truth, universal meaning, and unfading beauty.” Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 25.

27.  For those years, the conventional distance between camera and filmed object was nine to eleven feet. It was obviously possible to capture the object from a smaller distance; in this case, however, we would have “magnified visions” meant to evoke wonder, more than close-ups able to direct the narrative, as will happen in classical cinema. This confirms the fact that the same type of shot can assume meanings that are, in part, different, during the course of film history. On the close-up in early cinema, see Giulia Carluccio, Verso il primo piano: Attrazioni e racconto nel cinema americano, 1908–1909: il caso Griffith-Biograph (Bologna: Clueb, 1999). Among the most recent studies on the close-up, see at least Jacques Aumont, Du visage au cinema (Paris: Éd. de l’Étoile, 1992), which offers a useful summary, and Pascal Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle.

28.  Epstein, “Grossissement” (1921), in Bonjour cinéma, reprinted in Écrits sur le cinéma 1:93–99 (quotations from Écrits).

29.  Epstein, “Grossissement,” 98.

30.  Epstein, “Grossissement,” 97.

31.  Epstein, “Grossissement,” 98.

32.  Epstein, “Grossissement,” 93. On the same topic, and in the same year, Jean Epstein writes an intense paragraph devoted to the “Aestetics of Proximity” in La poésie d’aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence, 171–72 (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921).

33.  An idea so ably demonstrated at the time by Hugo Münsterberg in The Photoplay.

34.  On the permanence of lines of division in a world that seems to eliminate them, see Benjamin’s splendid observations on the nineteenth-century metropolis: “The city is only apparently homogeneous. Even its name takes on different sounds from one district to the next. Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void—as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 87.

35.  On awareness of the spectator, Hugo Münsterberg is explicit. See at least this passage regarding depth of field in an image that is in itself flat: “Nevertheless we are never deceived: we are fully conscious of the depth, and yet we do not take it for real depth.” Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 54.

36.  The camera movement is not altogether continuous, even if it maintains the effect of continuity: before the camera moves, there is a gap between the close-up of the couple and a slightly larger field, which is still on them, but also includes the son and some spectators to the side; moreover, the camera movement is rendered with two shots, joined by a half fade-over. Yet, I repeat, the effect of continuity is preserved. On the film, see Raymond Durgnat, “The Crowd,” Film Comment 9.4 (July-August 1973): 15–17; Heinrich Von Beck, “‘ History’ zu‘ Hysteria’—King Vidor’s The Crowd,” in Amerikastudien/American Studies 37.1 (1992): 85–93; and Giulia Carluccio, “City Films: New York nel cinema americano degli anni Venti: Il caso di The Crowd,” in Giaime Alonge and Federica Mazzocchi, eds., Ombre metropolitane: Città e spettacolo nel Novecento (Turin: Lexis, 2002).

37.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 7.

38.  The close-up seems to cancel all portions of the surrounding world; nonetheless, it succeeds in making us aware of it: “The setting is not seen in close-ups, but its atmosphere reverberates in the magnified image.” Balász, Der Geist des Films (1930), reprinted in Schriften zum Film 2:171–72.

39.  For the transformation of the idea of space in modernity, see at minimum Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. Kern offers many references, both in the fields of scientific and artistic research, which illustrate this passage: he cites Umberto Boccioni and his sculpture Development of a Bottle in Space to demonstrate how objects not only occupy a certain position but also literally absorb the surrounding context; he cites Munch and The Scream to show how space is taken up by the presences of which it is constituted; he names Mallarmé and his Calligrammes to illustrate the equal dignity attained by words and the spaces between words.

40.  On the idea of the world as an inclusive entity and the relevance of this idea to modern literature, see the intense analyses of Franco Moretti in Modern Epic.

41.  On the individual adrift, and in particular the woman adrift, see the informative observations of Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, 20–46.

42.  As Paolo Jedlowski reminds us, “[in the modern age] there is a rise of an ethic orientation that tends to emphasize more than ever first the essential freedom of each individual, his or her uniqueness, and his or her personal responsibility in the definition of one’s own destiny and its realization.” Paolo Jedlowski, Il mondo in questione: Introduzione alla storia del pensiero sociologico (Rome: Carrocci, 1998), 112.

But the singularity of the individual seems threatened by the presence of a second protagonist, precisely the mass, which presents itself as a decisive reality on the levels of production (the mass of workers), economy (mass consumption), politics (mass movements), military (mass troops), and knowledge (mass culture). The problem is then how the two terms relate to each other: is the mass—locus of pervasive anonymity—a negation of the individual, or does it constitute an extension of it? And in parallel, is the individual with his or her singularity integrated warmly into the mass, or can he or she only renounce him or herself to become part of it? For the dialectic between individual and mass, among the vast bibliography between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see at least Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life, “in Simmel on Culture, 174–85.

43.  Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film, 140. Here Spottiswoode speaks of the representation of the crowd in Soviet film.

44.  There is a vaudeville number going on onstage; but nothing prevents us from imagining that, given the structure of the performances of the age, immediately after a screen will appear and a film will be projected.

45.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 7.

46.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 7.

47.  Canudo goes on: “This oblivion will one day be aesthetic; it will be a religious day.” Canudo, “Trionfo del cinematografo” (1908), reprinted in Filmcritica 28.278 (November 1977): 302.

48.  And Romains adds: “The crowd is a being that remembers and imagines, a group that evokes other groups much like itself—audiences, procession, parades, mob in the streets, armies. They imagine that it is they who are experiencing all these adventures, all these catastrophes, all these celebrations. And while their bodies slumber and their muscles relax and slacken in the depths of their seats, they pursue burglars across the rooftops, cheer the passing of a king from the East, or march into a wide plain with bayonets or bugles.” Jules Romains, “The Crowd at the Cinématograph,” reprinted in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism 1:53; originally, “La foule au cinématographe,” in Les Puissances de Paris (Paris: Eugene Figuière, 1911).

49.  Matilde Serao, “Parla una spettatrice,” L’arte muta 1 (June 15, 1916): 31–32.

50.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 8.

51.  Freeburg, Art of Photoplay, 8.

52.  The last subject was recently taken up in cinematic debate: I am thinking in particular of contributions by Miriam Hansen, beginning with Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, in which she explores the idea that one of the great effects of the cinema was that of bringing some of the great private themes to the “public sphere” (which is not to be confused with the “public opinion” discussed by Freeburg, which has similar features). The Crowd, reread with Freeburg, seems a confirmation of the process brought to light by Hansen.

53.  This dual axis of spectatorality, which demonstrates the dual nature of the receiver of film (spectator/audience), has recently and meticulously been explored by Reception Studies. Among the various contributions, I will limit myself to recalling the work of Janet Staiger, beginning with Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), aimed at the study of historical forms of reception and interpretation of film; Douglas Gomery, directed at reviewing the ways in which the cinema was offered, in Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992)]; Annette Kuhn, focused on the exploration of the relationship between memory and consumption, in Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New York: NYU Press, 2002); the volume from Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994), on the act of seeing a film and its implications, etc.

I cannot leave out the vast work in the Italian sector: Gian Piero Brunetta, Buio in sala: Cent’anni di passioni dello spettatore cinematografico (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), and the studies by Mariagrazia Fanchi and Elena Mosconi, Spettatori: Forme di consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia, 1930–1960 (Rome: Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, 2002). This dual dimension of spectatoriality was recently taken up again by Ruggero Eugeni, in his beautiful exploration of the relationship between hypnosis and spectatorship: Eugeni notes how the “magnetic scene” revolves around the coexistence of two types of relations—those between hypnotizer and hypnotized and that between the two and an audience (Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto: Studi su cinema e ipnosi [Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002]).

54.  The way in which we pass, in the filmic experience, from being mainly scopic subjects to social ones and vice versa was finally analyzed by Erich Feldmann in “Considérations sur la situation du Spectateur au Cinéma,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 26 (1956).

55.  In this key, one can read phenomena such as the fan groups tied to cult films, ready to create ceremonies both around the representation of their love object (e.g., the weekly projection of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), as well as—in its absence—its reevocation (film buffs and cinephile chatter). Yet one can also read in this key the latently religious nature of the cinema (a completely secular religiosity) that, maintaining the desire to rejoin the object of the gaze, meanwhile makes scopic subjects members of a sort of “mystical body.”

56.  Robert Desnos, “Charlot,” Journal Littéraire (June 13, 1925), reprinted in Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 145–46.

57.  In point of view, the shot of the seeing subject can obviously also precede that of the object seen: it is important that the shot of the seen object perfectly reproduces the point of view of the seeing subject, and that the shot of the seeing subject clarify that the object is captured from his or her point of view. On point of view, see Edward Branigan’s essential Point of View in the Cinema. For a historical approach to point of view, see Elena Dagrada, La rappresentazione dello sguardo nel cinema delle origini in Europa: nascita della soggettiva (Bologna: CLUEB, 1998).

58.  On the semi-subjective shot, see Jean Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997); originally, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1966), 70ff. See also Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 102; originally, Dentro lo sguardo: il film e il suo spettatore (Milan: Bompiani, 1986).

59.  Casetti, Inside the Gaze, 96–106. For a more extensive analysis of the strategies of the gaze in Antonioni, see Lorenzo Cuccu, Antonioni: il discorso dello sguardo e altri saggi (Pisa: ETS, 1997), and Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or the Surface of the World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985).

60.  On the various scopic positions, see Jacques Fontanille, Point de vue et subjectivité au cinéma (Urbino: Centro Internazionale di semiotica and Università di Urbino, 1987), and Un point de vue sur “croire” et “savoir”: les deux systèmes de l’adéquation cognitive (Besançon: Imprimé par l’Institut National de la Langue Française, 1982); Eric Landowski, Jeux optiques: exploration d’une dimension figurative de la communication (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1981); Vivian C. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). See also Casetti, Inside the Gaze.

61.  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Citadel Press, 1956); originally, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).

62.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 252.

63.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 254.

64.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255.

65.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.

66.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 359. On the subject of self-reflexivity, also in regard to the cinema, see Montani’s recovery of Merleau-Ponty in Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione narrativa, 63–67.

67.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 263. Also, naturally, in the negative, so to speak: “And the one who I am—and who in principles escapes me—I am in the midst of the world in so far as he escapes me.”

68.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 257.

69.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968); originally, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Also: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York: Norton 1988–2007); originally, Le séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964) (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

70.  “Everything changes—and, with it, the revolution that began with Kant—when man is no longer conceived as a being who receives knowledge of a world held up by the laws of optics, but as a being who receives, through the various senses, messages from which he gathers and interprets information in such as way as to construct an image of the world that demands the participation of all his being. The eye, then, is not an optical device that transmits images to the brain that exist as they are on the outside. It is an instrument of codification and decodification that transmits information, which needs to be continually interpreted and whose interpretation will vary according to the received signs and the internal dispositions of the being who receives them.” Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie.

71.  On the ability of the spectator to filter and integrate filmic data, see the classic observations by Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 71: “Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them.”

72.  On the intentional suspension of disbelief and the building of belief from the Freudian denegation, based on a structure such as “Yes, I know it is not true, but still …,” see at least Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’immaginaire, ou L’autre Scène (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969).

73.  The mechanism of projection-identification, as a constituent of the spectator’s participation, is already analyzed by Hugo Münsterberg in The Photoplay. This will be the topic of many filmological studies in the fifties, and finds its most effective analysis in Edgar Morin, Cinema; Or, the Imaginary Man. For a survey of filmological studies, see Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema. 1945–1995 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1999); originally, Teorie del cinema, 1945–1990 (Milan: Bompiani, 1993), 91–93 and 95–102. For the difference between secondary identification in the character of the film and primary identification, in the filmic gaze that catches the character, see Metz, Imaginary Signifier.

74.  Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 345–49; originally, “En sortant du cinema, “Communications 23 (1975): 104–107, then reprinted in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques, vol. 4 (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 407–412.

75.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 346.

76.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 346.

77.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 347.

78.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 348. Barthes continues the sentence: “The Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks; the image alone (the imagerepertoire) is close, only the image is‘ true’ (can produce the resonance of truth).”

79.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 349.

80.  Barthes, “Leaving,” 345. And nevertheless, something still remains. The sentence continues: “he’s sleepy, that’s what he’s thinking, his body has become something sopitive, soft, limp, and he feels a little disjointed, even … irresponsible.”

81.  On this aspect of the apparatus, see Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” Camera Obscura 1 (Fall 1976): 104–128; originally, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72. See also Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974–75): 39–47; originally, “Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970). For a continuation of Baudry, see Metz, Imaginary Signifier.

82.  This idea has recently been put forward especially by Anne Friedberg in Window Shopping.

7. GLOSSES, OXYMORONS, AND DISCIPLINE

1.   On the notion of “theoretical works” that put their device in play, see Omar Calabrese, La macchina della pittura: Pratiche teoriche della rappresentazione figurativa tra Rinascimento e Barocco (Rome: Laterza, 1985). See also the notion of “metapainting” in Victor I. Stoichita, Instauration du tableau: métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993).

2.   On films as nodes of “circuits of social discourse,” see Francesco Casetti, “Cinema, letteratura e circuito dei discorsi sociali,” in Ivelise Perniola, ed., Cinema e letteratura: percorsi di confine (Venice: Marsilio, 2002), 21–31. The concept of “circuits of social discourse” is an attempt to rethink the concepts of “discursive formation” and “episteme” discussed by Michel Foucault in Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972); originally, Archèologie du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), with stronger attention to interdiscursive and intermedial processes.

3.   On theoretical reflection as “gloss” of the cinematographic phenomenon, see Francesco Casetti, “La teoria del cinema nella storia del cinema italiano,” in Un secolo di cinema italiano (Milan: Il Castoro, 2000), 129–49.

4.   I want to insist on the fact that the solutions proposed by the cinema, through its compromises, are neither pacific nor pacified. On the contrary, they inscribe within themselves the sense of tension and conflict from which they are born. Gian Piero Brunetta, in reconstructing the relationship between intellectuals and the cinema, emphasizes the work of confluence that the latter accommodates: “with respect to literature, the cinema redesigns and unifies the collective imagination, giving form to a type of visual story able to nourish in a deeper and more lasting way imagination and memory.” I agree with him less on the fact that this locus of confluence is precisely a place outside of these conflicts: “More than a simple locus of memory, the cinema is a hyperlocus, a locus of loci, a space of spaces. It is a point of connection and congruency among real and imaginary spaces as perfect and self-sufficient world.” The compromise is not always congruency and never self-sufficiency.

5.   On the rearticulation, see this passage by Benjamin: “Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is very easy to establish oppositions, according the determinate points of view, within the various‘ fields’ of any epoch, such that on one side lies the‘ productive,’‘ forwardlooking,’ lively, positive part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of the decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative, component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too—something different from that previously signified, And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 459.

6.   I am obviously referring to Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 and 1989). See also Jacques Aumont, A quoi pensent les films. On the idea that the cinema constitutes the locus of “philosophical reflection,” see Stanley Cavell, “The Thought of Movies,” in Themes Out of School (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 3–26, reprinted in Cavell on Film (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 87–106.

7.   Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture, 183.

8.   Simmel, “The Metropolis,” 184.

9.   Crary, Techniques of the Observer, and Suspension of Perception.

10.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); originally, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

11.  Pudovkin, Kinorežissër i kinomaterial (1926) and Kinoscenari (1926). Pudovkin’s work was immediately translated and had a rapid and influential impact on film theory: Film Technique: Five Essays and Two Addresses (London: George Newnes, 1933), followed by Film Acting: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the State Institute of Cinematography (London: G. Newnes, 1937), then both reprinted in Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V. I. Pudovkin (New York: Lear, 1949) (citations below refer to this edition).

12.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 64 and 40.

13.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 40–41.

14.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 58 and 98.

15.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 64–65.

16.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 66.

17.  Pudovkin, Film Technique, 41 and 47.

18.  See, on this topic, the excellent study by David Bordwell, On History of Film Style.

19.  This request underlies his entire volume: Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay.

20.  Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Selected Works, vol. 1: 1922–34, 39–58.

21.  Georg Simmel, “Money in Modern Culture,” in Simmel on Culture, 243–54; see also Philosophie des Geldes (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot Verlag, 1900).

22.  Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa 41, Milan (May 18, 1907).

23.  Anonymous, “Il pubblico del cinematografo,” La rivista fono-cinematografica (February 11, 1908), reprinted in Tra una film e l’altra: Materiali sul cinema muto italiano, 1907–1920 (Venice: Marsilio, 1980), 43–45.

24.  Anonymous, “Stile cinematografico,” Il Corriere della Sera (March 27, 1912): 3.

REMAINS OF THE DAY

1.   Zigmut Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2005).

2.   Among the contributions on the digital image, see “Film Theory and the Digital Image,” Iris 25 (1998); Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, eds., Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1998); Laurent Jullier, Les images de synthèse (Paris: Nathan, 1998); Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). For an account about cinema as a field of “transition” toward the digital media, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). Another critical (and highly interesting) account is John Belton’s “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 98–114.

3.   Even though digital images may still imply a strong component of indexicality. The surveillance camera is a good example of permanence of an indexical role—even transformed into a “temporal index.” On this topic, see Thomas Levin, “Rethoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of‘ Real Time,’” in Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds., Ctrl (Space): Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002; and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 578–93.

4.   On this subject see Gianni Canova in L’alieno e il pipistrello: La crisi della forma nel cinema contemporaneo (Milano: Bompiani, 2000)

5.   Even though there is also a shared sense that cinema has entered a new epoch. As Serge Daney writes, “The images are no longer on the side of the dialectical truth of‘ seeing’ and‘ showing’; they have completely passed to that of promotion and advertising: in few words, to power. We have thus arrived at the point that we must begin to work on what remains; that is, the posthumous and golden legend of what was the cinema.” Daney, Persévérance, 35.

6.   On this subject, see in particular Paolo Bertetto, ed., Il cinema d’avanguardia (Venice: Marsilio, 1983).

7.   Arnheim, Film, 32.

8.   Arnheim, Film, 33.

9.   Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 220.

10.  Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa 41 (May 18, 1907).