The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany

As cinema’s bandwagon—already heavy with reformers and trade journal reporters—rolled toward World War I, literary intellectuals, pundits, and other belletrists climbed aboard (sometimes climbing down again after their thousand words) just to see what the ride was like. Judging from the sharp spike in the number of film essays written between 1912 and 1914, it was apparently de rigueur to offer a learned editorial on the way modern life and culture found expression through this new phenomenon. Just as a range of opinions comprised the reformist discourse explored in chapter 3, so the tone of this collection of articles, which Anton Kaes felicitously dubbed the Kino-Debatte, extended from peevish outrage and haughty condescension to diplomatic concession or even roguish delight in the new medium.² This expansion of the discourse in Germany corresponded to cinema’s more visible public profile at this time, due to a stronger domestic film industry; the production of longer and more emotionally involving story films; the rise of film stars, such as Asta Nielsen and Henny Porten; the emergence of picture palaces and the successful “embourgeoisement” of the cinematic experience; and, most tellingly, the development of the Autorenfilm, a short-lived strategy that attached literary and theatrical luminaries to industry projects.³ Perhaps because those weighing in—including Ernst Bloch, Max Brod, Alfred Döblin, Georg Lukács, Kurt Pinthus, Walter Serner, and others—were or were to become such prominent names in the German literary tradition, this part of the conversation about film has received the most attention in secondary surveys of the period. We should be quick to note, however, that reformers and trade journal writers did not disappear during this time—on the contrary, they exerted a clear influence on the direction of the discussion, even if negatively—but the sheer number of new voices in the mix has tended to shift our attention from the pedagogical and commercial sections of the debate.

This chapter will be no different in that respect. It will, however, back away from the scholarly emphasis on the relation between literature and film. While depictions of the Kino-Debatte have been as varied as the debate itself, scholars usually focus on the battle between image and word in the contemporary discussion of cinema’s relationship to German culture. It is indeed hard to ignore the incessant complaints about the supposed decline in literacy attributed to the consumption of sensational and superficial images rather than great literature or the many declarations that cinema could never be considered genuine art as long as it lacked words to express the depths of the human soul. Anton Kaes was absolutely correct when he noted that the tension between old and new “found expression in a vigorous discourse about the relationship between literature and cinema,” or, simply, that the debate about cinema was “a debate about the literature of the time.”⁴ While theories of film started to disengage themselves from literary or theatrical models by the 1920s, before World War I, cinema and its champions felt the need to justify themselves in terms of literature. For Sabine Hake, literature was “the primary reference point” for writers coming to terms with modernity through their essays on cinema.⁵ Peter Jelavich emphasized the attempts to conform film to “traditional bourgeois aesthetics, which demanded clarity of authorial voice and rootedness in the written word.”⁶ Helmut Diederichs similarly charted the ways in which this group divided the ground between literature and film.⁷ Stefanie Harris has demonstrated, on the other hand, how cinema’s unique form shaped the literary work of such writers as Kurt Pinthus.⁸ As Heinz-B. Heller usefully pointed out, these were literary intellectuals after all, so it comes as no surprise that their response to film would be from a position firmly grounded in their chosen medium.⁹

Focusing so closely on early cinema’s relationship to literary form and turf, however, unintentionally narrows our understanding of cinematic experience to that particular relationship, leaving relatively unexplored the question of film and aesthetic reception in general. The above quotation from Benjamin—his point that the challenge that photography presented to traditional aesthetics was “child’s play” compared with film—summarizes a fairly common conception: that film was emblematic of a change in aesthetic standards at the fin de siècle as mass reception and distraction replaced individual contemplation as the dominant or most appropriate mode of aesthetic reception. Indeed, in film and media studies this account is more or less taken on faith in Benjamin’s word alone. I have no argument with the general outlines of this story, but even his well-known “Work of Art” essay compresses the events considerably. So we have a dual historiographical problem, as I see it: the emphasis on the literary misses a large swath of the cinematic experience, specifically the relationship between viewer and image, while the leap from contemplation to distraction in film history and theory is too often taken for granted without spelling out the character of “traditional aesthetics” and the transition to whatever replaced it. This chapter argues that a close, renewed examination of the Kino-Debatte is essential to solving both historiographical problems.

Previous chapters were concerned with the criteria for film’s legitimacy within any given discipline and the adaptability of motion picture technology to an expert mode of viewing as a major factor in establishing that legitimacy; this chapter will explore film’s legitimacy within the realm of aesthetics and its degree of adaptability to the expert mode of viewing known as aesthetic contemplation. It presumes that, following a trend in German aesthetics since Kant, the question of aesthetic value hinged on reception more than form. That is, the major statements on aesthetics in the long nineteenth century—especially those of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and others, but excluding those within the Hegelian tradition, which was concerned with how meaning inhered in form rather than how we experienced it—were concerned primarily with the role of aesthetics as a way of being in the world, more than whether any particular form was more artistic than another. They were concerned with the function of art within a moral, ethical, social, and philosophical system. The value and legitimacy of art in this system depended primarily on the singularity of the experience it aroused. The exact nature of that experience has been a topic of constant exploration since these statements, but the significance of that experience for the system in general—whether philosophical, moral, or political—cannot be underestimated. Form prompts experience, to be sure, but these and other statements emphasized the universal character of the aesthetic experience rather than the variety of experiences created by various forms. More often than not, evaluations of any given form, such as music, rested on the ability of that form to catapult the reader/listener/viewer into a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Better experience usually equaled more hallowed form.

If we gather common ideas about the nature of aesthetic experience in the major statements of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and others within the tradition of nineteenth-century German aesthetics, it appears that aesthetic contemplation entailed (1) detachment or disinterest, meaning that aesthetic judgment is without desire, passion, or self-interest; (2) repose, in that the object is lingered over without haste, giving enough time for the free play of the imagination;¹⁰ (3) activity, meaning that the mind is alive with associations and correlations; and (4) loss of self, in that the contemplation of the object can lead to either a transcendental immersion into the object (Schopenhauer) or a moment of awareness of one’s participation in a larger community (Kant). Under this category we can also subsume discussions about the role of the body in aesthetic experience; for some, aesthetic contemplation was a purely mental operation; others looked to the body as a model for understanding aesthetic pleasure, while avoiding the purely sensual. Some terms are mutually reinforcing (disinterest and participation in a community, for example), while others are contradictory (detachment and immersion seem to be opposite ideas).

But we can arrange these terms—detachment, repose, activity, and loss of self—into spheres or larger categories that also contain their opposites. These categories are: space (distance/proximity or detachment/immersion), identity (loss of self/self-awareness), time (repose/haste), and agency (activity/passivity or free will/determination) (see fig. 4.1). This arrangement shows especially clearly the ideological implications of these terms and of the descriptions of aesthetic experience they evoked. That is, to give aesthetic experience its moral or philosophical weight within a larger system—the pivotal role of Kant’s Critique of Judgment with regard to his other Critiques comes to mind—the terms writers and philosophers used to describe aesthetic experience were rhetorically linked to fundamental ideological values (or ideologically inflected categories of experience) such as agency and identity. Understanding the rhetorical role these terms played allows us to glimpse the stakes of any historical debate regarding aesthetic experience. Pairing the terms with their opposites also underlines their mutual dependence in those historical debates.

This scheme also allows us to escape the analytic philosophers’ futile attempts to logically reconcile descriptions, an evasion much more in keeping with the sharpest understandings of aesthetic experience as indeterminate. Schiller argued, for example, that the aesthetic state is a mediating moment “midway between matter and form, passivity and activity,” wherein indeterminacy is the preferred state of being.¹¹ Accepting the indeterminacy of the aesthetic state should turn us away from pat definitions and toward an understanding of aesthetic contemplation as dichotomous, fluid, oscillating, or unfixed. (Again, I want to stress that questions about what the aesthetic state actually is and even whether it exists are irrelevant when considering historical descriptions of it.) For example, descriptions of contemplation almost always preferred repose over haste—thereby presuming that both the object and the subject were more or less in a state of stillness—but the quick, gestalt-like expert glance over the artwork as a whole was not ruled out as part of the process.¹² However, detachment was almost a universal feature of these descriptions, so its opposites, self-interest or passion, were hardly ever included as viable elements of the experience.¹³ On the other hand, descriptions of the aesthetic experience often oscillated between sides of a dichotomy: claims that emotional detachment or psychic distance were crucial to aesthetic experience (Kant, Schiller) must be balanced or reconciled with descriptions that emphasized emotional projection or immersion into the artwork (Schopenhauer, Adolf Hildebrand). Likewise, the relationship between active and passive stances in aesthetic experience is often unclear from the descriptions; mastery alternates with surrender (as in many descriptions of the experience of the sublime), while focused attention alternates with the free play of associations or loss of self in the experience. This approach, then, matches a theoretical understanding of aesthetic experience as indeterminate to a historiographical scheme that does not try to resolve contradictions but allows them to stand to highlight their ideological function.

Obviously these categories overlap; questions of agency and identity are indeed hard to separate. But that is precisely the point: the overlapping conceptual categories strengthen the ideological weight of any given description. So this scheme might be useful for an investigation of any historical description of aesthetic experience; it is definitely useful to understanding the early debates about motion pictures. To summarize, viewing the historical claims for aesthetic experience in terms of a series of dichotomies, rather than as a series of firm characteristics, has three advantages. First, we avoid the futile philosophical debate about what the aesthetic experience actually is and replace it with the recognition that historical descriptions of aesthetic contemplation—what writers and aestheticians thought it was—have been varied and contradictory, but not infinitely so. Second, by subsuming the dichotomies under the general categories of identity and agency, we emphasize that most philosophers (in the neo-Kantian tradition) recognized aesthetics as a moral category that mediated between opposite poles of their choice. For example, the Kantian/Schillerian tradition of putting Art between Reason and Sensuality extends in spirit to at least Theodor Adorno, if not also Jacques Rancière and other contemporary philosophers who hope to find for Art a place apart and some emancipatory potential. Seeing the aesthetic experience as a series of unstable dichotomies recognizes not only Art’s socially mediating function but also that historical descriptions of aesthetic experience emphasized its productive indeterminacy.

Finally, with regard to this specific project, these dichotomies allow us to see more clearly how the discussion of motion pictures was ultimately an aesthetic debate, in the sense that these essays on cinema may be about the status of literature, the content of the films, or whatever, but the core issue was the larger ideological problem of the moral significance of the aesthetic experience. These writers obviously cared about the decline in reading skills, about the loss of ability to concentrate, the superficiality of the mass audience, the novelty of the moving image, and many other things that may or may not have indicated the decline of civilization. But, at bottom, all these complaints can be traced to the character of the aesthetic experience, which apparently mattered most to these writers. “Film presentations are generally rejected from an artistic perspective,” wrote Emilie Altenloh about the taste of the upper classes.¹⁴ While Altenloh undoubtedly refers to judgments of artistic form (“von künsterlischen Gesichtspunkten”), this chapter agues that complaints or judgments of form were ultimately in the service of a better aesthetic experience. Modernity was therefore an affront to their aesthetic sensibilities and values, which were rooted in a philosophical tradition that privileged a particular, expert mode of viewing a stationary image or object. The extent to which cinema challenged or could be accommodated to these values is the question of this chapter.

To burrow further, we could argue that these dichotomies grew out a more fundamental, historical division between active and passive viewers. As we have seen, film spectators were often characterized as hypnotized by the cinematic image, even addicted to it, and captivated by the ease with which it entered the stream of consciousness, while cinema’s fragmented temporality, quick pace, and motley form matched the habits and psyche of the modern city dweller, who was at once impatient and distracted, unable to concentrate on a single, main idea. Hence movies were perceived as effortless, whereas real art required work; movies were a jumble, whereas real art had a distinct form; movie spectators needed their next film like a drug, while real art encouraged a detached observer; movies moved by far too quickly, disallowing the continuous, leisurely attention required of real art. If these sets seem familiar, it is partly because they have been repeated over the centuries whenever audiences are described; theater audiences were probably the first victims of such characterizations.¹⁵ Rancière’s explanation of the paradox of spectatorship sheds some light on this issue:

The idea of aesthetic contemplation from Kant and Schiller to early twentieth-century professional aestheticians looks like a deliberate attempt to counter the problem of passivity in spectatorship by endowing the viewer with both a protocol and a philosophical justification that connect aesthetic enjoyment to reasoning and knowledge production (“the capacity to know”), on one hand, and political maturity or citizenship (“the power to act”) on the other. Endowing aesthetic contemplation with agency and linking it to individual or civic identity gave this mode of viewing the moral weight it needed to counter a mode of viewing perceived to be common to the passive, irresponsible crowd. The contemporary discussion of the cinematic experience could not avoid confronting this weighty connection between agency and contemplation—often to film’s disadvantage.

Precisely because contemplation had long been endowed with high moral import—with values such as reason and citizenship—any changes to the conditions of contemplation put these values at risk, especially as mass reception became more common with new urban demographics and forms. If cinema were not at the heart of these transformations, for many essayists it was a worst-case scenario. At the same time, however, the discussion about cinema was not merely a reactionary defense of Enlightenment-era ideals; it was a collective attempt to find some common ground, to ask (often implicitly) whether contemplation was the proper way to engage with these new forms, and if not, what was? In fact, Benjamin’s own position on the relative value of contemplation and distraction was not limited to his words in the “Work of Art” essay. As Carolin Duttlinger has shown, Benjamin’s conception of attention (Aufmerksamkeit) played a central and complex role from his earliest essays, and if he advocated distraction (Zerstreuung) as the perceptual stance most appropriate toward modernity in the “Work of Art” essay, that was only one part of a long conversation he had with himself about the relationship between a mode of viewing and one’s position toward and within modern life.¹⁷ Ultimately, this conversation was about the relationship between “a way of being with images,” in Dudley Andrew’s ingenious phrase,¹⁸ and a way of being in the world. For Benjamin as well as the writers of the Kino-Debatte decades earlier, the two stances were one and the same.

So this chapter will explore the status of aesthetic reception in the context of discussions about cinematic spectatorship. The first section will trace the broad themes in the Kino-Debatte about movies, modernity, and spectatorship in relation to the rhetorical or ideological categories of time and agency. Through an examination of Schiller and Schopenhauer, it will stress the philosophical and subsequently ideological connection between temporality, indeterminacy, and aesthetic experience, and how this constellation persisted in the descriptions of early cinema. The second section will inspect discussions of aesthetic experience in professional aesthetics of the time, especially around the concept of Einfühlung, or “feeling into” the artwork. These discussions about the relationship of emotions and the body to aesthetic experience were attempting to come to grips with, on one hand, unresolved ideas about reception in nineteenth-century aesthetics, and on the other, modern aesthetic reception characterized by turn of the century democratic access to art. This section will demonstrate that discussions of the cinematic experience also pressed on some of the same troubling issues—such as emotional projection, immersion and detachment, and visual pleasure—regarding the nature of aesthetic contemplation in the modern world that professional aestheticians discussed. This section explores the categories of space and identity. The third section focuses on Georg Lukács’s famous early essay on film, “Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (1913), to demonstrate the nascent political critique of contemplation that was to be such a central feature of his and other theorists’ stance after World War I. This final section will also return to Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and the discussion of contemplation and distraction to realign our history of these theories in light of the Kino-Debatte’s discursive construction of spectatorship.

Superficiality abounds, according to Kleibömer, because we do not have enough time to absorb the emotional significance of events before we are compelled to move to the next one. “The moral education of a child,” he instructed, “should include a few events that give him an understanding of certain emotional values,” but “above all, such emotions must not confront other feelings in close temporal proximity.” And in the cinema? “In rapid succession jest and seriousness alternate on the screen, since variety must reign…. So first horror, fear in the highest degree, then compassion increased to the utmost.” He therefore criticized “the danger that this rapid traversal of the entire scale of feelings poses for the truth and depth of children’s emotions.” Kleibömer saw filmic form as a synecdoche for the rapidity with which modern information was conveyed; he assumed that because of that rapidity, children could not absorb the significance of events, and this was the root cause of their perceived superficiality (as opposed to, perhaps, the possibility that they were six-year-olds not named Goethe).

Kleibömer was not alone in his opinion; writers of all sorts, not just cranky reformers, connected movies and modernity in this way. Austrian author Karl Hans Strobl similarly argued, “The cinema is one of the most perfect expressions of our time. Its hasty, erratic tempo corresponds to the nervousness of our lives; the anxious flickering, the whisking away of its scenes is the extreme opposite of a measured, regular stride, of confident persistence.”²¹ In the pages of Der Kinematograph a commentator noted matter of factly, “And so the cabaret, with its indiscriminate, democratic disposition, appeals best to the nervous haste and variety of our time, which of course is not say that the theater is doomed. But now the cinema, the projection house, successfully competes with the cabaret for the affection of the people just as the latter surpassed the legitimate stage.”²² Right-wing editor of Der Kunstwart and proto-Nazi Wilhelm Stapel was even more explicit:

Because of the rush of images, you get used to absorbing only an approximation of the impression; you do not get a clear and conscious understanding of the image in its details. Therefore only the coarse, surprising, sensational impressions stick. The sense for the intimate, the precise, the delicate is lost. The patrons of the cinema “think” only in garish, vague ideas. Any image that lights up their mind’s eye takes up all of their attention; they no longer mull and reconsider it, they no longer indulge in the particularities and the reasons.²³

Devotees of the connection between early cinema and modernity will find this theme familiar. Noteworthy, however, is not simply this well-known correspondence but the strong implication that cinema’s tempo interfered with the usual aesthetic experience of viewing images. Stapel was very clear in this regard: the spectator does not “get a clear and conscious understanding of the image in its details…. they no longer mull and reconsider it.” If one is to understand the image, one must attend to the details slowly. Now this could just be a commonsensical caution that one cannot simultaneously do anything hastily and well, but it was not usually put in those terms. Instead, the complaint was specifically about the superficiality that results from processing (or being forced to process) visual imagery too rapidly. What was the connection between viewing tempo and shallowness?

To appreciate the moral implications of this equation, we must return to Schiller and Schopenhauer, who based their philosophies on a common understanding of time. The importance of temporality for Schiller’s aesthetics is not only rarely discussed, it is key to understanding later ideological objections to film. So the following will explicate their aesthetic schemes while emphasizing temporality and indeterminacy, which will clarify certain aspects of the debates about cinema. Even if these early nineteenth-century philosophers were in many ways considered obsolete by the early twentieth century, their ideas about the moral and cultural importance of aesthetic experience—and the relationship between that significance and the passing of time—were widely and implicitly assumed. Schiller, especially, presumed that everyday, sensuous existence is necessarily tied to the inexorable succession of moments, while abstract thought and reason—or the Platonic idea—exist outside this temporal course in a timeless, static, changeless existence. Schiller called our animal nature the “sense drive” and the spiritual or intellectual side of our existence the “form drive.” He described the sense drive:

Here and elsewhere, Schiller defined his understanding of the different facets of human existence in terms of their relationship to time. In the sense drive, one is nothing but “an occupied moment of time”; by being occupied by (in terms of both concerned with and controlled by) sensuous existence—ruled only by needs and desires of the moment—one is “swept along by the flux of time.” This conception of temporality, for Schiller and others, implied a limit on human potential: “Wherever, therefore, this drive functions exclusively, we inevitably find the highest degree of limitation.” The form drive, however, “embraces the whole sequence of time, which is as much as to say: it annuls time and annuls change. It wants the real to be necessary and eternal, and the eternal to be necessary and real” (81). Ideas aspire to timelessness, being outside of the succession of events and therefore outside of perception. Reason is timeless, in Schiller’s scheme, but also ethereal. So Schiller invented another motive force to harmonize, balance, or counter the other two:

For as long as he only feels, his Person, or his absolute existence, remains a mystery to him; and as long as he only thinks, his existence in time, or his Condition, does likewise. Should there, however, be cases in which he were to have this twofold experience simultaneously, in which he were to be at once conscious of his freedom and sensible of his existence, were, at one and the same time, to feel himself matter and to know himself as mind, then he would in such cases, and in such cases only, have a complete intuition of his human nature. (95, emphasis in original)

Especially interesting and rarely noted, however, is the emphasis Schiller placed on the temporal dimension of this experience. The sense drive is “swept along by the flux of time,” the formal drive “annuls time,” but the play drive is repeatedly described as an experience of simultaneity: “a middle disposition in which sense and reason are both active at the same time.” The importance of simultaneity in his scheme marks Schiller’s move as a very modern gesture; both simultaneous and indeterminate (“this condition of real and active determinability [Bestimmbarkeit]”), his category feels very modern indeed. It is not too great a leap to argue that simultaneity creates this indeterminacy; we are both in and outside of time, which puts us in a position of being in neither one drive nor the other, but both states at the same time. This clarifies his formulation of the play drive: “the play-drive, therefore, would be directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling with absolute being and change with identity” (97, emphasis in original). The annulment of time experienced in the formal drive is reconciled with the experience of time within the sense drive, thereby resulting in the “annulling time within time.” Whatever one makes of the validity of his interpretation, there can be no doubt that Schiller’s conception of the aesthetic experience was ultimately temporal.

Schopenhauer also took pains to underline the temporality of the experience, even if it was different from Schiller’s: “It is the state where, simultaneously and inseparably, the perceived individual thing is raised to the idea of its species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowing, and now the two, as such, no longer stand in the stream of time and of all other relations.”²⁵ Both subject and object are raised to a transcendent state in Schopenhauer’s conception of contemplation, during which the object becomes an idea and the subject loses itself and its desire in the process, thereby also finding temporary relief from the misery of longing and striving. The emancipatory potential of aesthetic experience derives from its ability to provide a momentary escape from time; this is different from Schiller’s more moral and community-oriented aesthetics, but it affirms rather than cancels Schiller’s conception of the aesthetic as a primarily temporal experience. For both philosophers, and in the most common conceptions of aesthetic experience in the long nineteenth century, human limitation was tied to “the flux of time,” and its emancipatory potential was linked to the escape from that flux or being able to maintain a balance between competing temporalities.

This review of Schiller’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophies is necessary, because it reminds us of the ethical or moral mission they assigned to aesthetic experience, thereby giving it an ideological weight that it carried through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also establishes the importance of time within traditional aesthetics, especially the notion of repose in the aesthetic stance. Finally, it emphasizes that Schiller and others calibrated their conception of contemplation to highlight its indeterminacy, or more precisely, the importance of the indeterminate quality of the aesthetic experience as an emblem of human liberty. All of these features of aesthetic experience—especially the focus on experience, rather than artistic form—spread and took root in everyday understandings of aesthetic issues that we see in the Kino-Debatte and other, early discussions about viewing motion pictures. Again, the goal is to demonstrate that these debates were largely discussions about aesthetic (as opposed to narrowly literary) experience, especially this model of contemplation, to which modern spectatorship was detrimentally compared. Indeed, the unfavorable comparisons functioned primarily as a defense of contemplation’s ideological value. We could dismiss the comparisons out of hand as ideologically compromised, but we would lose the deeply ambivalent and complex character of aesthetic reception. Contemplation was not yet dead; whether the values associated with it actually ever died is still open to question.

Those values were primarily ethical in imperial Germany. Modernity, it appears, was too pushy; it shoved its spectators along, giving them no pause for reflection, which was an offense to values of repose. So when writers such as Gaupp, Sellmann, Stapel, Strobl, or others noted the potential effect of the fast pace of movies and modernity, they were not simply complaining about the vapid superficiality of “kids these days”; they were defending a very long tradition that insisted on leisurely approaches to the image. To allow oneself to succumb to the “flux of time” while attending to an image—or to let the image impose such limitations—was an abdication of the duty to self-cultivation, of the obligation to become fully human. Contemplation was depicted as a moment of escape, but also a moment of self-awareness; the aesthetic experience had a special place in state and cultural self-conceptions in Germany, which the righteous defended vigorously.²⁶ But because of its pivotal role between emancipation, civic duty, and self-awareness, contemplation represented a complex, ambivalent stance toward the world that was not so easily dismissed, as Benjamin recognized (and which I will discuss at greater length later in the chapter).

Another good example within the discussion concerns the fragmentary, disjointed quality authors attributed to modern life and to cinema. If movies and modernity were too pushy and quick, they were also disjunctive: the cinema “is short, rapid, even encrypted, and it stops for nothing. There is something compact, precise, even military about it. This fits very well with our age, an age of extracts.”²⁷ These comments on form were often framed as an analogy between movies, modernity, and the mind of its spectators; modern life was disordered, as were movies and the thought processes of its audience. This homology—a discursive construction of film’s spectator—was usually an implicit defense of aesthetic ideals of detachment and effort. Theater critic Hermann Kienzl’s brief commentary is exemplary:

The psychology behind the triumph of cinema is urban psychology. Not only because the metropolis is the natural focal point from which all social life radiates, but especially because the metropolitan soul—this inquisitive and inscrutable soul perpetually on the run, stumbling from one fleeting impression to the next—is really the soul of the cinema! Indeed, some city dwellers even lack the stamina and concentration for mental and emotional absorption—and probably also the time, especially in Berlin, a metropolis agitated by work-fever. The same trivial drive for relaxation that leads city dwellers to the operetta or farce after work to replenish their exhausted energies leads them likewise to seek the effortless pleasures offered by movie theaters.²⁸

There is also the implication, well before Hugo Münsterberg, that movies were popular and effective because they somehow mimicked the structure of the modern mind, or at least the mind of its audience. For many commentators, the link between movies, modernity, and mind made film “the most psychological representation in our time.”²⁹ The “effortless pleasures” of the cinema replenished the modern soul in a way—a trivial way, they would say—that other entertainments could not. Most writers disparaged movies and the mind of the masses in a dual dismissal, but others saw it differently:

Only film technology permits the rapid sequence of images that roughly corresponds to our own imaginative faculty and in some measure imitates its jerky unpredictability [Sprunghaftigkeit]. Part of the fatigue to which we finally fall prey while watching theatrical works of art results not from the noble effort of aesthetic enjoyment, but rather from the exertion in adapting to the plodding, affected movement of life on stage. Spared this effort in the cinema, one is free to devote a considerably more uninhibited commitment to the illusion.³⁰

But Kienzl and Andreas-Salomé shared one assumption: true art required effort and movies were effortless. The “noble effort of aesthetic enjoyment” was a persistent trope in these and other discussions about the difference between high and low cultural forms, in which high art was usually differentiated by its complexity or difficulty and low art by its simplicity. For Andreas-Salomé, cinema’s effortlessness was a result of its structural similarity with the mind, especially with regard to its motion and pace. It had also something to do with the age-old comparison of images and ideas, a comparison common to the Kino-Debatte, too, as when Hermann Duenschmann, apparently a big fan of Gustave Le Bon, compared the film audience with a crowd: “The crowd thinks only in images and can only be influenced through images that act suggestively on their imagination.”³¹ This implied that the learned think in words, but the visual status of ideas has always been ambiguous. At least since Descartes, many philosophers have defined “ideas” as images, not words. Descartes consistently made the analogy that ideas are “like portraits drawn from Nature.”³² Or Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote that ideas are “Pictures drawn in our Minds,”³³ or that the “Idea is just like that Picture, which the Painter makes of the visible Appearances joyned together.”³⁴ Now an important caveat here is that Descartes and Locke were thinking not of concepts, but of sensory ideas—the images that our brain creates from the sensory information gathered by normal perception.³⁵ But the leap to concepts is not too hard to make and has been made since Plato, perhaps. The point is that one support for this notion that films were “effortless” was the isomorphism between images and the way the mind is thought to work. (This was also a support for the assumption within discussion about educational media that visual instruction is more efficient than instruction with other kinds of materials.)

Yet images per se cannot be easier to comprehend; otherwise the aesthetic contemplation of paintings would have no pedestal upon which to place itself. So there must have been something other than the similarity between images and mind that supported the claim that movies were effortless. Ulrich Rauscher gives a clue: “I fear the cinema has one disadvantage for the audience: because it tells its story so comfortably, because it takes over the operations of sense-making itself, the cinema, which could foster the creativity of our literati, will bring about a general laziness of the public’s imagination.”³⁶ Film is effortless, because it “takes over the operations of sense-making itself” (weil er die Versinnlichung der Vorgänge selber übernimmt) for the audience, leaving nothing for the imagination to work on. The “noble effort” of aesthetic enjoyment was perceived as the free play of associations that accompanied a productively ambiguous artwork; the imagination filled in interpretive gaps with its own associations, thereby bringing subject and object together as the hermeneutic circle between part, whole, and subject tightened. Just as photography was not considered legitimate aesthetic material because of its mechanical nature and its excessive detail—which left nothing to the imagination, presumably—so, too, motion pictures were dismissed because their detail and their narrative patterns left the viewer nothing to do but watch. There was more to it than that, however, because these same movies were disdained for their chaotic, confusing stories, which doubtless would leave much to the imagination. The problem, then, was that the succession of images was not merely obvious, but preordained. Whether the images were confusing or crystal clear, they were always someone else’s images, and if we combine this concept with the “images = ideas” formula, we have a series of views imposed upon the viewer in a preordained temporal sequence, which does not happen with paintings or literary images. Hence the loss of free play, or more importantly, free will. The cinematic experience, in this view, was not indeterminate, but rather determined. (Benjamin quotes Georges Duhamel: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”³⁷) By showing us where to look, editing and cinematic narrative forced these writers to look there; this was for many patrons a step too far.

Those patrons would presumably never allow themselves to enjoy cinema’s flow of images. But the inadequacy of this rigid decree—that the flux of time jeopardizes agency and thereby imposes limits on human potential—for modern life becomes apparent in the Kino-Debatte (and elsewhere) as well, especially in discussions that emphasized alertness and somnambulism. Essays often invoked these tropes when describing the tolls of modern life. Recalling Georg Simmel’s vivid portrait of “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1905) or Freud’s idea of the “stimulus shield” (1920), these essays also assumed that life in the big city dulled the senses and made one blasé, requiring ever greater thrills to be satisfied.³⁸ For many writers, cinema was just the ticket: “But every day and every hour cinema restores to our pampered senses, which in the heyday of technology have forgotten how to be astonished, the feeling of Pygmalion’s enchantment with Galatea.”³⁹ Anticipating film theory of the 1920s, this author and others claimed that cinema renewed vision by offering a point of view we otherwise could not have. For writers such as Rauscher, cinema’s preordained succession of images was oppressive and imprisoning, whereas for this writer, it was liberating to see with another’s eyes. Max Brod, too, was rejuvenated by a visit to the cinema:

Or this early editorial: “I believe that through the cinema we have only now learned to see. We have been awakened to the pleasure of watching [Schauen]…. Reality appears much more clearly before us, and the interest is twice as great. We can almost let our mind fall asleep and reap with our eyes what the soul desires.”⁴¹ If these writers were drifting through their modern lives, semi-awake to its challenges and blasé to its pleasures, cinema roused them from this aesthetic slumber to give them a new outlook. Here, then, a trip to the cinema did exactly what any aesthetic experience should do: renew our perception. This idea, however, was relatively new in aesthetics and already expressed the waning dominance of the Schillerian model.

Indeed, that aesthetic contemplation was undergoing a transformation is evident in essays that evoked alertness and somnambulism in terms of modern life. Strobl both admired and was uneasy with social acceleration and its effect on our perception:

Aesthetic experience, as discussed by Kant, Schiller, and Schopenhauer in the early nineteenth century, was a complex and contradictory structure that was nonetheless required to bear a particularly heavy ethical load. If it collapses logically with the barest nudge, it was still home to a family of values related to agency and identity. As we have seen, early discussions about film were often couched in terms of agency, especially with regard to the spectator’s relation to the passing of time. Complaints about cinema’s incessant temporal push and its preordained succession of imagery continued at least one line of thinking about aesthetic experience, which insisted that the viewer’s stance before the image was also a stance before the world, one that recognized our limits but also strove to glimpse human potential in an ephemeral moment of transcendence. Aesthetic contemplation was understood as an exercise of free will, so to surrender oneself completely to the image or to the flow of time was an abdication of duty; indeterminacy meant liberty, but the rush of preordained images meant constraint. The temporal complexity of Schiller’s and Schopenhauer’s visions of aesthetic experience was therefore at odds with conceptions of cinematic temporality as constraining or controlling. But with statements attesting to the importance of alertness in modern life or positing that seeing the world from another viewpoint could reawaken the senses, the discussion began to question the utility of a leisurely aesthetic stance in favor of an approach to images—and the world—that was not merely cognitively active and unhurried, but reactive and quick. So in the Kino-Debatte we can begin to see the “difficulties” new forms might have posed for what Benjamin called “traditional aesthetics.”

But an understanding of aesthetic contemplation as inherently tied to leisure and free will—or, basically, the cultured gentleman’s prerogative—is only partially correct. We must also consider the relationship between aesthetic experience and identity or subjectivity. One might think that the gentleman’s prerogative also presumed a stable, unified self, which would be confirmed in aesthetic experience.⁴³ Kant’s theory of the beautiful, for example, held that pleasure arose from the harmony between the artwork and our cognitive faculties, which assumed a resonance between them that was stable and stabilizing. His theory of the sublime, however, maintained that its pleasure derived from the oscillation between the physical threat of nature’s awesome power or infinitude and our cognitive framing of that boundlessness. Faced with this power, the threat of physical annihilation presented a literal loss of self, while the mastery implied by cognitively framing such power was self-affirming. So the existence of that particular kind of aesthetic experience, especially given the importance of the sublime in aesthetic theory, meant that aesthetic experience per se was never inherently stabilizing.

This split between body and mind, or between loss of self (whether through physical danger or an experience of transcendence) and self-awareness (whether cognitive or corporeal), was exacerbated by the structure of Schopenhauer’s system. On one hand, Schopenhauer insisted that a loss of self was absolutely necessary to any experience calling itself aesthetic, if it were to have any mollifying effect at all. As Schopenhauer described it, the viewer attends to the object and gradually loses self-awareness as the associations and Ideal become prominent. Likewise, his description of aesthetic contemplation emphasized the purely visual and cognitive—as opposed to corporeal—experience of viewing. For him, the aesthetic gaze divorced itself from the world, from the flux of time, and even from the artwork itself, the specifics of which did not figure largely in his understanding of aesthetic experience. Indeed, Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel all ignored the specific features of any given artwork in favor of using the object as a prompt for abstract thought and for mounting ever more complex philosophical systems. Johann Friedrich Herbart continued this approach in his formalist aesthetics, which “proposed a simplified theory of form, one that defined aesthetics essentially as the science of elementary relations to lines, tones, planes, colors, ideas, and so on,” without reference to the specter of “content” or “meaning.” Similarly, “the perfect aesthetic frame of mind for Herbart was a state of absolute indifference, that ‘quiet seriousness’ that lies ‘between depression and excitation.’”⁴⁴ In this tradition, their understanding of the gaze matched their understanding of the object: neither emphasized detail or materiality; both could be characterized as disembodied or ephemeral.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer also simultaneously pursued another approach, which he did not see as contradictory, but complementary. Part of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation speculated on the physiology of the perceptual act, an approach that aesthetically minded scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner, and Wilhelm Wundt pursued further in their experiments on the nature of (aesthetic) perception.⁴⁵ Their findings, however, indicated that the human body was a transient, variable, and unstable field upon which any subjectivity rested at its own risk. That is, if a stable and unified subjectivity previously depended on a happy conception of the body as similarly stable and unified, experimental physiology and psychology of the mid-nineteenth century invalidated that guarantee. As Jonathan Crary has argued, the fleeting nature of the human body left barely any solid ground for subjectivity.⁴⁶

Many aestheticians during the late nineteenth century looked for an approach to questions about aesthetic perception that would navigate between the Scylla of abstract, disembodied philosophizing about art and the Charybdis of fragmenting, “scientistic” approaches to the aesthetic experience. They were less interested in philosophical or physiological questions about how we perceive form and space than in the psychological problem of how we take delight in the specific characteristics of form and space.⁴⁷ Robert Vischer’s seminal 1873 dissertation, On the Optical Sense of Form, coined the term Einfühlung, or “feeling into,” as an answer to this question.⁴⁸ Vischer meant it to explain “the symbolism of form,” or how spatial form has meaning for us: the subject “unconsciously projects its own bodily form—and with this also the soul—into the form of the object” (92). But Einfühlung eventually came to mean emotional projection in general, and then, with Edward B. Titchener’s translation of the term as “empathy,” it transformed into a broad psychological concept.⁴⁹ In aesthetics, however, Einfühlung was discussed in terms of several problems, including a renewed interest in analyzing the specific formal and material features of artworks and the experience they prompted⁵⁰; describing the emotional content of the aesthetic experience in terms of projection of self in relation to distinct forms; and understanding the role of the body as a measure of both art and aesthetic experience, especially in terms of aesthetic pleasure.⁵¹ That is, writers taking up the idea of Einfühlung explained aesthetic pleasure as a resonance between the structure of the body and the structure of the artwork, thereby explicitly acknowledging the embodied nature of perception.⁵²

This brief history is necessary, because it clarifies “traditional aesthetics” and its “challenges,” which were twofold: (1) new artistic forms, such as photography, fit uncomfortably in the canon of fine or even applied art; and (2) new aesthetic experiences, especially mass reception. The question of form is outside this chapter’s purview, but we can address the nature of mass reception, which differs from individual contemplation in at least two pertinent ways: (1) the emotions of the audience amplify those of the individual, thereby making emotional projection into the work much more prominent; and (2) because of this amplification, and the awareness of being in an audience, the sense of embodiment is more pronounced as well. We could therefore view the discussion of Einfühlung in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an exploration of conflicting dichotomies nascent in “traditional aesthetics” (such as the relations between mind and body, or between free will and destabilizing aesthetic experience), while also attempting to reconcile the contradictions inherent in these grand aesthetic systems with changes in class demographics as more and more people gained access to and were interested in art.⁵³ Specifically, I would argue that Einfühlung aesthetics could be seen as an attempt to reconcile issues especially pertinent to mass reception (embodiment, emotional projection) with individual contemplation and its ideological implications. While mass reception was not explicitly acknowledged in discussions of Einfühlung, the theories pave the way for a deeper understanding of the role of emotion and corporeality in aesthetic experience. Indeed, many contemporary theorists have looked back to Einfühlung aesthetics as a possible framework for new theories of embodied spectatorship.⁵⁴

The dichotomies circling around the category of identity were less fraught ideologically than those concerning agency. Whereas no one argued seriously for “determination” against “free will” (although “surrender” might have been an option), philosophers were able to describe aesthetic experience in terms of “loss of self” just as persuasively as “self-awareness.” The issue of embodied perception, however, brushed against the almost universal requirement of disinterest, in that any hint of sensuality immediately lowered the status of aesthetic experience to mere pleasure. Like paper and scissors, physicality always lost against reason in this ideological game. But because the ideological stakes were generally not as high in this category, this section will not focus on those stakes; instead it will emphasize descriptions of aesthetic experience. Specifically, in an attempt to understand precisely the nature of film’s “challenge” to “traditional aesthetics,” this section will draw upon theories of Einfühlung, which were particularly adept at describing emotional projection and embodied perception in aesthetic experience, two issues also present in the debates about cinema. In fact, if the legitimacy of cinema as an aesthetic form in part hinged on the answers to these questions, it was also true that these two issues—which I want to stress were present in “traditional aesthetics” from the beginning, if we look closely—mounted the strongest theoretical and practical challenge to individual contemplation as it was generally understood. Emotional projection and embodied perception threatened to change the questions about aesthetic legitimacy itself. If Einfühlung aesthetics tried to reconcile individual contemplation with features of aesthetic experience that were also prominent in mass reception, then the presence of a form such as cinema pressed harder on those questions.

This is not to say, however, that early discussions of cinema participated directly in debates within professional aesthetics or that professional aestheticians participated in the Kino-Debatte; to my knowledge no writings on film during this period in Germany ever mentioned the term Einfühlung.⁵⁵ But the early discussions of film brought up the same issues. To be sure, salons crowded with paintings and people had already prompted much complaint as mass reception elbowed its way into the art world and demanded a seat at the table. But cinema was not merely one of many emblems of modernity; the nature of the experience itself—the feeling of movement, synesthesia, emotional projection, and spatial depth—coincided precisely with issues in aesthetic reception that professional aesthetics hoped to pin down. We can therefore read the Kino-Debatte as part of an extended conversation in German culture about the nature of aesthetic experience. The debates were not just a series of complaints about film encroaching on literary form and territory; they were also a very sophisticated debate about the nature of aesthetic reception, about what it meant, in a broad sense, to contemplate an image.

As an opening example, consider this quotation from a 1912 article describing an actualité that featured Wilhelm II on one of his hunting trips:

This otherwise incidental passage is exemplary of the early debates about film in its focus on audience reaction. This writer described, for example, a process of emotional projection: the audience understood the representation by projecting itself into the scene of the hunt. They rejoiced with the kaiser as well as over his excellent aim. The writer also emphasized the physical response of the audience, demonstrating the importance of the body for this process of projection. The “wave-like movement” that ripples through the room was an effect of this projection. But here we should note what is different about the cinematic experience over the solitary enjoyment of a painting. This writer described the mutual amplification of audience emotion (which Benjamin later theorized in his “Work of Art” essay) that is inherent to the cinematic experience and that manifested itself here as a physical reaction. There is a reciprocity between spectator and screen, just as Einfühlung aesthetics described the mutual relationship between viewer and artwork, but here that feeling of resonance was amplified by the number of people in the room all feeling it at once (fig. 4.2).

Note, too, that if Einfühlung aestheticians thought about that resonance between painting or sculpture and viewer in terms of “movement,” here that term is no longer metaphorical but strikingly literal: the movement of the image, of the kaiser, and of the audience were all working in concert to provide the basis for emotional projection. If before—as I will explain later—the idea of “movement” in aesthetics was limited to what we might term “inner movement,” or emotional resonance, now that same reciprocity depended on a physical sensation of movement. Furthermore, just as writers on Einfühlung argued that our senses were not strictly delimited and that stimuli for one sense could also stimulate another, so we see here a similar recognition of the confusion of the senses. In noting that he “hears the gunshot,” the writer emphasized a synesthetic response; he recognized that the film experience is not merely visual, but that vision itself is embodied and connected to the other senses. (This “gunshot” could have been a sound effect, of course, but we should also consider that it could have been psychosomatic, an effect of deep immersion.)

This speaks to another theme in Einfühlung aesthetics: the idea of contemplation as the ground for aesthetic experience. Our usual assumption that the spectator is held in continuous rapt attention is troubled by this passage, for it also emphasizes the materiality of the experience: “the image twitches slightly here and there, flickering and spotting up as if something were boiling under the projected surface.” The film experience seemed to require the audience, like the motionless kaiser and the rolling mountain goat, to hold opposite attitudes—stasis and movement, contemplation and distraction—at the same time. At once immersed in the illusion while blithely noting the twitching image, the audience alternated between attention and detachment. Already, the cinematic experience highlighted contradictions at the heart of contemplation. The rest of this section, then, will explore the issues of emotional projection, synesthesia, and movement as they relate to identity and embodied perception in both Einfühlung aesthetics and early discussions of cinema in the Kino-Debatte.

Emotional projection was a key issue in aesthetics during this period. An essay from the debates on film will help explicate this topic. Alfred Polgar felt that attending the cinema was a sensual experience. In his 1911 essay, “Drama in the Film Theaters,” he described seeing pretty girls on the screen; they smiled at him and he felt that he should smile back, even wait for them outside the theater once the show was over. He knows it is silly to think of such things, but there is something strangely compelling in the way the film takes on a life of its own, the way it “smiles back at me.”⁵⁷ This could be the sigh of another lonely film guy, or the first glimmer of a phenomenology of film, in which the film itself has a subjectivity that engages with the spectator, such as that suggested by Vivian Sobchack.⁵⁸ But it also hints at the connection between emotional projection, Einfühlung, and identity.

Polgar’s emotional investment in the girls on the screen recalls one of the central concepts of Vischer’s dissertation and of this trend in German aesthetics: the imputation of one’s inner life to an inanimate object, which Vischer termed Einfühlung. Vischer wrote:

Polgar also made a comparison between film and music to further his thesis about the power of the cinematic image. Music, he wrote, has the power to “move” us; it moves our “inner humanity” in a way quite mysterious. It could also provoke a synesthetic response: “a powerful suite of images, color, feeling, and idea.” Film, Polgar argued, functions in the same way: it is “a similar fertilization of all the other senses through the stimulation of an optical sense.”⁶⁰ This idea of synesthesia was important to Einfühlung theorists, because it helped to describe what actually happens during aesthetic reception, but also because it indicated the centrality of the body as a measure of aesthetic response. Einfühlung theory postulated that the harmonious correlation of form to the physical or sensory structure of the viewer was the key to aesthetic pleasure. That is, according to the theories, if the object has a structure similar to our body, it is pleasing to us; if not, it strikes us as unpleasant. By extension, the symmetry of the body accounts for the tendency toward symmetry in art. A sympathetic response to this harmony could take place on a number of levels. There is, for example, in terms of symmetry, the physical correspondence of the structure of sense organs and various objects (a horizontal line matches the horizontality of our eyes, for instance). In terms of regularity, the formal arrangement in series matches the rhythmic function of our organs. In other words, “the body, in effect, imposes an ‘organic norm’ in viewing the world, according to which regularity, symmetry, and proportion induce pleasing sensations by emulating the normal human body.”⁶¹

But this “viewing” is not merely visual. Vischer noted that sometimes “a visual stimulus is experienced not so much with our eyes as with a different sense in another part of our body” (98). Sunglasses could have the effect of “cooling” the skin, while “loud” colors might offend our auditory nerves. “For in the body there is, strictly speaking, no such process as localization.” The embodiment of vision meant that “the whole body is involved; the entire physical being is moved” (99). On one hand, this embodiment implied the possibility—even necessity—of synesthesia, at least at some level. The senses resonate with one another; the boundaries between them are not simply blurred, but porous, causing a stimulus to one sense to spark a response in the others. On the other hand, Vischer also argued that this resonance between the senses is the model for the relation between the arts: “These reflexes or reciprocal vibrations of the senses are the physical cause of the unity of the arts” (99). While this parallel between the structure of the body and the relation between the arts was just a footnote to his argument, it points to an ambiguity in Vischer’s book and in subsequent discussions of Einfühlung, as we will see: the question of embodied spectatorship did not always imply physical participation in the act of viewing; instead, it often implied shared forms and orientations between the artwork and the human body per se. That is, the body was more often a model for art than a participant in art. Vischer’s evocation of synesthesia functioned ambiguously by pointing both to embodied spectatorship and to the body as an idealized model.

However, Ernst Bloch’s 1914 essay, “Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music,” pressed harder on this issue via the example of silent film accompanied by music. A musician by training, Bloch placed greater emphasis on the redemptive and sensual nature of sound. But he argued that, while it was exclusively visual, the film image gained another dimension when combined with the proper music. Indeed, his article was a plea for music that was appropriate for the film and not simply random notes played to cover the sound of the projector. He found synesthetic possibilities in film music, which could present a complete sensual experience initiated by the ear, not the eye.

Movement is implied by the very term Einfühlung, which translates literally as “feeling into.” Yet it also goes without saying that the combination of “feeling” and “into”—that is, the comparison of emotion and space—must be metaphorical. Nevertheless, the emphasis in Einfühlung aesthetics on physiology and on spectator response left open the possibility that “movement” during the aesthetic experience might be more than merely metaphorical. This was indeed the case for both Vischer and Hildebrand, who discussed physical movement of the spectator in terms of the movement of the eye over the object before it. But this activity, as Vischer explained, is largely confined to the eye: “We achieve this muscular activity, by moving the eye while looking at the object: that is, by scanning [Schauen]” (94). Hildebrand agreed; both theorists distinguished seeing (Sehen) from scanning (Schauen) and likened the latter to touch as a more sensual, tactile appropriation of the image.⁶³ Vischer allowed that there might be a more visceral or holistic physical response to art when he ventured that “mental stimuli can bring about motor stimuli in the lower organs, and vice versa. The whole body is involved; the entire physical being is moved” (99). Ultimately, however, this response was not what he had in mind when discussing the aesthetic experience. Instead, both he and Hildebrand stressed the importance of the imagination as a mediator between raw stimuli and a purely aesthetic response. “I might imagine myself,” Vischer wrote, “moving along the line of a range of hills guided by kinesthetic imagination (be it direct or mediated by the reflex stimuli of sensitized nerves). In the same way, fleeting clouds might carry me far away. This is no longer seeing [Sehen] but a watching [Zusehen]: the forms appear to move, but only we move in the imagination” (101, emphasis in original). In other words, our projection into the work—and our physical response to it—depends on an act of imagination, ensuring the aesthetic experience remains within the domain of the “higher” functions. The movement of the eye initiates the process, but in our response any “movement” is to be construed as virtual, not real.⁶⁴

If Einfühlung was a combination of emotional projection and (a limited form of) embodied spectatorship, the work of architectural historian August Schmarsow is especially appropriate. His inaugural lecture from 1893, “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” outlined a theory of architecture as “the creatress of space”: “Our sense of space [Raumgefühl] and spatial imagination [Raumphantasie] press toward spatial creation [Raumgestaltung]; they seek their satisfaction in art. We call this art architecture; in plain words, it is the creatress of space [Raumgestalterin].”⁶⁵ Schmarsow argued that we understand architectural form by projecting ourselves into it—by correlating our bodily axis, for example, to the vertical lines of a building. For Schmarsow, this was a process of spatial creation (Raumgestaltung), closely linked to proprioception, our sense of spatial orientation, or what he called “the intuited form of space”: “The intuited form [Anschauungsform] of space … consists of the residues of sensory experience to which the muscular sensations of our body, the sensitivity of our skin, and the structure of our body all contribute” (286). Our bodily activity creates or contributes to a physical “memory” of sensation, which serves as the basis for a physiological understanding of architectural form. Like Vischer and Hildebrand, Schmarsow found the imagination central to this process: “It is an act of free aesthetic contemplation when, with the aid of our imagination, we transport ourselves from the exterior that we see before us into the center of the interior space; when, by inquiring into its axial system, we strive to open up a remote organism to the analogous feeling within ourselves” (293). This “striving” to open up the interior of a building by means of our already existing sense of space is to Schmarsow a creative process, and “movement” was vital to it.

As in the work of Vischer and Hildebrand, this “movement” seemed virtual or imagined, detached from real muscular tension, but in Schmarsow’s essays something more seems to be at play: “We cannot express its relation to ourselves in any way other than by imagining that we are in motion, measuring the length, width, and depth, or by attributing to the static lines, surfaces, and volumes the movement that our eyes and our kinesthetic sensations suggest to us, even though we survey the dimensions while standing still” (291). Here Schmarsow hinted that our “kinesthetic sensations” play a part, that in the appropriation of architectural form there is a productive tension between stillness and movement in the body at the moment of apperception. Indeed, architecture may be the “creatress of space,” but Schmarsow emphasized the creative aspect of spectatorship as well:

On the other end of the spectrum, however, we find Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps, regarded as the chief proponent and theorist of Einfühlung aesthetics. Between 1890 and 1914, he was a prolific—not to say incontinent—explicator of Einfühlung, both in aesthetic terms (emotional projection of ourselves into art) and psychological terms (as the fundamental way we understand others).⁶⁶ On the question of movement, Lipps was contradictory. In a typically confusing passage, Lipps defined his terms: “Finally, one could figuratively say that ‘activity’ is the inner breath or heartbeat, or more generally, it is the inner motion. But ‘motion’ here is not meant as a simple event within me, but rather the fact that I move. Of course, this ‘motion’ has nothing to do with space.”⁶⁷ In postulating that “I move” but that “this ‘motion’ has nothing to do with space,” Lipps hoped to have it both ways, succinctly expressing the tantalizing tension in the definition of movement in Einfühlung aesthetics. Yet, in the end, Lipps was fairly clear that this movement was limited to “some inner, striving motion” (der inneren strebenden Bewegung).⁶⁸ Indeed, we might assume (or hope) that kinesthetic affect is an important aspect of the aesthetic experience, but Lipps was adamant that if we feel any bodily response, if we are aware of our bodies in any way, then we are no longer in the realm of the aesthetic proper. Real bodily movement or physical response may be mimicry or erotic pleasure, according to Lipps, but at the point that it is physical, it ceases to be aesthetic. He stated it flatly:

The cinematic experience, however, brings us back to the question. As we become immersed in the cinematic image, we might, as Lipps demanded, forget about our bodies, but this very forgetfulness might result in involuntary movement, such as gripping the arm of the chair (or the person next to you) during a car chase or moving slightly side to side during a well-choreographed fight sequence. It might even result in erotic pleasure. During the time that Lipps wrote about Einfühlung, these pleasures in the cinema would not have even been included in the category of “the aesthetic,” but the character of the moving image—among other things—may have forced a reconsideration of the definition of aesthetic pleasure. We can see this renegotiation start to take place with Walter Serner’s 1913 essay, “Kino und Schaulust,” which is one of the first to suggest the sexual dimension of visual pleasure.⁷² Serner’s discussion of the link between cinematic movement and bodily reaction implicitly challenged the division between visual stimuli and visceral response that we have seen in traditional and Einfühlung aesthetics. I am not suggesting that Serner was actively intervening in this discussion; indeed, his attitude toward cinema was ambivalent at best. But his essay indicates that what remains virtual and latent in Einfühlung aesthetics—movement in the image and in the spectator—was even at the time visceral and literal in the experience of cinema.

Serner was explicit that the Schaulust he described was not the polite, distanced gaze of the aesthete: “Not the harmless kind, for which everything is only movement or only color or both, but a frightening desire that is no less powerful than the very deepest kind. It is a desire that boils the blood and makes it rage, until an unfathomably powerful excitement common to all desire races through the flesh.”⁷³ This “unfathomably powerful excitement” was, of course, sexual desire. Serner was at pains to point out that this brand of sexual desire was not merely erotic but was tinged as well with the thirst for violence. Cinema appealed to our basest instincts, our darkest needs. But it was not simply the content of the films that made this appeal; it was cinematic movement itself:

It was neither the quick victory over something that was dying nor an astonishing profitability that with one stroke put this [cinema] into place from the outset. It was the exciting adventurousness of a tiger hunt, of a daring mountain run, of a death-defying automobile ride; it was the breathtaking pursuit of a wounded, bleeding thug over the dizzyingly high rooftops of New York; it was the eerie district filled with misery, sickness, and crime, and the entire horrific detective genre with murder and violence, Browning and Navajo; and it was all the bloody, blazing images of fire and death, of horror and terror, on which all eyes sate themselves after long privation. A gaze, it was, that had rhythm and life and was desire.⁷⁴

The tiger hunt, the mountain ride, the chase—these were the components of cinema as much as the bloody pictures of fire and death. Serner named the thrill of cinema as an explicitly visceral reaction in which the spectator was swept away by the movement of the image. The eye was no longer detached from the body but connected “through the sheer endless rush, which is all the more welcome, since it knows that movement is the greatest component of the desire to look and its innermost essence.”⁷⁵ Einfühlung aesthetics saw the body as a model for art, as a category for understanding, but mostly not as an active participant in the aesthetic experience, except for the initial roaming gaze. And there is no indication that Serner or anyone else at this moment viewed what he described as aesthetic. But as the filmic image and cinematic experience became associated with Art through other means (for example, the immersive form of film narrative, movie palaces, and so on), this residual experience of movement and visceral response could not be logically left behind, even if it were attenuated in practice or, as Tom Gunning argues, took its place in lower forms of cinema.⁷⁶ In any case, after cinema, aesthetics could no longer logically justify the well-mannered separation between contemplation and physical response.

Whatever their differences regarding the role of the entire body in aesthetic response, all writers on Einfühlung (indeed, most writers on aesthetics in general) assumed that contemplation was absolutely central to the aesthetic experience. Recall that Schmarsow declared, “It is an act of free aesthetic contemplation when, with the aid of our imagination, we transport ourselves from the exterior that we see before us into the center of the interior space” (293, emphasis added). Likewise, Lipps consistently invoked contemplation as the prerequisite to, even the ground for, Einfühlung: “The contemplation of the observed movement awakens the tendency to a corresponding inner response [Selbstbetätigung]; and by corresponding we mean that which would be connected with the execution of such a movement if I were to perform it. And this tendency is at the same time actualized in the act of contemplation.”⁷⁷ Lipps argued that whatever movement we might feel when encountering a work (be it a painting or dance or another form), we do not actually move, nor do we need to move. Instead, the impulse toward imitation of that movement in the work is resolved or dissipated by the act of contemplation itself. In Lipps’s version, the contemplative act transmutes motion into emotion. Contemplation thereby allows emotional projection to take place, undisturbed by the intrusion of physical sensation. It is a surrender to the object and to the process: “the aesthetic experience is the way that I feel moved when I engage in aesthetic contemplation, when I surrender myself completely to the representation,” wrote Lipps.⁷⁸ In this respect, Einfühlung aesthetics grafted common notions of aesthetic contemplation onto the process of Einfühlung. We could even say that the theory of Einfühlung was constructed to explain what happens during the contemplation of artworks, but without disturbing the moral and ideological significance of the operation. That is, the meaning of “contemplation” in Einfühlung aesthetics was not markedly different from what we might find in aesthetics generally, even if elements of Einfühlung theory tread close to an expansion of that meaning.

Could this model of contemplation accommodate the cinematic experience? An initial answer might be no, it could not, especially given the standard history, which dictates that contemplation faded and distraction took its place. The evidence in this chapter elaborates that history. The first section demonstrated that objections to cinema’s rush of images were grounded not simply in contemplation’s leisurely approach but also in the historically strong tension between the flux of time and free will. That is, writers were not just unaccustomed to the rush of imagery but felt determined by the choice and flow of imagery that seemed to push them along ever more impatiently through the present, giving them a strong, lived sense of time’s passage. Meanwhile, other writers reveled in the sense of presence and the present that motion pictures gave them, which sharpened their senses and put them on alert, as if caught on foot in midday traffic. Likewise, the second section sketched the trouble with contemplation from another angle as aesthetics tried to accommodate aspects of the aesthetic experience that were nascent in early theories but never fully accounted for, especially emotional projection and embodied perception. As these features became more prominent in the theories, it was more difficult to graft a common conception of contemplation (as largely inattentive to the body) onto this model. The cinematic experience, however, was varied. As we saw in chapter 3, reformers such as Häfker worked hard to fit film presentations into the ideologically dominant model of contemplative experience. We could also argue, after Charles Musser, that some film genres, such as landscape films, were designed from the start to provide for a contemplative gaze.⁷⁹

We could further contend, after Miriam Hansen and Heide Schlüpmann, that cinema’s public sphere had already created an alternative to detached aesthetic contemplation. They argue persuasively that the usual interpretation of these early discussions of film audiences in terms of class misreads to a certain extent the masculine anxieties of the moment, which should more properly be classified in terms of gender and sexuality. The presence of women in the public sphere in general and in the movie theater specifically, according to Hansen and Schlüpmann, indicates not only a change in gender dynamics in pre–World War I Germany, but also a change in aesthetic modes of reception—specifically, a shift from detached aesthetic contemplation to a more immersive, emotionally involved mode of viewing that has often been characterized as female. Their point is that, if we are going to look to the debates as evidence of a shift in aesthetic reception, we would do well to consider that most interlocutors were male and that many in the audience were female; contemplation was an ideological tool in service of not just class-based but also gender-based goals.⁸⁰

Hansen and Schlüpmann provide an important corrective and an avenue of research that has been enormously productive. I would only indicate that, as chapter 3 demonstrated, children also presented an important model of spectatorship. In fact, this book argues that gender, class, and age were only some of the categories through which spectatorship was discursively constructed, and that our understanding of this process is best grasped via the larger division between expert and lay viewers. An expert could very well have an immersive, emotionally involved reaction to a film or a painting, as in Diderot’s famous description of one of his encounters with a painting: “I was motionless, my eyes wandered without fixing themselves on any object, my arms fell to my sides, my mouth opened…. I shall not tell you how long my enchantment lasted. The immobility of being, the solitude of a place, its profound silence, all suspend time; time no longer exists, nothing measures it, man becomes as if eternal.”⁸¹ Apart from the final venture into metaphysics (“man becomes as if eternal”), this description recalls numerous reports of ordinary moviegoers, female and otherwise. But because it was written by an expert, it is free of the damning taint of passivity, which characterized all spectators—young and old, female and male. Diderot was absorbed by the image, but he wandered through it of his own accord. Passivity, not necessarily immersion or emotion, was the feminized trait that characterized lay spectators of all sorts.

Yet class does matter; if contemplation held most aesthetic theories in a tight ideological grip, it did so in service of implicit class privilege and agency. After World War I, however, when class barriers were subject to attack, the reaction to contemplation took on a more overtly political tone. While nineteenth-century philosophers might have viewed contemplation (and themselves) as active, revolutionaries saw contemplation (and the philosophers) as bourgeois and passive in favor of the status quo. This critique of contemplation was voiced most vociferously by the Dadaists, who vowed to no longer assume the role of mere “passive spectator [passiver Beschauer] of this comical world, of an aesthete like Oscar Wilde,” for, as Richard Huelsenbeck warned at the time, “to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life.”⁸² For the Dadaists, contemplation was irredeemably tied to passivity. They condemned the class dimensions of contemplation as a bourgeois appropriation of art for art’s sake that ignored the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic experience. Early discussions of cinema reversed this complaint. Various Kinogegner rejected motion pictures for their perceived association with the working classes and further argued that the nature of the filmic medium precluded the possibility of contemplation, which they defended as if protecting class boundaries. Either way, it seemed, motion pictures were not usually connected to contemplation. If they were, as in Häfker’s case, it was in defense of film, contemplation, and middle-class values. In fact, the extent to which film was considered suitable for either contemplation or a distracted mode of viewing depended precisely on the class alignments of any given writer.

After World War I, then, the passive and active connotations of contemplation and distraction traded places. The rehabilitation of distraction began, at least in film theory, with Siegfried Kracauer’s 1926 essay, “The Cult of Distraction,” in which he described film presentations in Berlin’s lush movie palaces (fig 4.3).⁸³ For Kracauer, these inherently fragmented, varied, and artistically incoherent presentations (which included live revues, advertisements, films, lighting schemes, music, and other spectacular elements) structurally matched “the disorder of society” and, hence, had the potential to present the working classes with a true picture of “the uncontrolled anarchy of our world” (327). That picture could also function as an image of the mass audience or masses (die Masse) of and for itself; that is, for Kracauer, if the mass audience could recognize itself in an image of itself, it would be a step closer to political consciousness: “Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions. Were this reality to remain hidden from the viewers, they could neither attack nor change it; its disclosure in distraction is therefore of moral significance” (326, emphasis in original). But Kracauer complained that picture palaces in 1926 papered over this fragmentation with “the glue of sentimentality” or an “artistic” unity, thereby hiding the true picture of alienation behind a surface sheen. They functioned in this case, for Kracauer, as distraction from, whereas he advocated distraction for political awakening. Although never named in this essay, contemplation was implicitly no more than a phantom appendage of an “idealist culture that haunts us today only as a specter” (327).

Benjamin also gave distraction an explicitly political valence. In his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, for example, he discussed the “transformation of a highly contemplative attitude into revolutionary opposition.”⁸⁴ But Benjamin’s understanding of the nature of that political charge differed from Kracauer’s. His “Work of Art” essay (1935–1939) remains the definitive sign of the rising political stock of distraction and the devalued currency of contemplation between the wars.⁸⁵ This essay has received more than its share of commentary, so I only want to underline certain keys differences between Benjamin and Kracauer. For Kracauer, distraction functioned as an image of the masses for the masses; the homology between leisure and labor, between the disjunctive form of entertainment and the alienated character of work and modern, urban life was something that the audience could see or picture through their experience in the picture palace. Indeed, Kracauer assumed that, once they grasped this picture, the mass audience would reflect on it and come to an understanding of its political situation. So the image that distraction presented would be structurally no different than any image the audience would contemplate and reflect on.

Benjamin, on the other hand, argued that modernity and technological reproducibility had destroyed the cult value of images, so he searched for an alternative mode of thinking that would not rely on images per se, or even vision. Distraction, for him, was this revolutionary mode that struck at the heart of knowledge as usual. For Benjamin, contemplation comes at knowledge through the encounter with—or reliance on—a transcendental Ideal (recall Schopenhauer’s understanding of aesthetic experience as loss of oneself and a nirvana-like communion with the Ideal). It is a top-down approach that already presumes form, like a Kantian a priori. That “already-given” rigs the game of knowledge production, stacking the deck against experience. Contemplation, for Benjamin, succumbed to the tyranny of forms of knowledge already given. Distraction, however, represented another way of thinking that worked from the bottom up; it takes the world and experience for what they are, not what they are presumed to be: “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it…. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves.”⁸⁶ The tables have turned: contemplation is now passive, in that the viewer is ruled by the rules and form of the work of art. Distraction, on the other hand, is now active, in that the masses control the work and care not for its form or the usual ways of appropriating it. Benjamin evoked touch and habit—senses other than vision—to describe this mode; distraction was a famously tactile form of knowledge: “The values of distraction should be defined with regard to film, just as the values of catharsis are defined with regard to tragedy … Distraction, like catharsis, should be conceived as a physiological phenomenon.”⁸⁷ Like Bergson, he hoped to turn us away from our common, ordinary perception that actually keeps us chained to the status quo.⁸⁸

Georg Lukács also offered a thorough and trenchant analysis of the class dimensions of contemplation. From his early Theory of the Novel (1916) to History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács presented a strong critique of the vita contemplativa.⁸⁹ For Lukács, contemplation was not merely a mode of aesthetic viewing, but a general reaction to the alienating character of modern life that must be surmounted for any transformation of the world to take place. It was a “pattern of consciousness in which man contemplates from a position of formal freedom his own integration in a system of alien compulsions and confuses this formal ‘freedom’ of his contemplation with an authentic freedom.”⁹⁰ Contemplation, for Lukács, was simultaneously tied to both transcendence and complacency. In the preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács wrote, “Above all, I was absolutely convinced of one thing: that the purely contemplative nature of bourgeois thought had to be radically overcome.”⁹¹ Even in Theory of the Novel, Lukács organized his argument around two modes: contemplation and action. Specifically, he found two broad trends in the history of the novel, “abstract idealism, which concentrates on pure action, and Romanticism, which interiorizes action and reduces it to contemplation.”⁹² Novels such as Don Quixote (1605) emphasized action without reflection, while novels such as Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) expressed the inward turn of romanticism, away from the disappointment and failures of modern alienation. Lukács explained:

Lukács set up agency/identity dichotomies similar to Benjamin’s: the paths to identity or self-realization were twofold, either through transcendence or self-awareness. If one denied the possibility of transcendence, then only a materialist, humanist approach would be possible, which was what Lukács advocated. Likewise, once this path was chosen, agency returned and one could be an active “author” of one’s life rather than a passive “observer,” which Lukács condemned. In Theory of the Novel, he advocated humanism (exemplified by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) as a middle ground between action and contemplation, but in his later, more explicitly Marxist works, Lukács focused primarily on a radical critique of contemplation.

But the first rumblings of this dissatisfaction could be felt before World War I, especially in Lukács’s 1913 essay, “Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (“Gedanken zu einer Aesthetik des ‘Kino’”).⁹⁴ This brief but provocative article for the Frankfurter Zeitung—it was chosen for publication over Bloch’s piece on film and music—has been given insightful consideration by a number of scholars over the years,⁹⁵ but it is worth another look, because it both addresses the most insistent themes of the Kino-Debatte (the distinction between theater and cinema, word and image) and looks past them to anticipate themes in film theory of the 1920s. While it does not speak to most issues common in Einfühlung aesthetics (for example, emotional projection, synesthesia, or embodied spectatorship), it offers in nascent form a critique of contemplation that Lukács developed in his later work; in this way, it articulates cinema’s implicit challenge to “traditional aesthetics” that will come out more forcefully in Lukács’s later work and the writings of Benjamin, Kracauer, and others.

Lukács did this through what at first appears to be a standard comparison of theater and cinema, a strategy common to much early writing on film. The difference between theater and film, according to Lukács, is the difference between presence and absence, specifically, the presence of the actor on stage. But it is not the gestures or words of the actor that give theater its effect, nor the action of the drama. Instead, it is “the power with which a person, the living will of a person, without mediation and without restraining direction, streams forth onto an equally living mass or multitude” (13). The very presence of the actor—the force of his or her personal will, his or her drive toward the fulfillment of his or her being, his or her destiny—is the essence of theater. This living, breathing essence of another person is inherently transitory—tied to the now of the moment, to the present—but its very ephemerality is “not a deplorable weakness, but rather a productive limit, the necessary correlate and most observable expression of destiny in drama” (13–14). That is, the presence of the actor in the transitory moment shared by everyone in the theater is the most visible expression of the enactment of becoming that is drama itself. This sense of becoming, of the lived moment, is available to us all merely through the act of living intensely, but “this so-called ‘life’ never attains an intensity that could raise everything up to the sphere of destiny” (14). Drama, in other words, frames and concentrates this sense of destiny and fate for us: “Throughout the presentation of the drama this metaphysical feeling grows in immediacy and perceptibility: out of the deepest truth of people and their position in the universe grows a self-evident reality” (14). The stage, by virtue of its emphasis on presence and the moment, becomes a vehicle for the profound truths of human existence. Actors are an instantiation of these metaphysical truths in that they focus the force of living, or the direction of fate, into an ephemeral here-and-now shared by the actor and the audience; in fact, the mere presence of a great actor is “already and without any great drama destiny, divine service, tragedy, mystery” because of his or her unique ability to be “absolutely present” (14).

Cinema, on the other hand, does not share this emphasis on “presence” or “the present.” Motion pictures lack this “presence” not because of any inherent defect, but simply because in films “there are only movements and actions of people—but no people” (14, emphasis in original). The people on the screen are not present—nor do they exist in the present—so they have no presence. Even so, the representations in cinema are “no less organic and alive than those images of the stage” (14). They are simply different: “they maintain a life of a completely different kind. In a word, they become fantastic” (14, emphasis in original). They present “a new aspect” of life: “one without the present, a life without fate, without reasons, without motives, a life without measure or order, without essence or value, a life without soul, of pure surface, a life with which the innermost of our soul does not want to coincide…. The world of the ‘cinema’ is thus a world without background or perspective, without any difference in weight or quality, as only the present gives things fate and weight, light and lightness” (14). At first glance, this judgment sounds very much like it might have come from a Kinoreformer, like a condemnation of the cinema as “soulless” and suitable for only the basest amusements that require no thought or reflection. But Lukács was after something else here. He saw in cinema the same utopian potential that one could find in fantasy: “‘Everything is possible’: this is the worldview of the ‘cinema’” (15, emphasis in original). Cinema was not just the poor cousin of the stage; it offered a completely different set of possibilities.

The basis for this difference lies in their formal properties as well as their dissimilar relationship to time and the word. The stage is populated with living, breathing people; drama focuses on exactly that moment of their shared presence with the audience. Motion pictures, however, do not picture people, but representations of people. Nevertheless, “not only in their technique, but also in their effect, cinematic images” are “equal in their essence to nature” (14). The “technique” Lukács speaks of here is the photographic quality of the cinematic image, while its “effect” is the illusion of movement that the apparatus creates. This movement, this temporal flow, also distinguishes cinema from theater. The stage has a paradoxical relation to time: “it is the flow of grand moments, something internally deep at rest, almost ‘arrested,’ something become eternal, as a direct result of the painfully strong ‘present’” (14). Theater’s emphasis on presence and the present gives it, oddly, a sense of stillness. The essence of cinema, on the other hand, “is movement in itself, an eternal variability, the never-resting change of things” (15).⁹⁶ These different concepts of time, according to Lukács, correspond to the fundamental difference between the stage and cinema: “The one is purely metaphysical, distancing itself from all that is empirically alive; the other is so strongly unmetaphysical, so exclusively empirically alive, that through this sheer extremity of its nature another entirely different metaphysics arises” (15). One is fate, thought, stillness, presence, metaphysics. The other is fantasy, surface, movement, absence, action. But, as Tom Levin has noted in his reading of this essay, the intriguing aspect of cinema is that it is both “empirical” and “fantastic.”⁹⁷ That is, its photographic image grounds it in reality, in the everyday, while its temporality—its rush of images, as well as their arbitrary relation to laws of physics and causality—frees it of necessity and allows it flights of fantasy. As Lukács declares, “The fundamental law of connection for the stage and the theater is inexorable necessity; for the ‘cinema’ it is unlimited possibility” (15). The uniqueness of cinema lies not simply in its ability to portray fantastic worlds but, as Levin argued, in its dialectical relation between the real and the possible. “Everything is true and real, is equally true and equally real” in the cinema, according to Lukács. The combination of reality and possibility and the equality of the two even gives cinema a utopian dimension.⁹⁸

But I would also suggest that, in Lukács’s essay, cinema provided a critical dimension alongside its utopian potential. In his comparison of stage and film in terms of “metaphysics” and “soullessness,” there was, I think, a critique of contemplation that emerged more forcefully in his later work, especially History and Class Consciousness (1923). Consistently throughout the essay, Lukács distinguished the “soul” of the theater (its stillness, its metaphysical depth, its emphasis on destiny and the human condition, its presence) with the “soullessness” of the cinema (its constant movement, its emphasis on surface, its metaphysical “lightness,” its fantastic quality, its absence). In this distinction, Lukács was not alone. Many other writers of this period also called cinema “soulless.” Franz Pfemfert, editor of Die Aktion, bemoaned in 1911 cinema’s role in the “soullessness” of modern society. For Pfemfert, the naked reality presented by the cinematic image—which he blamed for the lack of fantasy in the filmic world—could best be utilized for educational purposes.⁹⁹ But Kurt Pinthus, introducing his 1913 Kinobuch, a collection of scenarios written specifically for cinema, warned his readers, “Always remember: this is not high art, not ‘soulful’ art, not theatrical art. We write only pieces for cinema, not for theater.”¹⁰⁰

Here we find what Lukács meant by “soul.” Pinthus wrote, “not ‘soulful’ art, not theatrical art,” as if they are one and the same. Pinthus and Lukács referred, of course, to German inwardness (Innerlichkeit), that national tendency toward contemplation and reflection (and the demand for it in art). In his consistent opposition of “action” (cinema) to “soul” (theater), Lukács indicated that cinema offered an alternative to this cul-de-sac of reflection. His distinction between cinema and theater corresponds to the dichotomy between abstract idealism and romantic inwardness found in his Theory of the Novel, which in turn was the foundation for his critique of contemplation in History and Class Consciousness. The latter book, especially, condemned as bankrupt the alienated, contemplative character, in favor of political or radical action. His discussion of cinema’s “soullessness,” then, was not a condemnation, not even a slight in favor of the theater, but the articulation of a new possibility, a new form that more closely corresponded to the practical needs of the people. Cinema’s emphasis on surface and lightness was an opportunity to escape from the suffocating and futile tradition of Innerlichkeit, a formulation remarkably similar to those of Kracauer and Benjamin. Lukács thereby subtly pointed to the emergence of a new aesthetic, which Kracauer and Benjamin later articulated as “distraction.” So when Lukács declared that, with cinema, “Man has lost his soul; in return, however, he gains his body” (16), he celebrated the potential for a new aesthetic standard that incorporated physiological, even tactile, responses to cinema, thereby pointing the way for film theorists of the 1920s and beyond.

“What does all this mean? It means that real presentation banishes contemplation,” Benjamin announced, only slightly ironically, in 1930.¹⁰¹ It certainly seems that way, with Lukács proclaiming that our soul has been replaced by our body and Benjamin theorizing a physiological and tactile model of knowledge. Yet as Carolin Duttlinger has shown, Benjamin’s own conception of contemplation and distraction was much more complex and dialectical than the version even the “Work of Art” essay provides. In his essays from the early 1920s, Benjamin saw in religious contemplation a presence of mind that allowed for both absorption and alertness, which was different from what he saw in the secular, solipsistic immersion of the modern age. Indeed, he and Bertolt Brecht agreed that modern contemplation and distraction were two sides of the same coin: both precluded critical engagement and response and therefore impeded political action. If his discussion of distraction in the “Work of Art” essay reversed this view, it is only because he dialectically leavened distraction with both habit (Gewohnheit) and alertness or presence of mind (Geistesgegenwart). Yet later, in some of his historical works, Benjamin’s conception of modern contemplation again adds Geistesgegenwart as the essential ingredient. So Duttlinger concludes that Benjamin’s writings consistently reject “solipsistic contemplation in favor of a more flexible, perpetually alert presence of mind.”¹⁰²

The balance between immersion and detachment has been historically difficult to find, not only because it is challenged with every new art form, but because it is, as Benjamin’s work so clearly shows, a moral and political stance as well as an aesthetic stance, so finding the balance also implies finding a proper stance toward the historical moment. This is why the task continues to fascinate, and why contemplation, no matter what opprobrium it receives, will never die. For example, as Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece has shown, contemplation and immersion made a comeback in film theory in the 1930s through the 1950s, as modernist architects attempted to design movie theaters that would create an ideal, immersive viewing experience and hence an ideal spectator, who was contemplative yet alert and responsive.¹⁰³ Indeed, the change in ideas about contemplation seems to respond to Benjamin and Brecht’s complaints that the inherently individualist nature of contemplation separates the viewer from the collective, thereby inhibiting communication, solidarity, and political action. These architect-theorists, such as Benjamin Schlanger and Frederick Kiesler, hoped to induce an almost Schopenhauerian disembodied viewing experience, while also making that experience resolutely communal. Like Benjamin, they accepted and worked with cinema’s collectivity. This is the primary difference between the writers of the Kino-Debatte and later theorists: for the most part, the earlier writers were unwilling to relinquish the historically strong connection between contemplation and individual viewing. Mass reception, for them, held little aesthetic potential (and the fear of social democracy often shut down any political potential). Yet we have seen glimmers of this possibility in various individual essays across the debates; if they often argued individually against film’s aesthetic potential, as a group the essays helped clear the way. If single writers clung to models of individual, expert viewing, the collection of essays put mass reception on the film-theoretical agenda. Later shifts in film theory were therefore anticipated collectively by the film essays that appeared in the years before World War I.