CONCLUSION

TOWARD A TACTILE HISTORIOGRAPHY

Of course, after World War I everything changed. On 1 July 1918, the newly established state film production company, UFA, created a Kulturabteilung, or cultural division, to make and distribute a regular series of educational films. The leader of this division, Ernst Krieger, had been a major in the imperial army and had served alongside Alexander Grau, the wartime minister of culture. The war had offered a number of lessons, but in this case it had persuaded Krieger, Grau, and others beyond a doubt of the value of motion pictures as a means of mass education and indoctrination—which after the war could be directed toward peacetime social issues. Krieger hired a number of doctors, scientists, and educators fresh from the front to make educational films encompassing titles from The Alps (1918) to Marital Hygiene (1922). The division also funded scientific research films, thereby giving the state’s seal of approval and support to scientific and medical cinematography.¹ The number of universities and institutes using motion pictures to document and to explore increased dramatically after the war, as film found a secure place in laboratories and lecture halls. Hermann Häfker’s dream of a state-run, educational cinema had come true, even if—in UFA’s case, at least—it had to make room for fictional films as well. Indeed, cinema’s aesthetic pretensions received a boost after 26 February 1920, when The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opened in Berlin to much hype and wide acclaim. Its remarkable mise-en-scène, acting, and narrative framework struck a chord with all audiences, even those beyond Germany’s borders; its self-consciously artistic presentation drew from a distinctly German style, marking it immediately as “Art.” Caligari became a lightning rod of debate about the nature of film, even while people lined up at the box office. Ushering in German cinema’s golden era, Caligari gave cinematic form some measure of aesthetic legitimacy. Meanwhile, the credibility of film in terms of aesthetic reception received more attention and validation with new theories (Rudolf Arnheim, Balàzs, Benjamin, Kracauer) that acknowledged its significance for the transformation of aesthetic standards.

So in terms of disciplinary legitimacy, cinema had much less to worry about after the war. Debates continued about its proper function in society or how its artistic potential could be best realized, but they were not nearly as heated as in the prewar years. German society seemed to have adjusted itself to cinema, and cinema to it. In addition to prompting UFA’s role as state-sanctioned protector of educational (and propaganda) film, the war had also cut off the supply of imported films, thereby allowing domestic production companies to flourish; the complaint about foreign films could no longer fuel debates, and the supply of “quality” German films also rose. The international success of Caligari awakened the establishment to the artistic and economic potential of film, giving it a stamp of legitimacy that before had been only grudgingly offered at home. Firmly entrenched in German culture by the 1920s, cinema spent considerably less time defending its right to exist.

On the other hand, little has changed. We are still as preoccupied as ever—perhaps even more—with social acceleration and the dangers of distraction. If motion pictures exemplified the quick, relentless pace of modernity and the social consequences of inattentiveness, their secure place in mass culture did nothing to calm nervousness about their perceived effects. In fact, those concerns have doubled or tripled in our new century, predictably, as the emergence of new media forms seems to underline the lack of control we have over the pace of change and the technologies that come with it. The perceived effects have not changed, only the media to which they are attached. The rhetorical patterns we have seen over the course of this investigation have remained remarkably steady over the century; with each new media form we have a new round of experts decrying the infantilization of its audience while appropriating it for their own disciplinary projects. The difference between expert observers and lay spectators, as we have seen, resides in the amount of control one can wield over the technology and its product. The audience is infantilized precisely because it is perceived to surrender to the technology without maintaining a proper distance or detachment from it; the expert is able to use the same technology because he or she is able to master the medium—which testifies to his or her own self-mastery as well. This dichotomy between resistance and surrender seems at first indistinguishable from middle-class ideals of self-mastery or restraint. These class ideals definitely reinforce the disciplinary distinctions, but because experts have the technology in their hands, often literally exercising their control in this way, their disciplinary alignment is a more historiographically proximate explanation of their ideological stance. Hence the importance of examining these rhetorical patterns, which still persist in our media landscape today, in terms of disciplines as well as class.

Expert/lay distinctions are perhaps just as intractable as class distinctions, and they can be just as blunt. Yet by implicating education, training, and disciplinary communities, they offer an obvious and clear point of entry for historical investigation. Indeed, this project has argued that a full description of the rhetorical dichotomies common to debates about media—which would allow us to see their porousness and mutual dependence—requires an acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of film technologies, products, and experiences. Taken as a whole, the expressions of film’s potential or dangers are dynamic and conflicted—a result of the many-sided quality of the products or technologies the historical agents encounter on the ground. Any given agent might be intransigent in this or that essay or speech, but the collection of voices within a discipline or community are, like the object itself, heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of object and audience is, in my opinion, best (but not exclusively) expressed through the specific institutional appropriations of film in the nontheatrical context, and if we want to understand these applications, it seems apparent that we need to understand the disciplinary agendas at play and their relationship to the application. I am convinced that the historical interplay between these heterogeneous agendas and objects holds more insight into “what cinema is” than our own top-down theoretical proclamations.

So the way that experts handled the technology, both literally and figuratively, fills out the history of nontheatrical uses of media such as film. Production, distribution, and exhibition histories are traditionally important paths of inquiry for film and media studies, but we can also add descriptions of how experts have studied, manipulated, and adapted the image to their own ends, which reveals presumptions and expectations about their audience, their own expertise, and the role of film in their discipline. Experts have emphasized different aspects of film form in their use or study of the image: the still image is good for some tasks, the moving image is appropriate for other approaches; the detail of an image is an intriguing landscape open to discovery for some, while others (or even the same) gravitated toward the usefully abstract animated image. We are certainly aware of all these various facets of film, but we could focus more on patterns of use and their relationship to historically persistent rhetorical patterns. Investigating those varied uses also allows us to see the precise relationship between film form and disciplinary agendas. Moreover, the variety of approaches or entry points for expert analysis of the image also testifies to the ambidexterity of film, or its usefulness as both a still and moving image, among its other, varied manifestations. By emphasizing film’s variety of forms and ways of “handling” it, film’s malleability prompts what we might call a tactile historiography.

Indeed, it was precisely film’s adaptability that appealed to experts, that brought them to the idea that they could appropriate it, transform it, and make it their own. These experts sculpted cinema’s dispositif—the technology, the image, the audience, and the relationship between all three—in markedly different ways.² The scientific disciplines had the most rigid framework within which motion pictures could fit; the technology was used primarily to control duration and to aid correlation. From the aesthetic debates, we can see the negotiation between the cinematic experience—as varied as it was—and ideals of individual contemplation. In any case, the extent to which film could be shaped according to preexisting standards and practices determined its acceptability. What was this shaping, exactly? For researchers, it involved a very literal hands-on tinkering with the technology to adapt it to standards of evidence and imaging. It also involved, as we have seen, tinkering with the object of study to adapt it to the representational technology. For someone like Lemke or Häfker, on the other hand, it sometimes meant tinkering with the technology or the screening venue, but more often corralling funders, exhibitors, town councils, and other members of the community and driving them toward a common goal. Persuading these groups required a similar negotiation between the film experience or dispositif and established, often disciplinary agendas or ideals (“modernizing education,” for example). For essayists and aestheticians, it meant thinking through how some aspect of film form could fit established or emerging ideals. To press film into service, then, meant shaping it to an existing framework of institutional resources, policies, practices, and ideals.

So tactile historiography is sensitive to the historical impressions left on cinema (the filmic “material” that includes the technology, the image, and the audience). These impressions are of at least two types. On one side, we have the institutional or disciplinary framework to which film is made to fit; this is a historically specific but more or less stable configuration of disciplinary ideals, established practices, rules, policies, norms, and conventions. In education, for example, limited funding meant that elementary schools would not include film projection equipment in the classroom until the 1920s or so. So in the early 1910s educational screenings were held in commercial film theaters, which of course shaped the educational experience, sometimes objectionably. Yet teachers undoubtedly managed these educational screenings in such a way that the norms of the classroom were imported to the theater, so the use of film in this context expressed a combination of two institutional frameworks or two sets of institutional or disciplinary norms: commercial and educational.

On the other side, historical agents such as Lemke, who worked to make film fit into educational norms, left on these experiences the impression of their specific sculpting, tinkering, or negotiating. In this case, Lemke’s specific adjustments in part consisted of his arrangement of the films and discussion into a program designed around Herbartian principles. A discursive capitulation to disciplinary norms in education, this move shaped the experience in a local, perhaps fleeting way, in that the audience might have been only vaguely aware of this justification, so its impression was likely not durable. Still, the effort itself led to the acceptance of film as a tool that could be managed, as opposed to the earlier conception of film as totally unsuitable. This shift did indeed leave a lasting impression on the practices of educational film in Germany. Norms change, as do specific, local adjustments to them, which then incrementally extend or change the norms (or not). This historiographic approach sees film as an adaptable material, the form of which at any given historical moment expresses these norms and adjustments.

Yet if form matters, how does it matter? How can an understanding of film form contribute to an understanding of broader historical trends, or vice versa? Usually film historians illustrate this relationship through close analyses of individual films, the best of which present analogies between textual and historical structures, as in Tom Gunning’s essay on D. W. Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator (1909), which demonstrates the homology between the mise-en-scène, the editing patterns of the film, and the emergence of new gender roles and modern forms of transportation and communication.³ In this approach, the historian illuminates film style and historical moment simultaneously—each expresses the other. I advocate, in addition to this method, an approach that similarly demonstrates the mutually expressive relationship between disciplinary practice, ideals, and agendas, on one hand, and film form broadly speaking, on the other, which could include the specific quality of the image, the structure of the technology at the time, or the experience itself. The particular style of, say, a research film could be pertinent, but the way the technology is used in a research setting might reveal more substantial and specific patterns that help to explain the medium’s use in that particular laboratory at that particular time. The style of the research film could also express these patterns of use, so that is an area worthy of further investigation, but this project has stressed the experts’ own understanding of film form expressed through their patterns of use.

We must acknowledge, however, that all of these aspects of film form—style, technology, image, experience, and so on—are unstable and subjective; they change shape with the historical moment, of course, but what counts most as “form” depends on what the experts take it to be. This historiographic approach acknowledges that disciplines may see film differently than we do. Ludwig Braun, for example, saw motion pictures as an extension of serial photography; he therefore understood the technology as an image generator that could be best used to examine minute differences in the rhythmic function of rapidly moving objects such as the heart. In this case, Braun took film form to be a series of slightly different exposures, and the specific photographic quality of the image, for example, counted very little for his task. (If the technology could have generated successive line drawings of the heart just as easily, he would have been thrilled.) He took what he needed and left the rest. This unspoken selection or emphasis usually follows disciplinary logic, so this understanding of form—of what film is—also expresses that logic; form and discipline illuminate each other. Braun understood film to be “incremental exposures,” which expressed the serial logic in scientific and especially medical thinking at the time. The analogy between “incremental exposure” and “series” has explanatory power, because it demonstrates—more powerfully than, for example, just listing advantages and disadvantages—why a tool would be useful. If the form of a wrench is crucial to understanding why it works on a bolt, the relationship between film and any given discipline is not so straightforward; analogies and correspondences can help us see how film fit an agenda.

So this historiographic strategy differs from the usual, first, in its emphasis on patterns of use rather than style. Style is important and can be helpful, but patterns of use apply to adjustments to the technology, the circulation of images, the multiple function of any given film, or the role of moving images in a selection of representational options—a partial list at best. Patterns of use provide many more points of contact with the organization’s goals or the discipline’s logic than style alone. An analysis of style helps us understand, for example, the conventions within a given genre, which is good, but it limits us to the genre, when patterns of use take us into the heart of the discipline itself. Second, this approach emphasizes the notion of film form that arises from patterns of use. These patterns of use make sense only against a background of disciplinary problems and solutions. So the third way that this approach differs from the norm is in its emphasis on the disciplinary (as opposed to economic, technological, biographical, or aesthetic) context. This requires, as I have noted, some significant immersion into those contexts, but we would be rewarded with a deeper understanding of why this or that media technology mattered to the discipline. Having this insight into a discipline also helps us, as film historians, better argue the significance of film for that discipline. If we are determined to venture into the realm of the nontheatrical film, and we are convinced of its importance for this or that task, then we cannot back away from the possibility that film had some impact on the way an organization, community, or even discipline understood its agenda, its object, and itself. Having expertise in the discipline helps make the case for the significance of moving images on collective “thought styles,” in Ludwik Fleck’s phrase, of which disciplinary logic is one expression.⁴

This project has emphasized the correspondence between material and discipline. If we are interested in the mechanism of cultural legitimacy—the process by which a new technology or form comes to be accepted by a group or discipline—then this approach makes sense: any new form is not only understood in terms of what came before, but it must play by the rules set out by the discipline. The rules of evidence or legibility in the physical sciences, for example, are to a certain extent malleable or accommodating to new technologies, but if the technology does not offer representational solutions at least somewhat familiar with more or less agreed-upon conventions, it will not be considered useful.⁵ But if we are to explain not just legitimacy and acceptance but also the extent to which the technology transforms the discipline, then we must also consider the strangeness or difference the new form brings to the endeavor. This strangeness evokes wonder, as we have seen in the revelationist film theory of Balázs, Epstein, or Benjamin, or in the descriptions of researchers as they gaze into the microscopic sublime.⁶ This wonder may propel agents to replicate the experiments or experiences; it may reveal new vistas that shift the discipline’s horizon of experience. In other words, the strangeness of the experience of film might have acted as an engine of change in a given discipline. Cell biology provides a good example; descriptions of cell “behavior”—and the conclusions about cell life that rested upon such observations—could not have existed without the temporal manipulations afforded by time-lapse cinematography.⁷ That is, the descriptions and therefore understanding of cell behavior depended on the technology’s ability to match one timescale—that of the cells—to another, our human perception. Cell biologists really saw life through film’s eye, and it changed what they thought life was; it changed their “thought style.” The strangeness of film transformed biological conceptions of life, even if only slightly.

Yet these and other transformations are incremental, not revolutionary. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s idea of “differential reproduction” in experimental method is pertinent here; experiments are designed to be reproducible, to be sure, but that is not so important as the slight difference that each experiment affords. The difference between what is known and what is unexpected is usually only slight, but the gap between them is the real goal and product of experimental practice, because that is the space where new knowledge is produced.⁸ Likewise, the use of a new media technology as a tool is almost always experimental, and the difference between current understanding and the new view it provides is sometimes a surprisingly productive opening. The use of this tool is an attempt to solve a problem, and we can see over the course of the disciplinary appropriations of this tool a series of linked solutions to a common problem—like a series of experiments. Looking at the history of the disciplinary uses of film helps us to understand its role in a larger series of linked solutions and to see film’s incremental effect on the problem itself. It is as if Braun’s method of comparing minute differences in his incremental exposures and then projecting them to get a sense of the whole in its duration could be applied to historiography: we note the slight differences in applications of film technology in a discipline, but we are able to see the cumulative effect only by running the series through the flip book of history, so to speak. Or, to apply a biological metaphor, film technology could be the mutant gene in the disciplinary organism, the true effects of which we notice only after a generation or two.⁹

So this project has envisioned film’s dispositif—its technology, its image, its audience—as material in a grand, cross-disciplinary series of experiments. Experts shaped this “material,” adjusted or trimmed it to fit a set of needs, but the crucial difference that film provided to these disciplines came from its resistance to these efforts. The material was not infinitely malleable. The technology could be made to do only so much, the image was only so informative, the audience only so agreeable. We see this resistance in the strangeness of the view to the experts, but also in its inappropriate fit; some disciplines, such as geology, found little use for it. We see it also in the excess or residue, such as pleasure or thrill, which spills sloppily over the disciplinary framework; pleasure continues to be difficult to fit even into aesthetics. Expert vision wrestles with this remainder, even as it depends on it. Aesthetic contemplation, for example, is at once surrender and mastery; the oscillation between them relies on the irreducibly material, sensual, and singular character of the artwork, which is the basis for immersion and pleasure, but also the ground of its resistance to rationalization and abstraction—both of which are also part of the aesthetic experience.¹⁰ Similarly, the filmic dispositif as “material” partly resists expert efforts to sculpt it; this is especially true when it comes to the audience, which has been subject to much rationalization and abstraction. The “shape of spectatorship” in this regard was not just the negative outline or boundary with expert vision but the product of expert modeling. The form spectatorship has taken depended on the discursive and practical molding of experts but also on the resistance of the audience and cinema itself to this kneading and on the spectators’ willingness to take the experiment to places beyond which they were prodded.