RECURSION S

RECURSIONS
Ute Holl’s Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics discusses the cinematic apparatus
as an interface between mind and machine. Rather than simply a medium
for representing altered states, cinema is considered as a cultural technique of
trance. Close investigations of the Soviet avant-garde connect Dziga Vertov
to Russian psycho-reflexology and V.M. Bechterev’s theory of trance.
The anthropological tradition of cine-trance is viewed in the context of
feed-back, as conceived of by Jean Rouch, as well as of the New American
Cinema, following Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson, in conceptualizing the
reiteration of time, space, and movement, to prove that feedback is the basic

UTE HOLL
strategy of cinematic transformations. Holl’s influential stance suggests that
cybernetics is not only an instrument of control, but that the homeostatic
forces of film are steps to an ecology of the cinematic mind that finds it
origins in the nineteenth-century laboratory techniques of measuring the
senses, movement and behaviour.

Ute Holl is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

C I N E MA T R A N C E & C YB E R N E T I C S
“Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics will change the way you see the cinema’s past. Through an
impressive synthesis of psychology, cybernetics, anthropology and the cinematic arts, it
reveals how cinema was born in the scientific laboratory and grew into a machine for
controlling, but also emancipating, mental life. Providing a powerful historical account that
brings Maya Deren in contact with Vladimir Bekhterev, amongst others, the book shows
how cinema ultimately came to shape us into its own image.”
‒ Film and screen scholar Pasi Väliaho, who has written a new Preface to the English edition
of Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics.

Amsterdam
AUP.nl University
9 789089 646682 Press RECURSIONS
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics
The book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural
Techniques provides a platform for cuttingedge research in the field of media
culture studies with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology
and the materialities of communication. The series aims to be an internationally
significant and exciting opening into emerging ideas in media theory ranging
from media materialism and hardware-oriented studies to ecology, the post-
human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contributions to media
archaeology. The series revolves around key themes:
– The material underpinning of media theory
– New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy
– Studies in cultural techniques

These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international
media studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge
formations and new materialities expressed through biological and technological
developments are changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also
interested in the mediatic conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing
them as media theory.

Editorial Board
– Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton)
– Anna Tuschling (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum)
– Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia)
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics

Ute Holl

Amsterdam University Press

Originally published as: Ute Holl, Kino, Trance und Kybernetik © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose,
Berlin 2002
Translation: Daniel Hendrickson

Cover design: Herbert Müller

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.

isbn 978 90 8964 668 2

e-isbn 978 90 4852 348 1
doi 10.5117/9789089646682
nur 670

Creative Commons License CC BY NC

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0)

U. Holl / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam, 2017

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
 Table of Contents

Foreword: Fade into Black by Pasi Valiaho 7

Preface to the English Translation of Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics 13

In the Beginning 19

Part I
1. Cinema 23
2. Cybernetics 33
3. Knots 39
4. To Whom it May Concern 47

Part II
1. Discretions 57
2. Depersonalizations 77
3. Deviations 117
4. Compressions 137

Part III
1. Mental Apparatuses 161
2. Psycho-Motor Activity 187
3. Psycho-Drama 197
4. Psycho-Technology 205
5. Psycho-Reflexology 219

Part IV
1. The Truth Won by Means of Film 249

Part V
1. After All: Return to Receiver 281

Notes 285
Bibliography 309
Index 321
 Foreword
Fade into Black

Pasi Valiaho
Goldsmiths, University of London

Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics is driven by a refrain. The paths and forks
of the book’s reflections always return to a primal scene, a “ritual”, as Ute
Holl calls it, which keeps appearing in different guises: the “passage into the
darkness of the cinema” that begins as soon as the lights of the movie theatre
are turned off. This primal scene retains its familiarity to us. Despite the fact
that televisual screens have rendered their occurrence as virtually superflu-
ous, we can still remember and experience those anticipatory moments of
becoming enveloped into the movie theatre’s artificial blackness before the
film projector begins its duty of casting movements of light and shadow
on the screen’s blank surface. Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics reminds
us how this “passage” bears particular anthropological significance. The
movie theatre’s darkness is one in which the faces of our loved ones become
covered with the strangest masks, and we grow either closer or more alien
to ourselves.
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics can be read as a detective story: Who
turned off the lights? What happened when the darkness fell for the first
time? The book engages a range of actors from the later 19th century and
the first part of the 20th to divulge the necessary clues. Readers should be
notified, however, that its protagonists are not the usual (male) figures of
early cinema and the Hollywood movie industry but instead scientists as
well as scientific and experimental filmmakers. Rather than the Lumière
brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, the Wachowskis, etc., the
dramatis personae that for the most part populate the following pages
include Maya Deren, Jean Painlevé, Jean Rouch and Dziga Vertov, in addition
to numerous (more or less well-known) figures from the history of the life
sciences as well as anthropology, including Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson, Etienne-Jules Marey, Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz,
Vladimir Bekhterev, and the Harvard psychologist of German origin, Hugo
Münsterberg, who published one of the first theoretical studies on the
“photoplay” in 1917. Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics takes the reader to
a journey that spans a range of different sets (seen as if from a bird’s eye
view, through a virtual camera flying over different locations): Bali (where
8 Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Mead and Bateson did their fieldwork with film cameras and typewriters),
Albert Londe’s photographic studio at the Salpêtrière in Paris, Marey’s
physiological station in Bois de Boulogne, the international symposium
of neuroscientists and psychologists at Wittenberg College, Ohio, in 1927,
Deren’s house in Los Angeles where Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was
filmed…
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics in a sense rewrites film history. Its stakes
are nothing less. But instead of debating the historical record (who did what
when), the book’s implicit concern is on how these questions should be
posed. Rather than merely telling stories about how cinema was conceived
by various inventors and has been used by artists and entrepreneurs, Cin-
ema, Trance and Cybernetics is preoccupied by what the medium of film
has done to us, how the cinema has changed us. That is what the mystery of
darkness is about. The book thus refocuses the lens through which we look
at the past; it adjusts our conceptual understandings and approaches. Under
Holl’s scrutiny, cinema doesn’t appear as a medium of mass entertainment,
not even as a particular aesthetic form per se, but above all as an “anthropo-
logical machine” the stakes of which involve articulations between human
and animal, conscious and unconscious, or speaking being and living being.1
Above all, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics explores the film medium’s place
and meaning in the scientific and technological upheavals of the twentieth
century that came to radically reshape our composition.
A key thread of the book’s narrative fabric is to show how cinema was
born out of the spirit of the experimental scientific laboratories developed in
the nineteenth century. “The unknown avant-gardists of film history”, Holl’s
cogent observation goes, were in fact “natural scientists”. It was the forerun-
ners of modern neurology, physiology and psychology that first came up with
techniques of probing perception and consciousness, and above all the “li-
men” that separates conscious mental states from non-conscious ones. After
initial experimentations in the lab, commercial and artistic applications,
which capitalized on cinema’s liminal psychology, followed. Jean-Martin
Charcot’s and Albert Londe’s visualizations of the movements of so-called
hysterical female bodies at the Salpêtrière in Paris, for instance, provided
the breeding ground for Lillian Gish’s performances in David Griffith’s films.
Gustav Fechner’s three-year state of trance, which the founder of psychophy­
sics induced himself into with excessive experiments on afterimage effects,
amongst other things, might just as well describe the somnambulists flocking
to watch Griffith’s dramas, or alternatively today’s video game players.
Throughout Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics one can hear the echo
of Friedrich Kittler writing in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (originally
Foreword 9

published in 1986 in Germany): “Since its inception, cinema has been the
manipulation of optic nerves and their time”.2 Kittler’s insight was to show
how technological recordings and reproductions of acoustic and optical
“data” have critically changed the “state of reality.”3 For Holl, likewise,
cinema performs an experiment on our being; on what can be sensed, im-
agined and dreamt. Conceptually, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics is firmly
grounded in the German-speaking tradition of media and film theory,
and proves what this tradition of scholarship is capable of doing with its
vigorous mixing of philosophical thought with a sustained inquiry into and
critique of cinematic (and other medial) modes of being and thinking. Film
comes here across as a cultural technique the research of which, to borrow
Bernhard Siegert’s words, “amounts to an epistemological engagement with
the medial conditions of whatever lays claim to reality.”4
Cinema had its throne as the medium of the 20th century capable of
dictating how we are able to perceive and conceptualize the world. Cinema
had the power, to paraphrase Kittler’s words, to “define what really is.”5 Holl
investigates this power by deftly drawing conceptual parallels between
cinema and cybernetics, parallels that have largely remained to be explored,
one might surmise, simply because they perhaps aren’t the most obvious.
Whilst cinema, at first sight at least, comes across as a technology of the
industrial era, belonging to the family of mechanical apparatuses that
includes the steam engine, the bicycle, the train, and the clock, cybernet-
ics is an invention of the Second World War, of (electronic) signals and
computation. Whilst cinema was originally conceived by the Scientist and
then quickly appropriated by the Capitalist, cybernetics belonged in its very
beginnings to the General, that is to say, to the military-industrial complex.
Norbert Wiener’s “anti-aircraft predictor” (built in 1948) was one of the first
incorporations of the cybernetic idea of modeling and controlling a system’s
behavior and particularly its future states. How does this compare with film,
a technology we normally associate with storage rather than anticipation,
pure recording rather than feedback? The common denominator can be
found in the etymology of “cybernetics”, that is to say, governance and
control. Both cinematic and cybernetic systems link living beings with
machines and in so doing administer and regulate human cognition and
behavior, or in other words, the movements of bodies and souls. Both
“feedback” into our nervous systems and brains. “The cinema is thus a good
place to examine cybernetic processes, since the links between nervous
systems and apparatuses have constantly been synchronized, aligned, and
optimized in its history”, Holl writes. Synchronization and optimization of
the senses and psychic life coupled with the mechanics of the film apparatus
10  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

– this is the operating function of the feedback loop between the spectator
and the screen that is established in the dark of the movie theatre.
Cinema’s power, then, is not merely located in the contents of its imagery,
however moving, luring or explicit, but in the exchanges, repetitions and
relays that take place between the movie machine and our nervous sys-
tems and brains. Cinema is a machine for controlling and regulating our
impulses, sensations and emotions. But above all – and this is the point
that recurs in Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics like Karl Marx’s ghost in our
neoliberal nightmares – cinema is a machine for shifting and displacing
the consciousness, and for “inducing trance”. Combining film experience
with the trance state is the second key innovation of the book, in addition
to refocusing on cinema through the lens of cybernetics.
“Trance”, Holl writes, “as a dissolution or diversion of the conscious-
ness under the impact of certain technologies, is the gap in film theory.”
Much ink has indeed been spilled on the unconscious mechanisms of film
spectatorship; on the dream state induced by film viewing, on the mirror-
ings, misrecognitions and identifications that arguably take place in the
movie theatre’s darkness. In the film theory of the 1970s, the moviegoer was
even reduced to an infantile of sorts. Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics does
point towards a similar kind of loss of control in the spectator’s position
as soon as the lights in the movie theatre are turned off. But rather than
mere regression, the idea of trance designates here how the spectator’s
self-regulatory system yields control to external forces – the sheer force
of movement, light and shadow on the silver screen taking charge of inner
physiological and mental events. This means the emergence of alternative
bodily and psychic states, affective and emotional conditions, within the
individual. In this respect, Holl’s analysis can be seen to converge with
recent attempts at re-conceptualizing cinematic subjectivity, which seek
analogies between the filmic apparatus and hypnosis in particular.6 Here,
the power of cinema is considered in terms of suggestion, even possession,
which opens our minds, not simply to external control and machination,
but also to new dispositions and capacities.
In this respect, trance indeed appears in what follows as an ambiguous
concept, a concept with at least two faces. On one side, it is a question of
“command and control” – the movie machine’s steering of our nerves and
psyches like the God sending orders by means of rays of light to Daniel Paul
Schreber (the [in]famous case of paranoia “treated” by the psychiatrist Paul
Flechsig and theorized by Sigmund Freud, and later Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari). But on the other side, trance gestures towards ruptures, erratic
tics and fits within the dominant order of things.
Foreword 11

We might get a better grasp of this ambiguity by taking a brief look at the
Hauka movement, which began among the Songhay people in Niger in 1925
and was popularized for the Western audience in Jean Rouch’s ethnographic
film The Mad Masters (Les Maîtres fous, 1955). Rouch’s cinematic works play
a key role in Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, as they, according to Holl,
tinker “with the technology until new imaginary spaces start to emerge,
in which mental states are realized that are non-integrated.” The Hauka is
a famous example of such “non-integrated” as well as ambivalent states.
The participants would dance and become possessed by the spirits of their
European colonizers – military officers, administrators, governors, and so
on. The proceedings would be physically intense, as Paul Stoller describes:

The pulsations ripple like waves through Istambula’s [a Hauka medium’s]

body. He extends his arms and spins around like a top. He grunts and
howls. Saliva flows like lava from his mouth. Barbara Mossi and the
general join him. The tempo is quite fast; the beat is intense. One by
one the Hauka throw their bodies in the air, landing on their backs with
thumps.7

Possession means here complex acts of mimicry whereby Hauka medi-

ums would not only imitate the gestures, fashions and manners of their
“civilized” colonizers, but also the ways in which the colonizers aped the
“savage” colonized. It means dialectical play with identities at an uncertain
threshold between them and us, self and other. Michael Taussig calls this
kind of performance “mimetic excess” – excess whereby the hegemonies of
domination can at least momentarily be suspended, perhaps even annulled,
and which provides “opportunity to live subjunctively as neither subject
nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time.”8
Could cinema be capable of holding such subjunctive and excessive
powers? Can it give rise to spectators who are “possessed” instead of being
“possessive”? Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics will not give readers any
definitive answers; who could? But by probing into the cinema’s and our
psyche’s liminal states, the book makes a strong case for reconceptualizing
what the politics of cinema can mean. This is a gesture that several of the
book’s German companions have shunned – their inquiries into how dif-
ferentiations and separations are brought about often forgets the question
as to how orders of things could be changed, that is to say, the question of
political agency. Simultaneously, it avoids reiterating the well-rehearsed
critiques of “ideologies” and “representations” so dear to Anglo-American
scholarship. Liminal states hold the germ of excess and transgression – this
12  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

is how we might encapsulate the “surrealist” politics of cinema that Cinema,

Trance and Cybernetics outlines.
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics shows that the passage into the darkness
of the movies definitely compels us to let foreigners in. When the film ends,
the lights are turned on, and we hurry towards the exit, the spirits of the
silver screen gradually leave us, dissipating into the air. But during those
90 minutes or so, we have, potentially at least, been possessed to mime
ourselves and the world around us differently. Thanks to the movies, the
spirits will always be here, with us, in us.

Notes

1. I borrow the notion of “anthropological machine” from Giorgio Agamben;

see especially Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33-38.
2. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115.
3. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 3.
4. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Ar-
ticulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015), 14. See also the “Cultural Techniques” special issue
of Theory, Culture & Society, ed. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Ilinca Iurascu &
Jussi Parikka, vol. 30, no. 6 (2013).
5. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 3.
6. See Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités
(Paris: P.O.L., 2009); Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotics Crimes, Cor-
porate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008).
7. Paul Stoller, “Embodying Colonial Memories”, American Anthropologist 96,
no. 3 (1994): 634-648, quotation on 635.
8. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 255.
 Preface to the English Translation of
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics

Returning to Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, my study on cinema as a

cultural technique of trance and transformation, on the occasion of its
translation into English some fifteen years after the German edition, I
was surprised to discover that the book exposed new and unexpected
impacts in a fundamentally changed media environment. Under the new
circumstance it has, as it were, become a new book. The study’s research
into historical relations of anthropology, psycho-physiological studies and
experimental film culture produces unforeseen ramifications in the light of
recent developments in media technology and media practices. Therefore
it will definitely contribute to the fields of media theory and specifically
cinema studies, albeit differently than when it was first published.
Cinematic perception, in fusing single frames into an imaginary continu-
ity of moving images had, according to Marshall McLuhan’s diagnosis, been
a useful vehicle to travel from the mechanical Gutenberg Galaxy into the
20th century’s Turing Universe of an electronically composed perceptive
continuum. In the current condition of digital data processing, cinematic
perception might turn out to be even more indispensable in the attempt to
come to terms with the reorganisation of our senses under a 21th century’s
regime of electronic media. The algorithms that organize data for moving
images cannot be perceived for themselves, but only in what we perceive
as effects, which appear due to transformations of streams of data between
electronic devices. Since cinema itself has once and for all left its classical
setting in movie theatres to spread across electronic meshes and across
individual or shared screens, its specific entanglement of physical cultures
and wishful hallucination returns as an issue with ever more insistence.
Former meshes of the afternoon have turned into omnipresent meshes,
into a permanent mode of trance, as it were, disorganizing and disturbing
what we perceive as presence or absence.
It is only now, since technical devices, cultural bodies and physical
behaviour have progressively merged, that my book’s basic argument has
become common experience: The act of cinematic perception connects a
whole set of elements, technical as well as cultural, topological as well as
historical orders, so that the filmic image can never be located as such but
only considered in its effects, on different screens, in different viewing
cultures. The book Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics proposes a genealogy
14  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of cinematic experience which, as I see it, turns out to explain even more
of the ambivalences of communication and control in social and personal
media today than it had done for the critique of the old mass medium
which was still the dominant type of viewing film’s when the book was
written. Rereading my study I was astonished to find that in the light of
the latest developments of technical devices its assumption that technical
media carry the threat of social trance and oblivion, while also providing
perspectives of cultural transgression and the transformation of alterities
proved sustainable. Or rather, it seems much clearer today than when
Hollywood’s model of the cinema was considered classical, its apparatus
homogeneous and its impact compulsory. In today’s cinematic devices
from personal pads to gigantic screens on urban architecture, the issue
of feed-back, of senso-motoric integration or disintegration of bodies and
screens – or cameras for that matter – is obvious to every user. The history
of the cinema as an interface is a central thread in the book.
Venturing back into the psycho-physiological experiments of the 19th
century, I set out to discover a common history of technique, laboratory
studies of behaviour and desire. In this sense, the book seemed risky in a
methodological perspective. In a fortuitous encounter of luck and serendip-
ity I found these fields connected in the work of experimental filmmaker
Maya Deren. Following her biographical cues, I traced the genealogy of
cinematic experiments into the psycho-physiological laboratories of the
19th century and discovered close bonds between scientific experiments
of psychologists and scientists on the one hand and the studies of trance,
possession and altered states on the other. At their interface, major and
resilient filmic topoi emerged, the mad scientist as well as the hysteric
clairvoyant. Cinema’s history in the field between avant-garde film, 19th
century experimental psychology and anthropology had been discussed
before. But a study on trance and feed-back in cinematic perception also
shows that not only plots and content derive from cinema’s prehistory, but
also their technical adaptations to the minds of the 20th and now, differently,
to the minds of the 21st century.
Maya Deren’s work does not only link the fields of psychology, anthropol-
ogy and experimental cultures, she was also acquainted with a concealed
network of counter-psychological thought. Through her personal relations
to Soviet Psychology I discovered the strange networks of knowledge
established by Vladimir Bekhterev, who turned out to link experimental
practices connected to names like Paul Flechsig, Jean-Martin Charcot,
Dziga Vertov, Walter Cannon and finally Jean Rouch and Gregory Bateson.
Cybernetics as historically established feed-back relations or interfaces
Preface to the English Tr ansl ation of Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics 15

between the nerves, the senses and the minds on the one hand and technical
devices on the other – a context concisely called cinema-eye, kino glaz by
Vertov –, relations that at the same time escape the conscious perception
of users seems to be a very old project, which is taking possession of newer
cultures of seeing and listening only now, in the presence of personal and
personalized screens.
Maya Deren’s invitation to follow the Voudoun divinity Legba into the
darkness and towards the cross-roads of cultures and ecstatic practices also
led my studies. The path of research has thus lead from cinema’s darkness
into the flicker-lit set-ups of laboratories and to utopian and dystopian
models of technical devices connecting instruments and physical bodies. To
day, the darkness of the movie houses is only a memory of a trance technique
which is about to disappear. When writing the book, gramophone, film
and typewriter had just been replaced by Walkman, digital video formats
and personal computers. The culture of I-pods, smart phones and pads as
well as of streamed data which form into personal audio-visual viewing
dispositives was just on the verge of breakthrough. Once they reached their
subjects, they increasingly reduced them to consumers. Deren’s call for ap-
propriating technical skills and devices in the service of revolutionary and
ritual cultural forms seems to be right on time now. Gregory Bateson had
hoped that the notion of gods meant nothing far out but the implementation
of ecological thought against the competition of capitalist society. I kept
returning to this hope in the presence of ever more drastic exploitation of
people and continents. What sort of hybrids we have become under the rule
of the new and colder race of gods – as William James had predicted – will
have to be inferred as extension of the book at hand.
As opposed to the studies of the Canadian School of media theory,
contemporaries of Maya Deren she had not really taken notice of, Deren’s
thinking was concerned with syncretistic and unknown cultures rather
than with the decline of a Western world of literacy. And compared to
the Canadian School her work was inspired by feminist attitudes. Film
studies, and specifically in Germany, insisted that cinema is a form of
thinking liberated from the obligation of assuming philosophy’s single and
disembodied spirit – Geist – in favour of the multiplicity of heterogeneous
forms combining different views, gazes, bodies and minds. In this feminist
culture of film studies to which my research owes its foundations, Deren’s
work provided crucial forms of knowledge. This farewell to the formation
of a singular form of mind will also have to be reconsidered in the presence
of cinemas on multiple screens.
16  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Now that feed-back loops between technical devices, cultural and

physical bodies have merged as an every day experience, the book’s basic
assumption does not seem as risky as it used to: The film’s images are not
projected elsewhere, but come into effect in the cultural conduct of societies
as well as of single subjects. The ontology of the filmic image has to be
studied in our own forms of behaviour. As subjects, we prove to be interfaces
of historical and cultural techniques as well as of discourses of sanity and
legality as they are modified by the historical modes of cinema’s aesthetic
procedures. But even in the presence electronic data processing, cinematic
experience will allow us to reflect, perceive and negotiate our culturally
hybrid status. In terms of media theory this implies that it is not the search
for simple materiality which will prevent us from following endless routines
of hermeneutic odysseys, but the perception of historical relations between
material and cultural techniques, conscious or unconscious.
Apart from all such new and unforeseen impacts, rereading Cinema,
Trance and Cybernetics now had another effect which might qualify as
a central concern of media studies’ methodology: Wistfully I remember
the audacious research and writing in the wake of Friedrich Kittler’s
provocations, with or against the vortex of his own work. This is true for
interdisciplinary conjunctions and conjectures as well as for political con-
clusions related to strategies of subjectivation in technical environments.
These approaches once were alien to academic studies. Even if I thought of
my research as proceeding in a strictly discourse-analytically structured
manner, it was at the time considered risky and rejected by classical Ger-
man film studies. Today, this work is read as basic research into cinema’s
aesthetic history. If nothing else then, the book is a good example of the
pleasure that is connected to venturing into a field that is not academically
established, or the excitement of inventing a new set of questions. Thus,
the forms of research which are now called New German Media Theory
were mostly establish at the crossroads of existing discourse networks
and mostly at night. It was about exposing interrelations of disciplines and
cultural practices, deliberately without being caught in the trap of technical
determinism. This might, after all, qualify as the central concern of media
studies’ methodology.
If there was an initial goal of the text at all it would have been to describe
cinema as an experience of producing new perceptual forms and habits, new
forms of conduct and behaviour which would allow for social homeostasis
– call it peace or not – to be realized beyond disciplinary means. While
German media theory seems to be inevitably linked to technologies of war
and disciplinary data processing, my studies were at the time very much
Preface to the English Tr ansl ation of Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics 17

motivated by the will to find inventive and emancipative forms of media

practices, to discover new forms of communication capable of resisting the
regimes of control, and to reconstruct a discourse history of the unconscious
in cinema, which would expose the tiny messianic force of an equilibrium
between human beings and apparatus. It is here that the book seems have
developed its most antiquated facet.
The book is itself a node in a larger network of studies, and while it is im-
possible to name all the names necessary to explain its edges, there are some
that have specifically formed its meshes: the feminist film theory of Heide
Schlüpmann, and Friedrich Kittler’s media theory, two antagonistic posi-
tions which become really explosive if their forces are joint. Jutta Hercher
introduced me to Maya Deren’s cinema work. Bernhard Siegert rescued
the research project early on dropping terms like cultural techniques. That
the book exists at all is owed to Rike Felka and Erich Brinkmann who took
the risk of publishing it in the first place, and to the editors of the New
German Media Theory who chose it to become part of a great series. That
the English version exists at all is owed to the brilliance and elegance of
Daniel Hendrickson, himself a man at the cross-roads of the arts.
I am extremely happy that the book will be published towards the 100th
anniversary of Maya Deren who was born on April 29th, 1917.
Legba – life – is the link between the visible mortal world and the invisible immortal realms. He is the
means and avenue of communication between them. (…) Since he stands at the cross-roads, he has
access to the worlds on either side, as if he were on both sides of the mirror surface which separates
them. – Maya Deren, 1953. In: Divine Horsemen. The Living Gods of Haiti, New York 1973. p. 97.

La Cybernétique n’est pas une Super-Science, le cybernéticien n’est pas un Super-Savant: ce sera
bientôt un spécialiste comme les autres, installé en un carrefour, mais non pas pour faire la loi. –
G.Th. Guilbaud 1957. In: What is Cybernetics?, London 1959. p. 28.
 In the Beginning

In the beginning is the darkening. Indiscernible. Drifting into twilight.

Attention gets lost in the space. Darkness comes back through the depths.
Shapes and boundaries blur. Inside and outside are indistinguishable.
Desert, void, blind land between sundown and night. Like closing the
eyes. Departing from oneself. Back to the beginning. And then radiating,
shimmering, brightness, reflections, flickering. The trickling of light.
Effecting the passage into the darkness of the cinema in such a way that
the spectator does not perceive it, this is the art of the film projector. The
ritual is prescribed, the use of light and sound in temporal succession is
fixed. First the footlights and the stage lights are dimmed, then the light
in the audience is brought down and slowly the first curtain is opened – at
the same time the projectionist in the booth gets the film rolling, turns
on the lamps, opens the shutter, and turns on the sound, which fades in to
replace the music in the theater. The projection beam shoots through the
room, the studio credits become visible, which is synchronized to transition
in the waves of the receding curtain. “The spectator should never see the
bare screen. This is why the first decorative curtain, synchronized with
the architecture of the space, only opens as the projection starts, revealing
the action of the film.” (Hochmeister, Handbuch für den Filmvorführer) The
technical instruction means that the picture in the cinema, the action, the
projected emotions are not allowed any fixed location.
Part I
1. Cinema

The history of experimental research in technological devices and how

these devices have transformed human perceptual structures provides
a way to look at cinema as a laboratory for the feelings and sensations
provoked by technology, which form the basis of all histories of the screen.
Film critics, even without treating the apparatus as a fetish in their analy-
ses, have examined the technical aspects of the cinema as objective and
describable data striving to become a form of expression that can no longer,
or not yet, be called language, and that can only manage to claim syntax
and grammar for short historical episodes. But placing the cinema in the
history of devices and technologies that were developed in psychological
laboratories since the middle of the nineteenth century, devices that were
used to measure and simulate mental functions and emotions, also means
understanding cinema as an illustrative system that expresses and alters
perception and the corresponding nerve-psychological relations in bod-
ies as it transmits its impulses. Viewed from this perspective, the various
faculties of cinematic technology – recording, editing, and projection – can
also be seen in a different and unfamiliar light: as opportunities to place
spectators, the subjects of perception, into new relations, in which they only
consciously find themselves after they have already given themselves over
to the transformation caused by this cinematically constructed perceptual
relation.
Forms of space, time, and motion, the basic forms of perception, are just
as relative in the technology of cinema as is subjectivity in the cinema,
the self-perception through images. The cinematic apparatus produces
a special kind of trance in which we are distracted, at least for the dura-
tion of a screening, from our own routines and in which all we can do is
submissively follow our consciousness – or we have to leave the space of
the cinema, but this goes far beyond what constantly appears in Godard
as “Entrance”, “En trance.” Through the single images stored on celluloid,
through the flickering between light and darkness in the projection, cinema
is aligned with the nervous functions as a series of impulses. If we view
cinema as a psycho-physical machine, this not only shows images to be
rhythmic impulses, it also shows that certain brain functions can be trig-
gered by means of cinematic tricks. All these reactions, which take place
underneath the level of perception that is capable of conscious decision, can
best be described, following Walter Benjamin, as reactions of the optical
unconscious.
24  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

In a psychological history of cinema, reflexology appears as the first

great vision of an external aggregate that neurophysiologically gathers and
transmits human feelings. Reflexology thus becomes a vision of exchang-
ing experience, collectively and reversibly – possibly also as collectively
regulating human emotions, sensations, and experiences with apparatuses.
In the cinema, at least as we know it, this vision appears under capitalist,
hierarchical, monolithic, and fatuous conditions, and it is not possible to
speak of a general and reciprocal exchange of forms of perception. Cin-
ema production, aside from small islands of cultural sponsorship, video
networks, and ecstatic collective super8 evenings, is subject to industrial
systems of production and utilization. It is meant to make money and
secure privileges, and so no one is surprised that almost all Hollywood
films that thematize the recording and transfer of experience represent
this technology – and thus in the end also their own – as a vision of horror.
Even in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, in which a cerebral “film” can even
serve to explain away acts of violence, mental images are merely treated
as a bad drug.
The history of chronometric psychology and psycho-motor activity as
a history of bodily dispositifs developed in connection with the political
strategies of the nineteenth century continues in the cinema with its
fascination for all impulses and movements. In dance and as in trance, we
are enthralled by the illusion of movement itself, which appears as an effect
of on-screen technology, long before any concrete network of meaning has
been construed. If the technology of cinema is examined under this aspect,
then it is not as the simple paranoia of the moviegoer, but as a double one.
In the cinema, in which our interiority is interconnected with an exterior
apparatus, what we see is also our own shuddering and twitching, according
to the set up, according to the film genre. What we call our own feelings
can be objectified and adapted to the technological state of time in cinema.
Camera and editing techniques accelerate our bodies’ own frequencies of
shivering, vibrating, and flickering. So a film like Jan de Bont’s Speed can
function as an update of the old, archaic desire for motion perception. Or
a film like Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves can create the most ancient,
almost Augustinian desire to confront the Eternal Thou of God through
optical traps by altering perspectives and viewpoints, even before the mean-
ing and the motif of the victim have become established as the logic of the
film narrative. And Matrix catapults us into non-human synchronies of new
spatio-temporal coordinates, in which divine omni-vision is intertwined
with the compound vision of insects. The monsters and the monstrances
in cinema are our own eyes.
Cinema 25

If film were less of a plutocratic production form, nerves and film tech-
nology could enter into reciprocal communication, and what Vladimir
Mikhailovich Bekhterev maintained for nervous activity in general could
also be applied to the cinema: that not only does the human being have
to adapt psycho-physically, but that there is “also a modification of the
external conditions, that is, an ancillary adaptation of external conditions
to internal conditions.”1
With the technological unconscious, the condition of which is record-
ing and projecting discrete single images on film, the gaze unconsciously
moves in the pictures and the shots of the photographic surface. This is
the beginning of film criticism. Siegfried Kracauer saw this photographic
quality of images, which depict the external world in its unposed, random,
fragmentary reality, as the very essence of cinema.2 Hugo Münsterberg
pointed out that this surface is not only exhibited in its melancholy, absti-
nent visual clarity, as Kracauer had envisioned for ideal photography, but
that the photographic production of the film image also indicates a material,
meaningless, but functional side, which in turn spurs on a dramaturgy and
a way to draw the attention beneath the threshold of conscious perception:
“The shading of the lights, the patches of dark shadows, the vagueness of
some parts, the sharp outlines of others, the quietness of some parts of
the picture as against the vehement movement of others all play on the
keyboard of our mind… ”3
All three basic functions of film technology, camerawork, editing, and pro-
jection, can thus also be seen as psycho-physical technologies, as consciously
treating perception and reality at the same time, but which entirely evade
conscious perception, “a conscious manipulation designed to create effect”,
as Maya Deren put it.4 The basis of all film technology is cutting up, recording,
and projecting single images. And this is the technological consequence from
the old chronometry in physiology and psychology. After a unified time-frame
was incorporated as the basis of all experiments in the laboratories of the nine-
teenth century, this led in the twentieth century to an interest in expanding,
compressing, or accelerating this timeframe, or even in letting it run backwards
and in loops, leading the spectator astray. But all the illusionary techniques
of the cinema, which is also “the truth 24 times per second”, have to relate to
the spatio-temporal parameters of basic neurophysiological research. The
exceptions, construing reality in a different way and recording movement in
time differently, may not be called cinema and cannot technically be screened
in cinemas: such as focal-plane shutters which do not cut up the flow of time,
but recording flowing colors and forms on a running track and representing
the intensities of the world as rubber mat distortion.
26  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Cinema belongs to the trance techniques of our culture because it sys-

tematically treats and shifts the normative and imaginary time frames, in
which we remain subject to conscious daily production, in all the disciplines
of our bodily knowledge.
Camerawork not only ensures discrete single images, which allow for
the shaping of movements in the illusion of movement, but at the same
time it treats – by means of various optical tricks and their combination,
through focal lengths, depths of field, apertures, camera angles, camera
speeds, and camera movements – space and, as a result, time. In extreme
wide-angle lenses every movement comes to the camera unnaturally fast,
while in telephoto lenses they hardly budge from their place. Through
various camera tricks, as Münsterberg has synoptically described, various
perceptual functions can be initiated. Cinema could thus be euphorically
understood as an apparatus that technologically transmits experiences
from one individual to the next.
The model of connecting and conveying psychic energies in all directions,
which Bekhterev had proposed in Petersburg reflexology, allowed, even
more than Münsterberg’s American psycho-technology, for depictions to be
understood as a complex of signals that, while running through the tracts
of the central nervous system, can convey and associate feelings, allowing
people to become energetic signal carriers, accumulators, and transformers.
Dziga Vertov continued these Petersburg experiments in his cinema. There
are echoes of many of Vertov’s optical constructions in later experimental
films. For instance, the abstraction and isolation of the illusion of movement.
Detached from objects, figures, or identifiable persons, movements were
conveyed as moments of motion assembled in the field of vision. There is an
“across” to be seen on the screen, the bearer of which remains unclear or can
be assembled from various objects. Human routines of movement, as they
had advanced through cinematography in the medical clinic to scientific
opinions, were reversed, distorted, fragmented, and doubled in experimental
film with the same camera and editing techniques, so that the cultural
meanings attached to them had to be exposed as constructions. In this sense,
experimental filmmakers, by manipulating the manipulation of perception,
also liberated the body from the webs of historical and political discourse.
The discrete quality of images on the filmstrip, which allows us to analyze
and synthesize movement thanks to cinematography, is the prerequisite for
placing the body in certain iconographic or symbolic orders. The prehistory
of the cinema in psychological cinematography shows that cinema could
be used for medical diagnoses and at the same time serve as a sign system
for social relationships and political circumstances. Psychic qualities could
Cinema 27

suddenly be read in recorded physical movements. But its usage in the

relation between doctor and patient is only one particular case of cinema
as social technology. Wherever a film is shown, perceptual structures are
cross-linked over surfaces, and in the trance of non-perceivable functions,
social conventions are forms that still have to be traced back again to their
origins and their technological conditions.
The technology of montage lies at the border between conscious and
unconscious transmission in cinema. This is why the weight of ideology
critique was imposed on montage whenever it was necessary to differentiate
the methods of a film either as methods of information or of propaganda.
“Editing/montage forms the battlefield in the history of cinema on which
the fight about the so-called filmic and its language was/is carried out.”5
In fact, this opposition, which historically goes back to the Russian and
American film pioneers, was for many years the ideological dividing point
in film criticism. The debate about “editing” or “montage” is a relict of film
theory from a very cold war, but is simple and sustainable like all products
from this time.
“Montage is noticeable as montage, editing tries not to be noticed”, is
how Harun Farocki summarized the east-west formula for (at that time
still West) Berlin students.6 In the case of montage, as in the case of the illu-
sion of movement in cinema, the differentiation, being between conscious
and unconscious technologies, does not concern the problem of cinema’s
allure. The level of the technological trick, of the illusion of movement
and of the rhythm of montage, and on the other hand the level of images,
their modeling of light, and their iconography are complementarily taken
into account in montage, supplementing or contrasting. Roughly speaking,
Farocki’s formula means that the Americans, starting with Porter’s Great
Train Robbery and Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, tried to unite heterogeneous
elements as unnoticeably as possible into an omni-visionary perspective.
The spectator is meant to be stimulated, but not to notice the technological
circumstances under which a big “US” can be seen as a matter of course
on the belts of the soldiers or the sheriff whenever death is not far off. (It is
this “US”, which Thomas Pynchon responds to with the paranoid “THEM”,
that became all of our YOU THERE under the conditions of cinema). In
the American model of “editing”, psycho-technological rhythm and
photographic surfaces produce the sensations, tensions, and moods of a
perception into which logics of meaning and signification are introduced
as messages, and through which they can be reinforced. Whether the will
of the producers is guided by market forces, production codes, national
interests, or other possible missions is a question for the second step of film
28  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

analysis. The means to get there, however, are set up beneath the threshold
of consciousness and have no actual intention to rise above it.
The avant-garde films from the Soviet Union, called “Russian films” in the
twenties, dialectically produced a conscious clash of different images, from
which some third thing was meant to emerge and which was conceived as
a substitute for thinking. Of course Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Pudovkin
realized that film had to avoid conscious perception in order to be film,
but they nonetheless claimed that their montage was a method by which
relations could become deliberate in their dialectic, since they provided their
own expression. The cinema was meant to be a mirror in which ideological,
false, bourgeois thinking encountered and corrected itself as other. In this
respect, even the optical metaphysics of Tarkovsky or Kieślowski belong to
this tradition. In the term dialectic images, as Walter Benjamin coined it, this
concept even applies beyond any film theories as a historico-philosophical
attempt to prop up the hegemonic intellectual movement on the foundation
of its technological pre-conditions. Thinking could thus not only be moved
from an initially external principle, but also sedated or exploded.7 The actual
optical unconscious in cinema, however, the deception and intoxication of
perception as principle, which Vertov had his sights on, was also suspect
in Soviet cinema, for most directors as well as for the state agencies that
scrutinized and censored every film project in writing.
The difference between the Russian and American techniques, between
montage and editing, are not entirely subsumed in the opposition between
the conscious and unconscious manipulation of perception. In both East
and West, rules were provided that were meant to teach correct montage,
and all these rules served the goal of not tearing the spectator out of his
or her film trance. Whether it was supposed to be teaching an “I SEE”, the
“US”, or dialectical thinking in this trance was the subordinate problem for
those working at the editing table on both sides of the Curtain. It is certainly
true that over the course of time those techniques that are conspicuous as
changes in the field of vision – and that interrupt the trance – disappeared
from the repertoires of the editors: multi-screen, split-screen and different
dimensions for the screen, such as Eisenstein had wanted,8 iris wipes, but
also time lapse, black frames, and all the operations that the spectator
is aware of as intrusions into perception. By contrast, technologies that
simulate and stimulate involuntary activity in the brain, as Münsterberg
described, for instance light slow motion, lighting effects, certain estrange-
ment effects through graininess or layering, split focus shots, the use of
different focal lengths, etc., belong to the standard repertoire of tricks for
all camera operators and editors.
Cinema 29

Specifications for rules, however, have always been contested. Karel

Reisz, whose basic historical handbook The Technique of Film Editing first
appeared in the fifties and in many languages, on both sides of the border
that was still considered “iron”, served as an introduction for students,
editors, directors, and theorists, but initially had to admit that anarchy in
editing was completely feasible in early silent cinema:

The only thing which decided the order of shots was the desire to achieve
the most satisfactory results. […] The medium was extremely flexible in
that there was no physical reason why one should not cut from practically
anything to anything else.9

The experimental phase, in which everything could be edited anywhere if

there was only time to tinker with it, was then standardized, above all due
to economic restraints. At the end of the twenties Reisz established national
conventions for how to manipulate attention:

In many of Griffith’s films one is aware of the constant changing camera

angles and it requires a certain amount of practice and adjustment to
accept the jerkiness of the continuity without irritation. Eisenstein, far
from wanting a smoothly flowing series of images, deliberately set out to
exploit the conflict implied at the junction of any two shots. Against this
it must be said that the German film-makers of the late twenties, using
a much more fluid camera technique, often made deliberate attempts to
achieve a smooth-flowing continuity.10

Continuity and connection, heavily loaded terms anyway, to this day have
to serve in editing technique for something that is constantly changing. If
the first spectators were shocked by close-ups being edited in, because they
thought they were looking at limbs that had been cut off, by the end of the
twenties discontinuous scenes, edited like jazz music, in which musicians
and instruments elided into one another – like in Murnau’s Sunrise – were
no longer disturbing, but were the necessary variety that promised to be
entertaining. At the beginning of the thirties people were astounded by
sync sound, and the graphic dance montages of Berkeley, in which bodies
were arranged serially according to their limbs, were already a part of mass
entertainment. Changing montage rhythms made Jules Dassin’s Naked City
in 1948 the forerunner of films that relied less on story than on the rhythmic
montage of urban landscapes and movements. In 1960 Hitchcock acceler-
ated the performance of reception with the 70 cuts of the shower curtain in
30  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Psycho, setting new standards for the stimulation that was expected in mov-
ies. The West was discovering the montage techniques from the twenties in
the East, material time-space montage, which had disappeared there due to
the demands of Stalinism. The “visible cut”, montage that was introduced
against the cultural imperialism of Hollywood, could only elucidate until it
itself became invisible from habit. Who was still disturbed by the “wrong”
cuts in Breathless, who even noticed them anymore? Even Lars von Trier’s
cubist montage in The Kingdom, of shots that are incompatible according to
traditional spaces in time, and which showed that even at the beginning of
the nineties, in the age of MTV, there were still conventions that could still
be shockingly transgressed, has already become standard in commercial
film production. And also a standard of what we have been trained to
expect – and demand – in terms of speed in the cinematic experience. The
only thing that is still disturbing is anything that does not make use of the
acceleration of stimulation: Straub/Huillet and all those whose films we no
longer see in the cinemas for just that reason.
Even montage that tried to be conscious as an operation remains unno-
ticed as a technique. Often the effect on the spectator from the screen is no
longer a feeling of surprise, without her immediately becoming aware of the
breach in the conventions of perception as a breach against technological
conventions. This montage shows that genres are combinations of techni-
cal rules, which produce certain combinations of feelings. If these genres
are mixed, they therefore also produce new, literally artificial mixtures
of feelings in the cinema, which have caused people to be surprised at
themselves, but also disturbed, and which have not always immediately
been so well received.
Speaking about Une Femme est une Femme, Godard says:

Les comédies sont jamais filmées en gros plan, elles sont toujours filmées
en plan général. Et alors là, quand elles sont filmées en gros plan, elles
deviennent pathéthiques. Alors, il exprime des sentiments dans une
situation comique, c’est le beau dans le film. Mais, pour ça, le film n’a
pas marché.11

Genre means that space and time in film unconsciously guide the “mood”
in the sense of the old psychology of Wilhelm Wundt.
The attempt to describe the cinema as the extension of a dispositif that
usurped human minds and psyches as movement-chronograph and at the
same time as a rhythm machine is supposed to replace the dichotomy
between the conscious and the unconscious manipulation of perception.
Cinema 31

Cinema is always manipulation beneath the level of conscious perception,

otherwise no motion would be possible in the 24 still images per second.
But cinema is also conscious manipulation and the conscious desire to be
manipulated of our senses, in order to adapt to external circumstances and
to relativize and change external circumstances through film. Films can
be analyzed consciously, perhaps not right in the cinema, but afterwards,
when we, to quote Thomas Mann, “have dried off” – not only ideologically
and iconographically, but also physiologically and emotionally.
Cinema is what it is, a message that can be consciously perceived by
anyone who wants to receive it.
A message received by whoever it comes to:

“To Whom It May Concern.”

2. Cybernetics

… nor can we be sure that a considerable part of what we observe is not an

artifact of our own creation. An investigation of the stock market is likely to
upset the stock market.
– Norbert Wiener , 1963

At the beginning was the question of the particular reality of the cinema and
the question of the subject and its transformation through the links between
perception and technology in the cinema. At the end a variety of networks
have been extended in which historical cinematic perception can be seen
as psycho-physical training and the as implementing social technologies
by using devices. The history of cybernetics as the science of multifaceted,
regulating, balancing, and communicative processes can be used – and not
only because it historically crisscrosses the history of cinema – to theorize
communication as automatic and automating, a communication that, in
the cinema, cannot be understood as the experience of the senses alone.
This may come back to haunt us.
The cybernetic process in the cinema would then be a matter of changing
perception in the cinema and regulating this perception through the effects
of film, even before the meanings of these effects are even formed. The
cinema is thus a good place to examine cybernetic processes, since the links
between nervous systems and apparatuses have constantly been synchro-
nized, aligned, and optimized in its history. This means that a feedback
process had already emerged in the research, before any film screening, as
a gradual refinement of the trance in the act of seeing movement.
The cinema is also a good object for examining cybernetic processes
since the work of every filmmaker consists in using time manipulation
and other cinematic techniques to re-apply a recorded series of events
back to that series of events itself, and through such operations to bring the
future of the messages into the imagination of the dreaming spectator. The
spectator’s trance attests to loops of self-adaptation where the perception
in the cinema is located.
On the other hand, the cinema is a highly inappropriate object for a
cybernetic hypothesis because it neither has any clear signal, nor is it one.
In order for cinema as cinema to become a signal in statistical mechanics,
and thus for it to be predictable, it must also be reduced to the flickering
and fluttering of light and darkness, such as occurred in laboratories and
34  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

as it became a highly and potentially also dangerously stimulating art form

in the flicker films. For cinema to be a signal, it must distance itself from
the photographic reality that makes it possible to see movement in the
cinema as “human” movement in the sense of the old technological media.
From the history of neurological cinematography we can learn which
interfaces between human being and apparatus were developed and in-
dustrialized in the nineteenth century, and which were therefore deserted,
became a wasteland. But the boundaries of the cinema apparatus that would
allow us to designate a circuit diagram or a neurological network in the first
place are not clear. So the great aspirations of a cybernetic examination of
the cinema run the risk of methodologically appearing as a bluff or as pure
metaphor. Back to the beginning.
The issue that gets everything going was that of unconsciously changing
our own movements, and thus of externally transforming our own person
by means of an apparatus. The amazement that accompanies this issue was
the great pleasure we take in such bad stories, if they were worked well as
cinema. The interest in examining this ultimately industrial way of getting
our minds to dance arose from the parallel between these techniques and
the ritual trance techniques from other cultures, which promised a less
convoluted way of encountering the gods in this engrossed state.
At the beginning was a methodological comparison between watching
movies and the physiological proprioception in dancing. In dance a body
perceives itself as other, and at the same time external stimuli are perceived
as one’s own. In dancing the various, fragmented components of the body
are connected through sensors in the muscles and joints into a whole, which
regulates itself in complicated balancing acts. In certain situations this
self-regulation can get out of control, ending up completely under orders
from outside: in the tarantella, in Saint Vitus dance, in possession. Then
proprioception becomes someone else’s perception taken as one’s own. The
boundaries between these states cannot be defined, they are gradations of
shifts between I and the other, between I as another, which constantly take
place in every social relationship, in every space of rhythmic and structured
order. In the cinema the exposure of the body, the mutual metaphorizing of
internal perception and external perception, is all the more intense since it
can be introduced, as the result of a hundreds years of research on nerves,
reactions, and reflexes, in a quite targeted way.
Looking to the prehistory of cinema in the psycho-physiological laborato-
ries we can see that models developed in the laboratory of how the mind and
the psychology of the senses works exactly corresponded to the structure
of cinematic perception. The chronometric apparatuses in the laboratories,
C yberne tics 35

which sought to measure mental accomplishments and even their dysfunc-

tions as a function of time intervals, were continued in structurally similar
ways in the chronophotographs and the cinematographs, as if the devices
had only been temporarily readjusted. The neurological models of nerve
impulses themselves, which in turn were intermittent, were also the result
of the experiments in the realm of chronoscopy. According to these models,
ideas arose in the brain through the perception and association of single
impulses, just as illusions in the cinema were produced by intermittent
images. The neuronal models of perception and the practical neurology
of the cinema apparatus had the same historical origin in the laboratory.
The question of the equipment and apparatuses that were used to
examine, localize, and even artif icially simulate and regulate mental
functions thus became an essential way to approach this entire work. The
strategies of the researchers were manifest in the technical equipment,
and the interests of the individual researchers and institutes remain in
them. In the devices themselves, as Londe’s various photo cameras show,
the possibility of manipulating time and perception is manifest, whether as
an implement or as interconnectibility. And the polymorphy of the human
body is also reduced in these devices to particular interfaces and modes
of transmission, to particular tracks and experiences. This is a reduction
not only in a negative sense, but also as concentrating, intensifying, and
strengthening, for beautiful and high-frequency sensations can be played
out on these interfaces that otherwise do not exist in the landscape.
The history of laboratories is at the same time a history of sustained
intervention in bodies that, fragmented and subjected to rhythm, were
themselves altered in the course of the research. This began in experimen-
tal medicine by brutally wiring up organs and apparatuses, nerves and
recording technologies, in which frogs and rabbits and dogs were wired
into death dances. With time and in compensating for the injuries the
connections became finer, more distanced, retreating to the surface of
bodies, on which the effects and symptoms of even nervous disturbances
were supposed to be read. The devices conveyed the functions of the old
ideas of the mind in the old apparatuses from the laboratories – including
in the apparatuses from the photo labs. Using new procedures, nerves were
tested for the qualities of their circuits, their priming, and their chemical
and mechanical transmission methods, their interconnectibility, and for
the symptoms of their activity on the body’s surface. Bodies were no longer
material protective covers for the the soul, but were themselves states shot
through with nerves, in which the mental activity of a human being and
the reality of the world entered into a neuronal and energetic metabolism.
36  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

The experiments in neurophysiology and perception psychology in the

nineteenth century had showed that perception could be explained and
controlled physically, not mentally, even completely so, as the trio infernale
Du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Brücke swore that they could prove. In
physiology, devices were developed in turn with which bodily movements
could be perceived, recorded, and controlled more precisely, and it was
at exactly this crossroads of the research that the cinema emerged in the
Parc des Princes of the Bois de Boulogne as the unconscious of a wired-up
landscape, which could look at human beings from everywhere. And if
people now looked at pictures of landscapes from this crossroads, then they
saw their unconscious hidden in them.
But right from the beginning, what the observation of perception was
registering was not only the disturbance of the observed, but also distur-
bances of the observer. Gustav Theodor Fechner’s trance was one of the first
modern feedback trances, described as riding and being ridden, by devils, by
gods, by rays that he had looked at too long during his optical experiments.
Occasionally the feedbacks of perception in the experiment separate into
two complementary delusional orders: in the neurologist Flechsig and the
patient Schreber, who saw himself as watched by sun rays while at the
same time the nervous system was being cartographed in Flechsig’s clinic
as a centralized system. Or Bekhterev’s neuromedial utopia in which all
bodies united into one decentralized messaging network that was taken
for a real possibility by Stalin’s paranoia, a possibility that made him quite
unnecessary as general secretary.
The routine studies of perception on the one hand and the experiences
from the disturbances, from the perceptions that had gone wild on the
other, can be measured by means of devices, scales, and regular stimuli
to the nerves, regulated in a neurological noise reduction and combined
into inductions of sensations and feelings. These elements are the building
blocks of cinema perception, in which the artificial seeing of movement and
rhythmic exchange of images and shots control the attitudes of expectation
and attentiveness in reception. The history of these trance states produced
in the experiment finally ends in Rouch’s obsession with the camera and
Deren’s cinematic experience of voodoo possession, both of which were
not entropic states, but states in which the cinematic regulation of social
behavior was shown to be psycho-­physical.
Filmed dances and danced cinematography apply the dispositif of cinema
to itself time and again, which means to the events recorded, and they
also link the two sides of experimental psychology from which cinema-
tography can be assembled. On the one hand the movement of perception
C yberne tics 37

was researched in the history of science and its artificial regulation was
improved upon – one highpoint of this development was the symposium
“Feelings and Emotions” in Ohio, at which this research, mediated by
Bekhterev and Cannon, who could not be mediated there, reached back
into the early history of cybernetics.
On the other hand, the movement of the body was itself examined in just
the same tradition. Using instantaneous photography and cinematography,
human movements and expressions were depicted so that they could be
further processed, treated, and most likely would have been endlessly
projected on one another in the primal scene of Salpêtrière if the female
and male hysterics had not finally refused to play along. Medical diagnoses
as well as artistic depictions of certain states were the result of the recording
technologies that transform time and that could thus dissect the individual
in order to subject this depiction, and thus the subject itself, to new and
immemorial causal relations.
On the one hand perception of the human body was made alien to the
human mind with cinematography, on the other hand human vision was
itself transformed by cinematography. Two sides of a process that made it
impossible to distinguish any more between, for instance, the representa-
tion of cinematically depicted bodies on the screen on the one hand and
the cinematic perception of these bodies in the space of the move theater
on the other. Even without producing clear emotional attributions, the
representation of a body in slow motion shows both certain unforeseen
qualities of the body depicted and certain unforeseen possibilities for the
spectator’s perception. The bon mot that a cinematic image is created by
fusing retina and screen – in the cinema, in the head, or in the body – now
had to be extended.
Bodily movements and emotions fuse like dancers and the dance in
or through the image. At any rate, this takes place somewhere that is not
supposed to exist according to the instructions given to the projection.
They fuse with technical effects, with other, now divided individuals, or
with themselves as others.
It is astonishing that, in a system that complies to a certain degree out of
paranoia, differences can still be shown at the structural level. In neurology,
in cybernetics, and in the cinema there are quite different basic models
of the mind and the bio-socius, or rather, of how cinematic technology is
applied: a hierarchical model of self-control on the one hand, and operative,
reversible, feedbacking connections on the other, in which an exchange
of experiences could be organized and at the same time technologically
put together and newly put to use. A vision that constructs a genealogy of
38  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

experience, from Fechner, through Helmholtz and Bekhterev up to Can-

non and Wiener, that have designated such processes within the body as
homeostatic, and referred to similar processes in connection with other
bodies or other aggregates as feedback. The anarchic film people, misusers
of apparatuses, experimental filmmakers like Vertov or Rouch sought, by
linking the depiction of ritual with a ritual of depiction, to turn the medium
as a homeostatic world process into a remedy. Maya Deren, her films, and
her theories of rituals have shown that cinema technology must be used
in its genuinely technological sense in order to reshape the function of the
absolute control of the cinematic into a homeostoatic “beyond” of cinema.
The alternatives are not quite so banal, of course. An inventive genius like
Albert Londe had on the one hand fixed a clinical order in psychiatry with
his apparatuses that was as rigorous as it was artificial, and on the other
hand had used his time-tricks in serial photography to cause the glamorous
actresses of Paris to jump even higher and even more weightlessly.
Cybernetics in the cinema is thus a process that cannot be fixed. For-
tunately it is only used – unlike the first cybernetic steering machines,
regulated by centrifugal force, which were supposed to bring ships safely
across the sea – to navigate the ocean of feelings and sensations. Fortu-
nately? Only? Ocean?
The cybernetic cinematic process has its relay in the Darkness of Projec-
tion. This will be thoroughly discussed, the situation will get brighter, and
the cinematic circles will withdraw back into the subroutines of the mind,
of the apparatus, and of the industry.
Back to the beginning.
3. Knots

In the beginning is the darkness of the projection. Early film theorists, for
instance Münsterberg, Mauerhofer, Kracauer, or Arnheim,1 analyzed the
strange state that spectators indulge in as part of film perception. Since
the shutter strobes the projected beam in an established rhythm while the
Geneva drive intermittently transmits individual frames, moviegoers are
sitting in darkness for nearly half of the projection time, while their optical
nerves are stimulated to the beat of these mechanics. Hugo Münsterberg
was the first to draw the parallels between film perception and experiments
of isolated acts of perception in psychological laboratories. Hugo Mauer-
hofer, a psychologist, biographer of Hesse, and emigré in exile in Britain,
analyzed the transformation in psychic reception behavior of moviegoers
in four phases, diagnosing a state similar to that of daydreaming. Accord-
ing to Mauerhofer, the only proper object of scientific film theory is the
psyche itself, since every film critique, due to unconscious perception in the
cinema, is nothing more than a more or less inept report about individual
fantasies.2
Films are not simply seen. They transform the subject in the cinema. The
consciousness that, according to Kracauer, withdraws from the scene in the
cinema3 itself appears to the film critic as one that is under the influence of
a technologically evoked lull. Under the spell of early German experimental
psychology, represented in the Major Film Theories by the persons of Hugo
Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, students of Wundt and Wertheimer
respectively, 4 examining the technologies that manipulate perception
made up a large part of American film theory. References to historical
trance techniques came from French film theory. Raymond Bellour was
the first to systematically equate film perception with hypnosis.5 But as a
relation of domination, that is, as gaze, seeing can only be classified and
criticized once the physiological conditions of its movement are discovered
as technologies, technologies that establish social orders while themselves
remaining invisible. Films are not simply seen, they allow for seeing.
Seeing or being seen: blind spots and blackouts from the very begin-
ning. Joseph Plateau, who carried out the first experiments on strobo-
scopic seeing, long before there even was film or cinema, went blind after
experimenting on himself to study retinal afterimages. The experiment
was not differentiated enough: his phenakistiscope, literally eye-deceiver,
had actually already showed him that it was not positive afterimages, but
successive, albeit discrete single images that were the necessary condition
40  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

for seeing stroboscopic movement. But he wanted to know more precisely,

so he used his own retina. For too long.6
Plateau, however, was not the only one not to see that it was not after-
images that were the reason for seeing motion. Some of the classic film
theorists wanted nothing of it either: Eisenstein and even Bazin considered
film viewing as a question of positive afterimages on the retina. The film
theory of the psychologists knew better. Watching a film taps into functions
in the brain. What was and remains contested is how. Recent research has
explained seeing oscillopsia as an abbreviation system in cortical “image
processing”, a model in which old ideas of reflex arcs meets newer ideas from
data processing.7 For virtual reality researchers, who are simply interested in
the connections between humans and machines, the frequency of 24 frames
per second is just a symbiosis that works well.8 How these mechanical
hallucinations work would first have to be investigated in a long series of
experiments.
At the beginning of the century there were two competing theses to
explain seeing motion: one that was based on Talbot’s Law and unnoticed
phase failure, and one based on “identity deception.” The protagonists of
this were Carl Marbe and the Wundt student Paul Linke, who shot experi-
mental films as proof of his hypotheses, films that could be considered the
predecessors of the works of Otto Fischer or Hans Richter. Linke’s films,
however, were only screened at medical and psychological congresses.
Max Wertheimer had published the first complex experiments on seeing
motion in 1912, showing that this is an independent and direct experience
like seeing luminosity or color. He reported on one of his experiments
with oscillopsia in which he wanted to test the pure viewing of motion,
and describes the physical reactions of the test subjects, who designated
what they saw as “across”, although at the same time they saw that noth-
ing was moving across. “The exact facts of the case are: the crossing, the
insistent movement from a to b is clear and unambiguous, forcefully there
and thoroughly continuous, yet nothing went across the white and nothing
went across the stripe.”9 The more precisely perception was experimentally
examined in the subjective, the more objective the optical phenomena
appeared, which had no object whatsoever. The experience of cinematic
vision was only a further development of the psychological experiments
with the tachistocope.
Münsterberg, in his 1916 f ilm book The Photoplay, had declared the
circuits and accomplishments of the brain responsible for cinematic
perception. A film theory can be derived from this tradition that bases its
cultural critical or psychoanalytical interpretations of films on examining
Knots 41

the psycho-physical effects of cinema as an apparatus. The relationship

between the experience of reality and the production of reality can be re-
defined according to the results of experimental psychology, and contains,
at least as far as concerns the phenomenon of “movement”, a calming effect
that is not restricted to the movie theater. Experience can be had artificially
and it is indistinguishable from non-artificial experience. In the experiment
it was even possible to show that form and movement in seeing are not
separable perceptions, that luminosity (and not form) carries the perception
of motion, or also that the physiological processes in the brain that process
the seeing of movement in the cinema are oscillopsia, that is, the same as
it is in natural seeing of motion.10 So something is indeed moving, even if it
is only the brain that is affected.
Since the experience of movement in the cinema can thus not be dis-
tinguished from the experience of real movement – while the depiction of
spaces, forms, or shapes, as Arnheim has suggested, can be distinguished
from their physical reality without any trouble – then seeing in the cinema is
a more complex perceptual experience than can be grasped by the concept
of representation. While light, spaces, perspectives in film can be analyzed
as representations as they can in painting, movement belongs to a differ-
ent order of perception. In the cinema movement is not represented, but
presented, the artificially produced experience of seeing motion is thus
authentic, “not the re-experience, but the experience of motion.”11
This magic of the cinema, which Wertheimer’s student Rudolf Arnheim
pointed out in 1933, is based on a technical decision, not on a technical
necessity, for ultimately the movements of acoustic phenomena can be
directly recorded as movements.12 The cinema by contrast produces by
storing a further illusion of perception in discrete single images:

[Film] does not render motion by motion but gives an illusion of it by

means of immobile images shown in sequence – a procedure that is
possible because of the way our eyes work, a magnificent substitute, but
something fundamentally different from the rendering of motion by
motion. Why, then, did we have to resort to illusory movement?13

The historical answer to Arnheim’s question first comes out of the labora-
tories: since cinematography was invented to analyze movement by taking
apart a temporal continuum by means of a variety of procedures, every
new development of the apparatuses was initially done in this tradition:
practical human decisions. It first became uncanny in the history of science
when the models of human perceptual psychology evidenced similarities
42  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

with these mechanisms: the special synthesis of cinematic data would

correspond, it turned out, to particular achievements of the brain when
seeing motion. In other words: If god didn’t play dice, he had been playing
with the stroboscope from the very beginning. In the 1970s Arnheim would
expand on his early essays on cinematic technology in the light of new
research, with the astounding discovery that all seeing of motion, even
observing birds in the field with the naked eye, was in principle like that
in the cinema:

All motion perception is basically stroboscopic.[…] When a bird flies

through my field of vision, its physical displacement is continuous. What
I see of the flight, however, derives from a series of recordings by the
individual receptors or ‘receptive fields,’ in the retina.14

This made the artificiality of viewing cinema even more complex. The
functions of the apparatuses assume an alliance with the functions of the
nervous system. But the spectator needn’t know anything about this to see
motion in the cinema.
Cinema from the viewpoints of psycho-technology, as Münsterberg had
named his applied psychology, had to be examined precisely as a social
technology when its tricks were unconscious, such as in the transformation
of single images into a flow of moving images. Or the perception of motion
independent from the perception of a form: Wertheimer’s phi phenomenon.
Already in 1913 experiments in which white stripes were edited in between
film images showed that, despite the frequency of 24 images per second, as
is common in film projection, no flow of motion emerged as a cinematic
illusion, since the light impulse of the light fields suppressed the perception
of the previous images.15 The darkness in the cinema is initially neither the
metaphorical re-staging of Plato’s Cave,16 nor a mere refuge for lovers without
a room. The darkness in the cinema is above all a perception-physiological
necessity for viewing films. And for just that reason, as Benn describes it, it is
intoxicating. Just as Kracauer had suspected, darkness dismisses conscious-
ness from film perception.17 A phase of nerve stimuli slips in between film
projection and reception that only a visitor from the Gutenberg Galaxy like
Walter Benjamin could affably call it “distraction.”18 Since control by the
apperceiving consciousness is systematically undermined in cinema by the
technical equipment, it would be more precise to call this distraction trance.
Trance, as a dissolution or diversion of the consciousness under the
impact of certain technologies, is the gap in film theory. Here physiology
enters the humanities, challenging the idea of the subject to its very
Knots 43

limits. At this point physiological sensibility comes back into aesthetic

theory, from which philosophy had separated it and held it at bay. Trance
emerges from the connection between the intoxication of the senses
and technological noise. Cinema addresses the bodies that the spirit
has left.19
But it also trains them. Precisely because once new media like photog-
raphy, film, or the gramophone had differentiated bodies into every more
specific identity forms, the old philosophical order of the mind, which
could not be imagined as anything other than male and somehow pasty, did
not simply dissolve into pleasurable intoxication. The new media brought
with it new orders of bodies, wishes, and desires. As soon as voice, faces,
movements, the gentlest trembling and the faintest coughing could be
stored in media archives and thus examined and classified as bodily signs,
that was the end of simply subverting the order through sensuality. The most
sensual disturbances were themselves indicators from which the orders of
illnesses, of the genders, then also of classes, cultures, or subcultures could
be constituted.
The only way left to subvert the imaginary and the symbolic orders, the
imagination and representation, is to experiment with media transformabil-
ity itself. To transform oneself through technological tricks. Transformation
in the Occident, however, was reserved for either the Orphics20 or the lords
at the Last Supper. The transformation of women, other than from virgin to
divine bride, induced by the tongues of angels, belongs to the uncanny in
occidental discourse.21 Technological brides betray their secrets especially
when they do not present themselves as natural, mythical, or esoteric, but
when the technical procedures with which they are produced are clearly
shown to be part of the production of art. When the flecks of oil are still
sticking to the machinists’ work coats. When the girls are maculata. From
Germaine Dulac, the first female avant-gardist in 1920, up to Pipilotti Rist
and her digital expositions in 2001, anyone who does her own projecting
with technical devices and technological savvy has been considered objec-
tionable. Ultimately they are airing the dirty little secret that the formation
of identities presumes quite a bit of work and technical know-how. So the
dark side of cultural technologies as transformational technologies comes
to light. That the subject in ecstasy can experience its own self-dissolution,
its depersonalization, or, painfully as in the case of Marina Abramovic, its
dismemberment, does not simply mean that cultural boundaries are thus
violated and cultural laws have been breached. The fundamental functions
of cultural technologies are also confirmed by this. They are danced into
the physiological real, domesticated in the symbolic realm of the production
44  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of reality. Cultural technologies are mediations of the law, but they only
work when they can promise the subject – fragile, divided, powerless – a
new integrity for its submission. When it experiences itself in the joy of the
dance and the trance, it doesn’t notice anything of cultural technologies;
when it notices the cultural technologies, it experiences itself as other and
falls apart. In between the two is where female scholars and machinists
experiment.
The fact that the machinists’ effect is at the same time affect, the conse-
quence and the pursuit of their artistic methods, is one of the oldest insights
of experimental culture. In his text on the Marionette Theater, Heinrich
von Kleist described the relationship between cultural technologies and
souls as being dance-like, at any rate not as directly mechanical, but as a
relationship between various transformations: “Somewhat artificial” is
the relationship between puppeteers and the dancing puppets, says the
leading dancer of the opera, explaining this as an engineer: like that of
numbers to their logarithms. The path taken by emphasizing the puppet
in the intermedial relationship between machine, puppeteer and puppet is
not only the effect of the technical construction, but of the whole spiritual
complication, of psycho-physical dispositivs avant la letter, in which the
functions of perception, of consciousness, and of the soul appear as a
parable, the ends of which – author, narrator, subject – disappear in the
endlessness of the function “making dance.” A secretive line is the trace
of this interference:

It is nothing other than the path to the soul of the dancer, and Herr C.
doubted that it could be proven otherwise that through this line the
puppeteer placed himself in the center of gravity of the marionette; that
is to say, in other words, that the puppeteer danced.22

Ego and consciousness pursue one another hyperbolically in the tracks and
loops, the meshes and circles of medial constructions, and so the trance
can merge with the knowledge of how it came to be.
The film avant-gardists of the twentieth century let themselves become
fascinated by archaic trance techniques and transgressions time and
time again. African, Pacific, Caribbean cults became visible for the first
time outside their ritual spaces on 16mm film. The information that this
“visibilité” could deliver into the heart of the colonial powers thus suddenly
appeared as the dark collaboration of filming ethnologists. In the trance
films of Jean Rouch and Maya Deren techniques become visible that seek
to surrender knowledge not to power, but to powerlessness. Such trance
Knots 45

films experiment with feedback that no longer allows for any distinction
between puppeteer and puppet, between dance and dancer: cinematically
initiated entropy. “Going native” as fading out the messages of indigenous
informants – through feedback, through joining the ritual and ruthless
integrity of the technical medium. But the subversive usage of technology
does not automatically guarantee this entropy. The relationship between
the decomposing strategies of the avant-gardes and the mapping adminis-
trations is shockingly parasitical.
The American experimental films of the 1940s examine the emotional
effects of cinematic processes. But precisely the 16mm technology to
which they owe their art had only been developed and ref ined because
of the Second World War. Not only were 16mm film cameras and material
easier to get after being discarded by the Off ice of War Information,
new f ilm forms were being invented in the f ield at lightening speed.
Almost all of the big Hollywood directors had worked making newsreels
in the army. John Ford, for instance, was shooting The Battle of Midway
when an explosion ripped the f ilmstrip from the sprockets, producing
a skewed exposure of the material. This new form of newsreel realism
was legitimated in that it made the technical device itself visible. What
experimental f ilm theorists called for years later as a strategy against
Hollywood fiction had already been realized by chance in the field under
f ire. 23 The intoxication is the effect, was the message of the medium.
Effects of apparatuses and not of meaning stood at the beginning of
all experiments in cinematic space. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan would
explain this as a characteristic of the electronic age: “Concern with ef-
fect rather than with meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for
effect involved the total situation and not a single level of information
movement.”24
So if the effects of the electronic age place us in the synthetic totality of
a dance, we must first stumble into the process in order to be able to get
any insight into the foundations and chasms of subjectivity. A disturbing
experience. Subject and apparatus are reciprocal perturbations in the
sense of neurobiology. Changes in the structure of one’s own system,
which is not caused, but is provoked by another system or the surround-
ings – cinema is not always and everywhere, but wherever the work of
filmmakers encounter the functions of the apparatus and the perception
of the spectator, unsettling one another in the process. According to the
findings of neurobiology, the human being should be seen as a being that
not only operates a complicated communication system directed outward,
but also directed inward, proprioception. 25 The body moves, and from
46  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

this movement emerge systematic procedures that can be understood

as involuntary activity. The body keeps its various functions in a labile
equilibrium, when the individual cells and nerves precisely communicate
with one another. Every movement is an expression that is fed back in
order to coordinate new movements. “A ballet dancer is a virtuoso of
proprioception.”26 If this inner communication goes well, a human being
moves elegantly and dancingly. Speaking in terms of neurobiology one
might say, if it goes well a human being is danced by her self. Maya Deren
described it in 1948 for the voodoo dancers using the metaphor of the
marionette:

They danced as if they were marionettes tied to the drums by invis-

ible strings of sound. They are not dancing with one another, nor are
they dancing to the drums, nor do the drums accompany them. Their
movements are sound made visible and their voices are, in turn, the
transfiguration of their movements back into human sound.27

If it goes well, what gets developed and enhanced in the cinema is our
own thinking in the rhythm of images and films. But it is also clear that
this kind of message transmission does not stop at the limits of the body
or the sense organs, and that the quality of transmission can be improved
or inhibited by various external circumstances. Designating it as psychic
only means reducing long processes and complex relationships to a single
switchpoint. The machinists in art have a more wide-ranging approach.
They also attempt to switch themselves in to the self-guidance of inner
messaging systems in order to mobilize proprioceptors and effectors,
curves and arabesques, emotions and feelings, thus disturbing an inner
system so that its vibrations react to this in their own way. Examining the
cinema cybernetically therefore does not simply mean writing the history
of controlling and steering sense perception and unconscious structures of
watching under the conditions of cinematography. Rather, cinema should
be pursued in the sense of the perturbation of Walter Benjamin’s wish:
“The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium
between human beings and the apparatus.”28 There are describable and
historical relationships and interactions between the technology of cinema
and human perceptual functions. But this is not simply as rhizomatic as
Deleuze and Guattari wanted to claim when they wrote that the mari-
onettes strings are attached “to a multiplicity of nerve fibers.”29 Strings
and knots do not simply grow like mushrooms. A proper knot is a science
of its own.
4. To Whom it May Concern

The sciences are novels about heroes such as Hegel, Freud, Lacan.
The authors are the titles.
– Hubert Fichte, 1980

“We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication
theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics,
which we form from the Greek κυβερνήτης or steersman”, wrote Norbert
Wiener when he was reporting on the creation of this epistemological
program in 1947.1 At the time it was assumed in the military that form-
ing a theory of communication would need precise neurological and
mathematical research, which was supposed to be able to prognosticate
reactions and future developments in a system. During the Second World
War Wiener had not only worked on the project of an electric calculator
as a “form of communication apparatus concerned more with messages
than with power.” Kept awake with massive doses of Benzedrine, which,
as he reported it, caused him to tremble, since he was afraid of blabbering
about war secrets, he had calculated the predictability of the trajectories
of fighter planes. While at first the human element, the seemingly incal-
culable reactions and emotions of pilots and shooters, was supposed to
be excluded from technological warfare, later the human being and the
machine were merged into a joint venture of medicine and electronics.
Wiener, along with Arturo Rosenblueth, had shown that nerves and
electronic machines were compatible, and if they were wired together
they could cause messages to be transmitted.2 The goal of navigation,
however, was not sure. Guilbaud, a thoughtful historian of cybernetics,
added:

…les machines supérieures, les plus evoluées, les plus récentes, celles
qui jouissent de la remarquable propriété d’adapter leur fonctionne-
ment aux variations du monde extérieur, les machines ‘réflexes’ ont leurs
constructeurs mais non leurs architectes.3

When Wiener spoke of communication, it was about how information

could be optimally codifying and transmitted, whether that be by means
of technological devices or by impulses within the nervous system. For
cyberneticists – and the ethnologists not get around to this until later
48  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

– cultural modification or cultural transformation is dependent on the

cultural technologies that carried the information. For Wiener it had to
do with the hardware of social relations, and he wrote straight out: “Com-
munication is the cement of society.” Nonetheless, cybernetics in Wiener’s
sense is always a science of culture and indeed one of conjecture, for the
messages that are saved, processed, and sent are collective; they go beyond
the individual and his capacities, though they still guide his path:

Society has a memory of its own, far more durable and far more varied
than the memory of any individual belonging to it. In those societies
which are fortunate enough to possess a good script, a large part of this
communal tradition is in the writing, but there are societies which, with-
out writing, have preserved a whole tradition in the form of a technique
of ritual memorization of tribal chants and histories. 4

It is called “script” in order to emphasize the functional unit of technology,

protocol, and provision in the historical media of storage and transmission,
which must be true of “writing” as well as for archaic and future social
techniques.
In 1947 Norbert Wiener wrote: “The world may be viewed as a myriad of
To Whom It May Concern messages.”5 They only need to be transmitted.
The question was, in which form. 1947 is the year in which the technological
analog media that had started displacing the monopoly of writing around
1880 are definitively obsolete, and the first digital apparatuses are making
new paradigms in art and science overdue.
The film research on behavior, as anthropology or as documentary films,
was lagging behind the avant-garde after the war in the laboratories of MIT
and the Harvard Medical School, for the research on interlinking humans
and machines, in addition to visible patterns of behavior, had also brought
to light what was calculable in human bodies as trembling and jerking. After
cinematography had made nervous twitching visible for the first time in the
1880s, the program at MIT examined the pattern of these human tremolos.
After the war, examining human behavior no longer meant studying the
norms of practice, but the involuntary nervous reactions, the trances and
the staggering, in their regularity and their recurrence.6 This also concerned
the ethnologists.
To whom it may concern. This research was the requirement for the many
trance experiments and media rituals that young men and women from
good homes had carried out as romantic escapes into the exoticism of what
would later be called the Third World. What they sought as indigenous,
To Whom it May Concern 49

original, and authentic in the rituals of the colonies and the bodies of
the colonized, the involuntary intoxication, was precisely the object of
the avant-garde research into their own cultures. Western science and
medicine mapped the body anew according to a logic of contact noise and
of intoxication, and bodies were wired up to new apparatuses, creating
new entities.
In the fall of 1947 Artaud declared war on the organs. Deleuze and Guat-
tari, who continued working on this reorganization, invoke Gregory Bateson
when they use the term “plateau for continuous regions of intensity.”7 For
Artaud, organs create the connection between divine will and the capitalist
abuse of bodies.8 At the end of 1947 many young French people also flee
from this abuse. Alfred Métraux and Michel Leiris also travel to Haiti, with
the desire “to take one’s revenge on a life with which one was not satisfied.”9
(Traveling the other way around, André Breton had been stationed in Haiti
on his way back to Paris in 1945, had been feted by the revolutionary youth,
and was expelled after the fall of the country’s government.) The young
engineer Jean Rouch goes back to Africa, where he had already studied and
filmed rituals of possession during the war. The experimental filmmaker
Maya Deren, when she travels to Haiti in 1947, senses the flip side her own
culture on her own body. Her film study of minoritarian cultures ends for
her part in becoming-minoritarian, albeit minoritarian like a goddess.
Madonna-minority.
All of them described their travels as crises provoked in their own identity,
as desired transformation. Heiner Müller, who designated people like John
Cage and himself as the “revenge of dead Indians”, much later pointed out
the difficulties of producing art looming in the power imbalance between
cultures and subcultures. The technologies of production have already
attached themselves to the body before the artist even chooses his weapon:
“I didn’t know then, but already foresaw that one cannot remain an Indian
if one wants to do something with art. We all shoot from the hip, and in
art doing something means doing away with something, beginning with
oneself.”10 This goes for everyone, researchers or artists, who work with
technological images.
In a sciences’ history of the cinema, which examines the preliminary
neurological works on cinematic perception, parallels to pre-cybernetic
research and researchers quickly appears of its own accord. The artistic
induction of feelings and emotions that takes place in the cinema and the
technical motion of gazes are cybernetic regulations of an apparatus that
links living beings with machines. The name of this apparatus is cinema
in the broadest sense, from the moment in which it is technologically
50  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

realized in the shoot, to the emergence of a new space in projection and

the transmission of this space to the spectator’s perception.
What remains as a larger problem in the hypothesis of a cybernetics in
the cinema is, first, to establish the character of the goal at which something
should be directed in the first place. A physiologist noted that the aims of
technical control systems are evident, while those of biological systems are
metaphysical.11 The cinema is somewhere in between. The subject and object
of control cannot be distinguished. Technologically, self-perception in the
social is in control, stabilizing or destabilizing according to the film. The
goal can be refined in each case only if we see the history of cinema as the
invention of devices. A remark by the early film theory Hugo Münsterberg
gave direction to the many vectors of cybernetic processes between specta-
tors, the image, the apparatus, and the film artists: “To picture emotions
must be the central aim of the photoplay.”12 For all its ambiguity, this means
that feelings should be presented and depicted, at any rate expressed: put
into the image.
A second problem that the hypothesis of a cybernetics of the cinema
repeatedly led to the edge of a breakdown consists in the fact that images,
even technical images, are not simply signals. Film images especially
mix all kinds of other signal-like qualities – such as luminosity, contrast,
depth of field, or movement – into every shot as the material and technical
parameters of the image’s effect, alongside the trance-producing rhythm of
intermittent projection. Only then is the motif of a depiction emotionally
modified. The film images are thus multilayered complexes made up of
technical, iconological, historical, and sensual components. How they
can only be forcibly placed into an epistemological feedback process of
illustration, and how they make amends for this, is the subject of the first
chapter.
The question of “film and possession” was the starting point for this
research. The meaning of nerve agitation in various cultural trance tech-
niques leads to examining the cinema in this neurological context as well.
This can be assembled into a history that was directed, more than intended,
toward a cybernetic film theory – in a literal sense. At the same time,
however, this book forcefully documents how this cybernetics constantly
breaks away from all theories and systematics that can be described in
film history.
The chapter “Discretions” examines depiction as a social technique
using the example of Gregory Bateson’s pre-cybernetic speculations about
constructing images and meanings in anthropological films by means of
his footage of trance dances in Bali. Not only Bateson, with whom Deren
To Whom it May Concern 51

proposed a joint film project in Haiti, but also Norbert Wiener himself, who
asked the research couple Mead-Bateson to comment on the sociological
uses of cybernetics models during the Macy conferences, drew connections
between the question of social technologies, which was so virulent in the
1940s, and a theory of communication.
Against this historical backdrop, Maya Deren proposes the practice of
a technology of depiction that is simultaneously an artistic and a social
process. Film can become ritual technology if the rules of transformation
are set.
In the second chapter, “Depersonalizations”, possession is placed in
a diachronic context. Deren’s comparison of hysteria and possession in
Haitian voodoo is placed into relation with her film theory and her practi-
cal film transformations of the coordinates of space, time, and perception.
The precondition of all of her art is that Deren is familiar with the essence
of technical procedures. For all her discretion, what she nonetheless forgot
is: Knowledge about the rules of transformation do not necessarily protect
the subject from being infected itself, in other words, from becoming
possessed.
One of Deren’s more fortunate doppelgängers is Jean Rouch, an engineer
in street and bridge building, who developed the method of ciné-trance in
Africa, the technological correspondence between film and possession.
Using the example of his film Les maîtres fous, “the mad masters”, about
the cult of the Haouka in Accra, I will present Rouch’s reflections of “film
feedback as anthropological return gift”, and his practice of using film
footage as an art of transformation: “Deviations.”
It is not by chance that the threads of research about possession and
suggestions coincide at a place that also forms one of the primal scenes
of f ilm: Salpêtrière, where Albert Londe developed new cameras with
which doctors like Charcot could bring some order into the confusion of
hysterical gestures. With these cameras, they could then present themselves
as the masters of madness. Not only Sigmund Freud, but also Vladimir
Mikhailovich Bekhterev was a spectator at these stagings, the mastery of
which was based on a technology: “Compressions.”
The second part of the book looks into the prerequisites for all these
cultural technologies of trance in the history of sciences. The cinema
appears there as part of the history of psychology and its experiments,
localizing the soul in the nervous system and establishing the connec-
tion between human beings and machines, as it also defined art for the
electronic age: the birth of cinema from the laboratories of the neuro-
physiologists. The apparatus of the cinema appears in the line of medical
52  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

apparatuses that standardized rhythm and movement as indexes for

human mental life and, the other way around, could induce human mental
life artificially. This is the German pre-history of cinematic perception:
“Mental Apparatuses.”
Because the mind was by now accessible in the form of physiological
data, the physiometers, their psychically labile patients, clients, custom-
ers began to make new bodies and body movements to measure for the
impacted people or the audience. This is the French pre-history of cinema:
“Psycho-Motor Activity.”
From the institutes of the psycho-physiologists come the first profes-
sionals to use film to derive diagnoses from the body movements depicted
there: “Psycho-Drama.” Their most loyal spectators were the Surrealists,
while their most merciless perfectionists were the doctors in the Third
Reich.
Among the classic film theorists, at least two come directly from the
psychological laboratories: Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim. With
his book The Photoplay, Münsterberg wrote the first American film theory.
In contrast to German and French film theory, the American theory can be
described as one that complies with the wish of everyone to be connected:
“Psycho-Technology.”
Another figure had only indirect influence on film history: Vladimir
Mikhailovich Bekhterev, Münsterberg’s colleague in St. Petersburg/
Leningrad. In Deren’s works he turns up mediated by her father’s psycho-
logical advisor, Salomon Derenkovsky. Bekhterev developed the theory and
practice of a “collective reflexology” from his areas of specialty – hypnosis,
possession, and suggestion – in which the circumstances of transmission
can be imagined as an ideal and within society as a whole: a first vision-
ary neurological media theory: “Psycho-Reflexology.” His research at the
Psychoneurological Institute also shows him to be the man behind Dziga
Vertov’s man with a movie camera. Translated more precisely, the title of
his film sounds like an experiment at the Psychoneurological Institute: The
man observed by the cinematic apparatus.
The final chapter uses Vertov to sketch out the possibilities for a col-
lective human knowledge through cinema; “The truth gained by means
of film.”
Correspondences, coincidences, and good spirits that always turned
up when doubt took the upper hand kept the gaps and chasms in the
history of science together as a novel. Walter B. Cannon was at first only
conceived as a supporting character, as the medical mentor and colleague
of Norbert Wiener, and therefore belonged in the introduction. But then
To Whom it May Concern 53

he also turned out to be a researcher in comparative neurology of voodoo,

and thus turns up in the chapter “Trance-Technology.” Finally, according
to the congress protocol from a 1927 symposium in Ohio, he posed two
questions to the speaker Vladimir Bekhterev, thus playing a significant
role in the chapter “Psycho-Technology.” As an avant-gardist in the area of
medical illustrative techniques, he developed new radiological procedures.
Cannon died later from an excess of radiation from the laboratory, just like
a certain Blanche Wittman, the very first star, inaccessible, an “astre” in
the cinematic sky.
To Whom It May Concern.
Jean Rouch, Shooting from the Wheelbarrow. Private Collection.

Maya Deren, Glas. Photo: Alexander Hammid. Mugar Library, Boston, NY.
Part II
1. Discretions

Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead: Bali, New York

Gregory Bateson: “Norbert Wiener, when he had a problem, used to sit with the
wind blowing on a curtain.”
Margaret Mead: “I thought that was von Neumann.”

Most ethnological research trips ended quite literally at the knowledge

of the gods. Not only those of writers like Leiris and Artaud, but also the
anthropological journeys of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to Bali and
that of Maya Deren to Haiti. Film footage of rites and rituals was supposed
be made at a distance, in the field. Nevertheless, an unexpected interference
of cultural effects appears between the ones filming and the objects of their
anthropological investigations. Although the research reports were only
meant to convey information about the foreigners, they are also always
protocols about unhoped for and unexpected experiences with one’s own
culture and with its technological conditions, with the boundaries and
consequences of one’s own knowledge.
Over the course of their cinematographic research about trances and
dances, both Bateson and Mead, as well as Maya Deren, suddenly see
themselves exposed to a magic, the origin of which they do not know how to
interpret, but which can be explained as a result of their own misjudgment
of western cultural technologies. Looking for coherent cultural patterns,
such as those Margaret Mead sought to take as the basis for a new anthropol-
ogy starting in the forties,1 the researchers, with their image of the other, saw
themselves directly with the conditions of their own subjectivity. Those who
did not keep a sharp eye out for the difference between mirror and image in
their observations, between technological image and cultural imagination,
could easily believe themselves to be wrapped up in the business of spirits
and gods.
Transformations in a cultural space that the anthropologists call “inte-
grated”2 – whether ritual or simply cinematographic – are never missed by
their subjects, even if they can sometimes come into effect with astounding
time shifts. Students at Brown University experienced this during a lecture
about ethnographic film. Their professor, the anthropologist and documen-
tary filmmaker Karl Heider, was screening Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson’s Balinese film material when he suddenly reduced the projection
speed from 24 to 16 frames per second. The still twitchy movements of young
58  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

dancers and young women in trance were expanded into long undula-
tions on the screen. At the same time Margaret Mead’s commenting voice
dropped an octave, as if she were tying to prove the thesis that all cultural
coding is also always a transformation, carried out on her own body and
using the example of the most significant ethnological binary. The “grande
dame” of American anthropology, who had written her most important
books about the cultural differentiation of gender, sounded like a man.
What was thus shown in the “acoustic mirror”3 was a distorted acoustic
image of Margaret Mead, unclear in the cultural context but nonetheless
identifiable. A real fake.
Karl Heider justified his harsh manipulation of the playback speed in
the name of texts that Mead and Bateson themselves had written about
the conspicuous calm and even, slow rhythm of Balinese culture. Rituals,
ceremonies, and educational methods on Bali, as the two anthropologists
had shown, were all aimed at interrupting emotionally cumulative, that
is, increasingly sensational processes in social relations, and at regulat-
ing emotional states in terms of uniform stability and non-competitive
behavior.
What Heider provided for his students to see, manipulated in this way,
in fact matched the normal speed of Balinese dancers and rituals, since
Bateson, in order to economize on the expensive film material, had shot
certain parts of his footage at 16 frames per second. Margaret Mead had
simply edited these in between the remaining material later. In a regular
projection, the presumably calm dancers hysterically floundered around
on the screen during these sequences. The regularity of the film projector
could only present either the cultural integrity of the anthropologist or that
of the Balinese, and when Heider pulled back the tempo of the mechanism,
thus violating the correct cultural identity of the anthropologist, he put
the film apparatus at the service of Balinese culture. Its transformation in
the cinema occurred consciously and for pedagogical reasons. As a good
reader of Mead, the speed was significant for him, and not just the schema
of the course of movement: “Mead’s voice drops an octave or so but it is still
understandable, and the Balinese pace can be appreciated.”4 Now it was
exactly the goal of Mead and Bateson’s research trip to use new inscription
methods to transform themselves in the field of Balinese culture. Their goal
caught up with them in the end, but only belatedly, involuntarily, and with
Heider’s technological help.
Ethnographic films for the purposes of research had already existed in
the prehistory of cinema. In 1895 the doctor and anthropologist Félix-Louis
Regnault, together with the cameraman Charles Comte, prepared chrono
Discre tions 59

photographic recordings of people walking, attributing their walks and

gaits to different races: a running African, three striding Arabs, an African
woman with her child tied on her back, a person from the South Sea islands
climbing a tree – in comparison with a French soldier incidentally, who
manages it just as quickly without any help. Regnault’s recordings of a
Wolof woman making pots are considered the beginnings of ethnographic
film. Based on these images, which were photographed in the middle of
Paris at the “Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale”, he wrote
a revised cultural history of pottery making. Shortly thereafter, in 1898,
Alfred Cort Haddon recorded images, films, and sound on wax cylinders in
the service of the Cambridge Expedition to the islands of the Torres Strait
which were meant to document the psychological, social, and religious
particularities in the islanders’ behavior. In 1901 Baldwin Spencer recorded
a kangaroo dance by the Aboriginals in Australia and is thus considered
a pioneer among anthropological filmmakers. Films were also made by
physiologists, psychologists, and even commercial travelers and merchants
such as Augustin Krämer from Hamburg and adventurers such as Hans
Schomburgk, in order to gather data and information on film about the
cultures and colonies to be developed, but until the forties of the twentieth
century it was the portable typewriter that remained the scientifically
recognized instrument of all anthropologists working in the field. The
camera was relegated to illustrating the theses put down in writing. As
late as 1974, Margaret Mead expressed regret in her manifesto-like Visual
Anthropology in a Discipline of Words5 that whole cultures were disappearing
without ever being recorded and documented. Ethnologists, according to
Mead, in contrast to all the other disciplines in the natural sciences, would
not adopt the most advanced research technologies, thus allowing the whole
realm of visual anthropology to come under the influence of film artists,
whose recordings were in no way in the service of science.6 Margaret Mead
had good reason to criticize this development, since it was she, along with
Gregory Bateson, who had once initiated a film revolution in ethnography.
On a legendary trip to Bali, Bateson and Mead attempted to displace the
monopoly of the written word in ethnography with photography and film
as recording technologies in their own right: “We tried to use the still and
moving-picture cameras to get a record of Balinese behavior.[…] We treated
the cameras in the field as recording instruments, not as devices for il-
lustrating our theses.”7 Film illustration itself was meant to be a method of
scientific knowledge, in order to get around the subordination of foreign
societies to the conceptualizations of western paradigms. Registering on
film was meant to store “behavior” as physical action and reaction among
60  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

people, beyond all linguistic valuation, before the second step of analyz-
ing certain patterns and then discovering anthropological and cultural
typologies in the images.
The film material that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead brought
back from Indonesia at the beginning of the forties does in fact represent
a milestone in the history of anthropology. Since the two anthropologists
claimed to have discovered a model of non-aggressive social dynamics on
Bali and – anachronistic to all geopolitical escalation – a model of non-
competitive social behavior, the trip could very much have been understood
as a peace mission in dark times. The Balinese footage, however, caused
such a stir above all because it represented the basis for a future dynamic
anthropology. Already in the thirties, as part of their research in New
Guinea, Bateson and Mead had observed behavioral patterns among young
villagers on the Sepik river that they described as “schismogenetic”, meaning
a process of progressive cultural differentiation that was increased and
extended through symmetrical or complementary intersubjective feedback.
Examples of this are male and female behavior in everyday life in the play
between voyeurism and exhibitionism, in the back and forth of relationships
and gazes. Cultural identity, the two anthropologists could demonstrate,
could be understood as inter-relation, as interplay.
Since that time, anthropology no longer simply focuses on exploring an
unfamiliar society, but on discovering what recursive processes are used to
differentiate human behavior in a society into particular cultural or even
moral types. The goal of anthropological examinations was not simply
customs, rites, rituals, and relational forms, but the model that is visible
behind all variable behavior: the rules of transformation. The charm in the
heart of darkness.8
Due to his research in New Guinea, Bateson received a Guggenheim
grant to explore a theory of social transformation. The wording is as fol-
lows: “A formulation of a nucleus of theory relating to concepts of culture,
personality and character formation and the extension of this nucleus to
cover the phenomenon of cultural change.”9 Due to their research, Mead and
Bateson were invited, anthropologists among physicists, mathematicians,
and neurologists, to the exclusive Macy conferences to investigate “feedback
mechanisms and circular causal systems in biological and social systems”,
which launched both the term and the epistemology of cybernetics. Ques-
tions of how social relationships and social transformation are modeled and
regulated were at the core of this important American research program
for a (post-)war world that had got out of hand, the predictability of which
was supposed to be restored with the aid of electronic machines.
Discre tions 61

The possibility of understanding and modeling cultural behavior in cy-

bernetic terms, that is, in loops made up of “feed-backs” or “feed-forwards”,
was directly linked to the first Macy conferences and the effect that they
had on contemporary epistemological reflections. It was only against the
backdrop of the Macy conferences on cybernetics that Mead and Bateson
could turn a cultural anthropology of characters and temperaments into an
anthropology of socially differentiating behavior. Systematically surveying
the foreign was turned into interpreting by means of systems theory. Mead,
who examined mother-child relationships in particular in the light of this
dynamic, recalls in a conversation:

There had been too much emphasis that there were temperamental differ-
ences among children, so that you responded differently to a hyperactive
baby than you did to a quiet baby. But the extent to which there was a
system in which the mother was dependent on what the child had learned
as the stimulus for the next position wasn’t well articulated until we got
the cybernetics-conferences going.10

Cybernetics was therefore – much like navigating the sea, this master
pattern of cyberneticists and helmsmen – to be understood as a conse-
quence of situational assessments and the corresponding corrections for
readjustment. Observing this behavior would then also have to be kept to
a consecutiveness of actions in hierarchies of logical and temporal arrange-
ments that were only realized over the course of time.
Cinematography, with its temporal organization of events, thus initially
promised to provide the ideal recording instrument for ethnologists. Never-
theless, Bateson and Mead’s efforts in Bali to use film to raise the scientific
methods of anthropology to new heights of data processing11 initially proved
to be only an unexpected “quantum leap.”12 From their stay between 1936
and 1939, Mead and Bateson brought back 25,000 photographs and roughly
22,000 feet of 16mm film material, that is, more than 12 hours worth, which
they wanted to evaluate as the basis for their studies of trances and dances in
Balinese rituals. What was missing was the corresponding leap in methodol-
ogy. Only when viewing the material after their return to New York did it
become clear to the two researchers that the footage was only the necessary
preliminary work for a medial revolution in anthropological paradigms.
Editing the films, which required a structural organizational principle,
emerged as an unresolved problem. What was lacking in the editing room
was any convention that would have scanned the significant moments and
events in the uniform calm of Balinese images, given visibility to relations
62  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

and behavior, and thus suggested some sort of editing principle. In the
images of scenes from everyday life, rituals, and trance dances, which were
recorded in all kinds of lighting, from various perspectives, and with dif-
ferent speeds, one cannot initially spot any coherent units or elements that
might have organized the material. But this is precisely what would have
been necessary for any scientific systematization in structural anthropol-
ogy. At the beginning of his universal ethnological examination apparatus,
Claude Lévi-Strauss made the following remark: “In any field a system of
significances can be constructed only on the basis of discrete quantities.”13
Bateson and Mead had selected an analog recording medium right at
the point in time when the avant-garde of anthropologists were working on
formalizing reality in the direction of a strict binary. Claude Lévi-Strauss,
who was teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan at
the beginning of the forties, where Bateson was also lecturing, developed
his methods of structural anthropology in analogy with linguistics, which,
as Lévi-Strauss observed with “some, let us say, melancholy, and a great
deal of envy”,14 precisely involved a technological collaboration with the
engineers of that new science called cybernetics. Just as linguists differenti-
ated phenomena in language, Lévi-Straus discovered “distinct entities”
and “pairs of oppositions” in ethnological analysis, for example of kinship
relations, which could be ascribed to certain ways of behaving. So, just as
Freud had called for deciphering the contents of dreams not according
to their value as image, but according to relations of signification, Lévi-
Strauss noted that “the error of traditional sociology, like that of traditional
linguistics, was to consider the terms, and not the relations between the
terms.”15 Lévi-Strauss formalized these relations to make them available in
an almost exemplary way for further extrapolation by the “great modern
electronic machines.”16 The relations that Lévi-Strauss had discovered as
cultural forms in societies could all be notated and systematized as “+” or
“-” so that “each culture is a unique situation”,17 while remaining part of a
general law. Following this system, one could write an algorithm for each
culture, which would illustrate its patterns, processes, communications,
and transformations – the dream of every computer administration.
Binary coding for Lévi-Strauss, as an anthropologically constant
fundamental law – and this is the surprising turn in his argument – is a
formalization due to the unconscious activity of the mind.

If, as we believe to be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind

consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are funda-
mentally the same for all minds – ancient and modern, primitive and
Discre tions 63

civilized […] – it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious

structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to ob-
tain a principle of interpretation valid for other institutions and other
customs.18

The activities of the mind that humans beings are unaware of is not only ap-
propriate for Turing’s universal machine, it can also realize and integrate all
cultures in world history with their institutions and customs as a Hegelian
universal machine.
Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, who never tired of emphasizing
the value of “loose thinking”19 in scientific processes, deliberately kept the
relationship between linguistic and ethnological order casual and porous
from the very beginning in order to avoid some as yet undiscovered uni-
versality of human forms of relationship turning out to be a self-fulfilling
prophecy of a European, Cartesian mind. He systematically jeopardized his
own intentionality when speaking and naming. In contrast to the elegant
and elementary systematics of structuralism, he deployed Anglo-Saxon
“trial and error”:

When I am faced with a vague concept and feel that the time is not
yet ripe to bring that concept into strict expression, I coin some loose
expression for referring to this concept and do not want to prejudge the
issue by giving the concept too meaningful a term… I can go on using the
vague concept in the valuable process of loose thinking – still continually
reminded that my thoughts are loose.20

Bateson thus casts out his ever-refining net of signifiers, which is meant
to catch unfamiliar wild thinking and acting, while he remains categori-
cally camouflaged like a hunter. Like the entrapped Narcissus, however, he
himself becomes the first victim of this strategy.
Initially, however, Bateson wanted to transfer this method to film in
order to counter the French universalism of the mind with a psychosomatic
ecology, which was to be viewed in Norbert Wiener’s sense as the circulation
of the whole ecosystem, of the “organism-plus-environment.”21 Correspond-
ingly, the researcher couple got down to the task in a holistic way, albeit
always maintaining a division of labor. Margaret Mead recorded the course
of events in written form, while Gregory Bateson photographed and filmed
at the same time – sometimes assisted by anthropologist Jane Belo. In
one photo book, which the New York Academy for Science published in a
special edition, almost 800 photos are combined into thematic tableaus
64  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of five to ten pictures, each of which are extensively annotated en face,

representing a fascinating typology of the image of the Balinese body in
a hundred chapters. Bateson specifically describes which cameras, which
lenses, which film, and even which development chemicals he used, and yet
at no point does he announce which concepts of space and time – neither
anthropological, filmic, nor cultural – he used to determine whether to
use a telephoto or wide-angle lens, when and according to what model to
take series, when portraits, and when wide shots. Since he started using
a rapid-winder starting in 1937, the tableaus in the book look much like
sequences of single frames in a film, although they do not mark the courses
of movement systematically, for instance regularly on a timeline. The images
determine the aesthetic of the book to a great degree. They are not, as
announced, introduced as a media revolution in the scientific gaze, for they
function precisely not as photography and especially serial photography as
a scientific method would have required. Chrono photographic processes
were developed in the nineteenth century in order to fix traces in which
“behavior” is placed in a clear relation to temporal-spatial systems of coor-
dinates as a visible surface of psycho-­physical interaction.
One distinction, at least, was made during the process of filming. Since
there was very little film material available, it was the “more active and
interesting moments” that were shot, everything else being recorded with
a still camera.22 At no point does Bateson indicate when he chose to expose
the 16mm film at 16 frames per second, and when 24, nor in which situations
he switched to slow motion. We read merely that “we were compelled to
economize on motion-picture film.”23
Contrary to all epistemological declarations of intent, what is lacking is
any rule of transformation for the footage from Bali. The method behind
Bateson’s film anthropology can at best be described as an attempt to leave
the principle of recording to chance as much as possible:

[…] it is so hard to predict behavior, that it was scarcely possible to select

particular postures or gestures for photographic recording. In general,
we found that any attempt to select for special details was fatal, and that
the best results were obtained when the photography was most rapid
and almost random.24

It is not difficult to rediscover here the methods of epistemological hunting

taken from written ethnography. With “random” photography, Bateson
sought to deactivate the literary order of anthropology and, even more,
the interest from his own anthropologist’s gaze. The Anglo-Saxon legacy,
Discre tions 65

which Bateson brought to the cybernetically constituted anthropological

method was to refrain from all teleology. Later, he would explain this ex-
perimental phase of his research to a student: “One of the essentials […] for
understanding it, was to have been brought up in the age when […] purpose
was a total mystery.”25 Approximating chance as an illustrative principle
completely suited the paradoxical intention of recording the Balinese in
their own spaces and temporalities without intention or psychological
or ethnological purpose. The anthropologist man-with-a-camera had his
eyes on the complex, candid reality of human interaction: “[…] we tried to
shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide
on the norms and then get the Balinese to go through these behaviors in
suitable lighting.”26
What they sought to register was what was not “predictable”, for which
there was no term, everything that was not entangled in the nets of symbolic
designations, because it fell through the cracks of the order of anthropolo-
gists who used writing. This was meant to expand and restructure the field
of anthropology in terms of media. Using film, human behavior could finally
be recorded beyond “postures and gestures”, in all physical reality and the
uniqueness of random correspondences, in all its peculiar movements,
speeds, and irregularities, in all the indescribable surfaces of the body
and the unpredictable effects of exotic lighting conditions that once again
transformed the dancers’ movements.
While Gregory Bateson devoted himself to the lack of intentionality
of his recordings, he lost sight of the other side of the chance-coin: the
inauguration of order presumed to exist in every coincidence, as a mo-
ment of conjuncture. Only where there are borders, margins, and paths
can there also be crossings and intersections where accidents, chance,
and incursions can occur. “What do we mean when we say that something
happens by chance? We may mean one of two things, which may be very
different – either that there is no intention, or that there is a law.”27 Bateson
assumes that in doing away with intention he was also doing away with
the law, and in his epistemological anarchy he sought to pit random against
accident, hazard against chance, coincidence against probability. But not
everything falls so easily into place with the cybernetic anthropologists.
God may not play dice, but he did turn the dice’s structure into a kind of
trophy. Bateson attempted to shed all awareness of what he was doing
and to show that it was not only the photographed persons, but also the
researcher who could forget what had happened: “The photographer himself
ceased to be camera conscious.”28 All this making one forget and making
oneself forget, however, did not change the fact that photography and film
66  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

irrevocably brought symbolic conventions into the field of the Balinese and
even Balinese culture. What Bateson had ignored was that photography
and film, with their mechanical equipment, optical devices, and chemical
processes, were just as historically determined, and were just as foreign to
the Balinese as the typewriter had been. Bateson had ignored that he, with
Heiner Müller, was always already shooting from the hip.
The film material initially remained unedited. Instead, Bateson began
to organize all the open questions of social and cultural patterns in terms
of system theory at the New School for Social Research. In this context he
developed a graphic solution – halfway between writing and image – to the
problem of anthropological illustration. Typical Balinese behavior, which
consisted in systematically interrupting the “perhaps basically human
tendency towards cumulative personal interaction”29 and in it as duration
without escalation, becomes manifest, in its ordinate pattern of “cumula-
tive action” to the abscissa of time, in the form of a plateau. It is just this
plateau that would later come to prominence in the history of philosophy
with Deleuze and Guattari. Bateson was thus proposing one of the most
important lines of flight out of the limitations of western thought:

“Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual]

climax”, war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic
of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or
transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency
on the basis of their intrinsic value.30

Teleology, a total mystery. It is no coincidence that it was a filmmaker, Maya

Deren, who pointed out to Bateson that the form and course of his plateau were
solely due to the structure of his system of illustrating. In his schema, Balinese
feelings only appear as a break in an increasing, cumulating line because he
systematically does not mark a persistence in time as an increase in intensity.
This could also be conceived differently. Deren pointed Bateson to an obvious
counter example: “The duration in time […] applied to sexual activity even in
occidental cultures is not considered a negation but, on the contrary, valued
as a considerable achievement.”31 Duration itself could therefore be denoted
as an analemma curve in the sky. In other words, Bateson’s graphic contains
more information about Bateson than about Bali, as soon as the graphic is not
read in its value as an image, but according to the relationships that it creates.
Deren’s discomfort with cultural theory was justified. What Bateson had
sought as behavior in the film images were not simply reactions in time,
shapes in space, and forms of typical patterns of movement, but socially
Discre tions 67

pre-evaluated behavior such as dominance and submission. In a letter to

Maya Deren from December 12, 1946, in which Bateson prophesied difficul-
ties for her own film project, he explains to her the problems of his theory of
binary and complementary elements, with which he constructed relations
of social and familial relationships or national characters as a system of
regulation or control, warning:

The trouble is that these paired adjectives are very inadequate descrip-
tions of human relationships, that in fact, to make a pair, the dominance
and the submission have to be of such special sorts that the submission
is the sort of submission which is appropriate to that particular sort
of dominance… Dominance may be linked with spectatorship, and
submission may be linked with exhibitionism, or the pair of polarities
may be reversed – dominance being linked with exhibitionism etc. The
important thing is that there shall be an ethological system of some
sort underlying the relationship between the two contrasting elements.
Beyond this is it probably necessary for the two elements to be talking
about the same thing – e.g. sex, or drawing a hopscotch line, or whatever.32

Maya Deren distrusts any relationship categories constructed as binary,

with which Bateson sought to make “behavior” calculable as information
in social regulatory cycles. Her objection can be summarized as indicating
precisely the error that Bateson takes for the most common one in the
argumentation of systems theory: the confusion of “territorium and map.”
Deren’s sharp camera-gaze maintains that Bateson is always dealing with
illustrative functions in his material, whether these observations be written,
photographed, or filmed. She finds the constructions of his ethnological as-
signations to be “orders” in the double sense of arrangement and command,
and she criticizes the blending of the levels of depiction. After a lecture by
Bateson on February 22, 1947 she notes:

Last night the Bateson theory lecture and the mix up about Balinese
‘startle.’33 I suspect it doesn’t sit in there right, because it is a ‘symptom’ of
something which is an order, and it is not itself an order in the sense that
the ‘other feedbacks’ are orders. Anyway, that dominance-submission
business feels very wrong somehow but I don’t dare speak as strongly as
I should like to because I’d have not the right thing to offer instead. At
least if he would use arrows of dynamic movement (what the hell is the
name of them?) rather than make those directional signposts! Time Time
Time – not Space. Energy – not matter.34
68  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Deren’s critique of Bateson strikes at the core of all communications theory:

the functional distinction (in representation) and operational equation
(as circuit) of “order” as arrangement and command. Behavior should
be understood much more as a symptom of a certain social order than
as a classificatory system in its own right. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition
behavior is not only conduct, but also manners, and it is not for nothing
that Bateson, much later, will invent the theory of the double bind precisely
through the example of the parental imperative – “behave!”, while Bateson,
in his depiction, pursues the signifying pair “dominance and submission”,
which he himself introduced as a cornerstone of a “Balinese ethos”, Deren
insists that one can observe a movement in in which “orders” develop as
interaction and in which interferences, differentiations, and feedbacks are
revealed to be variable. While Bateson – as was the implicit rule of digital
research – introduced binaries into the social field in order to be able to
recognize algorithms as patterns in anthropology, he ignored the fact that
film itself introduces an order. Movements are chopped up into discrete
units and can be combined through this formalization into an illusion of
movement and animated into illusionary movements. The cinematographic
order scientifically dictates that reactions and behavioral modes are only
grasped over time, and they alter with time and temporality. In his film
depictions of the Balinese character, Bateson disregarded the time factor,
thus documenting his indifference in relation to the technical process of the
recording medium. His films, however, were objects, not simply of “invol-
untary”35 even random manipulations of the timeline, but of manipulations
justified purely by economic concerns, and thus provide a good example
of the colonial gaze, which can notoriously remain innocent because it has
implemented its operations and optical distortions, or more precisely: the
optical instruments.
Relativizing time in a very practical sense is one of the elementary opera-
tions of all film artists and researchers when they carry out experiments in
experience on screen. The temporal structure is the moment of the filmic
in every screening, which, by transforming discrete single frames into a
perception of motion, creates an imaginary that cannot consciously bring its
origins in its own technological realization into the present. Film perception
is principally illusionary, and technological manipulations are not seen as
such, but only in their aesthetic effects. Slow motion and time lapse take on
particular emotional values as the expression of a context of motion, and
are not simply their decelerated or accelerated variants. Rudolf Arnheim
confirmed this in the terminology of the experimental psychologists when
he was researching in the Frankfurt School of Gestalt: “The expressive
Discre tions 69

quality of any movement is dependent on its speed, and by changing the

speed of natural movements film can modify their character.”36 This is why
we attribute the charm of the movements at 18 frames per second, which
Chaplin also maintained in his sound films, to the little man with the cane
and the melons, and not to the film apparatus that creates it. This is why
Ninja and Wu Tang fighters appear so externally concentrated when their
on-screen movements just before the decisive stroke pass by in slow motion.
Maya Deren also made a film about the movements of shadowboxing in Wu
Tang and Shao Lin: Meditation on Violence. The film pits camera and body
movements against one another and as is therefore a study of the cinema
and the philosophy of Wu Tang at the same time, which is derived from
the Book of Changes and which views life as permanent metamorphosis.
A filmmaker’s indiscretions do not point back to the filmmaker him or
herself. Since film perception is illusionary, we sense a time-lapse recording
of Balinese dances as something nervous or hectic in the movement of the
dancers, and not as the economical or even stingy decision of the camera-
man. Slow motion, which also exists in Bateson and Mead’s Balinese films,
is understood as expressing an intensity in the trance, a heightened physical
control on the part of the dancers, and not as evidence of an increased
analytical interest, which both led to these recordings and then edited them
into the film without consideration for any ritual integrity. What is intended
as neutral instrumental editing in the name of research develops, despite
Mead’s off-screen commentary, into a willful emotional effect.
The duration of a jump, which is artificially extended in the montage
and can be combined from different sequences and perspectives, is exactly
not meant to neutralize excitement and tension – if it’s edited well – but
to increase it enormously. In this way, temporality in film is transformed
into intensity and f inally into emotion. Since Dziga Vertov’s stunning
analysis and synthesis of movement in Man with a Movie Camera, and also
in America at least since Panofsky drew attention to the fact that “these
unique and specific possibilities [of film] can be defined as dynamization
of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time”,37 it should have been clear
that every relativization of temporal conventions in film is a significant
transformation of everything that an ethnologist can record as cultural
information. It is the transformatory tool with which f ilmmakers can
produce emotions in the space of the cinema, quite independently of the
emotional states of their actors or their art of method-acting. But there is
no other way for anthropologists in the field to shoot film.
Margaret Mead, however, would adhere to this literal filmic illusion of
pure visual anthropology her whole life. “If tape recorder, camera or video is
70  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

set up and left in the same place, large batches of material can be collected
without the intervention of the film-maker or ethnographer and without
the continuous self-consciousness of those who are being observed.”38 In
misrecognizing the degree to which the usage of cultural recording tech-
nologies is conditioned and marked by tradition, she summarily threatens
those who put up resistance to their filming of her behavior with definitively
losing their history:

[…] the isolated group or emerging new nation that forbids filmmaking
for fear of disapproved emphases will lose far more than it gains.[…] they
will rob of their rightful heritage their descendants, who […] may wish
to claim once more the rhythms and handicrafts of their own people.39

Film archives or institutions in which the young and by now urbanized and
electrified indigenous population might once again take possession of its
legacy of ritual and handwork with the aid of anthropology have not pre-
vailed. In contrast, the subcultural use of electronic instruments in various
musical styles like the blues of the Delta, certain jazz music, or Hendrix’s pop
music might suggest an immediate and physical link to ritual techniques.40
Margaret Mead’s well-meaning colonialism, which also ignored the role of
technology, was avenged not by the descendants of the dead Indians, but,
as her Brown students heard, by the projecting institution itself.
Parallel to the ongoing debate with Gregory Bateson, Maya Deren wrote
an article about montage, Creative Cutting, in which she sees through the
anthropologists’ game with f ilm technology: “It is the phenomenon of
duration as tension which explains why slow motion – which may have
in it very little activity – often makes for greater tension than normal or
rapid motion for the tension consists in our desire to have our anticipation
satisfied.”41 It is this transformation of “duration” into “tension” that creates
emotionality in film. The intensity that appears in film as certain editing
sequences or in anthropological depictions of interactions that do not
provoke a differentiation between groups as a continual, sustained curve,
is created from elements that had previously been made discrete. If editing
technique remains in common conventions, it remains unnoticed as a
function of illustrative technology and thus unaware of the transformation.
If it appears, as it did at the beginning of film art, when there were barely
any film conventions, or later in the montage of cinéma verité, in Jean
Rouch, or in Jean-Luc Godard’s “wrong”, visible cuts, it troubles the field of
vision, thus instigating a disturbance to culture, its technologies of storing
and recording, and thus the vey conditions of subjectivity.
Discre tions 71

The relation to the apparatus is supposed to be forgotten twice: first when

shooting in the field, and a second time in the cinema. If the technical feed-
back of film movement disappears when a spectator looks at the electronic
artifice of the projection apparatus, the transformation does not return as
an effect of the filming direction and intervention of an observer, but as
an imaginary essence of what is depicted, thus provoking the spectator’s
emotional reaction. When Bateson cannot manage to edit the images into
any systematic scientific sense, what he experiences as the methodological
failure of his ethno-cinematography returns as an emotional effect at a
quite different spot. Maya Deren, to whom Mead and Bateson had initially
loaned their Bali film footage for her own film project A Fugue of Cultures,
had new and ecstatic experiences when watching the footage on her manual
home viewer: “The minute I began to put the Balinese film through the
viewer, the fever began. It is a feeling one cannot remember from before,
but can only have in an immediate sense.”42 Deren’s ecstasy on viewing the
footage can also be described as transformation, in which a return of the
cinematic unconscious in Walter Benjamin’s sense does not simply depict
the “concept of culture, personality and character formation” that Bateson
was looking for, but produces it in the first place. Emotional ramifications
develop in projecting the material that in the long run even form emotional
relations. Nonetheless, Deren notes that it is precisely the manipulation of
the film speed that represents a reason for the artificial ecstasy that has
little to do with the Balinese trance technique, but is due above all to the
feedbacking connection between the New York woman’s body with the
New York film apparatus.

The immediate physical contact with the film, the nearness of the image,
the automatic muscular control of its speed – the fact that as I wound –
my impulses and reactions toward the film translated themselves into
muscular impulses and so to the film directly with no machine – buttons,
switches, etc. – between me and the film[…]. Later of course, I shall use
the projector to get proper speed, etc. But first this intimate copulation
between me and the film must take place… 43

While Bateson had just given up hope that film might be a medium to
depict circular-causal and feedback mechanisms in social systems, he had
created all the necessary conditions to put such mechanisms in gear. The
cinematic feedback that the anthropologists had presumably sought in
the field occurred in the cinema. Only during projection could and must
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson be confronted with their cinematically
72  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

construed Balinese selves, and only then could they see the transformation
of the stranger as their own. Heider’s students were plied and flattened by
the same transformation, by an endless, and in McLuhan’s sense, medial
extension, which is echoed by itself over and over again, and which can
be described as a baker’s transformation, to use Deleuze’s terminology. At
the same time this medial extension is further processed further into a
multifarious “mille feuille”. It is the processing of one’s own sensibility, of
one’s own trance, which would not be induced by Indonesian drums and
dancers, but by the small Trojan horse of a 16mm projector in the lecture
hall. Heider’s dauntless speed switching constantly kept this processing
from becoming the usual procession of institutional anthropology.
In their model of the thousand-fold plateau, Deleuze and Guattari merged
the double sense of the anthropology-order into a direction for philosophy
to move. With regard to the subject, they turned out to be film philosophers:

Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has,
or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between
which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one
becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. 44

Deleuze and Guattari selected duration from Bateson’s plateau – unlike

Bateson himself – and therefore recognized the perception of intensities of
relation. The history of evaluating the Balinese ethos shows that Bateson’s
plateau is due to the experiments in film depiction anyway, and in no way
due to Balinese culture.
At the latest in 1951 Bateson will have integrated Deren’s objection, that
he was transferring his own order into foreign systems and cultures through
his system of notation, into his communications theory. This theory was
published as a study of psychiatric reform. Along with a research group,
Bateson had placed psychiatry in a completely new light by simultane-
ously examining physical illnesses under neurophysiological, linguist, and
behavioral psychology aspects as abortive or ambivalent communication.
Now his sights are set precisely on the illustrative system: the book about
the new methodology bears the title Matrix. He had taken Deren’s critique of
his transferal of western forms of subject formation to the rest of the world
seriously. In the sixties, Bateson combined all his reflections on cybernetics
and cinema with an emancipatory theory of subjectivity according to which
personalities and characters can be formed, broken down, or even healed
in the context of collective forms of relations with time and in duration. In
Discre tions 73

the foreword to a new edition 16 years later, he would add parenthetically:

“At the time this book was written, it became abundantly clear that the age
of the individual had passed.”45
At the beginning of these new research projects, Bateson placed Norbert
Wiener’s thesis that the concepts of “information” and “negative entropy” are
synonymous and develop simply and elegantly the connection between the
knowledge (or non-knowledge) of an observer about the state of a system on
the one hand, and the order or entropy that he or she can attach or attribute
to this system. Every speaker is entangled in the continuous process of
coding, evaluating, and transforming with his or her “information and
evaluation system.” The premises of the book, in which Maya Deren is only
faintly and fragmentarily perceptible, like an echo to Narcissus, are first of
all that codification and evaluation are two sides of the same operation, as
Deren had noted in relation to coordinate systems for the Balinese plateau,
and second, that the simultaneous definition and evaluation that someone
makes, from which their behavior can be inferred, presumes that the ob-
server progressively revises his or her assumptions, consequently learning
from his or her mistakes. Bateson’s clear thesis on meta-communication
can be read as a commentary on previous indiscretions. Bali, as it were, is
a network of gazes, recorded in discrete image by the camera, projected in
front of an audience, which relates to these images…
As a theorist and the great practitioner of a “learning to learn”, which
can mean both “learning to deal with and expect a given kind of context for
adaptive action” as well as “character change due to experience”, 46 Gregory
Bateson integrated the lesson of doubled film-time into his communications
theory. Starting from psychiatric studies he took a social matrix above all
as the basis of human behavior, relativized the observer’s standpoint, and
recognized every codification, every mode of illustration as evaluation. 47
Bateson had experienced the cinema as a dynamic relational trap. His film
experiment had not simply displaced the sad typology of the anthropologist
in the field, powerless in speech but powerful in writing, not simply made it
possible to see the structure of social feedback mechanisms among stran-
gers, but shown that films implied a fundamental relativizing of behavior.
The ethnographer must thus know that he is at best a cybernetic catalyst
in his work. Norbert Wiener formulated it to his Macy colleagues with a
malicious undertone:

With all respect to the intelligence, skill and honesty of purpose of my

anthropological friends, I cannot think that any community which they
have investigated will ever be quite the same afterward.[…] There is
74  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

much in the social habits of a people which is dispersed and distorted

by the mere act of making inquiries about it. In another sense from that
in which it is usually stated, traduttore traditore. 48 Bateson becomes
“trasformatore.” Ultimately he will simply call for: art.

Years later – and much to Margaret Mead’s annoyance – Bateson, think-

ing back on the shifts of the time axis in the Balinese film work, said: “I
think the photographic record should be an art form.”49 Mead, on the other
hand, who later edited the Bali material after all, remained true to the
time of the anthropologist, subsuming the Balinese footage in all speeds,
regardless of her off-screen commentary, to 24 pictures per second. She
also did not refrain from showing the long thin figure of Gregory Bateson
himself with the camera at his eye at the end of the film Trance and Dance
in Bali, as if she wanted to present the erratic and flickering film views as
the mimesis into the obsessive and causal-circular exuberance. As late as
1976, in a conversation with Stewart Brand, the two – who were both well
over seventy – could still reactivate their old argument about “behavior”
at a single mention. Mead immediately pointed out the weak blind spot of
the cameraman, the persistence:

Mead: […] he’s a good filmmaker, and Balinese can pose nicely, but his
effort was to hold the camera steady enough long enough to get a sequence
of behavior.
Bateson: To find out what’s happening.
Mead: When you’re jumping around taking pictures …
Bateson: Nobody’s talking about that, Margaret, for God’s sake.
Mead: Well.
Bateson: I’m talking about having control of a camera. You’re talking
about putting a dead camera on top of a bloody tripod. It sees nothing.50

Whether cameras can see, whether the control or steering of the gaze can
be placed or even concealed in the detail of the apparatus, whether human
being and machine develop symbiotic or parasitical relationships in the
matrix of cybernetic artificiality – in the 1940s these were not just questions
for anthropologists with movie cameras. In the Second World War, camera
and radar eyes on airplanes and machine guns could not only record and
transmit visual material, they could also calculate trajectories and guide
projectiles. But while the devices learned to behave more precisely, human
behavior under the conditions of war had turned out to be highly unreliable
and uncontrollable. People who were just supposed to shoot could suddenly
Discre tions 75

no longer trust their own senses and nerves, their muscles, and their self-
assurance, entrapped in irresolvable sensory-motor convolutions. They
started to tremble, to stutter, to stagger, and, at best, simply to collapse.
The mathematician Norbert Wiener, who was familiar with all these states,
tried to find a remedy to these break-downs while working for the US Air
Force. He discovered a new principle of integrated control: “This method
of control appeared to us not unlike a method already known in electric
circuits and now being applied in servomechanisms, or systems by which
we switch in an outside source of power for control purposes.[…] We call
this negative feedback.”51
It was this method of negative feedback that Bateson was looking for
when he sought to achieve control over the camera, which would see in
his place so that he could finally get the goal of his gaze in the viewer
– a constant feedback between technology and the gaze, which rather
precisely describes the difficult to achieve balance between self-control
and absent-mindedness that is necessary for all artistic production. Bate-
son became increasingly interested in his own cultural transformation,
which obviously included the world around him as an ecosystem. By this
time, ethnologists had been able to further deconstruct the image of the
stranger – if necessary, in a brutal and liberating way, such as Karl Heider
had done when he showed his students that sometimes all that is needed
to get the genie in the anthropological bottle to appear is a valiant grip
into the apparatus.
In a letter from December 20, 1967 to the neurophysiologist Warren
McCulloch, one of the pioneers of the mathematical calculation of neuronal
network processes and one of the founders of the Macy conferences, Bates
writes about the knowledge of the gods, which appears at the end of this
lifelong research report that meanders through the sciences:

I suggest that one of the things that man has done through the ages to
correct for his short-sighted purposiveness is to imagine personified enti-
ties with various sorts of supernatural powers, i.e., gods. These entities,
being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and
circuit characteristics.52

Gods regulate and rescue the world’s equilibrium by maintaining ho-

meostatic processes beyond all individual human interest. Maya Deren
had also regretted that no human society had integrated this divine
self-regulating dynamic into its social system: “But there is no society or
organization designed to change itself and this is what the whole hitch is”,53
76  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

she noted on March 16, 1947. Shortly thereafter, however, she encountered
the gods in Haiti, who appeared on the scene in such transformations, who
seized bodies and intervened in human relationships. This case makes
clear how such good gods form an alliance with the media of storage and
transmission.
2. Depersonalizations

Maya Deren: Hollywood, Haiti

Magic cannot be explained. Magic can only
be practiced, as you all well know.
– Heinz von Foerster, 1990

Body Balance

While Gregory Bateson’s oblivious use of film technology was making him
the object of cinema-trance unwillingly, Maya Deren, a pioneer of American
experimental film, is going the opposite way: as a levelheaded machinist,
she first appropriates the technological functions of film, only to take
her leave as often as possible in a kind of cinema-sleep. “[…]you may find
me many evenings in the motion-picture theater, sharing with the other
sleepers […] the selected dream without responsibilities.”1 While the British
Bateson dragged visions of analytical symmetry to the USA modeled after
his great role model William Blake, Deren smuggled an unusual legacy of
Russian knowledge in among the American filmmakers. Her father had
studied reflexology in St. Petersburg with Bekhterev, and had worked at
his Psychoneurological Research Institute in the 1910s, a time when experi-
ments were being done on methods of group therapy, methods of collective
suggestions and mutual psycho-­physical equilibration, methods that were
unknown in the USA. Only in the 1960s were similar forms of systematic
therapy developed there for schizophrenia patients: by a research group
surrounding Gregory Bateson.
Maya Deren will come close to circular-causal thinking, as she newly
discovered it in Bateson’s lectures at the New School for Social Research
in New York, when she begins systematically reflecting on the cinema.
Her most important text about cinema, Cinema as an Artform, in which
she produces the relativity of spatio-temporal perception and historical
technology, begins with the dedication: “To my father, who, when I was a
child, once spoke to me of life as an unstable equilibrium.”2 Her theory of
cinema examines just such an unstable equilibrium as a microstructure
of a web of relations, not only between subjects, but especially between
people and apparatuses.
Cinema, like dance, is about movements that produce an equilibrium of
moments which are unstable in themselves. This is why Deren constantly
78  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

pursues the interferences of historical technologies and social relations in

her texts on cinema. When technological developments encroach on the
parameters of time and space, it relativizes everything, even the conditions
of subjectivity. The indivisible ego no longer stands squarely on the ground
of reality, but gets displaced into new parameters:

Today the airplane and the radio have created, in fact, a relativistic
reality of time and space. They have introduced to our immediate real-
ity a dimension which functions not as an added spacial location but
which, being both temporal and spacial, relates to all other dimensions
with which we are familiar. There is not an object that does not require
relocation in terms of this new frame of reference, and not least among
these is the individual.3

For Deren, “relativistic” reality not only refers to the theory of a once
new scientif ic way of thinking, but also to complexity and ambiguity,
asynchronicity, blurriness, and imbalances in human perception, which
have become scientifically competent. With analogue media it was not
reality, but movements and relationship between realities that became the
object of research. For Deren, parameters like time and space are subject
to historical and technological developments – as is shown by the fact that
she insistently and repeatedly pointed out the simultaneous development
of cinema, radio, and rocket technologies since 1945. But cinema itself has
a part in this transformation of times and spaces. In the comprehensive
sense that Deren gives to it, cinema, by drawing technology and perception,
machines and human bodies, images and gazes together in its rhythm,
can itself create reality: “Cinema – and by this is understood the entire
body of techniques, including camera, lighting, acting, editing, etc. – is a
time-space art with a unique capacity for creating new temporal-spatial
relationships and projecting them with an incontrovertible impact of
reality[…].”4
Against the magic of film projection, the human head is powerless. Deren
examines the two operations of film production, technological storage and
the technological assembling of stored data into a new reality, in its effect
on subjectivity on both sides of the screen. “…filmmaking consists of two
distinct but interrelated processes: photography – by which actuality is
recorded and revealed […] in its own terms; and editing, by which those
elements of actuality proper may be re-related on an imaginative level to
create a new reality.”5 In photography every object portrays its own illustra-
tion onto light-sensitive surfaces or filmstrips, at any rate, as Deren repeats,
Depersonalizations 79

not before it has passed the analysis of recording technology: “the refined
optics of the lens, the slow-motion analysis of the movement, etc.”6
Only after being treated technologically does reality become visible, open
to experience and communicable, and thus reality is always a historical one.
From the very beginning Deren examines the quality of an image not for its
possible similarities with what is depicted, but for the effect of this image
on thinking and the imagination, for the medial effect as a mental effect:
“…the term ‘image’[…] presumes a mental activity.”7 The form of reality
that is photography marks its place value in a series of transmissions that
encounter and alter perception. This is why the photomechanical means of
illustrating, which can be relayed as the impression of light itself, constitutes
the form of reality that is every photograph:

The photograph not only testifies to the existence of that reality […] but
is, to all intents and purposes, its equivalent. This equivalence is not at
all a matter of fidelity but is of a different order altogether. If realism is
the term for a graphic image which precisely simulates some real object,
then a photograph must be differentiated from it as a form of reality itself.8

While Rudolf Arnheim thought that photography had “raised our demands:
we like reproductions not only to be faithful to the object but also to
guarantee their faithfulness by being mechanical manifestations of the
reproduced object itself”,9 for Deren photography is the tool that provides
art with reality.
After 1945, however, it was precisely technological devices that threat-
ened to replace human senses and possibly also human thinking. Every con-
nection to machines played with the inevitable self-dissolution of human
sensibility, and not only in art. The early researchers in cybernetics feared
that the individual as an active agent in the world was being reduced to the
minimum in the world of digital machines. In the opening speech of the
Macy conferences it is stated: “Wiener in his introduction in ‘Cybernetics’
points out […] that the complexity of the computing machine type of mecha-
nism is so great and can be pushed so far now that it potentially threatens
individual decision.”10 This is the disappointing way that the integration of
the human into the digital human-machine was being presented.
At the same time, Maya Deren was experimenting on analogue film with
the effects of technological images on human seeing, seeking to establish a
new reality assembled out of horizontal, reticulate, multiple functionalities
and relationships for the purpose of rescuing human sensibility.11 She was
simultaneously attempting to replace the idea of the individual with a
80  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

system of interfering human relations. This is the context in which she

developed her concept of the ritual: “In its method – a conscious manipula-
tion designed to create effect, in contrast to the spontaneous compulsions
of expression […] – the ritualistic form is much more the art equivalent of
modern science than the naturalism which claims to be so based.”12 In one of
her film projects, she proposes progressively deconstructing the identifiable
agents of action in her films as “Rituals Involving Minimization of Personal
Identity.” The smallest units of ritual activity – hand motions, eye motions,
chalk marks on the ground, round or oblong forms – are meant to become
recognizable as discrete elements, as “dis-associated”,13 and at the same
time to be assembled into a joint in which a cultural system would find its
expression. The interconnection between technological and social relations
in the cinema is the prerequisite for its “incontrovertible impact of reality.”14
As a complement to this “incontrovertible impact of reality”, Deren devel-
ops the term “experience” in her texts on cinema. At first glance it not only
bridges the epistemological gap between the production side of a cinema
image and its reception. Still, this reception leaves traces and changes once
and for all how space and time are perceived. Experience would be a first
circular-causal mechanism in the cinema. Watching films in the cinematic
space alters perception, this sleepy dream-watching in the cinema. The
new perception in turn determines new forms of watching film, which in
turn shifts perception, etc. It is precisely with the term experience that
Deren distinguishes the work of experimental filmmakers who are seeking
to realize genuine visual effects from the reality and effect of Hollywood
cinema, which does not function at all as film, but combines the literary
metaphorically into a system of fatuous transcriptions. In Deren’s strict
sense, Hollywood is not cinema at all, because it neither affects nor alters
visual perception:

…the Hollywood fiction film has created a kind of visual shorthand of

clichés with which we have become so familiar that we are not even aware
of the effort of transcription.[…] Actually, this has nothing in common
with the directness with which we would experience a truly visual reality,
such as falling […].15

Falling, tumbling, stumbling, these powerless movements of the body in

space are a good example of the experiences that Deren wants to make
filmic, because she assumes a strict composition in artificial, constructed
spaces and times, and because she takes and reflects the moment of the
involuntary in cinematic perception. Even how one’s attention is drawn,
Depersonalizations 81

how one’s thinking it directed in the cinema, or the shock of a cut can be
experienced as mental falling and tumbling. Incursions and consterna-
tion. In Deren’s films, however, it is above all bodies themselves that are
freed from the preconfigured gaze by which they are shackled and held
fast in symbolic poses and gestures. She takes up the unpredictable and
uncontrollable in movements, but not simply as letting-oneself-go or as
relaxation, not as coincidence nor as an accidental shot, neither random
nor chance. In order to create sequences of falling, spinning, jumping, or
tumbling, Deren demands enormous discipline from the dancers that she
works with, for what is supposed to emerge as feeling in the cinema must
be assembled technologically from precisely calculated fragments into a
new film reality. “‘Film-Spontaneity’ is impossible”,16 she writes succinctly
and in a snipe to the surrealists with the pig’s eye under the razor blade.
In order to have an experience in art or in the cinema, one has to grasp
the essence of the production-device, not the essence of an object depicted
by them: “…that experience would be created out of the nature of the art
instrument by which it was, in fact, realized.”17 Deren’s note is much more
significant for film theory than for the visual arts. From the beginning,
examinations of film perception such as Arnheim’s or Panofsky’s have
insisted that we can no longer speak of representation in the cinema, since
in particular the perception of movement in cinema is a completely distinct
and singular form of perception, “not the re-experience, but the experience
of motion.”18 In her films, Maya Deren will show that the same is true for
perception of film spaces and times.
In all of Deren’s films, from Meshes of the Afternoon to the raw mate-
rial that she shot about voodoo rituals in the Caribbean, the shifting and
interlocking of relations of time and space is not only a film process, but
also determines what could be designated as action or rather “incident.”
The protagonists, dancers, lose themselves in spatio-temporal labyrinths
and encounter themselves again, this time as others on their way through
the foreign spaces. These odysseys are not to be seen as the progressive
formational journeys of heroes, but as circular movements in spaces that
displace any unambiguous gaze. Spaces reflect and refract gazes and raise
questions about how the ego is optically involved in the relation to others.

Meshes, Tresses, Networks

The film Meshes of the Afternoon, which was shot, according to Hammid,
as a “home movie” at 1466 Kings Road in Los Angeles, a few blocks north of
82  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Sunset Boulevard, combined everything that the Bolex – this Swiss preci-
sion clockwork among 16mm cameras – allowed for, including changing
film speeds, fades, and focal lengths, and equipped with its frame counter
to precisely calculate multiple exposures. The film became a labyrinth
of perception, which in film history has turned out to be a labyrinth of
self-perception. The gaze in this film is led into all the paradoxes provided
by the functions of seeing. Meshes of the Afternoon realizes what Lacan
designated as the prison-house of desire in an image: “In this matter of the
visible, everything is a trap, and in a strange way […] entrelacs (interlacing,
intertwining). There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of the
double sides that the function of vision presents that is not manifested to us
as a labyrinth.”19 The interlacing of Meshes of the Afternoon is also about the
seeing of seeing itself, and how the subject is displaced and shifted in the
process. What does not stop shifting the subjects into meshworks of space-
time would then be the uncanniness of the home movie. The means are
banal and yet fundamental, as Panofsky succinctly pointed out for cinema:
“These unique and specific possibilities can be defined as dynamization of
space and, accordingly, spatialization of time. This statement is self-evident
to the point of triviality but it belongs to that kind of truth which, just
because of its triviality, is easily forgotten or neglected.”20
Using simple tricks, the little house in Kings Road becomes a villa with
endless staircases and interlocking rooms. While for example in one wide-
angle shot (Nr. 6) the protagonist climbs a couple of steps to the front door
of the house, these very same steps will seem to have been transformed
right afterwards into an infinitely long staircase by editing together several
close-ups of the key falling down the many steps in slow motion (Nr. 9-12).
The literary “…it would seem that…” becomes being in the film by manipu-
lating time. Right at the beginning of the film then, after the protagonist
has approached the front door of her lover’s house with decisive steps,
she loses control over herself along with the key – as is conveyed by the
slow motion – and her perception of her surroundings. The slowed-down
movements of the key appear to the identified and infected perception
of the spectators as a paralysis of their own deciding power, their own
ability to intervene. The suddenly transformed steps defy any perceptual
intentions, or to put it the other way around, they no longer have control
over the temporal spaces of the world. The problem of any interpretation of
this film remains that the intensity of a feeling produced by compressing
time – of paralysis, of resistance, or of heaviness – always leaves open vari-
ous other justifications at the same time, or, to use the terms of objective
psychology, it links together different relations. With this first use of slow
Depersonalizations 83

motion, spectators are seized by the same disturbance of perception that

the protagonist is experiencing.
The steps inside the home are slowed down using the same trick. Frustra-
tion, in the literal sense of deception, is conveyed to the spectator as a
technological trick. Deren passes the instructions for producing this effect
on to amateur filmmakers:

… to achieve on film the sense of an endless frustrating flight of stairs, the

great Hollywood studios would probably spend hundreds on the building
of a set. You, however, can do it for just the price of the film required to
photograph any ordinary stairway three times – the first angle shows
all but the top landing, the second angle shows the flight without any
landings included, and the third angle shows the flight with the top
landing. If the actor climbs the visible portion of the stairs three times at
a consistent rhythm, you will succeed in having created a stairway three
times as long as the real one.21

Film reality is not created from existing relations, but from optically
constructed ones. Exertion, fear, and the feeling of futility that befall the
protagonist are not mimicked, but simulated in film perception.
A further trick to manipulate spatial feeling is to link spaces by linking
two flash pans. A long and constantly accelerating pan (Nr. 16) through a
room is edited during the blurriness of motion together with a pan that
constantly decelerates and ends in a completely different room (Nr. 17). Later
in the film (Nr. 42) there is a pan away from these same rooms without a cut,
and a staircase that was not there before becomes visible in the center. This
gives rise to a new topological context of a space that seems to be familiar.
An interlacing space that conceals its knots in the editing. The discomfort
in this constellation appears not only as a serious doubt in the protagonist’s
perceptive capacities, but also as a slight doubt in one’s own ability to re-
member. Such paradoxical spaces appear complex, but they are the result
of simple editing tricks, which, due to their speed, fall below the threshold
of conscious perception and intertwine feelings of time and space. Meshes,
used as a technical term, not only means a network, but also feedback loops,
that is, a term that meant more than handwork and handcraft in 1942. These
feedbacks of perception, which are due to non-perceptible manipulations,
the cinematic tricks of single frames, are what induces one into a cinematic
trance. The discreet charm of the Maltese cross. Since he overlooked this
systematic dismantling of duration in time done by recording technology,
Gregory Bateson could not analyze trance – at least not in film.
84  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Hammid and Deren also create illusionary continuity by using the flash
pan to compress time. In a chase sequence between the protagonist and
a figure dressed in black, flash pans link up not only different spaces, but
also different recording speeds. The figure in black walks up the street in
slow motion, the camera follows her, then pans very quickly back. In the
blurriness of the motion the next shot is edited in, which begins with a
flash pan that slows down, and then ends on the young woman who, in
normal speed, takes up the chase (Nr. 32-38). Thus arises the paradoxical
time structure that the person walking away moves extremely slowly while
the chaser is walking very quickly and yet cannot catch up with the other.
To conscious perception, however, they are in the same space and thus
in the same time continuum. The paradox that the quick walker cannot
catch up with the slower woman is resolved by the visual perceptual logic
that knows nothing of technological tricks in that it draws compensatory
“conclusions” that here could be called “unconscious conclusions”, to bor-
row a term from Helmholtz. Because the spaces cannot be differentiated
optically, the different movement qualities of the two figures get attributed
to these figures themselves as emotional qualities. The woman in black
appears “uncanny” and “threatening” in her movements, the woman being
chased “desperate” or “frustrated.”
The exact reversal of this construction, in which the change in time takes
place over the course of the pan or as the scene goes on, is seen at the end
of the film Ritual in Transfigured Time, in which a woman, who is fleeing
in normal time, cannot escape her pursuer, who chases her in slow motion.
Here as well, the uncanniness of the spatio-temporal situation created by
film gets attributed to the man as an omnipotent fiend.
This transposition of the quality of a movement, which gets recorded
technologically and thus produced and defined cinematically, to the charac-
ter of a person who moves is fundamental to watching cinema. It is a cultural
means of perception, and it repeats the tactical history of the dispositif: the
way from physiologically measuring a person to psychologically assessing
him, which masks the operation of measuring. According to the cinema-
convention we spectators attribute cinematically produced variations of
speed and movement to the actors’ bodies, not to the film technologies
that actually create them. But even if Deren initially only sees her tricks
as the poetry of the medium, the paradoxical structures simultaneously
expose the functions of the medium. The simplest manipulations of the time
structure can make two different characters out of the same actress – in
Meshes of the Afternoon it is always Maya Deren herself. Rudolf Arnheim
described this logic in the sense of the experiments from Gestalt theory:
Depersonalizations 85

“The change of speed not only served to adapt visual movement to the
range of human perception, but also changed the expressive qualities of
an action.”22
Deren and Hammid have strategically reversed here what turns up
again in the discussion with Bateson about recording and assessment in
the documentary material from Bali. The parameters of illustration allow
what is filmed to appear in a particular and preconfigured system that has
already structured and shaped the innocent observation of the senses, be it
those of the ethnologist of the spectator in the cinema. While it is also not
possible to perceive at all except through such a matrix, the gaze should
nonetheless – and this is the point of Meshes – be drawn to the meshes of
the film.
Another trick for interweaving chronology is the repetition of certain
shots that are edited with different connections over the course of the film,
that is, into a different temporal context. Shot Nr. 21 for example shows a
close-up of a pillow, then follows with a pan right to a record player where
a record is spinning; the woman’s hand picks up the needle and pauses the
record player. The shot fades out into blurriness after another pan to the
left. Much later, shot Nr. 61 begins with a medium shot from below of the
woman, looking down and holding out her hand. Shot Nr. 62 is a medium
close-up of the record player, the woman’s hand comes into the picture
as the camera zooms in on the record player. When the framing is almost
identical with that of Nr. 21, she lifts the needle up again, once again paus-
ing the recording player… This repetition of the action appears in a new
spatio-temporal context, thus disturbing the logic of the story. Once again
the paradoxical structure actuates the circuits of logical attribution. Our
perception in the cinema tends to adjust what it sees to the usual experi-
ences of time and space, thus falling into paradoxical loops of causality. If
the same action is shown twice, then it will be a memory of the protagonist.
If, however, as its introduction suggests, it is a second, identical action,
then there must be something from outside that deceives the protagonist.
What is specific to film in this structure is that spaces and chronologies,
but also identities and movements are first identified and organized in an
automatism of reception, and are always only perceived as contradictory
after the fact. Optical illusions in painting can be distinguished from those
in film in that the latter occur in linear time and cannot be verified over the
course of projection. The constant belatedness with which consciousness
recognizes the steps of perception as missteps thus becomes a disturbance
of perception and of consciousness itself. All these dissociations, which
are called “dreamlike” in interpretations, arise from simple technological
86  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

manipulations, which can be achieved with a Bolex or with simple edits

made at the film viewer. In Meshes of the Afternoon the dream of a romantic
relationship becomes a somnambulistic pursuit and failure of two people to
meet. They wander, deferred in time, through spaces and when they finally
meet, the young woman has already lost herself in her doppelgänger, her
depictions on film. If desire, running up and down stairs, is represented
as a nightmare of desire structured by others and many other little things,
this other is absolutely cinematic.
Through Meshes of the Afternoon Deren came to understand two things,
as she wrote to the jury for a Guggenheim grant: “First, that a creative
work of art implied the creation of an imaginative experience or reality
rather than a reproduction of one already existent; and second, that that
experience would be created out of the nature of the art instrument by
which it was, in fact, realized.”23 Film is no longer about representation, but
about constructing experiences that are even more real when they reveal
historicity and relativity in the technologies of depiction themselves. In her
second film, At Land, which was shot in New York and on Long Island in
1944, illusionary compressions of space and time become so much the object
of the film that Deren can summarize her long literary scenario in a single
sentence, which for its part brings together perception, time, space and
history: “At Land is concerned with 20th century-minded time and space.”24
This film begins with a radical manipulation of time. Scenes are edited
in backwards. At first we see the entire screen filled with breaking waves.
A woman’s body shows up lying in the spray and is bathed, white on black,
by the water. When the shot comes closer to the woman, the film material
is edited in from front to back and in reverse – and thus, due to the technol-
ogy of projection, it is also turned on its head.25 The waves pull back from
the woman to the sea in a strange and peculiar way, while the woman at
first lies there unmoved. Her physical and sensual presence thus seems to
follow a simple duration in progressive time, for there is no indication of
any backward direction in her own physical chronology. This gives force to
two temporal movements of the gaze. One part of the image seems to run
backwards, an equally strong part of the image, or even stronger through the
sensual presence of the beautiful protagonist, seems to run forwards in time.
This gives rise to a dissociation in the perception of time, a schizoization
of time. The drifting apart of two parallel sensations of time produces a
circumstance in which a permanent psychic or perceptual-physiological
compensation in the spectator attempts to adjust to the paradoxical
processes and regresses on screen. Strictly speaking, this self-correcting
self-reflection of perception, regulated by external impulses, is already
Depersonalizations 87

trance. The time of perception and the perceived time periods displace one
another without there being any absolute time of consciousness as a holding
point. When a close-up of the woman’s eye movements follows the scene of
the sea in the film, which ultimately allows for no conclusions whatsoever
to be drawn as to whether the material is running backwards or once again
forwards, seeing has to be let go. Perception is squarely placed under the
regime of film movement. The following movements by the protagonist are
then set apart from all reality of the beach with a hyperreality. Her move-
ments make her appear as a stranger in her surroundings. At the same time
her sensual presence challenges the photographic realism of the sea waves.
Deren not only employs inversions of chronology, but also slow motion
and time lapse in a way that disturbs the perception of speed and reflects
on their determination from outside. When, for example, some of an actor’s
movements are executed very quickly, but recorded in slow motion, the
movement is seen in projection at a “normal” speed, albeit with qualities
that only slow motion produces. The impression of emotional closeness that
slow motion can produce is therefore also seen in normal time. In At Land
there is an example of this in a scene in which the actor’s head movements
seem to be a continuation of the previous scene in normal speed, but the
delayed speed of her hair in the wind show this movement to be accelerated
movement shot in slow motion. So this illusion makes it clear that any
so-called normality of movement is no longer a matter of normal speed or of
the normal course of movement, but a matter of a movement-combination
achieved through a camera technique.
For Deren, as for the directors of the French Nouvelle Vague twenty years
later, it is about mixing emotional affects against conventions, genres, and
topoi. In this sequence as well, two different feelings of time are aroused
in parallel, and a feedback loop of the senses produces a kind of visual
echo in the brain. The different movements on screen place the spectator
in particular but contradictory positions in relation to the image. We are
temporarily displaced. By cutting things up into single frames, the physiol-
ogy of the actor’s movements can be reassembled in any number of ways.
“(Slow motion) can create movements which are deceptively normal”, wrote
Deren.26 In the natural and idyllic surroundings of the beach everything
seems calm and unthreatening when suddenly there is the movement of
the girl out of the water itself. But the sensual quality of her movements,
the innocence of her appearance, and the fact that we are not immediately
aware of the technical manipulation shift the uncanny quality back – in
the spectator’s perception – to the carefree paradisiacal beach. Emotions
in the cinema are thus constantly compressed and shifted further.
88  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

When the woman from the sea finally goes onto shore, there comes
another spatial trick, which is an extension of the scene with the steps
from Meshes of the Afternoon. The protagonist draws up from the beach
and onto a tree stump. This is recorded from three different camera angles
– from above against the backdrop of the sand, horizontally, and from
below against the backdrop of the sky – so that the way to get there seems
insurmountably long. The impression is made even stronger by the use of
barely perceptible slow motion. Furthermore, her climbing is interwoven
with another scene edited in parallel, in which the protagonist scales the
table at a dinner party (Nr. 20-29). Maya Deren had hoped and claimed
that the identification effect of photography – “the compulsive reality of
photography” – that is, the identification of the woman on the beach with
the woman at the dinner table, would link the scenes into a continuity.
“There is a central personage who is identifiable in At Land: and whose
identity serves as a continuity method.”27 In fact, however, the perceived
continuity, which connects the obvious difference between the locations,
is made even stronger as the protagonist’s movements are slowed down
over the course of the edit and are executed more intensely as she feels her
way. Physical movements, time, and space are connected in the film in
contrast to the various conventions that the protagonist is working against.
What is fascinating in Deren’s spectacle is how easily she adapts, bodily
and sensually, to the artificial times and spaces. Like a cat she feels her way
through the film spaces, in springy, dancing movements, which in front
of the camera must in part have been completely artificial, slowed down,
sped up, or fragmented. Complementary to this, the woman at the camera
is also meant to adapt herself to the apparatus in order to make moving
images: “[…] the body with its complex combinations of joints, swivels,
etc., mounted on very adequate legs, can put, at the service of the camera,
a variety and combination of movements which even the most elaborate
tripod could not begin to offer.”28 The film At Land has been described as a
process of a woman growing up and becoming an artist,29 but this transition
can be seen as more than becoming a camerawoman in a doubled sense. A
connection emerges between body and apparatus, which appears as a new
being in the movements on screen.
There is a preliminary form in Meshes of the Afternoon to the editing
through continuous motion, which Deren herself would describe in retro-
spect as the prototype for all her successive works. At the end of this film (Nr.
131-136) one of the many Deren doppelgängers strides through the world with
a knife in her hand in order to cut her own throat when she’s arrived at the
other end. We see her feet in close-up as she walks in a continual path over
Depersonalizations 89

the beach, over grass, over a street, and finally stepping up onto a staircase.
“What I meant when I planned that four stride sequence was that you have
to come a long way to kill yourself, like the first life emerging from primeval
waters”, she wrote to James Card. “Those four strides, in my intention, span
all time.[…] As I used to sit there and watch the film when it was projected
for friends in those early days, that one short sequence always rang a bell
or buzzed a buzzer in my head. It was like a crack letting light of another
world gleam through.”30 Indeed, the film does have a different, earlier ending
in which the protagonist escapes the trap of self-perception, but the quasi
last ending, which is a murder of the self among doppelgängers, contains
yet another peculiar twist. Among the doubled women, the one who dies
is the one who was always alone in the picture, who never let herself be
copied or simulated, who could not move through the artificial cinematic
spaces and therefore could not merge with them. Those doppelgängers that
gather around the table in their multiplicity, chat, and finally pass a death
sentence on the one – who is presented as the original – thus turn out to be
resistant to romance love, to the deceptions of technical apparatuses and
to the threats raised by the transforming mirror images. They stay cool,
they are twentieth-century-minded or even cinematomorphic. Meshes of
the Afternoon marks the beginning of the evolution of a cinema-being in
Deren’s films, a being for whom going through technical processes and
images possibly means intensifying relations to the world. An intensifying
that becomes perceptible to sleepers in the cinema as an emotionalization.
At Land does not yet signify the arrival into the new world that Deren had
referred to in the letter to James Card, but is a search for forms of new, tech-
nologically manipulated relations to time and space. Stop trick sequences
and illusionary connections between movements are deployed in ever new
variations and combinations in order to push perception to the limits of its
capacity to integrate. But wherever clear-cut self-consciousness, which is
supposed to go along with clear-cut perception, has to be abandoned, the
emotional side effects continue on unbroken. For Deren this test was a way
of trying out the technical effectivity of film methods: “This concern with
time and space is not purely technical and one is not aware of the devices
of the cinema because of the emotional ramifications of this concern.”31
The odyssey through time frames in film tests the relativizing of one’s
own body in space and time through sensual impulses – and not only on the
protagonist, but also on the spectator in the cinema. The difficulty of build-
ing up a stable relationship to the fragmented and contradictory elements
of new time-spaces is not only the topic of the film, it is at the same time
adapted and altered for viewing cinema. The adjustment of the individual
90  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

to cinematic circumstances takes place through a cybernetic link between

perception and the cinematic apparatus. A gradual stabilization of subjects
examined by historical technologies is possible due to the interventions
and encroachments of cinema technology into the structures of perception.
Cinema creates artistic continuity where physical relativity rules.
Deren’s films enmesh gazes into images. Rudolf Arnheim’s remembrance
of Deren’s films shows that the transformation of technology into mental
states has succeeded as seduction: “What we can assert is that the sequences
of her images are logical. They are never arbitrary or absurd. They follow the
letter of a law we never studied on paper; but guided by our eyes, our minds
conform willingly.”32 The film critic finds himself and describes himself in
complete trance. The dancer had enchanted him as a technician and as a
scholar. The film maintains the “incontrovertible impact of reality” that
Deren claims for photographic images by immediately joining the specta-
tor’s perception and power of imagination with the artificially construed
worlds. Screen fuses with retina. Attention willingly subjects itself to optics
and montage. Sujet supposé voir.
This is also the context in which Deren disrupts the understanding of
identification from the theoretical calcification that it had been allowed to
become, at the latest during the forties, a calcification made up of an act of
idealization and subjugation to a higher principle, both in a psychological
and a political sense. Identification, such as Deren needs for her cinema, is
merely a process of transformation: “Identification – the idea of becoming
something else – is a democratic, not a hierarchical concept.”33
In the short film A Study in Choreography for the Camera, which Deren
shot in 1945, this identification is relinquished entirely to the analysis and
synthesis of movements. Here it is no longer the identity of the dancer, but
the continuity of the dance that produces connections in the film.34 Film has
altered the parameters of what is worthy of being recorded of people, and
the short film demonstrates the indistinguishability of dancer and dance
on the field of the social, in which technical penetration places the subject.
In the barely two minutes that the film lasts, seven optical time-space
constructions create a dance in twenty shots that is due to the film chore-
ography and that could not be achieved anywhere else but in the cinema.
The dance that the camera choreographs is a symbiotic function of man and
machine: “Moreover, (the dancer) shares with the camera, a collaborative
responsibility for the movements themselves. This is, in other words, a dance
which can exist only on film.”35 But it is not only in the recording process,
but also in the projection that this dance is a web that emerges when the
spectator surrenders herself to the technological time frame in the cinema.
Depersonalizations 91

The first camera construction in the film is a very long pan in which
the dancer Talley Beatty shows up at four spots between the trees of a
wooded area. This pan is assembled from four shorter, very even pans,
shot from a tripod. The second construction is a variation on movement
continuity across spatial distances. The dancer stretches out in long circular
movements, the first part of which is still in the wooded area, while the
following parts take place in a variety of interior spaces, and the extension
of the time of certain phases of movement is repeated and overlap. Over the
course of this dance sequence the dancer – this would be the third purely
optical choreography – ends up in front of a mirror, and the moving figure is
doubled in the image: a pas de deux through the mirror. The fourth and fifth
tricks are accelerations of the movement by means of spatial or temporal
contraction. In the shot in the Egyptian Court at the Metropolitan Museum
a sequence of jumps on the diagonals toward the rear corner of the room,
and then back to the camera, seems uncannily accelerated because the
use of a wide angle lens compresses the spatial relations. The reduced focal
length functions as a mental time lapse. The space gets a dynamism which
then creates artificial emotions. The same can be said of the treatment
of time. When the dancer spins in front of a four-headed Buddha, Deren
accelerates the pirouette by turning the film speed down in the Bolex from
its maximum 64 frames per second to 8 frames per second, thus achieving
an extreme fast motion – while an assistant closes the aperture so that the
lighting conditions remain stable. The manipulation of the camera appears
as art and skill, as a quality of the dancer.
When Beatty eventually advances to one last great cinematically con-
structed leap, so that his head, torso, legs, and finally even his heels fly up
and out of the image on the screen, the spectators are already deceived
by this first phase of movement, since his jump is a landing cut in reverse
into the film, a fall edited in reverse. But since the jump continues, all that
remains from the beginning is the impression of a particularly buoyant
take off. In the end the various phases of movement of a jump that is shot
in silhouette against the sky are edited together into almost 30 seconds of
floating in space before the dancer finally lands. The camera constructs
the reality of an artificially cinematic dance.
Beatty’s jump, which, as one critic noted, was actually Deren’s jump,36
displays the marionette figures whose movements are the movements that
we see on screen. Three of the dance tricks described here are not even due
to the editing, but merely to the recording technique. This makes it clear
that every movement on screen is the event of a technical construction done
by those holding the camera. By selecting the lens, the framing, the speed,
92  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

and the spatial perspective, they create movements and times that only exist
through the film. “Certainly the camera is unique, among art instruments,
in its ability to itself create time – not merely a sense of it – abut an actual
period. It can create time which is accelerated, attenuated or arrested.”37
It is such camera and cinematic constructions that Deren wanted to draw
attention to, and that exceed ordinary entanglements of time in the cinema:

By a manipulation of time and space I do not mean such established

filmic techniques as flash-backs, parallel actions, etc. Parallel actions for
instance – as in a sequence that we see, alternatingly, the hero who rushes
to the rescue and the heroine, whose situation becomes increasingly
critical – is an omnipresence on the part of the camera as a witness of
action, not as a creator of it.38

In her last film The Very Eye of Night the dancers’ movements finally be-
come composed of camera movements in such a way that the dancers are
floatingly danced through the cinematic space in a quiet ballet. Body and
movement meet each other in ever more abstract relations.
In her experiments with time and space, Deren was initially working with
dance movements because they can be more easily edited, since they have
their own rhythm. In the film Ritual in Transfigured Time, however, she
transforms ordinary movements into dance movements. Once again, this is
due to the choreography of the camera: “…first I should state, for the benefit
and ease of anyone overawed by the film’s title, that the transfigurations
of time are, on one level, just technical devices…” wrote the critic Ken
Kelman.39 In the film’s most famous choreographic moment, gestures of
greeting were assembled from numerous encounters into a social ritual,
although the course of movement during the repeated shootings was already
so heavily ritualized that the movements recorded cannot be called either
voluntary or involuntary. In a variety of sequences in which there are vari-
ous degrees of slow motion, Deren organized the rhythm of the movements
with a metronome, the basic instrument of all psycho-laboratories.
In a further development of the examples from Meshes of the Afternoon,
in the film Ritual in Transfigured Time various recording speeds are also
assembled into a space that had been established in the film as continuous.
The experiment is carried out in mathematical regularity. In one sequence
at the beginning of the film (Nr. 11-23) the two protagonists meet, played
by Maya Deren and the dancer Rita Christiani. Maya Deren allows woolen
yarn to unwind from her outstretched arms with great, even rocking move-
ments, and Rita Christiani then winds it into a ball either in countershot
Depersonalizations 93

or “over-shoulder.” While Rita Christiani is consistently shot in 24 frames

per second, Deren slows down her own movements in the countercuts by
increasing the slow motion from 48 to 64 and finally to 128 frames per
second, which means that even the possibilities of the Bolex here are much
exceeded and Deren has to resort to copying and doubling single frames. 40
The person whose movements are slowed down is imbued with a psychologi-
cal unreality that can once again be described as dreamlike. In the context
of this sequence, however, she appears as the film echo to the movement
of the other, who had entered the room with outstretched arms and eyes
wide open, like the cliché of a sleepwalker. The cinematic entrancement is
an extension of the symbolic-iconographic one.
In the ritual of greeting, the already ritualized movement sequences are
eventually assembled from copies of the partial movements duplicated in
the lab (Nr. 60-66), where the beginning and end of the sequence varies,
bringing in a dancelike effect once again: the same old pattern in ever
different performance. From this montage, which increasingly concentrates
on detail, the dance and the dancers lose their center until the couple’s
encounter develops from the dissolution of bodies.
The protagonists’ dance sequences in the park are also constructed
by copying in doubled sequences (Nr. 71-73) and structured by different
speeds of slow motion (Nr. 73 ff.). While the naturalistic parts of the dance,
filmed without any particular manipulation, seem somewhat inappropri-
ately pathos-laden, all the dance sequences that were actually produced
artificially get all the attention and sympathy. Involuntarily we follow a
jump in which a body successfully fights against gravity, tensed up in all
its physical detail until the very end.
Certain phases of movement in this sequence are held for seconds at a
time in frozen images, and exuberance turns to horror when the dancers
are solidified into a depiction of a demonic figure somewhere between the
god Pan and a Golem. Displaced from his solidification into slow-motion, he
will be able to catch up with those who are hurriedly fleeing with his slow
jumps. Tension, danger, and fear are not developed through mimicry in the
scene, but through the gradual manipulation of time. In this scene Deren
simulates and stimulates feelings and sensations in mathematical precision
by means of gradations of the camera, and she controls the connections
between nervous and mechanical impulses precisely not “by feeling”, but
by producing feeling.
In the film Ritual in Transfigured Time the transmission of the calculated
feelings runs in different directions. “Ritual is about the nature and process
of change”, explained Deren in a letter to James Card. 41 The narrative of
94  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Ritual in Transfigured Time can be described as the cinematic transfor-

mation of a widow into a bride. The inspiration for this film was Marcel
Duchamp’s “Le Passsage de la vierge à la mariée.” Like “La Mariée mise à
nu par les célibataires”, “Le Roi et la reine entourés de nus rapides”, and
finally the famous “Nu descendant un escalier”, it is part of his series of
stop-motion pictures that are all re-workings of the series by Étienne-Jules
Marey. 42 In “Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée”, the rest of a triptych is
still recognizable, but unlike in the case of Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”
the viewer does not need to move in order to see it. Instead, he or she is
visually moved. Duchamp’s passage from virgin to bride is no longer meant
to show a Marian mystery, but technological transformation. Like all his
stop-motion pictures, this passage is also an image that thematizes and re-
stages the modification of the body by means of the illustrative techniques.
He repeats the temporal segmentation that made what was illustrated in
chronophotography into an object of study for physiologists, but also to
supra-individuals that unfold out in their own traces: omnipresent and
not contained in any body. On the other hand, Duchamp transposes the
perception of visually stuttering movement from chronophotography into
painting in such a way that the spectator literally becomes an involuntary
voyeur of a wedding night, because and while all the trembling, fidgeting,
slipping, and turning is conjured up before our eyes. Duchamp also found
it amusing here to put the fixed gaze of the voyeur itself into motion, and
in doing so to make the viewer the subject and object of the transformative
illustration.
The different slow motions that Deren deploys as a procedure of analyz-
ing and synthesizing reality are also always a reference to and a reverence
for the first studies of motion in chronophotography. “Slow-motion is the
microscope of time. One of the most lyric sequences I have ever seen was the
slow-motion footage of the flight of birds photographed by an ornithologist
interested in their varied aerodynamics.”43 Deren herself follows the analyses
of psychologists and behavioral researchers who found the truth of basic
emotional movements in dissecting visual and perceptible surfaces. Deren
dissects the party scene in Ritual in Transfigured Time into emotional ele-
ments from which the dynamic and the impression of a society in society
can be transformed into a ritual:

But apart from such scientific uses, slow-motion can be brought to the
most casual activities to reveal in them a texture of emotional and
psychological complexes. For example, the course of a conversation is
normally characterized by indecisions, defiances, hesitation, distractions,
Depersonalizations 95

anxieties, and other emotional undertones. In reality these are so fugitive

as to be invisible. But the explorations by slow-motion photography, the
agony of its analysis, reveals, in such an ostensible casual situation, a
profound human complex. 44

Therefore, what is human in these movements is discovered through

technical film analysis. This discovery is then absolutely consequential,
and is taken as a re-definition of what counts as human in the history of
device-based psychology at the end of the nineteenth century.
The cinematic dissection of reality is therefore and at the same time an
analysis of what is hidden behind the perceived temporal flow of everyday
life, and on the other hand, the spectator’s own perception is plainly shown
by synthesizing movements in the cinema, by repeating and arranging
sequences. Perception of movement becomes the experience of cinema,
movement becomes artwork, integrating the machine operator, the specta-
tor, and even the non-professional actor:

The reprinting of scenes of a casual situation involving several persons

may be used either in a prophetic context, as a déjà-vu; or, again, precise
reiteration, by intercutting reprints, if those spontaneous movements,
expressions, and exchanges, can change the quality of the scene form one
of informality to that of a stylization akin to dance; in so doing it confers
dance upon non dancers, by shifting emphasis from the purpose of the
movement to the movement itself. 45

As Poincaré stated in 1895, the same year as the so-called invention of

cinema, movement is necessary in order to get information about the
psychical nature of stimuli from the information of neurons, all of which
can only convey different degrees of stimulus, since it is from movement
that an epistemology of learning through action emerges.46 Proprioception.
Methods of the dancers. Forming a network of bodies. Cinema, although it
only affects visual perception and in sound film also acoustic perception,
is a complementary epistemological structure. It itself induces motion
perception and therefore conveys new spatiotemporal contexts as experi-
ence. Deren was always attempting to get at such an epistemology of the
cinema by combining photographic realism and motion perception. Using
the example of slow motion, she describes the manipulation of perception,
of the “mind”, as an extension of experience: “Yes, slow-motion is not simply
slowness of speed. It is, in fact, something which exists in our minds, not
on the screen, and can be created only in conjunction with the identifiable
96  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

reality of the photographic image.”47 Cinema appears as a technology of

calling on, synthesizing, and forming certain psychic states.
Guilbaud pointed out, in his principles of cybernetics, that it is first and
foremost the connection of time and space that forms meshes, nets, webs,
networks, “réseaux” in the cybernetic sense.

Les thèmes, très variés de la cybernétique se laissent assez facilement

grouper autour de deux thèmes majeurs: l’un est spatial et l’autre tem-
porel. Le premier, que nous avons suivi pour commencer, est celui d’une
structure des relations, c’est le thème du réseau: asservissements circuits
ou boucles de réaction (feedback).[…] Aux connexions spatiales, il faut
donc joindre les connexions temporelles : le future dépend du passé. Or,
les connexions spatiales et les connexions temporelles ne sont en fait,
que deux points de vue sur une même réalité. 48

Even if the mathematization of these networks, which Guilbaud has to

require,49 are not conceivable at all levels for the cinema; the meshes of time
and space that Maya Deren forms through discretions of elements, through
their iteration and recombination can be completely understood as feedback
in perceptual logic. As the meshes and matrices of watching movies, in
which the individual must let herself be caught up and transformed at the
very least.

Doubling, Identification, Becoming Other

Since Maya Deren did not wish to understand identification as establishing

a consistent personality, but as a process of change (“Identification – the
idea of becoming something else”50), the motif of the doppelgänger in her
films can be described as experiments using medial transformations. In
Meshes of the Afternoon the depersonalizations and re-identifications of
the protagonist are staged as encounters, as collisions with reality as it
is constructed in film. The first tricks by means of which the protagonist
is doubled are entanglements of time and space in the montage. A first
doppelgänger appears after the woman has fallen asleep in the armchair
(Nr. 9), then repeating her arrival at the entrance to the house. After the
shot with the record player has been repeated (Nr. 21 and 62), there is a cut
from the protagonist lifting up the needle to the same character sleeping
in the armchair. The appearance of further doppelgängers, all following
in the time-labyrinths that are invisibly entangled through the editing
Depersonalizations 97

technique, becomes even more ominous because they are appearances in

temporal consecutiveness, self-pursuit, a self-“chase”, which consequently
ends in a battle with the self and with killing the self. As in romantic stories
of people selling eyes, shadows, and souls, the protagonist is killed by a self
that foils her desire as a stranger. This other, however, as has turned out in
the examination of artificial time frames, is the film experience itself in
Meshes of the Afternoon.
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud pointed out the distinction “between
the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely
picture or read about”51 in order to show that illusion of identification is
necessary for the feeling to overtake one. In the older neuro-psychological
economy, Freud explains that “every affect belonging to an emotional im-
pulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety” and
that there must therefore be a group of anxious states that can be explained
as the return of the repressed. This also includes the uncanny as the “secretly
familiar” that returns from repression.52 When a doppelgänger’s appearance
becomes uncanny in the film, this is because it proves that the copy leads
a highly autonomous existence. In its various presentations it shows the
prototype, the non-filmed original, that being captured in photography,
for all its identifiability, can make an individual’s data official and public,
its beauty and horror, old age or youth, tension or relaxation, qualities
about which one can know nothing as corps propre, on in oneself. The
doppelgänger demystifies the technological divisibility of the individual.
With the new media of the nineteenth century, identification and identity
became a matter of technological recording, and eliminated all forms of
self-assurance that was imagined in a space outside this frame of reference
with the help of instantaneous photo-processing.
Moving about in the cinematic space in doubles and triples, the multiple
doppelgängers in Meshes of the Afternoon compete with the romantic lone
woman, modelled after literary predecessors, who is always trying to see
herself through the windowpane and who, romantic all the while, must die
from this. It is she who want to be the ego at all costs. And so she brings the
uncanny into play. Deren’s later films only contain cinematic doppelgäng-
ers, ready for serial production, no longer uncanny and ominous. Instead
they are multiplications and facets of a person who does not want to let
herself get defined by the gaze of a great Other, but who herself uses the pos-
sibilities of reproduction to become other, and who subverts, multiplies, and
recombines all the attributions in the image. The fact that the image cannot
be controlled by the ego in the field of the strange arrangements makes no
difference to these roaming collectors and dancers, who constantly change
98  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

shape. All attributions are dissolved over time in the multiple reflections
of the gazes. In the cinema, as Deren’s films were able to show despite all
apparatus theory, it is not the confirmation of an original ego function
that is repeated, such as takes place in the mirror stage. Rather, the whole
allure of secondary narcissistic identifications is placed into the work, in
which everyone is constantly changing, or desperately wishes to change,
into a different futurist ego.
To this end, Deren uses the photographic image on screen, edited into
the film, which is capable of deceiving the others, all the more so when it
lets down its own self-perception, time and time again. As a good player
Deren puts herself completely into the task, allowing herself to be optically
fragmented, putting her own involuntary, unconscious movements of the
camera’s illustration on display and merging them in such a way that the
spectators see the Other of the others, the depersonalization in every film
shoot, causing them to be deceived about their own conscious self in the
cinema as well. The doublings, depersonalizations, and extensions on screen
are experiments with the self, in which perception and self-perception are
constantly and mutually modified: proprioception in the technologies of
perception. This auspicious fusion with the camera, however, only works if
no identities, truths, or diagnoses are attached to it. Seeing in the cinema
is the deceptive illusion under which a subject is constituted, and possible
meshes and impossible rituals are transformed in these deceptions.
In the film At Land there is an episode that at first seems to belong in
the repertoire of slapstick. The protagonist, who had already gone through
various stations of going on land as an experience of civilization, encounters
a cinematically multiplied personality in the man. While walking along
a country lane she is shown to be in dialogue with a man who is always
a different one (Nr. 56-64). The counterpart to this changing identity is
her own constitution, but not as identity, but as continuity, that is, as an
artificial duration of a sequence of time:

In one sequence of my film, At Land, I wished to establish the continuity

of a girl walking down the road, and at the same time her relationship to
a person walking with her, to her right, while the identity of that person
remained fluid and uncertain. It is really a ‘change of identity’ scene
similar to the common dream in which one person’s identity changes to
another’s before our eyes.53

This trick, that a new man jumps into the image behind the back of the
camera as it pans back and forth with the dialogue, is so unspectacular
Depersonalizations 99

that the small adjustments in perception provoked by the scene are barely
noticeable. It is not the similarity of the men that poses the question of iden-
tity. Rather, it is the establishment of a continual timeframe in the film, in
which the four men appear in the same spot, walking in the same direction
and taking part in the same conversation, which seeks to force cinematic
understanding to identify in the first place.54 By means of this trick, identity
is presented without mediation as intersubjective, as interrelational and
techo-social determination, in which the subjects, the man and woman in
the film, exactly like actors in the studio or on screen and the spectators in
the cinema, are subjected to one another in their temporal-spatial relations.
All desire that arises between them is shown to be the waste product of an
optical construction. This waste product, however, is the actual pleasure
in films, as it is in every relationship.
Pasolini staged quite similar sequences in Mamma Roma. While Anna
Magnani walks in long takes along the bleak whoring streets on the outskirts
of the city, she is accompanied time and again by single men or groups of
boys who engage in her monologue, answer her, calling in commentary
and jokes. For all their differences, these men also possess a single timeless
identity. Mamma Roma’s monologue could in turn be spoken in first person
by two and a half thousand years of Roman history. What she has to say
is defined by her relation as a whore to the men and to friends, and by the
dilapidated roads of the outskirts. The men, however, also appear on the
world’s stage only because they are allowed to be in relation to Roma – and
in the mirror reverse at the intersection, to amoR.
The sequence in Deren’s At Land unfolds its meanings only in the context
of the entire film, which is crisscrossed by a symbolic play by and with chess
pieces. At the beginning, animated chess pieces move before a single chess
player at the end of a dinner party. Over the course of this party the black
queen captures a white pawn which is dragged from the field, falls over,
tumbles off the board and – in a movement continued past the cut – tumbles
outside through meadows and into the sea, where it begins an odyssey
through natural landscapes. The chess game relativizes all other actions in
the film, albeit not through the strategic moves on the board, but through
the relation of the characters to the rules of the game. Animated by the
film’s tricks, the chess pieces leave the space and the patterns of movement
through which they are defined in their possible opposing power relations.
Away from the board they can no longer meet according to the old rules of
art, but are exposed to new laws of motion from bubbling brooks, breaking
waves, or blowing winds. In the space of the chess board or of geometral
optics, as Lacan calls it in a language game, we are “in space partes extra
100  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

partes, which always provides such an objection to the apprehension to the

object”,55 because the relations are prescribed. Outside this space, as the
parable of sea to sea shows in At Land, there will always be disturbances
in a logic of gazes and movements that alter the possibilities for movement,
unlike in a chess game, not only in their combinatorics, but in the very
structure of their rules, or, to speak in human terms, in their identity. Which
means: a queen only remains a queen while on the chess board.
The movements that the characters resort to in the water, waves, and
wind cause a change of register achieved for the individual by entering into
the cinematic space. In the cinema there are “moti inter motos”, which are
recognized and misrecognized as they transform. But what appears to be
the great freedom of the white queen is at the same time also her entrance
into a new dispositif, new rules, new traps. Fixed identity, which quickly and
early on was transferred to body movements in a symbolic order in film
history, is dependent on the parameters under which these movements are
measured. They vary from medium to medium. In film they are parameters
of movement, and only by manipulating times and spaces can they in turn
be liberated cinematically.
In At Land Deren develops constructions of identity that differ from liter-
ary procedures, and simultaneously liberates them through deconstructions
such as the multiple man as a film trick. This is the ruse of this anti-odyssey.
And the end of At Land is also cunning. The protagonist liberates the white
queen from her chess board and thus from the coordinates of her symboli-
cally established forms of movement. If the protagonist stole the queen from
the board, she walks through the spaces of her odyssey backwards: reversed,
to see herself seeing once again in all the stations. The film ends with a
thirty-second-long shot in which the protagonist walks along the beach,
her beautiful naked feet in beautiful indescribable movements, holding the
white queen up in her hand. She leaves traces that, like all tracks in the sand,
look archaically old and archaeologically ephemeral, and that can hardly
provide any information about the people who were walking there, but for
all that much more about the sorry state of sand on the seashore as a way
to preserve human faces and stories. This “back-to-nature” will, even if this
trace disappears after thirty seconds in the darkness of the projection space,
turn out to be a “back-to-the-temporal-spatial-nature” of the Paillard-Bolex
from Sainte-Croix in landlocked Switzerland.
Another trick to create doppelgängers in film is the use of doppelgänger
maskings, which cover a part of the lens. The film is precisely rewound and
then exposed numerous times. The company Paillard-Bolex made them to
order, but a cameraman like Alexander Hammid would make them himself
Depersonalizations 101

at any rate, if only to be able not only to double the single figures, but to
multiply them even more. In Meshes of the Afternoon three doppelgängers
come together for a round table discussion about the fate of the first, three
Maya Derens sit in judgment over themselves at the same time (Nr. 115),
much like how a photo from 1917 shows five Marcel Duchamps pondering
themselves.
Ever since Otto Rank declared the doppelgänger as an anthropological
mental constant in 1914, the prototype for creating doppelgängers in film
has been The Student of Prague, as it was brought to screen by Stellan Rye’s
cameraman Guido Seeber. Seeber, who was responsible for all the technical
tricks at German Bioscop from 1908 to 1914 (and who later shot The Joyless
Street and Secrets of a Soul for Pabst), used this trick of masking in his film
from 1913 in order to transfer the old fable of the selling one’s mirror image
to film. In his images, Rank first observed that representation in film “in
numerous ways reminds us of dream-work.”56 This was, as Friedrich Kittler
showed,57 already a misrepresentation and supersession of the history of
psychoanalytic knowledge, since it was not film that imitated the dream. On
the contrary, film, as Freud had previously seen it, as a chronophotographic
dissection of bodies and a way to store symptoms at Salpêtrière, was the
technical prerequisite for psychological and dream analysis. Before one
could find symptoms in the body, before the ego could be confronted with
a symptomatic Other, the body as body had to be able to be recorded and
stored with all its marks and defects.
The doppelgänger in Deren’s films are reworkings of human subjectivity
in the age of the time machines, among which the camera, alongside the
radio, the airplane, and concepts of relativity, is one of the most impor-
tant.58 Doppelgängers do not have a psychic or psychological origin, but
come from the history of cinema itself, and take possession of realistic
bodies. Since it became possible to indicate identity as the information of
technological media by bertillonage, doppelgängers have been a problem of
lighting. The relevant originary dispositif in film history of all later double
and triple exposures, long before the cameraman Guido Seeber’s tricks
were constructed, was indeed Étienne-Jules Marey’s multiple exposures
of a single photographic plate on which he recorded the course of motion.
One and the same soldier jumped, fought, and ran in the depiction, vainly
competing with himself, but since he was a being synthesized out of his
own jumps in the stop-motion images, he could also float above all reality
like the dancers in Deren’s film.
Time and again, Deren’s delight in mobilizing doppelgängers generates the
constellations in which the characters “see themselves seeing themselves”
102  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

through the countershot logic of gazes. In the repertoire of experimental

film this is a trick that is almost as old as doppelgänger masking, and Luis
Buñuel deployed it extensively in Un Chien Andalou, that classic about the
abysses and the traps of the gaze, in the sadomasochistic conversation of
the protagonist with himself (partly using a stand-in, who was filmed from
behind). In Meshes of the Afternoon the protagonist sees herself walking
(65ff). And she sees her doppelgängers looking at themselves (121 ff.). In At
Land the protagonist sees herself in the end with the looted or liberated
white queen running through all seven of the previous stations (133 ff.): “The
impression is that she is running backward through time, through all the
action which she herself has carried out, and which she can see herself still
carrying out, and that she, who is carrying them out, can also see the one who
runs by.”59 Lacan called the illusion that the “ego” could see itself seeing itself
“an avoidance of the function of the gaze” because no ego will get to see itself
as what it had taken itself for. Due to the symbolic network of the rules of
illustration or the symbolic orders, the ego will get to see what it did not want
to see. Over the course of a film, however, a new experience emerges when
the movement of the symbolic and the dynamic of the imaginary, which
always wish to be seen as others or another, are linked: “Those elements of
actuality proper may be re-related on an imaginative level to create a new
reality.”60 If, writing about Paul Valéry’s The Young Fate, Lacan characterizes
structure as a feminine trick to undermine the symbolic order, in Deren’s
films it can be seen as a trick of feeding back the order by manipulating the
time axes of the film, as fates do, in loops, chains, and punctures in order
to let deceptive moirés appear, under foreign Greek names, where there
should be patterns. Incidentally, Valéry used a similar procedure with text
in his poem. “It is not… necessary altogether to understand it as its exquisite
musical monotonies induce a trance”, wrote one critic.61
Since gazes in the cinema, like reflexes and reflections of the ego, are
not only cast as merely constructive and productive of relations, but also
as malevolent, competitive, and destructive, one last duel of gazes is staged
in a shot-countershot in Meshes of the Afternoon between the protagonist
and her lover, played by Alexander Hammid. At the same time the motif of
the mirror as illusionary form of identification gets fragmented here. One
of the two endings of the film finishes with the – in the spectator’s view –
long-awaited meeting of man and woman. In the last constellation we see
a close-up of a woman lying on the bed. We can see her face on the pillow,
next to which is lying the flower from the film’s first shot. In countershot
the man is sitting upright on the bed, looking at her, and when he leans
over to her he is undecided as to whether it is to embrace her or to take
Depersonalizations 103

possession of the flower, which has turned into a knife at just this moment.
The protagonists’ gazes – and with them the spectators’ gazes – shift in
both directions between love and aggression and are also crisscrossed
by side views of the reflective knife. Once again, spectators presume the
mutual assumptions running between the protagonists’ gazes. Although
the woman, quite in keeping with classical dramaturgy, lies submissively on
the bed, and in one shot we see only her mouth, which opens slightly, while
the man sits upright, coolly and anxiously looking down, this does not add
up to any clear order of emotions. The spectators will attempt to recognize
clear reactions in the protagonists’ facial expressions, but devotion, concern,
lust, fear, betrayal, and revenge are interpretations that can be seen one after
the other in the ever constant faces, or better, can be presumed. In the duel
of gazes the woman suddenly grabs the knife and throws it in the direction
of the man. This signifies a change in the optical conditions as a whole. The
sharp cut to the next shot shows that the image of the man must have been
a mirror image, which has now been shattered. A large hole is now gaping
where his eyes once were, providing a view to the sea.
Throwing the knife opens the gaze up to that optical space that surrounds
the space of the duel and had obviously surrounded it the whole time. What
is uncanny about this scene is that underneath, in the mirror’s blurriness,
which supplants the space “opposite”, despite its shattered surface, the
remaining partial portrait of the man, his face now without eyes and gaze,
continues, speaking, to move. What is uncanny is that he is not simply
dead, but has been displaced into a different, unknown, optically real
but not logical space, in which he can no longer give any response to the
woman’s inquisitive gaze, although he continues to have an influence on
her reality. This image is once again reminiscent of the other images in
the film in which the medial voices from other spaces are silenced. The
telephone receiver that is put back on the cradle over and over again, the
record player that is stopped time and again. What is uncanny in Meshes of
the Afternoon is that the connections to the absent and to the apparatuses,
the talking and the reflection of others, which structures the ego’s desire,
cannot be turned off. “It” keeps going. The second, less uncanny turn taken
in Meshes of the Afternoon with this break in the optics is that the man’s gaze
is cleared away as the sole answer to the woman’s desire, and not as killing
the consciousness of the other, but as an optical switch. In the following
shot we see the seashore with its beach and waves, blinking shards of mirror
floating in the water reflecting patches of the sky. A re-relativized space
has emerged by optically frustrating the structure of the gaze. Hard linear
gazes turn into waves that play with and wash around the mirror images.
104  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

This ending of Meshes of the Afternoon, in which the mirror flies to the
beach as shards, is the first ending, the “happy ending” of the film. It replaces
imaginary and eerie identification in the couple’s relationship with a mul-
tiplication of spaces. It is likely that this is the ending that Deren wanted,
since is a female gaze that no longer wishes to be required to look someone
else in the eyes in order to be recognized. And yet it does not heroically look
away, but invents new optical illusions that serve as a strategic eye-catcher:
becoming subject with one’s own devices. It is at any rate the film ending
that Deren chose as her own, for the film At Land will start a couple of
years later with almost the very same shot at the beach that Meshes of the
Afternoon ends with, but instead of shards of mirror there are eyes, bodies,
and the crests of waves in the image.
The mirrors that have played a central role in Meshes of the Afternoon as
a cinematic function of optical reflection and as a functional metaphor of
the gaze will no longer turn up in Deren’s later films – except for the one
mirror in Choreography for the Camera, in front of which the dancer briefly
dances a pas de deux with his doppelgänger. The function of the gaze will be
absorbed completely in the optical operations of the camera and the film.
Reflection becomes refraction. The tricks and techniques of the camera
itself provoke the feedback of perception about the technical conditions
that effect the reactions and emotions through projection.
The question of identity in the film will increasingly get shifted from
imagination to production. In At Land it was experiments with the gaze,
as experiments with editing together times and spaces, through which the
protagonist was meant to be put into a relation to a universe relative to
herself: “The problem of that individual, as the sole continuous element, is to
relate herself to a fluid, apparently incoherent, universe.”62 In Choreography
for the Camera the film replaces the logic of a person with the logic of a move-
ment: “Here the identity which unites space and time is not the personalized
identity of a given, individual character, for there is no effort to treat the
dancer in these terms; rather, it is the identifiable nature of his movement
which constitutes the compulsive continuity.”63 In Ritual in Transfigured
Time these two forms of identification, which after all are necessary for
“continuity” in the montage, are, as perception itself infers from a pattern
of movement or a photographic shape, supplemented by a third mode:

There is a long sequence held together almost exclusively by the con-

sistent mode of movement common to a variety of individuals who are
identified as singular and are used as interchangeable variables within
a consistent pattern created by the film instrument.64
Depersonalizations 105

Ritual in Transfigured Time shows illusive movements that lead to il-

lusive identities. The artificial movements of those acting and dancing,
particularly in one sequence, in which the images are frozen and then
re-awoken to artificial life, are always presented as movements that were
created by the camera in the first place. But the camera was only able
to capture them because they had already been formalized in social or
choreographed reality. The film Ritual in Transfigured Time brings together
film and social technology to regulate real involuntary bodily movements.
This regulation has its technological prehistory in serial photography and in
neuro-physiological research into perception. In Deren’s films the regula-
tions and the social codification of images are dismantled again, not in their
presumed original elements, but in their variability on screen: allowing for
dance through photography and editing and by deploying all the chemical
and mechanical qualities of film. In the end this is achieved by cutting in
the image of the widow going into the water as a negative. This inversion
of the material suddenly causes the bride to appear in white. Virgin, bride,
widow. Significations are social technologies like every individual film
trick of the cinematic apparatus to change the woman any way one likes
or desires. For Maya Deren this means ritualistically. This optimistic vision
of being able to encounter oneself more precisely outside the body is also
something that Deren shares with objective psychology.

Storing, Transferring, Transforming

In Cinema as an Art Form, Deren discusses Hollywood productions, distin-

guishing between horror films, which position the origin of the uncanny in
the external world, and psycho films, which place it in the interiority of the
protagonist. In her own films the cinematic reality connects external and
internal, objective and subjective, collective and individual movement in
order to initiate perception itself as an interference between internal and
external impulses. Even if Deren excludes the unconscious in the sense
structuring individual wishes or drives as a productive power for art, the
transformations that she describes for the cinema require at the very least
assuming non-conscious processes. In Deren’s film theory the difference
between conscious and unconscious processes of perception is nullified
in the theory of the ritual, which sees any transgression of the boundaries
of the personality as technologically induced or technologically modified:
“Above all, the ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source
of the dramatic action, but as the somewhat depersonalized element in a
106  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

dramatic whole.”65 Watching movies is a transformative process that can be

conceived of as circulating between depersonalization and identification.
All manipulations of the perception of time, space, and movement are
physically converted and psychologically something under the threshold
of frequencies that are still consciously perceptible. Like in trance.
The theory of depersonalization has a long tradition in Deren’s works.
At the beginning of the forties, when she was a 24-year-old journalist,
Deren had written a paper about trance and dance, in which she made
a comparison between archaic forms of possession and modern forms of
hysteria, a work that made an impression on the great anthropologist and
Haiti researcher Alfred Métraux:

When I did that paper on Haitian possession, I had no idea of making

films.[…] And then I went on to make films and it lay all this while in
my files – since 1942 – and was forgotten until now.[…] Now in 1947 I dig
it out and Métraux says it is one of the best things he has ever read on
possession.66

Deren describes both states, possession and hysteria, as social phenomena.

This focus of this work, which originally appeared as an article in the
journal “Educational Dancing”, is an intercultural comparison of extraor-
dinary states that are considered trances, absences, attacks, or possession,
their social significance, and the technological means that induce these
states: “If one compares hysteria with possession in terms of the individual,
the similarities become so striking as to tempt one to combine the two
phenomena into a single category.”67 What is decisive in the context of
her film theory is that the induction of states of hysteria or possession
comes from outside as an artificial agitation of the sense nerves. Rhythmic
inductions are divine invocations: “…just as various mechanical devices
such as crystals and light are employed in hypnotism, so, I believe, drum
rhythms and are extremely important in inducing possession.”68 All states
of possession are preceded by some artif icial agitation of the nervous
system.
What characterizes the term hysteria in European medicine, according
to Deren, is that the sick women are pathologized to the degree that their
symptoms are seen as the symptoms of individual conflict, while possession
in African or Caribbean society is recognized as the expression of critical,
or better, crisis-laden collective processes, in which possible solutions
can even become obvious and public. To view it in analytical terms, the
states are viewed as a sickness, either of the imaginary – in Europe – or the
Depersonalizations 107

symbolic – in Africa and the Caribbean – and correspondingly it is always

only the one or the other that gets treated.
In order to compare Caribbean knowledge of the gods with European
descriptions of hysteria, Deren takes Eugen Bleuler’s no longer quite new
but in fact groundbreaking Textbook of Psychiatry from 1916 as the basis
for the state of the research in European medicine, which she cites in the
American edition from 1924. The Swiss professor, director of Burghölzli,
and teacher of C.G. Jung had published a standard work in which he, as a
student of Charcot, both surveyed and critiqued the classical tradition of
European medical knowledge on the field of possession and hysteria. Bleuler
had revolutionized the discourse among professionals in psychiatry. He
wrote one of the first and most systematic protocols for hypnosis from the
point of view of the hypnotized person, thus judging hypnosis not only for
its effectiveness in medical practice, but also for its effect on the patient’s
psyche.69 Furthermore, Bleuler, who came from Zollikon, a town near
Zürich, was able to understand patients when they spoke Swiss German
or the malaproprisms of Swiss French, which was incomprehensible to the
ears of German professors with positions at Zurich universities. Unheard
messages became the object of science for the first time. Bleuler lived with
patients day and night for 12 years at the psychiatric institution Rheinau
in Zurich as a kind of socio-ethno-psychiatrist, “in great seclusion from
the rest of the world.”70 He created an “affective rapport” with each patient,
researching and gradually systematizing the rules of a disorientation that
he called schizophrenia. Another reason that he wanted to replace the old
term “Dementia praecox” was that “it can only describe the illness but not
the afflicted person.”71 Bleuler thus took the first steps toward a systemic
examination of schizophrenia, which would become so significant for
critical psychiatry in the twentieth century. The persons afflicted with
their multilayered speech, their inappropriate laughter, and their constant
shifting between linguistic levels of meaning determine what schizophrenia
is, according to Bleuler. Only after carefully listening to his patients did
he published his famous study in 1911.72 Only when he had grasped all the
“nonsense” was he able to develop a coherent picture of the illness from the
incoherent ramblings. Furthermore, Bleuler illustrated his textbook with
photographs, which means, he also drew on then new analogue recording
technologies, which could document the unutterable disturbances and
spasms, data for the novel amamnesis.
Bleuler’s systematics of psychotic processes turned sensations into
primary psychic functions, and perceptions into groups of sensations that
reanimate and link the physical traces of the memory of earlier sensations.
108  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Associations, or, since it is the same thing for Bleuler, the thinking that
follows these traces according to fixed rules, “can best be understood by
comparing it with the switches in an electrical plant. These switches may
connect different machines with one another or let them run independently
of each other; they can switch them on or off.”73 Bleuler’s theory of switching
on and off in the nervous system is not only one of the clearest example of
what, as Kittler noted, “every psychology or anthropology only subsequently
spells out which functions of the general data processing are controlled
by machines, that is, implemented in the real.”74 It justifies a functional
theory of the unconscious, which Bleuler only distinguished from the then
competing system of reflexes because he was examining reactions that did
not run by subcortical means, but by nerve tracts and cerebral cortices.
Such unconscious processes can also help explain perceptions that do not
arise from stimuli or sensations.

The comparison with electrical switches also makes it possible for us

to understand a number of other phenomena, such as flight of ideas,
schizophrenic disturbance of association, hypnotic phenomena, the exist-
ence of different personalities in the same psyche either simultaneously
or side by side, the phenomena of the unconscious, and a number of
pathological symptoms which are either denied or reluctantly admitted.75

Deren also assumes unconscious structures in Bleuler’s sense of generating

“extra-sensory” perceptions when she examines phenomena of voodoo,
although she immediately connects this unconscious with the cultural
traditions that determine their structures.

The accepted explanation of such modes of thought is that past experi-

ences, which may not be consciously and individually recollected but
which are permanently preserved in the sub-conscious, amalgamate
under certain stimuli in terms of our mores and traditional value pat-
terns, and form ‘a conclusion’ as it were, independent of the exercise of
conscious reason.76

The study of unconscious phenomena and hysterical symptomatology or

ritual possession is therefore, in both Bleuler and Deren, always already
cultural studies. Their archives are indeed not libraries, but also the bod-
ies themselves, in which involuntary forms of movement and patterns of
behavior are stored, which are constantly reproduced unconsciously and
in the case of western cultures are too rarely subjected to feedback and
Depersonalizations 109

modification. In this sense one can object, in contrast to Parin’s ethnopsy-

chiatry, that it is not that white people think too much, it’s that they dance
too little.
At the end of the nineteenth century and as if in preparation for the
events of the twentieth, there was an increase within psychology of examin-
ing trances, states of ecstasy, and mass suggestion. In the psychologists’
laboratories suggestibility was researched as a prerequisite for any attack, as
a question of the transmission of unconscious psychic mechanisms. Bleuler
had examined suggestibility as a special case of the formation of affectivity,
that is, as a form of transmission that forms complexes of associations
beyond language through “accompanying affective tones.” His psychological
experiments are the exact reverse of the film experiments being carried out
at the same time. The Soviet director Kuleshov, for instance, was conducting
his famous series tests at the time in order to show that film functioned
like a language because the meaning of images was altered by the syntactic
permutation of shots: the Kuleshov effect. Bleuler was experimenting with
the transmission of feelings that were supposed to be transmitted purely
be affect.

This affective suggestibility is still fully present also in man, in spite of

his language which has been more and more developed for intellectual
needs.[…] Because of the close connection between the affect and the
ideas to which it belongs and because of the influence of the affect upon
logic, it is self-evident that the ideas are very easily suggested along with
the affect…77

The unconscious affective transmission through links in the nervous system

enters into competition with the conscious, intellectual transmission of
language. The idea that the bearer or transmitter of a message is the affect,
and not the meaning in a syntactic network, distinguishes Deren’s film
experiments in principle from those of the Russian avant-garde.
Maya Deren’s position, which was therefore also avant-garde in theory,
consists in having examined the connections between cultural techniques
and psychic processes from the very beginning. Already in the early paper
on possession she concluded that it might be the emptiness between the
drum beats or the images, the intervals, that hold the secret to all unknown
or unconscious mental functions:

Drum rhythm consists in the regularity of the interval between sounds.

Once this interval has been established, our sense-perceptions are geared
110  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

to an expectation of its reoccurrence. This means that expectant atten-

tion […] is being deliberately and directly brought into play.[…] Even more
important, sustained rhythmic regularity and the fact that the source of
it is outside the individual rather than within, means that consciousness
in unnecessary, as it were, in the maintenance of this concentration.78

The attention turned on by repeating stimuli is also a quality of film percep-

tion as trance technique. The study of archaic trances provides Deren with
a way to see her own culture, alienated and cleared of all habit and custom.
She seeks out the rhythms established by cultural techniques that form the
bases of the rites and rituals of western culture and works with them. So
when she analyzes a party scene using slow motion in Ritual in Transfigured
Time, in which the guests always greet each other in the same poses and with
the same gestures, she discovers a further layer of social interaction, invisible
to the naked eye, internal to the conventions of movement: the hesitation,
wavering, and trembling that goes along with all encounters: “…the course
of a conversation is normally characterized by indecisions, defiances, hesita-
tions, distractions, anxieties, and other emotional undertones.”79 The gaze in
and through the cinema is dissected as one that is at the mercy of technical
manipulation and human relationality. Deren takes the emotional elements
from which the dynamic of a society within society is transformed into a
ritual and dissects them in a cinematic psychoanalysis of everyday life.
Poetically, the film Ritual in Transfigured Time, since it compresses the
moments analyzed into something new, is not simply satisfied with analyz-
ing wavering, but constructs from this a joint of ritual actions. The emotional
reality of the social event itself is placed into the work quite unrelated to
the case of a single fearful individual. But just as the paradoxical structure
of the gaze in her films only unfolds in relation to the conventions of shot-
countershot, and just as the labyrinthine spatial and temporal constructions
only function as a way of subverting habits of seeing in linear perspectives,
so do the choreographies of Deren’s trance and dance films only take their
effect against the backdrop of standardized body movements, such as they
were systematized at the end of the nineteenth century. Seen against the
backdrop of the history of cinema, in which the body was increasingly
standardized and shots were codified, the American experimental films of
the forties and fifties, in which one could see bodies in erratic movements,
unpredictable perspectives, and incredible transformations, represent a
political provocation. In these films, the movements of the actors became
dances that turned the culturally grounded bodily order, along with its
presumably objective order or the characteristics of race, class, and gender,
Depersonalizations 111

into a farce. It is only against the backdrop of normative movement of

cinema that the many levels of Deren’s films develop, all of which tend to be
supported more by choreography than by narrative – choreographies that
use the technical means of the cinematic apparatus to put social conven-
tions up for negotiation and in which normative reality becomes relative.
The chronometry of the apparatus remains as a reference rhythm by which
the deviations, the irregularities are chanted and syncopated, and new
perceptual connections are made.

Learning by Feeling

It is not fixed designs made up of optical machines and human bodies, but
vectors of permanently shifting force fields that would be the right model for
Deren’s film theory. Her films present feedback mechanisms and circular-
causal processes as they were being researched in the US during the forties
by anthropologists, psychiatrists, computer specialists, and engineers. The
cinema was to be conceived as an apparatus that linked individual percep-
tion and sensibility with times and spaces formed by technology. Techno-
logical images would form emotions that were nonetheless due to an exact
experience of reality. What is always “recorded subjectively as emotion”, as
Norbert Wiener conjectured, “may not merely be a useless epiphenomenon
of nervous action, but may control some essential stage in learning, and in
other similar processes.”80 Like affectivity for Bleuler. The nervous system
stores our experiences and models the perception accordingly.
Gregory Bateson had underestimated the intrusions that filming released
in the plateaus of Balinese culture, and its transformation by its connection
with the apparatus was surprising to him. Deren as well will be surprised by
an odd connection between human bodies and apparatuses in Haiti. But not
like Bateson. In Haiti, Deren encountered the archaic techniques of voodoo
rituals that she had previously studied and from which she had developed
a radical critique of her own culture and its techniques. But while the term
ritual had previously granted her a way to see the transcendences of western
cultures as equally producing and projecting in its cultural technologies, a
few years later she uses the eye of the cinema to look at the techniques with
which the Haitian gods can artificially be called into action. Like in the
cinema, manipulations of time are introduced into the rituals as gateways
to different perceptual levels, as “doors of perception”. “There are even ritual
details in which inversion and reversal suggest a mirror held to to time.[…] It
is like a motion-picture projected in reverse, a diver shooting back up out of
112  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the water on to the springboard.”81 Times, spaces, and movements are linked
in certain cultures according to particular laws initiated, altered, and formed
by the perception of those living in this culture. The integration of these forms
can be understood in the service of gods or of media, the decisive factor is that
this cultural aspect does not represent any law or fixed schema, but a rule of
transformation that has to be realized, embodied in constant performance.
When Maya Deren lands in Port-au-Prince in the autumn of 1947, she
brings along two cameras, tripods, and material for 16mm film footage,
a 6 x 6 still camera and equipment to record sound on magnetic wire. In
Haiti she records optical and acoustic signals separately, not at random,
as Bateson had attempted on Bali, but following an integrity that she had
recognized as the rule of transformation both of ritual and of the cinema
as well. In rhythms and light effects, in temporal and spatial compressions,
in fragmentations and compositions of collective body movements she
assembles a reality of gods and devices. Afterwards she thinks she was able
to differentiate manipulating and recording in ritual procedures:

I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of

a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by
recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which
had forced me to recognize its integrity…82

Deren experiences Haiti as a culture standing in transition between old and

new gods, between old and new technical rituals. When she researches rituals
and music, she herself becomes a “serviteuse”, the servant of the cult. Maya
Deren lets herself be caught up in voodoo while recording the techniques
of voodoo “humbly and accurately.” This is why she has become a model
of anthropological cinematography in film history.83 Even ethnographic
filmmakers sometimes get confused about which god they serve. In her
book about Haitian gods, Deren describes her own possession by the goddess
Erzvlie, a complicated, scandalous, and ultimately one might say hysterical
goddess who is the patron of dreams, love, and the muse of beauty.84 It is a
story of relentless identification in the sense of “becoming something else”,
in which the dreamlike imaginary love of the ego is abruptly interrupted by
the arrival of a new order. Deren’s protocol describes dissociated perception
in a cinematic space as a space of western mirror-ego identification. Trance
and possession are described in the parameters or metaphors of the cinema;
presumably unconsciously. This description is thus paradigmatic for ethno-
logical self-misrecognition in the foreigner. And for the universalization of
the cinematic space through the avant-garde of ethnologists.
Depersonalizations 113

To quote Deren’s protocol verbatim:

As sometimes in dreams, so here I can observe myself, can note with

pleasure how the white skirt plays with the rhythms, can watch, as if
in a mirror, how the smile begins with a softening of the lips, spreads
imperceptibly into a radiance which, surely, is lovelier than any I have
ever seen. It is when I turn, as if to a neighbor, to say ‘Look! See how lovely
that is!’ and see that the others are removed to a distance, withdrawn to a
circle which is already watching, that I realize, like a shaft of terror struck
through me, that it is no longer myself whom I watch. Yet it is myself, for
as that terror strikes, we two are made one again, joined by and upon the
point of the left leg which is as if rooted to the earth.85

In ritual, the rhythm of the drumming reassembles the ego, which had fallen
apart. The dance and the dance are indistinguishable, linked through the
acoustic “order”, arrangement and command, that structures time. The next
division takes places in the visual aspects of the mirror, which simultane-
ously constructs and divides the ego, demonstrating its interconnectedness
with the doppelgänger. At this moment the gaze of the dance becomes the
eye of cinema, which sees stroboscopically, shifting into slow motion, as if
an imaginary projection speed were being reduced. A flicker starts, black
holes emerge between the single frames, and the cinematographer loses
herself not between the ego and the mirror image, but in the nothingness
between image and image, which is never perceived in the cinema but
nonetheless governs cinematic perception:

(I) pick up the dancing rhythm of the drums as something to grasp

at, something to keep my feet from resting upon the dangerous earth.
No sooner do I settle into the succor of this support than my sense of
self doubles again, as in a mirror, separates to both sides of an invisible
threshold, except that now the vision of the one who watches flickers, the
lids flutter, the gaps between moments of sight growing greater, wider.
I see the dancing one here, and yet in a different place, facing another
direction, and whatever lay between these moments is lost, utterly lost. I
feel the gaps will spread and widen and that I will, myself, be altogether
lost in that dead space and that dead time.86

The film breaks in the projection room. What lies between image and image
as trance remains unconscious. It nonetheless turns up in the protocol
precisely as the technology of cinema. The fact that Deren no longer wants to
114  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

edit her own material after this coinciding of film image and identification
is everything but the rejection of the medium of film. It is much more about
promoting it into the pantheon of recording technologies that have formed
souls, spirits, and memories. The great alliance of cinema and anthropology
has brought the gods down from heaven in order once again to connect
them to the bodies of human beings. They are meant to change the world.
But the stories that they tell the anthropologists are stories of media that
have been changing people, their societies, and their histories from time
immemorial. Sometimes we forget that, sometimes we are reminded, for
instance by Godard when in Le Mépris he shows that Fritz Lang knew it.
Bateson had observed that people in occidental cultures still speak and act
as if dissecting and codifying reality on the one hand and subjectively evalu-
ating this reality on the other were processes that were mutually separable,
while in fact every visual perception of another person and every physical
reaction can only register the combined process of codifying and evaluating,
that is, behavior.87 This indicates the emergence of a new concept of the
human being, which has its preconditions in the cinematic recording of
human characteristics. But only in the fifties of the twentieth century did
“l’homme imaginaire”, whose behavior always had to be accompanied by a
double, get established in everyday life as well. Edgar Morin examined the
imaginary man in an ethnological study of his own society in its dependence
on the technology of cinema: “J’ai fait en même temps de l’anthropologie du
cinema et de la cinématographologie de l’anthropos, selon le movement en
boucle: l’esprit humain – éclaire le cinema – qui éclaire – l’esprit humain
etc.”88 Working with Jean Rouch in the summer of 1960, Morin also turned
his diagram of the flow between the functions of anthropology and the
function of the cinema, which projects all behavior onto the surfaces of the
body, into movements and voices beyond the symbolic, into a film experi-
ment. The reactions by various inhabitants of Paris to the questions “Are you
happy?” was combined into a kaleidoscope of French society: Chronique
d’un Été, a film commissioned by the Musée de l’Homme. A film about
film and anthropology, in which Batesonian binaries such as man/woman,
dominance/submission, strange/familiar are relativized into a historical
image of post-war society, where taboos suddenly push their way back into
the light and onto the big screen.
Bateson himself abandons cinematography and takes up circular-causal
processes in neurology and psychiatry. This is exactly the reason he remains
an anthropologist. His studies on homeostatic processes in schizophrenia
research examine group processes in which they attempt to understand
“the use of relations”, as Lacan says, the usage of relationships between all
Depersonalizations 115

the members of a group, from outside, from the behavior and strategies
of talking. Bateson’s research has affiliations with Vladimir Bekhterev’s
studies, which he had carried out in St. Petersburg a half century earlier.
These two strands of the history of psychiatry, which are separated from
one another by all the systematic, ideological, and institutional borders in
the world, can – and not by chance – be linked by the name Maya Deren.89
Par hasard the history of sciences as novel.
3. Deviations

Jean Rouch: Accra, Paris

The heart of the Corybantes has transformed today into the heart of a filmmaker
with and camera and a Nagra.
– Jean Rouch, 1977

In a modern industrial society, the artists consistute, in fact,

an “ethnic group”, subject to the full “native” treatment.
– Maya Deren, 1953

Following the end of the war, poets, painters, and ethnologists were traveling
out of the ruins of Europe and into Africa, the South Seas, or the Caribbean
to research occultism, mysticism, ritual practices and possession, and, as
Michel Leiris wrote, “to forget their mediocre little ‘white man’s manias’ (as
certain blacks say), and also to lose what they conceived of as their identity
as intellectuals.”1 They dragged along their own cultural technologies with
them, subjecting the objects of their research to the very same literary,
iconological, or medial orders that they were hoping to escape, a fact that
they remained oblivious to, and at any rate did not make their readers
aware of – with very few exceptions, who tended to be engineers rather
than humanities scholars. Jean Rouch, for example, “Ingénieur des Ponts
et Chausées”, had already signed up to go to Africa at the beginning of the
Second World War, since the only thing left for him to do in France was to
blow up bridges before the enemy could get to them. He wanted to use his
knowledge constructively in Africa and what interested him as an engineer
were how things worked, or how they had to be built so that they worked.
Coming from a family of Parisian artists and adventurers, having observed
the surrealist scene in Paris in his youth, and having been a regular visitor
at Café Flore, he was also interested in how things become dysfunctional,
how they produce erratic effects, and how they took place on the bridges
of unforeseen encounters between cultures. Rouch was a cartographer of
dépaysement.
In 1941 Rouch was deployed to the area around Niamey in Niger. His
predecessor gave him some advice: “Just don’t go native! Keep away from
those niggers! After all, you’re representing French culture!” Many years
later, in a conversation with Hanns Zischler, he would add: “I did not take
his advice.”2 Rouch represents his life as a clear case of “going native”, which,
118  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

in the colonial history of the nineteenth century, could only be imagined

as a vision of horror. With Rouch, however, it was a fortunate and also
always absurdly comical transition into the heart of darkness. At second
glance, it may be more exact to see Rouch’s “going native” as the “going
cinematographic” of the people in Niger.
As a thirty-year-old in 1947, Jean Rouch went back to places where he
had overseen the building of streets and bridges during the war, and where
he, with the mediation of his friend Damouré Zika, had learned about the
rituals of possession of the Songhay. He had already shot some footage in
Niger at the time, but it was all destroyed by heat and sand during transport.
Unlike Leiris, however, Rouch did not fancy himself as being able to leave
behind his own culture on his way through Africa. On the contrary: In
Africa this culture confronted him once again with the indestructability
of all the doppelgängers that are all the more durable in being safely stored
phantom versions of the originals: “Vichy survives in the colonies”, he as-
serted.3 At the margins there was not only resistance to the authority in
the center, but also the curious suspension of centralized power and its
instruments in the form of conscious and unconscious memories, which
were at any rate very physiological. The bearers of these memories, how
they worked, and the odd collectivity that they could claim, however, would
first have to be determined.
In his history of cinema, Gilles Deleuze writes that the directors of
cinéma verité, and particularly Jean Rouch, had followed in the footsteps
of Rimbaud by becoming black. This would not mean becoming part of the
native people, but of allowing the missing people to appear again against
the nations in the first place. 4 Deleuze uses the term people (the German
equivalent Volk can no longer be used in a simple, functional way) to
designate the deterritorializing and reterritorializing relation of people to
the land on which and with which they organize themselves. He therefore
describes a colonial post-war development at the end of the fifties that
leads to a multiplicity of liberation armies and fronts called “populaire” or
“the people’s”, and in which new approaches to the land were organized.
The colonial frontiers ran straight as an arrow, and had imposed adminis-
trative violence across all the mountains, rivers, and climatic zones. The
reappropriation of the land by the people could therefore always proceed
against colonial authority and with a sensual appropriation of the landscape
at the same time. The people’s traffic routes, therefore, were always taken
imbued with the senses, in Africa as in Cuba and Latin America: bridges,
streets, cameras, radio stations; what revolutionary film would not have
made them the focus.5
Deviations 119

Rouch’s f ilms are reflections of various imaginary histories, driven

by a search for post-colonial identities, which we encounter as much in
Leiris’s poetry as we do in Fanon’s manifestos or in the films by the crazed
camera teams in the Sierra Maestra. The opposition between “US” and
“THEM” defined the battle of the people’s revolutionaries: No pasaran.
Rouch’s films, however, put the imaginary and complicit relation between
“I” and “me” into the image as the prerequisite of all questions of power. This
not only goes for the film Moi, un Noir from 1957, which Rouch shot with
young migrants who had emigrated from the northern provinces in Niger
to Abidjan in order, as we hear in the commentary, to enter the modern
world. Rouch presents the street kids, “les voyous d’Abidjan”, as Sapho would
later commemorate them in her songs, as people who find themselves in
transit, between two worlds, “caught between tradition and the machine
world, between Islam and alcohol”, young people who “have not renounce
their old beliefs but who are devoted to the modern idols of boxing and the
movies.”6 Correspondingly, “I” in the film means Eddie Constantine, Edward
G. Robinson, Tarzan, or Dorothy Lamour. What appears as a curiosity to
the spectators is of ethnological consequence for Rouch. Under Muslim
rule, which had become firmly established in Niger during the seventeenth
century, every Songhay child, in addition to their “ma kayna”, the smaller
name takes from Songhay tradition, received a bigger name, “maberi”, which
the marabout selected from the Quran at the child’s birth.7 The identity of
the Songhay was a combination of the two names in which the imaginary
imperium of Hollywood was specifically inscribed in the case of the young
migrant workers.
It is these identities in transition, the states between “I” and “me”, exist-
ences between culture, that interest Rouch. As such he is not tempted to
present his protagonists as being on the hunt for authentic moments. He
uses the means of film to help them get to a space in which they can become
“themselves”, ritually and cinematically. And in which they can represent
themselves: Eddi Constantine, fabric brokers at the market in Treichville/
Abidjan, everyone gets the close-up that he needs to get his female custom-
ers to look him in the eyes according to the rules of Hollywood. Tarzan
gets the microphone when he provides the voice for an American singer on
the radio. All the protagonists delivered their monologues and dialogues
as interventions, as art, and lion-maned presentations in the studio, or
cut in later along with atmospheric sounds. Rouch’s commentary is not
privileged among these voices. He also subjected himself to the cinema
and its rules when he stayed on the young people’s trail all through Abidjan
for six months, running across the traces and rituals of his own culture all
120  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the while. When he films them all traveling to the beach together, Rouch
comments on his view, the images, and glamorous Abidajni stars at the
same time: “Voici enfin l’Afrique en vacances.” Moi, un Noir examines what
images an “I” would produce if it had the cinema.
“For Rouch, it is a matter of getting out of his dominant civilization and
reaching the premises of another identity.”8 Rouch’s strategy was every bit
as careful as Deleuze presents it to be. Because he was aware that he was
not only the symbolic representative of French culture, as it was called
during the war, but that he was also the engineer that had seen to creating
the conditions for traffic and mobility in Niger, he also wanted only to
use film technology to set up constructions on which identities could be
positioned, according to their usage, with or against cultural conventions.
Rouch examined how people learned to move, identify, and differentiate
on the bridges and streets and on other symbolic orders that the colonial
masters had saddled the country with. This is why he does not merely film
indigenous dances and music, but wild speech, the art of fabulating, which
explodes the masters’ discourse through speech acts that have gone mad.
“‘I is another’ is the formation of a story which simulates, of a simulation of
a story or a story of simulation which deposes the form of truthful story.”9
Cinéma vérité is a truth of the cinema that differs from other truths due to
its technological processes of production, but that no longer needs to claim
to be absolute. Films are a productive force that builds new bridges and con-
nections, on which syncretized forms of transitioning beyond established
forms of consciousness can be cultivated:

The trance, the putting into trances, are a transition, a passage, or a

becoming; it is the trance which makes the speech-act possible, through
the ideology of the colonizer, the myths of the colonized and the discourse
of the intellectual.10

While Deleuze emphasizes the imaginary and ideological requirements of

trance, Rouch first and foremost had its technical aspects in view, which
could steer or divert the paths of the imaginary. One of the most well-known
scenes from his films is the shot in Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, in which a
Deux Chevaux makes it way along the Niger not far from a long bridge, given
additional paddling and pulling by the chauffeurs. The 2 CV can swim, the
people on the Niger knew this, as did the entity that signed off as director
with “DaLaRou”: a combination of Damouré ZIka, Lam Ibrahim Dia, and
Jean Rouch, the longstanding shooting unit made up of old wartime friends
and colleagues. An entity that has completely “gone native”, embodied,
Deviations 121

wired, and fraternized by means of film technology, and which appropriates

the cinema, despite all of Metz’s misgivings, as “corps propre”: “Voici enfin
l’Afrique en cinema!”
The 2 CV shot has nothing to do with the randomness that Bateson
aspired to, but everything to do with “errandum”: the prefabricated must
absolutely be abandoned. In order to do so, it is not so important to know
oneself than to allow for technical possibilities, for movements and mobili-
ties. The little floating 2 CV with its increasingly naked chassis is a nice
African answer to the occidental call for disclosure. In the river, hidden
paths are technologically uncovered. And in the cinema.
At any rate, for Rouch the cinema is by no means a technological cure-all
for constructing or reconstructing cultural constellations. In his ethnologi-
cal studies of the fifties, with which he was one of the first, after Griaule,
Leroi-Gourhan, Lévi-Strauss, and Germaine Dieterlen, to get a doctoral
degree in anthropology, he proves to be a careful and almost fastidious
philologist of Songhay culture. In his Contribution à l’histoire des Songhay,
which was published in 1954, he reconstructs their history by comparing
the official chronicles, in particular the texts of Mahmoud Kati (Tarikh
al Fattach) and Abdoulrahamane es-Saadi (Tarikh es-Soudan), as they
had been preserved since the seventeenth century in Timbuktu, with the
oral traditions in epics and songs that had been passed down. In a critical
analysis of the Muslim historiography, which had been considered the
officially legitimate history of the Songhay to that point, he reconstructs
another history, in which written and oral records correct one another. By
doing so he develops, for instance, the thesis that the “actual” Songhay were
no longer to be found in Timbuktu or Gao after the seventeenth century,
but in the south and near Anzuru, on the islands between the rapids of
Niger, where in fact the centers of Songhay magic and ritual still lie today.11
The new historiography thus already produces new categories for African
origins or identities without judging the political value of particularization.
It is a simple matter of discovering stories of cultural interferences, even in
the historical tradition. Such a reconstruction of history, however, assumes
that ethnography, as Rouch practiced it in his field research, can advance to
become verifiable historiography. Historically, this step is due to the record-
ing technologies of audiotape and cinematography, which turn songs and
dances, voices and gestures into data in the first place. How these new data
should be treated methodologically was still open to debate in the fifties.
Rouch’s other major ethnographic studies, Migrations au Ghana, which
appeared in 1956, and La religion et la magie Songhay, which was published
in 1960 as Rouch’s “doctorat d’état”,12 served as both the foundational
122  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

research and starting point for his films. His data and depictions, all of
which – except for those that stem from chronicles in the name of and in
the archives of the Muslim rulers – were the result of empirical investiga-
tions in the field, could be supplemented by the African spectators in the
projections on the village square. His justification for him viewing writing
as inadequate for his purposes of transitory and reciprocal anthropology
was that the Songhay had torn only the photos out of the dissertation that
he had written about them and hung them up in their huts because they
could not read. Because the interventions of the African spectators in the
film work had proven to be a helpful corrective, however, Rouch began to
propose ethnology methodologically as a self-correcting scientific system.
Here as well, he made a detour around the institutional ways. Only after
the fact does pragmatism turn out to have been an epistemological leap:

I was convinced that using the means of f ilm one could contribute
substantially more to the research of foreign cultures than a scientific
discourse can, however thorough it might be. When, for example, one
witnesses and records an initiation, one is struck with how the individuals
being initiated react (this is most obvious with circumcision): classical
anthropology doesn’t even take note of this at first, it reduces the suf-
fering or jovial person to a fresco, an overall tableau. It takes itself out of
the reality that it itself has seen like a mask.13

As an engineer, Rouch can position a simple “more”, even if, as shown by

Bateson’s experience, recording with a different medium than presumably
Eurocentric writing is no less alienating and distorting. There are certainly
more and other data that differentiate behavior as the faculty and interac-
tion of bodies. In principle, however, cinematography is nothing other than a
new form of registering bodies, which could be applied, exactly like writing,
in the sense of colonial administration. In fact, the first anthropological
films were perhaps Félix Regnault’s simple surveys of the gaits of the various
“races.” Rouch was also aware of this, but in contrast to Bateson he nonethe-
less did not believe that the master discourse of ethnology could be toppled
by a simple change in media. For Rouch, film was a direct advance in ethnol-
ogy as the exchange between two cultures, in as much as those filmed could
understand the film images, albeit not in the same way as the European
researchers. The people in Rouch’s film speak about these differences.
This was the differentiating feedback that he was seeking. Africans should
comment on his films so that he, Rouch, could react again, recording the
commentary and putting it on the soundtrack… or correct the soundtrack
Deviations 123

like in the film Bataille sur le grand fleuve, a film about the hippopotamus
hunt, which spectators in Niamey criticized after it was completed because
Rouch put hunting melodies – played on authentic string instruments! – on
the soundtrack. Moi, Rouch, later admits what he was trying to do: “I wanted
to ‘make movies.’”14 Moi, un cinéaste! The Africans, however, let him know
that hippopotamus hunting required silence, a different nervous tension
than that provoked by the music in the prepared dance ceremonies. They
made their arguments ritually, cinematographically, and as hunters all at
once. Voici l’Afrique.
Damouré Zika, who had seen himself on screen for the first time in
Bataille sur le grand fleuve, then wanted to appear as an actor in future
films: “on va jouer!” And so it was in many other films, and the so-called
ethno-fiction film was invented. In turn, other spectators of Bataille sur le
grand fleuve suggested that Rouch make a film about their lion hunt. This
led to the film La Chasse au lion à l’arc. The new cinema that Rouch initiated
in Africa developed at the level of these expressed wishes.
Rouch’s specific methods also consisted in using cinematography not
only as a recording process, but as a potential and transcultural feedback
procedure.

This extraordinary technique of ‘feedback’ (which I would translate as

‘audiovisual reciprocity’) has certainly not yet revealed all of its possibili-
ties. But already, thanks to it, the anthropologist has ceased to be a sort
of entomologist observing others as if they were insects (thus putting
them down) and has become a stimulator of mutual awareness (hence
dignity).15

And a mutual transformer. After his dissertation, which he viewed as

a “visa for the irrational”,16 Rouch did not write much more. Instead he
almost exclusively only gave interviews in front of television cameras or
tape recorders, which were then edited, treated, broadcast, and printed in
transcript: Jean Rouch tells… Jean Rouch reports… Jean Rouch continues…
For audiovisual technology to work the contacts that were made have to
be right. Communication is then a question of correct wiring. Any inten-
tions that one had in mind become worthless in the field if the contacts
are loose. What Rouch intends with his procedure is more than simple
dialoguing between cultures. Connections are to be set up as flow functions
that use technical mechanisms to dismantle hierarchy. Petit à petit. The
feedback in Rouch’s film speech is meant to strengthen the disintegration
of retracted conventions, albeit not as a way of avoiding a clash of cultures,
124  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

but in order to make it loud and clearly audible. In the porcelain shop of the
fine information society you have to shatter the old connections, “casser
les vitres” in a double sense:

Le monde est en train d’évoluer justement par suite de ces moyens

d’information.[…] Si j’ai un rôle à jouer dedans, c’est de casser des vitres.
Quand les vitres sont cassées, on est forcé de les remplacées. Même si on
les casse pour des mauvais motifs, il faut mieux le faire.17

Rouch sees his f ilms as mediating between strangers, but neither as

diplomacy nor as interpretation. In the network system made up of hu-
man beings and the camera, the gazes of third parties, others, and other
authorities are switched on, and they jostle, disturb, or increase what gets
transferred. Rouch tinkers with the technology until new imaginary spaces
start to emerge, in which mental states are realized that are non-integrated,
nor can they be integrated into respectable civil society. While western
psychoanalysis reconstructs how the subject has to be positioned in the
symbolic realm of language in order to integrate longing and desires con-
sciously into a personality, Rouch attempts to open up a space in which
the non-integrated parts of the personality can be seen in the first place:
as in trance, as in possession. In this cinematically constructed topology
of the savage, all sorts of intersubjective, transsubjective, and social com-
munication becomes visible, but not “white” or “black” neuroses. This is why
Rouch’s technical “depersonalization” in Africa is the opposite of Parin’s and
Morgenthaler’s ethno-psychoanalysis. Only in 1969, in Petit à petit, does the
drama of the ethnologist become an intercultural comedy. Damouré Zika
and Lam Ibrahim Dia trail through Paris in order to survey the passersby
as ethnologists, noting down their ancestry, cranial circumference, and
dental structure and examining the costumes of men and woman. Taxi
drivers, police officers, and businesspeople become informants. “Parisians
are ugly, too thin or too fat, very ugly. They are also very sad. Without a doubt
they suffer from a terminal illness, and they know it”, notes Damouré Zika.
When the sad passersby express their surprise and no do open their mouths,
no wanting to show their teeth, the ethnologist merely explains that the
film is for television, and the Paris natives immediately show what they’ve
got. Even in Paris, an artificial, technically constructed, and imaginarily
structured space of higher authority can be exposed.
In 1960, in preparation for the film Chronique d’un été, Rouch and Ed-
gar Morin had begun working with the cameraman Michel Brault and
the manufacturer Coutand to design a new, more mobile camera outfit.
Deviations 125

“Coutand was prepared to develop the super light Éclair, which he had
built for satellites, for civilian use as well.”18 He tested the new technology
on colleagues in Paris:

The participating camera of Nanook has become a moving camera, a

contact-camera. The mobility and this closeness triggers, I believe, a
new form of dialogue, for the questioned/observed person no longer has
to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘camera,’ he addresses a system that is
self-contained and interconnected.19

An Éclair-centaur, a camera-man.
The improved optical network system shifts and displaces the iden-
tity positions of its participants to the point that they do not recognize
themselves.

Just like the first people I attempted to interview, I was highly surprised
by the provocative strength caused by this contact. It was a conversa-
tion with Paul Lévi, a student of Marcel Mauss, with whom I carried
out a highly intense conversation, the camera always at my eye. I posed
questions and got responses that I (and as he himself told me afterwards,
also he) had never experected.[…] I call this state “ciné-trance.” This
expression plays with the Vertov’s coining of the term “kino pravda”
(“cinéma vérité”).20

Ciné-trance did not emerge in Africa. It is a technological invention from

Paris, with feedback from speech and other reactions. It provided access to
hidden, repressed, denied layers of history. In Chronique d’un été this occurs
quite simply through the fact that a young woman with a microphone asks
people if they are happy. Not much later she dissects the Great Nation in its
bleak historical sections, which its subjects, colonial or European, cannot
elude. If Rouch’s films are about the cybernetic linkage between gazes and
reactions, then technology is just as important as the discourses behind the
speech act distinguished by Deleuze.
Using a 16mm Bell & Howell from the flea market, Rouch began, shortly
after the war, to shoot films about rituals and possession. He was “in charge
of research for the Musée de l’homme”, which, as Godard noted, was the
best definition of filmmaker. He described the permanent feedback of the
film experience as a series of transformations behind, in front of, and by
means of the camera. Some elements of this series are enumerated in the
title of one of his first texts: “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed
126  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer.”21
Spectators in the cinema can add themselves to this list. From the begin-
ning, possession has been a state that occurs not only in the ritual space of
the ceremony, but in the cinematic space that reaches far beyond the optical
field of the camera (or the projection space of the cinema).
In his description of possession, Rouch relativizes the distinction be-
tween dance acts and speech acts emphasized by Deleuze. In the time travel
that is one of the elements of dances of possession, language and movement
both become messages sent from the beyond. In possession (as in all ritual
processes) both the dance act and the speech act get their rhythm from the
outside. This is familiar to Europeans in dancing, but uncanny in speaking.
“The gods speak through the dancer, his body, and his mouth. When people
dance, they dance their history; history appears as they know it from the
continual narrative.”22
The messages are brought from the beyond with the aid of the camera,
which at the time was not even a satellite camera. Just as Deren surmised in
her examination of phenomena of possession, the power of the imaginary
established in rituals is dependent on the use of the symbolic and is thus
provoked and intensified by recording technology. The truth that emerges
is due on the hand quite simply to the cinematic restructuring of a space.
Because behavior itself, that is, the transforming interaction between
subjects, is made visible, cinéma vérité can register the precise truth of
lies. Rouch explains this with an example of a particular encounter, over the
course of which notions of center and periphery, of power and submission,
got inverted and twisted in a dual back-and-forth of presumptions. In the
Comédie Française Rouch saw De Gaulle talking with the Moroccan ambas-
sador during the intermission of a performance of Racine’s Andromaque.
Rouch recounts:

I got within a few centimeters of de Gaulle and he, when he realized the
camera was rolling, turned to to the ambassador and asked: ‘Excellence,
who do you prefer, Andromaque or Hermione?’ ‘Hermione, mon Général!’
‘How right you are!’ And I am quite certain that this dialogue would never
have existed in this form without the camera.23

If Rouch’s claim can be taken as more than speculation, it is because he had

the experience of imaginary and reciprocal presumption being immediately
crystallized in the space of the cinema according to the rules of the symbolic
and its representations: supra-individual and precise. The general poses
the question of the stance vis-à-vis the tyrants, and the man from Morocco
Deviations 127

takes sides with the one who renounces her own origins. Of course, since
the camera’s rolling, this could all be a matter of displacements, deferrals,
false statements, which is what produces cinéma vérité in this feedback.
Trojan horses for General de Gaulle. The camera instigates a show in which
everything is off-center – even if the center and the power located there
have not yet been abolished. Rouch studied this in turn with his footage
of possession rituals: “It’s a short step to fiction, for what occurs in these
dances is in principle nothing other than the birth of tragedy. Dionysus is
always passing by. The heart of the Corybantes is transformed into the hears
of a filmmaker with a camera and a Nagra.”24 It is not a matter of authentic
culture, but rather of people and gods in cultural transit.
Before the classics can appear in film with symbolic shifts, however,
and even before the imaginary can extend its wings in the cinema, Rouch
describes the simplest alliance of film with possession, one located at the
most elementary level of the camera’s technology. The process of rhythmi-
cally chopping up, with which the camera dissects the imaginary identity of
bodies into individual frames, can be connected in its rhythmic regularity
to the technique of inducing trance. Like drum rhythms, the intermit-
tent scansions of the camera throw consciousness out of sync with the
self-referential consciousness. The noise of the camera indicates that it
allows an Other from outside to take the place of the ego. Maya Deren
explained this process in terms of the physical properties of the nervous
system: “Sustained rhythmic regularity and the fact that the source of it
is outside the individual rather than within, means that consciousness is
unnecessary, as it were, in the maintenance of this concentration.”25 Rouch
provides a technical description based on footage shot for a film from 1971
about two particular drummers, Tourou et Bitti, and about the music and
the states of possession that they create. When he comes to the village with
the soundman Moussa Hamidou, the musicians are already playing, but
nothing has yet happened among the dancers:

I wanted to come into the village with the camera rolling. The problem
for Moussa, who was coming with me, was to choose the best of the
various sounds, the best of many things said, which of course did not
always happen identically with the image. We reached the dance square,
where an old dancer, old Albeydou, Sambou Albeydou, was just then
approaching the orchestra. I also went to the orchestra and then – sud-
denly – the orchestra paused. Normally I would have had to stop, but I
left the camera running, I squinted over at Moussa, he nodded to me, we
kept shooting, and the people around us sensed or knew that the camera
128  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

was still running and at that moment possession took over.[…] The priests
and the dancers went along, they knew that their dance and their music
were now being recorded, which stimulated them greatly.26

Here the camera replaces the function that has to precede all trance and
suggestion, as Deren had described for the leveling of the stimulus frequency
in acoustically inducing trance. An expectant attitude has to be introduced,
in which sense data are processed differently:

As we know, rhythm consists in the regularity of the interval between

sounds. Once this interval has been established, our sense-perceptions
are geared to an expectation of its reoccurrence. This means that expect-
ant attention, which I have previously spoken of as an important element
in suggestibility and concentration is being deliberately and directly
brought into play.27

Only when the confusing, noisy, and cacophonous flow of data has been
artificially chopped apart and systematized and a certain artistic space has
been established – in the acoustics of the archaic drum rhythms or in the
visual aspects of the cinematically rhythmatized space – can the imaginary
and symbolic relations be connected to it. This is the physiological pre­
requisite of possession. Rouch, however, does not so much stress the process
of rhythmically dissecting the movement, but the reverse of the process, the
continuity of the uniformly formalized elements, such as the 24 frames per
second in the projector, the cinema-trance, which continues even when a
black frame appears on the screen. Both sides of this process, the dissection
and the imaginary synthesis, form the social technique that combines the
peculiarities of the gods into the body images of the dancers. In order to
preserve the integrity of the ritual, intervening subjective decisions have
to be reduced. This is why Rouch insists on long takes, on shooting with the
camera without interruption as long as there is material.

To emphasize it once again, what was significant was the long take, the
continuity of filming during the ritual. My efforts went to shooting even
longer, substantially longer takes – an exclusively technical problem,
which, as I hoped, could be solved by Jean-Pierre Beauviala, the camera
engineer and inventor from Grenoble.28

Engineers regulate the appearance of the gods technologically and amongst

themselves. Bridges and streets, “Ponts et Chaussées”, are applied in the
Deviations 129

realness of the cinematic space that unlock the dark continent of the psyche
in possession, creating new insights and new overviews and allowing for
journeys into the heart of darkness. Psychic space is differentiated by the
technology of the camera. A new topology emerges, which stands completely
within the logic of European, western technology, but which also provides
an image of how a Deux Chevaux makes its way down the river along the
bridge African-style. As long as the engineers manipulate the technology,
they definitely maintain an awareness of the fact that the paths that they
are plotting are also those that they have have to “get over.” They can and
must also know that they themselves are transformed by this technology:

Vertov said that the eye of the camera is a mechanical eye, the micro-
phone is a mechanical ear or sense of hearing (so-called radio hearing),
this mechanical anatomy is characterized by a certain variability in the
optical (lenses, apertures, focusses) and in the acoustic (axial registration
with directional microphones). If I, equipped with these instruments,
make a film, I myself am a ciné-observateur and find myself in a state
of ciné-trance. In other words: I, Rouch, get up, move, and do something
that I otherwise would never do.29

In one of Rouch’s films the historically altered cultural technologies are

combined with the camera technologies into a spectacular cinema-ritual,
which turned into a scandal. The film Les Maîtres fous, which he shot in
1954, was considered horrible, malicious, and racist by both French an-
thropologists and cinéastes and African spectators.30 The film interweaves
cinematic and ritual space. It does this in a surgically precise and absolutely
ruthless way and is an example of Rouch’s technical and unflinching art of
“becoming black.” The complexity of the staging begins with Rouch inviting
the priests of the Haouka cult themselves to shoot a film about their rituals.
They are the rituals of the Songhay cult practiced by the “Gold Coastiers”,
the migrant workers from Niger in Ghana, in which the representatives of
the French and British colonial authority have replaced the spirits of the
bush, of the water, or of the air. In the film commentary these are referred
to as “les dieux de la ville, les dieux de la technique, les dieux de la force.”
It was thus a conscious step by the priests to extend the service to include
cinematography, which represents a kind of African mnemosyne in the pan-
theon of the Haouka – or, as Rouch applies it – as troops of Corybantes who
can totally destabilize memory as the central power. Because the priests
themselves appeared as the commissioners of the filming, that it, of the
technical surveying of the gods, they already subjected the anthropologists
130  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

to their cult, and precisely not as persons of authority from the colonial
powers, but as servants: “à la bonne.” In addition, a camera, which is called
Bell & Howell, must have appeared to these Haouka priests as a convenient
omen for the change of “his master’s voice.”
The title already announces yet another application of the film. On the
one hand the “maîtres fous” are traditionally “the masters of the wind that
brings madness in its wake”, that is, the priests who have overcome mad-
ness. At the same time, “maîtres fous” is the name of the mad masters, the
colonialists with their cultural and symbolic orders, their science, their
traffic systems, and their military parades. The syncretic sect of the Haouka,
beginning with the order that they gave to start shooting, provided the
occasion for a film of reciprocal anthropology. Les Maîtres fous is, according
to Rouch, “in the first place a film about us, the whites, about the image
that Africans make of us.”31
Rouch’s camera had to be rewound after 45 seconds. The “mise-en-scène”,
the dramaturgy, arose during shooting, in the seconds necessary to rewind
the spring mechanism again. Since Rouch was shooting in long takes, as
always – that is, making no interruptions and no cuts as long as the cam-
era ran in the space of the ritual activities, but only movements – he had
placed himself under the periodic standards of the camera and thus in a
ritual space. What caught his attention as he was rewinding the camera
determined the next take. This was, according to Rouch, the thinking in
the film, that had got lost with the incorporation of motors into cameras.
The gods of technology rule the parameters of cinema-thinking.
The sound, on the other hand, could be recorded continuously for 30
minutes. In order to apply it later, the editor listened to the whirring of
the camera, which was heard scene for scene in the original sound of the
ritual in the Ghanaian bush. Editing the film followed the chronology of
its recording.32 The shots, their beginnings and ends, are so haphazard and
noticeable due to the camera’s limitations that there’s no way to claim any
overview, any overall perspective. In the dramaturgy on the ritual stage,
which is extremely difficult to comprehend, the cameraman is optically
and firmly integrated in the events, in one role among many, subject to the
direction of the gods.
The techniques used to induce trance in the ritual are not separately
described in the film. What can be recognized is that rhythms are created by
pounding wooden guns and that large amounts of gin have been poured out
on the central sites of the scene. The first signs of possession are shot from
various camera angles, almost textbook cases from a catalog of convulsions:
first in the left foot, then in the right, in the leg, through the back, to the
Deviations 131

shoulders, to the head. Rouch captures the eyes askew, the contorted joints.
The degree to which the camera, the appointed cameraman, and the shoot
are stimulating the Haouka cannot be determined. The first possessed
person to get up, “Kaporal Gardi”, the corporal of the guard, does so in fact
directly in front of and looking at the camera. Over the course of the ritual
various other gods appear without being filmed from the beginning. The
trance as ciné-trance is evidently only one among many in this ritual. At
any rate, everything, let’s not forget, that we see of possession is cinema.
Among the gods that appear after the corporal of the guard, there are
the locomotive driver, Captain Malta of the Red Sea, the General Secretary
Gomno, the Major Commandant Mugu, Samkaki the truck driver, and
Chemoko, the son of the corporal. They are recognizable through their
movements, but additionally for the spectator by the fact that a running
commentary paraphrases what is said by the other participants, sometimes
also already gods, sometimes still human beings, as they greet the new
gods, test them, and adorn them with the appropriate accessories. The
perversions of colonial history are presented in many small details. Even
more than the ridiculed medals, helmets, suits, and flowery phrases, small
shifts in the relations show that the gods know what is driving them on. For
instance, in Les Maîtres fous it is the wife of the doctor, “Madame Lokotoro”,
who appears, not the doctor himself, whose figure also appears in Foucault
as the “master of madness”, the one “who makes it appear in its truth and
[…] dominates it, pacifies it, and gradually makes it disappear after having
artfully unleashed it.”33 In the ritual, the doctor’s Other appears, what moves
and controls him: Madame.
Much more than any symbolic staging, however, it is in the embodiment
of movements that the Haouka gods make themselves known. The corporal,
the captain, the locomotive driver are distinguishable through their gaits,
in which man and corresponding machine are partially fused, whistling
and fizzling, into a single way of moving. The gods therefore also appear
as a farce in the official history of anthropological film, which constantly
disavows its ergonomic beginnings and its initial regulation of bodies.
Cinematography is supposed to differentiate racially. Here, however, all
the movements of the maîtres fous appear as awkward, synchronized, stiff
convulsions set to a militarily strict pre-established rhythm: “In all the other
films that I shot on dances of possession the gestures of the dancers are
rounded out, soft, themselves dissolved in the greatest turmoil, while in Les
Maîtres fous they are angular, coarse, and ludicrous.”34 But they are precise
in a double sense. In the middle of the footage of the possessed, Rouch
inserts an old film document of a British military parade in order to be able
132  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

to show how the cult dancers simulate or distort these odd movements and
accessories. Through this material, however, it becomes clear that our gaze
among les maîtres fous has already begun to differentiate, and we become
attentive to differences between the gestures and movements of the British
and French occupiers. Under the gaze of the Africans, the Blacks, as they
could proudly be called in the négritude of the fifties, it becomes visible how
colonization had also subjected European bodies to a manifest violence.
The ritual in the film becomes a lesson in reciprocal anthropology. In this
regard the possession dances of the maîtres fous are unequivocal. They
show how domination does not remain on an administrative level, but
how it, unconscious and supra-personal, takes power through bodies. This
magic was first applied in Europe during the nineteenth century under
no less brutal rituals and then, through physical drill and psycho-­physical
identification, transferred to the bodies of the colonized. The divine appear-
ances of the Haouka reproduce and disfigure the technologies precisely to
the degree that power has made itself subjects through drill and stereotypes
in Africa. The transfer in the film works so well because chronophotography
had been the most important tool in establishing new bodily regimes in the
nineteenth century. This is repeated here in reverse. In the commentary
we hear a comparison between ritual and real colonial administration: “Ici,
l’ordre est different, ici et là, le protocole est bien le même.” The order that
the ritual dictates is the order (and the command) of the Haouka gods. The
protocol that governs how subjects (like the British subjects in the film)
should behave has the same prehistory. It is due to the dispositif by which
movements can be stored, controlled, and reproduced in the first place: the
protocol of cinematography.
Because Rouch subjected himself to the recording rhythm of the camera
– the micro-rhythm of 24 frames per second (here, unlike Bateson, he was
accurate) and the macro-rhythm of the 45-second takes – and because he
allowed the persons to depersonalize strictly according to the rules of the
Haouka in his montage, which maintained the continuity of the movements,
of the torches, of the colors, and of the relationships, he accomplished his
task. The terror that seized the audience at the screening of Les Maîtres fous
at the Musée de l’homme and that made the film unforgettable repeated and
distorted one of the strategies of possession itself: that of tying memory un-
consciously to the body by means of affects. “For it is the defeated who know
best which of the opposing tactics were irresistible”, wrote Maya Deren. In
Rouch’s film as well, the subordinated can indicate the tactics with which
they were codified to become part of a powerful empire, in order then, as
dispossessed, to flail on the fishhooks of power. The possessed persons first
Deviations 133

of all incorporate the “corporal”, the one who holds the corporeal body, then
the officers, the administration, the traffic system, and the “forbidden” other
sex, namely the wives of two dignitaries. Freedom, equality, civic fraternity,
identity, and happiness are all promised by power, capturing their subjects
with tricks that, if all goes well, leave behind weapons, quick jobs, old cars,
and sex. The Haouka ritual and the film give it a name: violence.
What shocked spectators when the film was shown for the first time
in 1955 at the Musée de l’homme was the violence with which possession
usurped the participants’ bodies: the screams, the cramps, the shaking, the
wide-open, rolling eyes, the foaming mouths, and the staggering, buckling
extremities. In the film, as Rouch shot it, the real of the bodies is made
painfully present in the imaginary of the appearance of the Haouka gods.
The gods “de la ville, de la technique, de la force” demonstrate how they
physically displace the whole person, leaving nothing left of the old remains
of the soul, which might still indicate a consciousness that accompanies
these transformations. No “je-sais-mais-quand-même”, as Leiris has seen
or only hoped for in Haiti, suggests that the possession might be simulation
or theater. The camera shows an absolute power takeover of civilization in
the interior of the nervous control function, and shows itself to be part of
the technology of civilization. The spectators were appalled, the majority
left the room in protest, but obviously not many of them were ready to
realize what was being presented: the mercilessness and horror with which
cultural technologies penetrate the body. Perhaps this is also exactly why
they fled. To a much smaller degree, but perhaps even more uncannily, this
process is repeated in the cinema. Rouch was reviled by Europeans and by
Africans, by whites and blacks, accused of having gone too far. Obviously,
however, none of the critics heard any message in this presentation of the
ritual that might have conveyed the takeover by power as a takeover of
bodies. Not consciously at least, for the message is crystal clear: “to whom
it may concern.”
What had been particularly shocking to the spectators was the depic-
tion of a dog sacrifice. In order to show that they are Haouka and thus not
subject to the order of human beings, the possessed persons eat of the dog,
which had previously been killed by the priest. Rouch did not shy away
from showing how the animal was torn apart and dog’s blood dripped
out of foaming mouths. The gods made fun of any attempt to rationalize
the horror. In one scene of anticipatory anthropology “the captain” has a
conference convened in order to pose the decisive question of whether
the dog should be eaten “raw or cooked”. In the meantime the dog is lacer-
ated further by the gods and swallowed up in large pieces. Rouch makes
134  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

no attempt to rationalize. The little dog in the film cannot even stand in
metaphorically for the allegiance with which it obeys the master’s voice,
archaically and technically. Bell and Howell. The master eats it up. When
the technology provides the rhythm, there is no more faithful allegiance,
but only involuntary loyalty. The violence is the intrusion of the real, not as
the making visible of the apparatus on the screen, as Baudry had imagined,
but as the twitching of the bodies, the real of which sweeps up once again
against colonial codification in the technically controlled space. Rouch
cinematically doubles the space of symbolic violence, thus bringing it into
the screening room. That was unbearable. It is said that Lacan left the room
without a word along with all the others.
The demented paths of the gods provided the film’s appeal to psycholo-
gists, anthropologists, and cinéastes. It was well received in these circles,
where the last trance left to central Europeans was being organized in
the fifties: the mass mobilization on the streets and the air with the goal
of forgetting oneself for a couple of days. “Ici, l’ordre est different, ici et
là, le protocole est bien le même.” The film, which the gods of the cities,
of technology, and of violence had commissioned and in which the gods
bloodthirstily show that they recognize no taboos, received the first prize in
Venice in 1957 in the popular category of ethnography, geography, tourism,
and folklore. “Voici enfin l’Afrique en vacances.”
An almost uninterrupted commentary runs on the soundtrack through the
entire film, which is normally an effective method of establishing distance
between the images and a secure order outside the film. For instance, we
have confidently watched lambs die in dozens of films about Jesus. Rouch’s
commentary, however, is unsettling even at the level of language. It emerges,
like the images, in the mutual displacement of the participants and repeats
the African fabulation. Rouch reports that the speech of the possessed was
a speaking in tongues: “Une langue, qu’on peut interpréter mais qu’on ne
peut pas traduire mot à mot.”35 At first he has the speeches translated into
into an African language and then conveyed in French afterwards. The
commentary that is added in the final version was spoken by Rouch in a
crazed state that he himself calls glossolalia, and that ordered him in the
darkness of the projection to the microphone in the recording studio. In the
studio Rouch repeats what befalls the good workers at Accra when they are
seized in the ritual of the gods. In the space of the recording studio, in which
the projected images set the rhythm of the speech, in which the foreign
speech of the gods is taped as the movements of one’s own tongue, in which
one’s own voice returns distorted and alienated as the carrier of technically
processed, foreign speech, consciousness takes leave, a consciousness that
Deviations 135

might have been able to imagine where the ego might be. The physical is
left to the laws of technology. It carries the mental functions in place of a
feedbacking consciousness. The glossolalia that Rouch reports seems only
to have an anecdotal character. Technically it corresponds exactly to the
experiences of our present culture: Gods only come into the studio.36
The god that we are presumably waiting for in the film is the incarnation
of the camera-man: the figure that inevitably belongs to the personnel of a
colonial troupe. This even seems to be signalized when above the “general
secretary, at the termite hill-royal palace” an old cinema program is filmed,
Le Signe du Zorro, the film about the revenge of the disinherited. Only when
the locomotive driver blows through the image, and the governor berates
those present in French, when Captain Malia from the Red Sea stumbles
through the scene like Groucho Marx in the British “slow march”, Madame
Lokotoro inaugurates and desecrates statues while wearing an elegant sum-
mer dress, and the priest Mountyeba chats at the alter like a radio reporter,
do we notice that the camera-man is also on the scene and is shooting as
the kino-eye. We as spectators suddenly notice that we do not comprehend
the gaze that rips us out of our anchoring by seeing; only afterwards can
be reconstruct it. The camera is our consciousness on the scene. By techni-
cally implementing the gaze on oneself, Rouch repairs to the level and the
program of the gods. He transforms himself by filming. What our gaze
identifies on the scene is a technically equipped white man, and thus, like
all the other gods present, a Black, a Negro, a Noir, who understands his
ego as other through the many interconnections and relations. What we
ourselves see are the pictures of a cameraman who has linked himself and
the camera to a cinematic occupation of the world. A maître fou. In Vertov’s
tradition Rouch has linked himself to the maîtres fous. In Vertov’s tradition
he has become a black: “In many of my films I freed the camera from its
prescribed usage, “converted” it. In today’s capitalist-industrial-socialist
world there is no other way to make films – you have to use the camera in
ways that were not intended or prescribed.”37
At the end of the film Rouch’s commentary speaks of the fact that pos-
session might be a cure for some people, with which the Africans might be
able to integrate into the system of normality. At the end, this sentence is
introduced somewhat rhetorically: Has the camera not already shown how
its remedy works? Isn’t the film about how to use media in a way that they
become remedies? The gods of the city, of technology, and of violence have
shown us this unambiguously.
Much like Deren in her comparison with hysteria, Rouch also designates
possession as a way of dealing with states that are merely considered
136  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

symptoms of abnormality in our society and are not perceived as social

processes, which show how dropping out, whether desired or undesired,
can be integrated by the norm. “For me this film is of utmost significance
because it represents something like a key, and this key can help us to
recognize the social character of mental illnesses and the social, the public
form of alleviation and cure.”38 In western medicine, by contrast, it is not
hysteria itself, but only its expulsion, that amounts to a cure. Historically
media in western societies initially serve to justify mental illnesses, because
what escapes the text based medicinal discourse can only be physiologi-
cally grasped and systematized by using the images of technology. Another
brilliant camera builder, Albert Londe, had turned hysteria into a fact by
working with the consciousness of male and female patients. The former
chemist was thus promoted to being a god in white. He could not cure
anything, all he could do is provide rules for justifying selection, hospitaliza-
tion, isolation. A half century later Jean Rouch will describe how the “griots”
in Africa work when they are able simultaneously to protect tradition and
to cure. A griot, for instance, is responsible for providing encouragement
in the case of catastrophes and overpowering enemies:

En recourant à la musique, aux phrases rythmées des devises, en rappe-

lant les haut fait des ancêtres, il parvient à créer une seconde personnalité
à ‘lever le cœur’ du guerrier au combat, du chasseur de lion, du pêcheur
d’hippopotame, du ‘Gold Coastier’ défaillant et souffrant du mal du
pays. Ce courage sera évidemment éphémère mais il suffit en général à
triompher de l’épreuve.39

Consciously or not, among these examples Rouch always names examples

from his own film work: La chasse au lion, Battaile sur le grand fleuve, Le
Maîtres fous, and he also names his own process, using rhythmic phrases
like in his commentary produced in the studio, of subjecting himself to ritual
rules in order to remember the past and the ancestors, thus producing a dop-
pelgänger that can behave appropriately in light of the threat. A fleeting but
absolutely useful doppelgänger that can be projected in the cinematic field.
Rouch became a griot. As a master of the black magic of images he
con­t inues to work on developing medial deviations, making visible the
processes of transformation and of intercultural mirror inversions, and
analyzing the imaginary security of our white personalities. “Maîtres
fous is, the voice of Dionysus speaks out of Maîtres fous, the voice of the
imaginary in our society. And in the future I will continue in this direction
with cameras that have yet to be built.”40
4. Compressions

Albert Londe: Paris, Paris

Quand le corps en mouvement est inaccessible comme un astre
dont on veut suivre le déplacement […] la photographie supplée
aux procédés mécaniques avec une très grande facilité.
– Étienne-Jules Marey, 1885

One of the genres in anti-monarchist group pictures in Dutch painting,

in which early bourgeois male societies claimed their own hierarchical
order, is that of the anatomy lesson. The surgeon, who occupied the great-
est knowledge and the power in the guild, was made the focus by using
structures of light and gaze, the other doctors were placed in the hierarchy
correspondingly: in the foreground, middle, or background, in portrait or
full-length, closer or further away from the corpse, with or without surgical
tools.1 One picture in this tradition of anatomy lessons is a canvas by the
painter André Brouillet, which was exhibited in the the Paris Salon of 1887.
It depicts a lecture by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot as a medical
attraction of the time: “Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière.” This painting
has been presented as emblematic by both male and female historians of
hysteria because an engraving based on Brouillet’s model hung in the iconic
corner of psychology itself, in Freud’s study at Berggasse 19 in Vienna.
Instead of looking at a corpse, as is the case with historical anatomy
pictures, here the doctors and assistants are looking at a woman who has
fainted and collapsed into the arms of a young man, while an older and a
younger nurse stand in attendance, following the process like chamber-
maids in a Trauerspiel. An older gentleman is standing next to them. He
is addressing the audience, but in his iconography he belongs on the stage
of the dramatic events. Charcot, the “Napoleon of Neuroses”,2 is, like his
military model, both the worst enemy of the old regime and its heir. His
lectures, where clinical cases were presented every Tuesday, were scientific
revolutions and social rituals at the same time. Charcot is considered the
inventor of the systematic clinical pattern of hysteria, which he had pro-
posed in the 1870s by schematizing hundreds of photographs of his patients
at Salpêtrière. Only through this schematicization, which had been clearly
laid out for other doctors in a synopsis drawn by Paul Richer, the head of
the laboratory for pathological anatomy, could the ranting and raving of the
patients be organized into a complex of symptoms. What had previously
138  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

been distorted in all medical or theological orders as mad femininity was

researched, systematized, regulated, and controlled at Salpêtrière.
The experiments with hysterics already represented a second career
for the neurologist Charcot. In the wake of the war in 1870-71, which had
brought many dead persons with bullets in the head into the clinic and onto
the dissecting table, he had already excelled with a completely new medical
cartography of the human body. Due to his research in nerve physiology,
he was able to redefine connections between symptom and cause. In his
studies on tropical disturbances he shows, through the example of a Ger-
man soldier, that injuries to the brain can lead to rashes on the buttocks, a
bold thesis, unheard of even among privates.3 Disturbances to the nervous
system and especially the cerebrospinal axis, as Charcot demonstrated
in the cases if shootings, allowed for a completely new view of how the
inner physiology of human beings is connected by the nerve tracts. The
“Napoleon” of neurologists could also be considered the “Columbus” of
illnesses to the spinal system, precisely because he had no orientation over
the systemic state of the new land he had discovered.
In 1887, however, when Brouillet’s picture was exhibited at the Salon,
Charcot’s scientific reputation in Paris had become obscured. Research
and publications by the medical school of Nancy were casting doubt on the
general validity of his iconographic understanding of the course of hysteri-
cal states, insinuating that they were effects of the examination methods at
Salpêtrière itself. The demonstration was raised to the level of diagnosis, it
was claimed, and Michel Foucault will claim that this is exactly what was
really new about the lessons in Salpêtrière, illustrating Charcot’s art of crisis
control with an example of an unpublished handwritten document from
the archive: “The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an
attack by placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman’s
ovaries. He withdraws the baton, and there is a fresh attack, which he
accelerates by administering inhalations of amyl nitrate.”4 Sigmund Freud
attended Charcot’s lectures when he was staying in Paris from October
13, 1885, to February 28, 1886. In his obituary for Charcot in the “Wiener
Medizinscher Wochenschrift” he also emphasizes reproducibility as the
high point of the methodology:

While he was engaged in the study of hysterical paralyses arising after

traumas, he had the idea of artif icially reproducing those paralyses,
which he had earlier differentiated with care from organic ones. For this
purpose he made use of hysterical patients whom he put into a state of
somnambulism by hypnotizing them.5
Compressions 139

Diagnosis had slid into functionality; whoever could set it in motion had
explained it.
Raising reproduction to the level of explanation initially meant that
the goal of treatment was no longer therapy, but controlling the illness.
Freud will not follow his teacher in this. Charcot’s oracle, that no theory
would prohibit what happened in the clinic from existing – “ça n’empêche
pas d’exister” – is something that Freud only pointed out in response to
the search for an “it” in the hysterics’ spells, an untouched “ça” that had a
mysterious, disturbing, and modifying influence on consciousness, which
Freud wished to examine. Freud praise of his teacher, however, was a
paraphrase of Charcot’s sentence:

We can artificially produce it under certain circumstances; this is the

sublimity of a genre and, in fact, the ideal of pathological physiology.
The ability to reproduce a pathological state partakes of perfection,
for it seems that one possesses the theory when one has the means of
reproducing the morbid phenomena at one’s fingertips.6

For Charcot, theory was first and foremost the “known like” of clinical
practice, which made hysterics publicly mad time and again, and especially
Tuesday for Tuesday. The transfer of the symptomatic order to the bodies
of the patients was the ideal of the diagnostics, although what was missing
in Charcot’s methodology was exactly any description of the “means of
reproduction” that he claimed to have at hand.
How the transfer of signs to the bodies takes place, how the oddly
reciprocal interferences of desire were performed as regular mechanics
or dramaturgies between body and soul, was something that Charcot did
not want to know anything more about – in contrast to Freud, who will
later get his first indications toward a theory of the unconscious from this
relationship. Charcot only submitted evidence that “it” did not let itself be
disturbed.
According to Foucault, the technological and discursive apparatus that the
various scientific and related services at Salpêtrière made available belongs
to a third epoch of truth production, which became established at the end
of the eighteenth century. Truth is generated in the experiment, and thus
must be repeatable. In the laboratory that was Salpêtrière, the techniques
of hypnosis and suggestion were refined to the point that the ill persons
obviously did what they assumed to be the demands of the doctors without
resistance. The hysteric, according to Foucault, “herself retranscribed the
effects of medical power in forms that the doctor could describe in terms
140  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of a scientifically acceptable discourse.”7 For Foucault sexuality was the bait

in the net of discourse in which the fugitive souls of the nineteenth century
were caught. “They constructed around and apropos of sex an immense
apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the
last moment.[…] sex was constituted as a problem of truth.”8 It is a problem
that is at the same time a ruthless power play, and Foucault’s designation of
the doctors is the exact opposite of the designation with which the Haouka
priests simulated the sick power of the white colonialists. “All the techniques
and procedures put to work in the nineteenth century asylum – …the func-
tion of all of this was to make the medical figure the ‘master of madness.’”9
As variable as the interpretations of the “Leçons clinique à la Salpêtrière”
were, their methods were persistently viewed as the invention and im-
plementation of a semiological order of the female body. Involuntarily in
accordance with Charcot’s demands, hysteria was read as an iconography
and a staged event.
Charcot’s own dramaturgy was as aesthetic as it was useful, for instance
when, in order to illustrate a lecture on various forms of tremors, he had
women brought in wearing hats with long feathers so that the specific
characteristics of each tremor in their trembling could be distinguished
down to the last row of the lecture hall.10 This was clinical practice with
style and strategy, and the dilettantish cynicism of this kind of staging
had a long tradition at Salpêtrière. Charcot’s predecessor, Duchenne de
Boulogne, had researched the Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine,
as his publication from 1862 is called, by electrically stimulating the face
muscles of both male and female patients. In doing so he went so far as
to ascribe to their bodies roles from classical dramas: certain probes and
certain muscles caused Lady Macbeth to appear in a fury of rage. Charcot’s
colleague Paul Richer, in turn, more vulgar in every respect, saw dogs,
cats, and ordinary people represented.11 The pleasure of the doctors was
visible, masked as the patients’ wishes, incarnated on the stage of the
medical theater. Both male and female patients, as mad as they may have
previously been, surrendered themselves to the intellectual madness of the
masters. One of the psychoanalytic primal scenes at Salpêtrière was also
the presentation of the obscene to open view. It documents the banality
of early psycho-physiological power fantasies, but also the efficiency of a
relay that continuously shackles all research to the system of meaning. At
the same time, the direction, regulation, and supervision of the researching
gaze is hidden away in the order and structure of the archive itself. This is
also not new for hysteria. Already in the seventeenth century hysteria had
been designated as an epistemological sickness of physicians themselves.
Compressions 141

Any one who has studied hysteria as an epistemological effect since then has
had to be prepared for feedback mechanisms with one’s own scientific work.
During the 1980s, when the first effects of new electronic developments
were breaking into ordinary life, coinciding with a crisis in theoretical
feminism and instigating a discussion about femininity and representation,
a renaissance in the historiography of hysteria began in which the visual
presentation of hysterics, as Brouillet’s picture shows, was examined as a
staging of gender difference. Hysteria was declared the hospitalization of
a desire that, following the dictates of the individual hysteria researcher’s
discipline, could be analyzed as relations of media, power, and gender.
Once Charcot’s reorganization of the body had been established, it was
seen that his experiments had not only been affairs between doctors and
patients, but manifestations of a new science of the body. This presumed
the development of new optical devices that got their finishing touches in
the laboratories of physiologists and replaced a geometric optics with a psy-
chological one. The technical developments appeared to the tableau painter
André Brouillet as a crisis of his own profession at the sector of imaging, and
he had treated them in his picture of Charcot’s lesson. Alongside the first
staging to shows the construction of typical femininity in the male space
of medicine, a second staging lies hidden in the image, one about seeing
and being seen, about becoming-visible and remaining-hidden: about the
chemical-physical machinery behind the stage that allows for the staging
and makes the truth from Salpêtrière available to science.
Charcot, the director on the small stage of hysteria, is himself only a bit
player in a much more broadly encompassing reform of the medicinal gaze.
Brouillet’s picture shows that Charcot is also only another person to look at
in this play, exactly like the helpless patient and the heroically composed
assistant. Behind the doctors’ heads, that is, at a site that the three women
in the picture could see if they had not lowered their heads or had not shut
their eyes in helplessness, hangs a picture, painted after a photo from the
photography archive at Salpêtrière: it is the picture of a woman whose body
forms an arc stretched out backwards from her head to the tips of her toes.
In the synopsis of the hysterical poses that Richer had prepared as drawings
based on the photographic models of the doctor Paul Regnard, this is the
“arc de cercle”, the “great hysterical arc” or “das Gewölbe” [“the arch”], as
Sigmund Freud translated more beautifully because more Kleistian. This
arc represents the highpoint in the course of the hysterical attack in the
order of Salpêtrière. Better yet, it presents it. In the hall of the clinical
presentations the “great hysterical arc” counters that all the patients are only
doppelgängers of the recorded originals, in which poses and bodies coincide,
142  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of which there are registries, photographs, and medical knowledge, and

which can thus be brought into play by power, truth, or gender differences.
The development at Salpêtrière during the 1880s consisted in allowing the
illustrational apparatus to disappear from the consciousness of the male
and female patients and in presenting the technological images of the body
to them as their own.
As a professional, Brouillet shows in his picture how he is part of the
cover-up of the technological intervention. He worked out the “arc” in
all the lighting effects of the drapery under aesthetic aspects, not under
systematic or medicinal ones. From the picture-in-a-picture it is not possible
to tell whether his model was a photograph or a drawing, even if the motif
can be identified as one from Régnard’s collection. Because it deliberately
blurs the traces of its origin, Brouillet’s picture remains a variation on the
fundamental question of Salpêtrière: “Is hysteria original or copy?”12 But
while this question refers in the research to the appearances of patients,
their poses and gestures, Brouillet integrated it into his picture as a question
of media: as a question of the procedure of illustration.
Brouillet goes even further in his composition. On the right side of the
picture the assistant Joseph Babinski – who would later become a famous
specialist in hypnosis – catches the patient Blanche Wittman – one of
the star hysterics of Salpêtrière and also of the history of hysteria – in
her fall, while on the left Charcot’s colleagues Paul Richer, Charles Féré,
Alfred Binet, and Gilles de la Tourette sit at a table observing the master.
Charcot, who had described himself as an artist and director of hysteria,
was shifted from the center of the picture to the right side by Brouillet, and
so a table is visible at this spot with measuring instruments and devices
for electronically stimulating the patients. The chair in the geometrical
middle of the picture, a splendid leather armchair in comparison to the bare
wooden chairs in the auditorium, the scholar’s seat, la chaire, the chair in
the academic sense, remains empty. This could be an homage to Charcot as a
clinician. Brouillet, however, has placed a figure in the image that relativizes
the arrangement of those present. On the left margin in the foreground, at
the position where the commissioner is often found observing, checking,
and confirming events in classical painting, sits the photographer Albert
Londe. In 1884, the year of a cholera outbreak, Londe was named director
of photographic services as Salpêtrière. It was Londe who had provided
Brouillet with photographic prints of the doctors and assistants, which he
then used as his models. Londe himself, on the other hand, was not painted
according to any photographic model, but had personally sat for the painter
in his studio. Londe is one of the few people in the picture to be seen in
Compressions 143

full, in a white apron tied at the waist and a black silk cap: the traditional
garb of an assistant doctor. This was simply presumptuous, since Londe
was not a physician, he was a trained chemist and amateur photographer
and earned, at the time the picture was painted, 1200 francs a year, roughly
the equivalent of an office boy’s salary.13 Thus while the facial expression
of most of the audience and even of Charcot were due to an instantaneous
photograph taken with a quick camera, which Londe had developed, Londe’s
portrait is the result of hours of sitting in the studio: a character study in
the manner of the old painters. This difference is as difficult to make out
in Brouillet’s illustration as is the reproduction of the “arc de cercle” on the
wall as being the result of photographic recording technology. Nonetheless,
Brouillet placed the destitute Londe in the position of the benefactor, for
the painter knew better than anyone that without Londe’s photographic
constructions, not only would this picture not have been possible, but
there also could not have been any “Leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière” in the
1880s. Londe’s techniques had completely restructured the medicinal gaze.
Brouillet’s picture is secretly an homage to the new era of recording and
depiction, which had become established at Salpêtrière since 1884.
Brouillet and Londe knew from their own experience that the disparate
eras of recording that were hidden in the picture were the key to mastering
madness. The mastery of the neurologists was due to the technologies and
procedures of depicting an illness, which showed no visible physical lesions,
it was “sine material.” Charcot had prided himself in being able to direct a
gaze that visually defined the forms of nervousness. His methodological
problem consisted in being able to document this gaze. Charcot’s clinical
practice can be distinguished from the experimental medicine of Claude
Bernard’s school, the famous vivisector, in that the patients were monitored
and observed, their symptoms catalogued and systematized in order for
the data recorded to be compared posthumously in the autopsy with the
nervous-physiological findings in vivo. According to Charcot, the clinical
rooms at Salpêtrière were not laboratories, but a

sort of living pathological museum whose resources are almost inex-

haustible. It is true that we sometimes miss the beginnings of disease;
but, on the other hand, we gain by being enabled to investigate after
death the lesions which correspond to the symptoms studied minutely,
and over a long period of time, during life.14

Usually, however, to no avail: the whole thing, as a museum disguised as

a charitable enterprise – Freud called it an “the institution for the care of
144  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

women”15 for poor people were treated free of charge at Salpêtrière provided
they committed every part of themselves, including their nervous systems,
to the institution – functioned as a hysteria exhibition only so long as
the exhibited objects were still alive. In the pathology in which Freud
had worked, neither lesions nor forms of trembling could be discerned.
Although Charcot had stylized himself as a seeing, as “visuel”, he could not
provide any proof for his unerring diagnostic gaze to the patients. This is
why the throne of science remains empty in Brouillet’s painting. In place of
a scientist there is the technology that makes the new knowledge possible
in the first place.
In 1882, when the parliament approved the budget for a new professorship
in neurology under Gambetta, the chemist Albert Londe was originally
hired as préparateur for the museum. When he started he found a photo
lab there, which he called “prehistoric”,16 and promptly set about renovating
it and equipping it with new machinery. Stages and mounting devices for
lighting patients were brought to his light-workshop, and the darkroom was
brought up to the latest standards. Londe developed a half dozen camera
prototypes, and in 1893, when Charcot was already dead, the (in)famous
“Piste de la Salpêtrière” was installed outside, on which the patients had to
complete long courses of movement in front of a serial photographer and
even later in front of a film camera.
With this “photographic service”, as his division was officially called,
Londe had greater visions than simply the task of depicting patients. Ulti-
mately it was not Londe that had introduced photography to Salpêtrière.
Long before he started his photographic service the famous volumes of
photographs made by his predecessors, the Iconographie photographique
de la Salpêtrière, were already in the laboratory. The three volumes had
been brought out between 1876-1879 by the neurologists Bourneville and
Régnard. But these photographs were, as Bourneville wrote in the foreword
to the first volume, merely illustrations of the medical gaze, and had only
been printed because “our excellent master Monsieur Charcot” encouraged
doctors “to publish the observations gathered by us in his halls, illustrating
them with photographs taken by Monsieur Régnard.”17
Londe, on the other hand, did not wish to illustrate the medical gaze, but
to thoroughly modify it. In “prehistoric” research, photography itself played
no scientific role. Londe, however, envisioned an epistemological function
for the new technology. The photograph itself was supposed to be the test
case, the proof, in the sense of evidence and of the artistic copy, “épreuve”,
of the illness hysteria, because it discovered things that the naked eye could
not discern. Just as the photographer Londe is asserted to be a physician in
Compressions 145

Brouillet’s painting, the value of the photo lab is also meant to be raised to
being a scientific laboratory.
The moment of Londe’s attempt at a power grab was opportune. In the
1870s Jean-Martin Charcot had worked on localizing various nervous ill-
nesses in the brain. Since 1878 he had examined and systematized hypnotic
states, eventually presenting his research at the Académie des sciences in
1882, thus achieving scientific recognition for hypnosis. In his opening
lecture of a series in the winter of 1885, at which Sigmund Freud most likely
also participated, Charcot confronted his listeners with a new, unresolved
medical problem:

But you are aware, gentlemen, that there still exists at the present time
a great number of morbid states, evidently having their seat in the nerv-
ous system, which leave in the dead body no material trace that can be
discovered. Epilepsy, hysteria, even the most inveterate cases, chorea,
and many other morbid states which it would take us too long to enumer-
ate, come to us like so many sphinx, which deny the most penetrating
anatomical investigations. These symptomatic combinations deprived
of anatomical substratum, do not present themselves to the mind of the
physician with that appearance of solidity, of objectivity, which belong
to affections connected with an appreciable organic lesion.18

Only Londe was able to provide the “material trace that can be discovered” of
hysterical illnesses, as the material trace on a photographic plate, thus advanc-
ing both hysteria to an illness with verifiable and reproducible symptoms,
and photography to a scientific method at the same time. Londe’s technical
invention made the epistemological revolution possible. The material trace
that he sought was not to be found under the surface of the body, but in the
folds of the temporal extension of its process. Time had to be manipulated,
enlarged, taken under the magnifying glass, in order to get to the bottom of
hysteria. The decisive shift in Londe’s methodology, as opposed to the old shots
by Régnard, was the drastic shortening of exposure times. In the 1870s, that
is, at the time when the first Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
had been photographed, the usual exposure time in interior spaces lasted
between 15 and 30 minutes. In 1880 Londe’s exposure of an external shot with
45 seconds got a great deal of recognition, around 1884 “temps de pose”, as
they were called in French from the perspective of those photographed, under
one second were still quite rare.19 Only in 1886 did Londe define the snapshot
as a photograph that was exposed for less than ¼ of a second. Most of his
spectacular inventions and improvements in photographic technology – a
146  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

new coating for the plates, new circular shutter techniques, the chronophoto
apparatus, and ever the improvement of his lenses – served to reduce the
exposure time for the purpose of instantaneous photography.
Londe’s technical inventions were the requirement to open up a new field
of research at Salpêtrière with the objectivity of scientific methods: the logic
of the involuntary and the unconscious in human movements. The short
exposure times and intervals with which Londe’s camera depicted moments of
movement could no longer be consciously perceived. This altered the diagnos-
tics of hysteria absolutely. The “system of relations” [“réseau”]20 between the
various discursive, institutional, or iconographic elements, which could only
be created thanks to instantaneous photography, captures the unconscious
as a “mental trace that can be discovered” by scientists for the first time.
This was something that Régnard’s “prehistoric” photographs with their long
exposure times could neither hope for, nor could they technically achieve it.
In a certain respect, what happened in Londe’s studio was nothing more
than in the “composite portraitures” of Francis Galton or of bertillonage, the
facial photography developed by the director of the photographic service of
the prefecture of Paris, Alphonse Bertillon, which quickly became mandatory
for European police departments.21 A person was photographically reduced
to a portrait view and a brief moment of posing in the simplest time-space
coordinates. Such shots were made in series with multiple exposures of
individuals, and then assembled by the eugenicist Galton as familial groups
or by Bertillon as criminal groups, so that types began to emerge with char-
acteristic deviances, visible at first glance. These could then be determined,
numbered, and transmitted by telegraph to aid in manhunts.22 Londe showed
how something similar could also be made visible in neurology, something
that only existed in the series of photographs: the facies, typical expressions
of an illness that could not otherwise be materially detected.

Dans un autre ordre d’idées, le chirugien, le médecin constatent au

moyen de la photographie l’étendue des lésions, leur aspect; ils en notent
les modifications et complètent ainsi de la manière la plus claire leurs
observations. Il est même certaines affections qui donnent au malade une
phsyionomie toute spéciale, qui ne frappe pas l’observateur dans un cas
isolé, mais qui devient typique si on la retrouve chez d’autres personnes
atteintes de la même maladie.23

The trick images are engraved into the physician’s memory, the picture of
the illness emerges in the photo lab: “C’est ainsi, en particulier, que dans
les maladies du système nerveux, on a pu établir des types rigoureusement
Compressions 147

définis qui correspondent à des affections détérminées. Ces types restent

gravés dans la mémoire du médecin…”24 Londe wrests power from the
engineers. His process of fragmenting the old pictures of bodies into the
realm of the millisecond and of reassembling them into new types is the
prerequisite for any and all psychology of the unconscious. It would be
wrong to describe Londe’s work as bureaucratic identification photography.
For him it was more about mobility during the shots, about the shots of
movement, about the variability of the illustrative system of photography.25
Londe was considered to be an excellent photographer, both inside and
outside of Salpêtrière, because he did not adhere to reproducing particularly
prominent characteristics, but depicted bodies, just as he did landscapes or
his many shots of the sea, as light, surface, and movement. Instantaneous
photographs were meant to fix the unfamiliar and unpredictable.
Even his first amateur experiments to improve the layers of the photo-
graphic plates with a dry emulsion, silver bromide gelatin, significantly
extended the horizon of movement in photography. Using the new plates
(which incidentally laid the foundation for the financial empire of the
Lumières), preparing, shooting, and developing a photograph could occur
far apart in time. For the first time the photographer could leave his studio
with the plates under his arm and take pictures when and where he liked,
then develop, enlarge, or process them later in the darkroom.
Following the same intention, of extending photography’s mobility,
Londe took a decisive stand against the mechanical hangings that were
used in Salpêtrière to sedate the patients in the frame of the picture. For
certain shots Londe did admit the use of apparatuses like “head rests”, but
he wanted to assemble and illustrate what was characteristic, not to set up
a typical scenario by force:

Il faut s’en servir lorsque le malade ne peut garder i’immobilité et que

le manque de lumière ne permet pas de faire une épreuve instantanée.
Il en sera de même lorsque l’on opérera de très près et que l’on voudra
faire à grande échelle la tête ou quelques parties de celle-ci… les yeux, la
bouche, le nez ou les oreilles. La grande dimension de l’image dans ces cas
particuliers nécessite des pose plus longues que d’habitude et d’autre part
l’immobilité complète du sujet est encore plus indispensable: cependant
toutes les fois que la position, l’attitude du malade seront caractéristiques,
il faudra proscrire d’une manière absolue l’emploi de l’appui-tête.26

The only way out of this practice based on devices, which Londe called
“mauvais à priori”, 27 was to develop mechanisms and equipment that
148  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

allowed for ever shorter exposure times in instantaneous photography.

Londe replaced the “guillotine” shutter of the old cameras, in which a piece
of cardboard whizzed down from a wooden bar, with circular shutters. In
1881 he constructed the prototype of a camera with variable sector apertures
made of copper, fixed to steel plates. The apertures were controlled by a
gear mechanism, and the time of the aperture was regulated by a spring
mechanism. Using a dial on the outside of the camera one could set different
exposure times. With these apertures Londe could expose for 1/10 or 1/15
of a second if he used additional lighting. This prototype was built by the
watchmaker Dessoudeix, with whom Londe would collaborate again and
again: a small heart valve of darkness.
Londe had his apparatuses built as small as possible, light, but also
robust, to the point that he could recommend the use of the hand camera
in 1893 in order to follow the patient and to capture a tremor or an attack
at just the right moment: “Il ne saurait être question de vouloir amener la
malade dans cet état devant l’objectif, il faut que ce soit l’opérateur qui la
suive avec un appareil à main, pour la saisir au moment favorable.”28 All of
Londe’s developments attempt to render the rigid structures of the studio
superfluous. He sought out a method of depicting the moving, living bodies
of the hysterics, and he wanted to give these movements of involuntariness
free reign.
At this point it is clear why it is so perspicuous to use Foucault’s term
dispositif in relation to Salpêtrière. If at first is was the mechanical and
architectural devices of the photo studio, in the concrete and simplest
sense of the French “dispositif ”, in which patients in the 1870s were sat,
arranged, turned, and fixed, with Londe’s inventions these adjustments
become functions of the recording apparatus, which allow for a medical
view of the body outside the studio. The new freedom of movement that
was granted to the patients’ bodies in the 1880s corresponded precisely to
the forms of time and space Londe’s new cameras were able to penentrate.
Neurology needed to analyze the ever faster movements, the trembling,
twitches, and ticks that had perhaps already been somehow perceived by
the physician’s gaze, but had never been seen or observed. Photography, as
Londe constantly stressed, discovers what remains hidden to the eye: “Il est
absolument certain que l’objectif photographique peut révéler des choses
que l’œil le plus exercé ne savait pas percevoir.”29 In this context Londe
borrows a formulation from the famous astronomer Jules Janssen, who had
described the photographic plate as “rétine du savant”, as the scientist’s
retina,30 after he had recorded Venus passing before the sun, only analyzing
it afterwards. Photography allowed one to temporally isolate the depiction
Compressions 149

from the object being observed, and to value depiction over observation. To
photograph meant to store and process an event for science.
Hysteria is therefore rightly called a sickness of representation.31 Physi-
cians at Salpêtrière had turned the iconography of hysteria into an object
without reflecting on the separation of their object of examination from
the patients. As long as they might stare at them, they could only learn as
much about them as an astronomer who stares into the sun and only sees
the flickering of his own eyes. The work of the photographer consisted in
inventing techniques that necessarily resolved the transferal of the moving
body to the image so true to nature and so scientifically that, on the one
hand, clear information could be gained from raving and trembling bodies,
and on the other hand, nothing of the bodies was missing in the images. The
technical service is the condition for the discursive order that Charcot was
able to set up in “all the wilderness of paralyses, spasms and convulsions.”32
Even in Salpêtrière, the Masters of Madness could only appear and keep the
protocol because the Master of Technology gave the “ordre” of the course.
By means of the instantaneous photograph, the meshes of the networks,
the physical and the sensual can be captured as signs and organized, decid-
edly finer. No longer just poses and gestures, but also involuntary move-
ments and also a frothing and vibrating can thus be fixed and systematized
in order to render a diagnostic judgment about the unconscious. A realm
of raving and mad movements beyond scientific ascertainability, in which
both male and female hysterics could send rebellious messages and cries for
help to all concerned through their attacks and behavior. While exposure
times of ½ hour or even ½ minute can still be described as an authentic
personal statement, self-showing, self-expressing, quick photography in
milliseconds seizes evidence from movements in moments that are so brief
that the patients do not notice, much less have the chance to react. Since
Londe the drama of hysteria is that utterly everything has been requisitioned
for the processing of signs with the new medical camera gaze. Even the
mad productivity of the hysterics’ parodies, acting, and performances, like
Charcot’s stage work, has to let itself be synchronized and processed by the
new cameras. What we see, read, and know about hysteria emerges in photo-
graphic networks. What can be captured as the message of male and female
hysterics had previously passed through the processes of technical storage,
as they can graph and corresponding dramatize physical expressions in the
realm of the millisecond in the case of instantaneous photography.
In his 1976 study, psychoanalyst Lucien Israel examined hysterical
symptoms “dans la ‘pathologie’ relationnelle de l’hystérie”,33 stressing the
difficulty of separating message and medium in hysteria:
150  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

The symptom is the entirety of hysteria, bearer of a message, of a some-

times awkward, often disturbing message, but one that always takes its
toll on the bearer. This automatic message, coming from the unconscious,
only becomes meaningful when deciphered. The difficulty in deciphering
it comes from the fact that the addressee is caught in the same net and by
the same system of attitudes, customs, and thoughts as those who have
compelled the hysteric to take to this encrypted message of symptoms.34

The hysterical message can only be deciphered by someone who allows

him or herself to be touched by it, who is “concerned”, and who restores
to it the language with which it can procure being right and healed in the
social. Israel as well understood hysterical messages as being directed “at
everyone”,35 as messages that have to be conveyed. This is why this decoding
also and fundamentally includes the examination of technical patterns
and registers to which the male and female hysterics react or, when it is
simply too fast for human perception, to which hysteria itself responds with
twitching, speaking in tongues, or even with “sécrétions abondantes.”36
The power of the doctors existed, not because of or despite the rebellious
desire of the patients, but because there were technologies available to them
“to produce illness in its truth”,37 that is, to translate desire into medical
discourse and to exclude everything else through technical evidence. Every
psychological logic presumes a technological logic. Any critique that would
liberate female and also male patients from the discourse of the Masters
of Madness must apply itself to the arbitrariness of these technologies
and the symbolic orders inaugurated by them. Only then do the messages
break down in their translation, and it could be shown that not only hyster-
ics, but all of us are simulators when faced with the technical medium of
photography. And that a snapshot will always prove each of us to have been
dissimulating.
In December of 1882 Londe presented his stereoscopic camera for relief
photography to the Société française de photographie, which was meant to
be used to document experiments on faradic stimulation of face muscles.
The principle behind this camera consisted in fixing two lenses on a plate
behind which a complex clockwork could be used to move an aluminum
panel, rather than a simple gear mechanism. The exposure times could vary
between 1/33 and 1/200 of a second with this camera. The star model for
one of the first series of images that Londe took with this construction was
Blanche Wittman, who will faint before all the doctors’ eyes in Brouillet’s
tableau. 16 round photos glued next to one another showed how, in a state
of hypnotic catalepsy, a certain cramped attitude could be transferred from
Compressions 151

the right to the left arm by using a magnet: “Mlle Wittman, transfer d’une
attitude au moyen de l’aimant.”
What was already presented as a chronophotographic series, as a con-
tinual depiction of a course of movement, however, in reality still belongs
to the era of the pose. Londe later admitted that the individual exposure
time amounted to a second in each case, that the suspension of movements
therefore lay with Mlle Wittman, and was not any chopping up of fluid
motion by the camera. But on whichever side of the lend the intermittent
twitches were made: the photographic preparation of reality by means of
photography is entropic, no event can be reconstructed from the photo-
graphic manipulations. This is something that photographers know as well
as painters do, when they offer themselves as chroniclers.
It was only the next camera that Londe built that finally allowed for
technical chronophotography strictly speaking, that is, serial shots in which
the individual photo is taken independently of particular and regular time
intervals. Instead of two lenses, nine lenses were arranged in a circle on a
plate, “qui nous permet de faire neuf épreuves successives à des intervalles
de temps rapprochés.”38 Nine times, one after the other, the photographic
plate captured a snapshot of the patient as she turned in new steps behind
the lens: the real Revolution Nr. 9 of the history of the sciences. These new
recordings of hysterical attacks took place in fractions of seconds, in periods
of time in which patients could no longer simulate because the short inter-
vals allowed for no conscious reactions, in the realm of the technological
unconscious. That means that male and female hysterics, even if they were
familiar with photographic services, could not turn the attack of illustrative
technology to their self-image. The random shots caught something real,
which could not merge itself with any imaginary image. The doctors of the
Salpêtrière could organize what became visible on the photos as they saw fit.
In the nine-lens camera a battery provided an electrical impulse to the
mechanism that controlled the shutters, while the impulse in turn was kept
in rhythm by a metronome. Thus, the moments of movement that were
photographed were initially determined by a unified division of time. This
meant that a technology was implemented in the “appareil photo-électrique”
that had otherwise been the domain of the doctor during inducing hypnotic
or hysterical attacks: the induction of trance by a rhythmic pattern. In this
case, it belonged to the mechanism of the apparatus itself. The tick-tock of
the metronome set the rhythm that set the pace for the patients’ nervous
crises while at the same time setting the rhythm by which the crisis would
be recorded. Subjective and objective in the recording shifted positions
with every stroke.
152  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

The time in which Londe was taking his first series with this “appareil
photo-électrique à neuf objectifs” corresponded exactly with the shift in
Charcot’s research from localizing nervous source of the disease in the brain
to the study of illness as “sine materia.” In the foreword to his translation of
Charcot’s lectures, Freud, observing that Charcot had left the research into
the organic studies of neural diseases, wrote: “At about the same time at
which Breuer was carrying on the ‘talking cure’ with his patient, the great
Charcot in Paris had begun the researches into hysterical patients at the
Salpêtrière which were to lead to a new understanding of the disease.”39 It
was this camera that made is possible to store the neuroses – at any rate
it also made it irrelevant to have the cooperation of the male and female
hysterics, and had made an allegory of the rapport between doctor and
patient. As such it was examined further in the iconographic research into
hysteria. The engineer in doctor’s clothing, who refined the power over
madness, remained unobserved as an assistant.
Because the single frames of the camera with nine lenses on the 13 x 18 cm
photographic plate were tiny, Londe was developing a prototype for another
camera at the beginning of the 1880s. Its twelve lenses would be overlapped
so that the square images would almost entirely fill up the wide format of
the photographic plate. With this prototype Londe delivered his medical
masterpiece in 1884: He photographed the patient Rosa Guillot, whose
unusually fast attacks, lasting for only seconds, could not be identified by
any of the resident doctors at Salpêtrière. With his chronophotographic
series Londe showed that the crises could indeed be classified as epileptoid
hysterical in the synoptic pattern of Salpêtrière. When, a few weeks later,
the crises slowed down and Rosa Guillot’s neurosis could be identified
by the naked eyes of the doctors, Londe was shown to be correct with his
photographic slow-motion diagnosis, and he was credited with the first
application of photography that was not merely for depiction, but could aid
in diagnosis. 40 Did he feel vindicated after this triumph for appearing in
the garb of the assistant doctor when he sat for the painting in the artist’s
studio?
The serial camera with twelve lenses also chopped up the image of the
body, which might still have been a draft of the hysterics’ “ego”, into a clinical
picture that consists of sections of twitching that cannot be consciously
controlled, and that had appeared indistinguishable to the naked eye of
the doctors and students. In the 1870s, when “walking through our halls”
with his students and assistants, Charcot, the physician, had incited this
in order to sharpen the medical gaze in the muddle of the body:
Compressions 153

At first glance one might well think that a monotonous spectacle of its
gazes was present. In fact, if one is satisfied with a superficial look, the
symptom of trembling seems to be identical or nearly the same in all the
women. Only one factor is remarkable, namely the changing intensity and
distribution that the rhythmic vibrations presenting by their members. 41

After processing with the photographs, after 1885, Charcot was able, ac-
cording to Freud’s own memories of the “rounds with his senior in one
of the departments of the Salpêtrière”, to bring some order to “all the
wilderness of paralyses, spasms and convulsions for which forty years
ago there was neither name nor understanding”, 42 or simply no recording
technology.
A short time later, Londe’s works was also publicly recognized: At the
beginning of 1885 Charcot illustrated his depiction of the case of Guinin, a
male hysteric, with a 12-part chronophotogrpahic series of Londe’s. Charcot
presents himself here as quite as aesthete of hysteria and he underscores its
beauty precisely through the illustrated example of a male body:

Toute cette partie de l’attaque est, chez G(uinin), parfaitement belle, si je

puis m’exprimer ainsi, et chacun de ces détails méritait d’être fixé par les
procédés de la photographie instantanée. Je fais passer sous vos yeux les
figures qui ont été ainsi obtenues par M. Londe. Vous voyez qu’au point
de vue de l’art, elles ne laissent rien à désirer; mais de plus elles sont pour
nous très instructives. 43

Charcot is methodologically dependent on photography, but he does not

wish to understand or name it itself as a medical implement, and even
in his books he shows hardly any prints of photographs, which were sup-
posed to have become so famous for the lessons at Salpêtrière. Londe is only
mentioned three times in his entire Œuvres Complètes. Charcot denies
the significance of the technicians and their instruments for research and
quickly incarnates even the technical service. “But to tell the truth, in this
I am nothing more than a photographer; I inscribe what I see.”44 It was the
photographer Londe’s intention, however, to give visibility to what a naked
eye and even also the naked eye of a physician could not see.
Charcot’s obeisance to Londe’s work at this rare spot in his writings does
not only have aesthetic reasons. In 1884 Hippolyte Bernheim published the
first of his works about suggestibility in hypnotic and waking states, from
which his vehement attacks of Charcot’s representation of the typical forms
of hysterical fits is meant to have come. 45
154  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Against these attacks on his scientif ic standards, Charcot publicly

engages photography to emphasize the objectivity of his research. But he
is wary of acknowledging the mechanist as clinician. At the same time he
co-writes the book Les démoniaques dans l’art with Paul Richer.46 Charcot’s
evocation of the documents of painting in this volume is a manifestation
not only of his claim of the timeless truth of his its iconography, but it is at
the same time a concealment of the technology that his analysis cannot
do without. At the same time Richer, Gilles de la Tourette, and Londe were
planning the publication of a Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière on
the basis of instantaneous photography. When this appeared in 1888, the
foreword contains the following text:

Avec l’aide de la photographie instantanée, on arrive à fixer, à décomposer

sur le papier sensible des mouvements anormaux.[…] qu’il eût été impos-
sible d’analyser avec toute précision souhaitée à l’aide du simple examen
clinique.[…] La photographie d’un paralysé agitant ou d’une hystérique
en attaques n’en dit-elle pas plus long à l’esprit qu’une description, si
analytique qu’elle soit?47

This elevation of photographic methods over clinical ones must have been
irksome to Charcot, and he took his revenge by relegating photography to
the second tier of aesthetics in relation to clinical work. In a counter move,
Londe had representatively enhanced his own value through painting and
might have been relieved that his methods did not have to withstand any
serious scientific controls, for he had readily delivered illustrations that did
not serve the cause of science, but the power plays of the physicians. The
photo series of Guinin’s attack in twelve images, arranged as if they were
taken from a single plate, was just as manipulated in time as the series of
Blanche Wittman had been. Londe had compiled it in the photo lab from
two different series of twelve in order better to simulate the aesthetics of
the attack. Charcot’s verdict, that hysterics “simulate without any particular
intention.[…] and cultivate the art for their own sake”, 48 goes for both the
medial staff as well as the photographic personnel. Simulation is the method
per se at Salpêtrière. And Londe’s time compression, achieved through the
technology of photography, successfully replaced all the physiotherapeutic
compressions, braces, and brackets with which the hysterics’ bodies had
previously been fixed in the clinic.
Unperturbed by all of this, Londe pursued his wish to perfect the photog-
raphy of the involuntary and the unconscious as a scientific method vis-à-vis
medical practice. For example, he exposed some patients for so long that
Compressions 155

their trembling members disappeared in blurriness, while the rest of the

body, which was still, remained quite sharp. In this way “hysterical” body
parts could be photographically isolated. This shows that chronophotogra-
phy and thus also the pre-filmic chopping up of the patients at Salpêtrière
was only one of many different illustrative procedures with which Londe
experimented. The series of instantaneous photographs, however, proved to
be the most effective. For Londe, scientific photography becomes equivalent
to chronophotography as defined by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1882 as serial
shots of moving objects in relation to defined temporal intervals. Londe
developed certain tricks to undermine this mathematical scientific basis
of the method. In 1893 he presented his camera with twelve lenses to the
Société française de photographie. And once again it turned out that Londe’s
variant, unlike the competing procedures, had liberated the dispositif of the
limits of time and space. While Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photography
was installed permanently at the racing track at Palo Alto, and Marey’s
camera was a permanent fixture in the Parc des Princes in the Bois du
Boulogne, Londe built a mobile and variable camera unit. He exposed the
plates with five variable shutter times. The mechanism of the twelve-picture
camera was completely unlike the nine-picture camera, for the photo plate
no longer turned along with it. This meant that the entire apparatus was
more stabile and allowed for significantly shorter exposure times. Each of
the twelve lenses in the camera had its own shutter, which was triggered
by a remote electric allocator. This theoretically allowed Londe – and this
was also an option that he wanted to keep open for scientific recording – to
overlap the end of one shot with the beginning of the next by using longer
exposure times. One incidence could, if necessary, be recorded without any
temporal interruption. Marey’s gun, by contrast, could take take twelve
pictures a second at 1/700 of a second, meaning that more than 98 percent
of what happened before the camera in this second was not captured.
There was yet another change with respect to camera with nine pictures,
controlled by a metronome, one that would also necessitate a change in
how the new pictures of hysteria were decoded. On the camera with twelve
lenses, each individual lens could be set to five different exposure times
and various intervals: long and short exposures, long and short intervals,
according to the theme that was to be recorded. Furthermore, the lenses
could be triggered to go off in any order. The camera therefore allowed
for any combination of times and intervals, and even for the coupling and
reciprocal time lag of two different lenses. In his book Photographie médi-
cale: Application aux sciences médicales et physiologiques, Londe provides
technical instructions for setting up the camera for every phase of the
156  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

so-called “great, complete, and regular hysterical attack.”49 The twelve-

picture camera could capture particular phases in a certain way by using
a variety of time settings and of “editing together” an “ideal” of the process
already in the camera, to use film terminology. Time is edited, movements
are scanned, no matter how strong and long the hysteria rants and raves.
To this degree, Londe’s chronophotography is not just cinematography,
but already animation avant la lettre. Londe specifies how to regulate the
camera-dispositif for photographing in the clinic with the goal of systemati-
cally producing clinic pictures:

Premier cas: Temps de pose courts, intervalles rapprochés. – On opérera

ainsi pour les études ayant trait à la locomotion animale, aux attaques
d’hystérie et d’épilepsie, aux tremblements, à la chorée, etc.
Deuxième cas: Temps de pose courts, intervalles plus prolongés. – Marches
pathologiques qui durent plus longtemps que la marche normale, mais
où, dans certaines périodes, on trouve des mouvements très rapides.
Troisième cas: Petites vitesses, intervalles courts. – Reproduction de
certains tics à courte distance: les mouvements du sujet peuvent n’être
pas très rapides, mais être effectués dans un temps relativement court.
Bâillement hystérique, torticolis spasmodiques, etc.
Quatrième cas: Petites vitesses, intervalles plus ou moins prolongés. – En-
registrement des transferts de contractures ou d’attitudes passionnelles,
des modifications d’attitudes obtenues pendant l’état cataleptique sous
l’influence de l’augmentation progressive du courant faradique.50

The technical instructions regulate the classical course of the attacks, which
can be seen in the photo series; they are the result of a particular dramaturgy
of time. The seemingly regular and continuous course of movement that
can be seen in the pictures is already carried over into compressed and
expanded time periods. The schematic attacks of the series, which mark the
medical gaze, are compiled from chronophotographic slow-motion and time
lapse. Unlike the series by Marey and Muybridge, Londe’s series allow for no
inferences about the temporal course of the patients’ movements, because
each shutter can be set differently. On the other hand, the attack of Guinin,
simulated in the photographic sense, is the best example of this. Of the twelve
photos on the print, those with the quickest course of movement (pictures
3, 5, 12) are shot with the shortest exposure and the shorted intervals, while
the pictures of the “arc de cercle” (pictures 6, 7) are taken in extremely large
intervals, for the poses lasted from five to ten minutes. These temporal
distinctions can no longer be extracted from the sequences of images.
Compressions 157

The options of the twelve-pictures camera bring Londe’s photography into

a new phase. He disassembled attacks into their instantaneous moments
of unconsciousness and synthesized them in a hysterical dramaturgy into
ideal arcs. The complicated and fascinating movements of the patients are
technologically dressed up. Their oppositional scanning and rhythmization
gets lost in the new artistic era of instantaneous storage and archiving.
Around this time the great and regular attacks start disappearing from
Salpêtrière. The old stars among the hysterics of Regnardian iconography
lost their imaginary pleasure in the photographic service, which had
betrayed them. They disappeared. And where to?
The patient Blanche Wittman, who lay in Babinski’s arms, the focus of all
the medical gazes, had already been the model of numerous photographs
in the collection Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, which had
appeared in the 1870s. She was called “la reine des hystériques”, a star model
that was supposed to be “authoritarian, capricious, and unpleasant toward
the other patients as well as the personnel.”51 After being treated by Jules
Janet at the Hôtel-Dieu she developed a new, balanced personality, “Blanche
II”, who conveyed that she had always been present as well at Salpêtrière,
when “Blanche I” was apparently unconsciously acting out the three stages
of hypnosis. Brouillet had recorded this double personality when he put
Blanche into the picture twice: once in the “hysterical arc” of the painting
at the wall, the model for which is taken from the old photograph, and once
in the hysterical crisis in Babinski’s arms, a crisis that had already played
out under the auspices of the Londe era, in which the change in personality,
that play with the imaginary, the tricks of the hysterics, no longer counted.
With Londe the tricks of instantaneous photography formed the arsenal of
power and the matrix of aesthetics, and women’s bodies had to compete
with the rolling waves before La Rochelle. By 1887, when Brouillet’s picture
was exhibited at the Paris Salon, Blanche Wittman had already returned
to Salpêtrière. She wanted to take part in those experiments where the self
could become other. She became an assistant in Londe’s photo lab and later
in the x-ray department. Blanche Wittman died, just like Walter Cannon, as
a result of high exposure to radiation in the laboratory while seeking for the
truth of communication of social bodies.52 “Quand le corps en mouvement
est inaccessible comme un astre dont on veut suivre le déplacement.[…]
la photographie supplée aux procédés mécaniques avec une très grande
facilité”,53 writes Étienne-Jules Marey, Londe’s good friend, who knew the
beautiful “Blanche” only from photos.
Max Ernst, “The unconscious of the landscape becomes complete”, in: M.E., La femme 100 têtes.
Berlin. No year, no pagination.

Jules Etienne Marey, Movements of a tightrope walker taken by Londe with his twelve lense camera,
1893 Société de Photograhie. In: Marta Braun, p. 88.
Part III
1. Mental Apparatuses

Least interesting of these shivers are the ones with a perfectly steady frequency,
no variation to them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the frequency-
modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on information put in at the
other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular waveforms that
change both in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier-analyzed
into their harmonics, which is a little tougher. There is often coding involved,
certain subfrequencies, certain power-levels-you have to be pretty good to get
the hang of these.
– Thomas Pynchon, 1973

Experimenting

The Benzedrine-guzzling Pfc. Eddie Pensiero in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

can “read” various forms of shivering at first glance, that is, he can analyze,
differentiate, and allocate them to the mental states of his fellow human be-
ings. What the normal human eye cannot perceive at all gets mixed together
in his amphetamine quickened mind, dissected into slow-motion and still
frames of involuntary movements, or dissolved into sinusoidal waves. The
series of shivers enumerated by Pensiero corresponds to a tour de force
through the history of the psychophysiological sciences of the nineteenth
century. It is the history of researching and charting human physiology
in the neurological sciences, which not only signifies a refinement in the
technologies of measuring physiological functions, but at the same time
constructs new bodies by developing new apparatuses for testing.
When the nervous functions were discovered and exposed, the old
body with its soul gave way, leaving the field free for new concepts of the
human. Over the course of the nineteenth century these became the basis
for transforming medical, moral, and political discourses. Those wishing to
have power and rule over others no longer had to manage people’s minds,
but to control their nervous functions. In the physiology of the nineteenth
century there arose a coherence to the body with its nerves, still in effect to
this day, which could be altered by medicine and pharmacology and could
be broadcast by technical media. In the illustrative technologies founded
by the new knowledge, however, it becomes clear that the “new” human
being is is formed by very few paradigms, while other faculties of feeling,
wanting, and thinking fall by the wayside. The lack of these others, of the
162  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

rejects of research, remains unnoticed unless it comes stubbornly back in

odd, abnormal states.
In order to explain how perception works, whether it is an activity
of the immaterial mind or of the chemical-physical body, devices were
developed over the course of the nineteenth century and laboratories were
set up that were meant to amplify, record, and analyze the involuntary
and invisible movements of people. The experiments began with simple
recordings of a living body wired with the device, later individual nerves
were connected measuring devices, and finally complex trembling states
could be artificially, or to be more precise, electronically induced, which
in turn were technically retained, measured, and “read.” The complexity
of scientifically ascertainable human feelings did not, however, as was the
case for Pensiero, depend on the intuition of a brain under the influence of
drugs, but on the improvement of the test devices.
The shivers named by Pensiero can be counted among the most important
inventions of experimental physiology and psychology. They correspond
to the classics among laboratory instruments that define the logic of the
body in the nineteenth century. The physiologist Carl Ludwig constructed
the kymograph, with which simple frequencies of nerve impulses could
be measured. Wilhelm Wundt built his complication-clock, on which an
oscillation amplitude could be set, which first shifted the test person’s
perception into rhythmic oscillations in order then to examine their reac-
tion in relation to this first oscillation. The advantage of this device was that
the oscillations could be set by non-professionals or even the test person
him or herself. “Information put in.[…] wherever that might be”, as Pensiero
thinks. Hermann von Helmholtz tried to analyze the physiology of percep-
tion in its smallest physical functions, for instance with his resonators,
which represent a kind of Fourier analysis. Differently sized glass spheres
or metal probes began to tremble when they met their own frequency in a
complex acoustic signal. Helmholtz explained how the device worked by
“breaking it down” in its “fundamental harmonic vibrations.” Later there
would be experiments with influencing the nervous functions through
chemical changes of the carrier substance. An area that was examined
by behaviorists and reflexologists, but also by biologists (for example the
adrenaline researcher Walter Bradford Cannon). This was the extent to
which nerves could be analyzed in the nineteenth century. The similarity of
amphetamine to the hormone adrenaline was recognized in 1910, and in 1930
Benzedrine was developed and introduced in the Second World War.1 The
analysis of the kinds of shivering involved with coding and subfrequencies,
mentioned by Pensiero, like Benzedrine and the computer, which could
Mental Appar atuses 163

analyze this shivering with no problem, belong to the 1940s. This is when
reflexology, chemistry, and electronics formed the unholy alliance to which
Pynchon dedicates his novel.
During the forties experimental artists in the USA – including Sydney
Peterson and James Broughton, Marie Menken and Willard Maas, Kenneth
Anger and Norman MacLaren – began making films about the sensations
and feelings that occur when human bodies are confronted with non-human
technologies. In the forties Maya Deren wrote articles about film art for a
living, working day and night with the help of Benzedrine proscribe by Max
“Dr. Feelgood” Jacobson, the side effects of which would eventually kill her.
Norbert Wiener, also on Benzedrine, calculated how airplane trajectories
could be predictable for human brains, commissioned by the Army.
Technologically recording and systematizing “feelings and emotions”
and then inducing them again in the nervous system in order to control
and manipulate them: this was a focal point of the research on human
beings as it was being carried out by the military-medical complex of the
nineteenth century in preparation for the twentieth. The idea of a freely
mobile spirit on the one hand and the simple reach of the technically or
chemically manipulated nervous system on the other are ultimately only
still linked by historical-critical paranoia, by a thought: pensiero. Eddie
Pensiero, whose Benzedrine perception is therefore brought up to speed by
all available means, reports the history of his own nervous condition with
the novel’s catalog of shivers, shortly before his visual center becomes so
quick that it can decode the stroboscopic messages of Byron the Bulb: … you
pretty much have to be on speed to get the hand of these. The bulb in turn
can only express itself because it is has entered into a nervous-electrical-
circuit feedback with a human being who engages its electrical generator. Its
flickering therefore not only simulates the heart of all cinema projections,
in which devices and nerves also have to be interconnected in intermittent
movements so that film stories can be told. Its flickering also tells the newer
story of the human body, which has become wired with medical test devices
and is in a feedback loop to the prurient bundle of nerves when it is either
analyzed or – in the experiment – depersonalized.
At the end of the nineteenth century the cinema as an entertainment
apparatus declined in physiological research. At the beginning of the history
of cinema, not only are there the optical devices that had been improved in
the nineteenth century, which could be manufactured in mass with more
precise lenses.2 At the beginning of the history of cinema there are also
devices that had been developed in the fields of physiology and psychology
in order to examine perception itself as a way of treating impulses in the
164  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

nerves. The goal of all the inventions of the technicians in the laboratory
was to record bodily functions through observation as much as possible
without blurriness and to store the data for later objective analysis. Over
the course of the medical attempts to investigate the functions of the mind
and perception, bodies were newly organized according to the findings of
nerve physiology, charted, interpreted, and in the process they changed
perception itself. Recording devices were at one and the same time also
machines for staging. This side of experimental physiology and psychology
is also part of the history of cinema.
The technical prehistory of cinema, the history of cinematic perception,
and finally the change to the body itself through the recording systems
are three different aspects of the same process: apparatuses, nerves, and
their physiological interfaces are linked into media. The individual has
to enter into relations of perception that can be no longer be consciously
controlled. In the 1940s experimental films from the USA are putting just
these three components of media communication – technology, perception,
and corporality – up for negotiation. They experiment with the feedback
between bodies and devices, with the limits of the body that are meant
to separate internal from external and that had become permeable in the
impulse-reaction circulation of the nerves. Experimental films thus always
introduce fragments of a psycho-physiological or psycho-technological his-
tory of cinematography. This is why the simple history of cinema by military
devices, as Virilio wrote, should be compared with, or better yet, included
in a medical one.3 It will be able to show that the term experimental in the
genre definition of many films can be correctly related to the methods of
physiology and psychology in the nineteenth century.

Shocking

In his essay about Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin describes the “shock” of the
photographic process as a technical realization of the power of destruction,
which it would be remembering under the conditions of modernity, because
there would no longer be any experience to be had in it. The human being
is aligned to the machine and, as Benjamin writes with horrible precision
in 1939, it is “part of society’s preparation for total war that training is shift-
ing from techniques of production to techniques of destruction.”4 These
preparations for war had already been in progress for a long time. In the
nineteenth century “technology.[…] subjected the human sensorium to a
complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need
Mental Appar atuses 165

for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock

[chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What
determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing
that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film.”5
Before any contents lies what the film viewer is not allowed to see: the
rhythm of the intermittent images that stimulate the brain to react, to have
to go along, to “see” continuous movement. Karl Marx had designated the
reduction of the industrial worker’s experience to a very few movements as
mere training [Dressur]. What was also being trained were the perceptual
capacities and the instructions to the animal and human test subjects in
the laboratory. Calling the scientific coordination of perception “training”
sounds euphemistic to our contemporary ears, but the term indeed has its
origins in training horses for racing – and thus even has a connection to
the first chronophotographic tests in Palo Alto. Training is also there at
the beginnings of illustrative technology, which later, with Frank Gilbreth,
would serve the ergonomic perfection of human working motions.
Benjamin went to great efforts to show that the term experience, which
for him designates unconscious forms of remembering a self-conscious
society both independently and separately in reciprocal and collective
forms of production, has been historically surpassed. But the term, just at
the moment that it should have been dismissed from art criticism, turns
out to be highly applicable or at least adaptable for a critique of industrial
forms of producing art and art reception. It undergoes a renaissance by
means of physiology and psychology, while elevate experience to a matter
of the nerves.
As a physiological method the new experience comes from France.
“L’expérience n’est au fond qu’une observation provoquée”,6 writes Claude
Bernard in his introduction to experimental medicine, adding “provoquée
dans le but de faire une idée.”7 The equivalency of experience and “expéri-
ence” is permissible because the unconscious quality of the knowledge
that Benjamin had laid such value on has also been maintained in medi-
cal usage. The physician has experiences in the experiment, controls the
external, from which his “internal” thought process is defined, thus linking
his own perception with the experimental set-up. He becomes part of the
experiment.
The scientists of the nineteenth century researched nerves physiologically
and psychologically in Bernard’s sense, synchronizing them with technical
devices, and trained test subjects in stimulus and reaction experiments to
make their mental and psychic activities retrievable. Even Pavlov, in 1899,
formulated his methodological reflections like an invocation of Bernard’s:
166  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

“The more complicated a phenomenon is (and what is more complicated

than life?) the greater is the need of experiment.[…] The experiment, how-
ever, takes the phenomenon to hand in a sense, setting sometimes the one
and sometimes the other in motion, thus determining the real context of
the phenomenon among artificial, simplified conditions. In other words:
Observation collects that which nature has to offer, whereas experiment
takes from her that which it desires.”8
While it was François Magendie who had founded the first laboratory for
experimental physiology, Bernard was the first to put the various bodily
functions into mutual relation and to verify the interconnections with
experiments. He was also the first to methodologically justify the experi-
mental intervention in the interior of the body with apparatuses, medical
invasion. “L’homme ne peut observer les phénomènes qui l’entourent que
dans des limites très restreintes; le plus grand nombre échappe naturelle-
ment à ses sens, et l’observation simple ne lui suffit pas. Pour étendre ses
connaissances, il a dû amplifier, à l’aide d’appareils spéciaux, la puissance
de ces organes, en même temps qu’il s’est armé d’instruments divers qui
lui ont servi à pénétrer dans l’intérieur des corps pour les décomposer et
en étudier les parties cachées.”9 The founder of experimental methods
in medicine defended vivisection,10 although his most famous theorem
is that of the stabilizing the “milieu intérieur”, which keeps all relations
within the body in harmonic exchange and balance, a balance that is more
unstable the higher the creatures are organized.11 “D’un autre côté, tous
les phénomènes d’un corps vivant sont dans une harmonie réciproque
telle, qu’il paraît impossible de séparer une partie de l’organisme, sans
amener immédiatement un trouble dans tout l’ensemble. Chez les animaux
supérieurs en particulier, la sensibilité plus exquise amène des réactions et
des perturbations encore plus considérables.”12 Consequentially, his experi-
ments could only demonstrate disturbances in the living body, although
Bernard sees the key to knowledge precisely in disturbance as destruction:
“pour apprendre comment l’homme et les animaux vivent, il est indis-
pensable d’en voir mourir un grand nombre, parce que les mécanismes
de la vie ne peuvent se dévoiler et se prouver que par la connaissance des
mécanismes de la mort.”13 Bernard conducted his most famous experi-
ments with secretionary functions of the body and with various vasomotor
mechanisms with Curare, the arrow poison of South American Indians,
which Alexander von Humboldt had been the first to describe for western
medicine, a strong mix of alkaloids and menispermaceae, which relaxes
all the muscles.[…] and brings all trembling to the zero point.
Mental Appar atuses 167

Over the course of the century the methods of getting experience went
under the skin and perforated the body. The first film experiments that
physiologists created at the end of the nineteenth century are simple con-
tinuations of those experiments with cut-up body parts in the laboratories,
and they served the same purpose: to reanimate what had previously been
destroyed for the sake of the experiment. This includes 35mm films that
Ludwig Braun made in Vienna, first on artificially animated dog’s hearts
and then, in 1898, on “live, exposed human hearts”, 14 just like Charles
François-Franck’s films about artificially induced reflexes on the leg of an
anaesthetized dog.15
In the clinical practice of the eighteenth century, as Michel Foucault
has demonstrated, the “first scientific discourse concerning the individual
had to pass through the stage of death.”16 The triumph of physiology in the
nineteenth century can thus be described as a renewed interconnection
of dead or dissected body parts and as the successful reanimation of a
harmonic and balanced body. But the bodies, according to the experimental
experience in the laboratory, are not the same ones as before. The experi-
mental set-ups left behind traces, which became part of the body that they
were examining. Without the media that extended these apparatuses into
our bodies and – as Marshall McLuhan more positively observed – that
extended our bodies into the apparatuses, no experience would have been
possible in the twentieth century. Pynchon lets Pensiero think that only a
brain on speed can create the connections between laboratory experience
and shivering. There is, however, a bit of data on this paranoia in the history
of science that might also illuminate brains that run somewhat slower.

Registering

Although Claude Bernard’s methods determined research all over Europe,

because almost all influential physiologists had worked in his laboratory at
one time or another, the direction of the experiments in Germany initially
differed significantly from the French. The search for the physiological
functions of thinking, wanting, and feeling there became a battle over
the mind or a mental organ, and an argument about national and ethical
values. In Germany the question of devices became the crucial question.17
It was not until the 1860s that the scientific disciplines responsible for
the mind started to differentiate, as did the laboratories and experiments,
and thus the complexity of mental functions. In the 1870s psychology was
separated from physiology and finally established as a distinct discipline by
168  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 in Leipzig. The question of the mind was no longer
a big issue, but it also no longer had much to do with what physiologists
had previously picked apart in the experiment. In 1874 Wundt explained
that, under the term mind, psychology had made “the whole realm of inner
experience” their object. This inner experience, however, as Claude Bernard
had claimed, had been “provoked” by “external” experiments. Wundt had
to and could demonstrate his elaboration of the life of the mind with 400
pages of fundamental physiological research.18 Henceforth the mind was
seen as a complex of individual psychic functions, which were disclosed to
each apparatus used to test them in the laboratory.
The analysis of the mind continued as nerve studies. Even philosophical
institutes used technical devices to speculate. Johann Friedrich Herbart,
Kant’s successor in Königsberg in the professorship that Hugo Münsterberg
is supposed to have turned down later in favor of Harvard, proposed an order
of concepts and connections between concepts already in 1824 according
to the laws of statics and mechanics. Around 1830 microscope technologies
were significantly improved and found a process of cutting nerve tissues
from the brain in thin slices and chemically hardening them. Augustus
Volney Waller, who in 1851 had demonstrated that every nerve fiber is linked
to a nerve cell, invented a method of damaging nerves in such a way that
their channels could be traced through the brain and spinal cord due to
secondary degeneration. The functions of the mind and its paths were
suddenly revealed to be nerves.19 When Fritsch and Hitzig announced the
localization of motor functions in the cerebrums of dogs, they also noticed
that the methods produced the following result: The smaller the damage
to the brain, the more differentiated the mental functions appeared. The
thought that the “mind is a kind of overall function”, they scoffed, can only
still be accepted due to all too “colossal mutilations of the brain” in the
experiments.20 Total damage equals total mind.
Technologies and devices decide the question of the mind, and so it is
no wonder that the expert that was called from Zürich to Göttingen for
arbitration was precisely an inventor of physiological devices for research-
ing mental activity: Carl Ludwig, founder of “quantifying experimental
physiology.”21 The list of students that studied with him in Zürich, Vienna,
and Leipzig shows what influence his work had on the development of
experimental psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century:
Granville Stanley Hall, who later founded the first laboratory for psychol-
ogy at Johns-Hopkins University in the US, Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov,
founder of Russian reflexology, Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion, or Élie de Dyon, as he
was called in Paris, and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov as well as Ernst Mach and Paul
Mental Appar atuses 169

Emil Flechsig, who dedicated his famous inaugural speech as rector to Carl
Ludwig.22 In psychological laboratories the world over experiments were be-
ing carried out with devices built by Ludwig. American psycho-technology
and Russian psychoreflexology are indebted to Ludwig for their methods of
interconnecting nerves and apparatuses to apply isolated stimuli in order
to read and systematize result by means of the apparatuses.
Ludwig’s most important invention was the kymograph in 1846, a reg-
istration device that “set the course of all further physiological research
more than any previous observations of physiological findings.”23 As was
common at the time for physiologists, Ludwig assembled the device, which
recorded the pressure fluctuation in the central arteries and simultaneously
in the rib cage and thoracic cavity himself according to the needs of the
experiment. In the place of an observing physician, the body attached to the
apparatus could record its functions and its circumstances itself. The body
no longer had to be destroyed and killed in order to get the measurements,
but it still was injured, drilled into for the interconnection. Only then did
the immediate representation of the body appear as a graphic curve, as
can be seen beating even faster today on electrocardiographs: the rationale
for a method that “means something similar for biological research as the
alphabet for human culture.”24 If history “runs parallel with the development
of its methods of registration”25 is as true for physiology and it is for modern
biology, this is the founding act.
Defining, separating, and recording the functions were considered the
basic operations of the physiological method. With scrawlings similar to
the attempts of a first-grader to write, the bodily functions reported with
black “rubber-based ink” on a white piece of vellum paper. Samples of this
are still stored today at the Physiological Institute at the University of Turin.
Ludwig would later inscribe the back of this to his student and biographer
Angelo Mosso, who noted that the paper “designated the origins of the
graphic method in the history of science”, writing: “These first stammerings
of the heart and breast are donated to the collection of my friend Mosso. C.
Ludwig, Leipzig, August 15, 1874.” In turn, it was Mosso who designed the
ergograph in Ludwig’s tradition, with which work and exhaustion could be
measured.26 Ludwig’s change in methodology was in fact revolutionary. If
the mind could no longer speak, the body could now write. Initially it was
not possible to get anything from its scribblings without having to drill
into it. The segmentation of the functions and the organs is suspended in
the fluid script of the heart.
Étienne-Jules Marey, who had introduced graphic methods into physi-
ology in France, would dissect his studies of movement into individual
170  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

images with a photographic gun, which he also built himself. Just as script
can be cut out of discrete heartbeats, continuous movement can also be
fragmented, and with other apparatuses the horses and soldiers concerned
can learn to run again as images. Indeed, Marey is considered one of the
inventors of cinematic projection, but for him it was much more a matter of
measuring bodily movements, and he did not take the illusion of movement
on screen for the reality of the gait. Marey paid his respects to Ludwig’s
inventions in 1895, the year of the so-called birth of the cinema, when
he had to announce his death as president of the Parisian Académie des
sciences: “On lui doit l’introduction en physiologie de méthodes précises et
fécondes en progrès. Ludwig créa le premier des instruments enregistrateurs
aujourd’hui si nombreux dans les laboratoires de physiologie.”27 Marey’s own
invention from 1860, the spygmograph, with which he had the rhythm of
the human pulse recorded on a sooty cylinder, was a further development
of the kymograph, this simple device that nonetheless set up a prototypical
register for mental functions and thus established the parameters for all
future programs of measurement and training.

Going Wild

While mental activities were being tested for their chemical and physi-
cal foundations in the laboratories, states of exception of the sense and
perception organs cropped as night views of this research at the same
time: trances and raptures, erratic attacks, fits and ticks, which should
precisely have been excluded by research. It seemed as if the concentrated
investigation of a certain mental accomplishment set other nerve connec-
tions in motion as well, letting the body become confusingly muddled.
New apparatuses were constructed to determine the laws of these states
of confusion, in turn calling up other odd effects. So, right around 1848, in
the years of the great expulsion of spirits, ever new unknown phenomena
were turning up.
The appearance of feedback effects in the laboratories, when observing
nerves and observing perception were interconnected, was first seen in
the middle of the century in a famous case. In 1840, after experimenting on
himself with disturbances in seeing color and afterimage effects, Gustav
Theodor Fechner lapsed into a three-year-long trance, from he he only
awoke through a kind of self-healing that he described as rebirth, such as
it known in shamanism. A metamorphosis took place that marks every
shamanistic journey. During his illness, the physician transformed into the
Mental Appar atuses 171

natural philosopher Fechner. He wrote an illness or travel report about his

self-perception using the metaphoric language of the shamans, in which
rider and ridden, movement and moved could no longer be separated:

One main symptom of my mental feebleness consisted namely in the fact

that the course of my thoughts eluded my own will. It split my insides
equally into two parts, into my ego and into thought. The two battled
each other; the thoughts attempted to overwhelm my ego and and to
take a self-empowered course, destroying its freedom and health, while
my ego in turn strained all the power of its will to become master of my
thoughts, and, when a thought sought to take hold and continue, to dispel
it and to pull in another one from further away. My mental pursuits thus
consisted, rather than in thinking, in a constant warding off and reining
in of thoughts. I sometimes seemed like a rider attempting the subdue a
steed that had gone wild and bolted with him[…]28

The artificial, experimental separation between thoughts and conscious-

ness, which according to Kant must be able to accompany any ideas, had
become an experience for Fechner and was close to destroying his ego.
No term for such a disorder could be expected from the humanities. A
philosopher like Hegel had subjected phenomena like those that confused
Fechner to the adventurous process of the spirit itself, which had sublated
the natural sciences in itself: “This dialectic process which consciousness
executes on itself­– on its knowledge as well as on its object – in the sense
that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely, what is termed
Experience.”29 The self-consciousness that befell such an odyssey of the
movements of thinking he called “unhappy”. Fechner, however, as a good
natural scientist, made his anarchic experiences the basis of his new
research. The loss of consciousness also incited him to examine what was
not conscious in perception. After his illness he researched the physical
laws of psychic activity as a relationship between the strength of the
impulse and the strength of the sensation by differentiating sensations
in their physiological threshold values. Sensations and feelings had to be
made calculable, every thing else was the madness of wild steeds. In 1860
Fechner published the “The Measurement of Sensation” in his Elements of
Psychophysics, as a conveyance and (negative) enhancement formula of
physics in the psyche: γ = k log β/b: “The magnitude of the sensation (γ) is
not proportional to the absolute value of the stimulus (β), but rather to the
logarithm of the magnitude of the stimulus, when this last is expressed in
terms of its threshold value (β), i.e. that magnitude considered as unit at
172  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

which the sensation begins and disappears. In short, it is proportional to

the logarithm of the fundamental stimulus value.”30
Like the relationship between machinists and dancing puppets in the
marionette theater, namely as a relationship of numbers to their logarithm,
the psycho-physicist calculates stimulus and sensation in relation to one
another, in short: S = k log R, the “Weber-Fechner Law.” Walter B. Cannon
declared the law, which was drawn up unaware of all the ways the nerve
connections react chemo-physically, to be responsible for the most and
the greatest detours and derailments in psycho-physiology.31 Fechner’s
research, however, is also responsible for the royal roads to knowledge
in psycho-physiology. Precisely the fact that he relied on the experience
of his derangement helped him to develop the basis for a psychic model
that split mental life into daytime work and nighttime work, which could,
however, exist together. He thus created the foundation for the largest
competitive project on the universal spirit. In The Interpretation of Dreams,
Sigmund Freud thus called him the “great Fechner”, and precisely because
he developed the model of an optical apparatus for the psyche:

As the starting-point for our enquiry, I should like to pick out one from
among many remarks made upon the theory of dreaming by those who
have written on the subject. In the course of a short discussion on the
topic of dreams, the great Fechner puts forward the idea that the scene
of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life. This is
the only hypothesis that makes the special peculiarities of dream-life
intelligible. What is presented to us in these words is the idea of psychical
locality. I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus
with which we are here concerned is also known to us in the form of an
anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to
determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain
upon psychological ground, and I propose simply to follow the suggestion
that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental func-
tions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus,
or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond
to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages
of an image comes into being. In the microscope and telescope, as we
know, these occur in part at ideal points, regions in which no tangible
component of the apparatus is situated.32

Freud, unlike the biologist Cannon, had not checked Fechner’s calculations
and detected mistakes his formulas, but, after previously having thought up
Mental Appar atuses 173

a complex neuron apparatus for psychologists in his sketches on Wilhelm

Fliess, he finally constructed an imaginary apparatus in The Interpretation
of Dreams that split up Fechner’s measured experiences into functional
systems: an “the mental apparatus as a compound instrument.”33 This ap-
paratus is meant to demonstrate how internal and external impulses are
received as sensations, transformed as agitations to the nerve impulse, and
can be stored in different layers – or as Freud formulated using media tech-
nical terms, “permanent records”34 – before they trigger a motor reaction.
This system φ is Freud’s model of the psychic apparatus, which has to work
like a “reflex apparatus”, albeit one that treats, connects, or constrains the
stimulus impulse, before it is diverted at the motor end, according to certain
criteria – including the strength of the impulse. Freud’s examples are meant
to make it possible to see how the mental functions are cut up. In an optics
of the photo apparatus, the impulses are turned into impressions, virtually
depicted and possibly even stored on another level. With this model Freud
can also show that traces of memory can also be regressively activated
and can simulate uncensored sense perceptions that nonetheless remain
innocuous for all their shamelessness, because they can never bolt through
to the motor end of the reflex apparatus. It is this model of regression that is
called up in various theories of cinema, including for instance Godard’s, in
order to show how memory and association can become sense perception
in quiet cinema perception.
Freud constructed the apparatus, which had actually been induced by
Fechner’s traces, exactly into the “idea” that Fechner provided for him – with
the difference that Fechner’s color optics, with which he had looked at the
sun, did not store impressions like a camera, instead concentrating the
light rays directly on his eyes, his visual center. Using experimental optical
apparatuses, Fechner varied the effect of external impulses on his percep-
tion – and experienced how the agitation caused sustained disturbances in
his interior, leaving behind traces on which his thoughts went off on their
own wild rides. Freud, much later, will conceive of an internal counterpart
to Fechner’s test device, an imaginary camera that first fixes the agitations
in order then to work through them in layers, without exposing itself to the
agitations. The experimental installations from the laboratory gradually
become internalized.
By analyzing his own experiences, Fechner opened up the area of the
involuntary, of the unconscious, and of trances to science in the long term.
Freud’s apparatus provided a psychotherapy for psychophysicists. Trances,
this feedback of the trembling nerves, can only be controlled if they are
first recorded and then analyzed. His predecessor on the path had been
174  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the French astronomer Pierre-César Jules Janssen from the observatory

in Meudon, who had captured the passage of Venus in front of the sun on
December 9, 1874 with his photographic gun. He could then calmly observe
the seventeen phases later on a photographic plate – which he therefore
called the “retina of the scientist”35 – without having to turn his gaze toward
the sun. Scientific objectivity was thus taken out of the flickering realm of
the observing scientist, vulnerable to trance, and became a simple matter
of recording. Janssen’s camera was the predecessor of Marey’s photographic
gun. In the history of a technology of cinema, experiments in technology
and in perception physiology converge. Imaginary psychic apparatuses were
proposed as a complement to real physical ones, in order to systematize
disorders and to balance out stimulus energies, which had previsions kept
a professor constrained to a bed for years. The psyche was qualified and
quantified as what a pscyho-physician can regulate.
Ultimately, also in the optical apparatus of the cinema, the “scene of ac-
tion of dreams” is artificially interconnected with that of “waking ideational
life”, without the trances that it induces becoming physical impositions
or mental disorder. The use of apparatuses and technical equipment to
induce mental and nervous reactions in psychological laboratories was the
prerequisite of cinema-viewing.

Resonating

In addition, it was also necessary to understand the physiology of the nerves

to which the apparatuses were specifically meant to be joined. In 1847,
when Carl Ludwig was graphing out the sputtering of the heart, Helmholtz
published his thesis about conserving energy and undertook the first meas-
urements in the speed of motor nerves in frogs using the Galvanometer.
In 1850 he established the exact rate of speed in nerve conduction. Once
again, the discovery was preceded by the development of an apparatus: the
carriage inductor, constructed by Du Bois-Reymond, with which modifiable
streams of induction could be applied to different spots of the nerve. Two
muscle spasms that were produced with it served as marks to measure
time.36 Helmholtz found devices for highly exact time measurement with the
military, where Siemens was improving conventional methods of recording
by “the fortunate idea of eliminating all mechanical mediators and letting
the electricity itself make the mark.”37 The rotating cylinders from Siemens,
which he took as the basis for his myograph, could be run at a speed of 60
rotations per second and allowed for measuring time down to the 40,000th
Mental Appar atuses 175

of a second. Compared to the measurements of light velocity made with

Foucault’s pendulum, which is exact to the 77 millionth of a second, this
is not much, but Helmholtz nonetheless gave his listeners something to
think about: “You see that the microscopy of time has far outflanked that
of space.”38 Helmholtz was able to give the propagation velocity for impulses
in frog nerves at 27.25 meters per second. The microscopic analysis of nerve
movements in time and space showed that a movement goes through the
body that the body knows nothing about and that it itself did not sense.
With his new construction, Helmholtz had raised Ludwig’s kymograph to
the highest possible mechanical velocity through a significantly higher rota-
tion speed and through a more uniform course of the barrel. This was the
prerequisite for being able to make assertions about human self-awareness
and its perceptional times.

Fortunately the distances that our sense perception has to go through

before they get to the brain are short, otherwise we would be far behind
the present with our self-awareness and would even lag behind the
perceptions of sound waves; that is, fortunately they are so short that
we do not notice it, and we are not touched in our practical interest. For
an ordinary whale it is perhaps worse; for in all probability he perhaps
experiences an injury to his tail only after a second, and needs another
second to command his tail to defend itself.39

But even for an ordinary professor, it can become bad, as Fechner noted,
when the connections in the brain are so multifaceted that perception
impulses are impeded, displaced, duplicated, and a series of asynchronous
thoughts ends up in a mad dash. Helmholtz was able to show how self-
awareness functions under normal circumstances, and he also provided
possible physiological explanations for confusions and trances. “My most
significant result was that the sensations of the senses are only signs to
configure the outside world, and the interpretations of them can only be
learned through experience.”40 His explanations of the physiology of percep-
tion and the achievements of the brain come ever closer, thanks to Werner
von Siemens, to communications technology. In the physiology of nerves
it had been assumed that a specific sense energy and a correspondingly
specific nerve energy determined the various perceptions of the senses.
In his On the Sensations of Tone Helmholtz showed that there were indeed
various sense organs and nerve conducts, for example, for optical or acoustic
signals, but that each individual nerve fiber can only establish different
impulse strengths. He illustrated his model with the comparison, which
176  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

became well known in cybernetics, between nerve systems and telegraph

systems: “Nerves have been often and not unsuitably compared to telegraph
wires. Such a wire conducts one kind of electric current and no other ; it may
be stronger, it may be weaker, it may move in either direction; it has no other
qualitative differences. Nevertheless, according to the different kinds of
apparatus with which we provide its terminations, we can send telegraphic
despatches, ring bells, explode mines, decompose water, move magnets,
magnetise iron, develop light, and so on. So with the nerves. The condition
of excitement which can be produced in them, and is conducted by them,
is, so far as it can be recognised in isolated fibres of a nerve, everywhere
the same, but when it is brought to various parts of the brain, or the body, it
produces motion, secretions of glands, increase and decrease of the quantity
of blood, of redness and of warmth of individual organs, and also sensations
of light, of hearing, and so forth.”41
Perception is also similar to the telegraph system in that it need not know
the functions in order to transmit signals; that it need know nothing of its
functions in order to transmit them promptly. Consciousness can become
a dangerous millstone on the neck of life. He first developed his theory of
“unconscious inferences” in a lecture entitled On Human Vision, which
Helmholtz held in Königsberg in memory of Kant on February 27, 1855. Using
the phenomena of apparent color and apparent motion he explains how “a
change in the practice of interpretation in sense perceptions can occur”,
which goes unnoticed by consciousness. Explaining this phenomenon,
according to Helmholtz, would be the task of psychology, which at the
time was incapable of complying because the unconscious in the sense of
psychic circuits that do not function consciously was not its object, but only
introspection. For help in explaining apparent phenomena “we find no help
among the psychologists, because for psychology self-observation has so
far been the only way to cognition, but here we have a mental activity that
our self-observation can give no account of; we can only infer its existence
from physiologically examining the tools of the senses.”42
His research led him to the objective science of unconscious nerve ac-
tivities in the old mental functions of thinking, feeling, and wanting. The
results also raised a question that for philosophy could only be explained
by consciousness: namely, how to ensure that perception accords with the
world. Helmholtz solves this by internally relativizing the sense organs,
which signal all the changes between consciousness and the outside world.
For vision, he explained: “The agreement between facial perception and
the outside world also completely or at least mainly has the same basis as
all our knowledge of the real world, namely the experience and continual
Mental Appar atuses 177

verification of its correctness by means of the experiments that we conduct

with every movement of our bodies.”43
The methods of dancers. Years before Poincaré showed that all sense
perception is only possible through correlations of sense perceptions
and bodily movement, in order to make sense data out of the data of the
sense organs, Helmholtz had already described this experience for vision.
This dance-like experimental physiology consistently leads to declaring
all of life to be a permanent experiment. Experience is provoked, had,
and modified with every movement. The individual bodily processes are
held together in constant dependence and thus in balance. Under the
conditions of communications technologies, however, Claude Bernard’s
theory of “milieu intérieur” had been transformed into milieu altogether,
to “milieu général”, which must also be able to balance inside and outside
through signals. The idea that follows from Helmholtz’s fine description
of methodology is his groundwork for a theory of media. Technology,
perception, and corporality are connected in a physical and homeostatic
way: pre-cybernetic.
In order to show how hearing works, Helmholtz had resonators con-
structed, “hollow spheres of glass or metal, or tubes”, 44 which, when put on
the ears, filter out all of the sounds from the outside world that correspond
to the oscillations of the resonator: a practical, sensual Fourier analysis.
Tones, overtones, and undertones could thus be differentiated when they
occurred in “the soughing, howling, and whistling of the wind, the splashing
of water, the rolling and rumbling of carriages.” The resonators were simply
models for how the ear works, which can analyze “the sound of a string into
precisely the same constituents as are found by sympathetic resonance.”45
Helmholtz amplif ied his resonators electromagnetically. Analysis and
induction function as the same interconnection between sense organ and
apparatus. Inside and outside the same Fourier analyzer. In his research
on the physiology of the senses, Helmholtz presents the internal func-
tions as the counterparts of the devices with which he had conducted the
experiments, or modified the devices according to his findings about nerve
functions.
Helmholtz became an avant-gardist of all experimental art, not only as
a teacher at Berlin’s Art Academy in the winter semester of 1848/49, but
through his later research on acoustics and optics. He analyzed sensations
and built devices that synthesize them again. But it was not artists that he
wanted to teach about the microscopic mechanics of sensations and feel-
ings, who already knew anyway, consciously or unconsciously, but critics.
“In my somewhat unusual attempt to pass from natural philosophy into
178  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the theory of the arts, I hope that I have kept the regions of physiology
and esthetics sufficiently distinct. But I can scarcely disguise from myself,
that although my researches are confined to the lowest grade of musical
grammar, they may probably appear too mechanical and unworthy of the
dignity of art, to those theoreticians who are accustomed to summon the
enthusiastic feelings called forth by the highest works of art to the scientific
investigation of its basis.”46
Helmholtz lets the art theorists know that enthusiastic feelings are
only effects and are not themselves open to scientific inquiry, and that the
physical “and that this analysis of the sensations would suffice to furnish
all the results required for musical theory.”47 No special mental activity is
needed in order to appreciate art. Helmholtz, who was passionate about all
the arts all his life had no need for any extra illusions: all that resonates in
perception are the oscillations of the world, which is something that any
dancer can verify.

Rhythmizing

The history of cinematography as media history, that is, as the interweaving

of technology, perception, and corporality, can be more easily reconstructed
from the laboratories of the physiologists than from the experiments of the
psychologists. In psychology the devices that were used as aids to examine
perception were dismissed, and thus the technological part that turns the
study of the mind into media research in the first place was shut out. For
instance by Helmholtz’s former Heidelberg assistant Wilhelm Wundt, with
whom he competed for having invented the term “unconscious inferences”
and for how they work. 48 In 1902 Wundt wrote that “as long as one applies
the physical aids merely to the purposes of examining psychic appear-
ances and their contexts, the actual character of of these also remains
psychological, just as the electric, thermal, and other physical effects that
one makes use of for chemical examinations doesn’t turn them into physical
phenomena.”49 There he recaptured the science of perception once again
for the humanities. It is thanks to Wundt’s biography that psychological
laboratories in Germany and the US were not joined to medical professor-
ships, but to philosophical ones, for the physiologist Wundt was appointed
Professor of Philosophy in Leipzig in 1875 and founded the first institute for
experimental psychology there in 1879, which became a model of institution
building in the whole world through the activities of his students. His career
is also due to the construction of a device.
Mental Appar atuses 179

Wundt’s appointment in Leipzig was promoted by the astronomer Zöll-

ner, not quite without self-interest, for the astronomers had a perception
problem, which they hoped to solve with Wundt’s aid. In astronomy certain
deviations in the measurement of time, which had been undertaken by a
variety of scientists, had become apparent. In order to read time – for in-
stance at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where it was authoritatively
determined for the entire empire to a tenth of a second – astronomers had
to coordinate two rhythmic series in perception: one acoustic and the other
optical. Through a telescope with a built-in wire grid, they observed the
passage of a star through the field of vision. When the star appeared in the
wire coordinate field of the telescope, the astronomer looked at the clock,
noted down the time exactly to the second, then counted the second with
the ticks of the clock, which he could hear, at the same time observing the
path of the star through the grid. He noted the position of the star with the
beating of the seconds “in his mind’s eye” before the star crossed the decisive
mark, and also the position at the stroke after it had crossed the mark. Then
he estimated the placement of the mark between the two star positions that
he had noted “in his mind’s eye” in tenths of the whole distance and added
these tenths of a second to the number of seconds that he had counted until
the stroke before the passage of the star through the grid.50 And just like
Pensiero, “you had to be pretty good to get the hang of it.”
The astronomers work proved to be a permanent set-up for psychological
experimentation. It turned out that their results varied. After Helmholtz
had proven that one could in fact measure the time of conveying mes-
sages in the nerves, and Christian Wolf had presented his studies about
absolute personal equations in perception, the differing reaction times of
astronomers’ observations were determined. But it was only Johannes Hart-
mann’s experiments that showed that expectation would be a significant
determinant in the personal, specific time lags in perception.
Hartmann’s experiments were carried out with apparatuses that be-
long in turn to the technical forerunners of the cinema: the stroboscopic
cylinders of the Vitascope. Simulating the passage of stars he had points
of light appear in equal intervals by means of a rotating disk. At the same
time he had a clock ticking and marking the rhythm of the test subject’s
perception. This person was supposed to give a sign when the optical and
acoustic signals were perceived to be simultaneous. He thus discovered
that there were deviations in observation from person to person, but with
each individual person they were fairly stable. Some test persons noted
the coincidence of acoustic and optical signals before the actual moment
of concurrence, others afterwards. Hartmann concluded from this that the
180  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

reaction of the observer in this experiment was determined by his or her

own expectations as induced by the rhythmic return of the impulse, not
by the occurrence itself. He was able to show that the occurrence was even
perceived by some observers when it had not happened at all, when the
series of impulses was interrupted shortly before the decisive moment. The
observer was therefore reacting to his or her own subjective disposition as
it was induced by the intermittent stimulation in the experimental set-up.
This information turned a question of astronomy into one of psycho-
physics. The experiments no longer had to examine only the transfer time
of the impulses, but the reaction times, which was obviously contingent on
complex processes in the nervous system and brain. In order to measure the
times that played a role in reactions and associations, Wundt constructed
an apparatus in 1863 that simplified the observatory situation, that is, the
intermingling of regular acoustic and optical impulses, and made it possible
to simulate it in a variety of ways: “Wundt’s Complication Clock.” With the
stipulation that one should proceed in self-experiments “as inattentively as
possible”, Wundt stipulated that in using the complication clock, psychologi-
cal practice should isolate intellectual faculties as much as possible from one
another. The unconscious of this psychology lies in the practical dissociation
of mental functions.
This clock qualified Wundt for his post in Leipzig. Only a few years after
Helmholtz had proven, against all assumptions, that the impulse in the
nerve needs time to proceed, psychologists were now agreed that the time
needed to process stimuli was extremely variable. An impulse could work
its way around in the brain without triggering a reaction until a suitable
attention predisposition made it receptive for an association, thus provoking
an idea and its reaction. Wundt tested the physiological agitation of various
sense organs and traced shifts in the reaction times back to combinations
and complications of conceptual links. He examined perception and ap-
perception, attentiveness, involuntary memory, association, in short, all
the processes that were considered mental activities, therefore opening up
the research field of “mental chronometry.” Only Pensiero’s paranoia will
show that the chronometric apparatuses that could define the duration,
frequency, and amplitude of trembling, or shivers in his case, measure their
own paradigms. The psyche is tested “subject to information[…] that is fed
in at the other end.” What is important for film perception as a stroboscopic
stimulus of the optical nerves is above all the experiments carried out on
“attitudes of expectation.” The rhythmizing of the stimulus impulse, which
had already driven the astronomers mad, becomes the norm in the labora-
tory through chronometry. It is the prerequisite for all forms of ciné-trance.
Mental Appar atuses 181

Now it can be seen that even Wundt, over the course of his publications,
constructed the model of a psychic apparatus according to the prototype
of his experimental set-up. The devices from the laboratory were tacitly
projected into the interior of people. In the fifth edition of his Physiological
Psychology from 1902, in which Wundt summarized his research in Leipzig,
the technical requirements of psychological measuring, the chronoscope
and the complication clock, were relegated to the third volume. The experi-
ences were supposed to no longer know anything about their prerequisites
in the set-up of the experiments. The body, moved in regular rhythms, as it
had been synchronized by the clockwork over the course of research, seems
to Wundt to represent in part the nature of the body and of consciousness.
In one of his final works, the Introduction to Psychology, which was consist-
ently reprinted up to 1922, rhythm seems to be a quality of the organism,
and thus a quality of perception itself: “Our consciousness is rhythmically
disposed. The reason of this scarcely lies in a specific quality, peculiar to
consciousness along, but it clearly stands in the closest relationship to
our whole psycho-physical organization. Consciousness is rhythmically
disposed, because the whole organism is rhythmically disposed.”51
This idea would be nice and easy if it weren’t for the fact that the rhythm
that is meant to dominate here is always based on the regular ticking of
a clock as the norm. When Wundt wrote the Introduction to Psychology
as a book of popular science, he replaced the complication clock with a
simple device that was available in every modest home with a piano: the
metronome. Using this device, anyone could conduct psychological tests in
self-experiments. Experiments with one’s own perception as “the entrance
of some content into consciousness – an entrance that can be in fact proved”
and with one’s own apperception as “the grasping of this by the attention”52
thus became a kind of parlor game. When the self-experimenter gets going,
that is, comes into “attitudes of expectation”, he or she has the experience
of a psychic (personal) achievement, which appears involuntarily. Simple,
uniform ticks become a series of strokes in which various emphases can
be perceived. From the pure ticking, a “content” suddenly enters “into
consciousness” through perception. The perception itself undergoes a
marvelous metamorphosis and transforms the world according to the
rhythm of the organs.

Now our means of locomotion are in a certain sense natural pendulums,

the movements of which generally follow with a certain regularity, as
with the pendulum of the metronome. Therefore whenever we receive
impressions in consciousness at similar stated intervals, we arrange them
182  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

in a rhythmical form similar to that of our own outward movements. The

special form of rhythm, ascending or descending, is within certain limits
left to our own free choice, just as with the movements of locomotion,
which may take the form of walking, of running, of jumping, and lastly
of all different kinds of dances.53

What arrives in consciousness is always already physical for Wundt, and

thus unconsciously processed into intervals and aligned to the rhythm of
the body. The physiologist with the clock has become a philosopher. The
attitude of expectation that has been observed in earlier experiments with
rhythm as the consequence of the ticking of the clockwork now appears
as a subjective achievement that brings the uniform signals of the world
into a certain order. Wundt had forgotten that it was not “we” who aligned
the intervals of external impressions to our internals ones, but that at the
beginning – and this had been the reason for his appointment at Leipzig
after all – the problem consists in the fact that unconscious achievements
of perception have been manipulated by external influences.
Psychologists have attempted ever since to alter body rhythm by means
of devices, to reduce or to lengthen intervals of its pulse in order to see how
perception reacts. Nerves are connected in order to measure their specific
contributions, forgetting that the nerves can only give the rhythm of their
impulse when they have already been connected, that is, when the ticking of
the clock has already put its own movements into an attitude of expectation
fairly artificially. But there is no great shamanistic Fechner of chronometry,
who would have told of the efforts to restrain the trembling of the nerves
in in the manifold forms of dance. Perhaps it could have been Nietzsche,
or Senate President Schreber, who wrote down a shamanistic tale for brain
physiology. But the idea that rhythm might be stuck “inside” the body itself
was the absurd core of occidental madness for both of them, a core that
precisely cannot recognize that every rhythm always takes possession
from “outside” the body: from history, from sounds, or from rays of light.
Wundt’s tests recall all kinds of achievements by literate individuals,
and appear on the surface of unconscious psychic achievements to gratify
the contents of bourgeois inner life. In tests to determine the threshold
of perception, Wundt used a tachistoscope, a quick viewer that was able
precisely to determine between 0.05 and 0.20 seconds in presentation
times.54 Experiments with unconnected elements (letters) and connected
elements (strokes) were supposed to show how consciousness was capable
or arranging its contents in phrases and rhythms. If six different elements
can normally be perceived at one glance, the consciousness can grasp signs
Mental Appar atuses 183

in the order of language even faster, that is, it can read. Within a familiar
word in a familiar language, consciousness can grasp as many as 20 elements
at a time. Wundt’s example of this is “Wahlverwandtschaften” [“elective
affinities”], which can keep together even if it is not spelled correctly.
For acoustic stimuli as well, the maximum number of events that can
be grasped is six. But integrated into a regular rhythm with three different
beats, six units of combinations can also be noted. Classical spelling literacy
and two-beat variations of a metronome ticker are appropriate to the nature
of the psyche, polyrhythms such as those in jazz or in the complicated
rhythms of voodoo rituals55 cannot be grasped by it. Central Europeans
no longer notice anything when Africans or Haitians know that the gods
are among them.
If, according to Wundt, “our means of locomotion are in a certain sense
natural pendulums”, as regular as those of the metronome, all that is lacking
is the methodology of the Kleistian puppeteers to make the connection
and provide the beat to appear as the inspiration for the gracefulness of
dance. “The limbs, which were no more than pendula, following along
mechanically, without any extra help, of their own accord”, as is described
in the marionette theater. Because the puppeteer and his mechanics cannot
be seen, what appears is the artistic and mysterious “path of the dancer’s
soul.” Wundt also staged the grace of rhythmic perception as path of the
soul simply by forgetting that the art of the movement of the soul is a trick
that allows the machinery to disappear into the wings. This as well is an
important preliminary step to staging perception in the cinema.
Wundt is also responsible for the insight that in cinema all meaning is
preceded by a physiological rhythmic structure that regulates what provides
that meaning:

In ordinary life we generally speak of the phenomena, that are observed

in such cases, as a change from “expectation” to “realisation.” If we fol-
low these phenomena a little more closely, we notice that in our case
the process of expectation is a continuous and regularly varying one.
At the moment immediately following one beat, expectation strains
itself to catch the next one, and this straining increases until this beat
really occurs. At the same moment the strain is suddenly relieved by the
realisation of the expected, when the new beat comes. Then the same
process is repeated during the next interval.56

If this beat takes place in intervals of up to 0.05 seconds, the sequence of

tension and release moved around the threshold of conscious perception.
184  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Wundt positions it beneath this; for him expectant nervous twitching is

an emotional state:

It is at once obvious that these states, which we shall call for shortness
the contrasts of strain and relaxation, have the very same right to be
called feelings. For feelings, wherever they arise, accompany, as subjective
reactions of consciousness, sensations and ideas, but are never identical
with them.57

Ideas, following Wundt’s definition, are the contents of consciousness,

which are related to the objects of the outside world, and sensations are
the corresponding psychic experiences from which they are composed.
Feelings, by contrast, are elements of subjective “emotions”, of internal
impulses and moods that are independent of objective objects. Warm,
cold, red, white, and, like in Kieślowski, blue, are sensations, while there
is a feeling for space and time. While physiological experiments treated
feeling and sensations as essentially the same thing, psychology differenti-
ates precisely here.58 Wundt put feelings to test into the laboratory as
subjective states: the rhythmic sequence of the stimuli were altered. An
increase in tension was indeed observed with an increase in intervals,
but the perception of release also became clearer, and the pleasurable
sensation that was introduced in expectation of this release flipped over
into a unpleasurable sensation. If the intervals were decreased, thus rais-
ing the frequency of the stimuli, singular feelings of tension and release
disappeared in favor of a general excitement, a state of trembling, which
was also unpleasant. Set back to a moderate speed the rhythm had a
calming effect.
The analysis of feelings in the experiment thus became an induction
of synthetic feelings. The experiments with metronomes allowed Wundt
to produce complex and even conflicting atmospheres, without these be-
ing linked to any particular idea. Since in Wundt’s theory all feelings: joy,
pleasure, cheerfulness, anger, worry, fear, etc. are dissected into the three
basic emotional pairs: delight and aversion, tension and release, excitement
and pacification, they can be artificially produced in the dramaturgy of
intervals. They are accompanied by the corresponding somatic changes, for
instance the expanding and contracting of the blood vessels, of glandular
functions. Many experimental filmmakers will continue working on exactly
these efforts from experimental psychology. They will examine perception
in the cinema by creating feelings cinematically, with or without the as-
sociated idea.
Mental Appar atuses 185

In the laboratory, Wundt collected evidence that there is indeed a subjec-

tive steering function for all sensations and ideas, a mind, but a multiple one:
“It is not as simple being but as the evolved product of countless elements
that the human mind is what Leibniz called it, a mirror of the universe.”59
Other psychologists preferred to think of the mind not as a mirror of the
universe, but to treat it as a mirror of the laboratory. Eugen Bleuler carried
out a connection between the laboratory apparatuses and psychic reactions
when he proposed his therapy with “Gelegenheitsapparaten” [“opportune
apparatuses”] in 1922. What Wundt had dissected into single elements
and subroutines in the laboratory is later combined again, for instance by
Bleuler, as a physiological function, the conscious and unconscious, the
light and the dark sides of the human mind function next to one another
as little apparatuses without disturbance.
The cinema as as apparatus linking technology, perception, and
corporality lies in the continuity of psycho-physical apparatuses. Film
dramaturgy consciously introduces the unconscious effects of a circuit.
A systematic insecurity of self-consciousness and a deception of percep-
tion is recognized, analyzed, and consciously built into the devices as
expectation in order to shift and displace consciousness and to induce
trance. Cine-trance. But very few have understood as well as Maya Deren,
who had read Bleuler, that these psychological effects were always about
historical technologies. She can write about voodoo rhythms and at the
same time say the following about cinematic psycho-technology: “Once
this interval has been established, our sense-perceptions are geared to an
expectation of its reoccurrence.”60 From the archaic trance techniques to
the new media is theoretically just one small step, but it took almost 50
years to implement it in practice and in perception psychology. The new
medial trances can be joined up specifically with particular rhythms at
particular receptors. This altered corporality itself in communication. New
bodies were formed, old body parts and body images dissipated. Whatever
a body could still be and become: We, as those sensing and feeling, like
Eddie Pensiero, are at the disposal of the media as bundles of nerves and
nail biters, the technologists and lab workers have seen to that. However
we turn and shift in the dance of the correlation functions of our senses
and our brains: Before all subversion, refractoriness, and anarchy, before all
the intoxication of the senses, the interconnection of nerves lies beneath
conscious perception as a social technology.
The sources of affections that lie outside also belong to the history of the
cinema as a registration of physical corporality. It is the French history of
the measurements made in the nineteenth century.
2. Psycho-Motor Activity

La femme sans tête

Highway sign on the A31 to Beaune

While the Germans came to the cinema attempting to optimize the mind’s
functions, the French invented it to take care of their bodies, and it is
believed that one can still recognize this difference in national film produc-
tions to this day. In 1872, after France had lost the war against Prussia and
the good citizens were shocked by the vitality, energy, and mobility of the
communards on the barricades in Paris, a patriotic movement was formed in
France that traced the catastrophic outcome of the war back to “decadence”,
to the soldiers’ instability and their weak wills. A gymnastics movement was
instigated to restore elegance and more stamina to the French. One of its
leaders was Georges Demeny, who had founded a “cercle de gymanstique” in
Paris to develop and train new bodies, which were not meant to be drilled in
any authoritarian Prussian sense, but trained in an economic French style
to optimize energy use, avoid fatigue, and learn sequences of movement in
which the organism functioned without resistance, in short, to introduce
grace in the Kleistian sense as an artificial paradise. Demeny made great
efforts to ground the new forms of movement in science and registered as
an assistant to the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey.
After his medical practice had failed, Marey studied the physiology of
movement as an independent researcher in his own laboratory and de-
veloped his own methods to read these movements from the living body.
He wanted to liberate physiology from the anatomy that it had always
been subordinated to. While still as assistant doctor in 1859, Marey had
developed the sphygmograph, a machine to read the pulse, which became
so popular in medical practices that Marey could live off the royalties
from the patent.1 The sphygmogrpah differed from Ludwig’s Kymograph
in that it was applied on the outside, on the skin, and did not have to be
inserted under the skin. It was made of aluminum and wood, which made
it very light, and instead of working with weights, it worked with a spring
that pressed the apparatus onto the artery. Instead of using a steel pin,
Marey’s sphygmograph used a spring to write down what the change in
the receptacle dictated. But although Marey’s technologies sought to record
inconspicuous movements like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, his most
spectacular and bloodiest experiment in these years was a cardiograph
188  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of the heart of a living horse, which he carried out together with Auguste
Chauveau, the laboratory director of the veterinary clinic in Lyon. A rubber
plunger was inserted into the cardiac chamber of a horse and transmitted its
contractions as neat three-track notations. Blood pressure in both cardiac
chambers and the beats of the heart were recorded in an “indirect” method.
The graphic notations only translated: “Nos courbes n’exprimaient donc
pas les mouvements du cœur à proprement parler; mais elles permettaient
cependant de déduire des changements de pression qu’elles traduisaient…”2
If Carl Ludwig is considered the inventor of the recording system where
bodily states leave their traces on soot or papered cylinders without the aid
of a physician, Marey was the theorist of the graphic methods of notating
body movement. Perceiving and representing motor phenomena coincided
in the body’s self-transmission mounted in the inscription machines. Marey
proposed devices and built models that allowed all possible movements
to be brought into the one-dimensionality of a single line. In the 1860s he
examined human and animal motor activity and made notations according
to intensity, duration, and form. In addition he constructed the thermograph,
the cardiograph, the pneumograph, and the myograph, which he also built in
a lighter version than Helmholtz’s prototype so as to be able to record the fine
movements of muscular tremors. Marey’s apparatuses, however, did have the
disadvantage that they limited freedom of movement when they were used,
that is, they altered the movements that they were meant to measure. Only in
1878, when he saw Muybridge’s photo series in the journal La Nature, did Marey
invent mechanisms to record living creatures in presumably free movement.
Following Jules Janssen’s model he constructed a photographic revolver,
which he tested in the summer of 1882 with his assistant Otto Lund in the
radiant light of Naples. 12 pictures could be taken on a rotating photographic
plate at 1/720 of a second, and Marey brought another 25 photographic plates
in a dark bag so he could reload his photographic gun at the beach.3 The
images made on the plates, however, were as small as postage stamps, and a
series of 12 pictures was too few to be able to determine the exact trajectory
of the bird they had photographed in its speed and direction. So Marey
altered the parameters. He built a camera with a fixed photographic plate.
Several phases of a movement were exposed over one another on the same
plate by rotating slots at 1/1000 of a second in intervals of 1/10 of a second.
In contrast to Galton, who standardized the traces of many bodies in the
contracted space of double exposure, he envisioned analyzing a body’s
course of motion in its graphic-spatial expansion. 4
Marey used these multiple exposures to create his pictures in phases,
which went against all western conventions of representation and which
Psycho -Motor Activit y 189

immediately unleashed a wave of experiments in the visual arts. Since the

Renaissance the picture frame had established a clear unity of space and
time. Marey’s pictures, which showed a course of time, could not be read
in this sense. They thus inspired avant-garde artists to depict the course
of movement on the tableau. Impressionists such as Edgar Degas in his
friezes of dancers, František Kupka or Jacques Villon, futurists like Giacomo
Balla or Luigi Russolo, even later Suprematists like Kazimir Malevich and
Natalia Goncharova and, super-pradigmatically, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude
Descending a Staircase introduced images of phases to the canvas, a new
feeling of the body transformed in time as a counter to identifying central
perspective.
Marey, however, was not interested in the aesthetic value of the depic-
tions, but in their documentary value, and this was flawed. If the person
being depicted moved too slowly, the phases of movement got entangled,
and the photo print showed a muddle of limbs. Marey solved this problem
by fragmenting and reducing the persons with lighting techniques. While
at first he had recorded figures dressed entirely in white against a black
background, he then had his models dressed in white only on one side, or
only with one white leg, and then finally in black leotards marked at the
joints with shiny buttons connected with metal bands. Time and space were
economized in the depiction: “Dans l’épure que l’on obtient ainsi, le nombre
des images peut être considérable et la notion de temps très complète, tandis
que celle d’espace a été volontairement restreinte au strict nécessaire.”5 The
photographs that he got from this approximated graphic illustrations. The
image of pure movement in compressed time had be liberated from the
body. In a very few attempts Marey had tested more or less all of the options
for illustrating bodies according to different criteria, creating a repertoire
that not only offered the necessary foundations for physiologists, but also for
all future film directors. With light and costumes he made it easy to control
the relationship between movement and the body, making it possible to
separate movement optically from even larger bodies.
Using this method, which emptied the body of all flesh and blood, the
first calculations of physiological pivot points were carried out by lever
principles and swing axles. After Demeny and Marey had provided the first
measurements, the city of Paris made the Parc des Princes in the Bois de
Boulogne available as a station for physiological experiments, initially pat-
terning their equipment after Muybridge’s model in California. Marey und
Demeny worked in a hangar equipped with black felt, and starting in 1883
they used a camera with the new shutter technology that was mounted on
tracks according to the model of Edison’s “Black Maria” as a large darkroom.
190  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Later a pole was installed from which views could be recorded from a bird’s
eye perspective. In comparison to the equipment that two German physiolo-
gists put on a “test individual” in order to measure the “gait of the human
being”, Marey’s installation was very free. Wilhelm Braune and Otto Fischer
attached small discharges – although not until 1891 – and later Geissler
tubes to the test subjects, which were charged by a Rühmkorff inductor
coil. With this equipment the measurements documented nothing but the
gait that the subject could take under such cumbersome circumstances and
the difficulties of the experimental conditions. In contrast the conditions
of the light French runners could be seen as natural, although they also
restricted the illustrative apparatus of body movements from a distance.
In contrast to the moving camera work, which Londe, for instance,
was developing at the same time, every stretch in the Parc de Princes was
supplied with scales, measuring rods, and chronometric gauges so that
temporal and spatial parameters could be meticulously documented on
the photographs, that is, in fraction of seconds. The objects on the runway
were no longer bird and insects, as had been the case with Marey, but hu-
man beings, who followed a course once it was set up and could carry out
particular movements. Together with Demeny, Marey tested gymnastics
students and soldiers from the military school at Joinville. Walking, run-
ning, jumping, fencing, riding, waving flags, carrying backpacks.[…] The
military disciplines were examined, with the support of the ministry of war,
for their trajectories, their energy consumption, and training programs.
It immediately became clear in the Parc des Princes that mechanical
discipline was required for all the measurement. In cinematic tests, for
instance, a runner on the level circuit of exactly 500 meters had to interrupt
the contacts of a telegraph circuit, which were installed along the track
every 50 meters, as he passed them. Inside the laboratory an odograph
wrote down these interruptions, and thus the speed of the runner, in
corresponding zigzagging lines. The speed could only be related to the
steps of the runner because he was synchronized by a bell in the middle of
the race track. Rhythmatized from a distance, the runner ran his rounds.
“Cette sonnerie peut prendre toutes les fréquences possibles depuis 40
jusqu’à 120 coups à la minute.”6 Truffaut’s first film, about the dark side of
post-war education, was called Les Quatre Cent Coups. In the film, rhythms
and strokes characterize the authorities that structure the individual’s life
from outside. The history of discipline and the history of cinema and the
history of French society. In France, the idea that the cinema realizes its
culturalization beneath conscious perception and catches up with it again
at the level of the narrative, is always present.
Psycho -Motor Activit y 191

In dynamic tests the soldiers in the Parc des Princes were laden down
with different weights in order to calculate the relations of weight and speed,
pressure and mobility, exertion and achievement in phases of movement.
What had previously been treated as a question of character – stamina,
resolution, deportment – was, in the new French body politics, divided “dans
la marche ou dans la course” into individual physical sizes, transferred into
graphic grids, and made calculable. This in fact allowed for the creation of
guidelines for gymnastics lessons, which would be whipping people into
shape throughout the twentieth century all over Europe: “Il y a donc, pour
chaque allure, une cadence optimum: celle où la vitesse croît plus vite que
la dépense du travail.”7 There is an optimal rhythm at which achievement
increases faster than effort is made. What immediately appeared to the
Germans, following Wundt, as a natural component of their organism,
was first worked out as a scientific special form by the French, who also
let themselves go, but then was trained into the body with tambourines
and bells. A certain rhythm that makes patriots mobile: “Les premiers
résultats que nous avons obtenus one fait l’objet d’un rapport au Ministre
de la Guerre.”8
On October 15, 1888 Marey presented the first long filmstrips that he had
shot with Demeny to the Académie des sciences. They were approximately
50 centimeters long and – in order to comply with copyright – were made
of paper. What could be seen was the flight of a pigeon: Land in sight! And
a hand opening and closing. The films had to be run through the camera
between two sockets on the shutter, and held still in each case in order to ex-
pose 20 images per second with 1/500 of a second. In 1889 in Paris one could
get films coated with a gelatin-collodion layer from the Lumière company,
while the photographer Nadar bought nitrogen films from the American
competitor Eastman. But neither the filmstrips nor the machinery worked
quite right. The strips became charged with static, were too short and the
coatings were too irregular, the strips did not run evenly. The pioneers of
cinematography, Marey, Reynaud, and Edison did indeed exchange notes
at the World’s Fair in 1889, but Marey had little interest in perfecting the
illusion of motion, for the apparatuses that he manufactured were meant
to serve the purpose of analysis. Nonetheless, although he was merely a
technical agent in the history of cinema, he had made the decisive step
toward filming human beings: namely, qualities that had previously been
considered mental were physiologically analyzed and then recombined.
Inner values were measured as external. The movement of the soul from the
outside, as is common in archaic and shamanistic trance techniques, could
now also be realized in the heart of Europe through cinematography. While
192  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

neurophysiologists had established that the nervous system could use body
movement to transform data from the surroundings into information, while
physiologists measured movement in anatomy in order to gain information
from it about the body and character, while soldiers ran their exhausting
laps for the text on the drum of the sphygmographs, what appears at the
interface of these undirected, but every finer data nets is the cinema, which
can turn movements and the transmission of stimuli into psychological
stories. What becomes clear on Marey’s testing grounds is that, since 1871,
the “armament of the souls” is a complex that combines apparatuses, bodies,
nature, and technology into a new aggregate. This is why Marey is the model
for all media theory that sees running such machines as the process that
makes it impossible to distinguish our physical and psychic breathlessness.
Even Max Ernst, who assembled the Parc des Princes into a landscape of
souls in his cycle “La Femme 100 têtes”, discovered the way that the psyche
could go crazy around 1900 in the apparatuses with which it was measured.
He showed that lost souls could be found again outside in nature, which,
itself integrated into the culture machine as a technical auxiliary construc-
tion, regulated movements and forms of human bodies. He gave the subtitle
“die landschaft wird im höchsten grade unbewußt” [“the unconsciousness
of the landscape becomes complete”] to one of his pictures from 1929, in
which Marey’s track is supplemented by trap-like devices and by the verti-
cally split and displaced body of a woman. Female bodies, the woman, as
Bresson then finds, were completely missing in the measuring being done
at the historical Bois de Boulogne. Ernst imported them from other research
stations and among other parameters and, foreign and anachronistic, placed
them in the paths of the male soldiers in order to transform desire into pure
escalation of energy… while the gait at 40 and 120 beats per minute remained
constant. “Cette sonnerie…” Heralded gender difference. Hammered gender
difference. The secrets of the new souls lie outside the body, where the
naked eye sees nothing, just as on the highway to Beaune, on the way into
the Musée Marey, there is suddenly a sign with three waves signaling that
in the invisible landscape beyond the street there should be a river, called
“La femme sans tête.” A hundred years later, what Marey had recorded
conforms to every serial human being as an image of the soul, even more, it
is enough for an optical bundling of desire, as Max Ernst prophesied in his
pictures. Documents of biometry become sentimental views. The curators
of the Musée Marey in Beaune ensure that the soul has changed under the
measurement into beautiful, cryptic affectivity, unconsciously of course:
“L’homme de Marey est repéré, mésuré, millimétré, cadré […] au risque
de perdre son âme: Il préfigure les images du corps numérisées, obtenues
Psycho -Motor Activit y 193

depuis quelques années grâce aux ordinateurs. Il reste cependant chargé de

mystère et d’émotion.”9 If the mystery designates the transformation of the
image of the body around 1900, after the psychic qualities become visible
on millimeter paper, then emotions are simply the physiological reactions
that the soldiers register on themselves: expanded blood vessels, heightened
glandular activity, increased heartbeat. Even patriotic sweating. The fact
that these reactions can be introduced even more strategically, in more
variety, with more entertainment, more narrative, and more commercially
will then be shown by the cinema.
Marey did not lose his soul to the new medium, but his assistant. After
Demeny had been commissioned to produce film footage for deaf children
in 1891, he patented a phenakistoscope for reproducing these series of im-
ages under his own name as a “phonoscope.” Under duress, in the light of
a giant concave mirror, which focused the sun directly on his somewhat
pinched face, Demeny said to the camera what lay heavy on his heart: “Je
vous aime” and “Vive la France.” He glued 24 single images onto a metal
plate, which was illuminated from inside, while a shutter restrained the
light while transporting the images. At the international photo exhibition
in 1892 in Paris Demeny thus became the first film star. Love in the age
of technological reproducibility: “Je vous aime” unflinchingly ran its laps,
addressing both amateur and professionals personally.
Marey replaced Demeny’s assistance with that of Albert Londe. This
collaboration not only fuses the latest visual technology and the most tested
methods of illustration, but also the most advance tricks for capturing the
nervous functions by chronophotography with the most modern equipment
for illustrating body movements. Parallel controls and communication of
physique and psyche. With Londe and Marey the faculties of knowledge
come together, which finally provide the conditions for cinema.
In the experimental station at the Parc des Princes and in Marey’s “Villa
Maria” near Naples with its permanently installed underwater camera,
a group of capable young physiologists, biologists, and neurologists were
trained as film artists. For the former Charcot employee Paul Richer and
the young Lucien Bull, the Olympic Games of 1900 in Paris became a
film academy where they recorded the athletes, along with Marey, first
to measure them and then for pleasure. Lucien Bull, who would later
be the director of the Marey Institute in Beaune, developed radio cin-
ematography, with which he shot footage stereoscopically at more than
2000 frames per second of the flight of insects and ballistic footage – his
most famous film being that of a bullet going through a soap bubble, in
which one can see that the surface of the bubble closes up again after
194  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the entry of the bullet before exploding completely as the bullet exits
the other side. Another well-known filmmaker was the medical student
Jean Comandon, whose f ilms were purchased as educational f ilms by
the UFA. In 1909 he shot a film about microbes in mouse intestines with
dark f ield illumination and in the same year a f ilm about the syphilis
virus, films show cells dancing with great tenderness. The most famous
of Marey’s successors, however, must be Charles Emile François-Franck,
Marey’s assistant at the pathological physiology department at the Collège
de France. Under Charcot at Salpêtrière in the 1880s François-Franck had
investigated circulation and localization in the brain, and had published
a book about the motor brain functions, for which Charcot wrote the
foreword. This work included film footage that, unlike with Londe, was no
longer meant to show the external movements or symptomatic expressions
of emotional stimulations, but the inner paths of transmitting stimuli.
François-Franck’s experiments are complementary to Londe’s illusionary
and imaginary images, which abstracted fragments from the living ap-
pearance of the body. François-Franck electrically anesthetized, dissected,
and reanimated animal bodies for cinematic recordings. His films are the
missing link between the experiments of Duchenne de Boulogne and the
first close-ups by D.W. Griffith and the sine qua non of all Frankenstein
movies.
Although Meliès and the Lumière Brothers are considered the actual
pioneers of film, the natural scientists, the unknown avant-gardists of film
history, developed a wealth of styles and techniques that slowly paved the
way for film into art. These include slow motion and time lapse, which make
it possible to see the movements of plants, animals, and cells, underwater
photography and the microscope, the x-ray and radio cinematography. It is
in biology films that the first artificial worlds emerge that only exist through
the fusion of camera and human perception. Among natural scientists film
was used in a filmic sense from the very beginning, and not as a replacement
for vaudeville, theater, or literature. Feelings that arise while watching the
staging of microbes in mouse intestines are undoubtedly artificial and
undoubtedly genuine.
The first artists’ films in came into being among the cinéastes in the
laboratories in France. Jean Rouch recalls how his uncle, a professor
at the medical university, regretted that in 1920 he had to fail his most
talented student in physics, chemistry, and biology. This was Jean Pain-
levé, the son of the mathematician, two-time Minister of Defense, and
Minister President Paul Painlevé. Since 1924 Jean had been publishing
Neo-Zoologisms in the journal “Surréalism”, which he had founded as a
Psycho -Motor Activit y 195

counter to Bresson’s projects with Ivan Goll, Appolinaire, and Delaunay.

In 1925 he passed the exams at the Académie des sciences after all with a
film about stickleback eggs, one of the first films to question structural
gender difference, in which he edited in a sequence in reverse at the
onset: the heart of a stickleback embryo repels a red blood cell! When
the commission wanted to check the film again the next day, Painlevé
had re-edited the f ilmstrips and has since been considered a master
filmmaker of biological works, with cameras that he himself built with
the participation of the cameraman André Raymond. All of his f ilms
calculate the doubled reality of the trick shot, both strictly satisfying the
criteria of scientific observation and at the same time being the result
of highly complicated manipulation. “La science est une fiction”, wrote
Painlevé as well.10 His films show everything exactly as it is and at the
same time let us see that everything visible here can in no way be seen
in any reality outside the cinema. They are therefore surrealist on the
technical level and, through their montage, which makes use of similari-
ties, mimicries, and deceptions of movement identification, they are also
political manifestos. The film Le Vampire from 1939, about a type of bat
that carries diseases and that has its front paw quivering upward at an
angle, features music by Duke Ellington and a commentary by Painlevé.
It ran in Copenhagen for two years during German occupation at the
train station cinema.11
In 1924 in the Paris avant-garde cinema “Vieux Colombier” there was
a screening of medical and natural science films by Lucien Bull and Jean
Comandon, which was attended by the group of artists and filmmakers sur-
rounding the Surrealists.12 Traces of all these manipulations of time, bodies,
and movements are obvious in films like Germain Dulac’s La coquille et le
clergyman (1926), Buñuel’s Chien Andalou (1928), or Man Ray’s Étoile de mer
(1928). It is less useful to trace the surrealist tradition of cinema at the level
of the motif than at the level of the systematic inversion of times, spaces,
and movements, through which a “total transmutation” was effectuated
at the editing table – “the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane
of two mutually distant realities.”13 To illustrate this aesthetic, Max Ernst
introduced Lautréamont’s example of an encounter between a sewing
machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. At this point in time the
perception apparatus itself is among the things that can be met on the
editing or the dissecting table, and its sensors and cycles are already fed
back with its mechanisms.
The surrealists, however, did not obtain just the formal manipulations
of the film recording and transmission technologies from the medical
196  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

tradition, but also the structure of shooting and the gaze, which turns
floating seahorses, disoriented dogs, and sick girls into stars.
In his brilliant outline of film history, Dalí wrote:

Following the dull years during which the technique is improved the
cinema […] suddenly reaches its true golden age in the achievement of
the first materialist films of the Italian school (prewar and the beginning
of the war). I am referring here to the grandiose period of hysterical
cinema…14
3. Psycho-Drama

The films of Painlevé, Buñuel, or Dalí make it easy to forget the murderous
legacy of Marey’s inventions. Following the model of Londe, who had provided
an iconography for unconscious poses and developed dispositifs of the female
or male unconscious, film became the model and then also the substitute
for conventional medial diagnoses. “Film reproduces” was plainly stated in
the protocols, and one enthusiastic researcher among the clinicians, Emil
Kraepelin, who had completed his education with Wundt, would turn to the
cinema in relief in his Munich psychiatric practice. The cinematogram archive
would spare him the confusion and madness of the patients at his station:1

In order to demonstrate the meaning of the cinematograms that Weiler

has been taking for years at the psychiatric clinic in Munich for clinical
teaching purposes, selected pictures were presented. Since the main
advantage of cinematography for teaching is that it visually reproduces
the attacks, it was initially paralytic, epileptic, and hysterical attacks
that were presented.2

The physicians, especially the neurologists, were strangely easygoing in how

they dealt with the new medium, and the technological conditions of the
medical assessments they made using it often remained concealed in the
darkness of the laboratory. What they all saw projected before their eyes was
seen as a valid case and attack, as complete and self-sufficient reality, not
as a recorded trace, which, as is common with other optical examination
devices such as the microscope of the x-ray, can only become scientific data
by first specifying the adjustment coordinates, exposure times, or focal
lengths. Mere cinematography becomes fiction film – as science.
Already in 1898 the Romanian neurologist Georges Marinescu, another
one of Marey’s students, carried out the first systematic film recordings of
paralytics. His films turned cinematography into a neurological measuring
instrument meant to distinguish “normal” and “abnormal” movements.
Cinematography was the diagnostic basis for differentiating health and
illness by means of analyzing movement. Anyone who limped, staggered,
stammered, or doddered was registered in the image as “pathological”: the
drama of being presented, which does not stop in the cinematic mythology
of Frankenstein’s monster.
In Marinescu’s footage patients of a hospital in Bucharest are presented
sequentially by the nurses. From left to right, from right to left, toward the
198  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

camera and away from it, clothed at first, then with bare legs, presumably
better to see the play of the muscles, and then finally nude. After a group
of adults, children are presented as well. They hobble, buckle, have trouble
moving forwards and getting through the area captured by the frame. Their
movements look even more awkward due to the mise-en-scène of their
skinny little bodies in the completely empty space of the picture.3
Marinescu’s camera stands fixed to one spot. Only the reactions of a few
patients who laugh or wave when they go to the camera draws attention to
the fact that there is someone behind the controlling gaze that the spectator
is positioned in, someone who is directing this. With the children, who
obviously attempt to evade the direction not to make eye contact with
the camera-eye, the sequence in which they walk towards the camera is
edited down to a few seconds. By using looks and gestures to point out what
surrounds the area where they are being judged, the children break through
the formal objectivity of the visual structure, and exactly this moment is
edited out in the name of science. Shortly before the cut, however, we see
them laugh briefly, presumably because they recognized someone behind
the camera. Only the cuts point to a different space, to the off-screen space
of the shot, and thus to the fragile masks of scientificity. If we watch the
images without the commentary that was added later on, the cinematic
strategy of eradicating those recorded becomes even clearer. We see name-
less, stumbling bodies shot from the side in wide-shots, largely without
faces. The young men have shaven heads. All personal characteristics that
could be manifest in clothing have been taken away from the children, with
the exception of a couple or social, or rather asocial, markings: the girls
have disheveled braids, are unkempt, their stocking hanging down. Nudity,
which is meant to reinforce the impression of physical health in Marey’s
hopping soldiers, and which by now looks a little ridiculous, reinforces the
impression of helplessness in the small patients in Bucharest, robbing them
of any human characteristic. Around 1900 medical exams were already
being used to slate children for treatment like the one that would lead
millions of so-called abnormal or pathological persons to their deaths over
the course of the century by more or less totalitarian regimes.
The iconography of annihilation in these first films by Marinescu can
be seen in all further films about ataxia or catatonia. It is correct that the
titles of films were only the names of the illness involved, for what is being
portrayed is the image of the illness with all its specific symptoms and
particularities, an image that was meant to train less experienced neurolo-
gists in diagnosis. In line with to the fact that it was not the person in need
of help, who was suffering under seizures or manifestations of paralysis,
Psycho -Dr ama 199

and whose appearance might cause fear or pity, that was represented, but
only a body befallen with symptoms, the extermination of just this body
appears as a coup de libération, which would no longer take any account
of anything human behind it or in it – a logic that is repeated in horror
films as valiant impalement and, incidentally, often as burning by body
snatchers and the living dead. Unlike in German fairy tales, it seems that
no good and enchanted soul will be able to work its way out of these film
bodies possessed by evil.
In the same year that Marinescu was shooting his f irst psychiatry
films, Albert Londe was carrying out a series of experiments with chrono-
apparatuses. Some of the ones that survived show male and female patients
on the “Piste de la Salpêtrière”, series recorded with the camera with twelve
lenses. At the end of the twentieth century, film scholars edited these im-
ages into short 35mm films to show early examples of movement analysis. To
give their film students the most authentic illusion possible of the medical
position on the “Piste de la Salpêtrière”, they even compensated for the
parallel shifts that had come about through the distances between the
twelves lenses. Didactically and artificially they attempted to created a
central perspective of unified space after the fact, which would allow for
only a single and continuous ideal gaze, whereas previously a series of
views and vantage points had only allowed for interpolating the patients’
movements. But despite the best efforts of the film scholars to create an
absolute and – as it was implemented in the history of perspective from
the beginning – self-denying gaze in a homogenous optical space, the clips
jerk and jump a little, just enough to make every student aware that these
images and these historical medical views are a carefully arranged optical
construction, exactly like every cinematic space. But it is precisely the dif-
ference between these awkwardly reconstructed not-yet-films by Londe on
the one hand and the films by Marinescu, staged in the coherent space of the
film camera, on the other, that makes it possible to trace the new sovereign
power of the camera’s gaze as visual diagnostics in medicine. The dysfunc-
tional aspects of watching movies also provide some elucidation here. If the
film historians had wanted to analyze the power, the source of which had
been concealed in the construction of the apparatuses, they would have
been better served if they had exposed the technical parameters of working
on film rather than continuing to conceal it with further manipulations.
When Londe himself later shot some footage with a film camera, he seems
to have implicitly taken the role of cinematography into account. In 1999
three of Londe’s films were restored by the Archives des films of the CNC
for an exhibition in Paris. The first showed a Cheval entraînant un moulin,
200  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the second the Abbatage d’un bœuf, and finally the third was a cinematic
Démarche pathologique de la Salpêtrière. Training, fragmenting, staging:
there could be no more precise summary of the cinematic body politics
that reworked Marey’s measurements into dramas.
One example that shows that cinematic recordings around 1900 was
already no longer serving to analyze movement, but had become quixotic
evidence for medical diagnoses, is the film Neuropatologia by Camillo
Negri from 1908, and it can be taken as representative for the cinema that
Salvador Dalí had in mind when he rhapsodized about the “grandiose period
of hysterical cinema.”
In his clinic in Turin, Negri had himself and his assistant filmed as they
treated a woman having a nervous attack. The woman was wearing a mask,
presumably to protect her identity. Already because of this, the sequence has
an undertone of a Sadistic boudoir play, and is reminiscent of the stagings
done at Salpêtrière in which hysterics had to incarnate classic theatrical
roles or zoological forms. After the woman has been brought into the picture
she gives a brief explanation, which is of course kept from the spectator, and
its wording clearly belongs to the medical protocol. Immediately following
this she falls into a state of twitching. Negri, who is bent over her busily and
business-like, communicates during the whole shoot with the cameraman
or the technical personnel behind the camera, obviously to check whether
everything happening can be seen in the image, and what instructions to
give to get the spectacle to run its course. Toward the end of the film, when
the patient is already giving the impression of being completely exhausted,
Negri once again gives a sign to shoot and then begins to press the woman’s
abdomen against the mattress. A new attack begins. From the point of view
of the film, there is no way to tell if the woman moved on her own accord
or whether the professor’s strong push and the feathers of the bed started
up the whole movement. One might say that hysteria itself thus appears in
front of the running camera. The subject and object of the hysterical move-
ment are indistinguishable. Just as the title says, neuropathology appears
in the image as a malaise of representation, as a trick of the neurologists,
as a mise-en-scène of the cameraman, as a reaction of a female body to
diverse psychic and physical factors. Because the identity of the woman
on the screen behind the masks of the “great universal matrix”, the “Caput
mortuum” of the female, as Michel Leiris called the practice in the case of
his research in Africa, has disappeared, it is no longer her twitching and
trembling that appears on the screen, but an attack, under the guidance
of the professor. What the film shows cannot give any information about
the physiological course of the attack. Recording it on film is no longer
Psycho -Dr ama 201

measuring it for the camera, but staging it for the camera. The complicitous
looks that Negri gives over and over again to the camera confirm how sure he
can be of getting the applause of his colleagues. The scientific demonstration
merges with its interpretation by the operating specialist. At the end of the
film the two men in the laboratory are presented like actors at the final
curtain, holding up a woman between them: the weak sex, patient, diva,
object of scientific ambition, whether she shares this now or not. 4 Staging
and diagnosis run in parallel and are demonstrated with shots that are not
relativized by any accountability beyond the technical aspects of filming the
experiment. Hysteria once again appears as the overwhelming corporality
of a symbolic order. Structures that supply meaning get into the image by
means of technical workmanship. Only when the attention is shifted to
cuts, dissolves, zooms, and pans does it become clear how film and medical
orders are dramatized into social contents. L’âge d’or du cinéma hystérique.
How to distract attention away from technical workmanship was
taught by a German assistant doctor, Hans Hennes. Like Charcot, what
he cherished about cinematography was that it could reliably store and
differentiate where human objects of view behaved erratically. “Once the
footage is shot, the picture is available for reproduction at any time, the film
is always ‘in the mood,’ there are no misfires.”5 Only with time will it turn
out that “reproduction” is a euphemism for dressing. The degree to which
cinematography in Germany found its way into medical diagnostics is
documented in the thorough overview published by the medical officer and
radiologist Dr. Martin Weiser, a student of Ewald Hering’s, just after the war
in 1919. His book Medizinische Kinematographie is both a film handbook and
a scientific report, revealing a number of inventions, techniques, and tricks
that were being used by physicians with the camera. Already in 1911 one Dr.
Summer had emphasized “the value of cinematography for the differential
diagnosis of epileptic seizures against hysteria and organic diseases of the
brain.”6 The great model of all neurologist-filmmakers, however, was the
Italian brain physiologist and cinema pioneer Osvaldo Polimanti, who
had taken it on to supplement his written protocols about neurological
deficits after extirpations of certain brain areas with “successful cinematic
records.”7 Weiser emphasized – and almost in the same words that Londe
had used to formulate his visions – that doctors should make use of the
cinematic impression of the medical gaze as a “natural” perceptual method,
in distinction from writing:

From early childhood on we are used to grasping processes of motion not

through description, but through direct perception, and we understand
202  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

them in nature and in cinematic representation much quicker and more

thoroughly than when reading a description, no matter how exhaustive
it is, during which we must reconstruct the process of motion in our
imaginations.8

As long as the connection between medical diagnostics, technology, and

body politics remained concealed under the assumption of the naturalness
of cinematic perception, the imaginary and hallucinatory practice contin-
ued in neurology, throughout all political and ideological periods. It was
always the Golden Age for neuropathology. For a 16-minute film series that
presented ‘catatonia’ in seven cases, German filmmakers compiled silent
film footage from 1925-1943. Intertitles direct the spectator’s attention. In
this film there is no recognizable continuity or logic of the shots that might
make it possible to have a scientific comparison or a systematization of the
material. The persons in the image are shown in wide shots, sometimes in
medium shots or close-ups, without any comprehensible criteria for the
decision. They stand there in their underwear, draped in black camisoles,
or shot in everyday clothing. Following inaudible commands they carry out
certain movements. In contrast to the expressionless people in Marinescu’s
films, now “types” are developed, pathological roles that the sick persons are
supposed to merge into. This becomes most clear through the example of a
“catatonia picture”, that simply indicates “affected clothing and posturing”
as a symptom and shows a man in a cape with a hat and scarf looking off
into the distance. A picture of illness that would have done for any actor’s
head shot; the records department of psychology would finally get its carte
blanche as coming to itself.
Finally, the medical f ilm work of Dr. Johannes K.J. Kirchhof should
be mentioned. In 1940 and 1941 he shot the film Ataktische Störungen bei
einem Geschwisterpaar [Atactic Disturbances in Siblings]. The siblings, a
man and a woman, both around fifty years old, are required, one by one,
to walk around naked in a room fitted with grey cloth and to demonstrate
a particular twitching in their movements. The camera sometimes gets
quite close to the bodies, mercilessly panning from top to bottom over and
over again. Shots of the patients looking into the camera are edited in. The
doctor (presumably Kirchhof himself) enters the picture in a white lab
coat with a tie and collar to demonstrate an announced kinetic tremor,
namely the increasing trembling of the man when he attempts to grasp the
doctors hand. In response to the joy that the naked man shows in seeing
the doctor again, whom he clearly knows well, the doctor responds with a
faint, embarrassed smile, which points the gaze not back at the patient, but
Psycho -Dr ama 203

to the camera. The staging reduces the madness of the patient to his illusion
in thinking that he is a human being just like the doctor and he could enter
into eye-contact with him at will. But the naked man does not have his
gaze in the space of the camera and is thus no longer the subject. Beyond
the implied diagnostic level – the analysis of nervous twitching – there is
a second level of the feud of gazes, which only one of them, technologically
equipped, knows about and survives: the medical gaze that is reinforced
by the camera. If we think that a certain horror has got a name and a face
in Dr. Kirchof’s appearance, it soon becomes clear that the technology of
filming also seeks to subordinate the gaze of the spectator to this logic
of annihilation. The staging consequently ends in a sequence that shows
the patient writing his name. We see the trembling hand, then the patient
holds up the paper and his name, now visible in full on the piece of paper,
is illegible. Even on the symbolic level, the identity of the patient is thus
definitively negated. Even more: the film suggests that the patient has
forfeited his humanity himself through his uncontrollable movements. The
film always only seems to show what is, but shots, gaze manipulation, and
montage constantly generate meaning. Given the euthanasia campaigns
during the Third Reich, the sequence, in which the man’s trembling results
in his failure to write his name, means that there is no identity here anyway.
In this discrete film sense, annihilation would only be the completion of a
process that, as the film seeks to establish in all objectivity, has long been
the patient’s destiny.9
In view of such obvious efforts at staging in medical films, it is astounding
that the scientific claim of “medical cinematography” (Weiser), that is, the
legitimacy of recording and registering bodily functions by simply storing
them on film, could hold for so long. Certainly the fact that cinematography
lies in the direct tradition of inventing methods to record physiological
movement meant that systematizing movement, and thus also formalizing
and pathologizing it, seemed to be guaranteed by film. But even if cinematic
methods of measuring by analyzing single images and sequences can be-
come an artificial synthesis of movements, various levels of staging come
forth in projection, on the screen, and the findings turn out to be imaginary
anyway. Interventions by a cinematically examining doctor can only be
reconstructed in the case of the basic stroboscopic illusion of movement if
slow motion and time lapse can be sensed or even noticed as “significant.”
All variations beneath this perceptible threshold, be they due to conscious
manipulation or to the contingent dysfunction of the apparatuses, remain
unnoticed. In contrast to the failed comparison of parallel axes mentioned
above, which made the reformation of chronophotographic analysis visible
204  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

as the projected illusion of movement, the space constructed by the camera

will also simulate homogeneity and wholeness, even in moving shots, due to
the angle of the shot and to editing, which will cause the perception of the
body and the gazes to appear as natural. In all cinematic “neuropatologia”
illusionary perception perceives the staged illusion of movement. Film
and neurology appear as historically connected, seeking to bring the truth
of neurological diseases to light as feedback of data that is always only
neurological. It is a system that can be manipulated without challenge
as long as both sides of the attack are filed away. For instance, Polimanti
conscientiously filed film footage of a disoriented dog running in circles
in the surgical protocol of extirpation.
4. Psycho-Technology

If the neo-impressionist is convinced, for instance, that the pleasurable

impression of a landscape that his picture is meant to induce only comes about
if a certain flickering emanates from the entire image, he then stands like a
psycho-technologist before the totally ratichal and not at all aesthetic question
of how the psychological effect of the flickering impression can be achieved.
– Hugo Münsterberg, 1914

It was not fables, forms, or colors that were raised to the quality of artworks
at the end of the last century, but excitation frequencies. Inasmuch as per-
ception had been dissected in the laboratory and examined for its individual
functions, art was no longer examined as an aesthetic phenomenon, but
also for the way it affected the nerves. Physiologists had previously analyzed
body movements and then, from outside, neurologically identified the
qualities of character. Psychologists had established the effect of images
and rhythms on the psyche. In psycho-physiological analysis art once again
became physical: a mental reaction to nerve stimuli.
One of Wundt’s students, Paul Linke, continued his experiments as
studies in cinema perception. In March 1916 he reported in Dresden on
his attempts to induce seeing motion artificially. “Dr. Paul Linke/Jena […]
breaks with the old, purely physiological views, which sought to explain the
problem of movement merely through the phenomenon of the afterimage
and amalgamation. According to Paul Linke, seeing motion in cinematog-
raphy is an illusion of identification”, was written in 1917 in Photographische
Korrespondenz.1 Linke provided the technological basis for a psychological
explanation of Wertheimer and Köhler’s experiments. Working in Wundts’s
laboratory, he had tested how many images in a series were necessary to
create the illusion of a course of movement. “What emerges from his work
is that our psyche possesses a quite astounding and previously unknown
capacity to reproduce a course of movement out of two different single
images.”2
As proof Linke had built “the tautoscope for the psychological cin-
ematographs” which put two different images from a series on screen,
“two perceptions of a face […] that have so little spatial difference from
each other that they can be identified, that is, can be referred to one and
the same object.” The two elements had to be perceived separately, but “be
simultaneously present in the consciousness, indeed, simultaneous, for
206  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

instance, like the sound of a spoken word or the rhythmic beat of the notes
of a melody.”3 Linke shows his audience that two visual impression can be
separated from one another by dark phases for so long that an afterimage
effect could no longer be considered a connector between the two images.
Stroboscopy, he demonstrated, calls on a capacity of the brain itself, so that,
as one spectator reported, “a clear impression of motion (emerges) in that
the psyche automatically supplements the phases in between.”4
Martin Weiser, who had written the first handbook for filmmaking physi-
cians, initially considered Linke’s studies to be psychological suprematism:
it only worked for points, lines, circles in black-and-white. But Linke was also
able to delude him with transformation effects: apples into pears. Weiser
remarked that Linke’s trick of affecting the brain was a typical trick form
Wundt’s laboratory: “In Linke’s experiments we must still bear in mind
that a quite specific rhythm is maintained, to which the psyche adapts.”5
Rhythm is the missing link between film and medical diagnosis, between
Ewald Hering’s panmnemism as a “surrogate science of the soul”,6 Bleuler’s
mental apparatuses, which could replace broken nerve functions, and the
stroboscopic affection of the psyche. Rhythm creates the tension in which
we are prepared to let signals in the nerves become data: expectation in
Wundt’s complex sense. Or in the sense of a certain drum rhythm, which
calls to action a certain dance in the limbs and a certain god.
Also in 1916, when the German Friends of Photography and Film were
rubbing their eyes after Linke’s screenings, in the USA the first psycho-
technical film theory was being written, The Photoplay: A Psychological
Study, and by one of Wundt’s students, Hugo Münsterberg. Historical and
practically, Münsterberg described the compatibility between psyche and
cinematic apparatus. In his film theory, which was one of the first film
theories at all, he reversed the relationship between subject and object,
familiar from art reception, when it came to watching movies. “In the
photoplay our imagination is projected on the screen”,7 wrote Münsterberg,
and by “imagination” he did not mean fantasy, but the imaginative power of
the mind. “The mental function involved is that of expectation or, when the
expectation is controlled by our feelings, we may class it under the mental
function of imagination.”8 Results and terminology from years of research
in the laboratory in Leipzig, starting with the first complicated expecta-
tions of astronomers up to systematic differentiations and interferences of
feelings and sensations, turn out to be perfectly suited to the experience
of the cinema. Perception studied by nerve physiologists as transferring
and processing impulses, can easily be extended into the apparatus of the
cinema. Münsterberg could easily demonstrate that, “for the first time in the
Psycho -Technology 207

history of art, feature films are capable of implementing the neurological

flow of data itself”, as Friedrich Kittler summarized the bold new theory.9
Münsterberg, was a philosophy professor in Freiburg, where, with the
help of his technician, Herr Elb, he had amassed an extensive collection of
devices for experimental psychology, including a complication clock. From
there he went twice to Harvard: the first time from 1892 to 1895, to work on
his book Die Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, the second time in 1897, when he
was appointed as the youngest chairman of the Philosophical Department.
What the American psychologists – especially William James, his colleague
and boss, who was one of the few “great” psychologists of the nineteenth
century who had not studied with Wundt – found highly convincing in the
work of the 34-year-old German was how he answered classic philosophi-
cal questions with answers tested by concrete experimental psychology:
“Consciousness of the self does not exist at all; if the ego, the only function of
which is consciousness, is to be directly known, it is then condemned to be
in the role of the Baron Münchhausen, who had pulled himself up by his own
hair”, wrote Münsterberg in his Beiträge zur epxerimentellen Psychologie
in Freiburg.10 He researched logic, ethics, and aesthetics with the help of
Elb’s laboratory technology: “Philosophy never has to do with the problems
of special experiences, but always has to ask how and in what sense such
experience is possible.”11 He transformed Wilhelm Wundt’s systematics
of feelings – pleasure and displeasure, tension and release, agitation and
pacification – into an economy of experiences that, in their dynamics, as
Helmholtz and Poincaré had claimed for the physiology of perception, can
produce identity and non-identity from the dynamic processing of stimuli
and reactions. This subjectivity from Leipzig-Heidelberg-Freiburg, with
its neo-Kantian turn, asserts itself as a practical self-actualization in the
New World:

We say our will is fulfilled when the idea we try to maintain becomes
realized. What does realization mean? […] It means the identity of content
between the preceding and the resulting experience.12

Already in his Eternal Values, which first appeared in English in Boston,

Hugo Münsterberg had integrated the economy of nervous energy and the
perception of the world into a neuro-philosophy. Based on his studies of
mental experiences Münsterberg developed a complex system of “eternal
values”, which provide access to the world in four categories, as logical,
aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical. Or, to put it the other way around,
they provided the world access to the mental processes, for values form the
208  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

relations that form human beings: “The world of values is the only true world,
and for every one who wants to have a world at all, all the relations which
result from the self-assertion of the experiences must be acknowledged as
absolutely valid for the true world.”13
Since they psycho-physically dissolve into single mental functions, values
are the contemporary replacement for old categories. They are the tools with
which the internal, external, and social worlds are linked by neurological
interconnections and flows of data. With these “eternal values” Münsterberg
can remain both moral philosopher and technician of brain functions at the
same time. In 1914 he published the first version of his popular scientific
work Die Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, a discipline that he had founded,
and which was meant “to be an application of psychology in the service of
cultural tasks”,14 a science that relates to psychology like “the engineering
sciences do to physics or the agricultural sciences do to botany.”15 In a more
efficient American sense, culture simply meant ergonomics, optimizing
performance, social hygiene. Here Münsterberg once again goes after
psychological methods and an overly hasty invocation of consciousness:

Physiological psychology links the sensation of consciousness by means

of processes in the brain, while anti-physiological psychology joins the
very same conscious processes through a psychic entity. This may be
called the unconscious or the subconscious or the soul, but in any case
it remains an unknown, which cannot be found in any experience.16

Incidentally, Münsterberg excludes Freud’s psychoanalytical concept

of the unconscious from his verdict on the unconscious since it is also
based on neurological impulses that “were repressed and, after they had
long vanished from consciousness, remained in effect indirectly in the
unconscious.”17 As long as the phenomena observed by Freud can even be
verified “galvanometrically” they belonged exactly to Münsterberg’s area
of research. In his psychological laboratories reflex-like reactions and their
non-conscious effectivity and duration were tested as mental automatism.
One experiment at the Harvard Psychological Laboratories that has since
become one of the most famous occurred during the period of Münsterberg’s
first tenure. Leon M. Solomons, together with his assistant, test person,
and colleague Gertrude Stein, attempted to track down the mechanism
that conjured up the appearance of a second personality during hysterical
trances. To achieve this, they ran tests on motor performances that could
be carried out without any conscious aid: automatic writing combined
with automatic dictation. In order to simulate this state, which, according
Psycho -Technology 209

to Solomons, became pathological in hysterics, he trained Gertrude Stein

to systematically distract her attention and to sever sensory-motor con-
nections in the brain. “Real automatism”, wrote Solomons in his report,
“that is, dropping out of consciousness […] comes only at intervals and for
short periods at a time. But it comes whenever the attention is sufficiently
distracted.”18
The trance that Gertrude Stein had to exercise in order to simulate the
motor reactions of hysterics, unconscious in the automatic sense, is thus
negative attentiveness training. Neurologically channeled habits were to
be interrupted, de-conventionalized. The tests did not work when the at-
tention could not be distracted by self-observation, for instance by reading
a novel. “Our trouble never came from a failure of recognition, but from a
functioning of attention.”19 Over the course of the test and training units,
Gertrude Stein developed a sure trick to separate motor and sensory skills,
as well as aural and linguistic ones, and to cause them to disintegrate into an
artificial trance of intellectual dissociation. “Miss Stein found it sufficient
distraction often to simply read what her arm wrote, but following three
or four words behind her pencil.”20 In so doing, she had also shown that
the classical training methods of the eighteenth century, in which the
synchronization of writing, reading, and comprehending was exercised
in schools, is what creates the context for a soul in the first place. Stein
deconstruct this through intrapsychic time manipulation as inducing
trance and personality doubling.
Later Gertrude Stein claimed that these dissociation exercises were
merely memory training in the laboratory, and ultimately not so different
from the other memory training, the intellectual training associated with
schooling to which all students are subjected. Already in 1935, while on a
lecture trip through the USA, she had explained to students, practically
inside the “laboratory”, that the experiments on automatic writing in the
Harvard laboratories had not formed the methods of her own literary
production, or should we read: had not formed it. Educational formation,
she writes, is always imitation, and therefore anyone can know what he is
doing within the university:

I did not think that we either of us had been doing automatic writing, we
always knew what we were doing how could we not when every minute
in the laboratory we were doing what we were watching ourselves do-
ing, that was our training, but as he wrote the article after all I was an
undergraduate and not a professional and I am always very docile, and
all the ideas had been his all that had been mine were the definitions
210  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of the characters of the men and women I had seen naturally it was as
if I had written that I did that automatic writing. I did not think it was
automatic I do not think so now, I do not think any university student is
likely certainly not under observation is likely to be able to do genuinely
automatic writing.21

Automatic writing would have assumed a machine-like circuitry at the basis

of human nerve physiology, and if Gertrude Stein had any ambition, it was
that of wiring up her own brain, cabling herself, even if she had to descend to
the bottom of the Atlantic to do so. For Stein, it was not a matter of automatic
writing on an anthropological search for the rules of authentic human logics
of letters of signifiers at the basis of consciousness, nor was it about simply
becoming a typewriter. She experimented with the quick interferences
between the inscription machines of physical perception, between literal
and corporal conventions as issues of the nerves. Naming generations of
small white poodles “Basket” and then notating the feeling for a dog named
Basket… or writing oneself as a character in the autobiography of a loved
one, these were the media circuits in which Stein produced herself and
sought to recast the tracks of reaction from the outside. In her literary texts
Gertrude Stein constantly translated back and forth between the flow of
nerve data and media and between the flow of media data and nerves. What
is understood as human in various cultures and institutions is constituted
historically from these connections. From certain circuitries, for instance,
Americans are made, with “minds” that are radically different than the old
European souls. Whoever newly associates inside and outside, as Gertrude
Stein does in her texts, creates, as Münsterberg showed neurophysiologi-
cally, logical, aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical surpluses: The making
of… Americans. “No, writing should be very exact and one must realize
what there is inside in one and then in some way it comes into words and
the more exactly the words fit the emotion the more beautiful the words.”22
Solomons’s experiments might have been the preliminary studies to
establish new circumstances and new images of the human by studying and
establishing new sensory-motor reflex arcs. Sensual-nervous reflex tracks.
If it had gone according to Stein, it presumably would have been like the
ones developed while driving. Shift, accelerate, shift. Solomons’s and Stein’s
experiments might also have been the beginning for an artificial regulation
of social life from the psychological laboratory, as the Russian reflexologists
later planned, but they did not get so far at Harvard. The connections be-
tween nerves and apparatuses, which had become established everywhere
in normal life, worked so efficiently and produced such incomprehensible
Psycho -Technology 211

states that even Solomons and Stein rested on the relay that gave the states
a convention. At the end of their research they stated that hysteria is “a
disease of the attention”,23 although they might have understood attention
to mean the neurological, sensory-motor interconnection and feedback
of intellectual subroutines, which could be experimentally altered. It is
notable throughout that over the course of training, the subroutines of
“minds” could be more reliably switched on and off with books, images,
or apparatuses than with “one’s own” central consciousness. Münsterberg
had arrived at Harvard.
Just as he had had the connections between dissociated mental functions
and apparatuses tested in the Psychological Laboratories, Hugo Münster-
berg examined the psycho-physiology of cinematic perception in 1916. His
theory of cinema is, like the Eternal Values, divided into “outer” and “inner”
“Development of the Moving Picture”, that is, into routines of technological
devices and those of the mind. As such, the Cinematic Apparatus is being
designated, already in 1916, as something that goes straight through all
the old corporal boundaries, part apparatus and part perception. “Our
imagination is projected on the screen!”
As a f irst indication of the fact that watching movies is a special
internal labor of the brain, Münsterberg also presents seeing motion as
a phi phenomenon, using examples from the museum of stroboscopic
apparatuses, and in doing so offers a list of all Wundt’s fellow students and
colleagues, who had discovered the cinema through their psychological
experiments: Stricker, Exner, James, Fischer, Marbe, Wertheimer, Korte,
and Linke. They had all done away with the illusion of the afterimage
effect as the basis for seeing motion: “The apparent movement is in no way
the mere result of an afterimage […]. The movement is in these cases not
really seen from without, but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to
motionless pictures.”24
Just as seeing motion is a mental act that is initiated by the apparatuses,
seeing depth in the cinema is a function of the brain induced from outside.
The experienced psyche combines perspectival relations, shadowing, and
various level of movement into plasticity where there is only a flat screen. In
the studios of the “Vitagraph Company”, which were first set up on Nassau
Street in New York, high above on the roof of the Morse Building, and later
were moved to Brooklyn, Münsterberg adopted, alongside directors and
actors, directorial tricks as one of the physiological justifications: “For in-
stance, by a well-known optical illusion the feeling of depth is strengthened
if the foreground is at rest and the background is moving.”25 This is the
neuronal depth and melancholy of road movies.
212  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

The impression of depth and seeing motion are only two of the per-
ception forms that can automatically be instigated in the cinema by
technical tricks as an artif icial analysis and synthesis of elementary
brain functions. All cinema dramaturgy is fundamentally based on this
mixture and consolidation of such routines, and Rudolf Arnheim, in his
f ilm theory grounded in Gestalt psychology 16 years later, at any rate
without previously having taken note of Münsterberg, will then extend
his fundamentals of perception elements in the cinema. Münsterberg,
however, emphasized what Arnheim would notice only much later, in
relation to the films of Maya Deren, namely the psychological trance in the
cinema, which emerges from the complexity and complication of neuronal
entanglements: “It brings our minds into a peculiar complex state; and we
shall see that this plays a not unimportant part in the mental make-up of
the whole photoplay.”26
Attention, and its possible dissociation from the familiar conventional-
ized sensory-motor context that Solomons and Stein had trained, represents
the pivot point in Münsterberg’s theory of the cinema. With his psycho-
technical analyses of both theater and cinema reception as a dynamic of
attention, Münsterberg disappointed all the ideals of the educated class.
It was not only true for the cinema, ostracized by the pedagogues anyway,
but also for the stage, that the attention is involuntarily drawn toward what
is loud, shiny, and unusual, or what blinks and flickers. While the staging
in the theatre has to make efforts to direct the attention consciously, the
cinema is nothing other than the guiding and misguiding of involuntary
attention itself, by means of the various techniques of the camera and of
montage: “…there is surely no lack of means by which our mind can be
influenced and directed in the rapid play of the pictures.”27
Münsterberg enumerates these means better than any handbook of
directing film, indeed, as a cineaste-purist, not even dealing with text or
music as aids to distracting attention. Camera angles and focal lengths, sets
and framing enhance the movements and relations that distract attention.
If it wants to be more than filmed theater, cinema must assert itself as direct
and unconscious distraction and affection of the nerves.
And Münsterberg was American enough not to view the reality of the
cinema, which corresponds to real mental experience, as secondary, but as
reality with its own rules, which can also stand up to the scientific scrutiny.
The fact that in 1916 there were still numerous technical shortcomings
that distorted these mental mechanisms does not alter the fundamental
autonomy of experience: “It is a unique inner experience, which is charac-
teristic of the perception of the photoplays.”28
Psycho -Technology 213

The experiments in the psychological laboratories had shown that all

impressions and impulses could be linked, processed, and made present in
the brain by associations with past and remembered events. The work in the
studios corresponds to this exactly. Cinema, unlike theater, can also make
a web of temporal and spatial associations directly present to perception.
“In our minds past and future becomes intertwined with the present. The
photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.”29
When Münsterberg establishes that in the cinema, in contrast to the theater,
where the spectator remains left to her own thought process, the power of
the imagination is projected on the screen, this not only means that it is
manipulated from the outside, but also that the unconscious actions of the
brain are made visible in how they work in the optical elongation outward,
and are made objective, as in the laboratory. In this way, Münsterberg is one
of the theorists of the artistic idea that, while it cannot yet be called artistic
intelligence, certainly can be called artistic power of the imagination. The
cinema initiates physiological automatisms, and the feelings and reactions
produced by them cannot be distinguished from those that appear outside
the cinema.
Münsterberg certainly distinguishes this artistic induction of inner states
from suggestion, which is always only a coercion to think and feel what
comes from the outside. How unstable this distinction is can be read in
Münsterberg in the formulation that the suggested idea “is not felt as our
creation.” In the cinema, however, the suggestion must appear as one’s
own imagination, “our imagination projected on the screen”, and may not
be sensed as coercion. The suggestive power of the cinema must therefore
consist in putting our imagination into a state in which the processes on the
screen are still sensed as our own creation and as real feelings or associa-
tions, but at the same time the transmission has to work with all the tricks
of trance so that thoughts are subordinated to the associations from the
screen. “The whole technique of the rapid changes of scenes which we have
recognized as so characteristic of the photoplay involves at every end point
elements of suggestion which to a certain degree link the separate scenes.”30
Münsterberg also gives an example of suggestion in the cinema that is
meant to show that the technique must not become conscious. In an adapta-
tion of Carmen with the anagrammatic vamp Theda Bara (“Arab Death”),
Münsterberg counts 170 cuts in ten minutes, “an average of a little more
than three seconds for each scene.”31 All that emerges from this montage is a
feeling of “nervousness”,32 which means that film technology is detectable as
feedback on the nerves. This interconnection of technology and perception,
a certain vibration, these flickering images must directly strike emotions, if
214  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

cinema is to be art and not simply a psycho-physiological experiment. “To

picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay.”33
While at the theater it is essentially the duty of the actor to evoke feelings
and emotions, in the cinema is the technology, which the performers must
and may yield to. Unlike on stage, their reactions must be able to be trained
involuntary ones. The difficult task of the film actor consists in introduc-
ing automatic or reflex movements: the movement of glands, vessels, and
involuntary muscles; the have to weep, sweat, let their pupils dilate… Unlike
in the theater, however, film directors can compensate for the naturalism
of physiological reactions with bodily street credibility. Since film direction
can dissect any body into fragments, even non-professionals without any
trained feeling for the whole body can be cast for the production of feelings
and emotions: “If he needs the fat bartender with his smug smile, or the
humble Jewish peddler, or the Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on
wigs and paint; he finds them all ready-made on the East Side.”34 The fact
that “method acting”, an acting style that activated emotional eruptions
through biographical memory, would become established later in the USA,
does not contradict this. Even in method acting, it is a matter of activating
involuntary affects, which can then be introduced ad libitum for the widest
variety of historical dramas. In this regard, the memory only clears the way
to the emotional storage repository.
Since film technology is not dependent on the “whole” body or images
of the body, the body politics of film can start beneath consciousness:
with automatisms. These can be physically conveyed in such a way that
even induce involuntary physical reactions from the spectators, much like
Gertrude Stein in the laboratory: “we always knew what we were doing how
could we not when every minute in the laboratory we were doing what we
were watching ourselves doing, that was our training.”
Feelings and sensations in the cinema run on a Mobius strip between
inside and outside, body and technology, which only need remain wired
through the nervous systems of the actors, spectators, and technicians in
order to induce trembling, gasping, or blushing in the most unbelievable of
scenes. What is transmitted is first the motor and then the sensory reflexes,
which then become sensed emotions.

The horror which we see makes us really shrink, the happiness which we
witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings contractions
in our muscles; and all the resulting sensations from muscles, joints and
tendons, from skin and viscera, from blood circulation and breathing, give
the color of living experience to the emotional reflection in our mind.35
Psycho -Technology 215

In Wundt’s terminology, what we find in these examples from Münsterberg

is a beautiful transformation of sensations into feelings.
Real film art, however, consists in emotionalizing the world so that the
spectator’s feelings emerge independently and also in contrast to the emo-
tions being played out. So just as perception psycho-physically distorts and
modifies what it sees, film must also introduce the nervous functions to
the spectator’s power of imagination: “The whole keyboard of the imagina-
tion may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.”36 The keyboard
of the imagination is a technological one. From this simply realization,
Münsterberg comes up with examples that belong to the refined technology
of filmmaking. In chapter 6, “Emotions”, he proposes producing a certain
trembling, which is not specified as an emotional value, but initially only
describes a heightened state of tension, like “a certain vibration”, which
creates the images of a neo-impressionist:

Take the case that we want to produce an effect of trembling. We might

use the pictures as the camera has taken them, sixteen in a second. But
in reproducing them on the screen we change their order. After giving
the first four pictures, we go back to picture 3, then give 4,5,6, and return
to 5, then 6,7,8 and go back to 7, and so on. Any other rhythm of course is
equally possible. The effect is one which never occurs in nature and which
could not be produced on stage. The events for a moment go backward. A
certain vibration goes through the world like the tremolo of the orchestra.37

Even at this early stage, Münsterberg was coming up with recipes for
experimental films. At any rate his suggestions were not appreciated. On
the contrary, film criticism, including Kracauer’s “psychological history
of film”, represented such tricks and uses of the material as superficial.
Kracauer, for instance, considered “one-turn-one-pictures”, with which
Fritz Arno Wagner created the jerky movements of the vampire’s coach
in Murnau’s Nosferatu, a frivolous effect: “It is noteworthy that such an
amount of picture sense and technical ingenuity served the sole purpose
of rendering horrors.”38 For Münsterberg, in the specific case of film it was
not about mirroring emotions, but of transmitting them.
In experimental films, manipulating material is the prerequisite for
experimenting with transmitting states or feelings. The question of the
conditions of human seeing always arises, but so does the question of the
possibilities of extending or destroying human emotionality through new
experiences of seeing. In the fiction film these technological tricks are indeed
more or less subsumed under the course of a narratable story and a surface
216  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

iconography, but they nonetheless always have a decisive effect on the style
and effect of a film in the cinema. It would seem that the most reliable people
to be able to analyze films as films would be trance specialists and test
subjects from the psycho-technological laboratories. Like Münsterberg, Maya
Deren, in her examinations of suggestibility and possession, also studied
the basics of film technology, which lie outside sociology, in the textbooks
of psychiatrists, formulating her film theses as a psycho-physicist: “Ideas
without an accompanying affect do not act suggestively; or, one might put
it this way – the greater the emotional value of an idea, the more contagious
or suggestive it is…”39 …and the better the transmission.
Deren’s most important reference, Eugen Bleuler, also described, in
his natural history of the soul, how important affect is as a medium for
transmitting an idea.

The adult cannot remain cheerful among mourners, not because of the
ideas underlying mourning, but because of the perceived expressions of
affect. The fact that related ideas might also be suggested along with the
affect is self-evident in the close connection between the two and in the
influence on logic by affect, quite unrelated to the fact that it may well
be the goal of the mechanism to transmit ideas as well. 40

The alliance between the technology of experimental psychology and that

of emotionalizing film, which is described in both historical and practical
terms in Münsterberg’s book, is part of a larger context of a revolution in
perception, which began with the investigation of the nervous functions.
Cinema is only one kind of relativized experience in this context, one for
the poor, or for everyone. Münsterberg reverts back to the terminology of
the neo-Kantian in order for the extension of the world in the cinema not
to appear as a confusion of consciousness:

But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is

probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and
which we have understood from its psychological conditions. The massive
outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and
causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness.
The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the
ease of musical tones. 41

While Münsterberg found himself under political fire in real life, because he
opposed the American entry into war and intervened for a “Nordic alliance”,
Psycho -Technology 217

he remained a scientific servant of the state in his media analysis. Instead

of giving reasons to consider the susceptibility of the masses to suggestion
in the darkness of projection and agreeing with the chorus of critics of
the new medium, he felt competent enough as a lab director, in the joy of
discovering that the soul is as cinematomorphic as its depiction, to tackle
the question of how to channel national feelings.

The fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on
the screen is established. The high degree of their suggestibility during
those hours in the dark may be taken for granted. Hence any wholesome
influence emanating from the photoplay must have an incomparable
power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national soul. […] The
people still has to learn the great difference between true enjoyment
and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and the mere tickling of the
senses. 42

Certainly Münsterberg himself firmly believed that national feelings would

some day be a matter of media and the psycho-technicians. The Americans
did not appreciate him for having described for them the knowledge and
the fundamental techniques of forming a national soul that he, as a proper
American, carefully distinguished from the spirit of a people and the mass
tickling of the sense organs. The course of national cinema in America
in fact ran quite differently than Münsterberg had envisioned it, and the
necessary nationalism was prescribed more by the Production Code of
1930 than by aesthetic training in Münsterberg’s sense. All over the world,
however, psychologists, physiologists, and soon even chemists at all the
most important conferences would take up the technological reproduc-
ibility of sensations and feelings as the order of business. For Münsterberg
this all came too late. He did not survive the attacks on his person, his
research, and his lab work, and he died in December 1916, at least without
having to witness the US entry into the war personally.
5. Psycho-Reflexology

We sometimes cry when we catch sight of an object, not because this object
generates a sad feeling in and of itself, but because it reminds us of a dead friend
through an association.
– Vladimir Bekhterev, 1913

Feelings and Emotions

In October 1927 at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio a symposium was

held under the title “Feelings and Emotions.” The occasion was the inaugura-
tion of a new psychological laboratory, which, as a brand new institution,
was being housed together in one building with the chemists. The lists of
those lecturing was impressive. In the volume that was published shortly
thereafter of the lectures, all the great men – and Margaret Washburn as
the only woman – of experimental psychology were represented, including
Pierre Janet from Paris, Alfred Adler from Vienna, Edouard Claparède from
Geneva, the Hamburg institutional director William Stern, the physiologist
Walter Bradford Cannon from the Harvard University Medical School, and
from Leningrad the old reflexologist Vladimir Makhailovich Bekhterev.1 On
the program were 34 lectures by scientists who belonged to the avant-garde
of psychology and who represented the second generation of the classic
school: Karl Bühler as a student of Ebbinghaus, David Katz as a student
of Georg Elias Müller, Adler as the fallen student of Freud. The whole was
under the auspices of James McKeen Cattell, Wilhelm Wundt’s very first
assistant in Leipzig.2
Barely 50 years after setting up Wundt’s first psychological laboratory,
a time when psychology schools and methods differentiated themselves,
specialized, and fought with and against Wundt, the enemy factions recon-
ciled in late autumn in Ohio. But what seems to be ripe for filming in this
scenery, the strolls through the autumn foliage, an international exchange
between scientists, the reconciliation of the different schools, is science
fiction. First of all there are contradictory reports of who exactly was in
Ohio. William Stern merely sent an article from Hamburg, and all that is
known about Pierre Janet is that he had spoken in Princeton, Philadelphia,
and at Columbia University a year earlier as he was on his way back from a
series of guest lectures in Mexico about the “Psicología de los sentimientos.”
Bekhterev, whose visit Ellenberger seeks to authenticate,3 was in the process
220  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of being politically sidelined at the time, and in 1927 in the Soviet Union
this meant much more than a travel ban.
What is certain is that the Wittenberg Symposium in 1927 was one of the
last great international psychological congresses before the Second World
War. It is also clear that the topic “Feelings and Emotions” was so explosive
that the National Research Council in Washington supported the sympo-
sium. The invitations and the interest of the speakers show that the problem
of feelings and sensations was the focus of neurological and psychological
research all over the world. What we can see from the contributions is that
the theories of how to explain, measure, control, and regulate emotions
were still quite diffuse. It is clear that there were certain convergences in
the discussions in Ohio. It is also clear that one person was definitively not
invited: the inconvenient Sigmund Freud. “Feelings and emotions” were no
longer available to simple therapeutic or cultural critical work. At the time,
Freud was writing Civilization and its Discontents, expressing doubt that
a strictly physiological description could do justice to the historical and
cultural networks in which emotions are differentiated. For this reason he
advises starting from associations, images, and representations in order to
infer from this the hidden, underground world of feelings.

It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to

describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible – and I am
afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of characteriza-
tion – nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content which
is most readily associated with the feeling. 4

In Ohio it was exactly the ideational content that was suppressed. Shortly
before the lights had gone out in Europe – to borrow a documentary film
title from Alexander Hammid – before the various fascist systems could
practically demonstrate that they could stabilize their power in a targeted
manner through mass mobilization of certain feelings, the scientists were
attempting to find their way in the darkness of “feelings and emotions.”
They wanted to get from describing and systematizing feelings and sen-
sations in the laboratory to inducing and regulating these feelings. The
symposium at Wittenberg College represented an international brainstorm,
in which psychology gathered together its practical clout in order to be
able to promise that they could direct emotionalized bodies in the future,
physiologically, pedagogically, and even aesthetically. The alliance with
chemistry expressed in the new architecture of Wittenberg College would
in fact determine the immediate future of psychology and psychiatry.
Psycho -Reflexology 221

In 1927, however, there were still quite different concepts of artif icial
emotionalization.
It is possible that Bekhterev was not in Ohio in October, 1927, but his
lecture was definitely given. In it he presented a proposal for a linked system
in which nerves and apparatuses, metabolism and chemistry would be
amalgamated beyond the individual body. Feelings are the measurable signs
of this interconnection. Bekhterev’s proposal, which he had worked out in
parallel to the first effective mass use of the press in the second half of the
nineteenth century and the significant use of the press and film in the First
World War, marked the aesthetic concepts of many avant-garde artists in
Russia, then in the Soviet Union, during the tens and twenties. Meyerhold’s
theater of biomechanics, in which bodily expression simulated and induced
mental activities as the primacy of the “external”, Eisenstein’s montage of
attractions, Kuleshov’s coordinate system of feelings for film, or Vertov’s
kinoki concept are directly or indirectly based on Bekhterev’s research and
are inconceivable without his medial turn in reflexology. With his lecture
in Ohio Bekhterev was attempting to establish transatlantic contact. He
directed his message at those to whom it would concern, due to their own
research: the physicians surrounding Walter B. Cannon from Harvard, this
“shadow community” who had also begun to examine not only individual
organs, but connections and relations between physiological circumstances
and homeostasis within complex physiological systems.5 Emotions, which
had always been considered an infraction into the controlled experiment in
laboratory medicine, were now to be seen as signs and signals of an affective
interaction, as information about the states of the body! Bekhterev wanted
to place his biomedial vision in the context of this research. It came, like
Münsterberg’s proposal ten years earlier, too early for science and too late
for the author.

The Ends of Paranoia

Whoever experiments must also take into consideration that his hypothesis
might get confirmed. Vladimir Mikhailovich’s death becomes a legend,
like in a Kleistian biography, at the moment that his life comes to its heroic
highpoint, and at the same time it falls into the grotesque. In December
1927, when the great old man of Russian hypnosis and reflexology, who was
now over seventy, was being celebrated in Moscow at the First All-Union
Congress of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists, he unexpectedly got a
summons from Stalin to pay him a medical visit. Bekhterev diagnosed him:
222  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

paranoia. Following this Stalin had him poisoned on the very same night
with two specially prepared ice cream desserts.6 Daniil Kharms made the
story famous in Soviet literature:

So the professor’s wife was sitting drinking coffee. Suddenly a ring. What’s
that? – A parcel for you.
The professor’s wife was really pleased; smiling all over her face, she
thrust a tip into the postman’s hand and was soon unwrapping the parcel.
She looked in the parcel and saw an urn of ashes, with a message: ‘Here-
with all that remains of you spouse.’7

Bekhterev, who added a “von” to his last name in German, was a celebrity
in international psychiatry8 until he was murdered, and the memory of
his name for the western world became reduced to a disease of the bone
marrow, which results in a stiffening of the spine. In the east his name
remained current because one of the most experimental clinics for nerv-
ous diseases is named after him, which is familiarly referred to as “the
Bekhterev” to this day.9 Alongside Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, his teacher,
and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, his lifelong rival, Bekhterev is considered the
founder of Russian reflexology. The comparison with Pavlov’s working
method, strictly concentrated on the physiology of the nerves, does not quite
do justice to the grandiose vision of a unity of all sciences of the human
being and its multiple relationships that Bekhterev wanted to realize in
his Psychoneurological Institute. Because Bekhterev’s experiments and
proposals are almost completely unknown, at least in West Germany, but
nonetheless represent the missing link in a neurological media history,
because they so decidedly influenced the arts and artists in the Soviet Union
and then also in the western world, and because they unexpectedly link the
experiments of the tens and twenties to the later cybernetic experiments of
the sixties, I will present them here, at least to the degree that they affect
an archaeology of the cinema.
Bekhterev had studied neurophysiology in Paris with Charcot, experi-
mental psychology with Wundt in Leipzig, brain anatomy with Paul Emil
Flechsig, and, like Sechenov and Pavlov, had worked in the psychological
laboratory of Carl Ludwig before becoming professor of psychiatry in
Kazan in 1885.10 The condition that he took on for his appointment at Kazan
was to set up a psycho-physiological laboratory in the classical Leipzig
style: with a pneumograph, a reflexograph, a reflexometer, an apparatus
for measuring brain volume, and a Hipp’s chronograph for measuring
psychic processes. This equipment was standard in the laboratories that
Psycho -Reflexology 223

were founded all over the world by Wundt students toward the end of the
nineteenth century.11
In 1884, when Bekhterev was Flechsig’s associate at the University Nerve
Clinic, the lawyer Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber had just been admitted, whose
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness appeared in German in 1906, which formed
the basis for Freud’s Psychoanalytic Comments on an Autobiographical Ac-
count of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia paranoids).12 Schreber’s memoirs as
“Iatrogenic (i.e., professional) psychosis”13 made it possible to see the mirror
inversion, the feedback between the systematic delusions of psychiatrists
and patients, and Bekhterev’s later misjudgment of this is thought to have
laid the groundwork for his abrupt end. Schreber’s memoirs, as a view to
the dark side, or better yet, the inner side of brain anatomy, would serve to
set the protocol for what was researched in Leipzig under Flechsig.

God to start with is only nerve, not body, and akin therefore to the hu-
man soul. But unlike the human body, where nerves are present only in
limited numbers, the nerves of God […] have in particular the faculty
of transforming themselves into all things of the created world; in this
capacity they are called rays.14

Bekhterev’s system of neuroscience forms an odd counterpart to Schreber’s

madness, it is also based on assuming a ubiquity conveyed by nerves, in the
space and intoxication of which trans-personal forms of communication
and transmission occur.
Schreber’s and Bekhterev’s constructions are both the flip side of the
new psychological and neurological sciences, which had taken it upon
themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century to experimen-
tally fragment the human body. Anyone combining what they analyzed
in interdisciplinary paranoia could recognize the vision of a technically
guided, emotionalized, and rhythmically moved human-machine corpus.
Among the scientif ic parallel worlds that dissected these bodies in a
sensory and motor sense and – as can be seen then in 1895 – made them
cinematomorphic, is the brain research that Bekhterev did with Flechsig
in Leipzig in 1884 as well as Wundt’s experimental examination of the
processes of attention and memory and of “sensations, (of the question of
‘psychophysics’ strictly speaking)”, which was the majority of his work in
the laboratory.15 At the same time, Londe was refining chronophotography
in Paris in order to systematize neurology according to the traces found on
the body’s surface, and in the Bois de Boulogne Demeny was putting on a
suit with metal strips on the side in order to record movement as ergonomic
224  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

data. The transformation of the body in the signal system was in full gear
everywhere, which would lend itself well to broadcast news technology.
Ever since there have been methods of brain anatomy “to take apart the
organ with its billions of ganglion cells and nerve conductors, mechanical
observations of mental appearances have been recognized by science.”16
They are supposed to serve to direct the tributaries in their ever more
mobile existence and also to guide them morally. Brain specialists hoped “to
provide a physiological foundation for ethics […] in order to be able to base
law on this whenever possible”, as Flechsig suggested in his rector’s speech
in 1894.17 At the end of the nineteenth century neurology was asserting itself
directly as a science of power.
Bekhterev, who had studied at all of the centers of this European
neuropower, began to link hysteria, hypnosis, and suggestibility research
on the one hand with nerve-physiology and brain-anatomy on the other.
He examined unconscious mental activity with laboratory apparatuses,
with which he undertook to check and regulate crazy thoughts. And like
Bleuler, Bateson, Deren, or Rouch, he examined hypnosis and suggestibility
as historical and social phenomena.
One of the Bekhterev’s first great cases was that of the sect founder
Kondrat Malyovany, whom he had described in the study Suggestion and
its Role in Social Life. In this encyclopedic examination of historical mass
illusions, mass hallucinations, and mass possessions, in which Bekhterev
investigated the psychopathological background of religious and political
group dynamics, Malyovanism stands in a long series of psychopathologies
between medieval demon possession and modern mass panic. Bekhterev
did not settle for any psychiatric judgment “of primary madness or of para-
noia”,18 but reconstructions, in “numerous examinations” with Malyovany,
the system of mad perception, although he was less interested in a clear
diagnosis than in the way to stimulate and convey Malyovany’s thoughts,
with which he wanted to account for the relations between consciousness,
nerves, and their collective interconnection.
Not only in his perception, but also in Malyovany’s movements, in his “de-
cisive gestures”, his “restless speech”, the “trembling” of his hands, Bekhterev
discovered affective feedback that extended beyond the person of the sect
leader. His attacks “of trembling or shaking” while preaching led to “some
of those present, namely the women, also coming down with convulsions
or cramps.”19 Bekhterev judged the different expressions of Malyovanian
possession according to Charcot’s system of hysteria.20 Unlike at Salpêtrière,
however, and similar to how Deren will describe Haitian possession in
contrast to clinical hysteria, Bekhterev diagnoses the states not as a sign
Psycho -Reflexology 225

of individual psychopathology, but describes them as symptoms of social

states and social networks.
Like Bleuler, Bateson, Deren, or Rouch, Bekhterev was also a commuter
between two worlds: the world of the European natural sciences and the East
Eureopean world with its multi-spiritualist cultures and states of conscious-
ness, which he was also familiar with from his medical practice. Although he
had studied trance techniques, hypnosis, and the lessons of systematizing
them at Salpêtrière, in Russia Bekhterev drew a theoretical cordon sanitaire
around his research on hypnosis by precisely demarcating it against the
traditional shamanistic cures that are so similar to hypnosis. As an inorodčy,
a non-Russian in the intelligentsia, he had good reason not to dare to go near
the fringes of science. Possession and shamanism, which were epidemic in
the Russian past and present as Bekhterev described them in 1905, were
supposed to be cured by the systematic medical form of suggestion.21 Only
by institutionally differentiating suggestion from clinically induced hypnosis
and the practices of shamanism could there be a clean division between
spirits and spirit, between madness and science, between what was examined
as “mental over-inoculation” in archaic mass hysteria and the technological
news systems, which would soon be called media and mass media.
Hypnosis as a therapeutic technique belongs to the clinical focal points
of Bekhterev’s work. His therapy program for alcoholics, whom he treated
with hypnosis, were internationally recognized innovations.22 Since 1893
he had been teaching hypnotic procedures at the Psychoneurological
Institute. Like Charcot’s lessons, Bekhterev’s hypnosis lectures were not
only attended by students and doctors, but also by the local public in St.
Petersburg. At this time Bekhterev developed the foundations of a new and
universal theory of the human mind. At least by 1902, due to the results of
his research on “conductors in the brain and the marrow”, Bekhterev was
opposing the various psycho-physiological theories with his new concept
of a “biopsychology”, which outlines the most important strategy of his
research and therapies.

The error of all […] teachers consists in the attempt to fathom the es-
sence of things speculatively, while the task of true science does not lie in
investigating the essence of things itself, but is geared toward pursuing
the mutual relationships between appearances.23

Making relations, rather than essence, the object of science was the episte-
mological turn from which Bekhterev formed the basis of an avant-garde
science of the human being.
226  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Everything visionary, however, first had to hold up to psychological

experimentation. Bekhterev solved the problem of mental relations in
the light of cellular physiology and impulse transmission by assuming a
universal energy that represents a medium of general influence in and
between all things and living beings:

… that the world surrounding us therefore presents itself to a certain

degree as active medium filled with energy, that furthermore the me-
dium, in whatever form we might want to conceive of it, can be modified
under the influence of the active principles of energy, and that in this way
the entire visible exterior world owes its emergence to the effectivity of
energy within a medium, which is as unfamiliar to us in its essence as
energy is itself.24

Bekhterev could infer this energy based on experiments in artificial growth,

in which dissimilar substances entered into mutual effect. Furthermore, he
had discovered “action streams” in the peripheral and central nerves, which
also pointed to a general energy. Incidentally, due to the same experiments
Bekhterev held the view that evolution was not driven by selection, but by
the polymorphous creative powers in organisms to form something new
and to learn.25 Only eighty years later will neurobiologists again introduce
an epistemological turn with similar theses.26
Bekhterev examined the circumstances and functions of transmission
of this world energy, the carrier and director of which would be the central
nervous system in higher organisms. In contrast, for example, to Dubois-
Reymond, who attempted to prove that the flow of nerves was “animal
electricity”, Bekhterev describes energy as a principle, which equally encom-
passes material, electro-chemical changes and the “subjective states that
are commonly designated as mental appearances or inner appearances.”27

Here, however, it must be emphasized that in our use of the term ‘energy’
we are in no way associating this with the common usage of ‘physical
energy,’ as is currently assumed. In our view, the energy or force for the be-
ing is nothing other than an active principle disseminated in the nature of
the universe. We know nothing more of the essence of this active principle,
which appears as the milieu of the global aether, but we see the expressions
themselves in the constant conversion of substance all around us.28

This theory of a universal transformability of the world was Bekhterev’s

answer to Herbert Spencer as well, whose theses were being fiercely debated
Psycho -Reflexology 227

in Russia around the turn of the century.29 Bekhterev extended Spencer’s

neo-Darwinian thesis, that the activity of the nervous system was an ad-
justment of internal circumstances to external ones, by inverting it. “This
definition, which has nearly become accepted, forgets that there is also a
modification of external conditions, that is, an accompanying adjustment
of external circumstances to internal circumstances.”30 This thesis of the
reciprocal effect of nerve impulses set a precedent for the orientation of
Petersburg artists toward reception physiology. The concept of “extensions
of man”, as McLuhan designated the electronic media as an extension of the
nervous system into the surroundings, has one of its most radical origins
in Russian psycho-reflexology.
In his book about suggestion, Bekhterev distinguishes between an ac-
cessible consciousness and an inaccessible one, which he assumed to be
collective. Although the technical terminology of contemporary psychology
suggested it differently, Bekhterev did not allow himself to designate this
inaccessible thing as the “unconscious”, since it remained unconscious only
for the subject itself, but not for objective psychology with its apparatuses,
measuring devices, and observations. Objective psychology can show that
an object of perception does not land in the “personal” consciousness in the
state of suggestion, “but in other areas of our psyche […], which can be called
the collective consciousness.”31 The concept “collective consciousness” is the
basis for a psychological model that assumes a connection among subjects in
which, alongside pure language and conscious communication – as is evident
in the model of the telephone – all sorts of roaring is transmitted that no one
understands. These transmissions connect every individual personally and
directly with the “collective consciousness.” The individual is distracted and
scattered by it, but also socialized and cultivated or subjected to suggestions:

In such cases the external impression passes by our personal conscious-

ness, thus managing to reach the sphere of the psyche without our ‘ego.’
In this case it is not through the main entrance, but through the backdoor,
so to speak, that it lands directly in the inner chambers of the mind. […]
Suggestion is thus the direct over-inoculation of certain mental states
from person to person.32

If Bekhterev’s examination of the paranoia of Malyonvanism ends with the

conclusion that mass suggestion has its origin in masses of suggestions, this
is only seemingly a tautology. In fact he founded the first mass psychology
that attempts to show that the reason for mass hysteria is not a single mad
leader, but physiological and cultural structures that provide the means for
228  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

psychic mechanisms to run according to laws that can be studied objectively,

structures that make the “over-inoculation” of ideas possible. In 1905 this did
not result in discounting madness or possession as religious deviances, but
in studying them as a social phenomenon. At the time Bekhterev’s diagnosis
was enacted as an anti-tsarist demand to enlighten the Russian people, who
were drowning in misery and alcohol. In 1927, when Stalin showed that
he thought he had conquered the political-bureaucratic apparatus of the
Soviet Union as a single leader, the diagnosis of the intrepid psychiatrist was:
Even Stalin is just part of the apparatus, despite all despotism he is just its
secretary. The diagnosis of paranoia was thus not at all meant personally, but
was a subjective slight for Stalin, even if in the name of objective psychology.
In the 1970s a manuscript turned up in Leningrad, long believed to have
been lost, of Bekhterev’s report that he had presented as a lecture to the
All-Union Congress “32 Hours before His Death.” In it Bekhterev presents
his “psychotherapeutic triad”: “explanatory lectures in the groups, group
hypnosis, and treatment by auto-suggestion.”33 Fifty years after his death,
Bekhterev was rediscovered in the socialist countries as the one who had
invented group therapy, before any American or French researcher. The
jubilation was mixed with slightly revanchist undertones in the Cold War
competition between psychiatric technicians, and it was affirmed, against
all the anarchy of group formation, that Bekhterev had laid the founda-
tions “for our psychotherapy, which respects the social determinacy of
human beings”, and therefore he was on the side of order.34 But it was not
quite so simple. Bekhterev viewed a person’s health as a question of the
functioning exchange between people and their surroundings. Reflexology
is fundamentally an ecology of relations.35
The honor given to Bekhterev in the German east could be traced back
above all to his attempts to provide therapy to alcoholics. His system-
atic proposals and his neurologically based vision of collective processes,
however, remain without comment. The mixture of nerve physiology and
research on possession, which was only socially acceptable under the term
“psychic infection”,36 the numerous transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary
experiments, and also the medical self-reflection of reflexology seem to
have made Bekhterev suspect for all time and under all regimes.

Personality Changes

By the turn of the century, in order to create a secure basis for his research
and his researchers, Bekhterev had already planned for a private institute
Psycho -Reflexology 229

“with a whole series of scientific disciplines for general research on the

personality, the training and hygiene of the mental sphere, and also to
set up courses to study the prophylaxis and cure of nervous and mental
diseases.”37 The institute had to attend to a serious lack in tsarist society.
“Due to the enormous number of attendees, it was necessary after a few
years to transform the courses of the Psychoneurological Institute into a
large private university (the first in Russia at the time), already accredited,
which comprised up to 8,000 students and was not inferior in either the
quantity nor the quality of the teaching staff to any Russian state university.
Here many people received their education who would not be accepted
into a state university under the current circumstances, which naturally
provoked the reluctance of the state professors and the government.”38
Those excluded from universities in the current circumstances in
St. Petersburg were, for example, women, who were already working in
Bekhterev’s laboratories as researchers and experiment leaders before the
turn of the century. Also excluded or subjected to strict quotas were Jews,
for instance one Solomon Derenkovsky, Maya Deren’s father, or one Denis
Kaufmann, who later became the film director Dziga Vertov. Bekhterev’s
private initiative was necessary to constitute critical research and academic
public life in St. Petersburg: a legal space for minorities, which was also open
to artists, writers, and musicians. Under the tsar the Psychoneurological
Institute became a center of political critique and student unrest. Bekhterev
had defended civil liberties from the position of a nerve physiologist and
in 1906 (in contrast to Pavlov) advocated for academic autonomy without
compromise against the threat that the minister of defense would appoint
positions in the medical academy. In 1905 he wrote a general assessment of
living conditions in Russia from a psychiatric point of view as a manifesto
against suppression in schools, in the family and military, against prohibition
through legal practices, against the political police and the death penalty.
What he made available was the Personality and the Social Conditions of its
Development and Health, but no longer in the sense of a bourgeois individual,
but as part of a larger context of stimulus and reaction.

The term personality thus contains, in addition to inner unity and

coordination, a certain activity in relation to the outer world, which is
grounded in the individual processing of external stimuli. […] Mental
life is not only the sum of subjective experiences, but always also gives
expression to a certain group of objective appearances. It is these objec-
tive appearances around which the personality enriches its external
social surroundings.39
230  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Bekhterev read the whole manifesto at the congress of psychiatrists and

neurologists, which had only been permitted by the Minister for Interior
Affairs on the condition that no topics outside the field be addressed.
Political movements, however, were not outside the professional concerns
of Bekhterev. The intentions of Vladimir Mikhailovich, who also wrote
plays, were exalted beyond any doubt: “…in Russia, in a country that is
backward and uncultivated in many respects, a man of science cannot get
around […] having to provide answers to various questions of the sick social
entity.”40 160 million people lived in Imperial Russia, for whom there were
350 psychiatrists and neurologists. Bekhterev demanded what was not self-
evident: health care for the mentally ill. In 1905, when “enormous violence
rolled over the whole empire as a reaction to the existing order of things,
the unsustainability of which […] was imposing itself on the population”, 41
reflexology showed itself as a mass psychology of the Napoleonic spirit:

Why do the masses move inexorably at a mere wave of the leader […],
why does everything strive toward the same goal as if on command?
[…] However one might think about this, and whether or not one wishes
to accept special ‘psychic waves’ that simultaneously extend over great
masses of people and are even supposed to be capable of a moving
backwards under certain circumstances, what cannot be doubted as
the bases of the whole appearance are the powerful effects of reciprocal
suggestion in masses of people. […] Such mutual suggestion leads to a
kind of ‘electrical charge’ of singular individuals, whose sensations now
increase into extraordinary tension. 42

In the “psychic waves” and “electrical charges” are the electrified media nets
without which the leaders of the uprisings of 1905 and 1917 could not have
brought their commands to the masses, presented as an ideal revolutionary
model from the control room of brain physiology. Bekhterev’s scientifically
defined agitation lends the artistic and dramaturgical metaphors of the
revolution a neurological foundation. The “shock theater”43 of Meyerhold
and Eisenstein invoked this research and and the concept of a personality
that enters into contact and exchange with its social surroundings when
something is communicated. This concept could only be conveyed with
great effort or incompletely without the corresponding reflex “social theory.”
Some German revolutionary theater artists were indignant. Piscator wrote:

In an article published in the German press by Potemkin director S.M.

Eisenstein, he explained that he saw the task of the ‘Potemkin’ film as
Psycho -Reflexology 231

electrifying, jolting the spectator. If that really were the task of revolution-
ary drama, the effect could be just as easily achieved by putting on a
boxing match. 44

Brecht in fact adopted boxing as a dramaturgical model, and Vertov will

show how a boxing match would have to be presented in a cinematically
revolutionary way so that it took apart bourgeois consciousness in the
process of reception. Piscator was simply lacking psycho-physical insights.
In the Soviet Union, however, they varied as well. Eisenstein’s idea of a reflex
structure differs from that of Vertov’s as a central nerve system does from
one that is mapped in a net-like way.
The methodology of the general, which Bekhterev really was, might even
have helped the tsar prolong his rule, quite in the sense of “sympathy for
the devil.” For Bekhterev added to his analysis of power in the age of mass
movements an instruction manual of collective unconscious electrification.
Far from idealistically dreaming up the liberation of the people as enlight-
enment and maturity, Bekhterev published power-bestowing knowledge
beyond good and evil, to whom it may concern:

Anyone who spends a lot of time with the people and has his own experi-
ences knows what the value of logical persuasion is. In the best case it
only has a very slow effect, while suggestion through encouragement or
command almost always leads quickly and surely to the goal. 45

The tsar did not wish to hear anything about experimentally tested propa-
ganda. In 1917 the Psychoneurological Institute was once again the center
of the uprisings. First the new rulers appreciated the research: under the
Bolsheviks the institute was indeed dependent on state subsidies, but was
developed further. On 32½ dessiatines of land within the city of Leningrad,
ten more buildings were constructed. Bekhterev published journals and
organized congresses on special psycho-neurological topics such as develop-
ing personality, criminology, the psycho-physiology and reflexology of
work, which are very similar to Münsterberg’s psycho-technology. For the
third edition of his General Principles of Human Reflexology in 1925, the
“second after the Revolution”, Bekhterev’s work is officially recognized in
the foreword as the consummation of the history of psychology. Bekhterev’s
teaching on associative reflexes “paves the way to constructing an objective
teaching of the human personality.”46 The Bolsheviks, inspired by thoughts
of a mass empire that could be uniformly governed by general electrifica-
tion, welcomed the attempt to research the nervous system as the state basis
232  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

in regulatable personality. In the model of the neurologists who conceived

the nervous circuitry according to the idea of the telegraph system, they
saw their own strategies in good hands.

Ways of Behaving

The significance of Bekhterev’s collective reflexology for an early history of

film, however, is not only based on the idea of a general medium of transmis-
sion that affectively links the body beyond its boundaries. 47 What is more
important in terms of methodology is the reflexological principle that the
entire human being in its social multiplicity only gets access to observations
from outside. Processes “that we have always called ‘mental’”48 are only
recognized correctly through objective scientific observations “with their
strict methods, with their exact apparatuses and measurements.”49
In critical comparing the psychological schools and laboratories,
Bekhterev regrets that “self-observation is the reigning, if not the only
method of research”,50 and that even Münsterberg and Ebbinghaus ulti-
mately had prescribed introspection. If he differentiates precisely in this
respect between memory and remembrance, Bekhterev f inds himself
surprisingly closer to psychoanalytic methods than to psychological
ones: “Experience shows […] that self-observation is not even sufficient
to recognize one’s own psychic life.”51 It was appropriate, then, to draw
conclusions from experimental observations regardless of how test subjects
found or sensed their states. “Free from efforts and attempts to intrude into
the subjective world of dreams and fantasy, psycho-reflexology gives us
prose in place of poetry, for it observes the neuro-physiological functions
exclusively from the outside.”52 For ethical and presumably political reasons,
Bekhterev also criticizes conclusions by analogy in subjective psychology,
with which conclusions are drawn in the introspection of a subject about
another and thus about general experiences. This methodology precisely
takes for granted a general human consciousness, which does not exist all
according to the findings of objective psychologists: “We deny the right
of subjectivist psychologists indiscriminately to extend, by using analogy
with themselves, the conclusion of their self-observation to the subjective
world of others and particularly to the subjective world of children, of
psychopaths, and of animals.”53
In protest, therefore, against a psychological truth that had already been
elevated to a dogma of a general human psyche before all research and
experimentation, and that already acclaimed to know how a subject had
Psycho -Reflexology 233

to be attuned, Bekhterev had founded reflexology – the science that, due

to its history in the twentieth century, became a synonym for fantasies
of programming and consolidation: in behaviorism as a science of social
techniques of adjustment and in the adaptation of Pavlov’s theories of condi-
tions reflexes for a totalitarian reason of state. Psycho-reflexology in the
sense of its initial founder, however, would have been concerned with the
differences of individual experience, with measurable personality rather
than the measure of the human being, because it examined not the essence,
but the conditions of its emergence, unfolding, and development on the basis
of a general principle of transmission. And a principle of transmission is
general if it is binding not only beyond philosophical frameworks, but also
beyond anthropomorphic ones, for human and animal, sane and insane,
protists, starfish, and voiceless infants. Psycho-reflexology is thus capable of
scientifically demonstrating, in the middle of Communism, the inequality
and incomparability of human being and pig.
The subject can only recognize its conditionality or damage when it is
observed by an outside, an other, or by apparatuses that depict the states of
the self as estranged and reflected. The reflexological method analyzes emo-
tions as paths in the nervous circuit and in the general transfer of impulses,
discovering intersubjective relationships there. In contrast to traditional
psychology, in which “the goal of examining objective appearances was
to recognize the human soul”, reflexology explains “the raw relationships
to external influences or stimuli.”54 After the Revolution Bekhterev even
subsumed Marxism into reflexological knowledge: “Existence which deter-
mines consciousness” is the activity of associative reflexes that can become
visible as “(in reflexological terminology) human behavior.”55
Behavior is thus to be understood as the complex reactions of psycho-
physiological bodies to one another; reactions that the trembling, blushing,
or gasping individuals do not perceive in themselves, nor do they want to
perceive them from themselves. Reproduced technologically, however, they
can behave in relation to themselves.

Nerve Priming

In contrast to Freud, who, in order to found psychoanalysis, stopped

looking at hysterics and began listening to them, Bekhterev learned to
draw conclusions from observing patients in terms of the state of their
nerve conduction at the Salpêtrière. Even while still in Paris he began
to develop the foundations for a theory of personality as reflex science
234  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

from the correlations between disturbances of the nervous system and

the motor expressions observed. “The first attempts to approach the study
of personality objectively were made by me as early as 1885, when I was
studying traumatic psychoneuroses and hysteria.”56 In his assessment of
hysteria as the constriction of the field of consciousness, Bekhterev was
following Pierre Janet and finding himself not so far from Leon Solomons’s
and Gertrude Stein’s conclusion that hysteria is “a disease of attention.”
If in doing so Bekhterev was invoking Radin’s theory of hysteria as the
disintegration of personality, then this was not in the sense of a pathologi-
cal exceptional case, but as an appearance of collective, social lack. The
objective examination of hysterical symptoms only led to few, disturbed,
or wrongly connected nerve conductors.57
The study of nerve conduction was Bekhterev’s main focus during his time
in Leipzig. His handbook Conductors in the Brain and Marrow, published
in 1896, became a classic in the field, used as the basis for neurophysiology
even beyond the borders of German clinics. Bekhterev had written the first
edition in German, but already in 1899 the “second, completely revised, and
significantly expanded version”58 appeared, translated back into German
from the Russian and enhanced by the experiences had at the new labora-
tory in Kazan, but still paying its respects to Paul Emil Flechsig as teacher
and advisor for the work.
Wilhelm Wundt had also examined localizations of mental activity in
the cortex and described functional neuro-anatomical connections. His
theory that brain functions are different reactions to stimuli could also
have been considered the inspiration and initiation of Bekhterev’s concept
of association reflexes if Wundt had not made the jump from physiological
laws into mental ones in synthesizing the basic elements of neurology.
Wundt insisted that the individual components that could be examined
physiologically combined into complexes that represented more than the
sum of individual reactions, and out of which were formed the psychic
complexes, “consciousness” and “ego.” It was precisely this conclusion,
however, that Bekhterev would consider hasty, dismantling it on the editing
table of neuroanatomy.
Flechsig, who was only ten years older than Bekhterev, was the more
important teacher59 for him in Leipzig, and during his short stay there
the two of them carried out a formidable and certainly merciless series
of experiments together, especially on the brains of human embryos and
newborns, which they got from God knows where. By means of successive
myelinogenesis of the nerve cords they represented the development stages
of the brain – Flechsig’s “myelinogenetic methods” – and localized the
Psycho -Reflexology 235

“associative areas” in the nerves, which grow up in the end to be the organs
of mental activity.60 To this day, the representation of corporal sensation is
localized in the areas designated by Flechsig.61 Flechsig had outlined certain
areas in the brain as “spheres of bodily feeling”, in which the shape of the
body was illustrated. As an inner mirror relationship, this constituted the
“consciousness” in physiological reflexivity, in which the system of inner
perception is the first area that develops and with the the self-feeling of
every small child is more developed than motor self-control.62 Bekhterev
adopts this concept and its topology. From the correspondences he draws
the conclusion that all behavior is not simply the expression of mental
activity, but much more the mirror of all neurophysiological processes of
stimulus and reaction. Nonetheless, the idea that he has of the structure of
the conductors in the brain and marrow can be distinguished significantly
from that of Flechsig. Flechsig’s topography was passionately against the
democratization of the model of nerves in early research, which sought to
replace the idea of a hegemonic soul. “It is not the republic, but the monarchy
that is realized in the organization of the mental organs”, thought Flechsig.63
He had presented the coordination through associative centers as “com-
mand hierarchies of the fabric of the nerves.”64
Bekhterev’s studies, on the other hand, especially concentrate on those
tracts that run between the various nerve centers, convolutions, cores,
functional joints, as if the hierarchical, monarchic structure from Flech-
sig’s model of the brain wanted to be rhizomatically undermined by new
conductors. At any rate, determining some order in the nervous system,
in which “the individual fiber tracts in the marrow and the brain lie in
close contiguity without perceptible boundaries, often even commingling
[…] or form meshworks, even sometimes intersections”,65 is not an easy
task. Bekhterev viewed the “associative tracts” as “intrinsic fibers” that
internally interconnected the cells of the cerebellum or the cerebral cortex
like a “functional collectivization of its various fiber systems.”66 Bekhterev
structures the topology and functions of the brain as anarchy, against the
position of his teacher, until he, much later, can describe the “function of
the brain” as “the most important apparatus of relating in communication
with the outside world.”67
As a last relay in the communication between inner and outer, nerves and
surroundings, the question of transmission or contact between the nervous
tracts had to be explained. Around the turn of the century there were two
competing hypotheses: one that assumed the continuity of the nervous
networks as a fibrous mesh and the other being neuron theory, which,
following the research of Forel, His, and Ramón y Cajal, assumed discrete
236  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

singular cells between which an impulse was transmitted. Bekhterev de-

fended the neuron model for the brain. The nervous current, the quality of
which he could never explain, was to be understood as a series of successive,
discrete signals:

I consider it much more correct to conceive of the nervous current as if

it it were composed of a series of successive stimuli that each land in the
individually following members of a nervous tract for development.68

When Bekhterev began to develop a psychology on the basis of reflex,

the discovery of each new nerve connection, each new cervical area was
undiscovered territory in the topography of the body. Where before one
had assumed the amorphous soul, now there were functioning structures.
And so, as Bekhterev was assembling the reflexes, he was opening up new
opportunities to produce, manipulate, regulate, or destroy sensations and
relations. In this light it is possible to understand why Bekhterev’s concept
of personality as a connection of reflex complexes was such a productive
shock for the avant-garde of artists. The fact that the physical body and its
movements could be seen as material disclosure of the subtlest movements
and relations of nerves not only revolutionized the practice of acting, but
the entire apparatus of theater and the emerging cinema.

Reflex Arcs

Unlike Pavlov, who reduced the processes of perception to a pattern of

stimulus and reaction, Bekhterev researched the combinations of neuronal
microprocesses in order also to be able to understand thinking, speaking,
and remembering using the methodology of objective psychology. In the
last book that appeared during his lifetime, he designates reflexes as the
“correlative activity of individuals” in order to free them finally from the
connotation of passive interconnection.69 Acting is the traversing of reflex
arcs, and reflexology is meant to become a universal science, in which “the
social interrelations between human beings” would be analyzed.70
As an homage to Flechsig, Bekhterev called the combined nerve priming
“associative”, which includes “all our gestures, such as laughing, crying, and
other physical movements.” Association was also conceived in the logics of
neuronal priming: “Every impression, no matter how it is called up, leaves
a certain trace in the nerve centers that can be reanimated, then appear-
ing as as associative or psycho-reflex.”71 The topography of these traces is
Psycho -Reflexology 237

personal experience, life experience, on whose traces, which determine

and therefore alter the following reactions of the organism as external
stimuli, new experience are laid down as new physiological nerve tracts.
So every personality develops a unique combination of nerves according
to the experiences that it has.
Bekhterev considers the experiences inscribed in the body to be socially
transferable as well, for a tradition to be reproduced without the conscious-
ness of the carrier. The science of physiologically stored stimulus receptions
and their processing by experiences thus becomes cultural theory:

Here it is about a particular way of inheriting, to be called psychic inherit-

ance, which in any case contributes more to fixing psychic acquisition
in posterity than does the factor of physical heredity. The descendants
of a genius can die out, but his mental creations are taken up by many
and become fixed through psychic inheritance in those who come after
him, thus becoming the possession of a whole series of generations.72

Here at the very latest Bekhterev goes beyond what can be considered a
reflex arc in science today, which only inherited Pavlov’s coup from reflexol-
ogy. In nerve interconnections communication with the surroundings is
opened up as complex behavior, extended, and – this links Bekhterev with
the biologists and neurologists at Harvard – fed back: “the cortex of the
cerebrum, in association with lower centres, establishing a correlation of
the organism with the environment on the basis of individual experience.”73
Reflex tracts function through a physiological constraint as a storage
space. Thinking and remembering fall under these processes of correlation
that are interpreted and postponed with time. “The associative processes
influenced by operations of constraint often demand a significant time
interval until the reaction is triggered, so that in certain cases the reaction
can appear to be an independent appearance.”74 So what can be considered a
motor reflex is not only the act of speaking, but also complex operations like
giving speeches, reading letters, writing books, or earning money. This ex-
pansion of the understanding of reflex was of course contested.75 Bekhterev’s
hypothesis that “consciousness”, “ego”, and all personal activity were made
up of reflex combinations, which could be completely explained through
biochemical processes, was not entirely original. Bekhterev would have
been able to draw on, for example, the teachers of Freud as predecessors
of reflexology: even Brücke, Meynert, and Exner had seen the foundations
of the ego as a thinking subject in the reflexes and their connections in a
system of cortical tracts.
238  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

What was new in Bekhterev’s proposal was that he followed the path of
stimuli and reactions beyond any anthropomorphic framework. Thanks to
objective examination aided by apparatuses, a complex view of reflex inter-
actions in living creatures was opened up. In this case the cinematograph
is the aid to the objective psychologist. By enlarging motion, the camera
can make visible that the operations at the basis of nerve transmission are
the same in all living creatures:

Cinematic representation of the movements of plants produces, as is well

known, the impression of quick animal movements. […] we should see,
if our eye were constructed like a microscope, that growing stems and
roots execute groping movements, and, in any case, we should discover
prompt reactions as results of stimulation.76

Quite in the sense of Londe, the camera shows what the naked eye can-
not recognize. In the series of these tropisms, reflexology f inally also
places the behavior of human beings in those “complicated forms that
are conventionally described as acts.” These series of reflexes, which are
guided by a goal, “that is, by a stimulus”, can be traced back to “offense,
defense, concentration, and in certain cases to imitation and symbol-
ism.” Neurological modal and cinematic illustration prove in turn to be
complementary. They provide, if they transcend the unity of the single
individual, the same discrete basic signals, from which the movement of
life itself is composed.
“Feelings and emotions” are good examples of such reflex complexes.
Movements of an “emotional character” are called mimic reflexes in
Bekhterev’s systematics. They are only partly observable: for instance as
facial gesture, breaking out in a sweat, blushing, or speeding up the rate of
breath. Mimicry is “obviously a very complicated and peculiar association
of the motor, secretory, and blood vessel reactions of the organism, which
can be distinguished in their complexity from simple reflex movements.
Nonetheless, these appearances run exactly as mechanically as do ordinary
reflexes”,77 wrote Bekhterev in 1913, when he formulated psycho-reflexology
for the first time as a “teaching.” Psycho-reflexological methods show ex-
actly which physiological processes belong to an emotional complex. The
analysis of mimic movements is more complicated if the organic-reflex
movements appear as components of associated movements. The various
organic reactions were measured in Bekhterev’s laboratory according to
time, intensity, and in their phylogenetic and individual emergence, and
reflex mimicry was physiologically classified according to the perceiving
Psycho -Reflexology 239

surfaces that they originated from.78 More complex associative reactions

come into being through the fact that an external impulse, for instance a
message arriving, is linked to life experience, to the traces of experience
in the brain. In every laugh and in every cry can be seen a mimic dissolve
of our biography as bodily experience.
Obviously Bekhterev used photography at the Psychoneurological
Institute, but not serial photography or cinematography, which by then
was widely used in neurology. It is, however, possible that there are
archives in Bekhterev’s institute that have not yet been viewed. Unlike
Münsterberg, Bekhterev, who could have been an eyewitness to one of the
creative phases of cinema, was obviously not interested. But the theory
of technological illustration as reflex analysis or psycho-analysis can be
rediscovered in the works and kinoki manifestos of Dziga Vertov. Vertov
transformed Bekhterev’s thesis – that associated reflex movements are
supra-individual, non-anthropomorphic, and can be bridged and linked by
means of technological apparatuses – into film technique. In his Man with
a Movie Camera collective reflexology is realized in film.

Media or Homeostatic Processes

After Bekhterev had disassembled the personality into the discrete single
parts of its basic neuronal functions, he finally attempted to construct a
theory of relativity of the psychic process.

But if matter is a fiction, and only energy is real, there is no ground for
the contraposition of the psychic to the material, and vice versa, and we
have ask ourselves: Is it not possible to reduce psychic activity, too, to
physical energy?79

Only after he had taken the analysis of nerve connectors as far as the
methods of natural science allowed, and after he had reconstructed the
transmission qualities of the nerve tracts in the laboratory and clini-
cal practice and newly integrated them into his therapeutic forms did
Bekhterev publish his global theory of relations of a worldwide network
of nervous current, which might appear a metaphysical paranoia, but
he could actually prove the functions of all the individual connectors in
experiments. Bekhterev’s anarchism included the idea that vision was not
conceived as the world on a wire, but as a multiplicity of relations, which
animate reality as a flow of energy between parts, which are smaller than
240  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

electrons, and between complexes that are larger than the planetary
system.

In this way, also, the external world – of course, not that which we
perceive and imagine, but that which exists in reality –is subject to
the law of causality or, more accurately, to the laws of relations. And
when we prosecute our analysis to the end, we must acknowledge one
fundamental and first principle of all being, and this we call energy.
In the concept of energy we have the idea of various manifestations
of movement under the form of great masses […]. To the basis of this
movement, a basis which must be common to all phenomena of nature,
including ourselves as a part of the universe, we give the name universal
energy.80

In this universality energy is reminiscent of Schreber’s rays. Paranoia and

science always lay side by side.
Assuming a universal form of energy was nothing extraordinary at
the turn of the century. There were numerous models of nervous energy,
which were analogous to physical models and theories and were only
provisionally proposed in order to link up organic functions and mental
phenomena. Extending from Bergson’s philosophy of life, Pierre Janet had
proposed the “function de réel” as an effect of nervous energy on external
objects. Freud’s first neuron-machine model for the psyche, as he describes
it in Project for a Scientific Psychology, also runs with an energy that he
initially calls “quantity.” C.G. Jung’s somewhat later reform of the libido
as a form of energy also belong to these models.81 Bekhterev’s variant is
distinguished by letting the bodies simply become energy-transformers,
despite any Wagnerian tonic notes. When energy penetrates bodies, follows
reflex arcs, establishes new connections, and then moves on, it leaves
behind experiences as the relay of energy. “But people are, i.e., they must
be regarded as energy accumulators resulting from their past individual
experience and hereditary influences”,82 is written in Collective Reflexol-
ogy, the book that, as the second volume in the series “Contributions to
Mass Psychology” posthumously sent Bekhterev’s outrageous message
into the middle of Europe, to Halle. With his relativizing system of a world
energy, which is propagated by discrete impulses, as he had studied in
nerve stimuli, Bekhterev proposes a universal medium of transmission,
which at the same time conveys messages and links relations, which forms
personalities and at the same time turns them into the batteries for the
whole system. Neuronal circuits are linked to bio-social networks by
Psycho -Reflexology 241

apparatuses. Every transmission alters both the experiential structure

of the body and the energy structure of the surroundings. The nerve
impulses therefore meet the definition of signals, and the world-energy
that Bekhterev imagines is a network of messages that is far superior to
Siemens’s telegraph system, because it will one day process the structure
of the network itself. Bektherev’s mass psychology is a very early project
for a theory of technological media. Since there is a link between organs
of sense perception and expression by apparatuses, they also alter the
subjects of experience.
In 1927 in Ohio Bekhterev’s lecture on feelings and emotions begins
surprisingly dramatically. Suddenly and without warning, opium and
hashish clearly showed how emotional states can be inf luenced by
external means. These drugs produce euphoria, just as adrenaline can
trigger fears or other poisons can precipitate depression. Just as abruptly,
Bekhterev raises the next topic: krov, blood. “Thus we see that the basis
of these states designated as feelings and emotions is alterations in the
composition of the blood.”83 This opening is more than a simple nod to
the institutional reorganization of psychological research at Wittenberg
College in its merger with chemistry. Bekhterev had also emphasized the
role of metabolism as part of the universal energetic system in a variety
of passages in his General Principles of Human Reflexology. Not only is
the human being nourished through metabolism, but it is also connected
to the universal energy through the sense organs and the nerves. The
biochemical side of Bektherev’s research, however, has always only been
a subordinate part, and the fact that he opened his lecture this way gives
an indication of the actual addressee of the message. If Bekhterev makes
controlling somatic-mimetic reflexes by controlling blood composition
the secret topic of his lecture, extending the neuronal reflexology to
include chemical reflexology, it is clear that he, whether present or not,
was speaking to Walter Cannon, and that he was trying to position his
bio-social studies in the context of the biochemical experiments by
the physiologists at Harvard Medical School. In his lecture, Bekhterev
continues:

The glands can, and undoubtedly do, react to the chemical composi-
tion of the blood (chemical reflexes). Thus there is established a sort of
equilibrium between the various glands, due to the direct effect of the
chemical composition of the blood upon the chemical elements of the
glands themselves.84
242  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Using the word “equilibrium”, Bekhterev was speaking to what interested

him in Cannon’s research. Cannon had advanced the first thesis on ho-
meostatic processes in the human body and experimentally verified them.
Even the term homeostasis was his. Cannon was, on the one hand due
to his own research, which regarded the body as an ecological interac-
tive environment, and on the other as the teacher of the Mexican Arturo
Rosenblueth, with whom Norbert Wiener collaborated, the pioneer of
cybernetics on both the medical and biological side. In 1956 Wiener wrote
in his autobiography:

Walter Cannon, going back to Claude Bernard, emphasized that the

health and even the very existence of the body depends on what are
called homeostatic processes. […] That is, the apparent equilibrium of life
is an active equilibrium, in which each deviation from the norm brings
on a reaction in the opposite direction, which is of the nature of what we
call negative feedback.85

The first experiments on physiological feedback, which brought together

the physician Rosenblueth, the physiologist Cannon, and the mathemati-
cian Wiener, were, incidentally, those on the impressions of muscular
joints, body specific responses to the state of the organs in movement,
the old dancer problem, which Bekhterev had also and independently
researched and had described in his Objective Psychology.86 According to his
own statements he had been dealing with this topic for some time already.
“Since the beginning of the eighties, my attention has been focused on the
functions of equilibrium or of the organs serving static coordination, which
at the time was a question that had not been examined much.”87 The nerve
physiologist wanted to find this principle of equilibrium and balance in the
body for all bodily processes. Both Rosenblueth’s American experiments
and Bekhterev’s were aimed at researching nerves as control systems, in
order then to find out that they could be affected and, according to their
physiological surroundings, also modeled. From this developed the concept
of a neurology that would at the same time be social technology. Cannon
had examined the biochemical side of these processes and his studies
on voodoo death were meant to show what happens when homeostatic
systems are taken out of equilibrium by purely social actions, a curse in
this case.
In his lecture Bekhterev also explained that affective and emotional
reactions that were seemingly outdated phylogenetically, such as threat-
ening gestures, or even blushing or sweating, are also completely sensible
Psycho -Reflexology 243

reflexes since transmitting impulses between individuals were encour-

aged or obstructed by this. Even in social situation, intra-physiological
or inner-physiological control systems communicate with one another
in order to instigate the optimal exchange of energies. “Feelings and
emotions”, or “somatic-mimic reflexes” as they are called in Objective
Psychology, represent a complicated and delicate corporal system of com-
munication, and the individual need not know anything about in order
for it to work. In this context Bekhterev had advanced the thesis that
the corresponding reflex tracts or channels are not only so for biologi-
cal impulses and signals, but also social ones. “In the case of man the
sources of excitation are to be found not only in biological, but in the
social environment, especially the latter. It is these social excitations that
make man a bio-social being.”88
In the twenties this research was still “questions that had not been
examined much”, and there were not many centers in the world where they
were so intensively examined than at the Medical School at Harvard or at
MIT. And there was hardly anywhere that this research was so systemati-
cally pursued in clinical practice than at the Psychoneurological Institute
in Leningrad. Alongside a few attempts with psycho-pharmaceuticals
Bekhterev’s practice primarily focused on hypnotic group therapy, which
was meant to initiate intersubjective homeostasis – similar forms of
therapy, following systematic, cybernetic models, were developed for
schizophrenia patients in the USA only in the sixties by Gregory Bateson
and his colleagues.89
Bekhterev was very familiar with Cannon’s research, including his
most recent experiments on altering the concentration of adrenalin in the
blood, and he was obviously attempting to create a connection to his own
experiments. In Ohio in 1927 Bekhterev wanted to make contact with those
whose research was the most advanced at the time, and to speak about the
science that – as the significance of the Macy Conferences would show in
the forties – was to be the science of the future. His lecture in Ohio was
obviously an attempt to consolidate neuronal and biochemical homeostasis
into a theory of the biosocial – or at least to discuss the possibility of such
a “fundamental basis for everything that exists.” World energy, according
to Bekhterev’s wish, was meant to be a scientific fusion of east and west, a
homeostatic force.
Cannon took the call from the Soviet Union seriously and posed two
questions following Bekhterev’s lecture that show that he had clearly carried
out similar experiments with different results. In his own lecture Neural
Organization for Emotional Expression, a short history of the uses and abuses
244  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

of fits of rage, he had only cited Bekhterev from very old experiments from
his time with Flechsig. He seemed not to be familiar with the new develop-
ments from Leningrad or, worse, they did not interest him. The historical
encounter between the two proto-cyberneticists ends in the darkness of
the protocol: “Dr. Walter B. Cannon requested that the following question
may be submitted to Dr. Bekhterev”, we read, then the daily minutes end.
And while in Ohio chemistry and psychology were being fused, in the name
of hormones and vitamins, into a single science that was meant to control
feelings in a more contemporary way than opium and hashish, in Moscow
power was being seized in the old style.
Bekhterev’s last work, Collective Psychology, is an elegant synthesis of
all his research, at once mass psychology, war psychology, psycho-history,
political theory, and – social critique from the perspective of objective
psychology. What Bekhterev opposes to Flechsig’s “ethics grounded in physi-
ology”90 as the coming project of a biosocial society are accumulator-bodies,
linked to one another but at the same time freely developing, which learn
and learn to learn in exchange with their surroundings, much like anti-
authoritarian cyberneticists like Bateson and von Foerster will imagine and
try out much later. If we take Cannon’s and Bekhterev’s research seriously,
feelings would be chemo-neurological complexes that guide social life, an
“autopoietic” variant of reflexology according to Maturana and Varela. In
1913 Bekhterev had imagined that

the organism, due to its neuropsychic activity, represents a machine that

is in a certain sense self-determinant and self-actuating. This is why its
outward reactions are not only determined by the external qualities of
the source of the stimulus, but also by its relations to the organism, which
has been shaped under the effect of inherited and acquired conditions.91

The utopia of a society mediated by feelings and emotions remained

Bekhterev’s dream: “Like a living organism, society represents a dynamic
equilibrium rather than something static.”92
No one wanted to know anything about any good-natured application of
multifaceted feelings, about any collective dance of the spheres of bodily
feeling. Much less about their abrupt mass feelings. In the Soviet Union
this ended after Bekhterev’s death in quite coarse propaganda assaults on
the people. In the USA the results of research were refined. Emotions were
simply supposed to be what cannot be decoded in the media transmissions
of the enemy. At the beginning of the Second World War the Office of War
Information provided its directors with the following:
Psycho -Reflexology 245

‘How to arouse emotions of the apathetic, and direct the energies of the
frustrated into the war effort, is the informational Challenge.’ That was
domestic information from the OWI, with an emphasis on emotion and
not intelligence or education which its Soviet or Nazi counterparts could
have easily understood.93

Not much was left of all the research, all the high-ranking symposia, all
the publications. All that “feelings and emotions” attested to now were
the remaining traces of the human in the function of the medial. And yet,
cinema people turn up over and over again that bring the dream of the
unknown Bekhterev to the screen.
 Dziga Vertov, Jumping Top. Private Collection.

Eisenstein, Still from the Film The General Line (UdSSR 1920).
Part IV
1. The Truth Won by Means of Film

Everyone who cares for his art seeks the essence of his own technique.
– Dziga Vertov, 1922

Signals

Many of Bekhterev’s students were artists, including the writer Isaac Babel,
the directors Grigori Boltanski and Abram Room and, one of the most
famous, Dziga Vertov.1 This has been pointed out by Herbert Marshall,
who had worked as Joris Ivens’s assistant in the Soviet Union and who
had been personally acquainted with Vertov since his visit to Germany in
1929. Marshall was in fact surprised that many artists had studied at the
Psychoneurological Institute with no intention of becoming physicians,
but then maintains Viktor Shklovsky’s claim that the institute was the only
place that had not restricted access to Jews through quotas, thus providing
an opportunity to assimilate into Russian society by means of an academic
degree.2 This explanation established the connection for film history be-
tween Vertov’s theory of the kino-eye and the experiments that Bekhterev
was conducting in his laboratories. In Vertov’s journals and workbooks,
however, there are a handful of revealing comments about how much his
films and his theories are indebted to the methods of objective psychology.
When he began working at the Moscow Film Ministry immediately after the
October Revolution, Vertov noted in the third person – observing himself:

He went there after having a few experiences in the areas of language

and sound. From the artistic recording ‘The Sawmill,’ to montages of
stenograms and audio recordings and the creative workshop ‘Laboratory
of Hearing’; from the recordings of various ‘chastushki’3 to stenographed
confessions; from primitive interceptions of truth to attempts at mind read-
ing; from self-experiments at the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute
(recordings of thoughts, reactions, forms of behavior) to reflections about
surprise recordings for attaining truth; from observing the Pathé newsreels
at the cinema to thinking about visually recording the visible world, about
the visual shape of the world, about the truth to be won by means of film.4

This list is Vertov’s biography as a series of recording experiments and

consequently a very brief media history of a Kinopravda. As a student he
250  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

had experimented with using letters to write down the sound of a sawmill
and sounds of nature. The outcome of these attempts to depict reality in
a symbolic order had above all clarified for him the limits of writing as a
recording technology, which could only manage more or less successful
reductions in the realm of acoustic events with its possible combinations
of 32 Cyrillic, preordained individual elements. Vertov then bought an
old phonograph, with which he could record, store, and manipulate the
vibrations of the noises of the world on cylinders, still without a microphone,
according to frequency and amplitude.5 In this continuous analogue record-
ing Vertov made his own cuts and edited the noises and voices into audio
plays. Initially he recorded human language in traditional literary form
and then as free speaking. Liberated by phonographic recording from the
compulsion of rhyme or rhythm, the old mnemomics, language could then
become voices, breathing, faltering, or hoarsely croaking like a sawmill in
the distance.
The experiments at the Psychoneurological Institute ultimately led
to Vertov’s theory of documentary film. Just as the reflexologists turned
thoughts – which, according to Sechenov and Bekhterev, are inhibited
reflexes – reactions, and behaviors into objects of objective psychological
examination as processes that can be observed, measured and stored by
means of apparatuses, Vertov replaced the old recording technology of
writing, which had implemented its transformative rule as a spirit in things
and people, with technical media that could work without introspective
additions, without the poetry of self-perception, because they stored
acoustic and optical reality in their physical qualities. Using experimental
and applied psychology, the human being – just like things and animals
– was transformed into the events and dimensions of data, which were
transformed according to the corresponding new rules. A new image of
people could only be realized through this transformation, and Vertov was
one of the most careful of its engineers.
Vertov’s study of psychic reactions and reflexes in his self-experiments,
that is, his attempts at self-portrayal with the camera, make it possible to
calculate the “ego” on film and to “relate it to the machine.” Thus arose
an ego-kino-eye or a kino-eye-ego, which could move through the world
beyond the limits of the old consciousness. A kino-eye that speaks from the
manifestos in the first person, like in the text entitled “Kinoks-A Revolution”:

Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the

chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements
composed of the most complex combinations. Freed from the rule of
The Truth Won by Means of Film 251

sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space,
I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve
recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the
world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.6

Human being and machine form a new optics, which dismantles the staged
presentation of the world into the individual parts of its movement, thus dis-
covering and displaying how the historical treatment of reality-data at the
basis of human perception works. Vertov transfers the signal character from
his experiments with acoustic recordings to film. The “zhizn’ vrasplokh”,
the life caught unawares, or, to go back to Walter Benjamin’s anti-bourgeois
methodology of observing history, life viewed as “non-intentional”, shows
the historical reality by technical means. Sophie Küppers, the wife of El Lis-
sitzky, translated the texts for Vertov’s trip to Europe in 1929 and introduced
once and for all the term “überrumpeltes Leben” [“life caught unawares”]
into German literature for Vertov’s technique of documentary film.7
From the beginning Vertov’s technique was not only seen as an attack
on bourgeois conventions and tragedies [Trauerspiele], but on the bourgeois
subject of seeing. The truth exposed by the “life caught unawares” are the
multiple, universal reactions and relations that remain unconscious – al-
though still visible and measureable – when staging the everyday. The truth
of this “zhizn’ vrasplokh”, of the life unconsciously caught unawares, means
that all seeing and measuring of social relationships is based on historical
technologies. The truth of depiction cannot be other than an analysis of the
character of the technology through which it is produced. That this is no
tautology in the practical work with apparatuses, but becomes epistemol-
ogy, was repeated by Godard when he calls film truth 24 times per second
in Le Petit Soldat. Vertov experienced this with own body.
Vertov described his first foray into film history as a self-experiment in
the terms of objective psychology. In 1918 he jumped from a height of one
and a half stories behind the film committee’s palace, while a cameraman
filmed the jump in slow motion. Vertov’s different emotional states on the
way down could then be analyzed using this film. While in real time all that
could be seen was him bowing, smiling, and jumping, the slow motion of the
film established the physical sequence of fear and indecisiveness, embar-
rassment, growing conviction, and so on. These were basic organic-reflex
types that the associative-reflex physicality of the heroic could be traced
back to, according to the experiments at Bekhterev’s institute. Manipulat-
ing the time axis allowed for about 18 truths per second in 1918. The time
became relative, so that even the terms “time lapse” and “slow motion” were
252  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

exchangeable depending on the standpoint taken. Vertov analyzed his fall,

which can be considered the origin of a Kinopravda, in 1935:

From the viewpoint of the ordinary eye you see untruth. From the
viewpoint of the cinematic eye (aided by special cinematic means, in
this case, accelerated shooting) you see the truth. If it’s a questions of
reading someone’s thoughts at a distance (and often what matters to us
is not to hear a person’s words but to read his thoughts), then you have
that opportunity right here. It has been revealed by the kino-eye. It is
possible, by means of the kino-eye to remove a man’s mask…8

When Vertov jumped, the truth of observation was still invoked against
the culture of writing from the old bureaucracy, which sought to grasp
and censor the spirit of artworks and artists. Storing human data on film
was established precisely in opposition to the bureaucratic version. In 1935,
when Vertov wrote down his memories of the jump, and when his film Three
Songs about Lenin was not explicitly censored, but was put aside by the
distribution offices, it had thus already become a bureaucratic technique
to censor without words and writing. There was plenty of opportunity “not
to hear a person’s words but to read his thoughts.”9 What is essential about
Vertov’s discovery, however, is that the truth of film does not lie on its visual
surface, but in the processing of discrete individual images, through which
new qualities of reality appear that are invisible without film. Vertov’s
experiments situate film exactly between its signal character, which allows
for manipulating the time axis, and the visual character, which causes all
kinds of shapes to appear on the surface.
In the tradition of the experiments at the Psychoneurological Institute, in
which Vertov placed his film experiments, the self-experiment corresponds
to an experiment from the series of “physical reflexes”, with which move-
ments and reactions could be tested “that characterize the inner state under
certain conditions.”10 It strictly adheres to the psycho-reflex method of
rejecting introspection, but giving free reign to subjective processes in order
to compare them with the results of simultaneous objective observation.
Bekhterev had written:

It is thus clear that the method of reflexology maintains the possibility

not only of studying the processes of human association-reflex from the
objective side, but also to explain the relationship of subjective processes
to them. Such a research method is very valuable when conducted on one’s
own person, particularly with regard to the mimic-somatic processes…11
The Truth Won by Means of Film 253

The ideal of psycho-reflexology research is to combine subjective and objec-

tive protocols of experimentation: such as a written working journal and a
simultaneous film recording, or even better, the “journal of a cameraman”,
which itself is filmed at the same time, a journal with “impressions on
celluloid in six rolls” attached, as is stated precisely in the intertitle of the
famous Chelovek s kinoapparatom from 1929. In early film theory, not only in
Vertov, the cinematic apparatus was advanced to an epistemological device.
The special consequence that Vertov draws from this is that the cinematic
apparatus is thus no longer any kind of representational apparatus, but,
as a visual medium of storage and transfer, is an instrument for analyzing
and synthesizing, producing a new reality of perception. The enduring
debate about whether Vertov’s films are documentary or fiction films comes
unraveled if we understand them as universalizing labor conditions. Film-
ing becomes an experimental construction for directors, camera operators,
editors, and – as Rouch and Morin would later claim for French cinema as
well, in Vertov’s name – it changes them as well.
Despite the critique of the film bureaucracy, Vertov holds fast to the
scientific character of the kinoglaz research. In his notes for a conversation
from July 28, 1935, presumably with the photo correspondent from the
newspaper “Prozhektor”, he writes: “I work like Pavlov’s laboratory and not
like a department at the film chronicle… ”12 At the main building of Pavlov’s
Biological Station in Koltushi near Leningrad, one can read, chiseled in
stone: “Observation and observation.” This was only the half-truth of the
laboratories, the other half was produced previously by the experimental
set-up and the apparatuses. Bekhterev had also called his own ability to
observe into question, more methodically than Pavlov had, in his Objective
Psychology, and then again in relation to the observation instruments.
Vertov, who also did not want to rely on his own eyes, thus is methodologi-
cally closer to him than to Pavlov. But in 1935 it was still permitted to name
the Nobel Prize winner to describe his own working method as methods
from reflexology. Bekhterev, on the other hand, who preferred to leave what
the essence of the human being is and could be up to the essence of the
apparatus and to the essence of relationship produced by them, had been
deemed unutterable since 1927.

Agitations

Although the whole arsenal of optical illusions, animations, and manipula-

tions were played out in the films of the Kinoki, although Vertov considered
254  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

animation filming one of the “chief positions”13 in the Kinoki’s work, he views
his method as a way to explain reality. He harshly criticizes practices that
obfuscate the consciousness of the population. He thus vilifies, moralizingly
and unexpectedly misogynistically, the hypnosis so valued by Bekhterev
in therapy by calling it an infamous trick from the arsenal of the feature
film and all other art forms that constrict consciousness. In the manifesto
Kinoglaz he writes of the film drama:

Stupefaction and suggestion – the art-drama’s basic means of influence

– relate to that of a religion and enable it for a time to maintain a man in
an excited unconscious state. We are familiar with examples of direct sug-
gestion (hypnosis), with examples of sexual suggestion, when a woman in
exciting her husband or lover can suggest any thoughts or acts to him.14

Just as Bekhterev had drawn the public’s attention to the infirmity of their
consciousness under neuro-physiological points of view in his Petersburg
lectures, Vertov also showed the audience how consciousness can be de-
ceived in the cinema, and self-awareness can also be disappointed. Vertov’s
films, above all Man with a Movie Camera, present cinematography as a
technology in all its manipulative possibilities in order then to raise aware-
ness of the “magic” of everyday life.

Only consciousness can fight the sway of magic in all its forms.
Only consciousness can form a man of firm opinion, firm conviction.
We need conscious men, not an unconscious mass submissive to any
passing suggestion.
Long live the class consciousness of the healthy with eyes and ears to
see and hear with!
Away with the fragrant veil of kisses, murders, doves, and slight-of-hand!
Long live the class vision!
Long live kino-eye!15

Both figures, Bekhterev and Vertov, battle with the paradox of recognizing
media technologies as not enabling conscious choices, but as having to
use it nonetheless to fulfill their mission to enlighten. What is common to
both is the attempt to make consciousness itself to appear as foreign and
different by means of the outside of the apparatus, and thus to be able to
judge oneself as different. This is also why the title Celovek s kinoapparatom
should be translated quite literally not as Cameraman nor as Man with a
Movie Camera, but more exactly as Person through the Cinematic Apparatus,
The Truth Won by Means of Film 255

who then turns up as a kind of causa formalis. What is shown is the person
produced according to objective psychology through the cinematic ap-
paratus in his or her objective truth.
The paradox of wanting to produce a self-awareness from unconscious, that
is, by means of film tricks or hypnosis not accessible due to the technical bases
of conscious perception, from which a “man of firm opinion, firm conviction”
can be formed, persists at any rate as an ambiguity of technical suggestion and
enchantment. Over and over again, the montage sequences of the Kinoki films
intoxicatingly circle around the topic of ecstasy, of shamanistic practices, of
stirring rhythm, of madness, and of the dance, like around the blind spot
of their own theory. An example is the beginning of the first Kinoglaz film:
One sequence is called “Kino-Eye, At the Church Holiday, “or”, The Effect of
Homemade Vodka on the Village Women”, and all the opium of the masses
is vilified in images of women dancing madly. Until it becomes clear that,
for the spectator, the village women’s frenzy is solely due to the frenzy of the
editing and thus to the cinema as a Platonic opium den. The succession of the
first 58 short shots shows that they are enhanced by a pattern of constantly
accelerating repetitions into a rhythmic crescendo of their own.16
What the art drama is meant to display as religious madness, “stupefac-
tion and suggestion”, is here conducted by the anti-drug agitation itself
by means of the technology of cinema. The women’s stupefaction, which
is announced in the caption as an example of misdirected ecstasy, has
too much momentum for an anti-alcohol campaign – or, as it is called in
more technical terms in the Kinoki manifestos, “rhythm of movement,
slowed and accelerated” – indeed, precisely that momentum that, from
so-called gypsy music to the music of Kusturica’s mad Balkanites, has time
and again been considered corrupting by orderly states and has thus been
banned. Just as the limbs of marionettes sway logorhythmically to the
mental lines of dancers, bottles sway in the hands of intoxicated female
dancers, and their bodies in turn sway logarhythmically to the gazes that
go into the camera-eye, constant and unflinchingly direct, like a steadfast
axis. The vilification of the dancing women turns into a sermon straight
from the mouth of a preacher that is itself intoxicated and intoxicating: the
cinematic apparatus. The question is whether, with so much movement and
excitement, for agitation is nothing other than that, it is ultimately only
rhythmic interference patterns that arise in the spectator’s perception in
place of a healthy class consciousness, and whether it is even possible to
speak of objectively analyzing reality anymore. In fact, the goal of analyzing
reality seems to have yielded once and for all to synthesis. In the Provisional
Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups from 1926 we read:
256  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

I can point to the dancing of the drunken peasant women in the first
section of Kinoglaz as an example of a montage moment not limited by
time and space. They were filmed at different times, in different villages,
and edited together into a single whole. The beer house and the market,
actually all the rest[…] were also done through montage.17

The truth of reality can therefore be experienced less by consciously re-

producing events than by exposing the recording and editing techniques,
that is, the conditio humana in the age of its film reproducibility.18 And
here it is not only about presenting the bare functionality of the device,
but about the effects of its functioning, the way that it conceals connec-
tions or brings them to the light of sense. The condition of this awareness,
however, is that the agitating attraction, the “Verblüffen” [“mystifications”],
as Sophie Küppers described it, is followed by an external view of one’s
own perception. The class morale of the sequence is meant to disappear
behind the question of “seeing class”, which means that the circumstances
that relativize all perception are brought to the screen in their interfer-
ences. That these functionalities produce new technical intoxications is
something that Dziga Vertov the enlightener would not wish to deny, Dziga
Vertov the director would be delighted, and Dziga Vertov the cultural
revolutionary would have known it already anyway. It was presumably not
a transcendental human being that Vertov wanted to bring to life, but one
that could enter into a new relationship to itself and the world by means
of the new technologies. At the Psychoneurological Institute Vertov had
been interested in “apparatus medicine” as a contemporary technology of
neurologists. For him the essence of reality cannot be separated from the
essence of the technology that places it into a constellation, thus creating
it in the first place.
Vertov did not assume, just as Bekhterev had not, that there was such a
thing as a stable, identical self-consciousness from which knowledge could
be set. The truth is that human beings are in constant exchange with the
molecular movements of their surroundings, which carry them along in
the form of symphonies or drinking women. Spectators are supposed to
learn not with their own eyes, but with kino-eyes, and thus also learn to see
themselves. They themselves can therefore be physiologically intoxicated
before they learn how the circumstances are constructed from the relations
of montage. For Vertov this is no support for conventional objectivity, but
is a violent split from an imagined subjectivity. In “Kinoki – A Revolution”
from 1923 the kino-eye, speaking in the first person again, explains how
the spectator’s attention is guided through space and time.
The Truth Won by Means of Film 257

I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of

this or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera
and is directed by it to those successive points of the action that, most
succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the height or depth of
resolution.
Example; shooting a boxing match, not from the point of view of a specta-
tor present, but shooting the successive movements (the blows) of the
contenders.
Example: the filming of a group of dancers, not from the point of view of a
spectator sitting in the auditorium with a ballet on the stage before him.
After all, the spectator at a ballet follows, in confusion, now the combined
group of dancers, now random individual figures, now someone’s legs – a
series of scattered perceptions, different for each spectator.
One can’t present this to the film viewer. A system of successive move-
ments requires the filming of dancers or boxers in the order of their
actions, one after another… by forceful transfer of the viewer’s eye to the
successive details that must be seen.
The camera ‘carries’ the film viewer’s eyes from arms to legs, from legs
to eyes and so on, in the most advantageous sequence, and organizes the
details into an orderly montage study.19

This montage study is not so much for editors as it is for spectator brains,
which themselves are brought to dance. “For the first time, we feel that the
obvious drawback of such a film screening can be found not on-screen but in
the theater”, was Rudolf Arnheim’s attempt in 1929 to explain this odd state
in Vertov’s cinema.20 The regularity of this exercise is one in which percep-
tion is imposed as something from outside, as a rule of movement-intervals,
a synthetic manipulation of the brain. The kinoks manifesto continues:
“The result of this concerted action of the liberated and perfected camera
and the strategic brain of man directing, observing, and gauging – the
presentation of even the most ordinary things will take on an exceptionally
fresh and interesting aspect.”21 The attempt to wire up apparatus and brain
and therefore to use film tricks to get around consciousness, since it is
moving on the familiar pathways of experience, was still an experiment
for the kinoks themselves in 1923, and its outcome could only vaguely be
prognosticated as “fresh and interesting.”
Many years later Rudolf Arnheim, who himself had done his doctorate
in Gestalt psychology on physiognomy and the problem of expression
and its interpretation, could not make rhyme or reason out of the lack
of any meaning on screen.22 Vertov’s first sound film, which bears the
258  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

title Enthusiasm, which is significant for the ecstasy complex, was heav-
ily criticized by Arnheim in the “Weltbühne” on September 29, 1931. It is
not by chance that Kleist’s formulation of marionette movements, “fairly
artificial”, is brought into the mix, and he is annoyed by the “flickering”,
which Münsterberg would have been particularly pleased about: “Montage
alone is supposed to provide the film’s structure, and this quite artificial,
theoretically thought-out restriction results in an editing overload – a
flickering of images, held only loosely together, which strongly taxes the
viewer’s nerves.”23 Using the puzzling formulation that the film Enthusiasm
remains an “unmodified structure”, perhaps Arnheim wished to aid Vertov’s
intention to assert its rights of not making reality available randomly, but
to construct an optics in which reality becomes viewable in its various
patterns. For Arnheim, however, all this was glowing splinters that showed
the nerves all that remained as movement: an attitude toward life, the
good “vibrations” of the Soviets, which Arnheim was justifiably calling
into question in 1931. But in doing so the documentary quality of the kinoks
operation was obscured. Vectors and power relations, movements and the
method of results seemed only to be empty claims before a party hierarchy
that had solidified into a block of matter. This caused what was new in
Vertov’s discovery, that the nerves could be moved without implying any
statement or contents, to disappear behind the critical mistrust that he was
trying to arouse enthusiasm for a corrupt system. In 1931 Soviet art was no
longer the great hope it had once been.
At the same time, Vertov’s aesthetic theory and practice, which he had
essentially formulated at the beginning of the twenties, was still, or rather
once again, far ahead of his contemporaries. The camera-eye shows a truth
that also holds outside the cinema, namely that the human eye is disengaged
from the position of power and control that the Renaissance was able to
promise the bourgeois individual with its optical tricks. What is deceived in
this case is a psychology that, despite all experimental research, holds onto
the biographical concept of a coherent individual with a soul, and draws its
conclusions from the introspective method. It is this subjective psychology
from which Vertov also distances himself, as a result of his years of study-
ing and experimenting at Bekhterev’s Psychoneurological Institute. In the
text “We: Variant of a Manifesto” from 1922 he writes: “The ‘psychological’
prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his
desire for kinship with the machine.”24 In 1931 Arnheim was not the only one
who refused to dignify the sensory-motor movements that Vertov’s films
spin and cast as collective, intersubjective, and metasubjective as a positive
and productive step. “Vertov does away very radically with everything that
The Truth Won by Means of Film 259

is individual – even with the human individual.”25 He sees Vertov’s demand

for kinship with the machine as above all a kind of technology fetishism, as
the critic Lenoble had attested fairly paradigmatically as Vertov’s psycho-
ideology already in 1929: “Vertov’s work comes very close to the perception
of the world and the outlook on the world of the technical intelligentsia,
who are characterized by precisely the anti-psychological and technical
approach.”26
An “anarcho-indiviualist”27 who seeks to merge, not with power but in the
new circumstances of time, space, matter, and movement, however, cannot
balk at harmonizing the human mind with matter and its physical laws. It is
the prerequisite for film epistemology, the “documentary cinematic decod-
ing of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye”,28
as he put it in the article “Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye”. Vertov follows Bekhterev’s
principle that science “does not consist in exploring the essence of things
themselves, but is aimed at pursuing the reciprocal relationships between
appearances.”29 In Bekhterev’s tradition, he had laid the foundations for a
new understanding of the medial unconscious, which, at least in western
film criticism, had not been pursued further. The relationship between the
“conscious” and the “unconscious” in film operations is not only contested
in Vertov, it is one of the most common causes for bewilderment in film
theory. Vertov and his kinoks practice is only one fundamental example
of film as a technology and film as a describable complex of signification
coming into contradiction and conflict. But the debates in film studies
about intoxication and enlightenment in what is called “Russian cinema”,
which will repeat more or less similarly for the American film avant-garde
of the forties, show that the most developed critics went mad due to the
distinction between the medial consciousness and the media unconscious
precisely because cinema works beyond conscious perception.
The open questions begin with what depiction means in the first place.
Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, after he had seen Man with a Movie Camera,
clearly before its German premiere, wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung on
May 19, 1929:

All is movement, a single powerful movement that encompasses the

heretofore fragmented aspects, and all the elements […] flow together
and fuse so completely with each other that they enter into the rhythm
of the whole.[…] There are, therefore, two principal actors in the film: the
ensemble of things and people in the city, and the “man with a movie
camera” who takes control of them all. The material world on the one
hand, and on the other, the “cinema-eye.” The relationships between them
260  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

determine the content of the film. The results are utterly remarkable; in
any case, the cameraman presents anything but mere copies of objects.30

By describing Man with a Movie Camera as a film made up of movements

and relationships, Kracauer very precisely described Vertov’s procedure. In
this first review Kracauer shows himself to be enthused, elevating Vertov’s
procedure above even that of Walter Ruttman in Berlin: Symphony of a Great
City: “While Ruttman’s associative linkages, however, are purely formal
throughout[…] Vertov uses montage to extract a meaning from the connec-
tions between the fragments of reality.”31 Once again, credit is given to sense.
Kracauer, who would afterwards write his “psychological history of German
film” in the tradition of a sociology founded in ideology critique, did not
wish to have the psychological, social, and thus also political implications
of the sense-less kinoks method overlooked, perceived, or disavowed. Over
the course of time Kracauer’s initial enthusiasm waned. By the time of his
book From Caligari to Hitler, which he wrote in New York, Vertov is merely
mentioned as a propagandist:

Vertov, infatuated with every expression of real life, produced weekly

newsreels of a special kind from the close of the Civil War on, and in
about 1926 began to make feature-length films which still preserved a
definite newsreel character.[…] Like Ruttmann, he is interested not in
divulging news items, but in composing ‘optical music.’32

Looking back, Kracauer is very reserved in his evaluation of Vertov. What

he once considered enlightening now seemed to him as purely formal
questions. In 1929 Vertov’s discovery of circumstances by cinematographic
means had still been illuminating: “Vertov interprets (the juxtaposition)
through his presentation.”33 In the course of his writings in exile, in the
course of the political developments of the forties, Kracauer’s sympathetic
understanding disappears. Kracauer’s own critical theory posed the ques-
tion of technology as only secondary. What he sought to explain in his
analyses, namely “those deep layers of collective mentality which extend
more or less below the dimension of consciousness,34” has nothing to do
with what Vertov, in the tradition of the reflexologists, was presenting
in the cinema as the unconscious mechanisms of human perception and
making visible by reflecting on technology. Kracauer’s examination of the
unconscious in the cinema also does not require any technical precision in
the apparatuses that was demanded by the objective psychologists in their
experiments on the nervous system, and that the kinoks realized in their
The Truth Won by Means of Film 261

experiments in cinema. In the US, Kracauer only mentions Vertov and the
montage of the kinoks at all in a comparison with Ruttmann, as if his initial
enthusiasm now only seemed to him to be an error and an infatuation at
the urging of the communists: “Vertov’s continued survey of everyday life
rests upon his unqualified acceptance of Soviet actuality.”35
In 1947, however, in the middle of the discussion in New York about
surrealism, avant-garde film, and the techniques of political propaganda,
a critical examination by Siegfried Kracauer would surely have resulted in
Vertov, who at the time was once again working under miserable conditions
in Moscow for the weekly newsreels, being discovered as a precursor to a
film practice that critically put the effect of the media itself to the test. Of
course, immediately following the war propaganda that had precisely been
so much about media in its planning, this topic would have been highly risky
and awkward for an asylum seeker. Kracauer, however, never examined
film technologies in relation to – and possibly as in contradistinction to –
political topics, neither then nor later. Ideology critique was not supposed
to be concerned with neuronal manipulations and flicker analysis, but with
the part of the cinematic that was capable of making conscious choices.
Nonetheless, as early as 1948 Kracauer displayed a fascination similar to the
one he had once shown for Vertov when discussing the films of Maya Deren,
who was interested in just those aspects of the cinema that could manipu-
late psychology and perception. Here as well, he qualifies his enthusiasm
with the words “the problem is only what the meaning itself amounts to.”36
Deren’s idea of the unconscious and here critique of psychoanalysis might
also have helped him – or seduced him – to find a new way to approach
the unconscious in and through cinema. But he remained steadfast. As he
had already done with Vertov, he refused to view the media process itself
as social or even political practice. For this reason, Kracauer has always
been considered a steadfast antipode to all media theory, and not only in
American film theory.37

Explosions

Walter Benjamin, who was a Russia traveler for love, tried to make the
phenomenon of the cinema understandable to the bookish set. In the first
version of his work of art essay in 1935, Benjamin attempted, albeit without
mentioning Vertov, the Kinoglaz films, or Chelovek s kinoapparatom, to
negotiate between human and apparatus, between subjective and objective
psychology, and between the the function of media and that of aesthetics.38
262  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Like Kracauer, he also takes issue with the distinction between conscious
and unconscious, but whereas Kracauer restricts himself to a “more or less
below”, Benjamin let the space of conscious and unconscious structures
get permeated, almost in a kind of cubistic manner. The human being
is – according to Benjamin in his preliminary work on a media theory,
which he would only work out in its various successor texts – not called
into question by the apparatus, but can extend his or her knowledge of the
ego, of the self, by means of the new technological apparatus. The example
that he uses for the optical unconscious is directly comparable to Vertov’s
film jump. (And the reflexive “self” used by the later Frankfurt School social
researchers is seen to be something more than the storing and collecting
rear guard of the ego-function.):

The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium be-

tween human beings and the apparatus. Film achieves this goal not only in
terms of man’s presentation of himself to the camera but also in terms of
his representation of his environment by means of this apparatus.[…]With
the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.[…]
Clearly it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to
the eye. “Other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human
consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas
it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved
in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all
what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a
step.[…] This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for
swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing
a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera
that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the
instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.39

It should be noted that in the second version of the essay, which Benja-
min only finished after the start of the war in December 1939, there is a
harsher syntax used to subject the human being as a subject to film. The
corresponding section XIII about film and apparatus now begins with the
formulation:

Film can be characterized not only in terms of man’s presentation of

himself to the camera but also in terms of his representation of his envi-
ronment by means of this apparatus. A glance at occupational psychology
illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment.[…] A similar deepening
The Truth Won by Means of Film 263

of apperception throughout the entire spectrum of optical – and now

auditory – impressions has been accomplished by film. 40

The bookish soul cannot get back to the world of its own bookish sensation.
The apparatuses have yanked apperception into depths from which it can
only come back to its senses with the help of science and psychoanalysis. The
following passage from the second version of the Work of Art essay justifies,
quite differently from the first, above all the objectivity of film as a scientific
instrument and, in parallel, the scientific quality of psychoanalysis as an
objective system of storing traces. On the one hand this lends more weight
to technology. “Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are
identical to its scientific uses – these two dimensions having usually been
separated until now – will be one of the revolutionary functions of film.”41 On
the other hand, in this second version the possibilities of film is pointedly
placed in light of a disillusionment with the emancipatory power of art.
The enthusiastic experiences that Benjamin had described with the Rus-
sian, Nordic, and American cinema as avant-garde in anti-fascist art must
have softened the insight that fascist artists knew how to use film just as
well. Although he himself never wrote any further film criticism, and in
particular despite never taking account of Vertov’s intentions, Benjamin
had nonetheless laid the foundations of a media critique that had taken up
a different “unconscious” than the individual-psychological one had been.
The “unconsciously affected space” that is screened in the cinema with
slow motion, time lapse, close-ups, fades, and cuts initially transcends the
known and conscious human in this technological sense.
Benjamin’s most famous formulation, however, is found in both the 1935
and the 1939 versions: “Hopeless” is how Benjamin describes the familiar and
common spaces, the bars, railroad stations, streets, offices, and factories
that enclose human beings. “Then came film and exploded this prison-world
with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly
on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.”42 In this sentence he
formulates the simultaneity of liberation and horror that affects anyone
who allows the intervention of film into the basic structure of perception
to become a conscious experience. In Benjamin’s formulation of calmly
move through the wreckage of the world we might already see one source
of McLuhan’s thesis that media might have anaesthetizing effects. At any
rate, Benjamin’s analogy is about an exploding out of habit and certainty
by the ego-feeling and its sensations, which had been raised by the new
technology in its origins. This is why cinema is also always a confrontation
with the fragments and the fragmentary in the world, even if involuntary
264  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

brain functions and imaginary energy force the split seconds into artificial
contexts.
Writing about the explosive force of film, Benjamin provides a significant
objection to that theory that sees cinema as a form of the Platonic cave, in
which spectators feel suspended due to the structural “sous-motricité” and
“sur-perception” in the movie seat, because in this mimicry of those bound
in Plato’s cave the reminiscence of the blissful imaginary experience of the
small child is actualized, the experiences of corporal unity are granted
in the optical-visual realm, while every real experience and especially
the violent breakthrough to reality is displaced by imaginary baggage. 43
For Benjamin, on the other hand, precise perception under cinematic
circumstances signifies the expulsion from the familiar as a chance to
discover the relations between consciousness and technology, between
the unconscious and the technical basis for how it works. In contrast to
later film theorists, Benjamin saw this attack on identity and the process
of identification in the cinema spectator not only as disturbance, but also
as a necessary, fragmenting analysis, which releases from the familiar
and common educational processes of the subject. 44 Frighteningly, we
can assert in the cinema that every identification has a technological and
perception-psychological prelude, and that not only works of art, but also
identities fundamentally change with forms of media depiction in the
passage of time.
But Benjamin cannot maintain the confidence of this statement in the
second version of his text. Under the impositions of history he had lost hope
that film might establish “equilibrium between human beings and the
apparatus”, this “equilibrium” that became the shibboleth of the anarchs
among the cyberneticists, who still dreamed of a scientific and artistic
extension and connection of human organisms with the world.

Intervals

Vertov’s montage theory of intervals is the production of relations between

the smallest common units of the appearances of matter by the cinematic
medium. While the debate about the alternative between music and math-
ematics has so far concerned Vertov’s interval theory, 45 here a physical
option will be brought to play as well. Vertov’s intervals have a strong affin-
ity to the Lebesque integral, which revolutionized pre-war mathematics as
much as Einstein’s theories of physics had – and which, in 1919 (when Vertov
wrote the first version of his interval theory), led a young mathematician
The Truth Won by Means of Film 265

daydreaming at the window at MIT to want to calculate the surface of

the River Charles in its movements. The theory of the Lesbesque integral
allows for calculating irregularly moving points on surfaces and bodies by
combing the sequence of intervals. 46 One significant requirement among
others for cybernetically determined prognoses: technology offered a view
to the future that could be seen, computed from the relations, interferences,
and sequencing of events in the past, in a surprisingly new quality: “shins
vrasploch.”
It is only in this context that intervals not only describe and signify
circumstances, but can become operators of a changeable world. The mov-
ing art of the cinema in meant to take apart the world into intervals, not
in physiological movements, but in substructures of units of physical
movement and their transitions. Vertov describes the transition from
cinematography to edited film as a relation of intervals: “Intervals (the
transitions from one movement to another) are the material, the elements
of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves. It is
they (the intervals) which draw the movement to a kinetic resolution.”47
Unlike Eisenstein’s later interval montage, Vertov wanted to edit the
elements of the world as the camera records them as unmoved elements of
motion, and as the projector again turns them into moved images. Vertov
proposed a montage of illustrations as derivations in the mathematical
sense of movement. The relations of movements on the screen is meant
to replace the systematic gap between the cinematic image and the film
signal. Vertov’s procedure is a non-hierarchical montage, which initiates
equal and reciprocal relations between the most heterogeneous elements. It
does without any “dominant”, like the one Sergei Eisenstein wants and must
maintain for his overtonal montage in film. So, as Vertov breaks, but does
not interrupt the intoxication of perception by reflecting on manipulating
this perception through technology, he takes up the law of movements
and follows it without letting it interrupt its path through the borders of
anthropomorphic shapes.
This movement of movement is an exact continuation of the principle of
transferal, which Bekhterev had examined for world energy. It was taken up
again, much later, by Gilles Deleuze in his first cinema book The Movement
Image, in which he initially gives an account of Henri Bergson’s reflections
on movement from Matière et mémoire: “Our error lies in believing that it is
any-element-whatevers, external to qualities that moves. But the qualities
themselves are pure vibrations which change at the same time as the alleged
elements move.”48 Already in Bergson’s book from 1896 there is the idea
of a movement that is realized through bodies and identities. In light of
266  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

this tradition Deleuze examines the structures of perception in Vertov’s

films, the relations of movement as interrelations and intervals of material
perception itself:

In Vertov the interval of movement is perception, the glance, the eye. But
the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, as
it extends from a point where an action begins to the limit of the reaction,
as it fills the interval between the two, crossing the universe and beating
in time to its intervals. 49

The eye of matter thus functions like human vision in the cinema. It syn-
thesizes impulses and connects action and reaction to a material reflex
arc, albeit one that transcends the boundaries of the individual. If Deleuze
distinguishes between camera-eye and human-eye in his description, then
he only does so to mark the break at which human perception can become
material, just as it had been imagined in reflexology. It is not the human
eye, but the human gaze that can find itself cinematically interrelating to
the world. At any rate, it gets lost, itself tossed about back and forth by the
reciprocally affecting light and reflection punctures of the matter, so that
there is no center any longer in which the old human being could maintain
his position. It is only the multiple ways and movements of actions and
reactions that become a recognizable model of a world in which everything
possible can be conveyed. This would also be a correct description of the
social circumstances in the relational logic of Bekhterevian collective
reflexology.50
Deleuze therefore points precisely to the sticks of Benjaminian dynamite
in cinema, showing which films consciously dismiss an old view of the
human being and which scientists and artists from the beginning of the
twentieth century had already distanced themselves from the anthropology
of the nineteenth century – which was often simply science in the service of
colonial and imperial power. The new structure and communication of mat-
ter, which had made visible a “truth by means of film”, realized movements
and connection beyond the shapes and boundaries of individual bodies:

We have seen that the gap, the interval between two movements sketches
out an empty place which prefigures the human subject in so far as he
appropriates perception to himself. But, for Vertov, the most important
thing was to restore the intervals to matter. This is the meaning of mon-
tage, and of the ‘theory of intervals,’ which is more profound than that
of movement. The interval is no longer that which separates a reaction
The Truth Won by Means of Film 267

from the action experienced, but, on the contrary, that which – an action
being given in a point of the universe – will find the appropriate reaction
in some other point [point quelconque], however distant it is.51

This explains why Vertov, with his concept of universal and reciprocal
matter-connections, of universal reflex-arcs, should be treated as a political
outsider in the new Soviet state, which was then in the process of making
the heterogeneous homogenous and hierarchical. But the interval theory
is even more radical than what the film agencies understood by it. In the
context of interval theory, Vertov’s temporary exclusion of “man as a subject
for film” because of “his inability to control his movements”52 is no mere
anti-humanism.53 It once again refers to an unconscious that has noth-
ing to do with suppressed fantasies, but with the unconscious movement
of perception and of desire – in the technology of the cinema and in the
structure of the gaze, permeated with desire. This is why Vertov embraces
the non-human as liberating from an oppressive, desireless human reality.
This is also a lesson from Bekhterev’s arsenal, which butted up against all
acceptable conventions with its view of being good citizens with Collective
Reflexology.54 Vertov wanted to liberate the cinema from its anthropomor-
phism, constituted from the symbolic remains of the culture of writing, in
order finally to let the dancer merge with the dance. If even he speaks of a
“new man” who “will have the light, precise movements of machines, and …
will be the gratifying subject of our films.”55 Vertovs concept makes a distinc-
tion from the new man demanded by socialism. The model of this new man
is Dziga Vertov, as artificial as the name referring to the man jumping from
the heights. Instead of a hero, cinema shows someone hesitating, balking,
wavering.56 According to this model, the analysis-apparatus ‘cinema’ was an
anti-heroic model, proposed as a universal transformation machine, just as
the personality had also been conceived by Bekhterev as a transformation
machine for global energy. From this perspective Deleuze defended the
Vertovian truth of matter against the reproach of anti-humanism:

…each – even the most charming peasant woman or the most touching
child – was presented as a material system in perpetual interaction. They
were catalysts, converters, transformers, which received and re-emitted
movements, whose speed, direction, order, they changed, making matter
evolve towards less ‘probable’ states, bringing about changes out of all
proportion to their own dimensions. It is not that Vertov considered
beings to be machines, but rather machines which had a ‘heart’ and which
‘revolved, trembled, jolted about and threw out flashes of lightning,’ as
268  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

man could also do, using other movements and other conditions, but
always in interaction with each other.57

What the “life caught unawares” – the declared goal of the cinematic organi-
zation of the world in the Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups from
1926 – conveys in the facial expression and gestures of the physiological
analysis to the cinema-lab worker corresponds to the truth of objective
psychology. This is why Vertov so disdained the cinema under the direction
of bourgeois psychology: “We consider the psychological Russo-German
film-drama – weighed down with apparitions and childhood memories – an
absurdity.”58 It does not observe with analytical apparatuses, kino-eyes, but
films what had been written, dramatized according to the logic of literary
souls. It remains the cinematic illustration of a Bildungsroman. Vertov’s rage
at fiction films can also be explained by the fact that in 1935 writing and
text were still an unavoidable reference medium for film artists, and served
as the basis for distributing production funds or imposing censorship. Only
previously written-down observations were permitted, after approval, to
be filmed. Any direct recording with the camera, however, was forbidden,
since the bureaucracy of the time had no censorship laws for celluloid. The
journal writer Vertov writes about the director Vertov: “To observe – all of
Pavlov’s students are allowed to do it, even all scholars and writers, but
he is not allowed. To him they say he has to write everything down in the
script, the script is the primary thing.”59

Experiences

Chelovek s kinoapparatom, proclaimed a “film without intertitles”, does

not, however, manage to get by completely without some sort of written
notice to the audience. But it is also possible that it was not permitted
to appear without titles. The spectator’s attention is discretely drawn to
her position as a test subject, as is always the case in the cinema. Later
this is experienced with the spectator’s own body. In the opening credits
The Man with a Movie Camera is called a “film experiment”, Dziga Vertov
is introduced as the “author-supervisor of the experiment”, the goal of
the experiment is “the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena” and
indeed exclusively by means of cinema. The announcement continues its
offensive not only against the competing arts, but against films that this
one is indebted to.
The Truth Won by Means of Film 269

This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events

Without the help of intertitles
(a film with no intertitles)
Without the help of a story
(a film with no story)
Without the help of theater
(a film with neither actors nor sets)
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language
of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theater
and literature.60

After the other film technicians have been introduced, there are in fact
no more intertitles for the next 92 minutes. The reciprocal relationship
between the images and the flickering, which now begin, are less anarchic
than Deleuze’s description would have them be. In one of the first sequences
the projector is introduced in the film, and the sequence is edited with
other shots into a motif of beginning. The film seeks to find the moment
between motionlessness and the introduction of a movement, between
rest and restlessness in the gears and the masses of people. Finally, there is
a shot showing two carbon pencils concurring in the image, and the light
of the arc lamp starts to shine, starting up the projection. This montage
blends into moments of awakening, of rising, of the visual movement of
opening and of the optical opening of perspectives and gazes. The motifs
metaphorically repeat what the technology is realizing.
Just as the principle of the interval is introduced into the montage, one
sequence shows – to put it into words after all – “traffic, movement, and
seeing movement.” The cameraman presented in the film throws himself
into the capital’s traffic, and the “invisible”, filming camera follows him.
Already at the beginning of the sequence unconscious perceptions and
effects of cinema have appeared, effects which work beneath conscious
perception in correspondence to one another, so that human vision itself,
in a parallel to all the images, becomes the object of observation. A relativ-
ity of seeing movement is gradually built up in the cinema. While at first
we only see simple movements in the image, these are then also taken
up by a moving vehicle so that two movements become relativized on
screen. Finally, the whole constellation itself is taken up in traveling, that
is, jolting, so that what is actually invisible, namely the camera that is
filming, becomes visible through its own movements. The brief cutaway
to the locomotive wheels introduces a new kind of movement: the tracks
that, in contrast to the carriage do not jolt, and thus also make it possible
270  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

for the camera to travel without drawing attention to itself. To this day,
tracks allow for cameras to move unnoticed in the cinema as effects of the
spectator’s perception, as Münsterberg had described for artificial atten-
tion. In the last long wide shot the viewing of images gets entangled with
the past impressions of the different movements produced by film. Every
movement that is seen becomes relative to all others and is at the same time
entangled with the new knowledge about how movements are produced. In
part this is a conscious reflection, in part it remains an unremarked shift
in perspective, which allows the spectator barely any conscious inferences
about his or her own seeing. Any fixed spectatorial standpoint is dissolved
in what optically comes from the screen. The spectator’s gaze gets lost in
the chaotic movements of the traffic.

– Close-up: Wheels of a locomotive slowing starting up (4”)

– Wide shot of the filming camera in motion, from behind the staged
cameraman, who turns the crank and records another carriage with
people in it riding in parallel (or simulates this for the footage) (5”)
– Close: the wheels of the locomotive in motion (6”)
– Wide shot from the filming camera to the staged cameraman, who is
filming the people in the carriage (4”)
– Medium shot: Train from below, that accelerates and drives away (3”)
– Medium shot: people in the carriage from the perspective of the staged
cameraman (3”)
– People from the perspective of a (second?) cameraman (5”)
– Medium shot of the staged cameraman on the carriage (6”)
– Medium shot to other people in carriages (6”)
– Close-up: the staged cameraman as he is shooting (2”)
– Close-up of two women in the carriage, one of them imitates the
cranking motion of the staged cameraman (2”)

Already the thematizing of traffic feeds back into the cinematic analysis
of movement and the synthetic, illusionary perception of movement. “The
essence of the cinematic movement-image lies in extracting from vehicles
or moving bodies the movement which is their common substance, or
extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence”,61 noted
Deleuze in a different context, but it shows how well armed the gaze is in
the cinema and how it can recognize itself as so armed.
Over the course of the sequence the confusion of moving gazes is pushed
even further. If at first the two perspectives of the cameramen were built up
and differentiated, now they are intertwined, and the spectator’s gaze can
The Truth Won by Means of Film 271

no longer distinguish which camera-eye she is looking with or through. She

can only know that she is seeing cinema. This is the aim of montage: The
camera can assume any standpoint and simulate any gaze. It can take on
any gaze and anyone can apprehend the standpoint of the camera from the
screen. From the gesture of a passenger in the coach, however, who imitates
a cranking motion with his own head, the gaze of the – or of a – cameraman
becomes present on screen. In the movements of seeing the logic of the
gaze is now also interlaced as that of the other. Always and still “caught
unawares”, we are those who are being looked at in the traffic of the world.
The film plays out in the intervals of the movements and gazes.

– Medium shot of the staged cameraman on the carriage, the filming

camera lets him get closer. In the background the carriage with the
people
– Close-up of the people in the carriage, children, in the wind of the
ride (2”)
– Medium shot: the galloping carriage horse (3”)
– The staged cameraman on the carriage, cranking, driving in relation to
the the filming camera through the image, forward and backwards (2”)
– Medium shot: The galloping horse as above… after 3 seconds “frozen”
into a still picture (4”)

In the unconscious navigation of gazes in the cinema, and in the un-

conscious relation and reversal of human gazes in the street traffic, the
unconscious deception of the senses then gets mixed in as a trick of the
cinema itself, namely the artificial animation of spectator brains, which
see movement in still images. In the image of the galloping horse, which is
frozen on screen by a trick, the film leads back to the primal scene of film
in the experiment at Palo Alto. Once again, everything is maintained in the
staging of the cinema-eyes: illusion and disillusion. Frustrating the illusion
of movement in the cinema by showing a still image, from which motion
is created in the first place, is at the same time a double deception, for a
still image on the screen can only be generated by showing a succession of
identical images in the intermittent course of the projector. Any conscious-
ness that tries to keep up with its own imaginative effects here will be lost.
Only someone who allows herself to be deceived can be enlightened by the
cinema-eye – about the fact that she herself is continually transformed
in every inevitable identification and – consciously – cannot see herself
seeing. The truth lies somewhere in between, around 20 times a second.
272  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

More still images follow, introducing us to the technology of the editing

room:

– Still: Medium shot of the people in the carriage (4”)

– Still: Wide shot of the avenue with passersby (3”)
– Still: Medium shot of two women in the carriage (4”)
– Still: Wide shot from above to a broad street, a market, or a large square
full of people and traffic (4”)
– Still: Portrait of a woman with a pitiful expression
– Still of frames from a filmstrip, on which is depicted the portrait of a
young girl (5”)
– Still: tight close-up of a young woman looking sternly into the distance
(5”)
– Still of frames from a filmstrip, on which is depicted the portrait of a
different young girl (5”)
– Medium shot: strips in front of a light box, 17 filmstrips are sorted and
form patterns (5”)
– Shelves with sorted film material (writing in Ukrainian) (2½”)
– Close-up: the spool on an editing table, still (2½”)
– Filmstrips, images of a girl, sideways, as they would be placed on the
editing table (2½”)
– Close-up: the spool on the editing table, now turning and winding a
roll of film onto it (2½”)
– Medium shot, from the side, of an editor at the editing table, she is
cranking the machine (2½”)
– Close-up: on the editing table above the light box runs a filmstrip
without intermittent equipment, that is, no picture can be seen, only
patterns that change with the speed. The strip is stopped, a pair of
scissors appears and makes the… cut (6”)

The elements of film technology appear in the image, and we see how neces-
sary technology is to create a moving image in perception. Single images,
strips, the nearly invisible difference between the pictures in succession, the
various speeds on the editing table, the order of the film strips, the editing
and the splicing make clear how much every depiction abstracts and has to
be made open to montage in the individual frames before it can be turned
into a moving form of reality in the cinema. What is demonstrated is that
no image can be seen if the film runs continuously. The invisible intervals
are necessary for an image to emerge. What is also demonstrated is that
quite different images – as in the case of a cut – can be put together by the
The Truth Won by Means of Film 273

brain, like the almost identical images of a still photo: only the movement
pattern and the intervals have to be right.

– Medium shot, from the side the editor, Svilova, at the editing table,
tapes two filmstrips together (3”)
– Still: Portrait of a young girl (3”)
– Medium shot of the editor from below, in the background are the strips
in front of the light box, the editor is looking for a strip (3”)
– Sequence of the young girl, who we have just seen as a still, in full
motion: the girl starts to laugh (3”)
– Medium close-up, the editor at the editing table cranks and looks at
the strips (2”)
– Still: film strip showing two boys in portrait (4”)
– Sequence of the two boys running in full motion (4”)
– Medium close-up, the editor at the editing table cranks and looks at
the strips (2”)
– Still of two other children as filmstrip (4”)
– Sequence of them in full motion (4”)
– Still of the portrait of the old woman who was already seen earlier (1”)
– Still: Wide shot of the large square that was seen earlier (1”)
– The two children just seen as a still, now in motion. The are watching
something, half afraid, half laughing…
– Wide shot of the large square now in motion: Traffic and passersby (6”)
– The old woman in the portrait now moving, arguing with a woman
at the market (4”)
– Medium shot, the editor at the editing table cranks and looks at the
strips (1”)
– Filmstrips run in a grey blur over the light box, stopping at… (2”)
– Still: Medium shot of two women in a carriage (1”)
– The two women in the carriage as a moving image (3”)
– The young woman, seen previously in a still as portrait, now laughs,
speaks to the filming camera, flirts, look into the camera…

In this last part of the sequence the analysis of watching cinema becomes
an analysis of interpersonal perception, a psycho-analysis in the sense of
objective psychology. It goes back to Vertov’s origin, his jump. The still
images, like that of the old woman, the young woman, or the various chil-
dren with their particular facial expressions, with their “somatic-mimic
reflexes”, are shown first so as to communicate these reflexes as emotion
and perception. As they get treated by film technology this impression is
274  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

frustrated, but also extended. If Bekhterev and Vertov had technologically

held and disassembled the complex reflexes and emotional movements of
expression in the early experiments, here they are presented as synthesis.
Once again the technical intervention is a treatment of what the naked
eye cannot see. The pitiable facial expressions of the old woman become,
in motion, those of a haggling market woman, but the other way around,
in the image of the unpleasant old woman there still exists what once had
aroused pity. Likewise, after being re-animated by movement, the young
woman, who seems dismissive in the still photo portrait, starts to speak and
to flirt with the camera, while all the earlier and contradictory components
of her expression are still maintained in this new movement. The children
continue changing their facial expressions, but the in the still photos one
could see that their exuberance also contained fear, surprise, amazement,
or timidity.
The film in the cinema is always simultaneously an analyzing and syn-
thesizing movement of a reality. It is never about how something would
be, but about how it can be brought into a reflexive and reversible motion
so that new relations are produced and the unknown in the world can be
recognized. The kinoki had realized what Bekhterev had promised from
reflexology: “The ultimate goal of psychoreflexology is thus to study the
relation of the organism to the outside world in connection with existing
experience, quite independently of subjective experiences that one might
presume in the organism with external effects according to the analogy
with oneself.”62

Centers or centrifuges

Somewhat puzzlingly, it is Vertov, with his montage theory, who is seen

as an agitator in western, and in particular German f ilm criticism.63
In a constant confusion of messenger and message, the demonstration
how power structures the gaze is taken for a power ploy itself. This is
exactly why Vertov explicitly replaced the subjective human eye, whose
logic cannot be seen objectively, with the mechanical kino-eye, whose
movements in the cinema can be traced and whose traces can be ensured.
This operation will be denounced as dogmatism in his successors, for
instance Godard, who invoked Vertov in his own work.64 The corrosive
and calculating Vertov is constantly opposed to the dialectical, musical
Sergei Eisenstein, whose work focuses on the human being as a hero figure
corrected by historical materialism.
The Truth Won by Means of Film 275

Eisenstein, on his search for a scientifically grounded effect aesthetics

of film, had also thoroughly studied the works of the reflexologists and
in particular of Bekhterev, as well as the writings of the most important
psychological schools.65 In 1924 Eisenstein defended his theater theses on
the Montage of Attractions, which had appeared in 1923 in the same publica-
tion of the LEF – “Levy Front Iskusstv” – as Vertov’s manifesto Kino-Eye, and
adapted it for the cinema. At the time Eisenstein held reflexology in high
esteem: “The method of agitation through spectacle consists in the creation
of a new chain of conditioned reflexes by associating selected phenomena
with the unconditional reflexes they produce.”66 While Bekhterev had
sought to show how observing and analyzing using technology leads to
different results in psychology than the subjective conclusions of analogy
do, and thus had used, among other things, snapshots in order to correct
subjective, pseudo-analogous, introspective psychology, Eisenstein orients
himself to Theodor Lipps’s thesis that emotional experiences can be had and
conveyed directly by the psyche, for instance “the emotional understand-
ing of the alter ego through the imitation of the other.”67 Furthermore,
Eisenstein invokes Hermann Nothnagel’s physiological examinations of the
brain, which had showed that different nerve tracts are used for imitation
depending on whether the stimulus is voluntary or involuntary.68 Only
stimulation by affects reaches the thalamus in the brain directly, main-
tained Eisenstein, and this direct path to the brain of his spectators was the
only thing that interested him. Later he turned, unlike Vertov, to classical
psychology and psychoanalysis in order finally to orient himself to Piaget’s
theory, which he knew from Lev Vigotsky.69 For Eisenstein montage was
not about psychological traditions, but simply about efficient dramaturgy.
“Reforging someone else’s psyche is no less difficult and considerable a task
than forging iron.”70
Although Eisenstein’s experiments were no less inventive than Vertov’s,
their film methods are completely different. Eisenstein was interested in
techniques that might change people, and he must have presumed that the
desired ideal, the goal of all education, which served as the basis for all artis-
tic modelings, was already well established, for it is not what emerges in the
course of the film process. The demand for the “model actor”, as he called
actors, was “the healthy organic rhythm of normal physical functions”,71 so
that the conveyance of feelings can run smoothly. It is hard to imagine two
goals of processing human feelings on film being more different. Whereas
Vertov begins to disassemble the great and heroic feelings cinematically
and to cause the boundaries between normal and pathological to collapse
276  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

in the multiplicity of elements and movements that establish a bodily state,

Eisenstein struggles with film to create a healthy social body.
For Eisenstein, film serves to convey affects through facial expression
and gesture, not unlike in theater. The special technical aspects of the
cinema that store and synthesize reality in images is not of particular
concern to him. Movements interest him as the movement processes
of human bodies and not – here he is following Meyerhold and biome-
chanics – as perceptual problems in the cinema. The cinematic method
corresponds to biomechanics because human movements, which by this
time had come under the influence of Taylorism, can be absorbed in
cinema as ergonomic – refined and systematized by analyzing working
processes historically and dialectically. Eisenstein relates all movements,
even the eccentric movements of a jazz musician, to a virtual center and
precisely to the “healthy organic rhythm of normal physical reactions.”
Film is not, as Vertov had proposed in his manifestos, an opportunity to
discover something new in the field of vision and to displace an “ego” and
its identity within familiar spatio-temporal conventions, but only one
among a variety of insufficient methods to depict, to regulate, and finally
to sort out the human historically.
In 1929 Eisenstein refined his theory of montage according to the model
of the kabuki theater, which does not simply stimulate the various sense
organs with various impulses, but aims for “the final sum of stimulants
to the brain.”72 Correspondingly, in his article “The Fourth Dimension in
Cinema”, Eisenstein organizes his forms of montage into classes of impulses.
He names the more complex of them after musical structures: tonic and
dominant, major and minor, dissonance and consonance, without ever
explaining the transfer of these acoustic relations into film technologies,
for instance into focal lengths, field sizes, or editing rhythms. He sticks
with illustrations using atmospheric images: so “major” is harvesting in
the sunshine, “minor” harvesting in rain or the port in fog, etc. Like in
acoustics, Eisenstein finds overtones and undertones in film as well, that
is, visual “aberrations, distortions, and other defects”73 that accompany a
film sequence.74 He then understands the optical impulses illustrated in
musical metaphors as complex and reflex:

That distinctive montage complex within the shot that arises from the
collisions and combinations of the individual stimulants inherent within
it, of stimulants that vary according to the ‘external nature’ but are bound
together in an iron unity through their reflex physiological essence.75
The Truth Won by Means of Film 277

This interpretation of reflexology assumes that nerves function in an analo-

gous way to the physical qualities of the sense surroundings, meaning that,
to stick with Eisenstein’s examples, “a grey-haired old man, a grey-haired
old woman, a white horse, and a snow-covered roof”76 also exhibit constant
similarities in nerve physiology. But the particular possibilities of film trans-
mission, as Vertov had developed them from neurological research, precisely
do not consist in banging out parallel visual qualities in the sense organs – to
speak euphemistically, to use visual metaphors – but in activating brain func-
tions through optical deception and in switching them on against viewing
habits. Another possibility might be to directly introduce an impulse to the
nerves through effects of movement and light in order to produce emotional
values. This would be the flickering, shimmering, and jittering in the cinema,
which transmits emotions that are neither coded nor decoded metaphorically,
and that expose the visual value, the motif, or the symbol in their various
possibilities of association or relation. Here it once again becomes clear why
Vertov insists that the cinema must first abandon producing images based
on the model of the human eye in order to experience its own traits and the
particular effects of the medium and its technology.
When Eisenstein enumerates his four fundamental techniques of mon-
tage as the metric, the rhythmic, the tonal, and the overtonal, he gets lost
in analogies. Poetry, music, and painting provide the terms for naming
film techniques, but once again the parallels are only vague at best. The
precision of the meter “joins the ‘pulse-beat’ of the film and the ‘pulse-
beat’ of the audience ‘in unison.’ Without this there can be no ‘contact’
between the two.”77 But Eisenstein does not introduce film montage as
electro-technologically as it is formulated here. For all his seemingly psycho-
physiological refinements, he always calculates the immediate effect on
the spectator, not the mediated one.
Eisenstein’s example for overtonal montage is the “Gods” sequence in
his film October. At the latest with this example, which is “assembled on a
descending intellectual scale” and shows “the notion of god back to a block
of wood”, it can be seen that the efforts to bring reflexology and psycho-
physics into the field are completely unnecessary to explain Eisenstein’s
forms of montage, since it is precisely the “reaction of tissues” that require
impulses that are encoded as streams. Eisenstein sticks to divine metaphors.
His famous montage of the gods rhythmically places still photo depictions
of religious artworks in succession. The accelerating editing of the series is
conceived as a descending line, from the architectural example of a Russian
Orthodox church to sculptures from the Far East and ritual African masks.78
The theory of intellectual overtone montage, which is supposed to be carried
278  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

out as “attack into the very heart of objects and phenomena”,79 merely il-
lustrates a literal and highly museum-like arrangement of sacred objects.
The differences between Vertov’s and Eisenstein’s theories of montage
lies above all in differing concepts of how human perception relates to
its technological conditions. The “sorts of vibrations”80 that Eisenstein’s
cameraman Tissé put into the work as the true virtuosity of the medium by
means of camera movements, fluctuations of light, various focal lengths,
gradations, and motivic tensions must, under Eisenstein’s direction,
always remain connected to fundamental dominants in terminology.
Vibrating itself can no longer be a film effect, it must remain hidden, like
the famous dwarf in his chess machine, and the truth of the cinema has
to resign itself to the law of dialectical materialism. Eisenstein counters
the skeptics of his montage theory with a striking argument from Lenin’s
Conspectus of Hegel’s Book “The Science of Logic”.81 The new man need not
be able to recognize the technical conditions of his own existence if only
he understands the dialectic. Eisenstein does not explain film starting
from f ilm technology, but proposes it in networks of signif ication for
persons of the Gutenberg galaxy. His films reenact this position. The well-
known example of the three marble lions that rise up after one another
in Battleship Potemkin is a “movement” that only stands metaphorically
for cinematic perception. Unlike Vertov’s demonstration of watching
movement in f ilm, Eisenstein leaves his spectators with an indication
of what has happened psycho-physically. Psychoanalysis and literature
will lead Eisenstein ever closer to ecstasy than to a “certain flickering” in
the image.82 But they also do not get him any closer to the conditions of
his own perception.
While Eisenstein wanted to reforge the essence of the Soviet man,
Vertov experimented with technology itself to experience the essence of
the new man. But he had to run the risk that he, if he wanted to experi-
ence the essence of technology, would no longer be the one to have this
experience. Anyone who goes so far into relativity can no longer ask what
he has lost:

We fall, we rise… together with the rhythm of movements – slowed and

accelerated,
running from us, past us, toward us,
in a circle, or straight line, or ellipse,
to the right and left, with plus and minus signs;
movements bend, straighten, divide, break apart,
multiply, shooting noiselessly through space.83
Part V
1. After All: Return to Receiver

Cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world

or possibilities and constraints. – And I would suggest
that this is also a viable definition of the art of living.
– Ernst von Glaserfeld, 1996

In the darkness of projection, in a state that, as Maya Deren wrote, so much

resembles sleeping or perhaps dreaming, our lunatic eyes find themselves
on the dark side of a cultural technology, on the far and weightless side of
the optical doors of perception, and at the same time, as Deleuze stresses
with Vertov, “the eye of matter, the eye in the matter”, that gaze which
has – just barely – formed us. Just barely, for who knows, perhaps soon
there will no longer be any imaginary people, Morin’s hommes imaginaires,
because other machines will affiliate themselves with other types of egos
in order to form people in their own image, getting them to dance. Until
then, however, all endings, whether hallucinated, projected, described, or
sung, will always also be visions and faces that are recorded in the form
of darkness and light, movement and blur, projected on movie screens,
subjected to our desires, spellbound beyond every ending. This is why
these somewhat twisted shapes appear, waiting for summer rains in
wild Italian landscapes, when The End is mentioned. Roman wilderness
spreads out in cinema and pop music where in the Renaissance the first
city was mapped, where mathematically and optically new knowledge,
nuova scienza, is meant to relocate spaced out subjects back in space.
Roma contra amor.
Until other machines affiliate themselves with other types of egos, we will
continue to pose the question of cinema as a technique, we will question the
fast, rhythmic, or logarithmic swinging movements it imposes on us, and we
can ask whether cinema couldn’t be considered a ritual or trance technique,
because with all its stories, dramaturgies, and dialogues, it always also cuts
into accustomed motor-sensory circuits modifying behavior through more
complex routines of relating to others and to new complexes of movement.
At the beginning was the question of a particular, and in the sense of Fech-
ner’s protocol, a fleeting historical subjectivity, its sensual entrapment and
constitution under the conditions of the ecstatic technology of the cinema,
as it was constituted in Paris, Leipzig, and Leningrad, the effects of which
were later experienced in Bali and in New York, in Haiti, in Niger, and once
282  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

again in Paris, and were then deconstructed, depersonalized, and analyzed

right away again thanks to image-producing apparatuses.
In the end it is about exposing the circular-causal qualities in cinematic
perception in light of the early neurological and psycho-physical research
that had always accompanied the invention of cinema. At the intersection of
the disciplines, the knowledge of cybernetics and cinematography meshes
up to networks in which a historical cultural technology appears as texture
of power relations – sometimes murderous, but always also as the possibility
of an improbable formation and encounter at the cross-roads: “The most
important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human
beings and the apparatus.” Not as mediation, but as existential provocation.
Both are challenged at the cross-roads: human beings and apparatus.
At the beginning was the question: To what end, for what possible
goal, for what sense, telos, or state could cinema govern the behavior
and interrelations of human beings and apparatuses? For this would be
the prerequisite to assuming cybernetic processes. At the beginning of
cybernetic history the first shadow community of the new science posed
the question of possibly recognizing purpose or teleology in the behavior
of animals, human beings, machines, or human-machines. The radicalism
of this epistemological program was not immediately clear. “One of the
essentials for understanding it, was to have been brought up in the age when
[…] purpose was a total mystery.” It was still a mystery for the participants
at the first Macy Conferences, who wanted to learn how to discover in
expressions, as Rudolf Arnheim had expressed it, or in behavior, no matter
how lunatic it seemed, an anticipatory and feedback relation of a particular
individual to its surroundings. Every behavior brought past experience up
to the present because these were reflected emotionally or humorally in a
specific bodily form or communication, as Norbert Wiener had speculated:
“I have a strong suspicion […] that there are two modes of communication in
the human body, the one that belongs to the neuronal system strictly and the
‘to whom it may concern messages’. I suspect that the ‘to whom it may concern
messages’ are a) closely associated with emotion and b) at least partly humor-
ally carried.” Especially if it is integrally guided by feelings and emotions,
behavior cannot at all be described as simple, goal-oriented, greedy reaction,
but as cultural reaction, supra-individual, as one that creates relations, one
that is implemented into our bodies in an odd and, as we know from Kleist,
dancing way, innocent, unaware, bear-bellied, puppet-like, or divine. In a
similar way, older cultures of possession have incorporated historical and
social knowledge, cultural relationships and behavioral forms according to
divine models of behavior in a precision that is quite incomprehensible to us.
After All: Re turn to Receiver 283

On the search for cybernetic forms of thinking which might save the
planet, Gregory Bateson, high above the Pacific in Big Sur, believed that
he could identify supraindividual and integrated models of behaving as
functions of the gods: “One of the things that man has done through the
ages to correct for his short-sighted purposiveness is to imagine personified
entities with various sorts of supernatural powers, i.e. gods. These entities,
being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit
characteristics.” Bateson, we know, learned from cinema. His divine func-
tions can be thought of as cinematic functions from beginning to end.
The fact that it was cinematography, and not the universal Turing
machine that was the prerequisite for all behavioral research is of course
not mentioned by the avant-gardes of cybernetic thinking, but it was cin-
ematography that turned behavior into an object for science in the first
place, placing even its interweaving of past and present into a measurable
order. Cinematography could record, store, and analyze behavior as a
complex interaction between arbitrary points in the universe, open it up
to combination, to repetition, to restaging. In the cinema behavior became
visible as a visible transformation of states, of circumstances, of sensations
and reactions nascent on the axis of time.
Cinema would be the art of combining behavior, which had been turned
into discrete data with the help of chronophotography, into new forms and
formations. This happens all the more precisely and poetically, that is,
counter to the cinema’s history of control and discipline, the more exactly
art moves in the matrices and registers of the medium. This is why in the
end we have dealt with films that were about the historical dispositif cinema
in the image, or at least of artists that went cinematic with the help of
transformation processes of shooting and editing.
For cyberneticists, not supermen of science, as Guilbaud emphasizes,
but simply people at the cross-roads of the disciplines, behavior, if it is
cybernetic, will bring all the points of the universe into equilibrium. “… for
cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and
constraints. – And I would suggest that this is also a variable definition of the
art of living.” There is nothing homely about this, no self-sufficiency and no
getting comfortable in a safe spaces. Finding equilibrium, in a cybernetic as
well as a cinematic sense, would mean entering into an extreme exchange
with the surroundings or the universe, and one that is decentering for the
individual. It is never a matter of binary relations, much less of exchange
values. Rarely were the travelers to Africa, the explorers of possession
techniques, the disturbers of behavior oriented as to where their journey
was going. It was nonetheless clear that the violence that is still hidden in
284  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

the decolonialized body cannot become visible in any other way than by
the means of those films which also decenter the observer. It was only the
doppelgängers of trance and their blinking paraphernalia, allowing the
light to flash and flicker in disturbing time periods, that were able to bring
photographing strategies of identity formation to light. And only with the
help of the movie camera those mechanical processes become visible in
which men and cameramen turn into organless or multi-organic energetic
complots and complexes, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The equilibrium in question demands of anyone looking to salvage it to
put oneself in danger, to risk jumping into the unknown of a technologically
manipulated time and its dark intervals, to risk crashing or overdosing,
or pirouetting into the spirals of one’s own ego, endlessly running around
the tracks of the measuring stations in the Bois de Boulogne only to learn
that the truth presented in statistical traces and recordings is a truth about
absences. “…in art doing something means doing away with something, begin-
ning with oneself.”
In the decenteredness in which “movements shoot noiselessly through
the room”, the meshes of the disintegrating or networking individual, its
obsessive, neurotic, and nefarious mental statements may therefore be
understood as a gift to the surroundings. “Mental life is not only a sum of
subjective experiences, but always also gives expression to a certain series of
objective appearances. These objective experiences are what the personality
uses to enrich its external social surroundings.” These objective appearances
in the form of sheen, flecks of light and bright spots on the screen, create
new kinds of homeostasis which connect us as spectators medially to a
degenerated, exploited global village gone off balance, and they teach us to
understand cinema as a production of perception, “in matter, as it extends
from the point where an action begins to the limit of the reaction, as it fills
the interval between the two, crossing the universe and beating it time to its
intervals.” This means we are summoned into the cinema in order to realize
crises in our sensory-motor reactions, to incarnate crises and to enter into
circumstances that connect us in ways that the ego had not previously
imagined. The unpredictable and unimaginable states that arise in the
cinema bring to the present exactly what was missing.
 Notes

Part I

1. Cinema

1. Bechterev (1908), 194.

2. Kracauer (1960), 14 ff.
3. Münsterberg (1970), 36.
4. Deren (1946 A), 20.
5. Kersting (1989), 265.
6. Farocki, (1981), 515.
7. Cf. also Krumme (1971), 72 ff.
8. Eisenstein (1998), 52.
9. Reisz/Millar (1968), 46.
10. Reisz/Millar (1968), 48.
11. Godard interview in Bazin/Labarthe (1995).

3. Knots

1. Münsterberg (1916/1970); Mauerhofer (1949); Kracauer (1960), 157-172; Arn-

heim (1957).
2. Mauerhofer (1949): “There is no doubt that the reason why film critics so
often contradict one another is that the difference between their uncon-
scious minds plays tricks on them. For no two people experience a film in
the same way. The experience of film is probably the most highly individual
of all experiences. Even the course of sexual experience, fundamentally
speaking, seems more monotonous than the experience of film in half-light
of imminent boredom, unconsciously fomented imagination at work and
passivity in voluntary seclusion.”, 106.
3. Kracauer (1960), 159.
4. Cf. Andrew (1976).
5. Bellour (1990): “The subject of hypnosis gives up his/her look under the
domination of the double movement which grips it tightly: regression, ide-
alization. The subject spectator is submitted to similar domination…”, 107.
6. Farges (1975), 80 and Anderson/Anderson (1980), 87.
7. Klivington (1989): “When we watch a movie, we are experiencing apparent
motion. Each image flashed on the screen is a motionless scene, but one fol-
lows another so fast with such a small change in the position of each image
that our visual system tells us the images are moving.”, 119.
8. Rheingold (1992), 600.
9. Wertheimer (1967), 65.
286  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

10. Wertheimer (1967): “The optical motion resulting from successive stimula-
tion can be seen in reference to the movement as equal to the seeing of
movement in the exposition of a corresponding object that is moving in
reality, and is equally strong, under certain circumstances even more insist-
ent.”, 75 (underscoring in the original).
11. Anderson/Anderson (1980), 87.
12. Arnheim (1957): “Sound-recording devices make the sound vibrations im-
press their own path, either mechanically or upon wax, shellac, or plastic,
or photoelectrically upon film by a beam of light.”, 164.
13. Arnheim (1957), 162.
14. Arnheim (1974), 387.
15. Anderson/Anderson (1980), 88.
16. As Morin (1956/1977), IX and Baudry (1970) would like to see it.
17. Kracauer (1960): “[The consciousness’s] withdrawal from the scene may be
furthered by the darkness in moviehouses.”, 159.
18. Benjamin (1937/2003), “Reception in distraction – the sort of reception
which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of pro-
found changes in apperception – finds in film its true training ground.”, 269.
19. Schlüpmann (1995): Heide Schlüpmann, who consistently interwove film
history and philosophy into a critical theory, wrote: “Film realizes the
separation that in philosophy was always at the same time the repression of
the body – and as a consequence of mimetic writing. It thus facilitates the
suspension of repression and the development of the curiosity of looking
in saving the power of intoxication. The cinema begins where philosophy
ended in failure, at the perception of its peculiarity in the separation from
the body but also in distinction to writing.”, 57.
20. Cf. Theweleit (1988).
21. De Lauretis (1987): “Female is what is not susceptible to transformation,
to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance,
matrix and matter.”, 43.
22. Kleist (1972), 22-26.
23. Doherty (1993): “…the violation of normative cinematic grammar (the sta-
tionary horizontal plane, sharp focus, unobstructed vision) translated into
heightened impact and added credence.”, 253.
24. McLuhan (1964/1994), 26.
25. Rheingold (1992): “Human proprioception includes a system of internal
sensors at joints and in muscles to detect changes in pressure and position.
A higher-levelprocessing system detects significant patterns among the mes-
sages from the body’s proprioceptors (e.g., this pattern of messages from this
particular set of sensors means that your body is going to topple forward if
you don’t do something about it; that pattern of messages means that you are
pushing something heavy and polished across a low-friction surface). Propri-
oception’s third information system consists of the effectors for transmitting
commands from the sensing and sense-making system to the muscles – the
microadjustements that keep us upright and guide our movements.”, 27-28.
Notes 287

26. Rheingold (1992), 28.

27. Deren (1948), 116.
28. Benjamin (1935/2002), 117.
29. Deleuze/Guattari (1987), 8.

4. To Whom it May Concern

1. Wiener (1965), 11.

2. Wiener (1956): “However, my interest in the development of computing
machines carried me far beyond those machines past, present, or to come,
which are made of brass and copper, glass and steel. The brain, the nervous
system also share in the main characteristics of computing machines. Paral-
lel to the yes and no of a relay is the fact that a nervous fiber can exist in
what are fundamentally only two states; the state of carrying a message and
the state of not carrying a message.” 267.
3. Guilbaud (1957), 13.
4. Wiener (1956), 327.
5. According to Paul Watzlawick in Ruesch/Bateson (1951), 3.
6. Wiener (1956): “We expected that if human control also were to depend
on feedback, there would be certain pathological conditions of very great
feedback, under which the human system, instead of acting effectively as a
control system, would go into wilder and wilder oscillations until it should
break down or at least until its fundamental method of behavior should be
greatly changed.” 253.
7. Bateson (1972/2000), 121 f. and Deleuze/Guattari (1987), 175.
8. Deleuze/Guattari (1987): “The organism is not at all the body, the BwO;
rather, it is the stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of ac-
cumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful
labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant
and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.” 176.
9. Leiris (1992), 3.
10. Müller (1990), 98.
11. Hans Schaefer in: Wiener (1963), 243.
12. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 48.

Part II

1. Discretions

1. Cf. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 41.

2. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 41.
3. To introduce a term here with which Kaja Silverman deconstructed the
female voice and female subjectivity in the cinema: Silverman (1988).
288  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

4. Heider (1976), 30.

5. Mead (1974), 3-10.
6. Mead (1974), 3-10. “…while whole cultures go unrecorded.”, 6.
7. Bateson/Mead (1942), 49.
8. Margaret Mead described the process years later in an interview: “From a
complex culture like Bali you take a lot of chunks – birthday ceremonies
and funeral ceremonies, children’s games and a whole series of things, and
then you analyze them for the patterns that are there.” in Bateson/Mead/
Brand (1976), 37.
9. Cf. Neiman (1980), 12.
10. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 35.
11. It was still too early to call the program cybernetics, for Norbert Wiener’s
book, which provided the name for the research on feedback systems at the
Macy Conferences, only appeared in 1948. Cf. also Foerster (1993 K), 115.
12. Mead (1975), 243.
13. Lévi-Strauss (1969), 53.
14. Lévi-Strauss (1963), 69.
15. Lévi-Strauss (1963), 46.
16. Lévi-Strauss (1963), 55.
17. Lévi-Strauss (1985), 103.
18. Lévi-Strauss (1963), 21.
19. Bateson (1972/2000), 84.
20. Bateson (1972/2000), 83-84.
21. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976): This was aimed against the model of black
boxes and “input-output” that had been established in the sciences: “What
Wiener says is that you work on the whole picture and its properties. Now,
there may be boxes inside here, like this of all sorts, but essentially your
ecosystem, your organism-plus-environment, is to be considered as a single
circuit.”, 35.
22. Bateson/Mead (1942), 50.
23. Bateson/Mead (1942), 50.
24. Bateson/Mead (1942), 50.
25. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 34.
26. Bateson/Mead (1942), 49.
27. Lacan (1988), 295.
28. Bateson/Mead (1942), 49.
29. Bateson (1972/2000), 112-113.
30. Deleuze/Guattari (1987), 22.
31. Deren (1947 typescript).
32. Deren/Bateson (1980).
33. A strategy of frightening, a kind of Balinese distancing effect, by which a
mother breaks her child’s habit of looking for high points in human interac-
tion by frustrating extreme increase in feelings, by, for instance, breast-feed-
ing another child, making her own child “artificially” jealous until it tires of
Notes 289

jealousy. Cf. Mead (1975), 261. The frightening would in fact not be an order,
but a symptom of upbringing.
34. Deren (1947 Notebook), February 22, 1947.
35. Cf. Kittler (1993), 190.
36. Arnheim (1957), 184.
37. Panofsky (1997), 96.
38. Mead (1974), 9.
39. Mead (1974), 7.
40. Cf. especially Murray (1989) on the lines of tradition in voodoo from Delta
blues to electronic pop and Jimi Hendrix’s sound.
41. Deren (1947 CC), 191.
42. Deren (1947 notebook), February 16, 1947.
43. Deren (1947 notebook), February 16, 1947.
44. Deleuze/Guattari (1987), 300-301.
45. Ruesch/Bateson (1951), Preface to the 1968 edition, VI.
46. Bateson/Bateson (1987), 13.
47. Ruesch/Bateson (1951), 168-227.
48. Wiener (1965), 162.
49. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 37.
50. Bateson/Mead/Brand (1976), 38.
51. Wiener (1956), 252.
52. Bateson (1982), 67.
53. Deren (1947 typescript), March 16, 1947.

2. Depersonalizations

1. Deren (1946 A), 44.

2. Deren (1946 CA), 313.
3. Deren (1946 CA), 319.
4. Deren (1946 CA), 319.
5. Deren (1945-1947), 11.
6. Deren (1945-1947), 11.
7. Deren (1960), 157.
8. Deren (1960), 158. Italics in original.
9. Arnheim (1957), 163-164.
10. Foerster (1949), Macy Transactions, 7. Wiener responded carefully: “Brings it
at low levels!” 7.
11. Cf. also the conversation with Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler:
“Poetry and the Film: A Symposium,” in: Sitney (1970), 171-186.
12. Deren (1946 A), 20. Underscoring in the original.
13. Deren (1945-1947), 15.
14. Deren (1946 CA), 319.
15. Deren (1946 CA), 40.
16. Deren (1946 A), 38.
290  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

17. Deren (1945-1947), 319.

18. Anderson/Anderson (1980), 87.
19. Lacan (1981), 94.
20. Panofsky (1997), 96.
21. Deren in Clark et al. (1988), 310.
22. Arnheim (1974) 386.
23. Deren (1945-1947), 11.
24. Deren (1944 P), 2.
25. Deren (1946 A): “By simply holding the camera upside down (I cannot stop
to explain the logic by which this occurs), one can photograph the waves of
the ocean and they will, in projection, travel in reverse. Such film footage
not only reveals a new quality in the motion of the waves, but creates, to
put it mildly, a most revolutionary reality.” 48.
26. Deren 1960, from “Adventures in Creative Filmmaking: Home Movie Mak-
ing,” quoted in: Clark et al. (1988), 186.
27. Deren (1945-1947), 12.
28. Deren (MM), 42.
29. Cf. Noll-Brinckmann (1984),
30. Deren (1955), 30.
31. Deren (1944 P), 2.
32. Arnheim (1979), 228.
33. Deren (1947 typescript) February 28, 1947.
34. Deren (1945-1947): “We are not so much concerned with who he is as with
how he moves, and such a transfer of identification seems to me to consti-
tute a progress away from the theater concept of personalized character,
and towards a more cinematic concept, based on movement.”, 12.
35. Deren (1945) to the Rockefeller Application in: Clark et al. (1988), 1.1, 262.
36. Sidney Peterson (1967) “Cine Dance” in: Clark et al. (1988), 1.2, 288.
37. Deren (1946 RO), 10.
38. Deren in: Clark et al. (1988), 320.
39. Kelman (1962), 20.
40. I was unable to find precise technical specifications for Deren’s procedure
in this shot.
41. Deren (1955), 451.
42. Cf. Braun (1992), 264-320.
43. Deren (1946 A), 47.
44. Deren (1946 A), 47.
45. Deren (1960), 164-169.
46. Cf. Foerster (1980), 23.
47. Deren (1960), 162.
48. Guilbaud (1957), 41 f.
49. Guilbaud (1957): «Les exigences de la mathématisation des réseaux font
appel à l’algèbre des groupes des transformations dont on sait qu’elle a
Notes 291

renouvelé la géometrie depuis un siècle et dont on n’ignore pas les ramifica-

tions jusqu’en psychologie (Gestalt)», 41.
50. Deren (1947 typescript) February 28, 1947.
51. Freud (1919/1955), 3697.
52. Freud (1919/1955), 3692.
53. Deren in Clark et al. (1988), 614.
54. The fact that this understanding of cinema governs us all once even led
Arnheim, in an attack of heretical mischief, to use the example of the old
stations of the cross to give up the identity of the Lord Jesus Christ: “Tempo-
ral sequence is translated into spatial sequence, the continuum of the story
is divided up into phases, and the same figure returns in several represen-
tations, be it in several pictures or within the frame of one, thus splitting
its identity”(Arnheim 1957, 169). But even the Christian God as a complete
trinity only became identified in the framework of “once per time-space”
with the panel painting of the Renaissance. In the cinema it is the other
way around; identity, like its splitting, can only appear in connection with a
cinematically delineated space.
55. Lacan (1981), 98.
56. Rank (1914), 97.
57. Cf. Kittler (2013).
58. Cf. Deren (1946 RO), 10.
59. Deren (1947 CC), 621.
60. Deren (1945-1947), 11.
61. Conolly (1966), 31.
62. Deren in Clark et al. (1988), 310.
63. Deren (1945-1947), 11.
64. Deren (1945-1947), 12.
65. Deren (1946 A), 20.
66. Deren (Deren 1947 notebook) February 23, 1947.
67. Deren (1941), 8. (I am citing the text her not from the published article, but
from the longer typescript, which is preserved in the Deren estate holdings
at the Mugar Library in Boston.)
68. Deren (1941), 10.
69. Cf. Ellenberger (1973/1985), 170 f.
70. Bleuler (1955), 111.
71. Bleuler (1911).
72. Bleuler (1911).
73. Bleuler (1916), 16.
74. Kittler (1984/1993), 132.
75. Bleuler (1916), 16.
76. Deren (1941), 13.
77. Bleuler (1921), 256.
78. Deren (1941), 10.
79. Deren (1946 A), 47.
292  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

80. Wiener (1954), 72.

81. Deren (1953), 35.
82. Deren (1953), 6.
83. Cf. Oppitz (1981), 257ff.
84. Cf. also Métraux (1958), 121f.
85. Deren (1953), 258-259.
86. Deren (1953), 259.
87. Ruesch/Bateson (1951), 168ff.
88. Morin (1956/1977), X.
89. And they become linked once again through another name, that of a Ger-
man professor: Caspar Kulenkampff, who wrote the foreword to Bateson’s
“Schizophrenie und Familie” in 1969, and who appreciated this book as a
“beneficial disturbance” for “those administering psychology in German.”
Kulenkampff (1969), 10. In 1967 Kulenhampff reported on an educational
trip to the Soviet Union, when he had also visited the Bekhterev institute,
and compared the work there with the latest research “from the Anglo-
American countries, from Scandinavia, Holland, and France.” Kulenkampff
(1967), 126.

3. Deviations

1. Leiris (1992), 34: “Pour oublier leurs médiocres petites ‘manières de blancs’
(ainsi qui disent certains négres) et ce qu’ils s’imaginent être leur personne
d’intellectuels.”
2. Rouch (1978), 5.
3. Rouch (1978), 6.
4. Deleuze (1989), 158.
5. In the pop culture of the eighties it would be “Phase, lock, loop!” Electronic
Front Populaire.
6. Rouch’s commentary in: Moi, un Noir (France, 1957).
7. Cf. Rouch (1954), 54f.
8. Deleuze (1989), 147.
9. Deleuze (1989), 148.
10. Deleuze (1989), 214.
11. Cf. Stoller (1992), 59.
12. Cf. Stoller (1992), 38.
13. Rouch (1978), 11.
14. Cf. Rouch (1978).
15. Rouch (2003b), 44.
16. Rouch (1978), 24
17. Interview with Rouch from the sixties, in Bazin/Labarthe (1995). Since this
is not a dialogue where Rouch is touting some big program, it has often not
been understood correctly by media studies scholars. “Certainly he wants
to dialogue the research process, a call that he is not alone in making in
Notes 293

ethnology; he wants to understand a recognition of the equality among the

differences of human cultures, and here as well he can count on the support
of a good number of his colleagues. But that it is precisely the medium of
film that ethnology is supposed to need so desperately to effect changes in
this direction is something that can be doubted.” Hohenberger (1988), 251.
Certainly it must be doubted that film is a means of dialoguing. Film is –
and this would have been clear to Rouch, as a scrupulous reader of Lacan’s
“Écrits techniques de Freud” – at least a trialoguing medium.
18. Rouch (1978), 25.
19. Rouch (1978), 25.
20. Rouch (1978), 25.
21. Rouch (2003a).
22. Rouch (1978), 28.
23. Rouch (1978), 25.
24. Rouch (1978), 28.
25. Deren (1941), 10.
26. Rouch (1978), 19.
27. Deren (1941), 10.
28. Rouch (1978), 20.
29. Rouch (1978), 25.
30. Rouch (1996) and Hohenberger (1988), 235, as well as Stoller (1992), 26ff.,
who in particular cites Sembène’s verdict that Rouch shows Africans as
insects.
31. Rouch (1978), 31.
32. Rouch (1996).
33. Foucault (2006), 340.
34. Rouch (1978), 31.
35. Rouch (1996).
36. Cf. Kittler (2013), 67.
37. Rouch (1978), 31.
38. Rouch (1978), 31.
39. Rouch (1954), 51.
40. Rouch (1978), 31.

4. Compressions

1. Cf. Wolff-Heidegger/Cetto (1968), 111-114.

2. This nickname is circulated by Ellenberger (1973/1985), 151.
3. Charcot (1881), 97.
4. Quoted in Foucault (1978), 56.
5. Freud (1962), 284.
6. Charcot, quoted in Didi-Huberman (2004), 187.
7. Foucault (2006), 341.
8. Foucault (1978), 56.
294  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

9. Foucault (2006), 339-340.

10. Ellenberger (1973/1985), 152.
11. Richer, in the appendixes to Didi-Huberman (2003), 297-298.
12. Schneider (1988), 151.
13. Bernard/Gunthert (1993), 100.
14. Charcot (1991), 3.
15. Freud (1962), 276.
16. Cf. Londe (1899), 282.
17. Bourneville cited in the appendices to Didi-Huberman (2003), 284.
18. Charcot (1991), 12.
19. Cf. Bernard/Gunthert (1993), 150.
20. Foucault (1980), 194.
21. Cf. Lorenz (1987), 108ff. and Didi-Huberman (2003): “For there was a
remarkable complicity, tacit and impeccable, between the Salpêtrière and
the Préfecture de police. Their photographic techniques were identical and
sustained the same hopes. The techniques were equally implicated in an
art.”, 51.
22. Cf. Sekula (1986), 17.
23. Londe (1888), 23.
24. Londe (1893), 5.
25. Contrary to all insinuations and allusions of Didi-Huberman, who would
prefer to see Londe characterized, along with Galton and Bertillon, as an
administrational type.
26. Londe (1893), 15.
27. Londe (1893): “On pourrait, il est vrai, assurer leur position au moyen
de l’appui-tête, comme on le fait fréquemment dans la pratique pho-
tographique, mais ce moyen nous paraît mauvais a priori. Il est indispensa-
ble de saisir le malade dans son attitude vraie et il ne faut pas immobiliser
dans une position qui peut ne pas être naturelle.”, 66.
28. Londe (1893), 98.
29. Londe (1893), 84.
30. Cf. Bernard/Gunthert (1993), 30.
31. An extensive discussion of this can be found in Bronfen (1982), 89ff.
32. Freud (1962), 276.
33. Israel (1976/1993), 25.
34. Israel (1976/1993), 118.
35. Israel (1976/1993), 270.
36. Israel (1976/1993), 29.
37. Foucault (2006).
38. Londe (1888), 3.
39. Freud (1957), 2211.
40. Bernard/Gunthert (1993), 125.
41. Charcot (1874), 167.
42. Freud (1962), 276.
Notes 295

43. Charcot “Apropos de six cas de hystérie chez l’homme,” quoted in: Bernard/
Gunthert (1993), 127f.
44. Charcot, quoted in Didi-Huberman (2003), 29.
45. Cf. Ellenberger (1973/1985), 139ff.
46. Cf. Charcot/Richer (1887).
47. Foreword by Richer, Gilles de la Tourette, and Londe, quoted in: Bernard/
Gunthert (1993), 129.
48. Charcot (1886), 39.
49. Londe (1893), 99
50. Londe (1893), 114.
51. Ellenberger (1981), 99.
52. Cf. Ellenberger (1973/1985), 157.
53. Marey (1885), 2.

Part III

1. Mental Apparatuses

1. Cf. Schäfer (1989), 160.

2. The two giants of the optics industry emerged in the middle of the nine-
teenth century: Carl Zeiss founded his factory in 1846 in Jena and Ernst
Leitz formed his company in Wetzlar in 1849.
3. Virilio (1986) traced cinema technology back to its origins in the pool of
military equipment. The practical alliance between military and medical
research is evident. To this day advanced research in every scientific field
are only permitted by military-industrial joint ventures.
4. Benjamin (2003), 350.
5. Benjamin (2003), 328.
6. Bernard (1865), 35.
7. Bernard (1865), 38.
8. Pavlov (1957), 488.
9. Bernard (1865), 11.
10. Bernard was one of the most notorious practitioners and defenders of vivi-
section. Public campaigns were led against him, which in part were financial-
ly supported with large sums of money by his own wife. Cf. Braun, (1992), 10.
11. Cf. also Bernard (1865): “Chez tous les êtres vivants le milieu intérieur, qui
est un véritable produit de l’organisme, conserve des rapports nécessaires
d’échanges et d’équilibres avec le milieu cosmique extérieur.”, 110.
12. Bernard (1865), 102.
13. Bernard (1865), 173.
14. Braun (1898), 1, Foreword.
15. Cartwright (1995), 44.
16. Foucault (1975), 243.
296  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

17. In 1854 the debate about materialism in Göttingen was carried out with
the belated verve of the political critique of 1848. Following a formulation
of Carl Vogt’s, according to which the brain did not exude its thoughts any
differently than the liver did bile of the kidneys did urine, the alternative
would be called “soul or secret.” Cf. Vogt (1847) and (1855). Instead of schol-
ars from the humanities, it was now physiologists, chemists, and physicists
who were debating the idea of the soul, and all partisanship had political
and institutional consequences. The physiologist Carl Ludwig, after trave-
ling from Zürich to the meeting of German natural scientists and doctors
in Göttingen, did not receive the appointment to a professorship in Bonn,
which had been previously considered all but certain.
18. Wundt (1874), 10.
19. Cf. Boring (1950), 68ff.
20. Fritsch and Hitzig, quoted in: Rothschuh (1964), 276.
21. Degen (1954), 271.
22. The complete list of Ludwig’s famous students can be found in Schröer
(1967), pp. 287-293. Joravsky (1989) also includes Vladimir M. Bekhterev
among Ludwig’s physiology students in Leipzig.
23. Bauereisen (1956/57), 104.
24. Schröer (1967), 107.
25. Schröer (1967), 107.
26. Cf. Braun (1992), 327.
27. Quoted in Schröer (1967), 110.
28. Quoted in Mattenklott (1984), 173.
29. Hegel (1807/1967), 142.
30. Fechner (1860), vol.2, 13.
31. Cannon (1945), 135.
32. Freud (1953), 969.
33. Freud (1953), 971.
34. Freud (1953), 973.
35. Bernard/Gunthert (1993), 30.
36. Helmholtz (1850), 14ff.
37. Helmholtz (1883), 867.
38. Helmholtz (1883), 870.
39. Helmholtz (1883), 880. Underscoring in the original.
40. Helmholtz (1891/1996), 29.
41. Helmholtz (1895), 149.
42. Helmholtz (1855/1896), 111.
43. Helmholtz (1868/1896), 365.
44. Helmholtz (1895), 43.
45. Helmholtz (1895), 7 and 53.
46. Helmholtz (1895), 6.
47. Helmholtz (1895), 6.
48. Helmholtz first describes it in his lecture “On Human Seeing,” which he
gave on February 27, 1855 in Königsberg; Wundt published it first in his “Lec-
Notes 297

tures on the Theory of Sense Perception” from 1858-1862, but had already
formulated it previously. Cf. Boring (1950), 316ff. and 329ff.
49. Wundt (1902), 27.
50. Cf. Boring (1950), 145ff.
51. Wundt (1912), 5.
52. Wundt (1912), 34.
53. Wundt (1912), 5-6.
54. Thus it was also possible to demonstrate that cinematic projection, in the
speed of the old projectors at 18 frames per second, would just be percepti-
ble as a sequence of single images if the blade shutter did not subdivide it
into two phases.
55. Cf. Deren (1953), 233-239.
56. Wundt (1912), 53.
57. Wundt (1912), 56.
58. Wundt (1902), 344-360.
59. Wundt (1874), 863.
60. Deren (1941), 10.

2. Psycho-Motor Activity

1. On Marey’s biography and life work, cf. Braun (1992).

2. Marey (1894/1994), 277.
3. Marey (1885), 15.
4. Marey (1885), 4.
5. Marey (1894/1994), 78.
6. Marey (1894/1994), 147.
7. Marey (1894/1994), 181.
8. Marey (1894/1994), 182.
9. Leuba (1994), 15.
10. Cf. Berg (1995), 72.
11. Painlevé (1991), 73 and 85.
12. Cf. Kracauer (1960), 270 and Cartwright (1995), 40 and 178.
13. Ernst (1948), 21.
14. Dalí (1998), 134.

3. Psycho-Drama

1. In Leipzig Paul Flechsig had dismissed his assistant Kraepelin in part

because he was neglecting his work at the station and spending too much
time on the experiments at the laboratory, or even: at the neighboring insti-
tute with Wilhelm Wundt, with whom he eventually wrote his Habilitation
thesis. Cf. Steinberg (2001), 252-256.
2. Kraepelin (1909), 689.
298  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

3. The negatives of Marinescu’s film series on pathological ways of human

movement were restored some years ago and clips from them were pub-
lished in a historical collection, edited by the Italian film historian Virgilio
Tosi. In co-produciton with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
in Meudon, the Istituto Luce, SpA. in Rome, and the Institut des Wissen-
schaftlichen Films in Göttingen, Tosi published Marinescu’s images along
with other examples in a series about early scientific cinematography. One
of the disconcerting issues in this publication is Tosi’s presumably scientific
commentary, which does not delve into the staging of illness by film using
camera and lighting technologies, but which simply repeats the diagnoses
staged in this way nearly a hundred years later, when he announces “record-
ings to analyze abnormalities in movement, generated by advanced ataxia”.
4. Camillio Negri’s film is included in the IWF compilation Nr. 193 “The Origins
of Scientific Cinematography – First Applications”, and once again Virgilio
Tosi’s attention as a film historian is sympathetic to Negri’s intention, not
to the technological film tricks of the staging, when he comments: “Negri
produced this film to give students the opportunity to learn by means of a
documentation of unusual cases”.
5. Hennes (1910), 2013.
6. Weiser (1919), 95.
7. Weiser (1919), 113.
8. Weiser (1919), 113-114.
9. Dr. Kirchhof is to the day the author with by far the most titles in the medi-
cal catalog of the Institut für Wissenschaftlichen Film in Göttingen. His
works do in fact span the regimes. The work on his film “Peripher nervöse
myopathische und strukturelle Störungen im Spiegel des Gesichtes” extends
from 1939 to 1957. Since the early sixties Kirchhof films on toxicology, on
diseases of the movement apparatus, on diseases of the brain, of the spinal
cord, and of the nervous system have come to Göttingen, initially from
Izmir in Turkey. These include footage from the Third Reich, which were
compiled and published later in Izmir. During the seventies Dr. Kirchhof’s
productions were once again coming from Bonn and Berlin. The presum-
able innocence of the shooting process protected Kirchhof from ethical
and medical judgments of his work. He is simply considered a good teacher
of the medical gaze. For more on Kirchhof, cf. the recent book by Schmidt
(2001).

4. Psycho-Technology

1. Lehmann (1917) quoted in Weiser (1919), 43.

2. Weiser (1919), 41.
3. Lehmann (1917) quoted in Weiser (1919), 43.
4. Lehmann (1917) quoted in Weiser (1919), 43.
5. Weiser (1919), 41.
Notes 299

6. Hacking (1995), 209.

7. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 41.
8. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 41.
9. Kittler (2013), 82.
10. Münsterberg (1889) Heft 1, 55.
11. Münsterberg (1909), 5.
12. Münsterberg (1909), 70.
13. Münsterberg (1909), 77-78.
14. Münsterberg (1914/1920), 14.
15. Münsterberg (1914/1920), 7.
16. Münsterberg (1914/1920), 159.
17. Münsterberg (1914/1920).
18. Solomons/Stein (1896), 499.
19. Solomons/Stein (1896), 502.
20. Solomons/Stein (1896), 506.
21. Stein (1937/1993), 274-275.
22. Stein (1937/1993), 275.
23. Solomons/Stein (1896), 507.
24. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 29.
25. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 22.
26. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 24.
27. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 33.
28. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 24.
29. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 41.
30. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 48.
31. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 45.
32. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 45.
33. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 48.
34. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 50.
35. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 53.
36. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 52.
37. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 55.
38. Kracauer (1947/1974), 79.
39. Deren (1941), 4.
40. Bleuler (1921), 256.
41. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 95.
42. Münsterberg (1916/1970), 96-99.

5. Psycho-Reflexology

1. Cf. Reymert (1928).

2. It had been Cattell who gave Wundt a typewriter, “one of the first in Ger-
many”. Avenarius had described this as a Trojan horse, since Wundt would
have written twice as many books with it as without it.
300  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

3. Ellenberger (1973/1985), 1145.

4. Freud (1961), 4466.
5. “It was only during the 1910s and 1920s, with the important researches of Wal-
ter B. Cannon, that a shadow community of emotion-attentive physiologists
began to congeal. Cannon’s extensive investigations of emotions in different
organ systems and functions put emotions themselves, rather than specific
organs or functions, at the center of attention. […] Instead of discussing
emotions in the context of a particular organ, system or function, Cannon
pursued the emotions in different organs, systems and functions of the body.”
Dror (1999), 218. In Dror’s multifaceted studies of a science history of the
emotions, Cannon’s research is presented in great detail in the context of the
transformation of the meaning and function of feeling in physiology.
6. Puente (1995), 510; Joravsky (1989) finds the source dubious: “the hearsay
report.” (314). Etkind (1996) pursued the legend further. In the period of
glasnost, doctors and historians debated indirect clues that could support
the hypothesis that Bekhterev was purposefully poisoned. Cf. Literatur-
naja Gazeta, December 9, 1987 and September 28, 1988; Ogonek 1988, 11, 7;
Medicinskaja Gazeta, November 11, 1988, 143.
7. Kharms (1936/1983), 5. Many thanks to Peter Urban for the reference.
8. Brozek/Diamond (1982), 125 and cf. also Ellenberger (1973), 1145.
9. CF. Ponomareff (1986) and Ziferstein (1966).
10. Joravsky (1989), 83 and Bechterev (1927).
11. It is indeed a bit paranoid how the science historian Alexandre Métraux
insinuates dark scheming to Bekhterev: “It is known that, before taking up
his position in Kazan, Bekhterev had traveled around outside of Russia for
more than a year for the purpose of study. […] Study travels also served the
purposes of laboratory spying.” Wundt, because his position as the founder
of experimental psychology was only confirmed through the many succes-
sor institutions, had never applied for a patent on his laboratory. What is
important about Métraux’s comment, though, is that reflexology is not any
Russian specialty, but has its origins in Central Europe and its, in Métraux
words, “institutional platform” was also in the devices that could measure
the mind as psyche. Métraux (1986), 91.
12. Freud (1958), 2386-2448.
13. Kittler (2013), 67.
14. Schreber (2000), 20-21.
15. Wundt (Festschrift), 15-16.
16. Flechsig (1896 R), 19 and 35.
17. Flechsig (1896 R), 34.
18. Bechterev (1905), 90.
19. “The cramp-like movements observed in people appear in three forms.
Relatively seldom they appear in screaming, laughing, sobbing, anguished
emission of tears, swallowing, belching, and other convulsive symptoms of
minor hysteria. Most commonly, however, cramps indicate the character of
the rhythmic and imitative movements peculiar to major hysteria, which
Notes 301

correspond to various progression and customary movements and which as

a rule are marked by complete uniformity in one and the same individual.”
Bechterev (1905), 81.
20. Bechterev (1905), 96.
21. Bechterev (1905), 72.
22. Cf. Gauld (1995), 420ff.; Kulenkampff (1967); Eichhorn/Stern (1977); Pon-
omareff (1986). And Bekhterev his autobiographical sketch: “I had already
begun the scientific study of hypnosis and suggestion in 1892, when the
subject was not yet being taken seriously in Russia, all the more so since
the practical application of hypnosis was subject to certain restrictions by
a provision of the medical board. These restrictions were only lifted at the
turn of the 20th century at my request.” Bechterev (1927), 4.
23. Bechterev (1902), 6.
24. Bechterev (1902), 16ff.
25. Bechterev (1905 A), 218.
26. CF. Maturana/Varela (1984/1987), 111.
27. Bechterev (1902), 131.
28. Bechterev (1902), 31.
29. Cf. Urban (1997), 331.
30. Bechterev (1908), 194.
31. Bechterev (1905), 11.
32. Bechterev (1905), 12.
33. Libich (1947), who found the manuscript, quoted in Eichhorn/Stern (1977), 581.
34. Eichhorn/Stern (1977), 579 and 584.
35. But the clinical practice in Eastern Europe, which hardly anyone in the west
is aware of, seems to have been relatively open. One visitor from the USA,
Dr. Ponomareff, described psychiatry in the Soviet Union in the presumably
dark eighties, emphasizing in particular the circumstances at the Bekhterev
Institute: “[…] psychiatrists a the Bekhterev favor a more restrictive definition
of schizophrenia and see mental illness as primarily a result of interpersonal
stresses.” Cf. Ponomareff (1986), 282. Ponomareff especially stresses the good
relationships of the patients to the doctors: “In general they were knowledge-
able about their illness and seemed to view their relationships with their
physicians as collaborative ones.” Ponomareff (1986), 285. Caspar Kulen-
kampff as well, then director of the psychiatric clinic in Düsseldorf, who later
brought Bateson’s studies on schizophrenia to Germany, found the “thera-
peutic-rehabilitative” efforts and the clinic and the research at the Bekhterev
Insitute in Leningrad to be exemplary in 1967. Cf. Kulenkampff (1967), 127.
36. Eichhorn/Stern (1997), 578.
37. Bechterev (1927), 4.
38. Bechterev (1927), 5.
39. Bechterev (1906), 3.
40. Bechterev (1927), 48.
41. Bechterev (1906), 26.
42. Bechterev (1906), 132ff.
302  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

43. Ditschek (1989), 153.

44. Ditschek (1989), 154.
45. Bechterev (1905), 18.
46. Foreword by the Russian state press in Bechterev (1926), xii.
47. When Bekhterev called his theory of reflexes “objective psychology,” he
wanted to underscore his distance to classical psychology on the one hand,
and at the same time to distinguish his methodology from pure nerve physi-
ology. Starting in 1912 he called his work psycho-reflexology, later human
reflexology, and finally, in his posthumously published political master text
it was called: Collective Reflexology.
48. Bechterev (1913), iv.
49. Bechterev (1913), 3.
50. Bechterev (1913), 6.
51. Bechterev (1913), 2.
52. Bechterev (1913), iii.
53. Bekhterev (1973), 380.
54. Bechterev (1912), 1486.
55. Bekhterev (1973), 20.
56. Bekhterev (1973), 19.
57. Bechterev (1906), 16.
58. Bechterev (1896/1899).
59. Cf. also Joravsky (1989), 497f.
60. Bechterev (1913), 25. Cf. Flechsig (1896), 26 and footnotes on 75ff. Here Flech-
sig localizes the the processes of consciousness and mental operations that
illustrated the structure of the brain, and not the other way around. “In the
construction of our spirits, in the great, persistent traits of its stratification,
we can clearly see the architecture of our brains reflected.” Flechsig (1896), 3.
61. Cf. Breidbach (1997), 225.
62. Flechsig (1896), 33f. Friedrich Kittler has pointed out that this is the ana-
tomical anticipation of Lacan’s description of the formation of an ego-func-
tion in the mirror stage. Kittler (1993), 70.
63. Flechsig (1896), 68.
64. Breidbach (1997), 224.
65. Bechterev (1896/1899), 2.
66. Bechterev (1896/1899), 421.
67. Bechterev (1926), 404. The fact that Bekhterev was interested in the rela-
tions, connections, and circuits of the microstructure in the brain addition-
ally prevented him from adopting the biologistic gender assessments of the
time, which had their outgrowth in the secure macro area of phrenology.
Nowhere in Bekhterev’s work are there allusions to a physiological distinc-
tion in the intellectual achievements or the multiplicity of personality
structures between men and women, and there were always many female
researchers working in his laboratories.
Notes 303

68. Bechterev (1896/1899), 616. Unfortunately, however, this discrete form of

impulse transmission, with its nice reference to contemporary messaging
technologies and which might have made it possible to seamlessly integrate
Bekhterev’s nerve theory into the apparatuses of cinematic perception, is
oddly syncretically linked to other models. With the precision of discrete
connection controls, the explanation of the transfer of the impulse itself in-
volves a rather psychedelic idea: By virtue of the ability of the protoplasm to
contract, the dendrites can be expanded or shortened and thus take up or
break off contact, thought Bekhterev. The “amoeboid movement” provides
the explanation for “the influence of habit and practice, the arousing or
calming substances on the nervous system.” Bechterev (1896/1899), 618. In
as much as these explanations are remote from the model of synapsis and
its electrochemical transmission function, they still allow us to recognize
the discrete elements of an impulse transmission for the nerve conduction
of the paths and courses in the central nervous system.
69. Bekhterev (1973), 139.
70. Bekhterev (1973), 116.
71. Bechterev (1913), 105.
72. Bechterev (1908), 234.
73. Bekhterev (1973), 166.
74. Bechterev (1913), 33.
75. Cf. Joravsky (1989).
76. Bekhterev (1973), 120.
77. Bechterev (1913), 281.
78. Bechterev (1913): “1. Organic (conditioned by inner stimuli), 2. Muscular, 3.
Gender, 4. Touch, 5. Taste, 6. Smell, 7. hearing, and 8. Seeing mimic.”, 289.
79. Bekhterev (1973), 98.
80. Bekhterev (1973), 98-99.
81. Cf. Ellenberger (1973), 515ff., 655ff., and 935.
82. Bekhterev (2001), 65.
83. Bechterev (1928 E), 271.
84. Bechterev (1928 E), 271.
85. Wiener (1956), 291.
86. Bechterev (1913), 76.
87. Bechterev (1926), 13.
88. Bechterev (1928 E), 276.
89. In light of this bold and careful psychoneurological research from the
beginning of the 20th century, all the current excitement that recent find-
ings mean that the perceptual system may prove to be plastic, “to facilitate
association, to be modulated by experience” seem somewhat belated. Cf.
Breidbach (1997), 24.
90. Flechsig (1896 R), 34.
91. Bechterev (1913), 86.
92. Bekhterev (2001), 93.
93. Short (1983), 4.
304  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Part IV

1. The Truth Won by Means of Film

1. Cf. Marshall (1983), 64 and Tode/Gramatke (2000), 203. Jörg Bochow (1997),
in his study on subject and religiosity in early Soviet film, for which he col-
lected and translated many previously unknown documents, has pointed
to the effects of objective psychology or reflexology, and in particular to
Bekhterev’s concept of mimic reflexes for Kuleshov’s idea of a new actor,
of the ‘naturshik’. The chapter on Vertov and religious ecstasy presents the
connections between Vertov’s musical inspirations and film montage.
2. Marshall (1983), 236, cites Viktor Shklovsky, “Abram M. Room: Life and
Work”, Moscow 1929, 6.
3. Humorous folk songs consisting of four-line couplets.
4. Tode/Gramatke (2000), 162.
5. Cf. Sadoul (1971), 15-46.
6. Vertov, (1984), 17-18.
7. Cf. Tode (1995), 145. Sophie Küppers also linked this expression not to palpa-
ble circumventions, which might be suggested by the somewhat awkward
phrase, but to the precisely planned work of the technician: “Vertov’s tricks
catch us unawares – if he has mystified us, so in the next moment he will
laughingly explain his trick to us. Even as the wild chaos of the street is barely
no longer whirring before us, he already shows us the assistant at her labori-
ous editing work. […] Through his instrument he has rhythmatized seeing;
seeing resounds; the theatre broke into pieces – what we experience through
him is only – REALITY.” Sophie Küppers cited in Tsivian (2005), 359-360.
8. Vertov, (1984), 124.
9. Cf. Annette Michelson’s detailed analysis of the situation in 1935 using
group photos of the All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet
Cinema, an “icon of dialectics” from which Kuleshov and Vertov are “miss-
ing.” “By 1935 […] Vertov’s situation within the film industry was […] one of
virtual expulsion.” Michelson (1992), 1.
10. Bechterev (1913), 278.
11. Bechterev (1926), 402.
12. Vertov, in Tode/Gramatke (2000), 43.
13. Vertov, (1984), 77.
14. Vertov, (1984), 63.
15. Vertov, (1984), 66.
16. “The agitation against intoxication has itself been raised to the level of
intoxication”, wrote Jörg Bochow concisely (1997). He also added the precise
editing sequence. Bochow (1997), 153f.
17. Vertov, (1984), 76.
18. In this representation and others, Jörg Bochow found the construction of a
transcendental human being, complementary to the “homeless, mutilated,
addicted, and mad” in Vertov’s films, “as he has been thought and imagined
Notes 305

in Russian culture since the turn of the century as a counter-term and

counter-proposal to ‘bourgeois individualism’.” Bochow (1997), 165.
19. Vertov, (1984), 16.
20. Arnheim (1979), 169.
21. Vertov, (1984), 19.
22. In his dissertation about empirical examinations of graphic and physiognomic
achievements Arnheim attempts, with numerous descriptions, protocols, and
evaluations of experiments, to create correlations between data from percep-
tion physiology and meaning. At any rate he proceeds “differential-diagnosti-
cally” from the beginning, which means, he is not satisfied merely to interpret
a particular handwriting or a particular facial expression, but confronts his test
subject with the “most characteristically marked” examples (8) and has them
ordered quantitatively: what looks “more energetic,” “cleverer,” “more poetic,”
“more mysterious”? The interferences of things, world, and perception that are
experienced as confusing in Vertov are only introduced at the very end in the
question, specific to Gestalt psychology, of the relationship between the part
and the whole, after the meaningful shapes [Gestalten] have already stabilized
against the molecular or signifying flickering. Cf. Arnheim (1928).
23. Arnheim, (1979), 169.
24. Vertov, (1984), 7.
25. Arnheim, (1997), 170.
26. Lenoble 1929 in Kino, nr. 17, cited in Tsivian (2005), 339. The entire passage
reads: “Speaking of the absence of psychology and the technical approach
to the perception of cinema as an end in itself, I was attempting to charac-
terize not only Man with a Movie Camera, but also that psycho-ideology, the
expression and a particular instance of which is provided by Vertov’s film.
In which class, in which social groupings, can this ideology be observed?
It is obvious that this is not the ideology of the proletariat, which does not
repudiate a psychological approach in film art, and which has absolutely no
inclination to festishize technique. Nor is it the ideology of the petit bour-
geois strata of society, who go to the ‘kinema’ as a means of escape from
reality and in search of ‘beautiful life.’ But Vertov’s work comes very close to
the perception of the world and the outlook on the world of the technical
intelligentsia, who are characterized by precisely the anti-psychological and
technical approach that I noted above.”
27. Vertov, in an official questionnaire sent to all employees by the All-Russia
Central Executive Committee (VTSIK) on September 21, 1918, in response
to the question: “What party to you belong to, or are you affiliated with any
party?” stated: “I am not committed to any party, but I sympathize with the
anarchist-individualists.” The entire questionnaire can be found in Tode/
Gramatke (2000), 200.
28. Vertov, (1984), 87.
29. Bechterev (1902), 6.
30. Kracauer, in Tsivian (2005), 356. The German premiere took place in Stutt-
gart on June 26, 1929 at the Film and Photo Exhibition (FIFO). The very first
306  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

screening took place in Kiev on January 8, 1929 and the Moscow premiere
occurred on April 9, 1929.
31. Kracauer, in Tsivian (2005), 358.
32. Kracauer, (1947/1974), 185.
33. Kracauer, in Tsivian (2005), 358.
34. Kracauer, (1947/1974), 6.
35. Kracauer, (1947/1974), 186.
36. Kracauer, (2012), 58.
37. Cf. Kracauer (1948).
38. Benjamin’s assessment of Vertov’s film A Sixth Part of the World in his 1927
essay “On the Present Situation of Russian Film,” however, was rather criti-
cal. Cf. Benjamin (1999), 13.
39. Benjamin (2003), 117.
40. Benjamin (2003), 265.
41. Benjamin (2003), 265. Italics in original.
42. Benjamin (2002), 117.
43. Cf. Baudry (1970) and Metz (1975) and for a general description and critique
of the apparatus discussion, cf. Winkler (1992).
44. Precisely in Vertov’s films Jean-Louis Baudry designates the appearance of
optical tricks on screen as the uncanny return of the repressed of cinematic
technology, which destabilizes the spectator’s identity: “Thus disturbing cin-
ematic elements – similar, precisely, to those elements indicating the return
of the repressed – signify without fail the arrival of the instrument ‘in flesh
and blood’ as in Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera. Both specular tranquil-
ity and the reassurance of one’s own identity collapse simultaneously with
the revealing of the mechanisms, that is, of the inscription of the filmwork”
(45). What is correct in this is that the formation of identity is linked to
images and the conscious disillusionment of this identity is linked to the
revelation of the technical conditions of producing images. But knowledge
about the conditions of one’s own identity furthermore presumes a disturb-
ing confrontation with technological, imaginary, and symbolic conditions of
these artistic, or to be more precise, these media worlds. / As to the histori-
cal reception of Vertov’s film, Annette Michelson, from a perspective of
phenomenological film criticism, also emphasizes that simple and reassur-
ing identity would be destroyed in the cinema. While Baudry argues that the
cinema apparatus precisely blocks the path to knowledge, Michelson under-
stands cinematic seeing as an epistemology of the 20th century, and thus she
can appreciate any collapse in identifying reception in the shock as cultural
critical knowledge: “It is the manner in which Vertov questions the most
immediately powerful and sacred aspect of cinematic experience, disrupt-
ing systematically the process of identification and participation, generating
at each moment of the film’s experience, a crisis of belief.” Michelson (1992),
65. / For Benjamin, this disruption is desirable. These techniques can calmly
observed in a cinema like Vertov’s, since they introduce into their analysis of
Notes 307

cinematic conditions film methods by which the conscious and the uncon-
scious become intertwined in their relations and correspondences. The radi-
cal disappointment of the “ego” in the cinema is in fact not a false identifica-
tion, lacking in experience, as it is criticized in the term “imaginary signifier,”
but much more the liberating dis-illusionment of the idea of human identity
beyond all technical or medial ages. Truth becomes results, knowledge of
realities that are won with literal, cinematic, calculating means.
45. Cf. Hein/Herzogenrath (undated) 103f.; Michelson (1992), 67; Farges (1975), 94.
46. Wiener (1956), 23.
47. Vertov, (1984), 8.
48. Deleuze, (1983), 8-9.
49. Deleuze, (1983), 39-40.
50. And for once refers the difference between eye and gaze to a proximity
of the cinematically constituted anti-Oedipal subject to Lacan’s analyti-
cal logic, in which the gaze is also set in motion by an interval, a gap, and
departs from the subject in the endless tours and routines of desire.
51. Deleuze, (1983), 81.
52. Vertov, (1984), 7.
53. Cf. Michelson, (1992): “... the Wings of Hypothesis”: “The resolutely anti-
humanist context in which the interval appears in the very earliest of his
important texts.” 71.
54. Posthumously one can read which illusions about the enlightened self-
consciousness in modern Soviet criticizes, but also in postmodern citi-
zens of the world, Bekhterev would have indulged when he thought that
subjectivism is anachronistic in a world that creates its relations and truths
by means of technological devices. “All this subjectivism borrowed from
psychology is in essence a remnant of the anthropomorphism that is being
radically eliminated from the biological sciences. It should also be expelled
from sociology, history and other humanities.” Bekhterev (2001), 20.
55. Vertov, (1984), 8.
56. Cf. Michelson (1972) about a photograph of Vertov in the air that re-stages
his first jump. “It projects the preoccupation spelled out in the pseudonym,
which replaced, at the very threshold of his working life, the family name of
Denis Kaufman. Dziga Vertov, translated, is ‘Spinning Top.’”, 62. And Georges
Sadoul (1971): “Dziga, déformation de Denis, se réfère au mot ukrainien
qui veut dire toupie, mais aussi Tzigane, peuple eternal errant. Vertov est
dérivé du verbe russe Vertet qui signifie ‘tourner, pivoter, tournoyer.’ […] le
nouveau nom signifia un peu ‘mouvement perpétuel.’” 15.
57. Deleuze, (1983), 39.
58. Vertov, (1984), 5.
59. Vertov, in Tode/Gramatke (2000), 85.
60. Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1928, opening credits.
61. Deleuze (1983), 27.
62. Bechterev (1913), 21.
308  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

63. Cf. Alf Bold “Experimentalfilm und Politik” in: Petzke (1989), 193.
64. Even the underground encyclopedist Amos Vogel (2005) gets worked up
about Godard’s “Maoist” films, 130.
65. “While [Eisenstein] was under the influence of Bekhterev at the beginning
of the twenties, when he was working on the montage of attractions, in the
second half of the decade he familiarized himself with a wide variety of
concepts: Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and ethnic
psychology. Eisenstein carefully studied the writings of Wilhelm Wundt,
Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Ernst Kretschmer, James George Frazer, Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl, and met with Wolfgang Köhler and Hanns Sachs.” Bulgakova in:
Eisenstein (1988), 356.
66. Eisenstein (1998), 40.
67. Eisenstein (1998), 43.
68. Eisenstein (1998), 47.
69. Cf. J. Dudley Andrew (1976), 55ff.
70. Eisenstein (1998), 44.
71. Eisenstein (1998), 50.
72. Eisenstein (1998), 111.
73. Eisenstein (1998), 112.
74. This analogy is also not technically precise, for it does not distinguish the
technical distortion in acoustics, which takes place on the recorded sound
material, from optical distortion, which is produced before recording takes
place, through lenses or quick camera movements.
75. Eisenstein (1998), 113.
76. Eisenstein (1998), 112.
77. Eisenstein (1998), 116.
78. All that is does provide is information about Eisenstein’s clearly ethnocen-
tric understanding of religion. While the simplest minds among the specta-
tors can clearly see, through the military meter of the sequence, that they
are attending a deconstruction of the divine image, all differences between
and reflections on what is seen here of the divine are subordinated to a
single idea: that god is nothing more than a block of wood – and overtonal
montage is just as awkward and bulky as its best service.
79. Eisenstein (1998), 123.
80. Eisenstein (1998), 118.
81. Eisenstein (1998), 121-122.
82. Eisenstein (1995): “…Hanns Sachs, a shrewd old salamander with the horn-
rimmed glasses, whose company I came to enjoy much later on my travels
in Berlin. He had a terrifying African mask – ‘a symbol of complexes’ –
which hung above his small, low, patient’s couch. We became great friends.
He gave me a most interesting book about psychoanalysis. Essay in Genital
Theory by Sandor Ferenczi, which explained a great deal of things.” (admit-
tedly post factum!) which I had come across on my obsessive quest to
penetrate the secrets of ecstasy.” 161-162.
83. Vertov (1984), 9.
 Bibliography

I. Writings, Essays, Articles and Notes by Maya Deren

Clark, Vévé, Millicent Hodson, Catrina Neiman (1988). The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary
Biography and Collected Works, vol. I, Parts 1 and 2. New York (cited in the following as
Legend I.1. or I.2.)
Deren, Maya (1941). “Possessed Dancing in Haiti”, typescript from the Maya Deren Collection.
Mugar Library, Boston University.
Deren, Eleanora (1942). “Religious Possession in Dancing” in: Educational Dancing. March,
April, May 1942.
Deren, Maya (1943). “Program Note to >Meshes<”, reprinted in: Film Culture Nr. 39, Winter 1965, 1.
Deren, Maya (1944 FA). “Fellowship Application to the J.S. Guggenheim Jr. Memorial Foundation”
in: Legend I.2., 243-248.
Deren, Maya (1944 P). “Program Note to >At Land<”, New York, reprinted in: Film Culture 39,
Winter 1965, 2.
Deren, Maya (1945 C). “Choreography for the Camera” in: Dance Magazine, October 1945,
reprinted in: Film Culture Nr. 39, Winter 1965.
Deren, Maya (1945 E). “Efficient or Effective” in: Movie Makers, June, 1945, reprinted in: Legend
I.2., 299-304.
Deren, Maya (1946 Letter). “Letter to the Editors”, The Nation March 3, 1946 in: Legend I.2. S. 383-385.
Deren, Maya (1946 M). “Magic is New”, Mademoiselle, January, 1946, reprinted in Legend I.2.,
305-310.
Deren, Maya (1946 A). An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. Yonkers, N.Y.
Deren, Maya (1946 CA). “Cinema as an Art Form” in: New Directions Nr. 9, Fall 1946, 110-120.
Reprinted in: Legend I.2., 313-321.
Deren, Maya (1946 RO). “Notes on Ritual and Ordeal” in: Film Culture Nr. 39, Winter 1965, 10.
Deren, Maya (1946 RTT). “Ritual in Transfigured Time” in: Dance Magazine, December 1946.
Reprinted in: Legend I.2., 457-459.
Deren, Maya (1946 CM). “Creating Movies with a New Dimension: Time” in: Popular Photography,
December 1946. Reprinted in: Legend I.2., 612-616.
Deren, Maya (1945-1947). “Film in Progress: Thematic Statement” in: Film Culture Nr. 39, Winter
1965, 11-17.
Deren, Maya (1947 notebook). Handwritten notebook on film about rituals from the Maya Deren
Collection, Mugar Library, Boston University.
Deren, Maya (1947 typescript). Typewritten notes from the Maya Deren Collection, Mugar
Library, Boston University.
Deren, Maya (1947 CC). “Creative Cutting” in: Movie Maker, May 1947, 190-206 and Movie Maker,
June 1947, 242 and 260.
Deren, Maya (1948). “The Artist as God in Haiti” in: The Tiger’s Eye, June 1948, 115-124.
Deren, Maya (1953). Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, McPherson &Company, Kingston, N.Y.
Deren, Maya (1955). “Letter to James Card” in: Film Culture 39, Winter 1965, 28-33.
Deren, Maya (MM). “Film Medium as Muse and Means” in: Film Culture 39, Winter 1965, 38-45.
Deren, Maya (1960). “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” in: Daedalus: Journal of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Winter 1960, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Deren, Maya and Gregory Bateson (1980). “An Exchange of Letters” in: October Nr. 14, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA. Fall 1980, 16-19.
310  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

II. General Bibliography

Agee, James (1968). Agee on Film. New York.

Amelunxen, Hubertus von (1990). “Zeit und Bildschirme: ein Gespräch” in: Television/Revolution:
Das Ultimatum des Bildes. Amelunxen, Hubertus von, and Ujica Andrei (eds.) Marburg.
Anderson, Joseph, and Barbara Anderson (1980). “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures” in: The
Cinematic Apparatus. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.).
Andrew, J. Dudley (1976). The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London, Oxford, New York.
Arnheim, Rudolf (1928). “Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchung zum Ausdrucksproblem”,
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 Index
Abidjan 119 Berlin 27, 260
Abramovic, Marina 43 Bernard, Claude 165, 166, 168, 242
Académie des sciences 145, 170, 191, 195 Bernheim, Hippolyte 153
Accra 51, 117, 134 Bertillon, Alphonse / Bertillonage 101, 146
Adler, Alfred 219 Binet, Alfred 142
Adrenaline 162, 241 Blake, William 77
Africa 49, 51, 107, 117, 118, 123-125, 132, 136, 200 Bleuler, Eugen 107-109, 111, 185, 216, 224, 225
283 Benjamin, Walter 23, 28, 42, 164, 165, 261-264
Afterimage 170, 205, 206, 211 Bochow, Jörg 304, 305
Albeydou, Sambou 127 Bolex 82, 86, 91, 93, 100
American film theory 39, 52, 261 Bolsheviks 231
American experimental film 45, 77, 110 Boltanski, Grigori 249
Amphetamine 161, 162 Boulogne, Duchenne de 140, 194
Anger, Kenneth 163 Brain anatomy 222-224
Anthropology / anthropologist 13, 14, 48, 57-65, Brand, Stewart 74
68-70, 72-74, 106, 108, 114, 121-123, 130, 132, Brault, Michel 124
133, 266 Braun, Ludwig 167
Apparatus 23, 24, 26, 34, 35, 38, 41, 45-47, 49, 50, Braune, Wilhelm 190
52, 58, 62, 69, 71, 74, 75, 88, 90, 98, 105, 111, Brecht, Bertolt 231
134, 139, 140, 142, 146, 148, 151, 155, 163, 168, Breton, André 49
169, 172-174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 185, 187, 190, Broughton, James 163
195, 206, 211, 222, 228, 235, 236, 253-257, 261, Brouillet, André 137, 138, 141-145, 150, 157
262, 264, 267, 282 Brown University 57
Apparatus theory 98 Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von 36, 237
Appolinaire, Guillaume 194 Bucharest 197, 198
Arnheim, Rudolf 39, 41, 42, 52, 68, 79, 84, 212, Bühler, Karl 219
257, 258, 282 Bull, Lucien 193, 195
Astronomy 179, 180 Buñuel, Luis 102, 197
Automatic writing 208-210 Burghölzli 107
Avant-garde 14, 28, 48, 49, 62, 109, 112, 189, 195,
219, 221, 225, 236, 259, 261, 263 Cage, John 49
California 189
Babel, Isaac 249 Cambridge Expedition 59
Babinski, Joseph 142 Canadian School of media theory 15
Balla, Giacomo 189 Cannon, Walter Bradford 14, 37, 38, 52, 53, 157,
Bali 51, 57-61, 64, 66, 71, 73, 74, 85, 112, 281 162, 172, 219, 221, 241-244
Bateson, Gregory 14, 15, 49, 51, 57-75, 77, 83, Card, James 89, 93, 219
85, 111, 112, 114, 121, 122, 132, 224, 225, 243, Cardiograph 187, 188
244, 283 Caribbean 44, 81, 106, 107, 117
Baudelaire, Charles 164 Cattell, James McKeen 219
Bazin, André 40 Charcot, Jean-Martin 14, 51, 107, 137-139,
Beatty, Talley 91 141-145, 149, 152-154, 193, 194, 201, 222
Beauviala, Jean-Pierre 128 Chauveau, Auguste 188
Behavior, behaving 36, 39, 48, 58-62, 64-68, 70, Choreography 90-92, 111
72-74, 94, 108, 114, 122, 126, 149, 162, 232, 233, Christiani, Rita 92, 93
235, 237, 238, 249, 250, 281-283 Chronophotography 94, 132, 151, 155, 156, 193,
Bekhterev, Vladimir Mikhailovich 51-53, 77, 223, 283
219, 221-245, 249, 250, 252-254, 256, 265, 267, Cinéma verité 70, 118, 120, 125-127
274, 275 Ciné-trance 51, 125, 129, 131, 180, 185
Belo, Jane 63 Claparède, Edouard 219
Benn, Gottfried 42 Cold War 27, 228
Benzedrine 47, 161-163 Collective Reflexology 52, 232, 239, 240, 266,
Bellour, Raymond 39 267
Bergson, Henri 265 Collège de France 194
Berkeley, Busby 29 Columbia University 219
322  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Comandon, Jean 194, 195 Ecology 63, 228

Comédie Française 126 Edison, Thomas 191
Communication system 45 Eisenstein, Sergei 28, 29, 40, 219, 230, 265,
Composite portraiture 146 274-276, 278, 279
Comte, Charles 58 Electronic age 45, 51
Consciousness 23, 28, 39, 42, 44, 70, 85, 87, 89, Ellington, Duke 195
103, 110, 120, 127, 133-136, 139, 142, 171, 176, Entropy/negative entropy 45, 73
181-185, 205, 207-211, 214, 216, 224, 225, 227, Equilibrium 17, 46, 75, 77, 241, 242, 244, 262,
231-235, 237, 250, 254-257, 259, 260, 262, 264, 281-284
264, 271 Ernst, Max 168, 192, 195
Constantine, Eddie 119 Erzulie (goddess) 112
Copenhagen 195 Ethnology / ethnologist 69, 85, 122, 124
Coutand 124, 125 Euthanasia 203
Cult 51, 112, 129, 130, 132 Experimental film/ filmmakers 215
Cultural patterns 57, 66 Experimental psychology 14, 36, 39, 41, 168,
Cybernetics / cybernetic 10, 14, 32, 37, 38, 47, 178, 184, 207, 216, 219, 222
48, 50, 51, 60, 61, 72, 79, 96, 176, 242, 281-283 Exposure time 145, 146, 151

Dalí, Salvador 196, 197, 200 Farocki, Harun 27

Dassin, Jules 29 Fechner, Gustav Theodor 38, 170-173, 175, 182
Dance 11, 24, 29, 34, 37, 44, 45, 74, 77, 90-93, 95, Feedback 33, 36-38, 45, 50, 51, 60, 67, 68, 71, 73,
105, 106, 109, 110, 113, 123, 126-128, 177, 182, 75, 83, 87, 96, 104, 108, 111, 122, 123, 125, 127,
183, 185, 206, 244, 255, 257, 281 135, 141, 163, 164, 170, 173, 211, 213, 223, 224,
Daydreaming 39, 265 242, 282
Degas, Edgar 189 Féré, Charles 142
Deleuze, Gilles 46, 49, 66, 72, 118, 120, 125, 126, Fichte, Hubert 47
265-267, 270, 281 Film footage 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 71, 74, 94, 118, 127,
Demeny, Georges 187, 189-191, 193, 223 131, 193, 194, 197, 199, 201
Deren, Maya 14, 15, 17, 25, 38, 44, 46, 49, 51, 59, Fischer, Otto 40, 211
66-71, 73, 75, 77-81, 83-96, 98, 100, 104-108, Flechsig, Paul Emil 14, 36, 169, 222-224,
110-113, 115, 126-128, 132, 163, 185, 212, 216, 234-236, 244
224, 225, 261, 281 Flicker 15, 34, 113, 261, 284
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 8, 13, 81, 82, Fliess, Wilhelm 173
84, 86, 88, 89, 92, 96, 97, 101-104 Foerster, Heinz von 77, 244
At Land (1944) 86-89, 98-100, 102, 104 Folklore 134
A Study in Choreography for the Camera Ford, John 45
(1945) 90, 104 Foucault, Michel 131, 138-140, 167
Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945/46) 84, Franck, Charles Emile François 194
92-94, 104, 105, 110 Freiburg 207
Meditation on Violence (1948) 69 French Film Theory 39, 52
The Very Eye of Night (1959) 92 Freud, Sigmund 10, 47, 51, 62, 97, 101, 138, 139,
Depersonalization 43, 98, 106, 124 141, 143-145, 152, 172, 173, 208, 219, 220, 233,
Derenkovsky, Salomon 52, 229 237
Dia, Lam Ibrahim 120, 124 Frische, Otto 190
Didi-Huberman, Georges 294, 295, 315, 317
Dieterlen, Germaine 121 Galton, Francis 146, 188
Dispositif/dispositiv 15, 30, 36, 44, 84, 100, 101, Gestalt theory 85, 86
132, 148, 155, 156, 283 Glaserfeld, Ernst von 281
Doppelgänger 86, 96, 97, 100-102, 104, 113, 136 Gilbreth, Frank 165
Dovzhenko, Oleksandr 28 Godard, Jean-Luc 23, 30, 70, 114, 125, 173, 251,
Dror, Otniel 300 274
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil Heinrich 36, 174 Goll, Ivan 194
Duchamp, Marcel 94 Golem 93
Dulac, Germaine 43 Goncharova, Natalia 189
Dyon, Élie de 168 Göttingen 168
Great Britain 39
Eastman 191 Griaule, Marcel 121
East-west formula 27 Griffith, David Wark 8
Ebbinghaus, Hermann 219, 232 Guattari, Félix 10, 46, 49, 66, 72, 83
Index 323

Gulilot, Rosa 152 Kelman, Ken 92

Guggenheim grant 60, 83, 86 Kharms, Daniil 222
Guilbaud, Georges-Théodule 47, 96, 283 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 28, 184
Gutenberg Galaxy 13, 42, 278 Kino-eye 135, 249, 250, 252, 254-256, 259, 268,
274, 275
Haddon, Alfred Cort 59 Kino pravda 125
Haiti 49, 51, 57, 76, 77, 106, 111, 112, 133, 183, 224, Kirchhof, Johannes K.J. 202
281 Kittler, Friedrich 17, 101, 108, 207
Hall, Granville Stanley 168 Kleist, Heinrich von 44, 141, 183, 187, 221, 258,
Hallucination 40, 224 282
Hamburg 59, 192 Königsberg 168, 176
Hamidou, Moussa 127 Kracauer, Siegfried 25, 39, 42, 215, 259-262
Hammid, Alexander 81, 84, 85, 100, 102, 220 Kraepelin, Emil 197
Haouka 51, 129-133, 140 Krämer, Augustin 59
Hartmann, Johannes 179 Kulenkampff, Caspar 292, 301, 302
Harvard Medical School 48, 241 Kuleshov, Lev 109, 221
Harvard Psychological Laboratories 208 Kupka, František 189
Hashish 241, 244 Küppers, Sophie 251, 256
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 47, 63, 171, 278 Kymograph 162, 169, 170, 175
Heider, Karl 57, 58, 72, 75
Helmholtz, Hermann von 36, 38, 47, 84, 162, Lacan, Jacques 47, 82, 99, 102, 114, 134
174-180, 188, 207 Lamour, Dorothy 119
Hennes, Hans 201 Lang, Fritz 110, 114
Hering, Ewald 201, 206 Legba 15
Herbart, Johann Friedrich 168 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 185
Hercher, Jutta 17 Leipzig 168
Hitchcock, Alfred 29 Leiris, Michel 49, 57, 117-119, 133, 200
Holbein, Hans 94 Lenin, Wladimir Iljitsch 252, 278
Hollywood 14, 24, 30, 45, 77, 80, 83, 105, 119 Leroi-Gourhan, André 121
Homeostasis / homeostatic 16, 75, 114, 221, 239, Lévi, Paul 125
242, 243, 284 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 62, 63, 121
Huillet, Danièle 30, 105 Linke, Paul 40, 205, 206, 211
Humboldt, Alexander von 166 Lipp, Theodor 275
Hypnosis 39, 52, 107, 139, 142, 145, 157, 221, 224, Londe, Albert 35, 38, 51, 136, 137, 142-157, 190,
225, 228, 254, 255 193, 194, 197, 199, 201, 223, 238
Hysteria / hysterics 37, 51, 106, 107, 135-142, Los Angeles 8, 81
144-146, 148-157, 200, 201, 209, 211, 224, 225, Ludwig, Carl 162, 167-170, 174, 175, 187, 188, 222
227, 233, 234 Lumière Brothers 194
Lund, Otto 188
Instantaneous photography 37, 146, 148, 149, Lyon 188
154, 157
Intervals 35, 109, 146, 151, 155, 156, 179, 181-184, Maas, Willard 163
188, 209, 257, 264-266, 271-273, 284 MacLaren, Norman 163
Intoxication 28, 43, 45, 49, 185, 223, 256, 259, Macy Conference 51, 60, 61, 75, 79, 243, 282
265 Marey, Étienne-Jules 94, 101, 137, 155-157, 169,
Israel, Lucien 149, 150 170, 174, 187, 188-194, 197, 198, 200
Ivens, Joris 249 McCulloch, Warren 75
Magendie, Fançois 166
Jacobson, Max 163 Magic 41, 57, 77, 78, 121, 126, 132, 163, 254
James, William 15, 207, 211 Magnani, Anna 99
Janet, Pierre 219, 234, 240 Malevich, Kazimir 189
Janssen, Pierre-César Jules 148, 174, 188 Malyovany, Kondrat 224
John-Hopkins University 168 Manipulation 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 58, 68, 71, 80,
Jung, C.G. 107, 240 83-87, 91-93, 95, 106, 110, 111, 151, 195, 199, 203,
209, 253, 257, 261
Kant, Immanuel 168, 171, 176, 207, 216 Mann, Thomas 31
Kaufmann, Denis 229 Marbe, Carl 40, 211
Kati, Mahmoud 121 Marionette Theater 44, 172, 183
Katz, David 219 Marinescu, Georges 197-199, 202
324  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Marx, Karl 135, 165, 233 Ninja 69

Matrix 24, 72-74, 85, 157, 200 Noise 36, 49, 127, 250, 284
Mauerhofer, Hugo 39 Nothnagel, Hermann 275
Mauss, Marcel 125 Nouvelle Vague 87
McLuhan, Marshall 45, 72, 167, 227, 263
Mead, Margaret 51, 57-63, 69-71, 74 Occultism 117
Medical cinematography 203 October Revolution 249
Meditation 69 Opium 241, 244, 255
Méliès, Georges 194 Optical unconscious 23, 28, 262
Menken, Marie 163 Optical tricks 26, 258, 307
Métraux, Alexandre 301 Ohio 37, 53, 219, 220, 221, 241, 243, 244
Métraux, Alfred 49, 106 Oscillation 162, 177, 178, 288
Metropolitan Museum 91
Mexico 219 Painlevé, Jean 194, 195, 197, 298
Michelson, Annette 305, 307, 308 Palo Alto 155, 165, 271
Mikhailovich, Vladimir 25, 51, 52, 221, 222, 230 Pan (god) 93
Mimicry 93, 238, 264 Panofsky, Erwin 69, 81, 82, 289, 290
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technol- Paranoia 24, 36, 37, 163, 167, 180, 221-224, 227,
ogy) 48, 243, 265 228, 239, 240
Montage 27-30, 69, 70, 90, 93, 96, 104, 132, 195, Paris / Paris Salon 38, 49, 59, 114, 117, 124, 125,
203, 212, 213, 221, 249, 255-258, 260, 261, 137, 138, 146, 152, 157, 168, 187, 189, 191, 193,
264-266, 269, 271, 272, 274-278 195, 199, 219, 222, 223, 233, 281, 282
Montage of attractions 221, 275 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 99
Morin, Edgar 114, 124, 253, 281 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 165, 168, 222, 229, 233,
Morocco 126 236, 237, 253, 268, 296
Moscow 221, 244, 249, 261 Pensiero, Eddie 161-163, 167, 179, 180, 185
Moscow Film Ministry 249 Peterson, Sydney 163, 291
Mosso, Angelo 169 Phenakistiscope 39
MTV (Music Television) 30 Phi phenomenon 42, 211
Müller, Georg Elias 219 Phonoscope 193
Müller, Heiner 49, 66 Photography / photographic reality 25, 34, 37,
Münsterberg, Hugo 25, 26, 28, 39, 40, 42, 50, 52, 38, 43, 59, 64, 66, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 97, 105,
168, 205, 206-208, 210-213, 215-217, 221, 231, 132, 141, 144-155, 157, 194, 206, 239, 263
232, 239, 258, 270 Physiological Institute 169
Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 29, 215 Plateau 49, 66, 72, 73, 111
Musée de l’Homme 114, 125, 132, 133 Plateau, Joseph 39, 40
Muybridge, Eadweard 155, 156, 188, 189 Plato’s cave 42, 264
Myograph 174, 188 Pneumograph 188
Mysticism 117 Poincaré, Henri 95, 177, 207
Polimanti, Osvaldo 201, 204
Nadar 191 Port-au-Prince 112
Nancy 138 Possession 34, 36, 49-52, 70, 101, 103, 106-109,
Naples 188, 193 112, 117, 118, 124-133, 135, 182, 216, 224, 225,
Negri, Camillo 200, 201, 298 228, 237, 282, 283
Nervous system / nerve systems 26, 33, 36, 42, Post-Colonial 119
47, 51, 106, 108, 109, 111, 127, 138, 144, 145, 163, Potemkin 230, 278
176, 180, 192, 214, 226, 227, 231, 234, 235, 260, Princeton, Philadelphia 219
287, 299, 303 Projection 23, 25, 37-39, 42, 50, 57, 58, 71, 78,
Neurology/ neurologist 35-37, 53, 60, 114, 137, 85-87, 90, 100, 104, 113, 122, 126, 134, 163, 170,
138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 193, 197, 198, 200-202, 203, 217, 269, 281, 290, 297
204, 223, 224, 230, 232, 234, 237, 239, 242, 256 Propaganda 27, 231, 244, 261, 321
Neuronal microprocesses 236 Proprioception (physiological) 34, 45, 46, 95,
New German Media Theory 16, 17 98, 287
New Guinea 60, 117 Psychoanalysis 110, 124, 233, 261-263, 275, 278,
New School for Social Research 62, 66, 77 308, 309
New York 61, 63, 71, 77, 86, 211, 260, 261, 281 Psychological laboratory 210, 219, 222
New York Academy for Science 63 Psychology, Psychologist 24, 25, 30, 34, 36,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 182 39-42, 51, 59, 68, 72, 82, 94, 105, 108, 109,
Niger 117-121, 129, 281 134, 137, 147, 162-165, 167, 168, 173, 176, 178,
Index 325

180-182, 184, 185, 202, 205, 207, 208, 212, 216, Tourou et Bitti, les tambours d’avant
217, 219, 220, 222, 225, 227, 228, 230-233, 236, (1971) 127
238, 240-244, 249, 250, 251, 253, 255, 257, Cocorico M. Poulet (1974) 120
258, 260-262, 268, 273, 275, 292, 301, 302, Royal Observatory Greenwich 179
304-306, 308 Russian Reflexology 168, 222
Psychoneurological Research Institute 77 Russolo, Luigi 189
Psycho-physiology, psycho-physiological 13, 14, Ruttmann, Walter 260, 261
161, 164, 172, 233, 277 Rye, Stellan 101
Psycho-reflexology 52, 169, 219, 227, 232, 238,
253, 274, 302 Salpêtrière 8, 37, 51, 101, 137-149, 151-155, 157, 194,
Psychotechnology, psycho-technical 42, 169, 199, 200, 224, 225, 233, 294, 315, 318
206, 212 Schizophrenia 77, 107, 114, 243, 302
Pudovkin, Wsewolod Illarionowitsch 28 Schlüpmann, Heide 17, 286
Pynchon, Thomas 27, 161, 163, 167, 169 Schomburgk, Hans 59
Schreber, Daniel Paul 182, 223, 240, 301
Racine, Jean 126 Sechenov, Ivan Mikhaylovich 168, 222, 250
Radiology / radiation 53, 157, 308 Second World War 45, 47, 74, 117, 162, 220, 244
Rank, Otto 101, 291 Seeber, Guido 101
Ray, Man 195 Shao Lin 69
Raymond, André 195 Shamans, shamanistic cure 170, 171, 182, 191,
Reflexology, reflex, reflexologist 24, 26, 34, 40, 225, 255
47, 52, 77, 102, 108, 162, 163, 167-169, 173, 208, Shklovsky, Viktor 249, 304
210, 214, 221-223, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 234, Shock 81, 164, 165, 187, 230, 236, 307
236-241, 243, 244, 250-253, 262, 266, 267, Siegert, Bernhard 17, 285
273-277, 301, 302, 304 Sierra Maestra 119
reflex arc 40, 210, 236, 237, 240, 266, 267 Snapshot 145, 150, 151, 275
Regnault, Félix-Louis 58, 122 Société française de photographie 150, 155
Reisz, Karel 29, 285 Solomons, Leon M. 208-212, 234, 299
Resonator 162, 177 Songhay 118, 119, 121, 122, 129
Retinal afterimages 39 Soviet Union 28, 220-222, 228, 231, 243, 244,
Reynaud, Emile 191 249, 292, 302
Rheinau 107 Spencer, Baldwin 59
Rheingold, Howard 286, 287 Spencer, Herbert 226, 227
Rhythm 23, 27, 29, 30, 34-36, 39, 46, 50, 52, 58, Sphygmograph 187, 192
70, 78, 83, 92, 106, 109-113, 126-128, 130-132, Stalin, Josef / Stalinism 30, 36, 221, 222, 228
134, 136, 151, 153, 157, 165, 170, 178-185, 190, 191, Stein, Gertrude 208-210, 214, 234
205, 206, 215, 223, 250, 255, 259, 275-278, 281, Stereoscopic camera 150
301, 305 Stern, William 219, 302
Richer, Paul 137, 141, 142, 154, 162, 193, 295 Stop trick 89
Richter, Hans 40 Straub, Jean-Marie 30
Rimbaud, Arthur 118 Stroboscope / strobe / stroboscopic seeing 39,
Rist, Pipilotti 43 40, 42, 113, 163, 179, 180, 203, 206, 211
Rites 57, 60, 110 St. Petersburg / Leningrad 52, 77, 115, 219, 225,
Ritual 15, 19, 34, 38, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 57, 58, 61, 228, 229, 231, 243, 244, 249, 253, 281, 302
62, 69, 70, 80, 81, 84, 92-94, 98, 104, 105, 108, Suggestibility 109, 128, 153, 216, 217, 224
110-113, 117-119, 121, 123, 125-132, 134, 136, 137, Surrealist 52, 81, 117, 195
183, 225, 277, 281 Synthetic feelings 184
Robinson, Edward G. 119
Room, Abram 249, 304 Talbot’s Law 40
Rosenblueth, Arturo 47, 242 Talley Beatty 91
Rouch, Jean 36, 38, 44, 49, 51, 70, 114, 117-135, Tarkovsky, Andrei Arsenjewitsch 28
194, 224, 225, 253, 293, 294 Tarzan 119
Bataille sur le grand fleuve (1951) 123 Tautoscope 205
Les Maîtres fous (1955) 51, 129, 130-132 Telegraph 146, 176, 190, 232, 241
Moi, un noir (1958) 119, 120, 293 Teleology 65, 66, 282
Chronique d’un été (1960) 124, 125 Theater of biomechanics 221
La Chasse au lion à l’arc (1965) 123 Thermograph 188
Petit à petit (1969) 123, 124 Third Reich 52, 203, 299
Third World 48
326  Cinema, Tr ance and C yberne tics

Timbuktu 121 Vienna 137, 167, 168, 219

Tourette, Gilles de la 142, 154, 295 Vigotsky, Lev 275
Trier, Lars von 24, 30 Villon, Jacques 189
Trance / trance dance/ Trance-Technology 51, Virilio, Paul 164
53, 62, 151, 170, 173-175, 180, 185, 191, 208, 209, Vitascope 179
212, 213, 216, 225, 281, 284 Voodoo / voodoo dancer 36, 46, 51, 53, 81, 108,
Trauma, traumatic psychoneuroses 138, 234 111, 112, 183, 185, 242, 289
Tsion, Ilya Fadeyevich 168
Turing, Alan 13, 63, 283 Wagner, Fritz Arno 215
Washburn, Margaret 219
Unconscious 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 42, 46, Washington 220
62, 63, 71, 84, 98, 105, 108, 109, 112, 132, 139, Weber-Fechner-Law 172
146, 147, 149-151, 154, 157, 165, 173, 176-178, Weiser, Martin 201, 203, 206, 299
180, 182, 185, 192, 197, 208, 209, 212, 213, 224, Wertheimer, Max 39-42, 205, 211, 286
227, 231, 251, 254, 255, 259-263, 267, 269, 271, Wiener, Norbert 33, 38, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57, 63, 73,
284, 286, 307 75, 79, 111, 138, 242, 282, 287, 289, 290, 292,
University of Turin 169 304, 307
Wittenberg College 219, 220, 241
Valéry, Paul 102 Wittenberg Symposium 220
Venice 134 Wittman, Blanche 53, 142, 150, 151, 154, 157
Vertov, Dziga 26, 28, 38, 52, 69, 125, 129, 135, Wolf, Christian 179
221, 229, 231, 239, 249-254, 256-268, 273-278, Wu Tang 69
281, 304-308 Wundt, Wilhelm 30, 39, 40, 162, 168, 178-185,
kino-Glaz, Cinema Eye (Кино-глаз, 1924) 15, 197, 205-207, 211, 215, 219, 222, 223, 234,
259, 271 296-298, 300, 301, 308
Kino-Pravda (Киноправда, 1925) 125, 249,
252 Zika, Damouré 118, 120, 123, 124
Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с Zischler, Hanns 117
киноаппаратом, 1929) 52, 69, 239, 254, Zollikon 107
259, 260, 268, 306, 308 Zöllner, Karl Friedrich 179
Enthusiasm (Энтузиазм, 1930) 258 Zürich 107, 168, 296
Three Songs about Lenin (Три песни о
Ленине, 1934) 252