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I : : Time and Space
1 : : Animation and History
E sth e r L e s li e

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Animation’s Ahistory

Does animation have a history? Does it evolve as would any other

medium that is born and grows up, all the while refining and developing
its techniques? This appears to be how film developed. Film moved from
the front-­on static-­camera view to the dollying and swooping camera
eye; from black-­and-­white, through hand tinting, to color; from silent
to noisy; and from 2-­D to 3-­D , while developing editing techniques and
honing its acting styles. Then came the day, quite recently, when film
merged, through cgi, with animation. This thing that was called film,
and still is, evolves from simplicity to complexity, blaring out a narra-
tive of progress, at least in the commercial realm. Each new film is to be
bigger, better, more immersive, more expensive, more profitable, and
more “life-­like” (if not more realistic) than the last. The latest gambits
are 3-­D and hd, though they are also part of the increasing entwine-
ment of film and animation via the digital. In its quest to be ever more
real, film mobilizes the irreal arts of animation. Does animation proceed
through time and technique in the same progressive way, rarely look-
ing back? Can one tell for sure when any one animation was made? Can
one date a single animation by its technique, its ideas, its structure, the
quality of its coloration or film stock? Of course, it is possible to perceive
celluloid’s deterioration and posit oldness. Of course, the coloration or
absence of color may give a clue. The technical properties of the strip
along with the music and the ideas may well indicate the date when it
was made. But animation is not as clear-­cut as film, because in film the
passing fads of a world out there impress themselves upon the medium
more definitely through a technical and a social reaction. Every detail,
the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if the film purports to
be a historical one), the attitudes, the quality of color, the pace of the
editing, the rhythms of the soundtrack, the clarity of the image, the
shape of the bodily gestures, all this bears a date stamp. Film, in general,
bears a rigidly progressive relationship toward both social and techni-
cal developments (though now part of that technical development has
absorbed into itself the technical capacities of computer-­generated ani-
mation). Film reflects its age into itself. But animation does not, or not
quite so straightforwardly. It would be barely possible to place in any
chronological order, in some line of responsible historical development,
the myriad flimsy fragments that make up animation’s legacy, for these
fragments, by their very (different) nature, are so detached, reattached,

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and misattached from and to the world outside of them that they pose
only questions, riddles, essays. Animation makes many starts. It makes
many false starts. Animation starts and stops, by nature. It combines
and cuts and undercuts, and reconstructs and constructs, tricks and
reveals the trick and perhaps all at once. Film may do this too, but it
tends to obscure the traces of the work upon it. In the mid-­1930s Walter
Benjamin described the output: “The equipment-­free aspect of reality
here has become the height of artifice.”1
Animation is too obviously manifold to set out upon a single line of
development. It begins with shadow play or with thumb cinemas, with
zoetropes or magic lanterns, with lightning sketches or cel animation,
with hidden wheels and pulleys or with stop-­motion photography. It
starts and stops in many places. It is at one and the same time a begin-
ning and a culmination. To accept a thought such as this could explain
the never-­flagging bounciness of Walter Ruttmann’s cavorting shapes
of the early 1920s. Or it could allow an understanding of why Disney’s
feature cartoons are reissued periodically, not as historical items but as
entities to occupy the present, even if nowadays morphed into 3-D. The
banal way to put this is stated by Alan Bergman, the president of the
Walt Disney Studios, in a press release: “Great stories and great charac-
ters are timeless, and at Disney we’re fortunate to have a treasure trove
of both.”2 In wayward terms, the sentiment taps into something of the
otherworldly character of animation, which makes it truly ahistorical in
relation to our world.
But this is not to say that animation always exchanges its relation to
its moment for an arrival in ours. Its moment of making marks itself on
the animation too, but perhaps more covertly than film’s historical mo-
ment does. What does Ruttmann’s outburst against Lotte Reiniger and
her silhouette animation suggest about animation’s particular hold on
its moment of making? Reiniger animated cutouts, black delicacies set
in flat fairy-­tale worlds of filigreed detail. Ruttmann was a collabora-

26 • Esther Leslie
tor on what is now labeled the oldest surviving feature-­length anima-
tion. Reiniger’s fairy tale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was released
in 1926. Ruttmann sat assembled with the other animators for the first
time to watch the marked copy and is reported to have exclaimed, “What
has this to do with 1923?”3 What did the dancing shadows, trapped in
a flat world of genies and demons, caught only with sidelong glances,
have to do with the spectacular collapse of the German economy in the
epoch of hyperinflation? This was a time when, as Benjamin notes, “for
this nation [Germany], a period of just seven years separates the intro-

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duction of the calculation with half-­pfennigs (by the postal authorities
in 1916) from the validity of the ten thousand mark note as the smallest
currency unit in use (1923).”4 But Ruttmann was wrong to think that the
fairy-­tale film was simply at variance to the economic devastations of
the epoch and only a frivolous play of paper and light. In any case, paper
in those charged years of billion-­mark banknotes and financial ruin was
far from a frivolous topic. Perhaps indeed this animation had everything
to do with the crisis years, re-­presenting, in graphic form, a fading out
of all life’s color, a distancing from the graspable three-­dimensionality
of reality, the world or life as bare, a shadow of its former self.5 Per-
haps Reiniger’s animation steps toward satisfying the needs of a new
audience—composed of those who Georg Simmel had earlier termed
the “blasé” type of industrialized modernity, for whom overstimulation
promotes a withdrawal from the distinctions between things—in order
to favor that which is homogenous.6 Perhaps this withdrawal anticipates
what Herbert Marcuse would later call the “One Dimensional Man.”7
Arguably, Reiniger’s animation dramatizes a local, historical alienation
of life through mobilization of its shadow forms by unseen hands and
unseen technologies. Except, sometimes, the scissors make their ap-
pearance—and they reveal the whole confection to be a dance of light
and paper and agile hands. Snip snip: the film is made of cuts. The film
presents, through another nature, a sidelong reflection on ours.
Perhaps it is also true that the animation had nothing specifically to
do with 1923. Animation, the one by Reiniger, just like countless others,
always asks the viewer to take a leap out of now, out of physics, out
of time, out of this world, in short, a leap of faith, to don the seven-­
league boots of folklore and replace the substance with the silhouette,
the shadow. Animation is not a depiction of a recognizable world. The
mission of animation is often to tarry with the shadow side, the “night
side of nature,” that obscured realm in which all unexplained and magi-
cal, illogical events occur.8 Animation goes, in all its superficiality, deeply

Animation and History • 27

into the substance of being, the hidden realms, the crevices beneath
usual exposure, the constructions and reconstructions. Animation as
the visualization of the shadow side is also an allegory of filmic actu-
ality, albeit a truth that film most usually works to obscure. For film, the
secret must be maintained: film asks viewers to believe in those shad-
ows cavorting in two dimensions on the flat screen in the “kingdom of
shadows,” who all too often seem to live for us.9 Film is the unknowing
suspension of disbelief in stand-­ins, doppelgangers, avatars, things that
only pretend to be real, full-­blooded, breathing, but are in fact chemical

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confections, celluloid compositions. Which is also to say, film is and has
always been just a subset of animation—in contrast to how critics pre-
sented the relation—if animation is understood to be the inputting of
life, or the inputting of the illusion of life, into that which is flat or inert
or a model or an image. Reiniger, intentionally or not, made an emblem
of this spectacularity, in a cine-­world that was also incidentally—with
the victories of the culture industry—flattening out into platitudes, fa-
çades, surfaces, and flimsiness. In giving the shadows delicate life, she
made a virtue of film’s flimsy flattening, decried its dull mimetics, and
opened it, through animation, onto fantastic speculation and the pos-
sibility of revelation.

Telling Fairy Tales

In “Better Castles in the Sky,” an essay from 1959 in The Utopian Function
of Art and Literature, Ernst Bloch wrote of how clouds are a “fairy tale
qualit[y] of nature.”10 They are, so think children, “distant mountains,”
entities in “a towering and wonderful foreign land above our heads,” a
Switzerland in the sky. The cloud is not only a “castle or ice-­mountain
to the fairy tale gaze.” It is also an “island in the sea of heaven or a ship,
and the blue skies on which it sails resemble the ocean.” In the child’s
mind, the fluffy clouds turn into solid mountains. The airy blue sky is
imagination’s watery sea. The heavens are like a mirror, reflecting the
Earth’s inversion. All this transformation is a fundamentally anima-
tional principle. And so, if down below on earth is the world of body and
action, then up there above is the world of mind, thought, imagination,
and other histories, including better ones. Clouds are the fuzzy matter of
utopian speculation for Bloch. They are moving screens onto which can
be projected a revolutionary “not yet,” the contents of an unbounded
“anticipatory consciousness.” This anticipatory consciousness as cloud is
the antithesis of the clouds that Leni Riefenstahl allows to frame Hitler

28 • Esther Leslie
in Triumph of the Will (1935). These filmic clouds are the backdrop for one
who is to be seen as a new god come down to earth from his airplane.
The nebulous clouds of blue-­sky thinking are also unlike the swastika-­
shaped clouds of Nutzi Land, projected by Disney in Der Fuehrer’s Face
(1942). But these Nutzi clouds, in their twisting of nature into politi-
cal form, do illustrate an astute recognition that even, or especially,
nature is not immune from the fascist colonizing impulse. The cloud-
scape, castles and mountains in the sky, the crystals of ice that make
up those clouds—these are the indistinct, magical, fuzzy places of wait-

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ing and longing. For Bloch, the vague awareness of a liberated life that
blurrily takes shape in our daydreams is a stimulus for the real-­world
political action that seeks to fix the wishes. In his revolutionary escha-
tology, the clouds themselves are to be brought back down to earth. Our
new, improved selves, lives, and political arrangements will roll in from
the clouds and lodge on our ground—and not as Hitler’s airplane does,
as spectacle. Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization
of a skirmish with nature. This skirmish is not the fascistic one of sub-
jugation. It is rather a wrestling with what is natural about nature, and
what is historical, which is to say, changeable, about it. In the cartoon
world, people, buildings, cars, and other inanimate objects swell sud-
denly, or run away, talk and leap, fly and fall without pain. Cartoons
and trick films produced to entertain the city hoards were experimen-
tal and crazy from the start, using cinematic tricks and visual gags that
defied logic. It was all these aspects of transformation, transmutation,
alogicality, antiphysics, and nonrealism that appealed to the many intel-
lectuals and artists—Dadaists and revolutionaries in Europe foremost
among them—who fell in love with cartoon product and the outputs of
American popular modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Early comic strips and young animation processes broke open the self-­
understanding of the image, fracturing it into absurdism. In the cartoon
world, all the laws of physics are defied or mocked. Even physics—the
science of physical experience in the world—is made provisional. In ani-
mated nature, technology and magic are one.
The animated world is one in which nature is remolded, made differ-
ent. Cartoons, modernized versions of folk and fairy tales, mobilize this
nature in their presentation of overlively objects, or cows that turn into
musical boxes, skirts that become parachutes when needed, or church
steeples that crunch themselves up so that the crazy plane can avoid
crashing into it with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on board. Animation
reminds us of the life in other things that is like and unlike the life in

Animation and History • 29

us. Taken as a document of utopian thinking, animation shows a nature
that is reformulated according to imagination and social prompts from
a world that could one day and in some form become ours. This ani-
mated nature may assume any form and usually does in its presenta-
tion of hybrids of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and
bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned or maliciously as-
serted. As the expressionist director Paul Wegener put it in 1916 in a lec-
ture attended by Reiniger, the aim for “absolute cinema,” an exploratory
cinema beyond the subtheatrical version that threatened to dominate,

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was “a kind of cinema which would use nothing but moving surfaces,
against which there would impinge events that would still participate in
the natural world but transcend the lines and volumes of the natural.”11
Animation appeared to fulfill this cultured wish.
Animation depicts a nature that is hybridized: speaking animals,
flowers that blush, fruits that ripen in the blink of an eye, people who
shrink and twist and deform and swell. Animation’s nature does not
obey the laws of physics. Rain may fall upward. The sun may smile. But
sometimes it is also just nature—redrawn and conceptualized, but me-
diated, with just a heightened element of drama, a potential that bor-
ders on the animistic. A shorthand version of such a definition of ani-
mation claims that animation is, in the phrases coined by Benjamin to
describe the reproduced and constructed worlds of photography and
film, “eine andere Natur” (different nature), an other nature.12 Anima-
tion is “different nature” because its nature is of a different kind to the
one we inhabit, and yet it is not distinct from it. Animation presents a
parallel world. It presents a nature recognizable to us processed through
concept, imagination, and technology. It is our nature returned back to
us through mediations. Animated nature’s otherness is, by and large,
not one of absolute difference. Instead it is an alternativity. Animation’s
objects and images, drawn or modeled, are motile, flexible, open to pos-
sibility, and able to extend in any direction and undertake any action or
none. Animation does not depict antinature, but “other nature,” which
might indeed be the noninstrumentalized nature that we would com-
mune with, were we not so far along the route to ecological disaster.
Animation’s animistic approach to its objects awakens life and voice in
stilled and silenced objects. It reinvents not only nature but our rela-
tionship with nature. It is therapeutic and utterly necessary. In “Experi-
ence and Poverty,” from 1933, Benjamin indicates Mickey Mouse’s ability
to embody utopian aspiration for a technology-­ravaged, yet technology-­
dependent, populace.13 The existence of Mickey Mouse is labeled by

30 • Esther Leslie
Benjamin a dream for today’s people. Mickey Mouse’s existence is full
of miracles, and these miracles outdo technical wonders, and satirize
them too. In Benjamin’s view, Mickey Mouse enacts the wish for a har-
monious reconciliation of technology and nature. The wish is born of an
age in which technological change threatens to destabilize the existence
of nature, including humans, and destroy all in spectacular acts of anni-
hilation. But the compassionate union of technology and nature must
be banished to the dreamtime world of comics and cinema, where ma-
chinery entertains and consoles humans, just as it dissects and recom-

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poses images of humans, and the rest of the object and natural world. In
the noncinematic world of industrial capitalism, technology and nature
(in other words, machinery and humans) pursue different ends, are vec-
tors of abuse and exploitation.
Sergei Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he
evoked in order to stress the originary shape-­shifting potential of the
animated, the way in which an object or image, drawn or modeled,
strains beyond itself, and can potentially adopt any form, thereby pro-
posing an expansion beyond current constraints.14 Where Benjamin ob-
served the antiphysical, antinaturalist aspects of animation, Eisenstein
focused on its renditions of the physical world. For Eisenstein, it was
animated fire, which, he observes, “is capable of most fully conveying
the dream of a flowing diversity of forms.”15 For Eisenstein, fire is form-
less. Fire is pure transformation. Fire is restless. It was the fire behind
the mirror’s mask in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
that evoked these thoughts. Eisenstein’s name for this mutability, echo-
ing but altering Walter Benjamin’s, is “non-­indifferent nature.”16 Ani-
mation is for Eisenstein an ecstatic form. Its objects are ecstatic (which
is to say, displaced or unstable), and it induces ecstasy in its viewers. It
makes the viewers be besides themselves. Animation forces transition, a
difference in quality. As Eisenstein puts it in Non-­indifferent Nature: Film
and the Structure of Things (1945): “To be beside oneself is unavoidably
also a transition to something else, to something different in quality[,]
. . . to be out of the usual balance and state, to move to a new state.”17
Such movement to a new state is made analogous to a physical process.
If fire is a transformation, formless form, so too is water. Water may
be steam, ice, liquid, and water is always passing between any of these
states, when subjected to processes of heating, cooling, agitation, pres-
sure, and so on. In Non-­indifferent Nature Eisenstein states that “if water,
steam, ice, and steel could psychologically register their own feelings at
these critical moments—moments of achieving the leap, they would say

Animation and History • 31

they are speaking with pathos, that they are in ecstasy.”18 Animation is
compelling because it is the “if” of water, steam, ice, and steel register-
ing their own feelings at critical moments. The artist, at the same time,
notes Eisenstein, creates “the necessary conditions”—specifically the
construction of pathos—for the transformation of the spectator into
an ecstatic state. It makes the viewer restless. This thought came from a
man who had proposed “Kino-­Fist,” an assault on the viewer, as the ap-
propriate mode of a new political cinema.
Animated nature appeals to us pathetically, by inviting us into its

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particular world. Animated nature’s appeal is mediated via technology
and is a shuttle between the image world of a new or second nature and
us, who may be addressed as nature or as nature’s other. We are invited
in for the duration of the show and the rattled and super-­lively objects
are to make us rattled and super-­lively in turn. Animation’s small worlds
propose certain stances on the part of viewers, encouraging them to be
at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before
them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit. They are
aware too, on some, if only subliminal, level, of the differences within
the image world, that is to say, the gaps between the cels or poses. These
gaps, key to animation’s structure, enable the excessive or implausible
movements that characterize animation and mark it as seemingly un-
limited and full of infinite potential. The animated form presents a
dynamic image world in which, in much the same way as Eisenstein
describes the dialectical cinema that he hoped to develop as his contri-
bution to postrevolutionary culture, there is manifested a condensation
of tensions that appeals, or may appeal, in a particular and cognitive
way to its viewers. This is because, in propelling the viewer from image
to thought, from percept to concept, the animated form models the mo-
tion of thinking itself—such that viewers are invited to complete the
film through an act of appropriation of its new, and subverted, nature.

Animation and Capital

But it is not all mountains, clouds, flickering fires, and fairy tales. Ani-
mation—as Reiniger’s work intimated with its flat, dark figures—has its
negative face. In fact, this account would all be fairy tale were there not
something else that animation as form could absorb. Animation may
not readily expose its links in a progressive history of unfolding forms,
but it can absorb and retransmit the motive energies of its moment.
Indeed, along with the trick in film, or special effects (e.g., montage,

32 • Esther Leslie
superimposition, and negative printing), which is always in some way
or another an introduction of animating principle into film, animation
was the realm in which all sorts of experimenting artists found that they
could develop a film language that communicated with and took hold
of modernity. Through photographic media’s barrage of special effects,
Reiniger and Ruttmann alike developed an animated language that
spoke to modernity, to its objectifications, its abstractions, and its flat-
tening out of everything to fit into the industrial template. In this they
mapped out the parameters of a system that was experienced as abstract

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and rationalized. They also made the system dance and overturn itself.
They stretched out its time and probed its space and logic. But this work
was not limited to the art experimenters—and this is another appeal of
the animated. Value is less of a paranoid concern for it. It is animation. Or
it is cartoon. Or it is eye music, “living pictures,” “kinetische Lyrik,” “opti-
cal poetry,” or cinematic lyricism. At a premiere of Oskar Fischinger’s
Study No. 12 in Berlin, the critic Bernhard Diebold gave a speech titled
“The Future of Mickey Mouse.” If cinema was to be an art form, he ar-
gued, it needed animation, because that made possible a cinema that
had broken free of a naturalistic template and conventional storylines.
Animated film defied the inherited artistic genres. Animation was pro-
posed as the medium to translate into movement Wassily Kandinsky’s
restful points and dynamic lines in tension. Animation is—or was—
always outside the frame of bourgeoisified art, though oftentimes spe-
cial pleading is made for it to be let in. And yet early critics and makers
certainly sensed that more united than divided were the popular works
of Disney or Max Fleischer and the absolute films, or artworks, of Hans
Richter or Lotte Reiniger or Walter Ruttman or Oskar Fischinger, or in-
deed the many advertisements they all made.
Winsor McCay, from 1911 onward, tried his hand at animation. His
comic strip Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland had thematically set
the city in motion. His first animation transferred Little Nemo to the
screen, tentatively. First we see live action, and we see the animators
and the backers of the industry in its moment of formation inside the
new structures of the supercity. Inside the boxes of offices in New York,
men conspire to give flat shapes life and color. There is little narrative in
this animation, which consists of an unmotivated, illogical squashing
and stretching, enacting the very principle of cartooning. This anima-
tion could be described as an example of the optical illusion of move-
ment, though it is honest about its source and does not seek to deceive.
It might better be described as a rumination on the passage between

Animation and History • 33

living and drawing, between lifelessness and life, identity and noniden-
tity. This animation is an image of the origin of animation itself. It is
not the illusion of movement but, rather, presents movement itself, as
a feat, rushing through the projector, the result here, as the film makes
clear, of thousands of drawings and gallons of ink.
The motion generated in these first studio offices of mass cultural pro-
duction could also be seen as a modeling of the dynamic, ever-­changing
forms of modernity, translated here into as lithe and as wild a form as
the innovations of the prized treasures of high modernism. More spe-

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cifically, the motion is a modeling of modern capital’s motive force, the
commodity economy, whose endless replications and innovations and
commodity fetishism are analogously evident in the animated objects’
push beyond their own static objectivity. Every week a new comic strip.
Every month a new cartoon. The capitalist machine needs its supplies.
Animation’s animatedness can be seen as a rendition of the appar-
ent liveliness of commodity-­fetishized objects. This is why advertisers
loved cartoons from the start—that illusory hyperliveliness of objects,
a topsy-­turvy negation of the value that stems from labor. What is ani-
mation but objects coming seemingly to life, without human interven-
tion, so it appears (but only appears—just as in commodity fetishism,
the real source of value is obscured from usual view and knowledge). In
the same way that commodities are correlated to exchange values, so too
are those who make the commodities. Their energy, all that makes them
alive, is directed toward making useful things, but it is also calibrated
as abstract labor, as quantities of labor—x amount of labor hours at y
amount of cost carried out by z. Indeed it is significant that, stuck on his
lonely desert island, Robinson Crusoe is much concerned with saving a
ledger, a pen and ink, and a watch. To be the perfect capitalist he must
keep a stock book of items, a record of their mode of manufacture, and,
crucially, a note of “the labour-­time that definite quantities of those ob-
jects have, on an average, cost him.”19 But think what an animator does
with the same equipment. Animation can be the realm in which such
graphic rendition might make social forms available to knowledge, by
redrawing or reshaping the rules, erasing the lines, twitching that which
has become static, reconstructing or just constructing the movement, as
a conscious afterimage of what we do and what the world does and what
nature does daily and forever. Animation absorbs, digests, and reconfig-
ures something of its moment of making.

34 • Esther Leslie
Cartoon Manifesto

Animation is subversive of nature, which has so often been mobilized as

ideology. Animation is subversive of order, of logic, of stasis, of every-
thing that would insist that things are so and must be so—the reaction-
ary mode that has more latterly been labeled by politicians as neorealism
and is partnered with neoliberalism. Animation is an art of metamor-
phosis, of transformation, and it is as if the ways in which the animated
form shifts from one state to another proffers an inkling of a transfor-

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mation that could be undergone by all—politically, socially. Therein lies
the utopian axis of animation—motility and mobility is its propulsive
force, its opening onto an infinite, antigravitational other-­space. Ani-
mation is subversive of progress as understood in its ahuman, limited
sense—as in the idea of endless perfectability in techniques and tech-
nologies. Animation does not necessarily eschew the low-­tech. Anima-
tion is subversive of tastefulness—though it must be said that it has
truly wormed its way into art galleries these days. Animation is subver-
sive of itself—ever changing, ever shifting. Animation is subversive of
separation. It is made and seen collectively. It unites the artisanal, the
artistic, and the mechanical.
Animation has a history, naturally. Everything has a history, but, un-
like film, animation, with its multiple forms (stop frame, puppet, drawn,
cgi), with its low-­tech and commercial practices, and with its multiple
origins in zoetropes, zoopraxiscopes, shadow theater, flip-­books, and
the like, evokes a history that is as crowded and indistinct as a phantas-
magoria. Animation does to history what it does to nature. Animation
evokes history, plays with it, undermines it, subverts it, but it does not
have it, just as it does not have nature. It has second nature. Or different
nature. It has different history. It models the possibility of possibility.

Notes

1. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media, 35.
2. “Disney Re-­releasing Films in 3D: ‘Beauty & The Beast,’ ‘The Little Mermaid,’
Others Coming Back,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2011, accessed July 1, 2013,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/disney-­r e-­r eleasing-­f ilms- ­3 d _ n
_994701.html.
3. Ruttmann quoted by Reiniger in Bendazzi, Cartoons, 33.
4. Benjamin, from a draft of “Imperial Panorama,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
IV.2, 934.

Animation and History • 35

5. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 14.
6. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 14.
7. Marcuse, One-­Dimensional Man (1964).
8. For example, see the nineteenth-­century Romantic scientist Gotthilf Heinrich
von Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views on the
Night-­Side of Natural Science) (Dresden: Arnold, 1808).
9. This is Maxim Gorky’s description upon experiencing the Lumière Cinemato-
graphe in July 1896. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Rus-
sian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994),
25–26.

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10. Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 175.
11. Paul Wegener, from a lecture given on April 24, 1916, at an Easter Monday con-
ference, and printed in Kai Möller, Paul Wegener (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag,
1954). Quoted in Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 33.
12. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 510,
512.
13. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 734–35.
14. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 11.
15. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 24.
16. The phrase non-­indifferent nature is to be found where Eisenstein found it: in
Hegel, in his discussion of chemism in the Science of Logic, where it is crucial to a
discussion of motion, transformation, and affinity in natural processes. G. W. F.
Hegel, Science of Logic (Blackmask Online, 2001), 120–24.
17. Eisenstein, Non-­indifferent Nature, 27.
18. Eisenstein, Non-­indifferent Nature, 35–36.
19. See Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin and New Left Review, 1976), 164–65.

36 • Esther Leslie