nf stellt fey selected writingsxhole” (stenope) through which he looks, and perspectivizes when he wants to “take Technically, Photography is at the intersection of two ‘quite distinct procedures; one of a chemical order: the action of light on certain substances; the other of a phys ‘al order: the formation of the image through an optical device. It seemed to me that the Spectator's Photograph descended essentially, so to speak, from the chemical rev- elation of the object (from which I receive, by deferred action, the rays), and that the Operator's Photograph, on the contrary, was linked to the vision framed by the key- hhole of the camera obscura, But of that emotion (or of that essence) I could not speak, never having experienced it; I.could not join the troupe of those (the majority) who deal with Photography-according-to-the-Photographer, ‘possessed only two experiences: that of the observed sub- ject and that of the subject observing. ¢ can happen that I am observed without know- ing it, and again I cannot speak of this experience, ince I have determined to be guided by the con- sciousness of my feelings. But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I fee! myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instanca- neously make another body for myself, I transform myself jin advance into an image. This transformation is an active ro/ ‘one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or morti- fies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortifer- ous power: certain Communards paid with theie lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one). Posing in front of the lens (I mean: knowing I am posing, even fleetingly), I do not risk so much as that (at least, not for the moment), No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependence is an imaginary'one (and from the purest image-repertoire), I experience it guish of an uncertain filiation: an image—my image— be generated: individual or from "good sort”? If only I could ” om paper as on a classical canvas, endowed with a noble expression—thoughtful, intelligent, etc.! In short, if T could be “painted” (by Titian) or drawn (by Clouet)! Bat since what I want to have captured is a delicate moral texture.and not a mimicry, and since Photography is any- thing but subtle except in the hands of the very greatest portraitists, I don’t know how to work upon my skin from within, I decide to “let drift” over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be “indefinable,” in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my na- ‘ture, my amused consciousness of the whole photographic ritual: I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I ‘am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the citcle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, fixapart from any effigy. What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among 2 thousand shifting pho- tographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and “myself” which is light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, “my- self” doesn't hold only Photog- raphy could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well- meaning) Photography always to have an expression: my body never finds its zeto degree, no one can give it to me (pethaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image—the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police—but love, extreme love). To see oneself (differently from in a mirror): on the scale of History, this action is recent, the painted, drawn, ‘or miniaturized portrait having been, until the spread of Photography, a limited possession, intended moreover to advertise a social and financial status—and in any case, a painted portrait, however close the resemblance (this is what I am trying to prove) is not a photograph. Odd that ‘no one has thought of the disturbance (to civilization) which this new action causes. I want a History of Look- ing. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy 12/ ‘was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuties this was a great mythic theme, But today itis as if we repressed the profound madness of Photography: it reminds us of its mythic heritage only by that faint uneasiness which seizes ‘me when I look at “myself” on a piece of paper. ‘This disturbance is ultimately one of ownership. Law has expressed it in its way: to whom does the photograph belong? Is landscape itself only a kind of loan made by the owner of the terrain? Countless cases, apparently, hhave expressed this uncertainty in a society for which being was based on having. Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, seum object: in order to take the first portraits (around 1840) the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the Jens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to im- mobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence, ‘The portrait-photograph is-clos es. Four Tntersect here, oppose and distor\gachimage-tepertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) rep- resents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micto-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. ‘The Photographer knows this very well, and himself feats Gf only for commercial reasons) this death in which his, gesture will embalm me. Nothing would be funnier (if fone were not its passive its plastron, as Sade would say) than the photographers’ contortions to produce ef- fects that are “lifelike”: wretched notions: they make me pose in front of my paintbrushes, they take me outdoors (more “alive” than indoors), put me in front of a stair- case because a group of children is they notice a bench and immediately (what a windfall! make me sit down on it. As if the (terrified) Photogra- pher must exert himself to the utmost to keep the Photo- graph from becoming Death. But I—already an object, Ido not struggle. I foresee that I shall have to wake from this bad dream even more uncomfortably; for what soci- ‘ety makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case, there are so many readings of the same face); but when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total- Image, which is to say, Death in person; others—the Other—do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest deceptions: one day an excellent photographer took my 14/ picture; I believed I could read in his image the distress of a recent bereavement: for once Photography had re- stored me to myself, but soon afterward I was to find this same photograph on the covet of a pamphlet; by the arti- fice of printing, I no longer had anything but a horrible disinternalized countenance, as sinister and repellent as the image the authors wanted to give of my language. (The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my politi- cal tight to be a subject which I must protect.) Ultimately, what I am seeking. in the photograph taken of me (the “intention” according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph. Hence, strangely, the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera. For me, the Photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things). I love these me- chanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing—and the only thing —to which my desite clings, their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches— and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. Its114 Gramophone cut-up techniques have done away with that virus, Before Hendrix, the paratrooper of the zoxst Airborne, cuts his machine-gun-like guitar to the title song, tape technology operates for its own sake: tympana, jt engines, Pistol shots. Weiting can write nothing of that. The Songbook for Electric | Ladyland notes the tape's forward and backward motion as well as its changing speed and the test points of a blind but manipulable time.2” The title on the cover—that which does not cease not to write itself. explicable yet irr | santly what their lens could record and what the type of proj __ developed could reproduce. Legend has it, however, that Georges M logical m Media eross one another in time, which is no longer history. The recording of acoustic data was accomplished with sound tricks, montage, and cuts; with film tricks, montage, and cuts that the recording of optical processes began. Since cinema has been the manipulation of optic nerves and theic time. This is proved, among other ways, by the ed trick of repeatedly splicing individual frames of a Coca- fashlike appearance for 4o millisec- onds reaches the eyes but not consciousness, the audience develops an in- le thirst. A cut has undercut its conscious registra- tion. The same is true of film. Beginning with Eastman in 1887, when celluloid superseded Daguerre’s photographic glass plates and provided the material basis for feature films, such manipulations became feasible. Cinema, in contrast to sound recording, began with reels, cuts, and splices. I is said that the Lumiére brothers documented simply and inces- jon they __ the meantime so-called life naturally went on. Viewing the ful _ Aim, its director was consequently surprised by the mag and disappearance of figures against a fixed background. former dicector of the Théatre Robert Houdin had already projected ‘many a magical trick onto the technological screen,’ had accidentally also seumbled upon the stop trick. Hence in May 1896, “before astonished and dumbfounded audience,” he presented “ dune dame, the disappearance of a woman from the picture.’ ing Villiers and his Edison) liquidate that “great m5Jean Cocteau, Le Song di podte, 1930. Lady, Nature,” as it had been described, but never viewed, by the nine- teenth century, Woman’s sacrifice. , And castration. For what film’s first stop tricks did to women. only re- peated what the experimental precursors of cinema did to men. Since 878 Edward Muggeridge (who changed his name to Eadweard Muy- bridge to commemorate old Saxon kings)’ had been experimenting with lve special cameras on behalf of the California railroad tycoon and iversity founder, Leland Stanford. The location was Palo Alto, which later saw the invention of the vacuum tube, and the assignment was the recording of movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter's eye. Racehorses and sprinters dashed past the individually and sequentially Positioned cameras, whose shutters were triggered succes- sively by an electromagnetic device supplied by the San Francisco Tele- graph Supply Company—x millisecond for every 40 milliseconds. ‘With such snapshot umes on Animal Locor ‘what motion looks like in real-time analysis. For his serial photographs imaginary element in human perception, a in the positions canvas or on English watercolor paper. To speak of cin- $ Muybridge’s hi jal would, however, be inaccurate, since rid was not yet available. The technological medium was meant to modernize a venerable art form, as indeed happened when impressionists ike Degas copied photographs in their paintings. Hence Stanford Univer- sity’s fencers, discus throwers, and wrestlers posed as future models for Film 117 painters, that is, nude—at least as long as they turned theie backs to one of the twelve cameras. In all the milliseconds of frontal shots, however, ‘Muybridge reached one last time for the painter's brush in order to prac- tice (long before Méliés) the disappearance of the male anatomy with re- led onto a reel, Muy- bridge's glass plates could have 's kinetoscope, the peephole precursor to the Lumiéres’ cinematic projection, The astonished visitors to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago would then have been wit first trick film: the jumpy appearance and disappearance of moral ins, which in the age of cinema approximate the condition of pure image-fickering. The trick film therefore has no datable origin. The medium’s possi- bilities for cutting and splicing assail its own historiography. Hugo Miin- sterberg, the private lecturer at the University of Freiburg whom William James ca .¢ Harvard Psychological Laboratory, cleacly recognized this in 1926 in the first history of cinema written by a professor: Itis atbiteary 0 say where the development of the moving pictures began and itis impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? ‘Was it the fist device to intéoduce movement into the pictures on a sereen? Or did the development begin with the fest photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it stare with the rst presentation of successive pictures at such 2 speed that the impression of movement resulted? Ot was the birthday of the new fart when the experimenters for the fest time succeeded in projecting such rapidly passing pictures on a wall?! Miinsterberg's questions remain unanswered because the making of films is in principle nothing but cutting and splicing: the chopping up of continuous motion, or history, before the len: wrote when he introduced such caesutas into historical methodology it- snatched from the law of development and established in a dis- continuous atempor several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either move- ‘As if contemporary theories, such as discourse were defined by the technological a priot I dreams flourish in this complication or impl ‘Theory itself since Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno has attempted t0 pseudo-metamorphose into film.’ It is also possible, however, to under- stand technological a prioris in a technological sense. The fact that cuts stood at the beginning of visual data processing but entered acoustic datax18 Film processing only at the end can then be seen as a fundamental difference in terms of our sensory registration. That difference inaugurated the dis- tinction between the imaginary and the real, ‘The phonograph permitted for the first time the recording of vibra- tions that human eats could not count, human eyes could not see, and writing hands could not catch up with. Edison’s simple metal needle, however, could keep up—simply because every sound, even the most ‘complex or polyphonous, one played simultaneously by a hundred musi- cians, formed a single amplitude on the time axis, Putin the plain lan- guage of general sign theory, acoustics is one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range." The continuous undulations recorded by the gramophone and the au- diotape as signatures of the real, or raw material, were thus passed on in an equally continuous way by sound engineers. Cutting and splicing ‘would have produced nothing but crackling noises, namely, square-curve jumps. Avoiding them presupposes great skill on the part of recording en- gineers, if not the computer algorithms of digital signal processing. ‘Therefore, when pioneers of the radio play such as Breslau’s Walter Bischoff were looking for genuinely “radio-specific” (fiunkisch) means of expression, they studied the parallel medium of silent films and consid- xed only the fade-out, not the cut, as possible model: “The man work- ing the amplifier,” as Bischoff argued in Dramaturgy of the Radio Play, “is in charge of a function similar to that of the camera man, He fades in and out, as we say in the absence of a radio-specific terminology. By slowly turning down the condenser at the amplifier, he lets the scene, the finished sequence of events, fade into the background, just as he can, by gradually turning the condenser u next acoustic sequence.”? By ides per unit of time, fade-outs have been “more ‘the mise-en-scén le yet localizable, cannot be dismantled and replaced by a new one in front of the listener as easily as in the case ‘of a monophonic play.” Once tethered, such are the constraints pro- duced by the real. For one thing, optical data flows are two-dimensional; for another, they consist of high frequencies. Not two but thousands of units of light per unit of time must be transmitted in order to present the eye two- or even three-dimensional image. That requires an exponential mag- nification of processing capacities. And since light waves are electromag- Film 1x9 times faster than. ‘Two reasons why film is recording physical waves, genet effects on its negatives. Optical thing of the future. And even if, ysics of the heart, everything from sound to light is a wave (or ‘optical waves still don’t have a storage or computing mediam— sny rate, until fiber technologies running at the speed of light have put today’s semiconductors out of business. ‘A medium that is unable to trace the amplitudes of its input data is permitted a priori to perform cuts. Otherwise, there would be no data. Since Muybridge’s experimental arrangement, all film sequences have been scans, excerpts, selections. And every cinematic aesthetic has devel- coped from the 24-frame-per-second shot, which was later standardized. Stop trick and montage, slow motion and time lapse only translate tech- nology into the desires of the audience. As phantasms of our deluded eyes, cuts reproduce the continuities and regularities of motion. Phonog- raphy and feature film correspond to one another as do the real and the imaginary, But this imaginary realm had to be conquered. The path of invention, from Muybridge's first serial photographs to Edison's kinetoscope and the ly presuppose the existence of celluloid, (as poetry) and organic world histories ‘engineers, Just as the phonograph ing) became possible only after acoustics had been made an object of sci- ‘entific investigation, so “cinematography would never have been in- vented” had not “researchers been occupied with the consequences of the stroboscopic effect and aftetimages.” ‘Afterimages, which are much more common and familiar than the stroboscopic effect, were already present in Goethe's Theory of Colors— but only, as in Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, to illustrate the ‘effects of Classic-Romantic literature on souls: a woman hovers in frontx20 Film of the inner eye of the hero or the readers as the optical model of perfect alphabetization, even though her beauty simply cannot be recorded in words. Wilhelm Meister observes to himself and his like-minded readers, “If you close your eyes, she will present herself to yous if you open them, she will hover before all objects like the manifestation which a dazzling image leaves behind in the eye. Was not the quickly passing figure of the Amazon ever present in your imagination?” For Novalis, imagination was the miraculous sense that could replace for readers all oftheir senses, At least as long as Goethe and his Theory of Colors were alive. For it was Fechner who first examined the afterimage effect with experimental rigor: Experimenter and subject in one, he stared into the sun—with the result chat he went blind in 1839 for three years and had to resign from his physics chair at the Uni 1 step from psy- chology to psychophysics ul neologism) was as conse- 4uential as the emergence of modern media from the physiological hand- ‘caps of its researchers was literal. No wonder, then, that the aesthetics of the afterimage effect is also due to a half-blind person. Nietzsche, the philosopher with -14 diop- * produced a film theory before its time under the pretext of de- 1g both The Birth of Tragedy in ancient Greece and its German re- birth in the mass spectacles of Wagner. In Nietzsche, the theater perfor- mances that were produced in the shadeless midday sun of an setting were transformed into the hallucinations of inebriated or v ary spectators, whose optic nerves quite unconsciously processed white- and-black film negatives into black-and-white film positives: “After an en- exgetic attempt to focus on the sun, we have, by way of remedy almost, dark spots before our eyes when we turn away. Conversely, the luminous images of the Sophoclean heroes—those Apollonian masks—are the nec- essary productions of a deep look into the horror of nature; luminous spots, as it were, designed to cure an eye hurt by the ghastly night.” Prior to Fechner's historical selfexperiment, blinding was not a mat- ter of desire. An eye hurt by the ghastly night that requires for its remedy inverted afterimage effects is no longer directed toward the stage of the Attic amphitheater but onto the black surface of soon-to-come mo screens, as the Lumigre brothers will develop them in defiance of their ‘name. Nietasche’s ghastly ni first attempt to christen sensory de- privation as the background to and other of all technological media." ‘That the flow of data takes place at al is the elementary fact of Nietz- sche's aesthetic, which renders interpretations, reflections, and valuations of individual beauty (and hence everything Apollonian) secondary. If “the Film raz san aesthetic product,""" world” can be “justified to all eternity . itis simply because “luminous images” obliterate a remorseless blackness. zsche movie called Oedipus is technological enough to pre~ date the innovation of the Lumigres by @ quarter century. According to The Birth of Tragedy, a tragic hero, as inebriated spectators visually hal- i “at bottom no moze than a luminous shape projected onto hat isto say, appearance through and through.” Ic is pre- the first place, that has been opening theater performances since 1876, the year of the inauguration of the theater in Bayreuth, whose prophecy The Birth of Tragedy undertook. Wagner did what no drama- turg before him had dared to do (simply because certain spectators sisted on the feudal privilege of being as visible as the actors thernselv during opening night, he began The Ring of the Nibelung in total dark- ness, before gradually turning on the (as yet novel) gaslights, Not even the presence of an emperor, Wilhelm I, prevented Wagner from reducing his ‘audience to an invisible mass sociology and the bodies of actors (such as the Rhine maidens) to visual hallucinations or afterimages against the background of darkness. The cut separating theater arts and media tech- nologies could not bé delineated more precisely. Which is why all movie theaters, at che beginning of their screenings, reproduce Wagner's cosmic sunrise emerging from primordial darkness. A 1913 movie theater in ‘Mannheim, as we know from the first sociology of cinema, used the slo- gan, “Come in, our movie theater isthe darkest in the whole city!”™! ‘Already in x89r, four years prior to the projection screen of the Lu- igre brothers, Bayreuth was technologically up to date. Not for nothing ddid Wagner joke that he would have to complete his invention of an in- visible orchestra by inventing i actors.22 Hence his son-in-law, the subsequently notorious Chamberlain, planned the performance of sym phonies by Liszt that would have become pure feature films with equally pure film music: accompanied by the sound of an orchestra sunk in Wag- nerian fashion, and situated in a “nightclad room,” a camera obscura was supposed to project moving pictures against a “background” until all es.” Such enchantments were unthinkable es did not mix up statues or paintings, or the bodies of actors, for that matter—those basic stage props of the es- id arts—with their own retinal processes. plans and their global dissemination by Hi logical theory of perception becomes applied perceptual practice: movie- goers, following Edgar Morin’s brilliant formulation, “respond to theion screen like a retina inverted to the outsi to the brain.” And each image leaves an afterimage, In order to implement the stroboscopic effect, the second theoretical condition of cinema, with the same precision, one needs only to illumi- hate moving objects with one of the light sources that have become om- nipresent and omnipotent since the 1890s. As is widely known, back then ‘Westinghouse won out over Edison, alternating current over direct cur- rent, as a public utility, The glow of light alternates fifty times per second in European lightbulbs, sixty times in American ones: the uncomplicated, and hence imperceptible, chythm of our evenings and of an antenna called the body. The stroboscopic illumination transforms the continuous flow of ‘movement into interferences, or moirés, as can be seen in the wheeling spokes of every Western. This second and imaginary continuity evolved from discontinuity, a discovery that was first made by physiologists dus- ing the founding age of modern media. We owe a large part of the theory of alternating current to Faraday, as well as to the study On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions (83 1)2 Coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday’s stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient con tion for the illusions of cinema. One only had to automatize the cutti ‘mechanism, cover the film reel with a wing disk between moments of ex- Posure and with a Maltese cross during moments of projection, and the «eye saw seamless motion rather than 24 single and stil shots. One perfo- rated rotating disk during the recording and projection of pictures made possible the film trick preceding all film tricks, Chopping or cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary—the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox. The problem of undermining the threshold of audience perception through Faraday’s “deceptions” reflected the inverse problem of undermining the threshold of perception of psychophysics itself to avoid disappointment or . Because real motion (above and beyond optical illusions) was to become recordable, the prehistory of the cinema began exactly as that of the gramophone. Etienne-Jules Marey, professor of natural history at the Collége de France in Paris, and later (following his successful film ex; ments) president of the French photographic society, earned his intial fame with a sphygmograph copied from the work of German physiologists that was capable of recording pulse rates onto soot-covered glass plates as curves.” In the same way, Weber and Scott had mechanically stored sounds (musical intervals themselves) that were not acoustic illusions, ‘Beginning with heart muscle contractions, Marey investigated move- thatis remotely con- Marey’s chronophorographie gun. ment in general. His chronographic experiments on humans, animals, birds—published as La machine animale (1873), a ttle that does justice to La Mettrie—inspired Governor Stanford of California to give Muy- bridge his assignment. The professional photographer only had to replace Marey’s mechanized form of trace detection with a more appropriate, or professional, optical one—and where eyes had always seen only poetic