Symposion
Das frühe Kino und die Avantgarde
Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde
Wien / Vienna 8. - 13. 3. 2002

Vorträge

Tom Gunning | Jan-Christopher Horak | Joachim Paech |
Claudia Preschl | Bart Testa | William C. Wees |

Vienna Avant-Garde and Early Cinema

Tom Gunning

Abb:
Lumière: La Sortie des Usines Lumière
(1895)

Let us start with a primal scene, and those of us here, cineastes and filmmakers, we know that the primal scene, whether traumatic or ecstatic, whether fantasy or memory, must always take place at the movies. The primal scene evokes therefore a moment of origin, a highly visual moment when something somehow is engendered. I cite one here, a recognition of the peculiar space of time of both modernism as a form of art, and modernity as a form of life. On a June night in 1918, modernist architect and painter Theo van Doesberg sat in a movie theater in Leiden watching a Keystone Kops comedy of crooks dressed in black suits chasing each other. The fast-paced slapstick chaos suddenly took on a new form before his eyes:

No one know for sure what Van Doesberg saw on the screen in 1918. The popular commercial film he was describing remains unidentifiable. It is clear that in any case Van Doesberg was looking through the film unto another landscape, one of possibility rather than actuality. It was not the film itself which transfixed and inspired Van Doesberg, but rather a fissure it caused in the solidity of its basis of representation, an opening that the film occasioned more than it caused. It makes one think of Maya Deren’s comment years later about watching projections on her apartment wall of her own film Meshes of the Afternoon made in 1943 as a defiantly non-commercial film, one inspired by the modern movements Van Doesberg participated in as Deren hoped to bring their modernist energy to the cinema:

I open with this primal scene, and with its image of a parting screen, no longer a seamless surface for projection, but a yawning gateway from which a new consciousness might be delivered, in order to remind us that the history we seek to rediscover here is not a simple chain of cause and effect, but a result of creative viewing, allowing films to not simply capture a surface but to seem to open a way, clearing a course for spectatorship, truly an invitation au voyage. My thesis tonight will not simply be that early cinema resembles aspects of later Avant-Garde cinema (I and others made that claim decades ago), or that the early cinema inspired Avant-Garde cinema (that fact is evident in the work of many filmmakers whose demonstrations opened my own eyes to new ways of seeing these fragments of the archeology of cinema decades ago). Rather, what I want to do is to use films from the beginnings of cinema to return us to the energy of the period of their birth, a point in history in which the convergence of technology, industry, capitalism, and imperialism not only created a Hell on earth, but also seemed triggered reaction to that Hell, releasing an apocalyptic energy which could refashion our sense of space and time and our understanding of the human body existing in the face of new dangers. To Paraphrase Walter Benjamin, cinema came along to provide a means of both representing this new world, but also of partaking in it. And the participation that cinema offered carried a double edge. on the one hand a channeling of the new threats to the human sensorium, a focusing of them. On the other hand what we might call a digesting of them, a processing and transformation. I believe we could call the product of that transformation the Avant-Garde.

I A Century Pivots: 1900 and the World Expositions

In this brief half a minute film from the 1900 World Exposition in Paris a cameraman for the Lumiere company unwittingly captured the conflict in the representation of space which the new century would usher in, triggered at least partially by the very industrial and technological development and burgeoning consumer culture the Exposition was designed to display and celebrate. The Eiffel Tower was, of course, the controversial legacy of the previous great Parisian World Exposition, that of 1889, and had initially been derided by many as the epitome of the ugliness of new industrial design, but was now acclaimed by a growing number as an emblem of a new modern mode of construction and design which invited a new visual experience. In its exposed structure the Eiffel Tower rendered its process of design and means of construction visible, as had the huge Galerie des Machines also constructed for the 1889 Exposition which employed the new industrial materials of metal and glass in a visible framework that displayed the unique engineering which allowed its massive size. In some ways the 1900 Exposition signaled a retreat from the exposed engineering of these modernist masterpieces of the previous Exposition. The celebration of the turn of the century featured a style based in an eclectic Beaux Art design which cloaked structures with plaster ornamentation. Yet these earlier show pieces of modern engineering, the Tower and the Galerie des Machines, retained central positions within the layout of the new Exposition, as one guide put it, serving for a second time as the passage way through which the population of the world passed, signaling the 1900 Exposition’s continuation of a massive modern ambition founded in new technology.

In addition to the spectacle of its own exposed visuality, views of the city of Paris seen from the Eiffel Tower had become a common subject for photographs and postcards, circulating this emblem of modernity around the world. But only the new invention of motion pictures, an innovation which had appeared since the 1889 Parisian Exposition, could capture the true dynamism of the most spectacular visual experience the Tower offered, the ascent in its elevator, specially improved and expanded for the new Exposition. Although the movie camera here employs no trickery, no editing or modernist techniques (which would not truly appear for another decade or so in the cinema), the very nature of motion photography captures a new mobile vision of the urban landscape, as our viewpoint of the city of Paris not only ascends precipitously, but is constantly and rhythmically bisected and reframed through the Tower’s system of supports passing before the gaze of the viewer/camera. Even today this brief view seizes the viewer viscerally; we are not only looking, but feeling, sensing our passage through unaccustomed space kinesthetically. One not only sees a place, but experiences it through a conjunction of modern technological triumphs: the camera itself, surely -- but also the elevator which enables the ascent and the struts of the Tower which frame our view. As much as space, we experience motion, a previously inconceivable motion outside normal human experience, enabled by new technology in which the viewer remains seated passively like a spectator in a theater, and moves nearly effortlessly, while simultaneously becoming hyper-visual, all-eyes, attentive as a new sort of space unfurls before her.

The World Expositions (whose origin as a modern phenomenon is generally traced back to the Crystal Palace of mid-nineteenth century England), were designed to bring together, in concentrated and spectacular form, the experience of modernity to masses of people. Charged with the mission of demonstrating the progress of the nineteenth century in industrial production and world trade (i.e. achievements occasioned by the exploitation of labor and the triumph of global imperialism), such expositions also forged a new visual culture. Here goods and processes were removed from either use or exchange value, to create a new relation we might call "display value". Machines performed for audiences, creating hordes of spectators rather than producing goods, while the goods displayed were positioned primarily for gawking at, rather than sale, let alone use. The products and processes of a newly world-wide capitalism were put on display. These global object lessons instructed the crowds that visited them in a primary lesson of the new consumer culture: the importance of spectacle, wonder and desire, carefully orchestrated to fashion a new generation of citizens eager to consume the world visually. Marking the end of one century and the beginning of the next , the 1900 Exposition, as one guide phrased it, "displays step by step the ascending course of progress, from the stag coach to the express train, from the courier to the wireless telegraph and the telephone, from lithography to radiography, from the first mining of coal from the bowels of the earth to the airplane which is about to conquer the sky."

Anne Friedberg in her suggestive study of consumer culture and post-modernity declares the mobilized virtual gaze as central to this new culture of consumption. As post-modernity has always seemed to me to simply be a method of re-packaging a "new!! improved!!" modernity for a generation grown bored with the cult of the new, likewise the "mobilized virtual gaze" repackages the visual strategies of the modernity of 1900. The World Expositions were not only founded on the regimes of the wandering eye, but proved to be expert tutors in the delights (and possible perils) of this new mobile vision. Visitors could not only ascend the Eiffel Tower, but could travel around the Fairground on the continuously moving trottoir roulant, "not only a means of transport", declared L’Illustration, "but an attraction in itself" and the subject of several other Lumiere films of 1900. A series of Exposition attractions were designed that offered visitors simulacra of the touristic gaze of the world traveler -- without ever leaving the banks of the Seine. As Emmanuelle Toulet’s research into the visual attractions of the 1900 Exposition has shown, such visual voyages were prime attractions at the Exposition, including the Mareorama, which recreated a Mediterranean sea voyage from Nice to Constantinople through a moving painted canvas a kilometer in length which unwound bit by bit before an audience assembled on a mock-up of the deck of a ship. In addition to the moving canvas, an ingenious mechanism imparted the sensation of the ship rocking and pitching, supplementing visual movement with a truly kinesthetic experience. The Panorama of Trans-Siberian Railway offered a virtual journey over the 63000 mile route from Moscow to Peking to viewers seated in a replica of railway touring cars. The forty five minute trip involved four separate layers of moving panoramas. Since elements at a greater distance from a gazing train passenger seem to pass by more slowly; each separate panorama moved at a different rate in order to more closely replicate this mobile visual experience. Perhaps the most elaborate attraction announced for the 1900 Exposition was the Cineorama. Here visitors crowded into a viewing platform fashioned to resemble the gondola of an aerial balloon to view a 360 degree view of balloon ascents and descents followed by aerial views of a number of European capitals. This virtual aerial journey was produced, however, not by moving painted canvas, but through motion picture images thrown on a circular screen by a battery of motion picture projectors. Touted as a key attraction for the fair, the Cineorama never actually opened due to concerns about fire and safety, especially after a projectionist fainted from intense heat generated by the projectors during a trial run and severed a thumb on one of the machines.

If the Cineorama never actually functioned, motion pictures were nonetheless shown in a variety of situations within the Paris Exposition. Less than five years had passed since the Lumiere company had first projected motion pictures to Parisian audiences. But four years is a fairly long time in the life of a technological novelty and the Lumieres knew it had to offer something spectacular to the sensation-seeking fair audience in order to keep its new invention a current. The Cinematographe Geant, a screen that measured 21 meters by 18, was set up in the Festival Hall of the Galerie des Machines. The screen was made of a material which, when wet, could both transmit and reflect the projections so that the images could be seen from either side. Screenings of a program lasting twenty-five minutes were given every evening free of charge to an audience that could swell to 25,000 and averaged around five thousand every night.

The World Expositions were designed to dazzle their mass audiences, render them speechless and overwhelmed with awe at the power of technology and capital through the technique of sensual over-stimulation. In previous articles I have characterized this experience on the American side of the Atlantic by quoting a nearly non-verbal response inscribed on a postcard sent by a young girl to her mother from the first great American World Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1873, trying to express her impression of the fair: "Dear mother, Oh! Oh! 00000000." Owen Whistler, the author of the novel The Virginian covering the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, claimed that in the first two minutes after he entered the fairgrounds "a bewilderment at the gloriousness of everything seized me until my mind was dazzled to a standstill." A neurologist in St. Louis actually warned patients with nervous disorders to avoid the 1904 World Exposition held in that city or risk a total mental and physical collapse. The most poignant account of this sort of sensory burn-out came from regional novelist Hamlin Garland’s description of his mother’s reaction to the spectacular lighting of the electric lights every evening at the Chicago fair: "She leaned her head against my arm, closed her eyes and said, ‘Take me home, son, I can’t stand any more of it." Garland interpreted this unexpected reaction of his midwestern farmer parents: "They were surfeited with the alien, sick of the picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color."

The experience of 1900 Fair in Paris was not that different, even to sophisticated Parisians. The nihilistic French novelist who wrote under the name Louis Ferdinand Céline recreated a childhood visit to the 1900 Paris Exposition in similar terms:

Later in the novel, the child Ferdinand dreams during a fever of the Exposition’s emblem, the statue of the modern woman that stood atop its monumental gate, La Parisienne, or as Ferdinand calls her, the Giant Lady Customer. She grows and swells before his eyes to cosmic proportions, sweeping away his family and the other small shopkeepers of the now demodé Parisian arcades, as the Exposition had in fact accelerated their financial ruin by draining away customers. In Ferdinand’s fever dream her apotheosis takes place on the grounds of the Exposition: The gigantic lady customer bends down to go through "the gate, the monumental gate, the arrogant gate that rose into the sky like the bun on a lady’s hair," then, causing a glacial whirlwind, she leaps into the air, leaving the small shop keepers behind bereft and abandoned. This image of the sudden uncontrolled growth of the consumer culture, inflating to the point of explosion recalls the contemporaneous trick films of George Melies (which Ferdinand also described his grandmother taking him to during this era). The magical spectacle of modernity was overwhelming and awesome, but partly because it was also unpredictable and indeed dangerous.

The expositions in fact taught its masses of attendees more ambivalent lessons about the experience of modernity than their official organizers may have intended. While dazzling them with the power of technology, they also terrorized them; while promising prosperity they often brought bankruptcy in their wake; and while intending to demonstrate a new world of magical convenience, they often revealed the possibility of disasters of a previously unimagined scope. In the dream-like ambiguous imagery of the Expositions the turn of the last century represented itself as inherently contradictory and tension-filled, able only to promise a scenario of dizzying transformation and continuous motion, rather than constant and predicable progress. In many ways the stylistic fissure in the art world of this period expresses precisely the same sort of ambivalent imagery in which promise cradled the possibility of disaster. Both the academic painting of the turn of the century and the new modernist innovators seem to deliver a sensory overload, an art striving to reflect the stimuli of a new modern life -- finding within it, alternately, balance and harmony or chaos and apocalypse. Eroticism, bodies dissolved in light or color, environments shaken by new rhythms or ahum with universal vibrations, the abjection of the working poor -- such visions seem to obsess visual artists across schools. The question seems to be: can the solidity of a world consisting of people and objects persist beneath this swirl of modern stimuli? Does the space of an ordered landscape and city persist behind the ever-changing grid of technology in Lumiere’s film of the Eiffel Tower? Or is everything threatening, to quote Marshall Berman, quoting Marx, to melt into air? Tonight I want to explore this new experience in which the world seems either to dissolve into immateriality of to collide with us in a brutal shock by examining two subjects constantly repeated in the films made between 1895 and 1900 (and a bit later): the image of the charging locomotive and the human body in motion. In these images, industrial force and bodily movement, s each express aspects of the new found kinetic energy of modernity and the possibility of capturing a new visual realm through the new invention of cinema.

II Train

There is a legend that when the Lumiere company projected their films in Paris at the Salon Indien for the first time on Dec. 26, 1895, one film caused a riot. When The Arrival of a Train at the Station appeared on the screen audience members supposedly rose from their seats and fled in terror, thinking an actual train was bearing down on them. Elsewhere I have pointed out that no account of such a reaction actually occurring can be found in the numerous descriptions of the early Lumiere Parisian shows, and I think that most likely it never happened. But like most myths, this one should not be dismissed solely on the basis of not being an accurate account of a real event, without being interrogated for its metaphorical significance and irrational appeal. It is unlikely that anyone viewing early train films was confused enough to take a black and white image projected on a screen little more than six feet high for the real thing and assume they were in real danger. But most certainly most viewers of early train films were highly affected both psychologically and physiologically by the new mobile spectacle of films showing locomotives charging towards the camera. One account of the showing of an early American train film by the Biograph company claimed that two women in the theater balcony had screamed and fainted upon seeing the film. A few days later a retraction was printed, clarifying that the women had screamed and nearly fainted. That difference accents the fact that reactions to such films, like the dazzlement of visitors to the World Expositions, were not a result of naiveté and or the product of super realism, but rather responded to the new sensory demands and over-stimulation delivered by the medium of moving pictures.

Chroniclers of early modernity all spoke of the fantastic increase in stimuli offered by new modern environments, whether the city streets, the modern industrial factory, or the technological battle field. The human sensorium, it was felt, was stretched to the limit, bombarded on all sides. Drawing on decades of such observations, Walter Benjamin in the 1930’s characterized modern life as quintessentially an experience of shock, of a sudden unpredictable assault. The great commentator on the role of the railway in creating aspects of modern experience, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, has more recently defined shock as, "the kind of sudden and powerful event of violence that disrupts the continuity of an artificially/mechanically created motion or situation, and also the subsequent state of derangement." [151] The train wreck provided the nineteenth century with a new experience of shock, intensified by the power of modern technology, the first widely experienced technological disaster, which unlike, say, a mine accident, burst in on its victims in the middle of seemingly everyday pursuits. The nineteenth century train wreck beggared the imagination. The force of movement, the energy expended, yielded not only massive loss of life and horrendous injuries, but also left psychic effects that ultimately transformed medical science’s conception of the relation between mind and body. Train insurance companies initially refused to pay damages for passengers who had undergone no physical injury, even when the shock of an accident had left them unable to function. In the 1880’s the toil train accidents took on supposedly uninjured victims led medical science to recognize for the first time what today we call post traumatic shock as a provable medical condition. As Schivelbusch points out, this radical new conception of psychic effect as a serious medical condition and not simply the product of willful imagination opened the door to Freud and Breuer’s treatment of hysteria as a psychic reaction to trauma.

Railway companies therefore needed not only to reassure passengers about the safety of their ride by implementing various safeguards, but also to calm their concerns during the ride itself through a series of distractions and devices of comfort. As Schivelbusch shows, the cars themselves were provided with shock absorbing mechanisms and the railway seats occasioned the first development of upholstery, originally designed to cushion the passenger’s body against the continuous little shocks of the railway journey. New ideals of comfort in travel appeared, as if to compensate for the increased danger to life, limb and psyche risked if something did go wrong. The reassured and buffered train passenger could share the impression of Jules Verne’s world traveler Phileas Phogg that he "was not traveling, but only describing a circumference.. he was a solid body, traversing an orbit ... according to the laws of rational mechanics." As if to allay any awareness of the possibility of an accident, the railway journey promised a totally frictionless transit, whose new comfort level fostered the new habit of railway reading (nearly impossible in the previous lurching conveyances), leading to a whole new industry of popular novels devoted to absorbed escapist reading during train journeys.

The desire to cushion the shock of modern life seems fully explainable, and extends, as Walter Benjamin observed, to the nineteenth century ideal of the bourgeois interior where furniture extended the railway method of upholstery and seemed to embrace its sitter, to insulate him from the shocks of the outside world, like a precision instrument encased in its etui. The over-stuffed stability of the bourgeois interior, therefore, took its lead from the first class train compartment and cushioned its inhabitants against the assaults of social life. This mode of domesticity can be understood as a reaction formation, a defensive retreat before a modern world perceived as threatening to human subjectivity. But how do we explain the simultaneous fascination in the new electrical and mechanical amusements that began to crop up at World’s Expositions, designed to create shocks as entertainment -- the desire shown by the crowds that flocked to these attractions to encounter the edge of danger, the possibility of collision? One attraction proposed for the 1900 Exposition sought to satisfy this desire in extreme form:

Like the dazzling, overwhelming form of the Exposition itself, such rides engage the contradictory energy of modernity, the desire to experience the shock of extreme motion, yet experience it somehow from a safe position, to be shocked and cushioned at the same time, as if the participant wanted to push experience to the point of near obliteration, yet pull back at the last moment into an embrace of safety, "screaming and nearly fainting." While this particular attraction was never actually introduced, (although its equivalents have appeared fairly recently) the "leap frog" railway in which two trains seemed to be able to collide when one suddenly passed over the other was a standard attraction of World Expositions and amusement parks of the turn of the century, the direct predecessor of the roller coaster. There was no question that the pursuit of strong sensation was the stock in trade of the modern electrical amusement park which appeared outside most urban areas in the late nineteenth century following in the wake of the World Expositions.

In many ways the popular genre of early train films which followed in the wake of the Lumiere film sought to provide precisely this experience of simultaneous shock and safety. Many train films simply seemed to provide the spectacle of motion and the delight of touristic sights for those who might not otherwise be able to afford it (such as the Hale Tours theaters which appeared internationally in 1905 offering train films projected in theaters which were designed to resemble train cars and often providing the addition kinesthetic sensation of rumbling tracks and swaying back and forth). Other films, however, seemed to relish precisely the experience of danger and near collision. The Edison Company hawked their 1902 railway film Panoramic view of Lower Kicking Horse Canyon with these phrases from their catalogue: "Of all panoramic mountain pictures this is the most thrilling, as the audience imagines while they are being carried along with the picture the train will be toppled over thousands of feet into the valley below." Their companion train film of the same canyon was described in their catalogue for eager buyers this way: "The train seems to be running into the mountains of rock as each curve is reached and rounded, making the scene exciting from start to finish." The train film of Panoramic View of Mt. Tamalpias Cal. the catalogue claimed was "most thrilling as one experiences the sensation of momentarily expecting to be hurled into space." Traveling film exhibitor Lyman Howe for years ended his "High Class Motion Picture Shows" with the attraction of " the runaway train," in which a regular film of a train going up hills and down dales was projected at breakneck speed, delivering a final whollop for his screaming audience. How can we explain this seemingly counter-intuitive pleasure in shocks?

In his later work with shell-shock victims from W.W.I, Freud theorized that the devastating effect of shock comes partly from its sudden and unpredictable nature. Anxiety in fact provides a defense mechanism , a sort of inoculation, a low level of non-specific fear that the psyche generates to protect itself against the sudden irruption of shock into a totally unprepared sensorium. The experience of a sudden total lack of mastery was precisely what caused the trauma of shock even when no physical injury resulted. Thus films and thrill rides for which the audience is fully prepared, and which build up a sense of expectation, suspense and anxiety can be experienced as moment of mastery when no physical harm results, the psyche protected by the free anxiety which creates what Freud, and Benjamin after him, described as a stimulus shield. Further, especially for the working class patrons these rides and films recalled in exaggerated form situations many people encountered in an involuntary way in their daily life, whether negotiating traffic-filled city streets or working in a modern factory. These rides, as John Kasson has claimed, provided contexts in which such threatening or abrasive forces could be experienced ludicly, within a playful atmosphere and with a complete lack of productive labor or utilitarian purpose. Industrial machinery used to manufacture thrills alone, modern mechanical and electrical contrivances designed to acts as the people’s monster toys, these carnival rides inverted the usual role of human and machine, while retaining modern stimulation and excitement.

III The Body and Sensation

One could see modern and Avant-Garde art as a reaction against all this, High modernism has often been described as a sort of anti-modernity wishing to fashion an area in which the human sensorium could retreat from this assault, like Des Esseintes’ artificial paradise of the senses, or the ivory towers evoked by Symbolist poets. But every reaction is shaped by the very thing it shuns, and the most powerful Avant-Garde artist understood the only way to engage the modern was to embrace its power even as they attempted to redefine it. Sensation, the idea of an experience precedes representation, that comes before meaning or significance, emerged as the material of a new art. But beyond the implicit call for a new threshold of abstraction, the declaration of a new art based in the senses pitched its revolution precisely in the human body as the realm of sensation and perception previous even to language and meaning.

But while the body may have been new territory for an aesthetics that traditionally had sought the image of the ideal, the Avant-Garde could not claim to discover this new modern body of sensation on its own. Throughout the Nineteenth century the physical sciences had been staking their claim through ever more advanced observations of the body and its senses. The cinema emerges partly from this new technology of observing and claiming the body for scientific knowledge. It is perhaps in cinema and photography that we most dramatically encounter the interaction between a science of bodily knowledge and control and an Avant-Garde anxious to discover in the body a realm beyond calculation.

History often serves us through coincidence, staging this intersection of the new art in search of new threshold of freedom and the new science seeking new regimes of control with ironic clarity. Arthur Rimbaud could be argued to be the figure who most primarily announces the emergence of a new conception of art with his call for a project of artistic research which he described as the "systematic derangement of the senses." This project was originally announced in May of 1871 in a now famous letter in which he set out the aspirations of an aesthetic Avant-Garde, involved in a dangerous and fundamental exploration of the limits of consciousness and experience. Now referred to as the "Lettre du voyant", the letter of the visionary, this manifesto was sent by Rimbaud to his friend Paul Demeny, a minor symbolist poet. It is not known if Paul showed this letter to his brother Georges, but as the historian of the archeology of the cinema, Laurent Mannoni, has remarked, it was Georges Demeny who is some sense fulfilled Rimbaud’s statement literally through his work in motion pictures, first with Etienne Jules Marey and then independently on a number of extremely important pioneer motion picture machines. These included the Phonoscope, one of the first attempts to produce motion pictures and first intended as a tool for the instruction of the deaf in the techniques of speech, as Demeny in close-up recited the phrases, "Je vous aime" and "Vive la France."

The invention of the cinema itself came directly out of the chronophotographic experiments and practices of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Thus cinema’s relation to motion always exceeded pure representation, or simply capturing movement. In the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey, motion was parsed out into still images, while time was indicated through a calculation of invisible intervals which occurred between exposures. As Bergson would later complain, this analysis of motion was based on its overcoming, its rendering as a series of static points along a graph of action. Chronophotography works as much to master motion as to portray it, achieving through this mastery the calculation of the body itself, rendering visible its unseen motions, making evident its unconscious behavior. Thus cinema emerges from a dialectic between stillness and motion reflected broadly in the visual culture of the turn of the century: between form metamorphosing in its transformations, and motion plotted within a space of observation and calculation.

The sometimes ungraceful positions of chronophotography would seem to operate in an opposite direction to the idealism of most turn of the century art, towards a de-romanticization of the body, capturing its far from ideal awkwardness. In contrast to the symmetry of the rocking horse-like images of galloping horses in earlier equestrian painters, Muybridge revealed a horses’ leg crumpled together in a wad beneath its belly, resembling a crushed spider. This ungainly quality would be seized upon by a avant-gardist like Degas to create sculpture which seem to be toppling over, unsteady, overcome by the material force of weight and gravity. But, almost paradoxically, this very surrender to the impetus of falling or leaping, the physical tension of maintaining or losing balance itself, was seized upon by Auguste Rodin to portray the agonistic aspect of spiritual struggle, bodies out of control, endowed with a spastic energy which twisted them into grotesque postures. For Rodin, claiming "the body always expresses the spirit of which it is the envelop" such figures embodied the idealist or struggle or agon. of spirits in travail.

The tortured physicality of this fin de siecle idealism thus converges with the visual representation to which it would seem ideologically opposed: science and new technology. The body that expresses the spirit for Rodin, is a naturalist body composed of taut muscle and stretched nerves. This mobile body that violated traditional norms of beauty and health called for new modes of representation, both in the traditional arts (opening the way for the revolution of modern styles) and in the technological process of representation of photography. The body out of control, the sick or decadent body, haunted the artists of the turn of the century, just as it did the scientists and politicians precisely because it could not be stilled, it threatened convulsive motion.

Such heightened anxiety focused on the degenerate or decadent body was partly a legacy of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and the gymnastic movement in France emerged largely as a means of reversing the physical weakness of the French recruit that many saw as an essential cause for that ignominy. As we know from the work of Marta Braun and Laurent Mannoni, his desire to perfect, teach and promote a new system of gymnastics which could counter the decadent French body impelled Georges Demenÿ into his work with Marey, while similar concerns motivated state funding of Marey’s Institute Physilogique.

If Marey’s and Demenÿ’s chronophotography can be seen as a direct response to the decadent body "deprived of gymnastics," as a means, among other things for devising a systems of physical training and discipline for a new modern healthy and efficient body, other chronophotographers focused more narrowly on observing and diagnosing the diseased and hysterical body. To fix the image of hysteria, Charcot instituted the Iconographie Photographique de Salpêtrière with photographs by Paul Rignaud and later Albert Londe. As Silverman points out, Charcot was obsessed with visual representation. Not only did the Iconographie de Salpêtrière record the many manifestations of disease, but much of Charcot’s published work was devoted to claiming that traditional painting and sculpture portraying grotesque or supernatural scenes accurately portrayed the diseases he studied, especially hysteria.

The lack of bodily control recorded in Charcot’s images signified disease. Like Charcot, Londe believed in the alignment of vision and knowledge and sought to make his own apparatuses extend and supplement the power of human vision. The camera, Londe claimed, was the "true retina of the scientist." Advocating a key role for photography in medicine Londe declared: "To determine the facies [the typical appearance] belonging to each disease, to each illness, to place it before the eyes of all, this is what photography is capable of." As the modern disease par excellence, hysteria with it periods of rapid transformation posed a challenge to representation. Taking over the photographic service at Salpêtrière in 1882, Londe immediately modernized the already existing darkroom and studio, and introduced the latest possibilities of instantaneous photography, stereoscopic photography and, using devices of his own invention, chronophotography. The panoply of photographic methods Londe marshaled to record the effects of disease reveals an almost obsessive desire to document physical deviation through a exhaustive inventory of photographic technology: instantaneous images, images in relief and in the phases of motion. Photographic technology served as a means of rational defense against the lack of physical and mental control of hysteria, whose facies medical photography would wrest from their patients’ deviant bodies and categorize scientifically.

Charcot’s presentation of patients to students and visitors took the form, as many have pointed out, of a private theater in which the power of the doctor’s gaze as he both examined and hypnotized his hysterical female patients interacted with the visual attraction of their frequent semi-nudity. Charcot described himself to Freud as a "visuel," "a man who sees." He claimed, "I am absolutely nothing but a photographer; I inscribe what I see." [Yale 48] But his role surpassed that of the passive observer, not only inscribing like a camera, but causing his subjects to freeze like an instantaneous photograph. In the spectacular display of hysterical symptoms that Charcot managed, the moment of cataleptic immobility played an important role, an effect that Charcot and his assistants could provoke at will by a variety of means. Richer and Charcot themselves drew the analogy: "The immobility of the attitudes thus provoked is eminently favorable to photographic reproduction." {Beyond Hysteria 383] In fact, as Ulrich Baer has shown, Charcot occasionally provoked an attack of hysterical catalepsy in his female patents by means of a sudden flash of brilliant electrical light within a darkened room, the very flash which made the photograph of their reactions possible. This cataleptic immobility was very strong and would even allow the doctor to arrange the patient’s body into "and arch... so rigid it remains in this position for quite some time." {Yale 53] As Bauer says, "Catalepsy retains by way of the body what photography retains by way of the camera: it freeze-frames and retains the body in isolated position that can be viewed and theorized outside a sequence of motion." [ibid.]

Charcot desired to represent the hysterical body in motion as well as catalepsy, and Londe sought technology for inscribing the succession of gestures or attitudes passionelles , in order that Charcot’s photograph-like perception could be available to all scientists. Thus Londe’s chronophotographic devices captured successive phases of an hysterical attack, and recorded them in close chronological order. The still image arrested motion, mastered the out of control mobile body and thereby produced knowledge. Londe saw his role as photographer as the achieving of an instant wherein science and knowledge triumphed over the vagaries and transience of the physical world. Whether capturing the stages of a grand mal seizure or the gait of someone moving down the stairs, (as in this Marey -like diagram taken from one of Londe’s books on medical photography), instantaneous and chronophotography could reveal the actual order beneath physical phenomenon, invisible to normal human perception, the typical facies discernible through the plethora of physical symptoms.

Where is the meeting place between this scientific discourse which hopes to delineate and control the deviant body of illness and a new art which finds in the sick and nervous body the best representation of modern spirituality? The meeting place is the world of modernity in which the body becomes the realm of experimentation for both science and the arts. Both discourses wish to produce an image of the modern body, the sciences and medicine with the aim of producing a pliant and hearty body ready to react to the new demands of modern warfare and industrial production. The arts observe this modern body not as deviant but as expressive, expressive not only of spiritual travail but of demands placed on it by inhuman systems. And at the same time this new nervous body also finds its own defenses against its new environment in speed cleverness and a new found modern synthesis of awkwardness and grace, like the black suited crooks falling through cinematic space in the Keystone comedy Van Doesberg watched with such delight, discovering their escape into the fourth dimension.

Does cinema ever escape from the legacy of scientific observation and control? If one answer must be found in the grotesque slapstick comedies of Chaplin Keaton and dozens of anonymous comedians celebrated by the new Avant-Garde in the teens and twenties, another can be found even earlier in the films of the turn of the century. In their capturing of the shocks and sensations of a new world, the cinema worked as an ambivalent training session, teaching perhaps, as Adorno feared, the viewer to accept the shocks of industrial work. But the cinema also served as Benjamin claimed as a survival course whose lesson were couched not simply in fear but also in hilarity and a new modern nervous grace. In early films of urban crowds, of the tough dances of urban couples and in a new embrace the cinema made possible of not simply the frozen moment of analysis but the mobile moment of speed and transport, a new sort of ecstasy is imaged. It has been the legacy of early cinema to the Avant-Garde to constantly rediscover this energy, to refashion it, and to make it once again new, even in the face of the double jaws of modern terror and repression.