I
In 1930, Sigfried Kracauer wrote a farewell text about the Linden Arcade in Berlin.[i] Within the article, he remembered how as a child visited the arcade and felt thus transported to a faraway place, utterly unreal, because of the travel shops and their postcards, the picture books and the World Panorama. Therein, frames of cities and mountain landscapes were showed and glided in by an artificial light which caused an illusion that managed to transport people of that age to exotic destinations. Nevertheless, Kracauer was aware that the time of arcades had run out. The arcades meant a space where the composition of bourgeois life was really created, since the half-light of the passageway served to elude the public sphere and to enjoy at once both of the primarily bodily needs and the daydreams images –necessary counterpart to fill the bourgeois moral. Walter Benjamin saw as well in the arcades the phantasmagoria of bourgeois society itself, which left up the exchange value and the commodification of entertainment. It is not trivial, therefore, that ‘the high point in the diffusion of panoramas coincides with the introduction of arcades.’[ii] These first mass media were born in the industrial revolution, when the working class started to have free hours in which workers sought to regenerate themselves to the next round. The bourgeois class saw in it an opportunity to make the masses watch the world in its own way. Benjamin was aware of it and considered indispensable the possession of these new –and often revolutionary- means by the working class to change the relationship of oppression in which the latter class was.
But the shift that these arcades were suffering in the time Kracauer wrote the article did not mean a radical change –in the sense of a change produced from the root. It rather meant the next step of capitalist society, which did no longer need that half-light of the arcades to hide the real entertainment of bourgeois society, which was now brought to light and incorporated to mass consumption. The arcades that still remained out of its proper age seemed, according to Kracauer’s article, the vestibules of department stores. He noticed the change that had been produced in the following terms:
‘The shops are still there, but its postcards are mass-produced commodities, its World Panorama has been superseded by a cinema, and its Anatomical Museum has long ceased to cause a sensation. All the objects have been struck dumb.’[iii]
In effect, the time of arcades had run out. But that disappearance had been caused by the own age of arcades, by nineteenth century’s expression. Benjamin presented this idea in the Arcades Project making these words by Michelet his own words: ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow.’[iv] The essay will attempt to follow as well another thesis of Benjamin, ‘It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture.’[v] That is, to grasp the economic process within the everyday life of this century as a visible phenomenon. Hence, the cinema can be understood as an invention of nineteenth century that, even though was crucial for the twentieth century development, was a product of the previous century. It was the economic world of nineteenth century bourgeois society which thought about it and about its purposes.
II
Walter Benjamin uses the term ‘phantasmagoria’ to apply the Marxist concept of ‘fetishism of the commodity’ to his cultural analyses, and especially to mass consumption. We should take in account that this term refers firstly to the phantasmagoria itself, i.e., an invention of the late eighteenth century in France that is predecessor of cinema and consisted of a projection of images from the magic lantern. That supposes a mass exhibition that will be continued by panoramas and films. The phantasmagoria involves a first digression of the aura, that is of the here and now of the artwork, since the projected image is separated from its real source and it is thus alienated and creates a fetish. However, this alienation is still insignificant. What creates the phantasmagoria in these events is the mass audience. Panoramas –and their subsequent variations- will be, therefore, a closer forerunner of cinema.
The panorama was an exhibition medium whose existence basically dates from nineteenth century. It consisted of a circular arrangement of big paintings which were shown to a mass audience and which later incorporated lights, music, and even motion to create a dynamic perception. Stephan Oettermann observed a double function to the panorama, both as ‘an apparatus for teaching and glorifying the bourgeois view of the world’ and for reproducing ‘the real world so skilfully that spectators could believe what they were seeing was genuine.’[vi] In this same twofold definition the fetish that this medium developed is unmasked. The bourgeois society attempted to reify its own ideology in the working class throughout these first mass media. The nature –and naturalness- of the representation is abstracted from the reality but at the same time it is presented in such a way. Hence, the bourgeois discourse implicit in this representation is concealed, and thus it is received as natural. Oettermann suggests that the Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is the counterpart of the panorama, as they were the two halves of the era of industrial revolution: work and play. Bentham’s idea would be in this case applied to the institution that kept watch on the workers to work and not to revolt; workers were thus watched and invigilated. Whereas in the panorama, people watched, but at the same time –and with the same arrangement that the panopticon- they were transmitted the bourgeois ideology. It was ‘the dialectic of the bourgeois mode of seeing’ what found expression therefore in panoramas.[vii] If in industrial capitalist society man’s own labour appears as alien to him and converted to a commodity, due to the autonomy of the commodity relation, in the entertainment media of that society, it is the own entertainment which is reified and turned into a commodity. The worker is dispossessed of his own subjectivity, both at work and at leisure time. It is the reception in mass which creates the actual reification of the society, which should thus require it to ‘learn to satisfy its needs in terms of commodity exchange.’[viii]
III
World Expositions were in Walter Benjamin’s opinion a key point –together with arcades- to understand bourgeois society of nineteenth century. That was the place par excellence where the fetishist character of commodities was created. The fetish was then reified in the mass audience that attended these expositions, as later in the arcades through consumption. Benjamin’s view about the purpose of these fairs is as follows:
‘World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating this person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others.’[ix]
It was likewise the space where the race which led to the invention of motion pictures was shown. Paris expositions of 1889 and 1900 were crucial in the development and expansion of cinematograph. If the former was still the age of panoramas -which were highly visited among other types of attractions that celebrated the triumph of Modernity and technology-, motion pictures were already demanding their invention. The year before, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince had invented in Leeds a single-lens recorder camera and had achieved to show the recorded images, although not in the correct and wished way. Meanwhile, the recorder material was not still the proper and the time he could film was only two seconds. In 1891, Edison would invent the kinematograph, and finally, in 1895, Lumière Brothers would invent the cinematograph. As Vanessa R. Schwartz points out, the panorama shown in the 1889 Paris exposition was very static for the audience, and hence, in the following years a lot of motion panoramas were developed. Thus, a mareorama -i.e. a landscape panorama which passed by the windows of a boat where the spectators were seated- or another panorama in a funicular were the proposals to develop the attraction. Nevertheless, even the photorama by Lumière brothers, exhibited in the 1900 Paris Exposition, was not successful.[x] In 1900, the newborn cinema invention had become very popular and was the star attraction of the fair. Thomas Alva Edison, renowned participant in latter fairs, did not only show his new inventions and patents in this exposition, but also filmed it. It is interesting to see how he called panoramas to the filmed images of Paris’ landscapes from the boat or from the curious moving sidewalk of the exposition. Even, how the circular arrangement of panoramas directly influenced the new cinematographic pans. Film hence fed from the forerunners at the same time it was inventing itself. In those years, it was also very common, as Lumière and Pathé brothers did, to send cinematographers all over the world –commonly to exotic and suggestive places like Venice, Istanbul, Niagara Falls or Tokyo. In this way, the landscapes that were painted and shown in the panoramas were now present in the cinematograph, even more real than in the former. The naturalness of the films and the attraction of the motion intensified the power of making the masses perceive the world in a particular way. Thus, for example, the exoticism so in vogue in that time was reified in these movies.
IV
The mass audience and the only possible existence of films by reproducibility were on a par for Walter Benjamin. The detachment of the recorded object from the sphere of tradition becomes in films the lost of its uniqueness, because of its replacement with a mass existence. The film has consequently a destructive and cathartic side, due to its inherent liquidation of tradition and heritage. According to him, the desire of masses ‘to ‘get closer’ to things, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction’ causes the decay of the social basis of the aura. Thus, the illusion of a unique presence -of a ‘here and now’- appears in cinema as a phantasmagoria. Distance is hence erased, and the relationship between spectator and film emerges as a fetish. This relationship is also that one between masses and reality, since the discourse inherent to the projected image appears in such a way. As Benjamin warned, ‘The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality is a process of immeasurable importance for both thinking and perception.’[xi] He knew that if the relationship between human being and apparatus had a fetishist character, the conditions of oppression could be easily naturalised, and hence incorporated to the consciousness of the masses and their common sense.
Benjamin understood that films had an inherent power to exploit. It is for that reason he dared to give a prognostic value to The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. The potential of cinema was present even before its invention. In that way he declared that ‘the sound film was latent in photography,’ since each invention subject to reproduction had implicit the new step –just as pictorial reproduction was thus so fast that he could keep pace with speech. [xii] That affirmation is not as impudent as he could seem, because actually when Edison first thought about the invention of motion pictures, he thought about synchronizing his phonograph with Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, in order to create talking moving pictures.[xiii] Even more, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince had already used Edison’s phonograph to provide music to his experiments, and he dared to say that ‘films would one day talk and have colour.’[xiv] Hence, the origin of films comes first of all from a technological nature, and the potential of cinema exists within this nature and depends on it. By concealing or by letting people know its nature –and thus its potential-, films can become an oppressing weapon or a liberating one.
V
Broadly, early cinema has been divided between realistic films –presided by Lumière brothers- and fantastic ones –by George Méliès. Nonetheless, this proves to be a fallacy in the right moment that Méliès, who was a spectator of the first projections of Lumière brothers, described them as ‘an extraordinary trick.’[xv] Cinema was born as the product of a society which started to universalise phantasmagorias. Thereby, as Miriam Bratu Hansen argues, ‘The cinema figures as part of the violent restructuration of human perception and interaction effected by industrial-capitalist modes of production and exchange,’ and it is conditioned by the vision of new technologies and the construction of new ways of life.[xvi] Cinema was therefore found a magnificent medium to naturalise the bourgeois vision of society, and to spread –and reify- the fetishist character of commodities among the masses. Reality and spectacle formed a couple since the beginning of films, as both of them were commodified and incorporated to the reification of capitalist society. In fact, that commodification of the reality came from the development of bourgeois society along the nineteenth century. Schwartz suggests that ‘Spectacle and narrative were integrally linked in Paris’ bourgeoning mass culture: The realism of spectacle was in fact often contingent on the familiarity of supposedly real-life newspaper narrative.’[xvii] Hence, neither the so-called naivety of Lumière’s films can be understood as an objective document of the reality of that time, nor the fairy tales such as Méliès’ Voyage à travers de l’impossible (1904) or Pathé’s Aladin et la lampe merveilleuse (1906) can be thought as completely estranged from society. Both of them are the visible expression of a time.
VI
There exists another division in early cinema between the cinema of attractions and narrative films. This division was developed from the term that Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault coined (or rather re-coined) in 1986 to define as ‘attractions’ the cinema that ‘differs from later narrative cinema through its fascination in the thrill of display rather than the construction of a story.’[xviii] That word, however, was already used to name other means of entertainment in the nineteenth century and likewise to call cinema itself in its beginnings. In the Histoire du Cinématographe by Coissac in 1925, Gaudreaut found that he referred to the films in these terms: ‘the large boulevards in Paris quickly became the centre of cinématographie-attraction.’[xix] This expression refers to the pure exhibitionism that these first films showed in order to attract the attention of the spectator. The two film theorist suggest two periods according to the division between ‘attraction’ and ‘narration’: the former, until 1908, corresponds with the system of monstrative attractions, whereas the latter, from this date to 1914, is the system of narrative integration. Nonetheless, Gaudreault expresses that both attraction and narration function at once as contradiction as they work together.[xx] Gunning recognises it considering the example of chase films, very popular in the first years of cinema.[xxi] As a mixture of narration and attraction, this genre started to develop the film form from a little narrative and the comic and ludicrous behaviour of the prosecuting characters. The story was then useful to contain gags that attracted the masses.
The justification for understanding these pioneer films as cinema of attractions is that, as Gunning claims, ‘Viewers place the phenomenon of kinetoscope within the visual illusions.’[xxii] Early cinema’s filmmaker was hence a monstrator, an exhibitionist of motion pictures that attempted to impress the audience in the way the best phantasmagorias and panoramas did in their ages. Leo Charney links this tendency of early cinema to the other kinds of attractions of the age, since these films ‘solicited the viewer’s attention not as the narratively absorbed voyeur of later cinema but as the gaping, amazed observer also engaged by the circus or an amusement park.’[xxiii] Charles Musser points out that Birt Acres’ film Rough Sea at Dover (1895), a two shot film about the image of a very harsh sea on the British coast, was the favourite film of the audience in the first exhibitions that there was in the United States, and thus the film had to be repeated as a loop several times.[xxiv] The narrative in this short film is nil, even less than the first movies of Lumière. So it only can be understood that what attracted the audience was the rough movement that this image showed. The great potentiality that cinema had and overcame the previous ‘attractions’ was therefore its ability to absorb the attention of spectators even along the time and make them to enter the picture.
VII
If George Méliès has been always difficult to classify -present both in attraction and narration and in montage and theatrical stage- is because he knew how to play and develop the film form from a synthesis of existent previous forms, as well as from the fantastic nineteenth century imaginary which was already prevailing. A rigorous analysis of Méliès should understand these divisions not as such, but as a dialectic process between different traditions that found a common place in cinema. With regard to the theatrical appearance of Méliès’ films, Gunning notices that the ‘unity of points of view gives the illusion of a theatrical unity of time, when, in fact, the substitution splice creates a specifically cinematic synthesis of time.’[xxv] But rather than looking for a theatrically experience, what Méliès attempted to do was to conceal the real nature of the cinematographic process, which could disrupt the sense of illusion with which his tricks involved the audience. What Gunning as well notices is that ‘The framing of Méliès’ composition … reveals itself as consciously constructed illusion designed to distract attention from the actual cinematic process at work.’[xxvi]
In this way, the spectator is alienated from the machine, and thus from the real nature of cinematograph. There is not therefore equilibrium between the human being and the apparatus, since the latter is erased in the final form of the film. That is transmitted and reified in the projection, as Benjamin points out:
‘The theatre includes a position from which the action on the stage cannot easily be detected as an illusion. There is no such position where a film is being shot. The illusory nature of film is of the second degree; it is the result of editing.’[xxvii]
Hence, the montage ends up stitching the fetishist character that films have, as it will be further developed in classic cinema. This kind of suture that film form adopts is however not own of cinema. If, as Benjamin says and I have pointed out above, ‘the sound film was latent in photography,’ the narrative that marks the beginning of the maturity of cinema was latent in nineteenth literature. In fact, he suggests as well that –because of reproduction- ‘Literature submits to montage in the feuilleton.’[xxviii] For instance, two directors who started to create the real film language, David W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, were clearly influenced by the literature of that age. Feuillade’s language reached a mature form with the serials Fantômas (1913-1914), based on the famous homonym novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, which had clear influence by nineteenth century’s feuilletons, and especially Les Vampires (1915), which acquires the feuilleton form by its own. On the other side, Griffith is influenced by the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, as Sergei M. Eisenstein holds in his famous article Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today. The American filmmaker did not only base his montage upon the parallel sequences and close-up that, according to Eisenstein, were already present in Dickens’ literature; but also, with this tradition, he took his thinking as a whole. Hence, the montage ‘appears to be a copy of his dualistic picture of the world, running in two parallel lines of poor and rich towards some hypothetical reconciliation.’[xxix] That is therefore the reification of bourgeois moral in films. In this direction, parallel sequences and the stitch of ‘the four walls’ in the filmic stage appear as natural, and the language that will culminate in the classic cinema starts to take form.
VIII
Nevertheless, Benjamin was always aware of the revolutionary potentials of films, just as the dangers that they could entail. Thanks photography, but especially cinema -since with them the exhibition value shows its superiority to the cult value-, ‘for the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.’ The social function of cinema therefore only could lead, according to Benjamin, to politics. This determination lies in the basis of the technological nature of the apparatus. Thus, he clearly saw how the concealment of the machine and the cinematographic process only could lead to fascism –since it seeks to corrupt and supplant the class consciousness of the masses. By contrast, if human being learnt to deal with the apperceptions and reactions that this apparatus creates, they could be taught how technology can release them from their enslavement.[xxx] Benjamin’s confidence of revolutionary potentials of films depended on the possession of the productive means by the proletariat, in order to place the apparatus in the service of the liberation of the working class.
IX
The time in which a medium is being invented, it is also a time of self-awareness of its own language. Hence, early cinema’s period was an age that thought about its potentials. That can be noticed in the numerous movies that use metalanguage along those first years. The apparatus was not still naturalised as an objective sight, and thus they mark better the real nature of film. For instance, How It Feels to Be Run (1900) by the Hepworth Manufacturing Co. shows the collision of a car with the camera as the reason of the gag, with an interjection over black that claims ‘Oh, mother will be pleased!’ In the same way, another production of the company, That Fatal Sneeke (1907), uses the movement of the shot frame to emphasize the inner movement of the narration. While it is true to say that it can be understood as another example of cinema of attractions, for which the spectator is even more entered the picture, it also shows the camera present in the reproduction, and consequently unmasks the naturalisation of objectivity that narration tends to show. The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901) by Robert W. Paul deals with the first perception of films by a countryman. It parodies the false reaction –as the common belief is- of the first spectators of Lumière’s films, demonstrating the theory that Charles Musser supports, i.e., that in early cinema ‘Spectators were not just given over to visceral states of astonishment or contemplation.’[xxxi] The Big Swallow (1901) by James Williamson plays both with the nature of shots and montage and with the presence of the cinematographic apparatus, which is devoured by the main character. If on one hand, it uses the filmic tricks in the service of narration and illusory perceptions, on the other hand, the presence of the cinematographer and the recording machine shows the relationship between human being and apparatus. This is a good example about how the illusion that cinema enables can work together with the self-awareness of the cinematographic machine, and hence prevent the spectator from his own self-alienation.
X
Early cinema was a period in which potentials of films were already present. In Benjaminian terms, it can be understood –in order to be analysed- as a time at a standstill that is writing its own history; but as well as an image that can be recognised later in other images of the history of films. The subsequent development was therefore latent in these first years. For that reason, for an analysis of this time is interesting to know the symptoms that cinema showed in its birth. Likewise, it was indispensable to observe the latency of past in this period of development. If this period started to write the subsequent history of films, it should be taken in account that the own existence of films should be understood as the product of the development of nineteenth century. Thus, it cannot only be said that arcades or world expositions –and clearly panoramas- were present in the beginning of films, but also that arcades will be subsequently latent in department stores and shopping centres, and that early cinema will be also latent in posterior cinema and, of course, in contemporary films. The same phantasmagorias that Benjamin saw in the formers were developed under other surfaces. Nonetheless, some potentials that in early films started to evolve were in the same way later developed and made films progress.
Benjamin’s great worth was warning about the dangers that films could entail with the concealment of his own nature, especially whether how fascism could use it. For that reason, the exploitation of its potentials with social and liberating purposes should start with the awareness of its form and social functions. And that comes by showing and making closer the technology to the proletariat, deprived of the fetishist character which bourgeois cinema tended to. As Benjamin pointed out, ‘The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.’[xxxii] The equilibrium in the relation between human being and apparatus, as he stressed, are crucial to avoid the oppressing potentials that lie as well in the cinematograph. The prognostic value of the importance of media in contemporary society was therefore already there.
[i] Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Farewell to the Linden Arcade,’ in The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995)
[ii] Walter Benjamín, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eilan and Kevin McLaughlin on the edition by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p.5.
[iii] Kracauer, p.342.
[iv] Benjamin, p.4.
[v] Ibid., p.460.
[vi] Stephan Oettermann, Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp.7 and 49.
[vii] Ibid., p.45.
[viii] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p.91.
[ix] Benjamín, p.7.
[x] Vanessa R. Schwartz, ‘Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,’ in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (London: California University Press, 1995)
[xi] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.105.
[xii] Ibid., p.102.
[xiii] Christopher Rawlence, The Missing Reel (London: Collins, 1990), p.32.
[xiv] Ibid., p.16.
[xv] Tom Gunning, ‘Primitive Cinema: A Frame Up? Or, The Trick’s on Us,’ in Thomas Elsaesser (Ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), p.96.
[xvi] Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,’ in Charney and Schwartz (Eds.), pp.362-363.
[xvii] Schwartz, p.298.
[xviii] Gunning, p.101.
[xix] André Gaudreault, ‘From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Kine-Attractography’,’ in Vanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p.94.
[xx] Ibid., p.96.
[xxi] Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,’ in Elsaesser (Ed.), p.60.
[xxii] Gunning, ‘Primitive Cinema: A Frame Up? Or, The Trick’s on Us,’ p.96.
[xxiii] Leo Charney, ‘In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity,’ in Charney and Schwartz (Eds.), 288.
[xxiv] Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s,’ in Strauven (Ed.), p.167.
[xxv] Gunning, ‘Primitive Cinema: A Frame Up? Or, The Trick’s on Us,’ p.100.
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ p.115.
[xxviii] Benjamín, The Arcades Project, p.13.
[xxix] Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,’ in Film Form (London: Dobson Books, 1951), p.235.
[xxx] ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ p.108.
[xxxi] Musser, p.170.
[xxxii] ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ p.108.
Bibliography
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———— The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eilan and Kevin McLaughlin on the edition by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999)
———— ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003)
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Elsaesser, Thomas (Ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990)
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