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Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life

University of California Press

Circulation, Mobility, Modernity, and the Body

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"

It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced goods, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and America, with a particular crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.

The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has demonstrated, the railway not only depended upon but also allowed expansion of industrial production, with broad networks for transportation of both raw materials and commodities, as well as the restructuring of

both rural and urban space as the site of circulation. This new landscape, which was organized according to circulatory needs, exemplifies the perceptual and environmental changes which define the experience of modernity: a new mastery of the incremental instants of time; a collapsing of distances; and a new experience of the human body and perception shaped by traveling at new rates of speed and inviting new potentials of danger.1

Any number of the topoi of modernity that cluster around the second half of the nineteenth century can be approached as instances of circulation: the boulevard system in the Haussmannization of Paris, which allowed a previously unimaginable expansion of traffic; the new modes of production of goods in the work process of the "new factory system," which demanded that individual workers perform simple and repetitive tasks as material passed before them; or innovations in systems of rapid transportation, such as the moving sidewalks unveiled at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Paris Exposition of 1900. In all of these new systems of circulation, the drama of modernity sketches itself: a collapsing of previous experiences of space and time through speed; an extension of the power and productivity of the human body; and a consequent transformation of the body through new thresholds of demand and danger, creating new regimes of bodily discipline and regulation based upon a new observation of (and knowledge about) the body.

Cinema nestles into this network of circulation as both technology and industry, but also as a new form of experience. As a mass-produced entertainment industry with a national system of distribution by 1909, film distribution and exhibition exploited railway networks pioneered by vaudeville circuits and circus trains. The early genres of cinema, especially such seemingly diverse forms as travel actualities and trick films, visualized a modern experience of rapid alteration, whether by presenting foreign views from far-flung international locations or by creating through trick photography a succession of transformations which unmoored the stable identity of both objects and performers. Early actuality films frequently presented a simulacrum of travel not only by presenting foreign views but also through "phantom rides" films, which were shot from the front of trains or prows of boats and which gave seated, stationary spectators a palpable sensation of motion. This contradictory experience was as much the attraction of these films as was the representation of foreign tourism.

While actuality films depended directly on the new technology of both cinema and transportation to image the collapse of the space and time formerly required for an experience of global tourism, the phantasmagoria of the trick film with its magical metamorphoses echoes the transformation of raw material into products achieved nearly instantaneously through the rapid succession of tasks in the new factory system. The amazement experienced by Upton Sinclair's Lithuanian worker Jurgis Rudkus in

The Jungle , as he watched hogs transformed into hams and other products by the concatenation of actions of a score of workers in a few minutes of time, recalls the astonishment of a gawker at a magic show spellbound by an unbelievable succession of transformative wonders.2 Peter Finley Dunne's Irish dialect character "Mr. Dooley" echoed this wonder when he ironically described the process: "A cow goes lowin' softly into Armours and comes out glue, gelatine, fertylizer, celooloid, joolry, sofy cushions, hair restorer, washin' sody, soap, lithrachoor, and bed springs, so quick that while aft she's still cow for'ard she may be anything fr'm buttons to pannyma hats."3

The speed of such industrial transformation made it appear magical, occluding the unskilled labor regulated by the factory system to perform repetitive and limited tasks. Skill seemed to be absorbed by the circulatory logic of the factory itself, as each task took place within a chain of rationalized labor. This new arrangement of production seemed able to make anything out of anything, without the laborious effort of skilled handicraft. In such new systems of labor, objects were transformed rapidly before one's eyes, and the stable identity of things became as uncertain as a panoply of magician's props.

Although the technical innovation of motion pictures introduced the literal possibility of portraying speed and movement, cinema's place in a new logic of circulation had been anticipated by the commodification of still photographs, especially the postcard and the stereoscope. As Jonathan Crary has indicated, we must rethink the history of photography by not focusing solely on the mode of new technological representation that it introduced but by considering its role in "the reshaping of an entire territory on which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate."4 While the debate on the ontology of the photographic image has centered on the indexical tie a photograph maintains with its referent, Crary directs our attention to the actual use of photographs, in which this connection to a referent interrelates with the image's detachable nature, with its...