Movement, Fragmentation, and the Uncanny

The body in films is also moments, intensities, outside a single constant unity of the body as a whole, the property of a some one; films are full of fragments, bits of bodies, gestures, desirable traces, fetish points ... —Stephen Heath

Early speculations concerning the nature of film hovered uneasily around the subject of movement, around issues of life and lifelessness, body and soul, the fantastic and the uncanny effect. "The essence of cinema," Georg Lukács wrote in 1913, "is movement itself," and he was already reflecting a widespread belief. Earlier, a Grand Café program advertising films by the Lumière brothers describes in detail what these films record, namely, "all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen." Wildly affirmative of cinema, in which he saw the basis of all new directions in the arts, the Expressionist poet Yvan Goll proclaimed in 1920 that cinematic movement would have the catalytic effect of ozone or radium upon all media and genres, which for the moment were "dead and mute." With Viking Eggeling and perhaps Hans Arp in mind, GoIl speculated that the future would soon bring Kinomalerei or "movie-painting" into existence. A year earlier, another German writer, Carl Hauptmann, theorizing about Rodin against the historical backdrop of the Laocoön controversy, made the claim that sculpture's manifest desire to suggest movement—indeed, the desire of all of the visual arts to transcend the moment—could now be realized in cinema.

But the introduction of movement into the realm of visual representation was thought to have negative consequences also. Cinematic bodies—the human figures subjected to motion in films—were generally perceived as attenuated, as "merely" the sum of their actions and movements, and were often contrasted negatively with so-called theatrical bodies. Eleonora Duse's is a frequently cited example of the stage actor's body, the theatrical body capable of projecting "full presence" or "soul," or—as even Lukács put it—a body in which being and acting were indissolubly one. As observed in theatrical performances, the actor's body was thought to be redolent of fate, mystery, and tragedy, whereas, according to Lukács, bodies in films should not even be considered human, but rather as constituting life of a wholly new and fantastic kind. Thus, cinematic representations of the human body were adjudged to be unmetaphysical and soulless, to constitute one-dimensional creatures whose life is one of pure surface—to be somehow monstrous, unnatural, precisely because visual representations, whose stillness the limits of technology had made to seem natural, were now capable of being subjected to movement. Still, Lukács's reading differs from some insofar as he felt that the cinematic representation of human beings ought not to be perceived as inadequate, as founded upon a lack, but rather simply as a consequence of the principium stilisationis of cinema. According to Lukács, neither fate nor causality determines cinematic life; since, he believes, movement alone constitutes or defines the cinema, he is able to argue that while the human figures represented on the screen may have lost their souls, they have precisely for this reason regained their bodies.

During this period of silent cinema, it comes as no surprise that the body language of pantomime and gesture occupied a central position in the discussion concerning the place of film with regard to the established arts. For some, the presence of the body on stage, contrasted with its actual absence from the cinematic frame, ensures the primacy of even theatrical pantomime over film, not to mention the primacy of drama, with its access to the spoken word. Others, like Carl Hauptmann, claim that the human soul is best expressed in body language, seeing in the foregrounding of gesture (Gebärde) a primal, privileged domain of signification available to film. Usually, however, it is suggested that the silent cinema's muteness—and even the facial expression of cinematic figures, whether exaggerated or blank and, in either case, mask-like—contributes to the uncanniness and "soullessness" of its figures. It is this effect, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, that Charlie Chaplin uses to such advantage; his "mask of uninvolvement" makes Chaplin into a "marionette in a fair sideshow." Contributing to this marionette-like effect are Chaplin's body movements, his "exercises in fragmentation," as Miriam Hansen puts it; utterly self-conscious about the effects of the cinematic apparatus on the representation of his body, Chaplin is the film actor par excellence who, by "chopping up expressive body movement into a sequence of minute mechanical impulses ... renders the law of the apparatus visible as the law of human movement." But Chaplin's recuperative strategy of exposing the fragmentation imposed upon the body by cinema was a personal solution to a perceived threat, not a strategy that could find universal application.

Unnatural Conjunctions: The Heterogeneous Text

In 1916, Paul Wegener's lecture, "The Artistic Possibilities of the Cinema," with its emphasis on the "kinetic lyricism" of the cinema and on the play of pure motion for its own sake, established him as a forerunner among the artists and filmmakers—including Hans Richter—who would develop the abstract film in Germany. Wegener's interest is in what he calls the "fantastic domain" of "optical lyricism," a term perhaps not as far from Gilles Deleuze's concept of the "movement-image" as the nearly seventy years that separate their two texts might suggest; for Deleuze, too, the lure of filmmaking lies in the possibility of reproducing pure movement "extracted from bodies or moving things," movement as a function of a series of equidistant instants reproduced in a sequence of shots. Not surprisingly, it was the tantalizing implication of movement suggested by series photography—comic photographs of a man fencing with himself and playing cards alone—that originally drew Wegener to the cinematic medium in 1913, and that, at one and the same time, suggested to him the suitability of the cinema for transmitting the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The significance of series photography to the development of cinema is well documented. In the United States, Eadweard Muybridge published photo sequences to illustrate his studies of animal locomotion, and was already using an invention of his own, the zoopraxiscope, to project short sequences during his lectures in 1880. Thus living bodies, especially human figures, came to be linked with movement—indeed, were vehicles for portraying movement—in series photography from its very inception. It is probable...