\n
Marc Silberman | UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON<\/p>\n
The mediatization of seeing, which set in with the invention of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century and reached an initial peak of mechanical perfection in the moving camera at the end of the nineteenth century, enriched the psychophysics of perception.\u00a0A whole series of ever more sophisticated technological innovations in optical instruments led to new means of representation and concurrently opened up new ways of imagining the self. What came to be called in 1920s Germany \u201cneues Sehen\u201d or new seeing was the short-hand description for an effect of modern industrial society that literally bombarded the eyes with a shower of visual stimuli. We encounter the breakdown of perspectival focus and the introduction of abstraction in the visual arts; modernist literature adapts techniques of narrative montage connected with memory and interiority; and a new kind of spectator evolves who has experienced the spatial rhetoric of rapid movement associated with trains and automobiles as well as the visual fragmentation associated with photography and cinematography. These creative aesthetic responses were probing the limits of representation and perception but at the same time they threatened to displace verbal language as well as the written word. The primacy of writing, which itself had displaced oral culture in the wake of the Renaissance, was challenged by the media shift to visuality. Yet this by no means erased speech or print; rather the flood of images and the fragmentary techniques of representation based on mechanical means of reproduction forced artists and critics to rethink their assumptions about language and communication. The historical oppositions of pictura et subscriptio<\/em> come into especially sharp focus in the visual and textual signifying systems of the German silent cinema.<\/p>\n If language loses its communicative and interpretative functions in direct proportion to the loss of its referential grounding, then the modernist crisis is simultaneously a crisis of its signifying practices. The evolution of the silent cinema in Germany between 1912 and 1930 engaged this crisis on at least three levels. Thematically we find here an inflation of psychological stories about ego destabilization, urban alienation, and claustrophobic family life, populated by fantastical doubles, psychopaths, vampires, robots, and golems. Inscribed in the paranoid narratives of self-loss is the modern experience of dissociation and deracination. Aesthetically the silent cinema was exploring new ways to represent such anxieties of modern subjectivity. These included technical innovations in lighting and cameras that allowed for intensely dynamic, expressive space relations as well as a distinct gestural acting style aimed at translating inner emotions into corporeal intensity. Philosophically the ongoing debates about the nature of the cinema as art and entertainment began to reformulate the image-text relation by questioning the hierarchy of terms. Does the silent cinema sponsor a linguistic theory of images based on the idea of \u201creading\u201d the pictorial discursively, or does it rest on an image theory of language that claims the image as the ground of language\u2019s referentiality?<\/p>\n In this essay I propose to examine the German expressionist cinema as a specific response to the modernist crisis of language in order to describe the diverse cinematic forms of resistance to the word, to articulated speech. I propose to do this from two different directions, even though in practice they were not clearly separate. Some expressionist film makers developed the silence of the silent film into a \u201cgestural language\u201d that dramatized light and movement; others reproduced the silent speech of the film figures by means of graphically stylized intertitles. My thesis is that the expressionist cinema maintained a traditional, idealistic notion of the film as a pure work of art that aimed at a unified composition of all elements: set design, architecture, costumes, make-up, acting, lighting, plot, and even writing. While other avant-garde artistic practices, say, in the theater (Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator), photography (Hannah H\u00f6ch, John Heartfield), or the fine arts (Max Ernst, George Grosz), integrated the most advanced technical means at their disposal in order to transform traditional art forms and to open up new dimensions of artistic perception, the expressionist film makers missed the opportunity to explore the rich semiotic possibilities of the new technological medium with its hybrid, synergetic forms and provocative force. Hence, the expressionist cinema marks a transition or even the endpoint of a long process of reflection about the communicative possibilities of language that shifted to a fundamentally new level with the invention of sound cinema at the end of the 1920s.<\/p>\n First of all, we need to recognize that the early cinema was not silent in the sense of soundless; sound had always been present in cinema auditoriums. The widespread assumption that written intertitles substituted for the lack of voices must be qualified. First, beginning in 1903 already there were successful experiments with new technologies of sound accompaniment through the mechanical separation of image and sound. In Germany, for example, synchronized wax disk recordings were especially popular for music and opera films, seeking to reproduce the \u201cauthenticity\u201d of performance. These \u201cMesster-Ton-Bilder\u201d (Sound-Images), produced under the brand name of \u201cBiophon,\u201d were commercially distributed with some success until 1913. Also, since the beginning of the cinema live film narrators\u2014like the impresarios and entertainers on vari\u00e9t\u00e9 stages\u2014accompanied movies with running commentaries. The narrator, standing in front of or next to the screen, introduced the film, explained the plot, and spoke the dialogues, a tradition that had disappeared entirely only in 1913.[1]<\/a> Around 1910 an alternative arose to the film narrator in the form of a small group of actors who behind the screen acoustically illustrated the corresponding visual events, but this proved to be only a short-lived fad (Orosz 136). And, of course, by the early teens other kinds of live musical accompaniment were becoming widespread, be they pianos, organs, small ensembles, or large-scale orchestras for gala openings in the new cinema temples in urban centers. In another sense too the silent cinema was not silent. Actors did speak their parts in front of the camera, and viewers saw them moving their lips, although they did not hear them once the \u201cinstitution\u201d of the film narrator disappeared. Thus, the silent film does show a communicating world but without audible speech, and as a result viewers developed historically conditioned habits of lending the screen figures their own imaginary voices. The audience provided not only their own \u201cspoken\u201d text of unheard voices but also the sound quality of those voices\u2014timbre, intonation, pitch, tonality, not to speak of other sounds and noises such as whistles, rain hitting the pavement, or screeching car wheels that might be represented in film images. In this sense it is impossible to regard the silence of the silent film as a lack; on the contrary, the absence of audible sound constituted its specific communicative condition, the condition of the viewer\u2019s imaginary activity in watching the film.<\/p>\n If the silent cinema was from early on not without sound, the new visual medium of moving images<\/em> similarly did not forego text in the form of printed words. From its very beginnings conventionalized print forms of communicating information accompanied the cinema in the texts of program booklets and on advertising posters. Printed words could also be seen in the profilmic space of the moving images, for example, a shot might show a factory entrance with the company name inscribed on it, a store front with business signs, a street sign or place name, a streetcar with advertisements. Even before the (technological) invention of the close-up shot cinema viewers apprehended visually such diegetical images of words. Moreover, printed credits at the beginning and end of films existed in the earliest phases of cinematography, although at this point they were not yet technically connected to the raw film stock; rather such titles were projected separately by means of the older laterna magica <\/em>technology (Hediger 169). It is relatively obvious that the projection of moving images begins in the medium of print, pointing to its precursors in book culture (the covers and title page of the printed volume) and the stage (the theater program). In short, the shift to mechanically produced visual media around 1900 was from the outset tied to technologies of sound and print.<\/p>\n Text-image relations in the silent cinema revolve principally around the use of inserts and intertitles as an integral component of the narrative system. Inserts are functional elements of the narrative fiction; they contain texts of written messages, for example, a letter, a contract, the verse of a poem, the inscription on a memorial, the words on a sign. Often they can be identified by the visual structure of the material on which the text is written (parchment, sheet of paper, page of book) or by the handwriting or typescript. This insert from from Fritz Lang\u2019s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler<\/em> (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler<\/em>, 1922) shows Edgar Hull\u2019s calling card, grasped by a finger in the upper right corner, with the handwritten promise to pay a debt;<\/p>\n the next insert shows the other side of the card, now with the finger in the lower right, and the implicit threat \u201cSpiel ist Spiel\u201d underlined (\u201cA game\u2019s a game\u201d).<\/p>\n Dialogue titles provide direct speech of the film characters (often with quotation marks), while expository titles explain the plot with details about place and time and\/or commentary. This dialogue title, again from Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler<\/em>, includes quotation marks for the question at the gaming table: \u201cAnd why aren\u2019t you playing?\u201d<\/p>\n Edwin Porter used intertitles for the first time in 1903 in the American short \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin\u201d in order to guide the viewer\u2019s comprehension in an episode lasting more than three minutes (Scheunemann 12). At this time these titles consisted technically of filmed stills of text cards that were edited into the actual film so that they filled the entire screen. Only around 1910 did text and image come together on the celluloid and produce the standardized intertitle: white print on a black ground, a white border surrounding the text, the production firm\u2019s logo on the top or bottom margin, and the title number in a corner of the image. By this point, then, intertitles functioned not only for purposes of narrative clarity but also for economic identity of the production company and for legal protection against unauthorized cuts. After 1914 dialogue intertitles came to dominate, while explanatory text titles became less and less frequent in order to sustain the viewing illusion of continuity. In fact, according to Birett\u2019s (74-82) statistical analysis\u2014albeit based on a very limited corpus of only eighteen international film productions between the years 1908 and 1928\u2014the ratio of intertitles to image shots tended to diminish consistently into the 1920s, while their function as redundant messages for the action or content of the moving images had by and large gone out of style.<\/p>\n Many contemporaries of the silent cinema considered filming and screening still images of printed titles to be incompatible with its essence. In the original, 1911 version of the essay \u201cGedanken zu einer \u00c4sthetik des Kinos\u201d (Thoughts on an Aesthetic for the Cinema) Georg Luk\u00e1cs (304) regards the spoken word as a disruptive tautology:<\/p>\n The \u201ccinema\u201d can only represent actions, not their cause and meaning; its figures have only movements, but no soul, and what happens to them is simply an event but not their destiny. (Therefore\u2014and only apparently because of current technological imperfections\u2014the scenes of the \u201ccinema\u201d are silent: whatever is important in the represented events is completely expressed by what actions and gestures, any speaking would be a disruptive tautology.)[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/MabuseTitle1A-300x240.jpg\" "\\"MabuseTitle1A\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/MabuseTitle1B1-300x240.jpg\" "\\"MabuseTitle1B\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/MabuseTitle2-300x240.jpg\" "\\"MabuseTitle2\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n