Magician and surgeon act like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue.23 The images they both come up with are enormously different. The painter’s is an entity, the cameraman’s chopped up into a large number of pieces, which find their way back together by following a new law. That is why the filmic portrayal of reality is of such incomparably greater significance to people today, because it continues to provide the camera-free aspect of reality that they are entitled to demand of a work of art precisely by using the camera to penetrate that reality so thoroughly.

  XII

  The fact that the work of art can now be reproduced by technological means alters the relationship of the mass to art. From being very backward (faced with a Picasso, for instance), it has become highly progressive (given, say, Chaplin). Yet this progressive response is characterized by the fact that in it the pleasure of looking and experiencing is associated, directly and profoundly, with the stance of passing an expert judgement. The link is an important social indicator. In fact, the more the social significance of an art diminishes, the greater the extent (as is clearly turning out to be the case with painting) to which the critical and pleasure-seeking stances of the public diverge. The conventional is enjoyed without criticism, the truly new is criticized with aversion. In the cinema, the critical and pleasure-seeking stances of the audience coincide. And what crucially makes this happen is: nowhere more than in the cinema do the individual reactions that together make up the massive reaction of the audience actually depend on their immediately imminent massing. And in making themselves heard, they also check on one another. Again, painting offers a useful comparison here. A painting always had an excellent claim to being looked at by one person or a small number. The kind of simultaneous viewing of paintings by large crowds that occurs in the nineteenth century is an early symptom of the crisis affecting painting, which was certainly not triggered by photography alone but, relatively independently of photography, by the work of art’s claiming mass attention.

  The fact is, painting is not able to form the object of simultaneous reception by large numbers of people, as architecture has always been, as the epic once was, and as film is today. And despite the inherent impossibility of drawing conclusions from that fact regarding the social role of painting, the same fact nevertheless counts as a severe setback at a time when painting, as a result of special circumstances and to some extent in defiance of its nature, finds itself face to face with the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and in the palaces of princes up until the late eighteenth century, joint reception of paintings occurred not simultaneously but often in stages, when it was handed down hierarchically. Where this happened otherwise, what comes out is the special conflict that befell painting as a result of the image becoming reproducible by technological means. But although an attempt was made to bring painting before the masses in galleries and salons, there was no way in which the masses could have organized and checked on themselves in the context of that kind of reception.24 As a result, the same audience as reacts in a progressive way to a grotesque film will inevitably, in the presence of Surrealism, become a backward one.

  XIII

  The distinguishing features of film lie not only in the way in which man presents himself to the camera but in how, using the camera, he presents his surroundings to himself. A glance at performance psychology will illustrate the camera’s ability to test. A glance at psychoanalysis will illustrate a different aspect of that ability. Film has indeed enriched our perceptual world with methods that can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a conversational slip went more or less unnoticed. Its suddenly revealing depths in what had previously seemed a superficial discussion was probably regarded as an exception. Since The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901], that has changed. The book isolated and at the same time made susceptible of analysis things that had once swept past unnoticed in the broad stream of things perceived. Film has resulted in a similar deepening of apperception across the whole optical (and now also acoustic) segment of the sensory world. It is simply the reverse side of this state of affairs that performances presented in film can be analysed more exactly and from many more angles than can attainments portrayed in paint or on-stage. Compared with painting, it is the infinitely more detailed presentation of the situation that gives the performance portrayed on the screen its greater analysability. Compared with live theatre, the greater analysability of the performance portrayed cinematically is due to a higher degree of isolatability. That fact (and this is its chief significance) tends to foster the interpenetration of art and science. Indeed, in connection with a piece of behaviour embedded in a specific situation and now (like a muscle from a cadaver) neatly dissected out, it can scarcely be judged which is more gripping: its artistic worth or its scientific usefulness. It will count among the revolutionary functions of film that it renders the artistic and scientific uses of photography, which beforehand generally diverged, recognizably identical.25

  By showing close-ups of them, highlighting hidden details of props with which we are familiar, exploring commonplace environments under the inspired guidance of the lens, on the one hand film increases our understanding of the inevitabilities that govern our lives while ensuring, on the other hand, that we have a vast, undreamt-of amount of room for manoeuvre! Our pubs and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our factories and railway stations seemed desperately imprisoning. Then film came along and exploded all these dungeons with the dynamite of its tenths of a second, leaving us free, now, to undertake adventurous journeys amid their widely scattered ruins. The close-up expands space as the slow-motion sequence dilates movement. And just as enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse ‘anyway’ but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter, neither does the slow-motion technique simply bring out familiar movement motifs but reveals in them others that are quite unfamiliar and that ‘bear no resemblance to decelerations of rapid movements but are like strangely gliding, floating, supernatural ones’.26 Palpably, then, this is a different nature that addresses the camera than the one that speaks to the eye. Different above all in that a space permeated by human consciousness is replaced by one that is unconsciously permeated. While it is quite normal for a person to form some account, even if only in outline, of the way others walk, that person will certainly know nothing of the walkers’ posture in the split second of their stepping out. And if we have a rough idea of how we pick up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, we know little of what actually happens between hand and metal when we do so, not to mention how this will vary according to our current mood. Here the camera intervenes with its different aids, its plunging and soaring, its interrupting and isolating, its stretching and condensing of the process, its close-ups and its distance shots. Only the camera can show us the optical unconscious, as it is only through psychoanalysis that we learn of the compulsive unconscious.

  XIV

  It has always been among art’s most important functions to generate a demand for whose full satisfaction the time has not yet come.27 The history of every art form has critical periods in which that form strives for effects that are able to find expression without effort only when technology has reached a new level – that is to say, in a new art form. The flamboyance, even crudeness, that art manifests in this way, especially in what are called ‘periods of decadence’, spring in fact from art’s richest core of historical forces. Latterly, Dadaism revelled in such barbarisms. Only now is what drove it becoming clear: Dadaism was trying to generate the effects that people now look for in film, but using the tools of painting (sometimes literature).

  Any radically new, pioneering generation of demands will go too far. Dadaism does so to the point of sacrificing the market values that film possesses in such abundance in favour of more significant intentions – of which it was not, of course, aware in the form we have been describing. The commercial marketability of their works of art meant far less to the Dadaists than their non-marketability as objects of contemplative immersion. They sought to achieve that non-marketability, that unrealizable quality, not least by fundamentally disparaging their material. Their poems are ‘word-salad’, containing obscene expressions and all manner of linguistic detritus. Likewise their paintings, on to which they glued buttons or bus tickets. What they achieve by such means is the ruthless destruction of the aura of their output, which they use the means of production to stamp as ‘reproduction’. It is impossible, in the presence of a picture by Arp or a poem by August Stramm, to take time out, as one can with a Derain painting or a Rilke poem, for contemplation and for forming a view. Immersion, which in the degeneration of the bourgeoisie became a school of asocial behaviour, stood over against diversion as a variety of social behaviour.28 Dadaist demonstrations did indeed constitute a very violent diversion in that they placed the work of art at the centre of a scandal. That work above all had to meet one requirement: it must provoke public irritation.

  In the hands of the Dadaists the work of art, from being a sight that seduced the eye or a sound that persuaded the ear, became a bullet. It flew towards the viewer, striking him down. It assumed a tactile quality. In so doing, it furthered the demand for film, the distracting element of which is also a mainly tactile element, being based on changes of setting and camera angle that stab the viewer with repeated thrusts. Compare, if you will, the screen on which the film unrolls to the canvas that carries the painting. The latter invites the viewer to contemplate; he is able, in front of it, to give himself up to his chain of associations. Watching a film, he cannot do this. Scarcely has he set eyes on it before it is already different. It cannot be pinned down. Duhamel, who hates film and understands none of its importance, though he does know something about its structure, comments on this state of affairs as follows: ‘I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts.’29 The sequence of association of the person viewing those images is indeed instantly interrupted by their changing. That is what film’s shock effect is based on, which like every shock effect seeks to be absorbed by increased presence of mind.30 By virtue of its technical structure film has taken the wraps off the physical shock effect that Dadaism kept shrouded, as it were, in the moral sphere.31

  XV

  The mass is a matrix from which currently all customary responses to works of art are springing newborn. Quantity has now become quality: the very much greater masses of participants have produced a changed kind of participation. The observer should not be put off by the fact that such participation initially takes a disreputable form. There has been no shortage, in fact, of participants who have stuck passionately to precisely this superficial aspect of the matter. Of these, Duhamel has spoken most radically. What he blames film for mainly is the nature of the participation it arouses among the masses. He calls film ‘a pastime for helots, a distraction for uneducated, wretched, overworked creatures who are consumed by their worries […], a spectacle that requires no concentration of any kind, that presupposes no ability to think […], lights no flame in people’s hearts, and kindles no other sort of hope than the ludicrous one of becoming, at some time, a “star” in Los Angeles’.32 Clearly, this is at bottom the old charge that the masses are looking for distraction whereas art calls for immersion on the viewer’s part. That is a platitude. Which leaves only the question: does this furnish an angle from which to study film? Here we need to take a closer look. Distraction and immersion constitute opposites, enabling us to say this: The person who stands in contemplation before a work of art immerses himself in it; he enters that work – as legend tells us happened to a Chinese painter when he caught sight of his finished painting. The distracted mass, on the other hand, absorbs the work of art into itself. Buildings, most obviously. Architecture has always provided the prototype of a work of art that is received in a state of distraction and by the collective. The laws governing its reception have most to tell us.

  Buildings have been with mankind since its earliest history. Many forms of art have come and gone. Tragedy emerges with the Greeks, then disappears with them, to be revived centuries later only in accordance with its ‘laws’. The epic, after originating in the youth of nations, wanes in Europe with the passing of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and there is no guarantee that it will continue uninterrupted. However, man’s need for shelter is perennial. The art of building has never lain fallow. Its history is longer than that of any other art, and imaginatively recalling its effect is important as regards any attempt to form a conclusion about how the masses relate to art. Buildings are received twofold: through how they are used and how they are perceived. Or to put it a better way: in a tactile fashion and in an optical fashion. No idea of such reception is conveyed by imagining it as taking place collectedly – as is the case among tourists, for example, ogling famous buildings. The fact is, there is not, on the tactile side, any counterpart to what on the optical side constitutes contemplation. Tactile reception does not occur in both ways: through the medium of attentiveness as well as through that of habit. As regards architecture, the latter largely determines even optical reception. The truth of the matter is that this too occurs very much less in a state of close attention than in one of casual observation. However, there are circumstances in which this reception accorded to architecture possesses canonical value. Because: The tasks that at times of great historical upheaval the human perceptual apparatus is asked to perform are simply not solvable by visual means alone – that is to say, through contemplation. They are gradually mastered, on the instructions of tactile reception, by man’s getting used to them.

  Getting used to things is something even the distracted person can do. More: the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction is what proves that solving them has become a person’s habit. Through the sort of distraction that art has to offer, a surreptitious check is kept on how far fresh tasks of apperception have become solvable. Since, moreover, there is a temptation for individuals to duck such tasks, art will attack the most difficult and crucial of them where it is able to mobilize masses. It is currently doing so in film. The kind of reception in a state of distraction that to an increasing extent is becoming apparent in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception has its true practice instrument in film. In its shock effect film goes halfway towards meeting this form of reception. Film pushes back cultic value not only by persuading the audience to adopt an appraising stance but also by ensuring that this appraising stance in the cinema does not include attentiveness. The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one.

  Afterword

  The increasing proletarianization of people today and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of one and the same sequence of events. Fascism seeks to organize the newly emergent proletarianized masses without touching the ownership structure that those masses are so urgently trying to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in allowing the masses to find their voice (not, of course, to receive their due).33 The masses have a right to see the ownership structure changed: Fascism seeks to give them a voice in retaining that structure unaltered. Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life. The violation of the masses, which in a leader cult Fascism forces to their knees, corresponds to the violation exercised by a film camera, which Fascism enlists in the service of producing cultic values.

  All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and war only, makes it possible to give mass movements on a colossal scale a goal, while retaining the traditional ownership structure. That is how the situation looks from the political viewpoint. From the viewpoint of technology it looks like this: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all the technological resources of the present day while retaining the ownership structure. Obviously, the apotheosis of war by Fascism does not deploy these arguments. Nevertheless, a quick consideration of them will be instructive. In Marinetti’s Manifesto Concerning the Ethiopian Colonial War we read: ‘For twenty-seven years we Futurists have been objecting to the way war is described as anti-aesthetic […]. Accordingly, we state: […] War is beautiful because thanks to gas masks, terror-inducing megaphones, flame-throwers, and small tanks man’s dominion over the subject machine is proven. War is beautiful because it ushers in the imagined metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a meadow in flower by adding the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines rifle-fire, barrages of bullets, lulls in the firing, and the scents and smells of putrescence into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates fresh architectures such as those of large tanks, geometrical flying formations, spirals of smoke rising from burning villages, and much else besides […]. Writers and artists of Futurism […], remember these principles of an aesthetics of war in order that your struggles to find a new kind of poetry and a new kind of sculpture […] may be illuminated thereby!’34

  As a manifesto, it has the advantage of clarity. The questions it poses merit adoption by the dialectician. He sees the aesthetics of modern warfare as follows: while natural exploitation of the forces of production is held in check by the ownership structure, an explosive growth in technological alternatives, tempi, and sources of power urgently seeks unnatural exploitation. This it finds in war, which with its destructive onslaughts proves that society was not mature enough to make technology its instrument, that technology was not developed enough to tame society’s elemental forces. Imperialistic war, in its ghastliest traits, is dictated by the discrepancy between hugely powerful means of production and their inadequate exploitation in the production process (in other words, by unemployment and lack of markets). Imperialistic war is a rebellion on the part of a technology that is collecting in terms of ‘human material’ the claims that society has absented from its natural material. Rather than develop rivers into canals, it diverts the human stream to flow into the bed of its trenches; rather than scatter seeds from its aeroplanes, it drops incendiary bombs on cities; and in gas warfare it has found a new way of eliminating aura.