Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture

By Klaus Kreimeier

Essays examining the relationships between culture, film, and the audience around the turn of the twentieth century.

The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900 when the technology was rapidly developing. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explains the aesthetic and institutional characteristics in early cinema within the context of the contemporary media landscape. It also addresses transcultural developments such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, as well as differing attitudes toward modernization. Film 1900 is an important reassessment of early cinema’s position in cultural history.

“The capable Ligensa and Kreimeier invited a coterie of renowned Continental scholars and thinkers to reflect on issues of modernity and cinema by harking back to the fin de siècle. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —T. Lindval, Choice

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9780861969166

Book preview

Introduction

Triangulating a Turn: Film 1900 as Technology, Perception and Culture

Annemone Ligensa

Our cultural ‘matrix’ today is not only digital, it is also still filmic, in the sense that it is significantly comprised of technologically (re)produced moving images. Film did not die in the digital age; rather, it is noticed less per se , precisely because it is ubiquitous: it is now playing not only in cinemas, or even on television, but on airplanes, advertising screens in public spaces, notebook computers, mobile phones – and thus on our minds more than ever before. It has become so pervasive, that it is not only part of everyday reality, it may be difficult to image life without it. Around 1900, by contrast, media of any kind were still a rare experience for many, as an account from Max Hölz’ (1889–1933) autobiography exemplifies:

Up until I was fourteen years old, I had taken part in only three children’s amusements: the first was a school trip to the ruins of a monastery, the second was a puppet theatre show … and the third … was a visit to a panopticon in the nearby town during a local festival.¹

Early cinema scholars have described the ‘train effect’ (i.e. reports of spectators’ fear of being hit by the locomotive depicted in Lumière’s Arrival of a Train) as the ‘founding myth’ (Martin Loiperdinger) of the new medium in 1895:² even though it is not literally true (neither was the illusion complete, due to the black and white as well as silent images, nor did spectators lack knowledge that what they were seeing was a technological reproduction), it does encapsulate the cultural ‘impact’ of the novel experience of seeing an artificial, but lifelike representation of movement. Contemporaries were already aware that this effect would wear off; but some also saw that film had the potential to become a less ‘direct’, but all the more lasting and profound cultural force. Just as film, in many respects, had its roots far back in the nineteenth century (e.g. individual technological elements, exhibition practices, aesthetic forms), it took many years for the technological innovation to become a culturally dominant new medium. Hence, ‘1900’ is not intended to point to the developments of a single year or to claim that a cultural phenomenon emerged in a mere moment, but to signify a significant turn in media history, which has continuing effects to this day. Furthermore, since film is a part of modernisation, i.e. it is shaped by it, represents it and perhaps even promoted it, it seems apt to connect the emergence of film with the ambivalent connotations that regularly arise with new centuries in general and the specific cultural concerns around 1900 in particular.³

To structure the exploration of this media turn, technology, perception and culture can be usefully employed as a conceptual ‘triangulation’. As a technological medium, film from its inception was shaped by the restrictions as well as potentials of industrialisation and commercialisation. Even before film became a large-scale industry, film producers adopted many of the strategies of modern capitalism (e.g. standardisation, transnational operation, advertising).⁴ However, it is important to recognise how these developments depended on and were also shaped by culture, especially the acceptance of audiences.⁵ Examples of this are the integration of the new medium into existing cultural traditions (e.g. variety shows, fairs), the adoption of forms familiar from other media (e.g. theatre, illustrated press) as well as processes of differentiation for various audience segments (e.g. age groups, local audiences). The well-known debate about the so-called ‘modernity thesis’ (David Bordwell)⁶ foregrounds, among other concerns, the question of whether audience preferences were pre-existing and relatively unchanging (i.e. film became such a success because it best catered to them), or emerged together with modernity, even with modern media themselves (i.e. the specific conditions of modern life brought about new leisure activities, modern advertising induced new desires etc.). That contemporaries were debating such questions as much as we are today is indication both of their importance as well as the difficulty to answer them conclusively. But within a larger framework, more often than not, differing positions reveal themselves to be complements to each other, rather than contradictions.

In various ways, ‘perception’ is a central and mediating concept between the other two. Conceptualising ‘film as a form of perception’ is a powerful, yet potentially problematic metaphor that requires some explanation and differentiation. The short-circuiting of what is represented with the process of its reception, to the point of conflating subject and object and focussing only on the ‘percept’, tends to understate the potential for difference, creativity and even resistance on the production as well as the reception side (which need to be studied empirically). Furthermore, the physiological connotations of the term may tempt one to overstate the malleability of the experience of media technology on a psycho-physical level.⁷ A cultural history of the emergence of film is an ideal ground to rethink such issues. For instance, Jonathan Crary charts the history of the theory of perception, including its changes around 1900;⁸ but as Michael Chanan reminds us, the invention of film, which successfully (re)creates moving objects for our ‘perceptual apparatus’, was possible under a theory of motion perception that we now know is wrong (and even today, we still do not fully understand how it works).⁹ One might even argue that science was inspired more by practical discoveries of new technologies than vice versa. Furthermore, the (entertainment) audience neither needs nor necessarily wants explanation of theory or technology to experience media. Hence, the relationship between epistemes, technologies and experiences is indirect and complex. Bearing this in mind, ‘perception’ is nonetheless useful as a concept to capture the ‘deep impact’ that media have as sensory experience, both on an individual level as well as on a societal one. Transferring the concept to a ‘social body’ (i.e. as ‘public perception’) provides a fruitful connection to the theory of the ‘cultural public sphere’,¹⁰ in which film undoubtedly brought about a profound transformation (e.g. wide diffusion, access and participation of social strata, convergence of high and popular art).

The contributions to this volume each address one or more of these three aspects – technology, perception, culture – and their interrelations, in different configurations and degrees of emphasis. Hence, even when the authors argue on the basis of individual examples, they are not primarily concerned with early filmmakers and films, but with the cultural significance of film as a new medium per se. In order to further the understanding of the conditions for and reverberations of film’s emergence around 1900, some of the studies look far back into the nineteenth century, and some even forwards to ours. The contributions not only stem from a range of disciplines, but many work in an energetic spirit of transdisciplinarity. Several times, two studies are in direct dialogue with each other on the basis of a shared topic, but sometimes aspects only touched upon in one study are elaborated in others, creating a complex map of interconnections.

The noticeable interest in German examples and theory perhaps requires some explanation. As is well-known, many of the oft-quoted, contemporary theorists of modernity in general and of film in particular were German (e.g. Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer). It is perhaps less well-known what the reasons for this may be. Germany experienced a particularly dynamic process of modernisation precisely at the time when film emerged, and reactions to both were not only unusually prolific, but particularly critical. Hence, the German discourse is a rich and fascinating source, but we should be wary of reading it as general experience. In this regard, both the examples from other countries that some of the studies provide in this context and the analyses of the cultural background of the German examples is of great theoretical value.¹¹

In his ‘archaeologies of interactivity’, Thomas Elsaesser discusses the trope of the naïve spectator, which repeatedly appears throughout media history in different guises (e.g. rube, zapper, video game player), not simply with new media technologies, but, according to Elsaesser,

versions of the ‘rube double-take’ on attention, interaction and bodily presence tend to turn up whenever there is transference of, or struggle over, symbolic power between one medium or media-technology and another.

This also shows that, despite the indisputable importance of cultural conditions, media developments have a certain logic of their own, and different media directly and self-referentially react to each other.

Frank Kessler’s contribution provides a thorough and lucid account of the idea that ‘vision has a history’, as well as suggestions how to explore it further, based on the concepts of ‘dispositif’ (Jean-Jacques Aumont)¹² and ‘cultural series’ (Michèle Lagny)¹³. He argues that this notion should not entail the assumption of a ‘unified scopic regime’, because various aesthetics and reactions to them may co-exist simultaneously (across media and even within a single medium). Ben Singer takes up and expands the ‘modernity thesis’-debate more generally. He explores the paradoxicality of early cinema, i.e. the fact that contemporary film theories and films expressed ambivalent and contradictory currents, rather than simply siding with modernisation. He proposes the term ‘ambimodern’ to point to antimodernity as an essential element of the modern.

Henning Schmidgen’s challenging study explains the basis of Henri Bergson’s film theory in nineteenth-century physiology, connected in turn to phenomena of modernisation (e.g. standardisation of time, communication technologies). Via Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, Schmidgen presents ‘a history not only again highlighting the fact that cinema is sometimes experimental, but also showing that physiological laboratory experiments are essentially cinematographic’.

Harro Segeberg’s discussion of the aesthetics of the ‘cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault)¹⁴ in the context of contemporary epistemic revolutions, such as Albert Einstein’s relativity theory and the ‘psychological physics’ of Ernst Mach, provides a nuanced exploration of the relationships between epistemes, aesthetics and new media. In Segeberg’s words:

the term ‘emergence’ … is taken to imply that in media history, not only manifest technological and economic conditions need consideration, but also cultural configurations, which consist of autonomous, irreducible elements (e.g. epistemes and aesthetics). Such elements cannot be derived or interconnected on the principle of strict causality, which is precisely why they are ‘creative’, but they develop in complex co-evolution, rather than being merely contingent.

Jörg Schweinitz’ analysis of the first major academic film theory, Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay, highlights the tensions between modern and traditional values that cinema provoked, as well as providing an important example of the concerns of German theory, even in the case of a German psychologist who emigrated to the USA and worked as a ‘psychotechnician’ for modern capitalism. Despite the fact that Münsterberg was willing to take the new medium more seriously than many German critics, he based his optimism on envisioning film as a further example and fulfilment of idealist aesthetics. (We might remind ourselves that Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of German physiological psychology, also explicitly identified himself with Kantianism.)

Scott Curtis does not explicitly address it, but (Neo-)Kantianism also seems to be the shared epistemic, aesthetic and ethical background of the medical applications of cinematography and the discourses on the potentially harmful physical effects of cinema on audiences that he describes as a significant part of the German Kinodebatte (‘debate on cinema’). Curtis shows that ‘by understanding what German doctors considered to be the improper mode of spectatorship, we come to understand what they thought was a proper way of viewing images’.

Andreas Killen explores a cultural phenomenon that Curtis also mentions in his context, and that Stefan Andriopolous has introduced into film theory: hypnosis.¹⁵ By analysing several examples of films that deal with hypnosis as well as censorship cases against the contemporary background of expert as well as public discourses, Killen reflects Kracauer in a new light:

For all his commitment to taking mass culture on its own terms, Kracauer’s analysis remains embedded within an older, deeply conservative set of discourses about film and its relation to its audience, according to which the cinematic image, by virtue of its unheimliche Macht [‘tremendous/uncanny power’], established a virtually demonic influence over the viewer’s psyche’.

Andrea Haller and Pelle Snickars analyse different sides of the same coin, the connection between cinema and urbanisation. While Snickars examines the material web of public transportation and communication, i.e. the relationship between modern means of transportation and cinema location in Berlin, Haller explores the web of discourses on big city life and the early cinema programme, revealing their similarities. Snickars argues that for Berlin audiences, the easy accessibility of cinemas through public transportation as well as the convenience of the continuous programme were the significant characteristics of the cinema experience: ‘Hence, attending the cinema was effortless entertainment: Kintopps temptingly positioned themselves at busy street corners, willing to satisfy one’s visual pleasure at almost any time’. Haller concludes that

Cinema critics adopted concepts and arguments that had already been developed by cultural theorists, such as Simmel, in other contexts. The concern about the effects of cinema and especially its programming practices was fuelled by the same uncertainties and worries that accompanied modernisation in general.

Hence, despite many factual connections between film and urban life, e.g. that permanent cinemas first emerged in big cities and adapted themselves to their urban environment, interpreting the new medium as essentially sharing the characteristics of modern urbanisation, especially its negative aspects, was itself a particular perception.

This, among other aspects, is further substantiated by Joseph Garncarz’ overview of the development of cinema as a media institution in Germany, e.g. by the fact that the short-film programme, adapted from the live programme of urban variety theatres, worked equally well with the rural audiences of travelling film shows. In Europe, before permanent cinemas appeared, apart from the ‘optische Berichterstattung’ (‘visual reports’) in high-class variety theatres, film was mainly shown in itinerant cinemas on festivals, markets and fairs, and the diffusion of this exhibition form has thus far been underestimated. Hence, the new media technology was integrated into diverse cultural contexts and established traditions, before becoming the basis of a separate and distinct media institution.

Ian Christie and John Sedgwick’s study on the so-called ‘transitional era’ in Britain (i.e. the turn towards the longer narrative film that was connected with permanent cinemas, especially those for middle-class audiences)¹⁶ surprisingly reveals, among other things, that in contrast to the USA and Germany, this development does not seem to have entailed ‘nationalisation’. Neither did British producers immediately embrace the trend towards the longer film, nor did exhibitors mainly select US films (as they did later). This deserves further investigation, for which cultural comparison should prove valuable.

Tom Gunning’s and Klaus Kreimeier’s essays aim to recapture the essence of what was new about film: ‘the attraction of motion’. Early cinema not only recorded movement as a spectacle in itself, but many subjects and genres of early cinema, such as phantom rides, serpentine dances, physical comedies etc., highlighted and played with it. Gunning regards this fascination with technologically (re)produced motion as having been deeply ambivalent, fraught with danger and sexually charged energy. Read with Benjamin’s film theory, such virtual thrills served as a cultural reaction formation against the shocks of modernity. According to Gunning, the phantom ride

provokes not only a crisis within the spectator’s relation to space and landscape, but a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself, its temporal protentions and retentions, its constant reach into the distance, balanced by its sense of passing by and leaving behind. If the phantom ride is ‘a mysterious and impressive allegory’ one might describe it as an allegory of spatial perception itself.

Martin Loiperdinger’s contribution analyses Tonbilder, i.e. early German musical films with synchonised sound – a little-known phenomenon, despite recent interest in the sound of early ‘silent’ cinema.¹⁷ Loiperdinger explores technological, economic and cultural characteristics to reveal the surprising degree of technological sophistication and cultural specificity of this genre. Despite their success with audiences, Tonbilder experienced only a short boom phase, followed by rapid decline, for which Loiperdinger identifies economic reasons. Similarly, Michael Wedel deals with a perceptual and technological phenomenon that one does not immediately associate with (early) film: stereoscopy. Wedel shows that stereoscopy influenced the aesthetics of early as well as German expressionist cinema, which aimed to achieve virtual ‘relief effects’. According to Wedel, the exploration of stereoscopy across media reveals that

in a particular historical situation – characterised by competing technologies, arts and forms of entertainment, as well as specific creative environments and cultural pressures – stylistic paradigms take shape in variable degrees, depending on current aesthetic debates and generic horizons, but also on personal dispositions and cross-media concerns.

The collection concludes with two studies on gendered perception and the perception of gender, respectively. Nicola Glaubitz finds in the film theory of the British modernist Dorothy Richardson a contemporary precedent to Jennifer M. Bean’s contention that early cinema was ‘dominated by exhibitionism rather than voyeurism, by surprise rather than suspense, and by spectacle rather than by story’.¹⁸ However, Richardson simultaneously complicates this view, by also imbuing her theory with a more contemplative, literary mode of perception. My own study, dealing with the reception of the Danish bestseller The Dangerous Age and its filmic adaptations, aims to highlight the sensationalism of early cinema well into the era of the longer narrative film and the culturally specific reactions to it.

Notes

1. Max Hölz, Vom ‘Weißen Kreuz’ zur roten Fahne: Jugend-, Kampf- und Zuchthauserlebnisse (Berlin: Malik 1929), 22 (my translation).

2. See Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image 4, 1 (Spring 2004): 89–113.

3. On ‘1900’ as a significant turn in media history, apart from the work of the University of Siegen research centre ‘Medienumbrüche’, see e.g. Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800, 1900, 4th, rev. ed. (München: Fink, 2003), Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Thomas Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (München: edition text und kritik, 2002) and (specifically on the USA) Carol A Stabile (ed), Turning the Century: Essays In Media and Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). For a cultural analysis of ‘turns of centuries’, see Arndt Brendecke, Die Jahrhundertwenden: eine Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung und Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999).

4. See e.g. Deac Rossell, Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).

5. The role of audiences, users etc. is stressed e.g. in Brian Winston’s media theory, see his Media Technology and Society (London: Routledge, 1998).

6. See e.g. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Tom Gunning, ‘Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows’, in Murray Pomerance (ed), Cinema and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 297–315. See also Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

7. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see e.g. Noël Carroll, ‘Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, 1 (2001): 11–17.

8. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

9. See Michael Chanan, The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema In Britain (London: Routledge, 1980); Oliver Braddick, ‘The Many Faces of Motion Perception’, in Richard L. Gregory (ed), The Artful Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 205–231; Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision’, Journal of the University Film Association 30, 4 (Fall 1978): 3–8; Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited’, Journal of Film and Video 45, 1 (Spring 1993): 3–12; Dale Purves, Joseph A. Paydarfar and Timothy Andrews, ‘The Wagon Wheel Illusion In Movies and Reality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 93 (April 1996): 3693–3697; Robert M. Steinman, Zygmunt Pizlo and Filip J. Pizlo, ‘Phi is not beta, and why Wertheimer’s discovery launched the Gestalt revolution’, Vision Research 40 (2000): 2257–2264.

10. See Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920)/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren, 2008).

11. On Germany’s cultural Sonderweg, see e.g. Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing On Film In Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

12. See Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: Nathan, 1990).

13. Michèle Lagny, ‘Film History: or History Expropriated’, Film History 6, 1 (1994): 26–44.

14. See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

15. See Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Spellbound In Darkness: Hypnosis As an Allegory of Early Cinema’, The Germanic Review, 77 (2002): 102–117 and Besessene Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften und die Erfindung des Kinos (Munchen: Fink, 2000).

16. See Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

17. See e.g. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

18. Jennifer M. Bean, ‘Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema’, in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader In Early Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002): 1–27, quote p. 6.

Chapter 1

Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship

Thomas Elsaesser

It is difficult not to discuss contemporary cinema in terms of its multiple – and for some, mortal – crises: loss of indexicality, due to the transition from photographic to digitally generated images; death of the auteur cinema, even in Europe, as a creative force, overtaken once more by Hollywood’s Bat-, Spider- and Iron-Men, with their sequels and prequels; decline of the cinema as an art-form, its medium-specificity diluted by the hybridisation of a film’s textual autonomy in the DVD bonus package; appropriation of the cinema’s history and cannibalisation of its cultural memory through television and the internet serving up teasers, trailers and other pre-cooked forms of compilation and compression. Finally, some of the most persistent anxieties arising from these crises of cinema centre on spectatorship and narrative, figured as a loss of attention and the decay of storytelling. Filmmaking, according to this argument, is threatened by the impatient, hyperactive spectator, and trapped by the contradiction between ‘game logic’ and ‘narrative logic’.

Of course, these symptoms of decline can be turned around and advertised as signs of continuity, transformation and renewal: digital technologies have vastly extended a filmmaker’s creative tools; special effects have been the lifeblood and ‘attractions’ of cinema since its beginning; platforms like the video recorder or the DVD player have created new markets not only for the mainstream; the bonus package encourages reflexivity, provides historical information, technical background and can be put to good pedagogical use, while television and the internet open up distribution, circulation and choice unmatched by site-specific cinemas. As to the active-interactive spectator, his or her heightened involvement in the story or immersion in the spectacle has been the goal of the popular arts for centuries.

In what follows, I shall take a different line of defence, arguing that it is possible to map certain variables around spectatorship and narrative (which include some, though by no means all of the phenomena just listed) and trace their persistence as a constant throughout the history of cinema, thus providing a possible ‘archaeology’ for both the impatient viewer and the interactive user. It means shifting somewhat the ground and focus of our theories, while extending the conceptual framework deployed by the studies of spectatorship in film theory and cultural studies towards anthropology. As so often, such a shift is best implemented by a ‘return’ to early cinema: reviewing – and, if necessary, revising – our interpretations of the cinema’s initial modes of bodily engagement and sensory immersion. If successful, it should permit a fresh approach to the issue whether there is a future for the cinema after narrative, thereby also illuminating another perennial question: why and how did the cinema turn to narrative in the first place?

Modernity and the attention economy

An obvious starting point for such an archaeology would be to re-examine the evidence we have of how spectators construed or experienced cinema around 1900, how they made sense of the different kinds of movement and of the new kinds of surface agitation within the fabric of the everyday. Did the apparitions on the screen take them out of their lives into the ‘kingdom of shadows’, or were they inclined to integrate or embed moving images into the urban experience, as its natural extension and site of heightened sensation? Such studies have been undertaken under the headings of modernity and visuality, of shock and protective shield, conceptually held together by the idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’, typical for an intense and immersive but also intermittent and impatient spectatorial habitus. Fast-forward to 2000: can one locate a similarly contradictory dynamic (or ‘dialectic’) in contemporary modes of spectatorship, and how might one describe their polarities? In other words, what are the dynamics of attention and interaction commensurate with our contemporary media environment, and what kinds of bodily presence and sensory agency do they entail or stage?

A second shift is required: one that opens up the somatic as well as the perceptual field, taking us away from the cinema as a physical site of optical projection, though hopefully only in order to bring us back to the cinema as a space of mental, affective and sensory extension. Firstly, then, let us look at ‘attention’, that is, the selective perception of a particular stimulus (sustained by means of concentration and the exclusion of interfering sense-data).¹ In the contemporary knowledge society and information economy, attention has arguably risen to the status of a universal currency, while also becoming this society’s scarcest resource. As such, it paradoxically emerges as both a problem (for child psychologists, cultural critics and advertisers) and a solution (for audiences and spectators), in that the audio-visual media constantly solicit our attention and spare no effort or expense to retain it. Attention is the problem for educators, under the name of attention deficit disorder, and for cultural critics who lament the general amnesia in our culture, blaming television or video games. But attention is the solution when considered as a response to the dilemmas of overload and over-exposure, because as a form of selectivity, as an ability to shift or switch, it allows for a mode of perception – and by extension, spectatorship – that refuses to be absorbed or drawn in, that resists contemplation or analysis in depth, resolutely staying on the surface and remaining alert. It is the reed rather than the rooted tree that weathers the storm, and it is the cork, bobbing on the water, that survives a flood.

What if the attention economy demanded choices being made between being ‘reed’ or ‘cork’, rather than, as used to be, between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ spectatorship, or between ‘identification’, ‘distraction’ and ‘distanciation’? In such a case, the much-maligned figure of the television zapper, along with the equally despised first-person shooter of the video game might yet become the unlikely heroes of these new ‘flexible’ modes of perception: witting or unwitting vanguard figures, parrying the double-binds of interactivity, as bodies engage with images, and images require different motor-skills or hand-eye coordination in order to be ‘grasped’. At once target and survivor, the zapper wields the remote control as much to ward off the ever-increasing army of programmes, as s/he selects favourites or chooses amongst them. But the zapper is also the canny user, the disabused and uncommitted sceptic, who surveys all, brushes or grazes the media world with the lightest of touches, before deciding who or what to engage with, and for how long. Similarly, the first person shooter, armed with joystick, console or mouse, learns to be both defensive and aggressive, to anticipate the ambush and prepare for the next proactive, pre-emptive move, all in order to gain a foothold on the terrain, and then to stay the course.

It may seem that these two figures – the zapper and the gamer – are typical phenomena of the last 30-odd years, products of television and the Internet and thus symptomatic of precisely those crises of the cinema just mentioned, especially the decay of narrative and the corresponding decadence of spectatorship.² Yet one can also recognize in this configuration a much older cultural trope, that of ephemerality, chance and the fugitive moment, first diagnosed by Charles Baudelaire around the emergence of photography, with its confusing and hyper-stimulating l’émeute du detail (‘riot of detail’), given a heroic-ironic embodiment in the urban rag-picker, the drunk and the dandy, but also – even more emblematic for our purposes – typified in the ‘man of the crowd’, from the story by Edgar Allen Poe. The significance of this tale largely comes to us through Walter Benjamin, interpreting Baudelaire, who translated Poe. The man of the crowd’s modernity is manifest in his anonymity as much as in his ‘state of heightened sensitivity’: As Poe describes him, in ‘one of those happy moods – which are so precisely the converse of ennui-moods – of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses greatly its everyday condition’,³ he can stand for a new somaticsensory state of immersive bodily attention.

Yet such clarity of alertness, coupled with introspection, also acts like a shield or mirror: for much of the time, Poe’s protagonist is not immersed in the ebb and flow, but glued to his window as if to a screen, watching the crowd over a whole day and night cycle, both switching focus and varying speed. It is as if Poe’s narrative anticipates or emulates some typically ‘cinematic’ techniques of montage and editing, as well as ‘televisual’ ones, of fast-forward and action-replay, and thus the protagonist becomes not only the well-known flâneur of the metropolis in Benjamin’s interpretation, but already the zapping attention-flâneur of media-immersion and media-saturation.

In other words, the trope of the ‘fugitive moment’, of ‘sensory overload’, of ‘heightened sensitivity’ and selective surface attention inevitably brings us back to Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s theories of the ‘culture of distraction’, which Benjamin contrasts to the reception mode of ‘auratic’ works of art, and Kracauer to the reading mode of the realist novel. If Versenkung (‘sinking into a text’) is the gathered, focused concentration that leads to immersion, distraction is the mode of perception engendered by the technical media, particularly the cinema.

At this point, one needs to be clearer what is meant by ‘cinema’. Benjamin keeps intact the essential tensions just outlined between distraction and focussed immersion, which I argue are typical for the contemporary mode of selective attention and bodily participation. Yet he refers to a cinema that knows about the problematic status of narrative, as in the films of Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov, neither of whom assumes storytelling to be the necessary destiny of cinema, as it reaches ‘maturity’ as an art form. Likewise Benjamin, for whom the turn to narrative is more like a compromise formation or even a reactive rearguard action, a sign of the cinema mimicking the bourgeois novel. As is well-known, in the debate between ‘realists’ and ‘formalists’, Benjamin favoured the montage cinema of the Soviets, but not exclusively for the political reasons of outlining an aesthetics appropriate to the Socialist revolution.

The mode of ‘distracted viewing’ and the ‘montage of attraction’ advocated in Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’-essay⁴ signify both more and less than artistic experiment and revolutionary practice. They can be understood as a complex counter-stance to another kind of revolution. For with the emergence and rapid dissemination of mechanically reproduced sounds and images at the turn of the twentieth century, there began a data-flow previously unknown in human history, whose main material supports were the cinema, photography, radio and the gramophone. Time and the moment could now be stored, without the intervention of any kind of symbolic notation, such as a musical score, verbal language or a chronometer. But the recording and transmission of sights and sounds, thanks to the camera and the phonograph, also meant the proliferation of acoustic and optical data in quantities, and with a degree of physiological presence as well as signal precision (‘fidelity’) hitherto unimaginable. The impact can be measured negatively: widely resented as a threat to the established arts and their institutions, the cinema also occasioned medical warning about eye strain and attention-deficit, besides the better-known moral panics about sexuality, drink and other ‘depravities’ or ‘degeneracies’. But mechanical reproduction also gave rise to what has been called ‘haunted media’: extremely popular para- and pataphysical experiments that accompanied the discovery of electricity, electro-acoustics, electromagnetic fields and radio waves. Jeffrey Sconce (who coined the term) has documented some of the rich folklore and fantasy-literature accompanying the introduction into everyday life of the telephone, the telegraph and the wireless.⁵ Friedrich Kittler has shown how

all data-flows prior to the phono- and cinematograph had to be cut up, symbolized and pass through the ‘gate’ of the signifier: alphabet, grammatology, writing … [so that the technical media] launched a two-pronged attack on … the book [and its monopoly] on the storage of serial data. The gramophone [for instance] empties out worlds by bypassing their imaginary aspect (signifieds) for