The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

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      INTRODUCTION

      The Cult of Visibility

      WHEN HE ARRIVED IN Kraków to give the first demonstration of the Cinématographe in late 1896, itinerant Lumière exhibitor Eugène Joachim DuPont realized that counterfeit copies of the apparatus were circulating in the region. He defended his patented apparatus by referring to it as the only “real” one. An advertisement for the first demonstration concluded, “The Lumière brothers from Lyon are the exclusive inventors of the real Cinématographe.”¹ For DuPont, “real” may have been an expression for “patented” or “high quality.” Nevertheless, he probably knew that audiences would understand it, at least in part, as a synonym for the national-cultural institutions of France. The initial program of short films featured national symbols of European powers, including images of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, the French cavalry, and the Spanish artillery. It included none of the short films that had been shot in the lands annexed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia at the end of the eighteenth century and partitioned among them until 1918. In its emphasis on the symbols of existing nation-states rather than those of the occupied territories, the first program offered viewers the opportunity for national and personal identification with the screen images without the burden of actual participation. Although the first audience complained about the poor quality of the projection, critics expressed awe for the “truth” of which DuPont spoke when he claimed that his apparatus was the only real one—a complex truth that grew to encompass more than the provenance of the motion picture camera or the pictures themselves. This truth was a blurry notion of the way that things had been, were, and should be. As depicted in the first short films projected in the eastern lands, Europe was a modernizing society complete with confidence-inspiring national militaries and sausage-grinding machines. In addition to being novel, early cinema in the partitioned lands revived a distant familiarity with these objects. Its shameless kindling of nostalgia for the embryonic republic of generations past prompted viewers both to identify with and to long for a nation-state.

      In the partitioned lands, cinema roused the first audiences to compare the images on the screen to the aesthetic, linguistic, and economic conditions of their own communities. Audiences, and later, filmmakers, formed a multifarious and fickle relationship with the apparatus and the screen. No writer more thoroughly describes the complexity of the situation than does Karol Irzykowski in his book on film theory, Dziesiąta muza: Zagadnienia estetyczne kina (The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Considerations of Cinema), published in the reconstituted Poland in 1924 and republished in 1957. In a chapter titled “The Law of the Looking Glass,” Irzykowski considers the ways in which cinema both reflects and distorts reality. He claims that cinema allows viewers to study the world without directly engaging in it:

      I once saw the moves of some English gymnasts as they marched in time, breaking up to form patterns such as stars, etc. I am not embarrassed to admit that I liked these performances in the cinema better than the many live ones I had seen. There is in man a desire to view things and events in abstraction from reality. The more directly he has experienced them, the more he would like to have them before him once again in a less committal, harmless and more exact form. This is one of the sources of art (as well as of science). For only half of the world is ruled by the principle of action; the other half is subject to the laws of reflection.²

      Irzykowski argues that cinema offers an escape from the necessity of physical interaction with the world even as it extends the possibility of studying others’ interactions with it. As such, it may have cushioned the blows of modernity—including those resulting from its lack—for audiences in the partitioned lands. Irzykowski explains

      In cinema, a locomotive rushes straight toward you. It is already approaching, expanding more rapidly than in reality, like a monster, in order to devour you . . . when suddenly it is surrendered, it has infiltrated you; you still feel anxiety for a moment—an anxiety that is truly nice, maybe the kind that some English lord experiences when he is hunting in the jungle with a protective shield. But if you also had heard the chug of a locomotive and the clang of its wheels and had sensed its horrifying weight, if the foul odor of its smoke had reached you, you would have been petrified and would have jumped up and run away, thinking that under the pretense of a motion picture show you had been lured into a trap. . . . But this is only an optical locomotive, a locomotive-apparition, which passes through you.³

      Because film is a visual medium, Irzykowski implores filmmakers to pay attention to the consumption of its imagery by viewers. Audiences lord over the screen, according to Irzykowski. In doing so, they become masters of the terrain presented there, impassively devouring even the most terrifying images. He writes

      By all appearances, photographic objectivism is one of the cinema’s features. However, a certain mystical possessiveness resides in humans, which identifies “seeing” with “having.” This is why cinema aims to make the world optical. . . . It not only renders what we usually see. It also spies for us, persistently and courageously, that which we do not see because of inaccessibility or impatience. It shows the struggle of a polyp with a crab in the water, it breaks a horse’s gallop into its components, it sees in ellipsis how grass grows; in the end, it even makes us believe that it sees unusual and supernatural things (special effects, fantasy films).⁴

      Two issues are at stake here. First, Irzykowski’s claim that cinema is an entirely visual medium derives from an intellectual tradition that considered an organic desire to overcome linguistic barriers an essential element of Polish national culture. For more than a decade before writing his book, Irzykowski had been declaring his opposition to the transition from silent to sound film, which occurred in independent Poland in 1929 and 1930 and which contributed to the widening divisions among speakers of the welter of languages encompassed by the new state. Irzykowski, for one, considered words amorphous, insubstantial, and detrimental to communication. Inside the motion picture theater, language differences led to ethnic tension, segregation, and even violence. In his view, cinema was undergoing “the same sort of basic cultural transformation of the soul that happened in the invention of writing or script. However, those changes took place slowly, while this one is occurring abruptly and before our own eyes.”⁵ His struggle to cut short this transformation is one of the major issues in the region’s cinema.

      The second issue arises as early as the first projections. Viewers’ “mystical possessiveness” of the objects on the screen is of particular relevance to the partitioned lands. Cinema granted audiences a peek at the symbols of modern national consciousness, of which they had long read and heard. They had seen these symbols in still photographs, but now they could glean meaning from people’s interactions with them and the other objects on the screen. Every movement, from the way that the leaves rustled to the tipping of a hat, took on meaning. Film exposed movement—and, СКАЧАТЬ