APPENDIX 2

Early cinema, surrealism,

and allegory

Early cinema is an art of allegory; and it is due to the profoundly rooted

modern (post-Romantic) opposition to allegory that its displacement was
inevitable. Its primary allegorical feature is its location of writing and
image on the same plane. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter
Benjamin quotes Schopenhauer's condemnation of allegory, which nevertheless shows a grasp of its complicity with writing:
When, therefore, an allegorical picture has also artistic value, this is quite
separate from and independent of what it achieves as allegory. Such a work of
art serves two purposes simultaneously, namely the expression of a concept
and the expression of an Idea. Only the latter can be an aim of art; the other is
a foreign aim, namely the trifling amusement of carving a picture to serve at the
same time as an inscription, as a hieroglyphic
It is true that an allegorical
picture can in just this quality produce a vivid impression on the mind and
feelings; but under the same circumstances even an inscription would have
the same effect. For instance, if the desire for fame is firmly and permanently
rooted in a man's mind... and if he now stands before the Genius of Fame (by
Annibale Carracci) with its laurel crowns, then his whole mind is thus excited,
and his powers are called into activity. But the same thing would also happen
if he suddenly saw the word "fame" in large clear letters on the wall. (Origin
of German Tragic Drama, pp. 161-2; ellipses by Benjamin)

Benjamin remarks that the last comment comes close to touching on

the essence of allegory; it is also prescient of the mechanism of silent
film, in which intertitle and image are interchangeable. The silent
screen does not simply display in the form of intertitles the writing
that was to vanish from the cinema until Godard's Brechtian devices
restored it; it also uses rhetorical gestures and mime, which stand in
for words and indicate that the intertitles are not "foreign matter" troublingly inserted into the "realist illusion," but have been solicited into
the work by its images7 mimesis of language. If Benjamin failed to perceive that the allegory he thought dead was really alive in early cinema, it may have been because of an instinctive awareness of the
death sentence hanging over it: of the manner in which the accusation
237
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Appendix 2

238

of "rootlessness" was to underlie the killing both of the Jews and of

silent cinema, dissociated as the latter was from the real world in
which people speak. Was not the rejection of silent cinema a rejection
of the immigrant and the otherness of his or her silence? (Cf. "Realism, Totalitarianism, and the Death of Silent Cinema" in Chapter 1.)
As silent cinema is about to die, however, it seeks support in the
only allegorical hermeneutic compatible with the bourgeois world: that
of psychoanalysis. It is a psychoanalytic hermeneutic destabilized,
rendered ultimately self-destructive, by its employment to dissolve the
ego rather than to reinforce it, as Freud had intended. Hence surrealist
cinema gives one the silent, rather than the talking, cure. Its silence is
a refusal to admit the necessity of any other cure than the madness
itself. Rather than translate the image into an allegory, to be deciphered by reason, it transforms it into a fetish: As an allegory that
denies its own allegorical status, it simulates the presence of an object
that is in fact absent: for Freud, the penis whose absence from the female anatomy generates castration anxiety in the male. Surrealism, in
taking psychoanalysis as its fetish, reveals psychoanalysis itself to be
a form of fetishism: fetishism being in fact the fundamental form of all
allegorical reading, which expresses an attachment to something history has displaced by both recognizing and disavowing that displacement. The model for this is the simultaneous displacement and
fulfillment of the Old Testament by the New: History is dialectically
preserved and canceled. Thus allegorical thinking is a dialectical
thinking that is also double think: The object is thought as both present and absent, intrinsically valuable and valueless. Such thought is
born of crisis: An old order has been displaced so violently that its
afterimage persists in the minds of those unhabituated as yet to the
definitive nature of its departure. Allegory is thus an attempt to cope
with history conceived as the catastrophe of sudden loss. (A fixation
on the Sublime, meanwhile, values only the new and sees the ruin of
the old as positive.) The dream, the fetish of the surrealists, is present
inasmuch as its condensations and displacements anticipate those of
the surrealist artwork, but absent inasmuch as that work is merely the
simulation of a dream. Here surrealism reveals its role as the antagonist of psychoanalysis, its hostile double: Whereas the latter seeks to
restore order to chaos by means of allegory, the former idealizes chaos
as the sublime liberation of the libido. This chaos can only be idealized, however, for so long as its name remains unknown, unspeakable.
Only as the unknown, the unnamable, is it Sublime. When it takes on
a name, it ceases to subvert history and becomes instead an active
force within history. After the naming that betrays them, the surrealist
dreams of the dissolution of the bourgeois individual leave chaos behind and become part of a new order: the order of fascism.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527128.009