Photogenic Neurasthenia:

On Mass and Medium in the 1920s*

NINA LARA ROSENBlATI

There is no question that the mechanical reproducibility of film technology­

the photographic basis of the medium, the regularized actions of gears and
shutters, as well as the repeatability of effects-had secured cinema's status by the
19205 as the visual medium of the industrial era par excellmce. Phorogenie, that elusive
concept at the heart of early French film theory (generally considered to be the
very first theory of the film as medium) was, in an important sense, an attempt to
define the nature of a cinematic art around the formal and perceptual properties
of a new type of mechanical reproduction-a process that produced no concrete
objects or images but rather the traces of a movement that occurred between
photographic frames (or afterimages, to cite one of the English definitions of the
term "photogene").) Still, lest we forget that mechanical reproduction is only one
of the ways in which the cinema can be defined, consider the following incident­
which, as far as I can tell, is not cited in any accounts of cinema and modernity.
In the years immediately following World War I, French film industry journals
reported regularly on a dispute that arose between the union of moviehouse owners
and operators, the Syndicat des Directeurs de Cinemas, and Compagnie
Parisienne de Distribution d'Electricite over the rate at which the electricity used
to light the lamp in the cinematograph should be tarifTed. 2 At the heart of the
dispute lay a distinction, which had been written into the French laws of energy
distribution in the late nineteenth century, between the energy used to drive

* I want to express deep thanks to Jonathan Crary, Hal Foster, and Malcolm Turvey for their
insightful comments in preparing this text. I am also grateful to Fred Schwanz for his generous assistance.
1. On French film criticism as the origins of a true film theory, see Richard Abel, French Film Theory
and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Volume I: 1907-1929 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press,
1988); and Joel Magny, "Premiers ecrits: Canudo, Delluc, Epstein, Dulac," in Histoim des theories du
cinema, ed. Joel Magny with the assistance of Guy Hennebelle (Paris: Cinemaction, 1991), pp.
14-24. On the significance ofJean Epstein in particular to the articulation of an ontology of the film
image, see Annette Michelson, "The Art of Moving Shadows," in The Art ofMoving Shaduws, ed. Annette
Michelson, Douglas Gomery, and Patrick Loughney (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989),
pp.17-18.
2. The dispute was reponed in such industry journals as Le Ciniopse and L'F..a-an.

OCTOBER 86, Fall 1998, pp. 47--62. © 1998 October Mugru.iRe, Ltd. and MassachuseUs Institute of Tet:hnology.
 . Advntisnnmt for
Gaumont projector light.

.
machinery and the energy used for illumination-a distinction, as it was routinely
characterized, between motor force and light. 3 If the law itself marked an attempt
to impose some kind of conceptual order on a rapidly expanding commercial
sphere, a glittering "dreamworld" of department stores and mass entertainment
sustained in part by the ever more efficient industrialization of light, by the 19205
it led to the assertion of a curious "work ethic" on the part of the moviehouse
operators. In arguing that the functioning of the lamp was fundamentally
inseparable from the synthesizing actions of gears and shutters in the projector,
the moviehouse operators clearly sought to emphasize the role of light in the
transformation of substance from one state to another, the "labor" that would

s. The history of the origins of this legislation is recounted in Charles Malegerie, L'EJectricUi Ii Paris
(Paris and Liege: Librairie Polytechnique, 1947).
Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 19205 49

qualify it under the law as a motor force and therefore subject to a lower tariff.
But as far as the electric company was concerned, such local effects were irrelevant.
In their rulings, the cinematograph was considered to be merely a provisional
relay in a much larger enterprise of energy distribution and regulation, and its
operations assimilated to the "unproductive" expenditures of other commercial
technologies of illumination. The electricity harnessed in the colored tubes of the
illuminated advertising sign, the latest marketing tool to impose itself on the
cityscape, was one frequently cited analogy.
This incident calls for a reexamination of the connections usually made
between cinema, mass experience, and industrial, urban life, not least of all
because it challenges the possibility of a stable definition of the cinema on the
basis of its technological properties. I hasten to add, though, that what I do not
mean to do here is to suggest a more "correct" ontological definition of the cinema.
For if the motor/light debate has any lesson to impart it is this: already by the
19208, the way in which the local effects of cinematic technology were construed­
the relationship between projector and image, for example-had as much to do
with the larger interests it served and the social spaces in which it was deployed as
with the technological properties of the medium itself. In what follows, therefore,
I want to explore the possibility that the preoccupation among French modernist
filmmakers and theorists with film technology was also related to an apprehension
of larger, social processes of modernization. To that end, I propose that we consider
the cinema not simply as a technological paradigm, an abstract machine or
instrument, but rather as a social diagram, a way of tracing the specifically modern
organization of mass experience, whose principles could be-and more importantly
UIm'-thought independently of technological properties.

*
Returning to the issue of photoginie, take, for example, the filmmaker Louis
Delluc's extraordinary foray into the "crowd" in a 1918 article of that name
(subsequently reprinted in his 1920 collection of essays on film, Photogenie).4
Delluc's writings on photoginie effectively introduced that term into discussions of
medium specificity, making it a central concept in various attempts to formulate
the essential qualities of film in relation to the other visual arts. 5 But in his 1918
piece, Delluc was less concerned to define the irreducible elements of a film practice
than to describe the particular features of the field of film reception. He wanders

4. Louis Delluc, -The Crowd,M in Ji'm&lhFilm Theory and Criticism, vol. I, p. 162. The original French
version, -La Foule," appeared in Paris-Midi (August 24, 1918) and in an expanded version in Photoginie
(Paris: de Bronoff, 1920).
5. And as many have noted, Delluc's initial definitions of the teno were mainly negative ones in
this respect. Film, according to Delluc. was not aligned with the surface appeal of the -beautiful," for
example, or with the paralytic arts of painting and sculpture; nor could it be reduced to the immobile
sections, the photographs that were the film's component parts.
 Louis DeUuc. ewer of
PhotoRenie. 1920.

from one Parisian moviehouse to another, registering the various responses from
the haute bourgeoisie on the Champs Elysees to the mechanics and pimps near the
Gare de l'Est. On one level, the irony of the comparison lies in a distinction: the
working-class audiences' greater appreciation of cinema's specific affect, which is
intimately tied to the absorptive powers of the images on-screen. Where the upper
class falIs short, according to DelIuc, is in its tendency toward a divided or dispersed
attention that characterizes other, earlier types of spectacular events. 6 DelIuc cites
the behavior of the "Opera subscribers" who now patronize the cinemas in the

6. The historical problem of attention in the nineteenth century has been at the center of
jonathan Crary's recent work on visual modernism and the psychic, social, and economic terrain of
modernity. See, for example, his "Unbinding Vision," October 68 (Spring 1994), pp. 21-44; also
"Attention and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century," in Picturing Scinlce, Producing Art, ed. Peter
Galison and Carolinejones (New¥ork: Routledge, 1998), pp. 475-99.
Jean J<..)stein. Cover of
Bonjour Cinema. 1921.

fashionable quartiers of Paris: "Their evening is spent in animated conversations,

broken by sharp laughter, distinguished coughs, and sometimes ferocious yelpings
when one or two loges have deigned to signal that the spectacle was especially
ingenious.'" By contrast, the "popular public hears because it listens"; and, as
Delluc concludes, "silence genuinely helps in looking and seeing."8
On another level, though, the description points equally to the breakdown
of class distinction, especially when compared to prewar patterns of spectatorship.
Delluc attributes the working-class response in large part to the abandonment of
working-class locales for cinema, those provisional spaces of film exhibition in the
prewar period such as the cafe concerts, music halls, and traveling fairs. "As long
as he is not at a cafe concert the worker is reserved," Delluc writes. The very premise

7. Delluc, "The Crowd," p. 163.

8. Ibid.
52 OCTOBER

of his argument depends, in other words, on the implementation of standardized

theaters and formats across class divisions, a set of shared conditions for film
consumption that would probably have been inconceivable only a decade earlier.9
Yet if Delluc's discussion retains something of an active dynamic between the
standardization of reception on the one hand and local variation on the other,
three years later his fellow filmmaker and close associate Jean Epstein offered an
account of more complete homogenization. In his theoretical salutation to film
aesthetics, the 1921 Bonjour Cinema, the spectator is now identified as an abstract
category, part of a configuration of isolated and identical points of perception:
Wrapped in darkness ranged in cell-like seats, directed toward the source
of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium
converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred,
excluded, no longer valid. Even the music to which one is accustomed is
nothing but additional anesthesia for whatever is not visual. 10
In the era immediately preceding synchronized sound, the mass experience of
cinema is an undeniably visual one in which musical accompaniment serves
merely to suppress anything that is not intended for the eye. But we miss the
significance of Epstein's characterization if we equate the "modernity" of that
experience, as a number of writers have done, simply with its privileging of the
sense of sight. "Anaesthesia," in the sense of the suspension of sensory engagement
beyond the "funnel of sensibility" directed toward the screen, is the critical notion
here. What accounts for the film's efficacy is its capacity to create a psychological
unity among the members of the audience, but that unity is predicated on their
simultaneous restraint from real interaction. It is a uniquely modern form of
cellular isolation and association that finds expression in the cell-like arrangement
of seats in the theater itself.
The psychosocial topography revealed in these twentieth-century accounts
of film reception closely resembles that of late-nineteenth-century crowd psychology.
One thinks of Gustave Le Bon's phenomenally popular Psychologie des Joules,
published in 1895--the year in which the Lumiere cinematograph offered, for the
first time, the possibility of collective film spectatorship.ll As is often noted, Le

9. Charles Pathe, the unsurpassed entrepreneur of French cinema, began the long-term process of
replacing provisional exhibition sites with permanent theaters in 1906. On early film exhibition in
France, see Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparee du cinema, vol. 2 (Paris:
Castennan. 1968); also. Valerie Kauffmann and Vincent Renie, MPanorama des ecrans parisiens; in
Paris Grund-Ecran: splendeurs des salles obscum. 1895-194J (Paris: Musee Carnavalet, 1994), pp. 11-27.
10. Epstein, MMagnification," in Frmch film Theory and Criticism, pp. 239-40. Originally published in
Bonjaur Cinima (Paris: Editions de la Sirene, 1921).
n. Gustave Le Bon, PS'Jc1loltJgU des Joules (Paris: A1can, 1895). The cinematographe was the particular
contribution of Auguste and Louis Lumiere to cinema technology. Its importance-in particular in
the context of my discussion-is that it allowed cinematographic views to be projected onto a screen
and thus viewed collectively, rather than individually, as had been the case with its most commercially
successful predecessor. the Edison Kinetoscope.
Photogrmic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s 53

Bon's influential book was not an original piece of research, but rather a shrewd
repackaging of the extensive work on suggestion, hypnosis, and crowd behavior
undertaken by numerous others in the 1870s and '80s. Its aim was no less than the
complete dissection of the "collective mind" in order to provide a compendium of
techniques for mass persuasion, a handbook for the control of the mob. But,
partly because of its unabashed plagiarism, Psychologie des Joules also represented an
exemplary and easily generalizable analysis of the psychological absence underlying
mass reception in the modern era-what Le Bon referred to in his own peculiar
tautology as the "Era of the Crowd."
According to Le Bon's account, a key factor in the heightened receptivity to
suggestion experienced by the individuals in a crowd was the erosion of a more
profound homogeneity, the creation of a void in which conscious will was
surrendered to a neurological automatism, "the unconscious activities of the
spinal cord." Although in terms of a broad historical schema Le Bon ascribed the
fractured plurality of the modern crowd to the absence of a unifying racial
unconscious, he located its more immediate manifestation in the sensory withdrawal
of the members of a crowd from all objects and stimuli other than the crowd
"leader." In that sense, the energy binding individuals in a crowd to one another is
an energy that effectively annihilates, or even exceeds, the experience of a concrete
place. And in fact one of the key features of the Le Bonian crowd is its virtual quality,
the fact that its existence is defined not by the physical proximity of its members,
but by a "law of mental unity" that operates equally powerfully over dispersed
populations. Significantly, Le Bon invoked the magic lantern, a forerunner of the
cinematic illusion, to convey the disconnected, rapidly shifting quality of the
mediating forms that produce a sense of solidarity in the crowd. But what is
equally significant is the way in which, purged of its associations in the 1890s with
social insurrection, the threat of a volatile proletarian class, Le Bon's delineation
of the essentially "arbitrary" nature of crowd unity, becomes, by the 1920s, a
model for a supremely purified form of aesthetic engagement, that is, for an
experience of photogenie.

*
The point to be drawn from these examples is this: a crucial precondition
for the definition of photoginie, or film specificity, was the elimination ojspecificity in
the behavior of the spectators themselves and the reproducibility of affect and
response. On one level, this may seem to be familiar ground. The interplay
between the objective qualities of the medium and the subjective, psychological,
and physiological constants of perception is a key feature of early film theory (for
example, Hugo Munsterberg's classic 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study), It
also underlies the epistemological claims made for film-namely, its potential as
an instrument of revelation, not merely reproduction; its status as an art, not simply
a technique. But what has not been adequately addressed in these formulations,
54 OcrOBER

and what is absolutely essential to the status of French film in the 19208 in particular,
is the way in which these psychological constants were bound up with the
elaboration of specifically modem fonus of mass integration. The search for positive
laws behind aesthetic phenomena, the "positivism" that lurks within French
modernism, is inseparable from the larger delineation of a psychophysiological
ground that constitutes the objective basis for social cohesion in turn-of-the­
century France.
If modernist filmmakers suddenly rediscovered the cognitive value of the
cinematographe years after the Lumiere brothers first presented their invention
to the public, it was because their attempts at formal purification depended on
the medium's capacity to synthesize multiple, solitary consciousness. Thus, for
example, Leger could write of the film in 1925 as a "gigantic microscope of things
never before seen or experienced" in an explicit counter to narrative cinema,
what he called the "negative weight of the scenario."12 But underlying this invocation
of the movie camera's capacity to extend the spatial boundaries of sight was the
assumption that its prosthetic effects corresponded to a collective and not an
individual perception.
Hence, in Epstein's 1922 film Pasteur, made to commemorate the centennial
of the French physician's birth, the intertwining of scientific objectivity and the
formation of a collective subjectivity is given a thematic expression. Here the
splicing together of shots of active microbes (filmed using the technique of
microcinematography) with biographical sequences and documentary footage
relating the salvation of the silk, wine, and sheep industries as a result of Pasteur's
work becomes emblematic of the interpenetration of the themes of scientific
perception and collective productivity. Epstein's minor stroke of brilliance in this
essentially propagandizing piece of filmmaking was to provide the twentieth­
century film viewers with a sight into the invisible terrain of microorganisms-a
terrain that the film's narrative simultaneously indicates was highly contested in
the late nineteenth century. The paradox, of course, was that these shots, which
seem to penetrate beyond the threshold of a natural vision, contributed to the
collective mirage of an economy grounded in the industrial exploitation of
France's natural resources, a screen behind which the realities of postwar speculation
and inflation were concealed. lll
But while the impact of the First World War unquestionably intensified the
impulse to seek an image of social "wholeness" within the constructive possibilities
of modern technology, it was not at the origin of that impulse. The celebrated
move from the futurist glorification of the destructive potential of machinery in
the era immediately preceding World War I to the various postwar manifestations

12. Femand Leger, MPainting and Cinema,· in Fmu:h Film Th«1ry and Criti€ism, vol. 1, p. 373.
13. No less a social analyst than Marcel MaUllS published a series of articles on the crisis produced
by postwar speculation and inflation in the publication Le PopulaiR, beginning in the same year as
Pasteurs release.
Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s 55

of an "industrial" aesthetic-a shift from an aesthetic ideology that sought the

random liberation of energy to one based on its constructive channeling--charts
only the most visible course within the development of postwar modernism.
However, the conception of the mass itself as a kind of technological form, a
machine whose energies could similarly be directed toward the apprehension of
specific objects and images can, as we have already seen, be traced considerably
further back.
Perhaps the most significant attempt to delineate the new specifically socio­
logical contours of a mass aesthetic occurs in the vastly undervalued work of the
French philosopher and sociologistJean-Marie Guyau, in particular his 1889 L'Art
au point de vue sociologique (Art from the sociological point of view). The "modernity"
of this book lies less, as might first appear, in its broad appropriation of current
developments in scientific psychology (from the work of Gustave Fechner to
Pierre Janet, for example) than in the way these borrowings are directed toward
determining the physiological grounding of a modern, collective reception. What
distinguishes Guyau's work from any number of apparently similar texts on
"scientific" aesthetics, in other words, is that it describes the absolute homology
between aesthetic experience and the sociopolitical doctrine of "solidarism"-the
shared origins of each in the "already social" composite, or "coaenesthesia" of
consciousness itself. 14 More than simply establishing formal principles based on
the repeatability of aesthetic response from one individual to the next, as Charles
Henry had done in his psychophysical studies, Guyau insisted on the idea that
aesthetic phenomena were irreducibly collective in their effects, characterized by
"contagion" and "expansion," and as difficult to circumscribe as the "heat or
electricity within a living body."15
Even more remarkable in terms of the genealogy I am tracing here, within
Guyau's writings technology itself emerges as the figuration of this irreducible
"mass" aesthetic. In a passage from Art sociologique that both echoes and subverts
Baudelaire's famous description of the man plunging into the reservoir of electrical
energy that is the anonymous urban crowd, Guyau wrote of the individual consumer
of art as "a wire that must be magnetized without direct contact, in which vibrations
must be made to run from afar in a predetermined direction."16 The dense physi­
cality of the crowd-which in Baudelaire still confronts the unpredictable
movements of an autonomous jliineur--gives way in Guyau's analogy to a highly
mediated sphere of social interaction. Although Guyau died, at the age of thirty­
three, in 188B-several years before the invention of Lumiere's Cinematographe
or of Edison's Kinetoscope-he did draw upon another of Edison's devices, the
phonograph, to set out the possibility of a mimetic system based on nonillusionistic
properties. The traces of acoustic vibration inscribed on the phonographic plate

14. Jean-Marie Guyau, L'Art au puint tk V1UI sociologique (Paris: Alean, 1889), p. 8.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 19.
56 OcrOBER

were, for him, an instance of a representational mode aimed at the synchronization

of vital energies rather than the fixing of static images, as in photography)7
That Guyau's writings have all but dropped out of our own accounts of 19205
modernism is, I think, symptomatic of a certain myopia, a tendency to trace the
relation between a mass aesthetic and industrial culture through its most visible
features. But well into the early twentieth century his work remained a point of
reference for considerations of a mass aesthetic. The filmmaker Marcel
L'Herbier-best known as an exemplar of French Impressionism-invoked Guyau
in a 1918 essay in which he sought to establish cinema as an instrument of social
concentration, "a force ... more efficacious, powerful, and dynamic than the daily
press or the telegraph."18 But it is also the case that from the point of view of social
modernization itself-that is, the elaboration of society as an objective and
normative structure (Durkheim's object sui generis)-many of Guyau's ideas about
modern community seem oddly anomalous. To give one example, hardly anyone
would connect Guyau's name with the notion of "anomie," now practically synony­
mous with Durkheimian sociology, although it was Guyau who initiated the
modem use of the term)9 Yet Guyau's understanding of the anomic aspects of
modern experience was, in many respects, at odds with the strategies of social
integration that were being institutionalized in the very years that he was writing.
Whereas modern social thinkers, following Durkheim, used the concept of
anomie to describe dysfunction and decomposition in social wholes, to Guyau it
conveyed the positive consequence of breakdowns or gaps within what Durkheim
called "large-scale social aggregates." For him, anomie-literally "without norms"
in ancient Greek-had outlined a possibility that would be foreclosed by the soc;:ial
psychology of the modern era, a subjective position within mass society that
belonged neither to the fully rationalized, regulatory spaces of capitalist production
nor to a realm of unproductive drives and expenditures somehow "beyond" it.
However different Guyau's immediate concerns were from those of the first
generation of French film theorists, what unites their considerations is the insepa­
rability of modem aesthetic form from the disembodied, dynamic unities to which
the individual subject, the mass subject, had to adapt. It was not to plumb the
depths of unconscious desires that French filmmakers posed the dissolution of
consciousness as a precondition for collective aesthetic reception, but rather, as
Epstein suggested, to remake individual consciousness into "a larger surface of
contact with the world."20 A year later, the art historian Elie Faure employed a similar
spatial metaphor to make his own predictions about the new art. Writing in 1922,
in what must be seen as an uncanny foreshadowing of Kracauer's elaboration of
17. Ibid., pp. &-6.
18. Marcel L'Herbier, "Hermes and Silence," in Frmch Film Theory and Criticism. vol. 1. p. 152.
Originally published as "Hermes et Silence" in Lt Film 110-11 (April 1918). See also Max Horkheimer.
"Art and Mass Culture," in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Seabury Press. 1972), p. 274.
19. See Marc Orru, "The Ethics of Anomie: Jean-Marie Guyau and Emile Durkheim," The British
]uumal ofSociolotJ 34, no. 4 (1983), pp. 499-518.
20. Epstein, "Le Phenomene Iitteraire," Esprit NUUVMU8 (May 1921).
Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s 57

the "mass ornament" several years later, Faure insisted that "cineplasties will
doubtless be the spiritual ornament sought for in this period-the play that this
new society will find most useful in developing in the crowd the sense of confidence,
of harmony, of cohesion."21
Although Faure's conception of the ornament as an emblem of the "mass"
was not, as Kracauer's was, bound up in a larger hermeneutics of the repudiation
of depth over surface in the pursuit of sociological knowledge, his use of the term
was, I would argue, no less deliberate, no less of a play on the prevailing sense of
ornament as applied decoration, the hallmark of an outmoded art nouveau aes­
thetic. The irony of Faure's formulation becomes sharper, in fact, when we recall
the particular vigor with which various political interests in France deployed the
decorative motifs of art nouveau in an effort to forge the surfaces of the city into a
harmonious vision of urban life; building facades, metro entrances, department
stores, and poster designs in turn-of-the-century French cities were all twisted and
pulled into a single metaphor of organic growth. 22 Such formal excesses bore little
resemblance to the machine-age aesthetie, the "inner functional logic rigorously
established [in] a visible structural logic" that Faure embraced in the 1920s-and
which eventually relegated art nouveau to stylistic oblivion. 2!l But we miss the point
ofthe "spiritual ornament" if we fail to see its relationship to the functionalist plan,
that is, its status as a blueprint for the transformation of individual energy into
structural unity that found physical embodiment in Faure's extensive writings not
only in cinema, but, for example, in the "motor like" arrangements of transport
systems, communications networks, and "mobile architecture" in Le Corbusier's
proposals for a Ville Radieuse. 24

*
To be sure, the mobility intrinsic to this new art of cineplastics made it the
perfect philosophical embellishment for a mass aesthetic whose contours had
begun to be drawn decades earlier. What was photoginie except an attempt to theorize
this movement, to establish it as the essence of cinema-not as an added element
of time, but, to use Bergson's generally over-applied formulation, as the immanent
quality of duree? When, in their writings, Delluc, Epstein, Dulac, and others
replaced the photograph as the implied smallest component of film by the

21. Elie Faure, "The Art of Cine plastics," in Abel, Frmch Film TMIYrJ and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 267.
Originally published in French as "De la cineplastique," in Arlm tk 1'Edm (Paris: G. Cres, 1922).
22. See, e.g., Debora Silverman's Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sitcle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
23. Elie Faure, L'Esprit des formes (Paris: Editions G. Cres, 1927), p. 323.
24. The contrast should also be made between the physical proximity implied in the experience of
art nouveau ornament and the distance required to grasp the patterns of a project like Ville RJJdiewe. In
his enthusiastic review of Le Corbusier's scheme, Faure himself suggested this opposition, writing that
"I read [Le Corbusier's) latest book while descending in an airplane. I could have wished for no better
preparation, especially after having passed through the suburbs of Paris and Paris itself to return
home" (Faure, "La Ville Radieuse," L'ATChitectun d'Aujoum'hui 5, no. 11 [November 1935], p. 1).
58 OcrOBER

photogene, it was precisely to link these elemental units etymologically to the

mobile, vital processes by which light is generated. 25 In this sense, Gilles Deleuze's
observation in Cinema I: The Movement-Image that for the French school of the
1920s (in contrast to German Expressionism) "everything is for movement even
light" is an incisive one. 26 It was, after all, in reference to the bristling, active light
of the paintings by Renoir, Monet, and others that the name "Impressionism" was
coined for the native cinema championed by Delluc in the early '208. 27 Deleuze
himself, of course, avoids aligning this tendency among French filmmakers to
extract the "maximum possible quantity of movement" with any single technological
model or imperative; instead he defines the "mechanical" quality in French cinema
in terms of a particular process of abstraction, a means for producing commensu­
rability among unlike, even radically opposed elements. "Mechanical movement,"
he writes, is the "law of the maximum for a set of images, which brings together
things and living beings, the inanimate and the animate by making them the
same."28 We can expand on Deleuze's essential insight by considering how movement
provided a linking term between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and
the whole in French culture at large in the 1920s.
The emphasis on movement as an instrument of social cohesion was a product
of the fin-de-siecle, both a cause and a consequence of the physical reforms that
were aimed as much at the health of the social body as that of the individual one.
If neurasthenia as the modem "disease" of energy was related to the physiological
disintegration of the individual resulting from the stress and intensified interac­
tions of urban existence (as was argued in the standard text on the subject, the
French L'Hygiene du neurasthinique), it was also linked to an array of different forms
of decadence. 29 Guyau made the connection, hardly unusual for the time,
between arhythmy in literature and derangement in the individual: "In short," he
wrote in Art sociologique, "the dissolution of vitality is the common character in
society and in art: the literature of decadents, like that of the unbalanced
[tksquililml], is characterized by the predominance of instincts that tend to dissolve
society itself."!lO Speaking neurologically, the short-circuiting of energy that was

25. The suffix graph (to write or draw) points to the inert image resulting from the imprinting
action of light, whereas K"U suggests a quasi-biological underpinning to cinematic fonn.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: TM Ml1VeFIIn&t-I~, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara HabbeIjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 44.
27. Alan Williams attributes the first published reference to cinematic Mimpressionism Mto Gennaine
Dulac, who used the tenn to describe the break with realist cinema in the early 19205; the analogy
between Impressionist painting and a fonnalist cinematic practice was current before then, however.
See Williams, Republic of Imagrs: A Histqry ofFmu:h Film1lUllcing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992), p. 101.
28. Deleuze, Cinema I, p. 42.
29. Achille-Adrien Proust and Gilbert Ballet, Hygiim dll neuTasthinique (Paris: Masson et Cie., 1897).
For an extensive and extremely subtle historical perspective on neurasthenia. see Anson Rabinbach,
TM HIIJlUJn Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and tM Origins of Modemity (New York: Basic Books. 1990); also
MNeurasthenia and Modernity,M Incorporations: Zune 6, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New
York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 178-89.
30. Guyau, Dirt sociologique, p. 377.
 Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s 59

jaques-Dalcrou Eurythmics. "

L'Esprit Nouveau 3. December 1920.

the common feature of the individual neurasthenic's web of symptoms could be

seen as the catalytic breakdown in a chain reaction of other, more collectively
experienced compositional disruptions (de-cadences). But by the same token,
individual bodies could be recomposed, subject to new kinds of training and
thereby made into bearers of new social arrangements.
It is no coincidence that the overhaul of physical education, implemented
by the French physician Fernand Lagrange in the 18805 and aimed at eradicating
the modern epidemic of fatigue, replaced the military drill with a program of
holistic exercise. The social aim of the new program was not to regiment from
without but rather to regulate from within, by investing the very neurological
core of the body with the knowledge of rhythmic movement. Le Bon's great fear,
the surrendering of the self to "the unconscious activities of the spinal cord," was,
in this sense, the goal of modem physical education; the automatic transmission of
energy from the nervous system to the muscles ensured adequate exertion of the
body while at the same time "economizing the work of the brain, the guiding
force of the human machine."51 Emile Jaques-Oalcroze, the Swiss professor of
harmony who turned Lagrange's principles of exercise into an entire method of
rhythmic living, described this ideal in terms of a kind of reformatting of the
individual, a neurological rewiring that would increase the accessibility, efficiency,
and convertibility of the body's potential energy. Eurythmics, he wrote, was "a

31. Femand Lagrange. Physiology of Bodily f:xnrise (New York.: D. Appleton and Company. 1890). p. 21.
60 OCTOBER

force analogous to electricity," a means of achieving the reconciliation of the

human organism with "the necessities of individual and collective existence."32 At
least one modernist figure seems to have recognized the visual affinity between
this new collective kinaesthetic and the renewal of the aesthetic order demanded
by the machine age; Le Corbusier, himself an enthusiastic practitioner of the
methode Dalcroze, published publicity photographs of eurythmic exercises in
L'Esfrrit Nouveau in which the geometric formations produced by the synchronized
bodies of adolescent girls virtually eclipse the spare, classicizing architecture of
the Dalcroze Institute at Hellerau. 33
But the visual, human ornaments displayed in the eurythmic photographs
only skim the surface of the relationship between movement and a modernist
aesthetic. Far more profound from the point of view of aesthetic reception is the
way in which the collective body was being defined in terms of the rhythmic
orchestration of fundamentally mobile components. It hardly needs to be said
that French filmmakers and theorists would turn these organizational properties
into an artistic credo of their own in the '20s. Again, though, film technology was
not the source, but rather one exceptionally complete confirmation of this mass
aesthetic. Paul Souriau's meditation on the relationship between aesthetic pleasure
and various types of human and animal locomotion, for example, in his 1889
L'Esthetique du mouvement (The aesthetics of movement), stands at one threshold of
a truly cinematographic elaboration of aesthetic form. 34 One might even say that
this work, which draws significantly on that of Lagrange and Etienne:Jules Marey,
among others, presents at the philosophical level the synthesis of late-nineteenth­
century motion studies that cinema would effect technologically. At the same
time, L'Esthithique du mouvement was not simply a benign cataloguing of the aesthetic
properties of movement. It was also part of a larger preoccupation of Souriau's
work-and of late-nineteenth-century French scientific and social thought in
general-that is, the detection of physiological norms, the normal synthesis of
subjective and objective perception along what was understood to be a fundamen­
tally mobile continuum between the twO. 35
The relationship between the "mass" experience of modern life and the
emergence of the mass medium of film has been considered, for the most part,
from the perspective of a "primal" scene of modern urban fragmentation and
dislocating speed that can be traced-or so it is often claimed-through the

32. Emilejaques-Dalcroze, I.e Rhytllme, fa mwique, et l'edw:atitm (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1920),
p.192.
33. The photographs accompany an article on the Dalcroze method written by Le Corbusier's
brother, A1benjeanneret, a disciple of jaques-Dalcroze and director of his own school of rhythmics
beginning in 1919. See MLa Rythmique," in L'Esfrrit N()UtJeau 2-3 (November and December 1920). In
1911 Le Corbusier had been invited to work on the project at Hellerau by the institute's architect (and
Alben Speer's mentor), Heinrich Tessenow.
.34. See Paul Souriau, L'Est/aitJaique du lIIOU~t (Paris: A1can, 1889).
35. This project informs Souriau's subsequent books as well, such as La Suggrstitm dans l'an (1893);
La Beauti TtJtionel.k (1904); and L'Esthithique tk fa lumw (1913).
Jean f.pstein. KCharlot. ~ From
Bonjour Cinema. 1921.

exemplary accounts of Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin, among others.!l6 But

an alternative genealogy presents itself in the social models of the French
thinkers I have been looking at here, one in which the sense of mobility as an
experience of "shock," or, as in Simmel's famous phrase, "the rapid crowding of
changing images," is effectively superseded by its figuration as the adaptibility of
subjectivity itself to a range of objects and events, a precondition for the affective
functioning of the work of art in the age of machine production. The presumption
among French filmmakers of a "physiological utopia," approximated by the assimi­
lation of consciousness to the temporality of the film itself with its rapid
succession of images, not only participated in this analyis of modern, mass

!J6. See. e.g.• the introduction to the recent anthology Cinema and the 1nvmtion of Modem 1.ij'e. ed.
Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwanz (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995).
62 OCTOBER

subjectivity. As I have argued elsewhere, it was also structurally related to the

emergence of a "machine aesthetic" within French modernism, to a statement like
the one made by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant in their most systematic delineation
of a post-Cubist, machine-age language of forms that "the painting is an apparatus
destined to move us."!,
The elasticity of reception implicit in these formulations is, of course, also
fully bound up with the dynamics of capitalism. The point is not to deny the
experience of relentless destruction and perpetual renewal at the heart of capitalist
modernization, but rather to see what other kinds of interactions between social
and aesthetic arrangements become visible once that experience is no longer
understood uniquely through the category of "shock," the violent collision of
distinct elements. To that end, let me offer one final example, again from Epstein,
in which shock, the jarring encounters that are the source of both the city's and
the cinema's paradigmatic modernity, are explicitly subsumed, or channeled into,
a new socioaesthetic typology. The protagonist and "hero" is Charlie Chaplin,
whose own kinaesthetic style of acting made him a cult figure among the advocates
of a nonnarrative cinema in France.!l8 "Chaplin," Epstein writes,
has created the overtaxed hero. His entire performance consists of the
reflexes of a tired nervous man. A bell or an automobile horn makes
him jump, forces him to stand anxiously, his hand on his chest, because
of the nervous palpitations of his heart. This is not so much an example,
as a synopsis of his photogenu netlrasthenia.!9
Is this an example of what Fredric Jameson might call a "Nietzschean fiat," the
transformation of neurological failure into a compensatory pleasure through a
sheer act of will, the addition of a positive term?40 Or is it, as Epstein indicates, an
expression of the modern Gesammstkunstwem as dosed circuitry, a "relay between
the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance"
that suggests a provisional assemblage wholly different from the aesthetics of
montage or collage?41

37. Amedee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, "Le Purisme; L'Esprit Nouveau 27
(November 1924), (emphasis added). The relationship between 19205 French modernism and a late­
nineteenth-century model of normative mass reception is the subject of my dissertation, "Photogenic
Neurasthenia: Aesthetics, Modernism, and Mass Society, 188~1929," (Columbia University, 1997).
38. Delluc, for example, devoted an entire book to the actor, entitled C1Iarlot (Paris: de Brunhoff,
1921).
39. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 238.
40. Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in Pnftmodm&i.rm, t1t' The Cultural Logic
ofLate Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).
41. Ibid.