Brigitte Peucker is Professor of German and Film Studies, and Chair of German at Yale University. She has published extensively on issues of representation, both literary and cinematic. Her last book is Incorporating Images (Princeton, 1995); she is currently working on a book concerning the real in film.
1. The phrasing of this exchange is taken from the English translation of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, probably the version read by Kubrick (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1981], 53. Hereafter abbreviated as CL.) Gustav Janouch's original--and perhaps fictitious--account is as follows: "'Die Vorbedingung des Bildes ist das Sehen.' Kafka lächelte. 'Man photographiert Dinge, um sie aus dem Sinn zu verscheuchen. Meine Geschichten sind eine Art von Augenschliessen'" (Gespräche mit Kafka: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968], 54). The English translation of Conversations with Kafka is as follows: "'The condition of an image is vision.' Kafka smiled. 'One photographs things in order to get them out of one's mind. My stories are a kind of closing one's eyes'" (Conversations With Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees [London: Quartet Books, 1985], 31).
2. Indeed, Kubrick's reported interest is in filming things that "the mind could see but the eye could not" (Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor, Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999], 344-45).
3. In the title of his memoir of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay of Kubrick's last film, excises the paradox from Kubrick's title, which he neither liked nor understood. (Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick [New York: Ballantine, 1999], 136. Hereafter abbreviated EWO.)
4. Michel Ciment, Kubrick, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1983), 66, 146, 154, 156, 186. Henceforth abbreviated as KUB.
5. See Dennis Bingham, "The Displaced Auteur: A Reception History of The Shining," in Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, ed. Mario Falsetto (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 290. Hereafter abbreviated as "TDA". See also KUB, 186.
6. Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 133.
7. Frederic Raphael claims that "the still--or almost still--image was fundamental to Kubrick's vision of cinema. The density and care with which the frame was so often composed in his work showed very little to any appetite for motion" (EWO, 134).
8. Annette Michelson, "Bodies in Space: Film As Carnal Knowledge," Artforum 7.6 : 59. Hereafter abbreviated as "BIS".
9. Siegfried Kracauer, "Die Photographie," in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 21-39
10. See Brigitte Peucker, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 10-15.
11. This essay was substantially completed before I had read Between Film and Screen, Garrett Stewart's comprehensive study of --among other things--the presence of photography in film, yet it is clear that Stewart anticipates my reading of The Shining here in a number of ways. Nevertheless, my emphasis remains rather different from his. See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1999), 176-87.
12. Indiscriminately combining the different temporal moments of the photographs--Grady's stewardship of the Overlook in the 1970s is merged with the 1920s in which the hotel flourished--Jack's visions de-emphasize temporality in favor of the space of their setting, the hotel. But it is not "nostalgia" for the past--for which past, we might well ask--that animates Kubrick to bring them to life, as Fredric Jameson has suggested (see Fredric Jameson, "Historicism in The Shining," in Signatures of the Visible [New York: Routledge, 1992], 82-98). Rather, it is the temporality of the photograph, its unique moment in time, that these sequences undermine as they conflate and subvert their several temporalities by introducing narrative--or cinematic time--into their frames.
13. See Jameson, "Historicism in The Shining", 94.
14. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, "Auerbach's Cellar" (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1986), 67-75.
15. Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 191.
16. See my reading of Day of Wrath in Incorporating Images, 94-101.
17. Another example of this occurs as the camera, having peered from behind a pillar in the "8 AM" sequence, then reveals Jack also to be peering.
18. In this it resembles 2001 , where science fiction's "denial of sexuality, mortality, fleshy bodies" (See Scott Bukatman, "The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime," in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen [Seattle: Bay Press, 1995], 289) finds its counterpart, too, in an address of the spectatorial body. As Annette Michelson has brilliantly argued with regard to 2001 , "Things happen between the screen and the spectator" that "dissolve the oppposition of body and mind" ("BIS," 57).
19. Kubrick's visual allusion to Lewis Carroll is a complex one, perhaps referring less directly to Through the Looking Glass than to Carroll's staged photographs, whose transparent dream res and ghosts seem to speculate on the nature of the photographic medium. Kubrick also alludes to sequences in Expressionist film in which the mirror image takes on a life of its own. See especially Paul Wegener's Der Student von Prag (1913; also known as The Student of Prague), on which Otto Rank based his study of the double (Otto Rank, Der Doppelgänger: eine psychoanalytische Studie [Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925]; translated by Harry Tucker into English as The Double: a Psychoanalytical Study [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971]).
20. See Menninghaus, Ekel, 336; my translation.
21. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 205-6. See also: KUB, 144; Pietro Santarcangeli, quoted in KUB, 146; Walker, Taylor, and Ruchti, 233.
22. See, for example, Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).
23. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 16. Henceforth abbreviated as POH.
24. Arthur Schitzler, Traumnovelle (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1926), 50.
25. Nevertheless, as Raphael puts it, "my glib suspicion is that the only serious scandal for him is the Holocaust, which is why he will not, or cannot, deal with it" (EWO, 151).
26. Frederic Raphael asserts: "It is, however, absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality, if not of his work in general" even though "he himself was known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents. Jews are not featured in any of his films; he seemed to expose, or at least to dwell on, many ugly aspects of human behavior, but he never confronted anti-Semitism. Is it unduly fanciful to see fear and horror driving him to face in art the malice that he feared in life?" (EWO, 107-8).
27. It should be noted that it is not known whether Schnitzler ever read Kafka's The Trial, and that he seems to have read The Castle in 1928, two years after the publication of Traumnovelle. But the actual presence of "Kafkaesque" material in Schnitzler's text is not at issue; what matters is how Kubrick--who did read Kafka--may have read the Schnitzler novella, one of the literary texts that most fascinated him.
See Leo Lensing, "Schnitzler's Alphabet of Love: Sex, Music and Dreams in fin-de-siècle Vienna," TLS, 13 October 2000, 5-6, in which he writes: "Did Schnitzler read Kafka? In Hohenschwangau, of all places, where he stayed while touring what he called the 'regal kitsch' of Neuschwanstein, he records reading Kafka's very different Castle on the evenings of August 19 and 21, 1928; on each of the following mornings he begins his journal entry with the text of a dream. Schnitzler dreaming of Kafka? Psychoanalysts will want to read carefully" .
28. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 1991), 147. Henceforth abbreviated as LA.
29. Schnitzler uses the term Femrichter, judges of the Feme, which, from the fourteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, referred to a secret court to which only the initiated had access.
In recent years, several screen adaptations of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu have been produced in defiance of the legendary difficulty of an enterprise that discouraged earlier directors such as Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey. 1 In 1999, Raoul Ruiz completed Le temps retrouvé and, in 2000, Chantal Akerman's La captive enriched the growing Proustian filmography. Whereas Akerman successfully adapts just one section of the Recherche, Ruiz's movie more ambitiously dramatizes the entire last volume, thus attempting a synoptic recapitulation of the entire oeuvre. To make an adaptation of the Recherche may look like an act of hubris, yet, as Walter Benjamin remarks apropos of an imagined film production of Goethe's Faust, "the indestructibility of the highest life in all things" compels critical intelligence to regard the quality, rather than the principle, of a work. 2
Although Ruiz's effort shows many clever intuitions, such as its canny usage of superimposition to represent the intricate effects of involuntary memory, his film, in the final analysis, fails to convince. The reason for his failure has less to do with the a priori impossibility of filming the Recherche than with a literal-minded fidelity to his narrative model and a concern for décor d'époque, concern which unfortunately conveys the impression of a Merchant-Ivory period piece, or perhaps a minor Visconti costume drama. Moreover, the Chilean director's insistence on a surrealist manipulation of the image within a single frame (for example the scenes carpeted with upturned hats or populated by mutiple Marcels) rather than on the organizing work of montage mistakenly results in an adaptation that reduces the Recherche--a novel whose very title suggests an operation of some epistemological importance--to a trivial dramaturgical puzzle. A better translation of the novel into the cinematic idiom would aim at a more ral or "involuntary" relation to the original, a reinterpretation through which the very temporal ground of interpretation would reveal itself allegorically. 3
Along these lines, a work that ought to be regarded as an "involuntary" adaptation of La recherche is Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma. The four-hour film, released simultaneously in France with a four-volume book interweaving text and stills, ambitiously attempts to reconstruct twentieth-century history and the very development of the movies through a collage of film traces. Godard worked upon this singular enterprise over a span of ten years from 1988 to 1998, and it at once constitutes a sort of archeology of the medium film and an act of recalling the twentieth century. 4 The result is a work divided into eight segments or, as Godard puts it, "constellations," bearing such evocative titles as "Toutes les histoires," "Une histoire seule," "Seul le cinéma," "Fatale beauté," "La monnaie de l'absolu," "Une vague nouvelle," "Le contrôle de l'univers," "Les signes parmi nous" (ACMS, 9). The different units vary in length and bear an often inorganic relationship to the central idea of the film. The titles and subtitles reappear as if refrains in a litany. 5 The final work consists of a dense montage of fragmentary movie sequences which is punctuated by the superimposition of flashing text, color schemes, paintings, and readings of literary works. Playing the role of Virgil, Godard guides us on our meandering way through an inferno of images while commenting in voice-over on the past as if from beyond the grave.
Melancholic in tone, Godard's Histoire(s) ought to be understood as a highly subjective response to the increasing obsolescence of a certain idea of cinema, call it "art cinema," the cinema of montage and mise-en-scène. Although computerized cinematography may in some sense represent the future of the form, it is evident that the digital image, as distinct from its celluloid variant, enacts a temporality of the perpetual present tense. Indeed, in so far as the digital image is removed from any ontological grounding or referent, it may even be regarded as a photograph that is atemporal in nature, without temporality. What the camera produces is no longer necessarily a historical record, because digital techniques enable the creation of the image ex nihilo. Although the flexibility of the new technology opens a space for a certain type of creative experimentation, its divorce from historical reality deprives film of its function as a mode of memory, and hence as a framework for critical inquiry. In this light, Godard's search for lost cinema represents a potential corrective to indiscriminate acceptance of the status quo.
Implicit throughout this search is the recognition that film has furnished the twentieth century with new resources of memory, chief of which are the reorganizing procedures of montage. Montage defines the peculiar manner in which we remember movies, the mode in which consciousness incorporates the fragmentary, involuntary, and defamiliarizing experience of time. Yet as powerfully as Godard's mélange of film quotes affirms the idea of cinema as an artistic means of access to the past, it also mourns this untimely and imperiled notion. Histoire(s) du cinéma thus performs an especially pointed, if allegorized, reinterpretation of À la recherche du temps perdu. Speculating on the fate of a medium that seems about to disappear before the completion of its perceived end, Godard draws a parallel between the task of cinema and that of the narrator at the end of Proust's opus.
Appropriately, the most daring of film editors has achieved the most Proustian of films. Histoire(s) du cinéma recounts the camera's pursuit of what the film alternately calls a "monde perdu" and a "temps perdu." 6 The very "matière et mémoire" of Godard's history thus derive from Proust's Recherche. If, early in his career, the director's bold experiments helped establish the "amnesic" style of the New Wave, they now permit him to rehabilitate the tatters of our past. In Histoire(s) Godard is intent on rescuing past images from banality and on restoring their strangeness by refusing to supply the narrative context from which they are taken, as Alain Bergala points out: "Godard systematically refuses the present of the shots he shows us. He recuperates these shots from the past and if he tries to resuscitate them, it is by trying to allow them to return in a different way, disconnected from the script within which they were caught." 7
Godard's approach renounces the "objective" logic of collective history and memory in favor of the subjective contingency of Proustian mémoire involontaire. His quest for a lost cinematic paradise, however, is motivated by an ambition that exceeds the strictly "autobiographical." Godard strives to express the physiognomy of the twentieth century through its remains. In this sense, if his aesthetic inspiration is mainly Proustian, his ideology and methodology betray a close proximity to Benjamin's last works, The Arcades Project and the "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Indeed, as I will argue, it is by developing a cinematic language capable of encompassing the Benjaminian antipodes of materialist critique and messianic hope that Godard ultimately arrives at a truly Proustian relation to the past, at a model of remembrance that is neither mechanical nor nostalgic. Histoire(s) du cinéma imagines the resurrection of history through the recuperation of an idea of film that has been eradicated by the ascendancy of mass entertainment, a recovery that can only be accomplished in a Proustian spirit of receptivity to the involuntary.
If memory is the broad, manifest theme of Histoire(s), Godard in particular wants to show how cinema alters our very conception of memory, transforming it from the faculty of willed recall into a ghostly element of involuntary reminiscences. On this score, he demonstrates to what extent the medium film possesses a Proustian aspect: movies return to haunt us according to the logic of the involuntary. Indeed, he argues cogently that our memory of film consists of the emotional shape of certain images, not their phenomenological content. 8
This position dovetails neatly with a view held by the French philosopher Deleuze. He believes that, had Proust lived longer, he would have written in cinematic terms; but he also regards him as the proper originator of the most complicated of film theories, that of the time-image. 9
Godard enlarges upon Deleuze's intuition to compose a history of cinema that enacts the rhythm of the time-image, instead of adopting a conventionally chronological approach. Histoire(s) du cinéma thus pertinently reframes the question of the relationship between Proust's novel and cinematic memory. While many critics, from Brassaï to Mieke Bal, agree that there is a photographic logic at work in the Recherche, the cinematic subtext of the novel is more rarely and obliquely considered by readers (Deleuze and Benjamin being the only two critics who readily come to mind). 10 As will be contended, however, the language of the novel powerfully deploys a range of cinematic techniques from montage to superimposition.
Did Proust ever go to the movies? According to his latest biographer, William C. Carter, the answer is yes, but probably only once. The event took place in 1908 during a stay at the hotel in Cabourg, which later served as the model for Balbec in the novel: on the last day of his visit he went to see a Punch-and-Judy show. 11 "This was apparently Proust's first movie," Carter writes in a footnote, "it may also have been his last. The cinema was one of the modern inventions that interested him little" (MP, 866). According to the biographer, Proust presented his friend Marcel Plantevignes with a copy of his French translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens just before the film began. 12 The choice of gift seems strangely apt. The gesture brings Proust's devotion to the art of vitraux exemplified in Amiens cathedral back to mind, and suggests his fascination--in spite of himself--with that twentieth-century art form that most powerfully renovates the optical phenomenology of stained glass. Morever, the juxtaposition of religious scenes characteristic of medieval, stained-glass window-making anticipates the modernist emphasis of art cinema on montage and mise-en-scène. In this regard, it is interesting to recall that Godard has often maintained that Christianity represents a type of cinema, precisely on account of its obsession with the spectacularized image: "I invoke Christianity as the original film; it is there for every painter, it is something literature has not done" (ACMS, 77).
In his book The Proustian Quest, Carter remarks that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, motion pictures offered Proust and others (for example, Mirabeau, Léger) an ideal model for describing the sensation of movement in the mechanized modern era. 13 Carter cites a section of the Recherche in which Proust arrestingly likens the passage of a group on horseback to its own cinematic image. The tableau is that of Odette being greeted by the Prince de Sagan and his team of riders who advance past her as though "filmed at a gallop in the blinding glare of the avenue." 14 Although it is rare, as Anne Henry notes, that film so plainly exerts its hold over the Proustian imagination, the novelist doubtless knew that his ocular preoccupations were ahead of their time. 15 For example, Proust persistently indulged an interest in visual perspectivism; such fluidity of outlook enabled him to resist the finality of psychological judgments upon his characters: "Nothing is farther away from the analysis of a character than this succession of points of view which defines them.
Even if it may be involuntary, the filmic subtext of Proust's article "Impressions de route en automobile," published in Le ro on 19 November, 1907, is nonetheless unmistakable. Reworked in the Recherche in the famous description of Martinville steeples, the essay details his drives with Alfred Agostinelli to visit Gothic cathedrals in Normandy. In the novel, he conveys the exhilaration of kinetic sensations associated with riding in an automobile in terms of a heightened experience of perspectival shift. In the original essay, however, his account of the continuously mutating point of view resulting from the car ride climaxes with the startling epiphany of a motion picture. At night in the town of Lisieux, while straining to see or, as he adds, at least to touch the stony foliage of the cathedral of Notre Dame, he is suddenly confronted by the spectacle of an overtly cinematic nativity scene:
But at the very moment when I was approaching it groping blindly, a sudden radiance inundated it; trunk by trunk, the pillars emerged from the night, vividly detaching, in full light against a background of shadow, the large pattern of their leaves of stone. It was my driver, the resourceful Agostinelli, who, sending to the ancient sculptures the greeting of a present whose light served all the better to read the lessons of the past, directed the fires of his headlights successively over all the parts of the portico in such measure as I wanted to see them. And when I returned to the car I saw a group of children whom curiosity had drawn close and who,bending toward the lights heads whose curls fluttered in that supernatural luminousity, reconstituted here, as if projected from the cathedral in a ray of light, the angelic ration of a nativity scene. 16
The darkness and the mechanical blaze of the headlights seem to reproduce the phenomenological conditions of a movie theater (or perhaps more precisely a drive-in), opening up a space for the "projection" of the improvised nativity scene. The scene is all the more dramatic for its juxtaposition of the mythical past in the shape of the cathedral to the new myths of modernity in the shape of the car and, we might want to add, the cinema.
In the Recherche, however, motion pictures do not receive a flattering representation. Besides the description of the team of riders greeting Odette, we find only four other references to the "cinématographique," all in Le temps retrouvé and all reaffirming the superiority of literary or metaphoric representation over the cinematic. 17
If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience, more or less identical for each one of us, since when we speak of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of cinematograph film of these things would be sufficient and the "style," the"literature" that departed from the simple data that they provide would be superfluous and artificial. But was it true that reality was no more than this? ( ROTP , III: 925; RDTP , IV; 468.)
Proust clearly means this last question to be understood rhetorically, since he had already observed in a preceding passage that "nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents" (ROTP, III: 917; RDTP, IV: 461). In such passages, Proust shows little awareness that the impact of film resides not in the ability of the camera to capture images, but in the potential of montage to incorporate time.
On the other hand, Proust firmly defines the novel as a whole as the "optical instrument" with which the writer furnishes the reader to refine his or her perception of the world (ROTP, III: 949; RDTP, IV: 489-90). If we surmise that the model for this optical instrument may be film, we do so not simply because, ever since his childhood in Combray, the narrator has been beguiled by the mysterious "magic lantern" that projects the endlessly mesmerizing story of Golo and Geneviève de Brabante. 18 As Anne Henry has noted, we arrive at this intuition, because the narrative mechanism that organizes the Recherche is nothing other than montage. Rather than a serial succession of events such as can be found in the more linear plots of Balzac and Zola, we encounter in Proust's chef d'oeuvre a circuitous conjunction of heterogeneous moments and concerns. The discrete events comprising the Recherche unfold according to a variety of different perspectives and narrative detours which achieve synthesis only by means of the work of montage:
Proust is therefore driven to inaugurate this modern technique: montage, that is to say an artificial continuity obtained by adjusting sequences built independently from one another, belonging to different domains and yet receiving a superior unity from the general project. . . . The strength of this kind of montage is to be found not in the effort to produce aesthetic effects, alternation, symmetry, etc., but in the fact that it is placed at the service of a demonstration. As one says in cinematic language, it is an ideological montage. ( TMP , 200).
Henry's vision of a "superior unity from the general project" which holistically emerges from the novel's independently built sequences is consistent with Proust's revelation that he composed the Recherche non-sequentially, writing the first chapter of the first volume and the last chapter of the last volume in succession and then filling in the intervening episodes. Regarding this authorial method we should also recall the novel's vivid depiction of the narrator's work routine. Like a director, the narrator Marcel constructs his manuscript through the procedures of collage and montage by having Françoise, the domestic, cut and paste the text into a new arrangement every day (ROTP, III: 1090; RDTP, IV: 610). At the level of narrative macroeconomics, the montage technique permits the simultaneous development of three divergent main themes, which, following Deleuze's suggestion, we might classify as the narrator and his social life, the narrator and his sentimental education, and the narrator and his artistic vocation. 19
Yet even at the level of its linguistic microeconomics, the Recherche relies on an inherently cinematic device. The novel's well-known predilection for metaphorical expression is not only manifested through the mere choice of the appropriate, poetic image; rather, the Recherche develops a sort of mise-en-scène of metaphor through an insistence on the technique of superimposition. That is to say, the Recherche aims to capture in writing how consciousness sustains moments of optical equivocation, how the mind blends together one image with another, a practice compounded by photographic technology. Indeed, the experience of la mémoire involontaire--the novel's philosophical nucleus--functions as a superimposition of two images, a process that in its psychological, temporal, and visual aspects ultimately achieves the effect of film. 20 When Marcel reaches the Guermantes courtyard late in the novel and trips on the uneven paving stones, he is reminded of an earlier visit to Venice and expresses his happiness in terms of "evoked images": "A profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them . . . I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower" (ROTP, III: 899; RDTP, IV: 445-46). Not only are these sensations provoked by involuntary memory described in visual terms; the moment of epiphany itself is presented as a sort of visual ralenti in which the narrator's image is nearly frozen as he strikes a fateful pose. The cinematic logic pursued by involuntary memory defamiliarizes the very itinerary of recollection from the slow-motion unwinding of the epiphany through its culminating freeze-frame of the narrator to the ultimate superimposition of two images--one of Venice, the other of the "Guermantes courtyard"--which have no organic connection to one another. This logic delivers a shock to the narrator precisely because no clear hermeneutic connection can be established between the two images conjoined within involuntary memory: "Owing to the work of oblivion, the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present minute" (ROTP, III: 903; RDTP, IV: 449). As there is no apparent rational link between the two images, the operation of involuntary memory finally must be assessed in terms of a cinematic "superimposition." 21
The critic who has been most closely attuned to Proust's cinematic sensibility is Walter Benjamin, and it is no accident that he, in his major essay on Proust, focuses on the central role of the image within the Recherche. He observes that Proust treats the relation of resemblance between two things according to the code of the dream world, through the intervention of a third element: "the image." 22 Rather than providing a smooth synthetic integrity, the image jars the reader of Proust through its "beatings of wings" and "small shocks" ("IOP," 208). 23 "The beatings of wings" aptly typifies the Proustian mise-en-scène of superimposition, a poetic that also corresponds to the crucial notion of "intermittences" ("IOP," 203). Given this understanding of the image as the presentiment of an uncanny similarity between disparate things, we should not be surprised that Benjamin, in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," also identifies the image as the proper means of access to the historical past.
The "Theses" conceive of history as a stream of visual "monads" that, by virtue of their perpetual recombination, fleetingly suggest a larger pattern of correlation. At the center of this current of fragments, we encounter the most elusive image of all: "The true image of the past flits by. The Past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." 24 Benjamin's definition of history in the "Theses" never strays very far from the language with which he discusses memory in Proust. His insistence that history's authentic image vanishes at the moment it "flashes up" bears a strong resemblance to his exposition of mémoire involontaire in "The Image of Proust": "When the past is reflected in the dewy fresh 'instant,' a painful shock of rejuvenation pulls it together ... But this very concentration, in which things that normally just fade and slumber consume themselves in a flash is called rejuvenation" ("IOP," 211). 25 It seems particularly fitting to stress the latency or dormancy of the material expended by involuntary memory when we consider the dream-like suddenness with which the apparition of the narrator's dead grandmother in the novel is superimposed upon the empty room where Marcel is about to take off his boots (ROTP, II: 783; RDTP, III: 152).
Indeed, the fictive and linguistic practices of the Recherche could be said to exemplify the operation of a cinematic unconscious. 26 In the novel, both superimposition and montage help to establish a larger tropology according to which existence is defined as a function of ocular perception. And in consonance with this tropology, the novel presents the approach of death as the moment when we see the moving pictures of our lives unreeling before our eyes. Within a certain vein of modernist discourse this conceit has become familiar, crucially animating essays by both Benjamin and Pier Paolo Pasolini; in Proust's novel the trope provides the allegorical horizon within which the Recherche reveals its ideal form as a film. Benjamin's celebrated essay "The Storyteller" portrays the mythical moment preceding death as the occasion when "a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end," and meaning thereby becomes transmissible. 27 In his article "Observations on the Sequence Shot," Pasolini argues that death instantaneously effects the final cut of one's life, putting significant moments into perspective by arranging them in sequence. 28 Both these writers may be viewed as performing variations on the theme established by Proust at the end of the Recherche when Marcel, contemplating himself on the verge of death, seems to experience the sudden transformation of his consciousness into a kinetic visual projection of his entire past. The very circular structure of the Recherche enforces the presentation of the narrative as a cinematic après-coup, a print that will outlive the narrator. 29
The trope of life as cinematic spectacle elaborates the novel's central concept of involuntary memory, which, as Benjamin points out, is comparable in effect to the rapid screening of an emotionally charged or significant image. In a handwritten text found among the critic's paperwork after his death and entitled "From a Brief Speech on Proust on the Occasion of My Fortieth Birthday," he explicitly compares la mémoire involontaire to a movie trailer or review of our death:
Concerning involuntary memory . . . one might say that a tiny image, a photo of ourselves, is appended to our deepest moments exactly as on certain packs of cigarettes. And that "whole life" that, as we often hear, passes before the dying or before those people who are in danger of dying, is composed precisely of such tiny images. They present a rapid streaming like in those notebooks, the precursors of cinematographs, in which, when we were children, we could admire a boxer, a swimmer, or tennis player at his art. 30
According to Benjamin, then, Proust's "notebooks" are cinematic as a consequence of the narrator's existential point of view, since it is only his imminent death that endows the fragmentary layers of images, the passing of involuntary memories, with that elusive fluency of meaning characteristic of film. If the usual gratifications of narrative terminus seem dubious at the end of the Recherche, they are so not only because of the unlikeliness of Marcel's having a lifetime of sufficient remaining length to write the book we have just read. The novel seems open-ended rather because its meaning consists in an eternal return of the same, no longer as a text but as a film. This is to say that, in the end, the Recherche provides an anticipatory glimpse of its own afterlife. The task which the narrator must shoulder, as he recognizes, is to give birth not just to a new work of art, but altogether to a new type of art. It is the drive to achieve not merely the latest in the expected output of artistic products, but a change in the very methods of production that gives À la recherche du temps perdu its radical force.
To come back to Godard, what makes his Histoire(s) du cinéma such a suggestive adaptation of the Recherche is in large part the film's successful assimilation and refinement of a Benjaminian view of Proust's novel. 31 Godard's and Benjamin's interpretations of the novel coincide in so far as both privilege an understanding of mémoire involontaire in terms of an expressly visual dialectic of recollection and forgetfulness. However, Benjamin's work provides Godard not only with an aesthetics of reminiscence, but also with an ideal of the politically redemptive value of history. In this sense, Godard composes his Histoire(s) through a contamination of Proust's doctrine of involuntary memory with Benjamin's problematic of history. As the French director himself puts it, "the future bursts amid remembrances" (HDC, III: 12). Godard's ambiguous description of the arrival of the future as a violent or shocking occurrence already hints at the political and cultural fatalism that will frame his unveiling of a Proustian history of cinema. Such an attitude represents an extension of Benjamin's melancholy position with regard to history, capitalism, and the epoch of the commodity.
One essay crucial to an understanding of Histoire(s) du cinéma is Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In The Arcades Project, Benjamin had already defined history not as an objective science but as a form of subjective remembrance [Eingedenken] (AP, 471). On this score, it is in Benjamin's wake that we should position Godard's resistance to linear narrative and preference for constellations of images. 32 His affinity for the critic's view of history embraces not only a common imagistic method, but also a similar preoccupation with the end of time in its political and religious dimensions. Godard shares a belief with the later Benjamin, albeit ambivalent or "weak" in the philosophical sense, that history provides the messianic horizon of a possible resurrection of art as cinema. 33 Indeed, the image for Godard inherently carries a promise of the redemption of reality: "The image is first of all of the order of redemption, look here, that of reality" (HDC, III: 149). In the age of commodification nothing speaks to the contemporary Zeitgeist with more iconoclastic candor, nor offers greater hope of cultural salvation. We should not forget that, for Godard, Christianity represents the ideal origin of cinema, precisely because it constructs an allegorical iconology on the foundation of a revolutionary historiography. It is hardly accidental that one of the epigrammatic refrains of the film, inspired by Saint Paul, avows that "the image will return at the time of resurrection" (HDC, IV: 75).
For Godard as for Benjamin, the messianic horizon is linked to a "moment of danger." Benjamin writes: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke); it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it" ("TPH," 255). There is no doubt that it is to the mindless conformism of Hollywood and the totalizing domination of mass-market consumerism that Godard opposes his Histoire(s):
Yes, it is of our times that I am the fugitive enemy, yes, the totalitarianism of the present as it is applied mechanically every day more oppressively at the planetary level, this tyranny without a face that overwhelms everything for the exclusive profit of the systematic organization of the unified time of the instant . . . because I try in my works to show an ear that listens to time. ( HDC , IV: 289)
Elsewhere, Godard reiterates this point when, adopting a pastiche of Hölderlin's and Heidegger's metaphysical terminology, he imagines the world as a realm deserted by gods where the function of the artist is to rediscover the necessity of the sacred: "Not only have the gods and god fled, but the splendor of divinity is extinguished in the history of the world" (HDC, I: 245).
If Godard and Benjamin share similar notions of memory and of history, their respective approaches to cinema might seem at first sight very different. Certainly, Godard would reject the German critic's initial appraisal of cinema. In his 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin links the emergence of cinema to the destruction of the aura of the work of art. However, Benjamin also labors to elucidate the politically liberating consequences of the disconnection of film from traditional culture. 34 Yet, by the time of his 1939 article, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin proceeds to explore the question of aura in a different frame of mind, complicating his first "political" definition with nostalgic overtones.
In his accompanying commentary upon the Histoire(s), Godard clearly articulates his nostalgia for the aura of lost cinema. We should bear in mind here that he defines film neither as an art nor a science, but rather as a "mystery," a word that invites interpretation in terms of the auratic. 35 According to Miriam Hansen, the auratic in Benjamin never coincides with the unveiling of a symbolic integrity, but on the contrary with a "catastrophic and dislocating impact." 36 The same is true of Godard's auratic cinema. In Godard's eyes, film is mysterious because it performs an allegorical movement, an alternating dispersion and concentration of signification. Histoire(s) du cinéma aims to witness just that movement, in the process bringing to light the messianic possibility of a catastrophic change. Whereas for Benjamin history must attend to the experience of the vanquished, for Godard film must be given attention in so far as it has been vanquished by video, by digital technology, and more generally by what he defines as the "totalitarianism of the present" (HDC, IV: 286).
In the most celebrated passage of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin imagined history as the allegorical subject of Klee's painting "Angelus Novus," a divine spectator who looks back on the past while being propelled into the future amid a hail of debris by a wind blowing from paradise ("TPH," 257-58). Strikingly, Benjamin revives the metaphor at a pivotal juncture in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" when he imagines the advent of film: "Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling" ("WOA," 236). The resemblance of the two passages suggests that Benjamin at some level associated cinema with the paradise from which the storm of the future originates. Godard quite consciously appropriates and redeploys this association. In the first, televised version of Histoire(s) du cinéma, at the end of Episode 1B, we thus encounter the image of Klee's angel dramatically (and perhaps a bit self-aggrandizingly) superimposed upon that of Godard himself (NMQG, 222). Behind Godard's enterprise stands a Benjaminian insistence on the critical recuperation of history, a retrieval of ephemeral images "flashing up" to demand analysis in the present, because, as Benjamin puts it, "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" ("TPH," 255). Film offers the ideal reservoir of such images, a reservoir that offers the advantage of presenting historical events without adding causal explanations from outside the events themselves.
If the philosophical standpoint of Godard's Histoire(s) is the same as that of Benjamin's "Theses," its methodology is closer to that of The Arcades Project. Indeed, as an attempt to delineate the specific physiognomy of the twentieth century from its fragmentary cultural traces, through a collage of images and texts, Histoire(s) du cinéma reveals a genealogical relation to The Arcades Project. As has been documented, Benjamin until the end of his life pursued the project of a history of the "minor" or marginal, a project applying the practices of historical materialism and articulated around the emblematic res of the nineteenth century: arcades, whores, gamblers, gilded mirrors, mechanical dolls. The resulting epigrammatic sketches, organized into a kind of patchwork of quotations, contribute to what Benjamin defined as a "dialectic at a standstill," a sort of intransitive unveiling of the truth that avoids the illusion of linear narrative progress. But as in the case of the "Theses," the theory of collective memory developed in the Arcades also owes its inspiration to the Proustian notion of involuntary memory, of which it represents a sort of "objective," material aspect. 37
Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma identifies the twentieth-century analogue of the arcade in the movie theater. Like the arcade, film is able to provide a centrifugal mode of access to meaning and history. Not only do Benjamin and Godard both espouse a poetics of montage or quotation, they also share a determination to escape the strictures of conventional historicism in order to unveil the allegorical res that arise from the ruins of history. Even Godard's written commentary upon Histoire(s) mimics the visual procedures of montage, linking as it does citations or pastiches of a variety of authors--philosophers, film critics, songwriters, poets, and directors--who are listed at the end of each volume, but not individually attributed. Film clearly represents for Godard a sort of private or personal historical arcade, a spectacular space that provides us with an "involuntary memory" of the century. In this light, Benjamin and Godard may be seen to share much the same project; both aim to perform a materialist critique of culture by means of Proustian acts of remembrance, to expose the hidden costs of production by means of a poetic recovery of the past. Such a critique, far from enforcing an objectively verifiable or scientific picture of events, provides access to history via the digressive, subjective paths of allegory. Godard underlines this emphasis when he writes, "why simplify when one can complicate?" (HDC, II: 78). If history becomes legible for Benjamin by alternation between the mystical perspective of the "Theses" and the materialist approach of the Arcades, we find in Godard the possibility of bringing the two modes into convergence through the language of cinema, a language that according to Godard expresses the "egality and fraternity between real and fiction" (HDC, III: 126-27).
In Histoire(s) du cinéma, however, Godard intends to superimpose his personal experience upon the collective, public face of cinema. Histoire(s) du cinéma is an autobiographical enterprise in spirit, since the material traces of film are also reflections of Godard's own personal life story. 38 As he himself phrases it, "without cinema I would not have any history" (HDC, II: 39). Proclaiming the visual language of film as the mother tongue of the twentieth century, Godard refuses to provide an ostensibly objective, chronological overview of the medium. To the question of historical origin he responds instead by taking the invention of motion pictures as the revolutionary new beginning of a certain way of looking at the world, the emergence of cinema in this sense standing for the birth of a peculiarly modern consciousness of estrangement. We thus find three historical levels "superimposed" on one another in the Histoire(s): the personal, the communal, and the cinematic. The titles of the first two segments--"Toutes les histoires" and "Une histoire seule"--imply the constantly viable possibility in Histoire(s) du cinéma of a Gestalt switch between two ways of thinking about the medium: in terms of its social currency as spectacle or in terms of its psychical value as allegory.
It is well known that Deleuze's theory of cinema divides the history of the medium into two periods: that of the "movement-image" and that of the "time-image." Coinciding with Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, the second period represents the equivalent of a Kantian revolution of cinema in as much as it overturns the silent era's subordination of temporality to movement and instead comes to enact what Deleuze, employing a very Proustian formulation, calls "temps à l'état pur." 39 We might surmise that it is because the most recent productions of the movie industry threaten to eradicate art cinema between Hollywood's bloated overcommodification of the medium and the atemporality of digital technology that Godard resolves to resurrect the time-image. Histoire(s) du cinéma should be regarded as an exploration of the autobiographical value of the time-image, an effort advanced in a Proustian mood to distill from the fractured remnants of the past a "pure history." If Godard's Histoire(s) shares with Proust's Recherche a similar inspiration we should also note that it runs a similar risk of appealing to a regressive or at least nostalgic mentality. Since film (as opposed to television or video) represents for Godard a sort of idealized childhood of the arts, his enterprise in Histoire(s) du cinéma may be regarded, like Proust's in À la recherche du temps perdu, as an attempt to regain infancy (HDC, I: 238).
According to Godard, cinema is best defined not in terms of ontological presence à la Bazin, but rather in terms of metaphorical and historical representation (ACMS, 67). And like Proust, Godard affirms a poetics of shock or paradox by cultivating visual superimposition in order to sustain epistemelogical instabilities, by performing a "battéments" of images, a deployment of signs that we might describe in Benjaminian accents as a "beating of wings." 40 At stake in this agitated beating of images is the "fatal beauty" of film, its uniquely sublime quality. As Godard declares elsewhere in Histoire(s), "only cinema" mobilizes itself with such unnerving ostentation. To better highlight the metaphorical function of film, Godard, like Proust, actively experiments with the condensation and displacement of images, confronting us with a visual archive of the century that exemplifies the paradox of superimposition: "That which is above all at the base, it's always two, always presenting from the start two images instead of one; it's what I define as the image, this image made of two, that is to say the third image" (ACMS, 27). As a strategy of visualization, superimposition corresponds to a complicated and enigmatic philosophy of history within whose terms the past manifests itself as a palimpsest that is always in the process of being revised. Godard, the narrator, orients our cinematic excursion through the labyrinth of history by means of a sardonic, frequently melancholic commentary that propounds a poetics of quotation.
Jacques Aumont interprets the melancholic tone as the lament of an artist-critic for his lost or defunct art (AMNÉ, 168). By way of an allegorical recapitulation of the project of the Recherche, Godard aspires to recapture his ideal of the "film perdu," once a certain type of cinema has run its course:
We can say, in general, that a certain idea of cinema, not Lumière's but that which was perhaps pursued by Feuillade and continued by Delluc, Vigo, and from which I do not consider myself to be far, this idea of cinema is over, as the Fontainebleau school is over, as Italian painting is over. . . . One can say that a certain cinema has now been achieved. As Hegel put it, an epoch is finished. Afterward it is different. One feels sad because childhood has been lost. ( ACMS , 87)
Just like literature in the Recherche, cinema in Histoire(s) is not "sheltered from time," but simply "the shelter of time" (HDC, IV: 299). This is another way of saying that Godard's Histoire(s) does not embrace the machinery of archival history. To the order of the archive, Godard opposes the aura of involuntary memory.
Indeed, Godard's intuitive, dream-like layering of images resembles involuntary memory more than it does organized montage. As if to drive the point home, during the four-hour course of the Histoire(s) we are repeatedly shown a self-referential scene of the director gazing with somewhat lax attention at the film as it passes by on his editing table. Although we might regard such an image as a way of thematizing the hermeneutical problematic of the film, that problematic is framed by Godard not in analytic terms, as Bergala has remarked, but in emotional terms, in terms of distress and consolation: "We should most of all refrain from thinking, before the authority of the completed work, that Godard has always been sure about which shots he was looking for, and that he knew in which films and in which place in those films to find them. The most troubling shots are those regained when they were inaccessible to the convocation of his voluntary memory" (NMQG, 241).
In the choice of images that constitute the Histoire(s) we should recognize not so much Godard's logical ordering of experience as his spontaneous election to an intensified state of consciousness by his memories of forgotten films. The obsessive return of certain images suggests that Godard has been chosen by his memories in so far as he allows them to resurface. 41 We might say that Godard unveils the Proustian unconsciousness of cinema to the extent that he reveals even montage in its ostensible identity as a visual technology to obey the involuntary rhythms of the subjective. A sly illustration of this point may be found in Episode 3B (AMNÉ, 17), where, after an eruption of fragments from Rossellini's Paisà and Carné's La belle et la bête, we abruptly encounter the legend, "Hardly Working," which ironically raises the question of the psychic labor behind the editing. Although, on the one hand, montage may be work, its result resembles the effortless arbitrariness of the involuntary. It is on this ground that Aumont rightly considers Godard to be Proust's "brother" (AMNÉ, 225).
Aumont's judgment is to some extent invited by the director; in Episode 2B of the Histoire(s), which is entitled "Fatale beauté," references to the Recherche are made openly and at some length. Godard emphatically repeats the name of Marcel's vanished and mysterious love, Albertine. On the screen the phrase "le temps perdu" flashes out several times. This evocation of Proust's enigmatic female protagonist occurs not accidentally during a meditation on the nature of cinema, which Godard equates with its function neither as art nor as technique, but as mystery: "I said: neither an art, nor a technique, but a mystery (voice of Godard). Time regained. Only cinema. All alone. Mystery" (HDC, II: 154-55). Yet his very insistence on the value of film as the embodiment of regained time may also be read as an admission of the medium's untimely status or condition. If the Recherche is written at the dawn of cinema, the Histoire(s) awakens to its sunset, a distance that Godard captures by ironically rewriting Proust's famous first sentence, "for a long time I used to go to sleep early," as "for a long time I used to wake up unhappily." The punning conversion of "early" ("bonne heure" in the original version, which itself echoes "bonheur"--happiness) to "unhappily" ("malheur" in the original) or unhappiness brings to light at once the proximate, but also mutated, condition of Godard's present relative to Proust's past. The director's mise-en-scène must dispense with elegiac niceties, and his own search for lost cinema will be conducted, according to Aumont, as the potential final chapter in the history of art (AMNÉ, 149). Indeed, immediately after airing his revision of Proust's incipit, Godard indulges in a bit of wordplay on the phrase "le temps retrouvé" (time regained) by typographically highlighting the "trou," the hole or empty space, at the heart of the adjective "retrouvé."
Godard's opus is Proustian in spirit because it manages to evoke the involuntary intermittence of our memories of film in a first-person narrative voice: "All that remains of films are a few images in our memory" (ACMS, 85). Moreover, for the French director the history of cinema does not contribute to any larger optimism regarding the revolutionary triumph of the social collective. Instead, Godard's historical outlook derives from an anxious sense of the singularity and frailty of personal memory, and it is in this light that his aims can be considered Proustian. His effort is not to construct a systematic catalog of film memories that provide immediate access to history, but to retrieve a few fragmentary touchstones that, like Proust's involuntary memories, redeem the past by means of indication or suggestion. Paradoxically, these touchstones can be recovered only through a process of forgetting. It is precisely in the readiness of consciousness to brave the threat of erasure that he locates the possibility of recollection as an aesthetic act: "Whoever wishes to remember must trust to oblivion, to that risk which is absolute oblivion, and to the beautiful accident that might then become the remembrance" (HDC, IV: 128-29). Whereas the visual composition of Histoire(s) du cinéma demonstrates that films may provide the material analogue par excellence of memory, Godard's assertion implies that their evocative power rests on what Aumont defines as "amnésie." 42 It is Godard's intention to save a select few auratic images and thus the essence of art cinema at the very moment when the cybernetic practice of the information archive or database seemingly replaces that of a living cultural memory (NMQG, 216).
Godard's cultivation of a sort of involuntary memory of cinema shows to what degree cinema as a medium is well suited, probably better than literature, to elaborate the phenomenology of remembrance. 43 He suggests that, by virtue of its nonchalance of retrospection, film makes it possible to rewrite the myth of Orpheus in a less tragic key than literature permits: "Cinema authorizes Orpheus to turn back without killing" (HDC, II: 96-97). However, if the history of cinema revises the ideology of involuntary memory in a compelling way, Histoire(s) du cinéma at the same time bears witness to the approaching terminus of that history, to the disappearance of film's Orphic potential. In this light, the Proust who is a true brother to Godard is not only a disenchanted, Deleuzian semiotician, but also an elegiac spirit for whom "the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost" (ROTP, III: 903; RDTP, IV: 449). Histoire(s) ends on a freeze-frame of a rose superimposed over a still image of Godard himself. Over this literally arresting vision, the voiceover intones "if a man crossing paradise in a dream received a flower as proof of his transit and, on awakening, found the flower in his hands, what else would he say but I was this man" (HDC, IV: 306-11).
It is at the intersection of the Proustian poetic of involuntary memory with the Benjaminian doctrine of messianic history, then, that we should position Godard's faith in the resurrection of cinema. After all, at its invention the medium of film was taken so seriously as a technological means of resuscitating the dead that, as Christian-Marc Bosséno reminds us, somebody in 1905 went about providing cemeteries with projectors to show movies of the dearly departed. 44 In this light, Godard's redemptive valediction to art cinema looks back through a messianic conception of the medium to the very origin of film itself, so completing a circular motion that is a quintessentially Proustian authorial gesture.
Alessia Ricciardi is Assistant Professor in the department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She is currently completing a book entitled Beyond the Mourning Principle: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Culture of Loss.
1. Joseph Losey's hope was to film Harold Pinter's screenplay of the Recherche, which was published as À la recherche du temps perdu: The Proust Screenplay (New York: Grove Press, 1977). Visconti's project, initiated and then abandoned in the spring of 1970, was to have been based instead on Suso Cecchi D'Amico's screenplay and would have recapitulated Proust's narrative from the central segment of À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs forward. Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti, À la recherche du temps perdu: Scénario d'après l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (Paris: Persona, 1984).
2. ". . . Isn't it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn't there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn't there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? What matters are never the 'great,' but only dialectical contrasts, which often seem indistinguishable from nuances. It's nonetheless from them that life is always born anew." Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 459; hereafter cited within the text as AP.
3. In this sense, I find the accusations advanced against Ruiz's film on the grounds of having taken excessive liberties with Proust's novel to be misplaced and banal. Predictably, many literary critics have complained about the supposed original sin of a cinematic version of Proust. Film critics generally have been better disposed toward the film, although they often praise it in vague and generalized terms. For an example of a typical critique of Ruiz's project from a literary point of view, see Pascal Ifri, "Le Temps Retrouvé de Roul Ruiz, ou Le Temps Perdu au Cinema" Bulletin Marcel Proust 50 : 166-75. For an example of film criticism, see Thyerry Gandillot, "Du Côté de chez Proust," L'Express (20 May 2000): 47.
4. Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Archéologie du Cinéma et mémoire du siècle (Tours: Farrago, 2000), hereafter abbreviated as ACMS. All translations from this work are mine.
5. For an interesting excursus on the director's use of titles and subtitles in Histoire(s) du cinéma, see Jacques Aumont, Amnésies (Paris: P.O.L, 1999), 67. Henceforth abbreviated as AMNÉ.
6. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) II: 86, 92; hereafter cited within the text as HDC. All translations from this work are my own.
7. Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1999), 180, hereafter abbreviated as NMQG. All translations from it are mine.
8. Godard's meditation on the temporality of cinema is poignantly articulated by the character Lennox in the film Nouvelle vague: "It is not enough to have remembrances, it is necessary to forget them when they are numerous, and it is necessary to have the patience to await their return" (cited in Bergala, NMQG, 201).
9. "But the direct time-image always gives us access to that Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space. Proust indeed speaks in terms of cinema, time mounting its magic lantern on bodies and making the shots coexist in depth" (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison, Robert Galeta [Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 39).
10. Cf. Brassaï, Proust sous l'emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) and Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually trans. Anne-Louise Milne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
11. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 456; hereafter cited within the text as MP.
12. According to Plantevignes, the inscription in the book commemorated the exact moment of Proust's gift, referring to the beginning of the "guignol cinématographique" the two friends were about to view. See MP, 456; and Marcel Plantevignes, Avec Marcel Proust (Paris: A. G.Nizet, 1966), 133.
13. William C. Carter, The Proustian Quest (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 12.
14. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Moncrieff and Terence Kielmartin (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), I: 689. See also the French original, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), I: 629. Further quotations are cited in the text from the English version, henceforth abbreviated as ROTP, followed by reference to the French original, cited as RDTP.
15. Like Carter, Henry seems sure that Proust saw a "courte-metrage comique" at least once, but that the silent films shown in Parisian movie houses (for example, Méliès and, as of 1917, Chaplin) cannot have influenced Proust, as his writing already evinces a fascination with the visual beginning with Jean Santeuil in 1895. Henry argues that the genealogy of Proust's ocular imagination derives from the progressive spectacularization of the arts and of communication since the nineteenth century. Anne Henry, La tentation de Marcel Proust (Paris: PUF, 2000), 220-21; hereafter cited as TMP. All translations from it are my own.
16. Marcel Proust, "En mémoire des églises assassinées," Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 101-2; my translation.
17. Brunet, Le vocabulaire de Proust (Paris: Slatkine-Champion, 1983), II: 264. Under the entry "cinema" and its variants, Brunet tallies one occurrence in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (the episode involving Odette and the riders) and four in Le temps retrouvé.
18. "Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of Gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. . . . And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself" (ROTP, I: 9-11; RDTP, I: 9-10). In this passage, Proust seems to provide a possible link between the luminosity of stained glass and the projectedness of film, a spectral effect that he associates with the two terms "mystery" and "beauty." The former term, we should note, also supplies Godard's definition of cinema in Histoire(s) du cinéma. In fact, one of the litanies recurring throughout his film is the sentence "neither an art, nor a technique, a mystery."
19. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, 1972).
20. In his essay on Proust, Benjamin insistently characterizes mémoire involontaire as "visual images." See "The Image of Proust," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 214; for an interesting analysis of the Recherche as a "visual novel," see Mieke Bal, Images littéraires (Toulouse: PUM, 1997).
21. The invention of superimposition dates back to the first generation of cinematographers (1895-1927), who were active roughly in the same years in which Proust was writing. We might define the technique as the layering or fusing together of multiple exposures within the same shot, permitting the condensation or dilation of time and space, and thus the production of an image endowed with a third dimension besides length and width--that is to say, depth.
22. Walter Benjamin, "Image of Proust," Illuminations, 204-5, henceforth cited within the text as "IOP".
23. In fact, Proust himself defines moments of epiphany in terms of their "shock" to his senses (ROTP, III: 905).
24. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, 255, henceforth cited within the text as "TPH."
25. Cf. Robert Kahn, Images, Passages: Marcel Proust et Walter Benjamin (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1998), 181.
26. This hypothesis finds support in Benjamin's own selection of examples for his decidedly cinematic idea of the "optical unconscious," examples that remind us of the specific instances of mémoire involontaire catalogued in the final section of the Recherche. In his celebrated essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin equates the optical unconscious with such peculiar moments of perception as when we notice "a person's posture during the fraction of a stride" and "the act of reaching for a spoon and how it might fluctuate with our moods." It is striking how closely these examples resemble the two crucial instances of mémoire involontaire at the end of the Recherche when the narrator trips over a cobblestone and overhears the sound of a spoon knocked against a plate (ROTP, III: 900; RDTP, IV: 446). It could be said that Benjamin exposes the cinematic unconscious of the novel in the sense that he reveals the Recherche as an "involuntary" exploration of the filmic. See Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, 237, henceforth cited within the text as "WOA."
27. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations, 94.
28. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton, Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 236.
29. Driving this point home, Ruiz's adaptation of Le temps retrouvé opens promisingly with the tableau of the author on his deathbed, surrounded in his room by his paperôles and Celeste Albaret. (In the Recherche the narrator's cerebral seizure, a virtual "review" of death, takes place at the end of Le temps retrouvé.) Ruiz not only deliberately conflates the narrator's life with Proust's own, but also strategically displaces the approach of death from its logical position to the very start of the film. Unfortunately, the cleverness of the film's opening is more than offset by the gimmickry of its closure, as Ruiz attempts a sort of extradiegetic deconstruction of the idea of film as biography. The movie closes on the beach at Balbec where "Marcel enfant" is looked upon by "Marcel adulte," in a sequence too studiedly reminiscent of Visconti's adaptation of Death in Venice. Meanwhile, a voice-over recounts the story of the sculptor Salvini who, as his end draws near, is offered an opportunity to review all the significant moments of his life by the angel of death. Salvini refuses, pleading instead for the right merely to reassess his last work of art, entitled the "Triumph of Death." However, this act of self-judgment proves impossible: "There is a paradox in all this, Salvini exclaimed, I had enough time to review all the instants of my life, which lasted sixty-three years, and the same amount of time has not sufficed for surveying a work which I finished within three months." As the angel of death explains, the reason for the paradox is the fact that a work of art embodies not only the author's life, but indeed the lives of all people. This story, which does not come from the Recherche, is an awkward interpolation, as it establishes an apparently transcendental distinction between life and oeuvre, autobiography and fiction, that Proust had carefully tried to efface. See Raoul Ruiz et Gilles Taurand, "Le temps retrouvé," L'Avant-Scène 482 (May, 1999): 73; my translation.
30. Walter Benjamin, "From a Brief Speech About Proust On the Occasion of My Fortieth Birthday," Gesammelte Schriften eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), II: 1064. The English rendition is mine.
31. As will be evident to anyone who has read his recent interviews about Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard seems drawn to Benjamin as a source of constant intellectual reflection. One example of Benjamin's influence is Godard's frequent recurrence to the word "constellation"--with explicit reference to the German critic's precedent--in order to signify his intention to establish a resonance between present and past. As Youssef Ishaghpour observes, allusions to Benjamin are also preponderant in a recent film by Godard and Anne Marie Miéville about the Museum of Modern Art in New York (ACMS, 9-10, 17-19).
32. For a discussion of Benjamin's visual approach to history in relationship to photography, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
33. "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. . . . Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim" ("TPH," 254).
34. See Samuel Weber, "Mass Mediauras; or Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin," Walter Benjamin ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 27-49.
35. In his first essay, Benjamin chastizes Abel Gance and Severin Mars for their obstinacy in reading ritual elements in film ("WOA," 227).
36. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 211.
37. Kahn, Images-Passages, 194.
38. Aumont contends that, like Proust's, Godard's narrative represents a superimposition of different "je" (AMNÉ, 212).
39. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 85-92
40. Cf. Aumont, AMNÉ, 132, and Benjamin, "IOP," 203.
41. For some useful remarks on the unconscious or preconscious quality of Godard's images, see Bergala, NMQG, 213-15.
42. Thus the title of Aumont's book.
43. Cf. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, 160-62.
44. Christian-Marc Bosséno, "Sur Impression," Cahiers du cinéma: le siècle du cinéma (Nov. 2000): 56.
The First International Dada Fair held in Berlin in 1920 holds a most significant place within the history of the 20th-century avant-garde ( 1). It marks the point where modernist practices of fragmentation, disruption and shock were aimed directly at the German public by utilizing the strategies of contemporary journalism and advertising. Political protest was combined with attack on the exalted status of art, the death of which was famously proclaimed by one placard at the exhibition. A German soldier's uniform with a pig's head was hung from the ceiling, provoking legal action and ensuring good tabloid coverage. The walls of the exhibition rooms were covered with posters and banners which competed for attention with the more traditional paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz, although their subject matter--crippled war veterans and urban disorder--was suitably confrontational. Photomontage, a new medium recently seized upon by the dadaists, was prominently placed, recycling imagery from the illustrated press for satirical or absurd ends. And in the midst of all this could be found a tower of found objects, newspapers, and textual fragments assembled by Johannes Baader and known as the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama ( 2).
Some objects from the Dada Fair have subsequently become museum pieces and are now iconic images of the period, an example being Hannah Höch's large photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife. In fact, art historians have slaved long and hard to identify as many of the sources for this montage as possible and offered sustained interpretations of it on the basis of their findings. 1 Baader's sculpture has a very different status, given that it did not survive the exhibition and is only known through photographs. Even so it is widely considered to be a crucial object in the history of modernism: "definitely the first assemblage-environment in the history of art," for Helen Adkins, "one of the first large assemblage-environments," according to Eberhard Roters, "an assemblage of, until then, unparalleled proportions," in Stephen Foster's words. 2 It has also been described as "the most audacious of the diverse array of assemblages at the Dada Fair" and, according to Hanne Bergius, it deserves a new category of its own, démontage, because of its unique, deconstructive nature. 3 Even though it has not been preserved, it is surprising that no similar attempt has yet been made to produce a close reading of Baader's object. It is my intention here to redress this situation so that the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama might be more accurately situated within our current understanding of Dada and modernism in general.
The first point of redress is to give the assemblage its full title, not often quoted alongside reproductions: Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Grösse und Untergang oder Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada(The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany's Greatness and Decline or The Fantastic Life of the Superdada). It did have, therefore, a very specific subject matter. It was intended to be read both as a description of recent German history and as autobiography (Baader was known amongst his colleagues as der Oberdada). In the first case the assemblage was a record of the fall of the German empire, and in the second Baader's rise to fame. We shall see how in both instances a departure was made from predominant models of, firstly, history as rational progress, and secondly autobiography as self-revelation. To the two movements which Baader aimed to represent, decline and ascent, he gave the form of a sculptural and architectural hybrid part tower, pyramid and spiral. The ultimate function of the object was to be "Dada monumental architecture," and I will conclude by considering how Baader's conception of death and remembrance was also red in the object.
At first glance the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama appears to be totally chaotic, an arbitrary collection of objects and texts stacked up in no particular order. However, given the large amount of textual material it is comprised of, it demands to be read. For its original public in 1920 there were two tools to assist them in this task. The first was the exhibition catalogue. It described the piece as:
Dada Monumental Architecture in five stories, 3 parks, 1 tunnel, 2 lifts and 1 cylinder cap. The ground level or floor represents the fate determined before birth and has no other relevance. Description of the stories. 1st floor: The Preparation of the Superdada. 2nd floor: The Metaphysical Test. 3rd floor: The Inauguration. 4th floor: The World War. 5th floor: World Revolution. Penthouse: The cylinder twists into the sky and proclaims the resurrection of Germany by means of schoolmaster Hagendorf's lectern. Eternally. 4
This draws our attention to the numbered labels attached to the assemblage, dividing it into the sections specified. In the best known photograph we can see numbers 1, 2, and 5. A second photograph of unfortunately much inferior quality shows the assemblage from the reverse angle and reveals that the number 4 was placed next to the hanging carbide lamp ( 3). It is safe to surmise therefore that 3 completed the pattern, and that the viewer was expected to follow the numbers around in an ascending spiral. Baader imaginatively incorporated both the floor on which the spectator stands and the empty space above into the work. His reference to it as monumental architecture has connotations of both commemoration and potential scale.
The key to the work that the full catalogue entry provided was further enhanced by the appearance in the Dada Almanachwhich was published to coincide with the end of the exhibition, of a "closer description" of each story. 5 Here Baader offered various references which explain some but not all of the items in the assemblage. The first story, for example, connects his birth in 1875 to the emergence of the unified German state represented by Kaiser Wilhelm I's express train, erroneously misled by the assumption of an ever-unfolding future. Symbolically depicted, it continues traveling around the powder keg on a circular track until it finally explodes. 6 The second story is intended to represent the emergence of a "collective artistic culture . . . in the tunnel of the doomed Reich," above which appears "a museum of masterpieces through the ages" represented in the assemblage by two arched gateways and a mousetrap. 7 At the end of the tunnel stands Baader himself, seized by Platonic ideas which are "violating him, overpowering him," and he is only saved by the "spectre and outcome of the World War." 8 The third and fourth stories concern the declaration of war, interpreted by Baader in terms of Revelations, and the war itself which he, seventy years before Baudrillard had the idea, declares to have been a media event: "a newspaper war. In reality it never existed." 9 The newspapers included to represent this statement carry us on up to the fifth story, World Revolution, which emerges from the peace declared at Spa. Broadcasting into the ether via the aerial which is the final component of the work, Baader proclaims "the final redemption from suffering and death." 10 Some items that are identifiable in the assemblage but not directly mentioned by Baader include, at the bottom, Raoul Hausmann's sound poems, cuttings from Dada journals such as Franz Jung's Die Freie Strasse (The Free Street), to which Baader had been a contributor, and at the summit an issue of Die Pleite (Bankruptcy).
"Germany's Greatness and Decline: or the Fantastic Life of the Superdada," therefore, can be interpreted autobiographically, and it stages a strange Bildungsroman which takes us from Baader's childhood through to maturity. This is red in the object by the transformation from Hausmann's sound poems, deliberately primitivizing and perhaps mimicking baby talk, to the newspaper texts and their "adult" language. That this route leads ultimately to Die Pleite is an idea that will be returned to. From what we can see in the photograph, we also have representations of Baader himself, first as a small drawing to the right of the cog wheel with his name underneath ( 4), and then in the middle left standing next to the assemblage in the form of a tailor's dummy from whose hand hangs the number "2" ( 5). The appearance of a moustache on the latter is another means of representing the passage of time. That this passage has now become the rejection of reason rather than the adoption of it should not deflect from the formal model with which Baader was playing.
Simultaneously, Baader intertwined images of the Wilhelmine empire keyed to particular ideas of modernity. The express train already mentioned can be understood as a reference to the rapid expansion of the railway network under the Kaiserreich. Just behind the number "1" on the assemblage, the toy train used to represent this can be seen ( 6). An important policy of the Wilhelmine government, investment in the rail infrastructure, was brought to a grinding halt by the war, quite literally Wilhelm's express train going nowhere. Baader may also have picked up on the use of a similar image used by Jakob van Hoddis as the climactic line of his 1911 poem Weltende (End of the World) which reads, "trains tumble from bridges everywhere." 11 Another point of reference may have been the fact that Wilhelm II, seeing his role in the First World War as military rather than political, spent much time away from Berlin near the front line. His preferred means of transport on these occasions was the royal train which doubled up as the imperial residence for much of 1914--1918. 12 At the summit of the assemblage is a railway carriage, separated from the engine down below, stranded at Spa ( 7). [Begin Page 590]
Between first and second story is another reference to a major Wilhelmine construction project, the "museum of masterpieces through the ages." The architectural fragments and mousetrap undoubtedly refer to Baader's previous career as an architect specializing in funerary monuments, with the Mausefalle (mousetrap) punning with Mausoleum ( 4). Pinned just above to the right, however, we find a reproduction of Dirk Bouts' Christ in the House of Simon, a fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece which had been purchased for the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904 ( 8). The placement of the mousetrap/mausoleum over the tunnel cleverly refers to the construction of the Museum-Insel (Museum Island) in Berlin, an ambitious attempt to confirm the cultural as well as political significance of the new capital city. By positioning it over an empty space, Baader satirizes its lack of foundation both literally and metaphorically. This cultural center in Berlin had been begun with the building of Schinkel's Altes Museum (1823-1830) (to the cupola of which the shape of the mousetrap may also allude) and the Neues Museum (1843-1850), but the rapid expansion of the royal collection led to the addition of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (1898-1903) and the Pergamon Museum (1909-1930), all on the same site. The last of these museums, designed specifically to house antiquities transported from Turkey, clearly expressed a desire to place Berlin ahead not only of national rivals Munich and Dresden, but also other European capitals in the arts. It was also a famous characteristic of the Museum-Insel that it was bisected by a major railway line leading in and out of Friedrichstrasse Station, and that passengers were given fleeting glimpses of the great collections as they passed through. That the museum should follow the railway in Baader's assemblage is a cunning reference to Berlin topography.
Perhaps the most significant marker of modernity in the assemblage, though, is its collection of newspapers. Baader has carefully selected for inclusion local Berlin newspapers renowned for their "new journalism." Prominent in the center of the construction is a copy of the Lokal-Anzeiger which, as Peter Fritzsche has demonstrated, was the first paper to bring "urban reportage" to Berlin. It was a paper through which to understand the growing and ever more confusing metropolis:
New arrivals depended on newspapers to find work and housing, to sell goods and services, and to identify urban types and negotiate local institutions. Increasingly elaborate local reportage provided readers with sketches of homelife in tenement buildings, public life along fashionable streets, and work discipline inside factories and department stores. Over time newcomers--readers--filled in the blank spaces of their mental maps of Berlin. Not to read the newspaper was to risk losing orientation. 13
Also prominently displayed by Baader is BZ am Mittag, a Berlin tabloid founded as recently as 1904 which was sold on the street as a "boulevard" newspaper. It takes its place alongside the Dada periodicals some of which, such as Die Pleite, were also sold directly on the streets. At the top, Baader created a signpost from newspaper cuttings: Köthener Strasse in one direction, Die Freie Strasse in the other ( 7). Köthener Strasse is one of the roads adjoining Potsdamer Platz, Berlin's busiest junction, which was a favorite location for journalists to linger and report on the state of the traffic. 14 Once again, Baader integrated local topography into the assemblage, this time connected to journalism and its role in guiding the public through the chaos of the city.
While it is interesting to consider the significance of the newspapers and Dada journals in regard to urban orientation, it should also be noted that, by 1920, Baader had himself become something of a tabloid celebrity in Berlin. One of his most infamous acts, the disruption of a service in the Berlin Cathedral in 1918, was reported in not fewer than three of the local Berlin papers. 15 In addition to the reporting of this and other public stunts, Baader often played practical jokes through the Berlin press, such as the announcement of his death as an April fool's joke in 1919, followed up a little later by the notice of his resurrection. 16 The Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was itself preceded by a similar prank, the announcement in two Berlin papers, BZ am Mittag and the Berliner-Börsen Courier of the loss of the manuscript of the Fantastic Life of the Superdadain the following absurd circumstances:
While the Superdada was traveling home after his ascension on the evening of the 13 May on the "W" train from Stettin station to Steglitz, in the company of two angels who escort him, he left behind in the carriage the manuscript of his Fantastic Life Story, due to be published in five installments by Ernst Rowohlt. The finder is requested to deliver the manuscript of the Superdada to Ernst Rowohlt Publishers, Potsdamerstr. 123b, Berlin W.35 in return for a superdadaistic reward. 17
To read the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, then, involves understanding how Baader had begun to live his life through the press and was no longer interested in distinguishing reality from reportage. In the assemblage, he has literally constructed his subjectivity from tabloid journalism. In the context of the Dada Fair, we can compare this to the appearance of another copy of the Lokal-Anzeiger, which George Grosz collaged into his painting Germany, A Winter's Tale (visible in the background of 1). Here, a good Bürger is depicted sitting in a café, drinking a glass of beer and reading the local newspaper, oblivious to the violence and chaos surrounding him. The newspaper is represented not as the key to interpreting social conflict, but as escape from it; to read the Lokal-Anzeiger is red by Grosz as a marker of bad faith. When exhibited at the Dada Fair, the painting was accompanied by a large banner stating that "Dada is Political," which confirmed Grosz's opinion that the role of Dada should be to counter the misinformation disseminated by the press by representing all the brutality of contemporary circumstances. Grosz's attitude to the press was confirmed by his inclusion in a later painting, Pillars of Society , of a newspaper editor depicted alongside other instigators of the bloody repression of the German revolution such as the clergy and the military. Once again the banner of the Lokal-Anzeiger was prominently featured.
The difference in attitude between Grosz and Baader to the mass media is indicative of the divide between the politically committed wing of the Berlin Dada group and its rather more anarchic side. By 1920 Richard Huelsenbeck, the erstwhile leader of the Berlin Dadas, had become distinctly irritated by Baader's self publicizing antics and was almost certainly responsible for the stinging attack in the Dada Almanach, where he described him as "a comfort-loving Swabian pastor or petit bourgeois [who] attempts to exploit his mania for godliness simply in order to line his pocket." 18 He continued this line of criticism in his later memoirs where he again disparaged Baader's "psychotic exhibitionism," calling him "an itinerant preacher, the Billy Graham of his time, a mixture of Anabaptist and circus owner." 19 However, Stephen Foster finds Baader's dadaism to be more radical than that of Grosz in that he attempted to find "an extracultural position from which to speak." 20 This, Foster contrasts to Grosz's "more orthodox politicizing" which did not challenge the accepted roles of art and literature but merely used them in a satirical fashion. How Grosz responded to the inclusion of his own cover for the journal Die Pleite, exhibited at the summit of the Plasto-Dio- Dada-Drama, is unrecorded ( 4). 21
Baader's engagement with the role of the media in the construction of reality has one final arcane reference in the assemblage. Having transformed the Dada montage principle from a two- to a three-dimensional experience, the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama alludes in its title to the diorama, a form of spectacular entertainment invented in the early nineteenth century which had been conceived by Daguerre as a challenge to the then quite common panorama. Daguerre took the panorama's concern for illusion or fidelity to nature and added the excitement of witnessing a scene apparently unfolding in real time. Through clever backlighting of a transparent painting, the spectator could enjoy "the many momentary changes of mood which he knew so well from nature--from the hazy morning to the clear light and from the calm beauty of a sunny day to the brooding and stormy sky." 22 The "performance" of an image would last approximately fifteen minutes, and the audience was seated on a revolving platform so that they could be turned to view a second scenario. In 1834, Daguerre devised the "double-effect" diorama, where not only could changing light effects be produced but, with the use of certain filters, res could be made to appear in the scene who had at first been invisible. The craze for such entertainment spread to London and also to Germany. The Berlin diorama developed in a rather extraordinary way with the emergence of the Pleorama, a kind of moving panorama. The designers of this attraction, Carl Wilhelm Gropius and Gottfried Langhans, the latter the architect of the Brandenburg Gate, seated the audience in a ship and took them on a small "voyage." As Helmut Gernsheim records, "the illusion of movement was achieved by the back-cloth slowly traversing the stage, giving the impression of a moving viewpoint on the part of the spectator." 23
While these forms of moving narrative unfolding in time seem extremely pertinent to the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, it is difficult to judge what knowledge Baader may have had of them, as the diorama did not survive much past 1850. The term has remained in common use, especially in English, to describe any form of illusionary model against a backdrop. German dictionaries are far less promiscuous with their definition of the term, limiting it to either the illusionistic show devised by Daguerre or to the building which might have housed such an event. The Berlin diorama was in fact situated in a grand building designed by Schinkel at the intersection of Georgenstrasse and Universitätstrasse, midway between Friedrichstrasse and the Museum-Inseldirectly along the route through which the railway was driven.It is tempting to interpret this as yet another reference by Baader to the actual topography of the city.
Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary has noted, the transition from the panorama to the diorama is a key moment in the creation of the modern spectator. 24 No sooner had the panorama broken with the traditional perspectival box and created a new ambulatory audience, than the diorama removed this freedom of movement, placing the seated viewers in front of a screen on which movement was depicted. Walter Benjamin's description of such spectacles in his notes for Paris Capital of the Nineteenth-Century conflates the two forms, a product it seems of his ambivalence regarding the active or passive roles adopted by the cinema audience. 25 The dominant mode of distraction, which he identifies as the effect of the modernization of vision, had its parallel for him in Dada montage techniques. As early as 1920, Hausmann had claimed that he was producing a kind of cinema, and the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama does have the feel of a strangely inverted panorama. Instead of the spectator placed at the center of the world, turning to view the scene all around him, he now circles around an object which has attempted to collect a whole world in itself.
With the idea of the diorama as a scenographic unfolding narrative in mind, we can now turn to the second main narrative which Baader invited the audience to read into the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, namely his autobiography. What I wish to pursue further now are the ways in which this autobiography would have been understood within the longstanding German tradition of the Bildungsroman, a fictionalized account of the development of a subject in connection to a cultural education. The Fantastic Life of the Superdada did indeed mention a key text in this tradition, Goethe's Italian Journey, a diary recording the famous author's grand tour of Italy and assimilation of classical culture. Goethe appears in the text at the start of the third story where he "arrives in Weimar, lays his Italian Journey on teacher Hagendorf's lectern and tells the Swabian pastor [Baader himself]: 'One cannot understand a word of literature without this lectern.'" 26
The first part of Italian Journey was originally published as an appendix to Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) and was then reprinted several times independently. It functions as an interesting model for Baader in that it combined travelogue with an account of personal development and education. We have already noted how the cultural pretensions of the Wilhelmine empire and its museum building programme are mocked in the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, how "the museum of masterpieces through the ages" is something that Baader depicts himself as passing through, and how Baader uses a reproduction of a Flemish masterpiece from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), which founded the tradition of the Bildungsroman, dealt with the artistic training of a young man through his appreciation of the art of the past. In fact, Goethe began to write this novel while on his Italian trip, and its development is recorded in his diary entries, leading to an intriguing conflation of his personality with that of Wilhelm Meister and both their simultaneous cultural educations. This was taken up by successive imitators, such as Ludwig Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen(The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald), which again combined travelogue with the study of Italian and Flemish masters.
An anecdote told by Raoul Hausmann reveals Baader's interest in another very particular version of the Bildungsroman, Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich(Green Henry). Walking along the street together one day in summer 1918, Baader suddenly informed him that it was Keller's one hundredth birthday. Hausmann continues: "I made up my mind at once. 'Have you got anything by Keller on you?' 'Yes, I've got Green Henry.' 'Good, let's celebrate.'" Standing in the middle of the street, the two proceeded to take turns to read from the book "at random and read scraps of sentences with no beginning and no end, changing our voices . . . leafing backward and forward, spontaneously." 27 Performing a typical dada subversion of sense, the two transformed the text into a form of sound poetry. The logic of the life described in the novel as an emotional and intellectual development was metamorphosed into a haphazard chain of accidents. But the text they were using was not only a classic Bildungsroman, it was also known to be again a thinly veiled autobiography on Keller's part. Running to four volumes it included all kinds of material drawn from the author's own life, not all of which was flattering. The novel details the ambitions of an artist whose quest for fame destroys his family, a story that strangely parallelled Baader's own neglect of his wife and children. Just as with his attitude to the press, Baader was ever reluctant to draw the line between fiction and reality. In the context of the negative Bildungsroman that the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was, it is important to note that Baader had experienced traumatic losses of selfhood, none more painful than his persistent identification with the re of Christ. Although he is perhaps the only dadaist to have been actually certified insane, I do not wish to undertake a retrospective diagnosis of him through his work or normalize his personality by matching it to a recognized psychiatric condition. His testing of the boundaries of personality is far more interesting as a cultural phenomenon and should be considered alongside Dada's broader examination of the modern subject. In the assemblage, Baader used a typical Dada motif in the image of the mannequin or dummy which stands in for himself and holds the re "2" in its right hand. Mannequins frequently appear in Dada imagery as metaphors for the rejection of the expressionist concern for the uniqueness of the individual; they register the dehumanizing effects of industrial society, or they signify aspirations to what Michael Hays has called a post-humanist subjectivity. 28 In the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, the mannequin features at the end of the second story, described in the text as "The Metaphysical Test," where Baader finds himself "violated by Platonic ideas." He is rescued only by the appearance of "Herr von Münchausen's beanstalk," via which he climbs to the next story. In Baader's biography, this is the moment he published his first book, the Fourteen Letters of Christ, written in the form of a series of letters to eminent people signed by himself as Christ. A copy of the book is described as included somewhere in the lower section of the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, although it is not visible in the photographs. Significantly, he reused an image of the very same mannequin for a 1920 photomontage, The Author of the Book "The Fourteen Letters of Christ" in his Home. The outcome of "The Metaphysical Test" is the rejection of a metaphysical separation of the real from the apparent along with the notion of a stable subjectivity. The result for the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama is that it cannot be seen as a self portrait so much as Baader's self- construction. There is no real Johannes Baader beyond the assemblage.
One final important piece of autobiographical writing should be mentioned here which again contested the construction of the subject formulated by the Bildungsroman, namely Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. Both Baader and his closest associate in the Dada group, Raoul Hausmann, were enthusiastic readers of Nietzsche, and the latter is known to have owned a copy of Ecce Homo. 29 The text proposes itself as a reflection back on the philosopher's life and career giving short accounts of all his books prefaced by sections titled "Why I am so Wise," "Why I am so Clever," and "Why I Write such Excellent Books." It is immediately obvious that Baader's Fantastic Lifestory of the Superdada follows certain traits of Ecce Homo. In the early sections of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche relates his family history and childhood to the political life of Germany, such as sharing his birthday and name with King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. In the opening sections of the text, Nietzsche also makes clear that his life story is as much one of decline as progress. He casts himself as a decadent, a Doppelgänger with at least two faces:
To express it in the form of a riddle, as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old. This twofold origin, as it were from the highest and the lowest rung of the ladder of life, at once décadent and beginning . . . I have a subtler sense for signs of ascent and decline than any man has ever had, I am the teacher par excellence in this matter--I know both, I am both. 30
The Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama integrates both ascent and decline in its ostensible subject matter: the fall of the German empire, and the rise of the Superdada. It also makes use of the spiral form curving around the tower or pyramid structure to signify these two movements. At the summit stands the banner of Die Pleite, but we are asked to imagine the cylinder revolving endlessly into the ether. Baader found a form to accommodate the dual movements present in Nietzsche's philosophy; the linear passage from man to superman, and the cycle of eternal recurrence. The first term takes an evolutionary model, the second a circular one. The spiral, as movement without progress, fits perfectly with the antirational nature of this dynamic.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced eternal recurrence as a deconstruction of idealist interpretations of history as teleology. Central to the same book is the doctrine of the superman as destiny of mankind. How the two might be compatible has created problems in Nietzsche scholarship ever since. However, in the prologue to the book, Nietzsche has Zarathustra state quite clearly that the passage to the superman is both a "going-across" and a "down-going." 31 Similarly, eternal recurrence has no status in Nietzsche's writings as a cosmological explanation of existence. Rather, he is interested in the psychological burden of repetition. These notions are red in the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama by the express train "erroneously misled by an assumption of an ever-unfolding future" and, in the second story, "the wheel of events (for furthering the transformation of the round by means of new lives--albeit still tied to the wheel)." 32
Baader was not alone in using the spiral as a re for the active nihilism summoned up by Nietzsche's thinking. The architect Henry van de Velde was commissioned by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to build the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar in 1902-1903, and he spent the next years devising plans for a Nietzsche temple and monument for the same location. One of the surviving drawings shows how he planned to use a section of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled The Way of the Creator as an inscription on the monument, a text which praises the solitary artist who places himself above the law, beyond good and evil: "Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-propelling wheel? Can you also compel stars to revolve around you." 33 The only decorative element van de Velde conceived for the monument was the inscribed motif of a spiral on a square base expressing the movement described in the text which is, once again, dynamic without being progressive. The significance of the number five for the stories of the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama is that the spectator is lead around the square base and returns to the side where he began. 34 The life that the object traces is set merely to repeat.
A few commentators on the Plasto-Dio-Dada Drama have made the connection between it and Baader's earlier career as an architect who specialized in mausoleums and funereal architecture. 35 As noted earlier, the Plasto-Dio-Dada Drama was to be considered "Dada monumental architecture" and it contained numerous references to recent building programs in Berlin. The image of a tower or pyramid that it conjures up is very much connected to his earlier visionary projects such as the Cosmic Temple Pyramid which he planned in 1906 ( 9). This unfeasible construction of colossal size (1000m wide at the base and 1500m high) was to contain "free universities, libraries and archives, modern world museums and world collections, arenas and plazas for international games, music festivals and dramas, public parks, pilgrimage centers, garden cities, and villas and gardens and forests and fields and mountains and meadows and steams and lakes and rivers and the sea." 36 The pyramid was the ultimate collection of world culture and knowledge, a Gesamtkunstwerk of astonishing ambition. It was also, as Baader conceded, "a new Tower of Babel," an image I would suggest is preserved in the Plasto-Dio-Dada Drama.
Baader's response to modern architecture appears to have been drawn largely from the satirical writer Paul Scheerbart. From the 1890s onwards, Scheerbart had been developing in his blackly comic novels the image of a new fantastic architecture of color and glass. Combining apocalyptic with utopian themes, he dreamt of crystal palaces set on mountain tops constructed through the force of sheer genius. He appears in Baader's text in the third story: "Paul Scheerbart pulls up in a coach of crystal and lies down--as a bomb--beside the dusty crate of architecture," possibly a reference to Scheerbart's death in 1915. 37 Baader is reputed to have known him well, and it is likely that he was mimicking the megalomaniacal characters of Scheerbart's novels when he appointed himself President of the Globe. 38 Scheerbart had also come up with the vision of the Earth as a star, Der Stern Erde, which Baader used in his later cosmologies. Baader also took over Scheerbart's adoption of a monistic philosophy and rejection of the Christian explanation of death, an idea which has interesting implications for the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama. As mentioned before, the fifth story is not conceived by Baader as the end of the narrative. Above it he imagines the cylinder soaring into the sky from which he broadcasts "into the ether the final redemption from suffering and death." The spiral form of the assemblage is important for developing its energy to continue ever upwards, spinning by force of its own momentum. The inspiration for this idea may well have been derived from Scheerbart's 1910 novel Das Perpetuum Mobile, which recounts in first person form the attempts of its narrator to invent a machine which conserves all of its energy and keeps moving eternally. As he steadily approaches bankruptcy, the narrator fantasizes more and more on the potential of such a device to solve all the world's problems, but also to conquer death as we know it, finally introducing the image of the Earth Star as the ultimate perpetuum mobile. 39 Hanne Bergius, in her account of Baader's family history, tells us that his father was a carpenter who went bankrupt in 1891 after neglecting his work in favor of trying to build a similar device. Once again we are faced with a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, as Scheerbart could have taken the plot of his book from Baader's own life.
Finally, it has not gone unnoticed that the form of the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama bears an uncanny similarity to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, both in its tower form and the dynamic rotational aspect. There is no evidence to suggest that Baader may have seen a photograph of the model that Tatlin had recently completed, but a written description of Tatlin's project had been published in Germany shortly before the opening of the Dada Fair. Konstantin Umanskij's Neue Kunst in Russland1914-1919 has long been acknowledged as the source for the placard displayed at the fair of "Die Kunst ist tot--Es lebe die neue Maschinenkunst Tatlins" ("Art is dead--long live Tatlin's new machine art"), but the text also commented on the enormous scale of Tatlin's project and his plans for it to contain a radio station, cinemas, telegraph and space for art exhibitions. 40
The synchronicity between Baader and Tatlin may also be explained by their common adoption of the Eiffel Tower as image of modern engineering and architectural ambition. While this may be rather more literal in Tatlin's case, it is interesting to note Baader's incorportation of Henri Rousseau's Self-Portrait into the collage Club der Blauen Milchstrasse of 1920 ( 10). 41 Here, Raoul Hausmann's face has been inserted in place of Rousseau's and the famous background, which included the Eiffel Tower, has been partially covered over by Baader's leaflet protesting against the constitution of the Weimar republic and declaring himself President of the Globe. Also included in the collage is a reproduction of the Cosmic Temple Pyramid in the top left hand corner, and in the lower right a flyer explaining the significance of the Handbuch des Oberdadaismus, Baader's version of the Bible. On the right of the collage, emanating from behind Hausmann/Rousseau, and where we would have originally seen the Eiffel Tower, is a cone reaching up into the heavens and to a cosmological ying/yang symbol. In the same way that Tatlin attempted to make the Monument to the Third International calendric and astronomically aligned, both he and Baader produced readings of the Eiffel Tower that were thoroughly utopian rather than concerned for the practical engineering possibilities. This was to be architecture that could relieve mankind from the alienation of urban life by reconnecting it to the cosmos rather than increase its disempowerment in the face of technology.
Furthermore, as we trace the passage of communication in the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama from phonetics to journalism, we should not forget the aerial at the summit that would transform these words into radio signals that could be broadcast into the ether. The Eiffel Tower was used in its earliest years for meteorological experiments and as a giant aerial. Tatlin took up the theme to suggest that the message of international communism could be broadcast from his colossal tower across otherwise insurmountable boundaries. If Baader's monument is viewed as a pyramid and his background as a designer of mausoleums is borne in mind, then it may be that the route of the spiral is meant to suggest the transformation of matter into invisible energy. Given that we have been obliged to consider this as Baader's autobiography, the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama becomes a tomb which will preserve his presence after his death. However, its ephemeral nature contradicts everything that a tomb should be; instead we are left with the conclusion that Baader is commenting on his own transformation into a trail of newspaper headlines, into a set of references in the media--into what he has in fact become almost half a century after his death.
We have clearly seen that beyond its reputation as the largest, most audacious assemblage of the 1920 Dada Fair, the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was also an object loaded with meaning rather than the unintelligible heap it has previously been taken to be. Moreover, it was aimed at a very particular urban audience, the tabloid reading Berliner, and used visual strategies adopted from montage that related very specifically to the presentation of narrative in new media such as film. Spatial and temporal narratives connected the assemblage to the topography of the city center and represented the manner in which the contemporary subject navigated it. Most importantly, the Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama presented itself a perpetuum mobile not because it actually moved, but because it was projected into the future as an object through which Baader would be remembered. If the main message of the Dada Fair has been read until now as the death of art, the staging of the death of the author and his resurrection as a media construction which Baader enacted through this assemblage will ultimately be seen as far more radical.
Michael White is a lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. He is currently completing a book on De Stijl and Dutch modernism for Manchester University Press.
1.  Untersuchungen zur Fotomontage(Münster: Lilt-Verlag, 1981) and Maud Lavin, Cut with the kitchen knife: the Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven & London: Yale, 1993).
2. Helen Adkins, "Erste Internationale Dada-Messe," in Berlinische Galerie, Stationen der Moderne(Berlin: Nicolaischer Verlag, 1988), 167. Eberhard Roters, Berlin 1910-1933: Die visuellen Künste (Berlin: Kunstbuch Berlin, 1983), 96. Stephen C. Foster, "Johannes Baader: The Complete Dada," in Dada/Dimensions, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), 266.
3. Timothy O. Benson, "Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin Dada," Art Journal46.1 (Spring 1987): 52. Hanne Bergius, "Architecture as the Dionysian-Apollonian Process of Dada," in Alexandre Kosuth & Irving Wolrath eds., Nietzsche and An Architecture of our Minds, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999, henceforth abbreviated as NAAOM), 127.
4. "Dadaistische Monumental-Architektur in fünf Stockwerken, 3 Anlagen, 1 Tunnel, 2 Aufzügen und 1 Cylinderschluß. Das Erdgeschoß oder der Fußboden ist die prädestinierte Bestimmung vor der Geburt und gehört nicht zur Sache.
Die Beschreibung der Stockwerke:
Überstock: Der Zylinder schraubt sich in den Himmel und verkündet Wiederauferstehung Deutschlands durch Lehrer Hagendorfs und sein Lesepult"; catalogue number 174 of the Dada Fair 1920, reprinted in Hanne Bergius, ed., Johannes Baader, Oberdada: Schriften, Manifeste, Flugblätter, Billets, Werke und Taten (Lahn-Gießen: Anabas Verlag, 1977), 90, hereafter cited within the text as JBO. All translations from the German are mine.
5. "Nähere Beschreibung" (Johannes Baader, "Deutschlands Größe und Untergang, oder die Phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada," in Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada Almanach (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), 92; hereafter cited as "DGUU")
6. "Um das Pulverfaß kriecht in der fälschlichen Irreführung der Voraussetzung einer ins Weite reisenden Zukunft zwischen Schillers Gedichten mit dem Motto 'Dada siegt' und der Originalausgabe der Vierzehn Briefe Christi der D-Zug Kaiser Wilhelms des Großartigen, der, symbolish umschrieben, durch die Rundschiene, immer nur das Pulverfaß umkreist, bis er schließlich zur Explosion kommt" ("DGUU").
7. "Aber zuvor erwächst im Tunnel des todgeweihten Reiches die ganze Epoche der künstlerischen Gesamtkultur. Ein Museum der Meisterwerke aller Jahrhunderte eröffnet sich unter dem Zucken der altgermanischen Mausefalle" ("DGUU," 91-92).
8.  Als die den Oberdada packen, vergewaltigen, überwältigen, erscheint das Phantom und Resultat des Weltkrieges" ("DGUU," 92).
9. "Der Weltkrieg ist ein Krieg der Zeitungen. In Wirklichkeit hat er niemals existiert" ("DGUU," 94). Baader's attitude to the press could well have been derived from Oswald Spengler. In The Decline of the West, Spengler discussed the parallels between military and communications technology, concluding that: "Now the press campaign appears as the prolongation--or the preparation--of war by other means, and in the course of the nineteenth century the strategy of outpost ts, feints, surprises, assaults, is developed to such a degree that a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired--because the Press has won it meantime." Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, volume two: Perspectives of World History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), 461. See also note 29 below.
10. "Hier von diesem Zylinder, auf den Flügeln von Hagendorfs Lesepult funke ich in den Aether, die letzte Erlösung vom Lied und dem Tode" ("DGUU," 95).
11.  / Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen / Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken." Jakob van Hoddis "Weltende" Die Aktion 1911, reprinted in Michael Hamburger, German Poetry 1910-1975 (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977), 83
12. See Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and his Times (London: The Cresset Press, 1964), 356.
13. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20.
14. On the importance of Potzdamer Platz for the "new journalism" see Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, 108-10.
15. "Störung des Gottesdienstes im Dom," Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung (18 November 1918), "Der Oberdada im Dom," BZ am Mittag (18 November 1918), "Zwischenfall im Dom," Der Tag (18 November 1918).
16. "Johannes Baader: Der Oberdada gestorben," 8 Uhr-Abendblatt (2 April 1919), "Der Oberdada im Jenseits," BZ am Mittag (11 November 1919).
17. "Er gibt keine Ruhe. Der Oberdada schreibt uns: Das Manuskript des Oberdada verloren. Als der Oberdada nach seiner Himmelfahrt am 13.  Der Finder wird gebeten, das Manuskript des "Oberdada" an den Verlag Ernst Rowohlt, Berlin W.35, Potsdamerstr. 123/b gegen oberdadaistische Belohnung abzuliefern." Johannes Baader, "Das Manuskript des Oberdada verloren," Berlin Börsen-Courier (19 May 1920), BZ am Mittag (20 May 1920), reprinted in Bergius, JBO, 96-97.
18. "Man muß sich von vorne herein darüber klar sein, daß diese Person Baader, die im Dom eine Rede hielt, in der Nationalversammlung Dada-Reklamezettel abwarf, nebenbei das Äußere eines behäbigen schwäbischen Pastors oder Kleinbürgers hat, mit dem Fimmel der Gottseligkeit kleine Geldgeschäfte zu machen sucht." Hans Baumann, "Eine dadaistische Privatangelegenheit," Dada Almanach, 31.
19. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 67.
20. Foster, "Johannes Baader: The Complete Dada," 252.
21. In the corner of the edition of Die Pleite in the assemblage, a skull and other body fragments can be made out from which we can identify this as the April 1919 edition featuring Grosz's drawing "Prost Noske!--das Proletariat ist entwaffnet!" (Cheers Noske!--the proletariat has been disarmed!) as the cover.
22. Helmut & Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerrotype (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956), 16.
23. Helmut & Alison Gernsheim, Daguerre, 45.
24. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992), 6.
25. Walter Benjamin, "Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 150.
26. "Goethe gelangt nach Weimar, legt seine italienische Reise auf Lehrer Hagendorfs Lesepult und erklärt dem schwäbischen Pastor: 'Ohne dieses Lesepult kann überhaupt keine Literatur verstanden werden'" ("DGUU," 93-94).
27. Raoul Hausmann, quoted in Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 124.
28. K. Michael Hays, Modernity and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992).
29. Hanne Bergius notes that Hausmann had Also sprach Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, Götzen-DämmerungandDie fröhliche Wissenschaft on his shelves ("Architecture as the Dionysian-Apollonian Process of Dada," in Kosuth & Wolrath, eds., NAAOM, 115).
30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 38.
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 44.
32.
33. Léon Ploegaerts, "Van de Velde and Nietzsche; or, The Search for a New Architectural Style for the Man of the Future," in Kosuth & Wolrath, eds., NAAOM, 249.
34. In the notes accompanying the recently translated version of the Dada Almanach it is suggested that the division into five stories parodies "Spengler's Decline of the West, in which the history of mankind is divided into five developmental stages." (Malcolm Green, ed., Dada Almanac [London: Atlas Press, 1993], 98). I am certain that Spengler is one of Baader's reference points but The Decline of the West uses period divisions of four (world history as the seasons) or three (preculture, culture and civilization).
35. Benson, "Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin Dada," 52.
36. "Große, völlig freie Universitäten, Bibliotheken und Archive, moderne Weltmuseen oder Weltsammlungen, Arenen und Plätze für Völkerspiele, Musikfeste und dramatische Festspiele, öffentliche Parks, Wohlfahrtsanlagen, Frühlingswohnstätten und Villen und Gärten und Wälder und Felder und Berge und Auen und Bäche und Seen und Ströme und das Meer." Johannes Baader, "Architekt Johannes Baader," in Bergius, JBO, 11.
37. "Auch Paul Scheerbart kommt in einer gläsernen Kristallkutsche und legt sich als Bombe neben den verstaubten Architekturkorb" ("DGUU," 94).
38. See Green, ed., Dada Almanac, 101, note 48.
39. Paul Scheerbart, Das Perpetuum Mobile (Leipzig: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1910).
40. Konstantin Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914-1919(Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1920), 32.
41. The montage of Hausmann's face onto Rousseau's Self-Portrait was first carried out by John Heartfield and George Grosz in 1920 which they titled Corrected Self-Portrait. It is one of a series of games concerning authorship amongst the Berlin Dadas at the time. Hausmann was himself responsible for using Grosz's profile for the montage The Art Critic, also of 1920, which was then stamped with Grosz's name into the bargain. The reappropriation of Grosz and Heartfield's montage by Baader further complicates the issue.