49. Sackville West, "What Do Women Want from Books?" Vogue, early October 1923. An editorial by Edith Sitwell, "A Defense of the Theory that Male Technique Is Entirely Unsuitable to the Poetry of Women," Vogue, early March 1925, similarly speaks to this literary interest in maintaining a sexual boundary, making the claim that only male poets are able to utilize free verse effectively. Sitwell sees H. D. as an "exception" to this rule, rather than an occasion to interrogate the premise of her argument. Similarly, in Herbert Farjeon, "The Mystery of the Woman Playwright," Vogue, 5 March 1930, the notion that female authorship is inherently limited remains unquestioned: "Why is it that women (speaking generally rather than particularly) cannot write plays? . . . What bluestocking even with a room of her own in Blooomsbury can claim to have achieved in drama anything approaching the position of Virginia Woolf?" Throughout Vogue's pages, Woolf is celebrated as an exception to the rule of female mediocrity.
50. Vita Sackville West, review of Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, by D. H. Lawrence, Dark Laughter, by Sherwood Anderson, Ann Lee's and Other Stories, by Elizabeth Bowen, and The Venetian Glass Nephew, by Elinor Wylie, Vogue, late July 1926.
51. Vita Sackville West, "The Edwardian Below Stairs," Vogue, 25 November 1931.
52. Clive Bell, Civilization: An Essay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1928), 210, hereafter abbreviated C; "The Balance of Power," Vogue, early May 1921. This article contrasts male and female differences through their relation to technology, arguing that "men have mechanics" while women have only "machinations." Elsewhere, however, the magazine repeatedly appeals to women's interest in machinery; Vogue is packed with ads for refrigerators and electrical lights, as well as articles on airplane travel and automobile ownership. In general, the magazine eroticizes women's relationship to technology whenever possible. Thus, for example, an article on the woman driver's point of view features a secret car compartment that opens to reveal a powder-puff, mirror, and cigarette case, with the following copy: "the only thing nowadays that may cause the slightest perplexity to the woman motorist . . . is the question of lubrication" ("Round and About," Vogue, early November 1922).
53. The term "Bloomsberries" was coined by Molly MacCarthy in 1910; see Marler, Bloomsbury Pie, 7.
54. Among the women featured on the magazine's "Women of Distinction" page (early October 1924) are H. D., Stein, and Rebecca West, none of whom, like Woolf elsewhere, returns the camera's gaze. In contrast, a 1923 photograph of D. H. Lawrence--in a suit and tie, arms folded, gazing seriously into the viewer's eyes--exemplifies the magazine's representation of the male artist as a re of authority. This is consistent with the magazine's photographic representation of the male members of Bloomsbury. An unsigned essay on new books, published in early October 1923, features a photograph of Clive Bell, wearing a hat, gloves, overcoat, and walking stick, staring directly into the camera. Beneath his image is a photo of David Garnett, similarly suited and also gazing at the reader, and beside him is a snapshot of Osbert Sitwell, also in formal attire, with folded arms and a professorial expression.
55. Raymond Williams cites Leonard Woolf, who acknowledges the persistent sexual asymmetry of the Group: "Of the 13 persons mentioned above [as members of Old Bloomsbury] three are women and ten men; of the ten men nine had been at Cambridge" ("BF," 162).
56. Janet Lyon, "Militant Discourse, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragettes and Vorticists before the War," differences 4, no. 2 : 124 nn. 12, 14; 127 n. 32, discusses this modernist critique of English art in general, and Fry's Omega Workshop in particular.
57. Both Fry and Bell, unlike the women artists they wrote about, were inducted into Vogue's "Hall of Fame": Fry in late August 1924, "because his Vision and Design is a book that no educated person can leave unread"; and Bell in late March 1925, for being one of the preeminent art and cultural critics in Europe.
58. Roger Fry, "Vanessa Bell," Vogue, early February 1926.
59. "The Contemporary Style in Decoration," Vogue, early January 1924. Elliott and Wallace, "Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(s') Arts," esp. 76-89, provides an insightful reading of Vanessa Bell's marginality and professional insecurities, especially in relation to Duncan Grant. For other examples of Vogue's representation of women artists, see "The Women's International Art Club," late April 1920--in which women's presumed "lack" is the premise of the essay--and "The Feminine in Art," early March 1922, which makes the case that "typically feminine" paintings are delicate, in good taste, and reflect a feeling for that which is small, immediate, and domestic. In other words, "feminine" artistic products conform to Vogue's dominant characterization of the female body.
60. Augustus John, "The Woman Artist," Vogue, 18 April 1928. Given Vogue's anxiety about women's professionalism, it makes sense that the magazine would only select paintings by both Bell and Marie Laurencin that reflected a "feminine" perspective. It is certainly true that a large number of Bell's paintings are of mothers, children, and domestic objects, and Laurencin herself identified her style as quintessentially feminine. The magazine echoes this sentiment, putting Laurencin's drawings on its covers in the 1920s and gushing about her work: "So feminine, so personal is she that we cannot help thinking of her as the sister of Sappho" (Polly Flinders, "Marie Laurencin: A Graceful and Melancholy Temperament Reflected in Pictures of Young Girls, Nymphs, Nosegays, and Wild Animals," Vogue, late January 1925). Despite this surprising allusion, there is no overt or subtle reference to homoeroticism in the evaluation of either woman's paintings. Despite Fry's critique of the double standard, he still attends to "the woman's point of view" in Bell's work. For a discussion of the work of women artists and modernism, see Gil Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and "Feminine" Art, 1900 to the late 1920s (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).
61. Fry, "Vanessa Bell."
62. Clive Bell, "The Allied Artists at the Leicester Galleries: Some Notes on the Work of the Modern English School of Artists at Their First Exhibition in London," Vogue, late May 1926.
63. Amber Blanco White, review of Hunting the Highbrow, by Leonard Woolf, in "Turning Over New Leaves," Vogue, late April 1927.
64. Leonard Woolf, Hunting the Highbrow (London: Hogarth, 1927), 20; hereafter abbreviated HH.
65. Robert Graves, Impenetrability (London: Hogarth, 1927), 30-1; hereafter abbreviated I.
66. Leonard Woolf, "New Books for the Morning-Room Table," Vogue, late January 1925.
67. Deirdre Lynch, "At Home with Jane Austen," in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 168-9.
68. Aldous Huxley, "Chains," Vogue, early September 1923.
69. "What the English Read," Vogue, 13 June 1928.
70. Lesley Blanch, "To Have and to Hold? Some Aspects of the Raging Controversy on Whether Treasures Should Be Risked in the Raids," Vogue, September 1941.
71. According to Leonard Woolf, Bloomsbury denied its existence as a formal group, alleged to have no common theory, and "were not proselytizers, missionaries, crusaders, or even propagandists" (Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964], 25).
72. Duncan Grant quoted in Virginia Woolf to Logan Pearsall Smith, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1923-1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), 3:158; hereafter abbreviated L.
73. John M. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 108-11, discusses the massive British Empire Exhibition. See also John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977), 126-9; and A History of Wembley, ed. Geoffrey Hewlett (London: Brent Library Service, 1979), 173-87. Hewlett's book points out that only three colonies--Ascension Island, Gambia, and British North Borneo--were not represented at Wembley .
74. From captions to two photographs that accompany Osbert Sitwell, "The Empire Exhibition," Vogue, late June 1924.
75. Street does not write explicitly about the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, but his discussion of the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 elucidates the ways in which the exhibition, and the photographic images and postcards that accompanied it, "[are] to be understood within this construction of a modern, civilized self in contrast with a primitive 'Other'" (Brian Street, "British Popular Anthropology: Exhibiting and Photographing the Other," in Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], 126). Street argues that these "ethnographic shows were seen not simply as 'entertainment' but as having educational value: through them British society learnt about the 'other' peoples of the earth. Members of 'savage' countries were taken to England and other European societies in remarkable numbers to be viewed as specimens or zoo-like exhibits, to satisfy curiosity and to reinforce the confidence of the public in their own 'progress'" . Geoffrey Hewlett reveals that several exhibits housed not reproductions but indigenous peoples, such as the British Guiana and West Indies display that featured "natives . . . working at various crafts," or the "spectacular" India Pavilion, in which "Tibetan dancers gave a continuous performance" (Hewlett, A History of Wembley, 181).
76. "The British Empire Exhibition: Some Account of the Wonders Now in Course of Preparation at Wembley, Which Promises to be England's Most Attractive Area in 1924," Vogue, late March 1924. A universe unto itself, Wembley extended over fifteen miles of roadways with names chosen by Rudyard Kipling; the exhibition grounds also featured art galleries, a small basilica, an amusement park, and even a scenic railway. John Allwood provides some interesting details about Britain's self-promotion at Wembley, pointing out that one of the most widely remembered exhibits was a giant statue in the Canadian Pavilion of the Prince of Wales, President of the Exhibition, made entirely of butter--a colonial product. He also reveals that the official symbol for the exhibition, a lion whose design reflected the current preoccupation with "things Egyptian," was widely critiqued on the grounds that it was "very un-English and, therefore, exceedingly disturbing" (Allwood, The Great Exhibitions, 129).
77. The Woolfs visited the British Empire Exhibition on 29 May 1924; see The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), 2:305. Woolf's essay, "Thunder at Wembley," was first published on 28 June 1924. In this piece Woolf pits nature against the presumed culture of Wembley, imagining its destruction at the hands of "some malignant power" that arises, undetected, out of the sky, and ends with a conflagration: "Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror. . . . Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. . . . Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom. . . . The empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins" (Woolf, "Thunder at Wembley," The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie [London: The Hogarth Press, 1994], 3:413). We can situate Woolf's essay within the larger context of what John M. MacKenzie describes as the intellectual elite's hostility toward Wembley: "The exhibition was derided by intellectuals, who formed the WGTW, Won't Go to Wembley, Society" (Imperialism and Popular Culture, 8). An example of this critique in Vogue is an article by Osbert Sitwell, which denounces the Exhibition on the grounds that it eclipses Britain's role in the "smothering" of native cultures. However, the proliferation of visual images of England's imperial strength is so overwhelming that his comment is ultimately ineffectual. Even Sitwell acknowledges that there are multiple "pleasures to be found" among the displays, where a variety of manufactured goods derived from colonial raw materials were for sale (Osbert Sitwell, "The Empire Exhibition," Vogue, late June 1924).
78. See "For the Hostess: Cooking within the Empire, Recipes and Menus," Vogue, late July 1927. The Empire dinner in this article highlights Baron of Australian lamb, Indian rice, chicken with Scotch cream, trout with sauce from Cypriot wine, and peach flambé with South African brandy.
79. Regarding the development of Bloomsbury, Leonard Woolf writes, "We were out to construct something new; we were in the van of the builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and beauty. It was all tremendously exhilarating" (Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960], 161).
80. See Leonard Woolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1920; New York: Howard Fertig, 1968); idem, Economic Imperialism (1920; New York: Howard Fertig, 1970); and idem, Imperialism and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928). For an analysis of Bloomsbury's impassioned advocacy of anti-imperialism, see Patrick Brantlinger "'The Bloomsbury Fraction' versus War and Empire," in Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature, ed. Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 149-67. For reference to the Woolf's investment in "imperial ventures," see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 549.
81. For a discussion of the influence of the Oriental look on fashion during this period, see Peter Wollen, "Out of the Past: Fashion/Orientalism/the Body," in Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 1-34.
82. "The Truth about Jazz," Vogue, late August 1926. Only a few articles in the 1920s highlight black performers, and in each case the representation is rife with racial stereotypes. "The Negro de Nos Jours," Vogue, late February 1925, contains several caricatures of men and women performing the Charleston; the text reads, in part: "In the 18th century we made money out of negroes. In the 20th they make money out of us. We used to send them missionaries, now we send them telegrams." The article, "Enter, The New Negro, a Distinctive Type," Vogue, late April 1925, asserts that "the Negro . . . no longer has to be either a Pullman car porter, or over-fond of watermelons, in order to be a successful type on our stage." In "The Truth About Jazz," jazz is revealed to be a "return to Nature," but not "the elegiac Nature of . . . our eighteenth century ancestors," but "Nature red in tooth and claw, the Nature of the jungle and the swamp" where the "penalty for a moment's negligence" is death. For a discussion of Josephine Baker's performance that foregrounds her self-conscious manipulation of cultural tropes, see Wendy Martin, "Remembering the Jungle: Josephine Baker and Modernist Parody," in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 310-25.
83. "She Was Our South Africa, Africa All Over," Vogue, late April 1925; Rosita Forbes, "A Vision of North Africa," Vogue, late January 1925. The author of "She Was Our South Africa" writes that in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa there are "indigenous peoples still representing mankind in its infancy, our Paleolithic ancestors." For a similar perspective, see "Kenya Colony: The Simple Life," Vogue, 18 March 1931.
84. "South Africa, the Land of Gold and Sunshine," Vogue, late February 1924.
85. See Inderpal Grewel, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 82.
86. "She Was Our South Africa."
87. "The Truth About Jazz"; "The Art of Duncan Grant," Vogue, late February 1923.
88. Edwin Muir, quoted in Georgina Howell, In Vogue: Six Decades of Fashion (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 53.
89. Edwin Muir, review of Nigger Heaven, by Carl van Vechten, Vogue, late January 1927.
90. "The Truth About Jazz."
91. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 85-104, devotes a chapter to Roger Fry's politics and aesthetics. Torgovnick argues that reading Fry on the primitive is "like witnessing a tug of war: on the one side . . . is the innovative Fry, free of contemporary prejudices; on the other side . . . a Fry who thinks and speaks in the rhetoric of colonialism" . Despite Fry's limitations, as Torgovnick points out, he was the premier art theorist in Britain and virtually the first who was willing to follow the French avant-garde in treating African objects as art. Christopher Reed, A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 232-45, offers a fresh interpretation of Fry and discusses the critic's relation to the primitive. Although Vogue neglects Fry's essays on African art, it does celebrate Carl Einstein's Negerplastik as the definitive book on "negro sculpture," applauding the text for being the first to discuss at length the importance of African art even though "its intrinsic value is still less appreciated in England" than on the continent. See Einstein's appearance in "The Hall of Fame," Vogue, late December 1925.
92. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: Brentano, 1920), 103.
93. "A Vision of North Africa," Vogue, late January 1925.
94. Duncan Grant's painting The Harem appears in Clive Bell, "The Allied Artists at the Leicester Galleries"
95. Edwin Muir, review of Passages to Tehran, by Vita Sackville West, and Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, Vogue, late January 1927.
96. I discuss at length Woolf's alliance with Vogue's dominant construction of 'the civilized' as white, English, and upper-class in my "Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue." I here argue that "John Mytton" is Woolf's Vogue essay that most explicitly invokes primitivist discourse, but I also demonstrate how she trades on the idea of the Other in her additional contributions to the magazine.
97. These remarks are from Bell's chapter, "How to Make Civilization." He continues that the working class man
likes his barbarism well enough. Only he would like a little more of it. . . . His notion of a glorious revolution is . . . slipping into some rich man's shoes. . . . The revolutionary coal-miner conceives no better life than that of . . . rum and milk before breakfast . . . a day spent in pursuing and killing, or in some bloodless pastime, champagne at dinner, and long cigars after, an evening at the movies or music-hall, with an occasional reading of Miss Corelli and Michael Arlen . . . and all the time a . . . genuine detestation of foreigners, artists, and high-brows. [C, 263]
98. "Turning Over New Leaves," Vogue, early October 1923.
99. I focus on Bell's remarks in Civilization because he is more direct in his assessment of the problems with civilization here. In his dedicatory preface to Woolf--his "dearest Virginia"--Bell situates the book in relation to On British Freedom, seeing the two as one conceptual piece; indeed, the conclusion of On British Freedom reverberates throughout the introduction to Civilization. Bell actually calls laborers "slaves," then qualifies his statement by saying--"people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others" (C, 209-10).
100. Bell writes,
It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities. . . . A civilizing nucleus becomes civilizing when it is sufficiently numerous and powerful to colour the mass. [C, 171-2]
For a discussion of Woolf's views on civilization, see Shaffer, "Civilization in Bloomsbury," 73-87. Shaffer discusses Bell's theory of civilization and its relation to Bloomsbury; he also details Woolf's ambivalence towards Bell's controversial ideas. Although Woolf was privately critical of Bell's book, it is interesting to note the parallel between his reference to fifth-century Athens as "civilization . . . at its best" (C, 152), and her comments that, "Roger [Fry] is the only civilized man I have ever met. . . . If Bloomsbury had produced only Roger, it would be on a par with Athens at its prime" (L, 3:566).
101. Bell argues that in order to maintain this nucleus of civilized individuals, society must support "inequality as a means to a good," but he goes on to stipulate that money alone is not an adequate determinant of who should comprise the leisured class (C, 214). For Bell, what is required in addition to material security and leisure is the "will to civilization," or, as he puts it, "the desire for pleasure refined and intellectualized" (C, 256).
102. Aldous Huxley, "The Dangers of Work," Vogue, late April 1924.
103. Bell is explicit about this point:
It is in the mind of man that we must seek the cause and origin of civilization. Not laws nor customs nor morals nor institutions nor mechanical contrivances, as we discovered from a glance at savage communities and the British colonies, can create it: such things cannot make civilization because they are made by men. It is the mind, the individual mind, which conceives, creates, and carries it out. It is the influence of a number of minds, thinking and feeling sympathetically, which fashions, unconsciously and unintentionally as a rule, societies and ages. [C, 172]
For a discussion of this point, see Shaffer, "Civilization in Bloomsbury," in esp. 83.
104. Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, "Modernist Anomalies: Bloomsbury and Gender," Feminist Art News 3, no. 4, 22, illustrates how, although Williams discusses gender relations within Bloomsbury, he leaves "the notion of the kind of social progress achieved by such fractions ungendered."
105. Woolf writes, "if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical" (Virginia Woolf, A Room of Own's One [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957], 101).
106. Shaffer, "Civilization in Bloomsbury," 87. For a discussion of Woolf's view that "the ultimate warfare must be . . . waged by women against the male ideology," see Brantlinger, "'The Bloomsbury Fraction' versus War and Empire," 151.
107. See Kate Flint, "Virginia Woolf and the General Strike," Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literature and Criticism 36, no. 4 (October 1986): 332, where this passage is also cited.
In this essay, I wish to reassess the juncture of cinema and modernism, and I will do so by moving from the example of early Soviet cinema to a seemingly less likely case, that of the classical Hollywood film. My inquiry is inspired by two complementary sets of questions: one pertaining to what cinema studies can contribute to our understanding of modernism and modernity; the other aimed at whether and how the perspective of modernist aesthetics may help us to elucidate and reframe the history and theory of cinema. The juncture of cinema and modernism has been explored in a number of ways, ranging from research on early cinema's interrelations with the industrial-technological modernity of the late nineteenth century, through an emphasis on the international art cinemas of both interwar and new wave periods, to speculations on the cinema's implication in the distinction between the modern and the postmodern. 1 My focus here will be more squarely on mid-twentieth-century modernity, roughly from the 1920s through the 1950s--the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation--and the contemporaneity of a particular kind of cinema, mainstream Hollywood, with what has variously been labelled "high" or "hegemonic modernism."
Whether or not one agrees with the postmodernist challenge to modernism and modernity at large, it did open up a space for understanding modernism as a much wider, more diverse phenomenon, eluding any single-logic genealogy that runs, say, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka to Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Arnold Schönberg to Karlheinz Stockhausen. For more than a decade now scholars have been dislodging that genealogy and delineating alternative forms of modernism, both in the West and in other parts of the world, that vary according to their social and geopolitical locations, often conred along the axis of post/coloniality, and according to the specific subcultural and indigenous traditions to which they responded. 2 In addition to opening up the modernist canon, these studies assume a notion of modernism that is "more than a repertory of artistic styles," more than sets of ideas pursued by groups of artists and intellectuals. 3 Rather, modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed. In other words, just as modernist aesthetics are not reducible to the category of style, they tend to blur the boundaries of the institution of art in its traditional, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century incarnation that turns on the ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the distinction of "high" vs. "low," of autonomous art vs. popular and mass culture. 4
Focusing on the nexus between modernism and modernity, then, also implies a wider notion of the aesthetic, one that situates artistic practices within a larger history and economy of sensory perception that Walter Benjamin for one saw as the decisive battleground for the meaning and fate of modernity. 5 While the spread of urban-industrial technology, the large-scale disembedding of social (and gender) relations, and the shift to mass consumption entailed processes of real destruction and loss, there also emerged new modes of organizing vision and sensory perception, a new relationship with "things," different forms of mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity, temporality, and reflexivity, a changing fabric of everyday life, sociability, and leisure. From this perspective, I take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am referring to this kind of modernism as "vernacular" (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term "popular") because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability. In the latter sense, finally, this essay will also address the vexed issue of Americanism, the question of why and how an aesthetic idiom developed in one country could achieve transnational and global currency, and how this account might add to and modify our understanding of classical cinema.
I begin with an example that takes us back to one standard paradigm of twentieth-century modernism: Soviet cinema and the context of Soviet avant-garde aesthetics. At the 1996 festival of silent film in Pordenone, the featured program was a selection of early Soviet films made between 1918-1924, that is, before the great era of montage cinema, before the canonical works of Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Alexandr Dovzhenko. The question that guided the viewing of these films was, of course, how Russian cinema got from the Old to the New within a rather short span of time; how the sophisticated mise-en-scene cinema of the Czarist era, epitomized by the work of Yevgenij Bauer, was displaced by Soviet montage aesthetics. Many of the films shown confirmed what film historians, following Lev Kuleshov, had vaguely assumed before: that this transformation was mediated, to a significant degree, by the impact of Hollywood. American films began to dominate Russian screens as early as 1915 and by 1916 had become the main foreign import. Films made during the years following 1917, even as they stage revolutionary plots for "agit" purposes, may display interesting thematic continuities with Czarist cinema (in particular a strong critique of patriarchy) and still contain amazing compositions in depth. 6 Increasingly, however, the mise-en-scene is broken down according to classical American principles of continuity editing, spatio-temporal coherence, and narrative causality. A famous case in point is Kuleshov's 1918 directorial debut, Engineer Prait's Project, a film that employed Hollywood-style continuity guidelines in a polemical break with the slow pace of Russian "quality pictures." 7 But the "American accent" in Soviet film--a faster cutting rate, closer framing, and the breakdown of diegetic space--was more pervasive and can be found as well, in varying degrees of consistency, in the work of other directors (Vladimir Gardin, Ceslav Sabinskij, Ivan Perestiani). Hyperbolically speaking, one might say that Russian cinema became Soviet cinema by going through a process of Americanization.
To be sure, Soviet montage aesthetics did not emerge fullblown from the encounter with Hollywood-style continuity editing; it is unthinkable without the new avant-garde movements in art and theater, without Constructivism, Suprematism, Productivism, Futurism--unthinkable without a politics of radical transformation. Nor was continuity editing perceived as neutral, as simply the most "efficient" way of telling a story. It was part and parcel of the complex of "Americanism" (or, as Kuleshov referred to it, "Americanitis") that catalyzed debates on modernity and modernist movements in Russia as it did in other countries. 8 As elsewhere, the enthusiasm for things American, tempered by a critique of capitalism, took on a variety of meanings, forms, and functions. Discussing the impact of American on Soviet cinema, Yuri Tsivian distinguishes between two kinds of Americanism: one, stylistic borrowings of the classical kind described above ("American montage," "American foreground"), and two, a fascination with the "lower genres," with adventure serials, detective thrillers, and slapstick comedies that, Tsivian argues, were actually more influential during the transitional years. If the former kind of Americanism aspired to formal standards of narrative efficiency, coherence, and motivation, the latter was concerned with external appearance, the sensual, material surface of American films; their use of exterior locations; their focus on action and thrills, physical stunts and attractions; their tempo, directness, and flatness; their eccentricity and excess of situations over plot. 9
Tsivian analyzes the Americanism of the "lower" genres as an intellectual fashion or taste. Discerning "something of a slumming mentality" in Eisenstein's or FEKS' fascination with "serial queen" melodramas, he situates the preference of Soviet filmmakers for "cinematic pulp fiction" (Victor Shklovsky) in the context of the leftist avant-garde's attack on high art, cultural pretensions, and western ideals of naturalism ("BON," 43). 10 What interests me in this account is less the intellectual and artistic intertext than the connection it suggests, across the distinction, between the two faces of American cinema: the classical norm, as an emergent form that was to dominate domestic as well as foreign markets for decades to come, and the seemingly nonclassical, or less classical, undercurrent of genres that thrive on something other than or, at the very least, oblique to the classical norm. What also interests me in the dynamics of Americanism and Soviet film is the way they urge us to reconsider the relationship between classical cinema and modernism, a relationship that within cinema studies has habitually been thought of as an opposition, as one of fundamentally incompatible registers.
The opposition between classicism and modernism has a venerable history in literature, art, and philosophy, with classicism linked to the model of tradition and modernism to the rhetoric of a break with precisely that tradition. 11 In that general sense, there would be no problem with importing this opposition into the field of cinema and film history, with classical cinema falling on the side of tradition and alternative film practices on the side of modernism. If, however, we consider the cinema as part of the historical formation of modernity, as a larger set of cultural and aesthetic, technological, economic, social, and political transformations, the opposition of classical cinema and modernism, the latter understood as a discourse articulating and responding to modernity, becomes a more complicated issue.
I am using "classical cinema" here as a technical term that has played a crucial part in the formation of cinema studies as an academic discipline. The term came to serve as a foundational concept in the analysis of the dominant form of narrative cinema, epitomized by Hollywood during the studio era. In that endeavor, "classical cinema" referred to roughly the same thing whether you were doing semiotics, psychoanalytic film theory, neoformalist poetics, or revisionist film history. This is not to say that it meant the same thing, and just a brief glimpse at its key moments will illustrate the transvaluations and disjunctures of the term.
Not coincidentally, the reference to Hollywood products as "classical" has a French pedigree. As early as 1926, Jean Renoir uses the phrase "cinematic classicism" (in this case referring to Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch). 12 A more specific usage of the term occurs in Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche's Histoire de cinéma, in particular in the second edition of 1943, revised with a collaborationist bent, where the authors refer to the style evolved in American sound film of 1933-1939 as the "classicism of the 'talkie.'" 13 After the Occupation, critics, notably André Bazin, began to speak of Hollywood filmmaking as "a classical art." By the 1950s, Bazin would celebrate John Ford's Stagecoach as "the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection," comparing the film to "a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position." 14 This classical quality of American film, to quote Bazin's well-known statement, is due not to individual talent but to "the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements." 15
The first major transvaluation of the concept of classical cinema came with post-1968 film theory, in the all-round critique of ideology directed against the very system celebrated by Bazin. In this critique, formulated along Althusserian and Lacanian lines and from marxist and later feminist positions, classical Hollywood cinema was analyzed as a mode of representation that masks the process and fact of production, turns discourse into diegesis, history into story and myth; as an apparatus that sutures the subject in an illusory coherence and identity; and as a system of stylistic strategies that weld pleasure and meaning to reproduce dominant social and sexual hierarchies. 16 The notion of classical cinema elaborated in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinéthique, Screen, Camera Obscura and elsewhere was less indebted to a neoclassicist ideal, as it still was for Bazin and Rohmer, than to the writings of Roland Barthes, in particular S/Z , which attached the label of a "classic," "readerly," ostensibly transparent text to the nineteenth-century realist novel. 17
Another turn in the conception of classical cinema entails the rejection of any evaluative usage of the term, whether celebratory or critical, in favor of a more descriptive, presumably value-free and scientifically valid account. This project has found its most comprehensive realization to date in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson's monumental and impressive study, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 . The authors conceive of classical cinema as an integral, coherent system, a system that interrelates a specific mode of production (based on Fordist principles of industrial organization) and a set of interdependent stylistic norms that were elaborated by 1917 and remained more or less in place until about 1960. The underlying notion of classical film style, rooted in neoformalist poetics and cognitive psychology, overlaps in part with the account of the classical paradigm in 1970s film theory, particularly with regard to principles of narrative dominance, linear and unobtrusive narration centering on the psychology and agency of individual characters, and continuity editing. But where psychoanalytic-semiotic theorists pinpoint unconscious mechanisms of identification and the ideological effects of "realism," Bordwell and Thompson stress thorough motivation and coherence of causality, space, and time; clarity and redundancy in guiding the viewer's mental operations; formal patterns of repetition and variation, rhyming, balance, and symmetry; and overall compositional unity and closure. 18 In Bordwell's formulation, "the principles which Hollywood claims as its own rely on notions of decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool control of the perceiver's response--canons which critics in any medium usually call 'classical'" (CHC, 3-4).
Such a definition is not just generally "classical" but more specifically recalls neoclassicist standards, from seventeenth-century neo-Aristotelian theories of drama to eighteenth-century ideals in music, architecture, and aesthetic theory. 19 (I do not wish to equate eighteenth-century aesthetics at large with the neoclassicist tradition, nor with an ahistorical reduction to neoformalist principles; the eighteenth century was at least as much concerned with affect and effect, with theatricality and sensation, passion and sentiment, as with the balance of form and function.) As in literary and aesthetic antecedents that invoke classical antiquity as a model--recall Stendhal's definition of classicism as a style that "gives the greatest possible pleasure to an audience's ancestors" 20 --the temporal dynamics of the term classical as applied to the cinema is retrospective; the emphasis is on tradition and continuity rather than newness as difference, disruption, and change.
I can see a certain revisionist pleasure in asserting the power and persistence of classical standards in the face of a popular image of Hollywood as anything but decorous, harmonious, traditional, and cool. But how does this help us account for the appeal of films as diverse as Lonesome, Liberty, Freaks, Gold Diggers of 1933, Stella Dallas, Fallen Angel, Kiss Me Deadly, Bigger Than Life, Rock-a-Bye Baby (add your own examples)? And even if we succeeded in showing these films to be constructed on classical principles--which I'm sure can be done--what have we demonstrated? To repeat Rick Altman's question in an essay that challenges Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger's model: "How classical was classical narrative?" 21 Attempts to answer that rhetorical question have focused on what is left out, marginalized or repressed, in the totalizing account of classical cinema--in particular, the strong substratum of theatrical melodrama with its uses of spectacle and coincidence but also genres like comedy, horror, and pornography that involve the viewer's body and sensory-affective responses in ways that may not exactly conform to classical ideals. 22 Also minimized is the role of genre in general, specifically the affective-aesthetic division of labor among genres in structuring the consumption of Hollywood films. An even lesser role is granted to stars and stardom, which cannot be reduced to the narrative function of character and, like genre but even more so, involve the spheres of distribution, exhibition practices, and reception. The Classical Hollywood Cinema explicitly and, it should be said, with self-imposed consistency, brackets the history of reception and film culture--along with the cinema's interrelations with American culture at large.
It is not my intention to contest the achievement of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson's work; the book does illuminate crucial aspects of how Hollywood cinema works and goes a long way toward accounting for the stability and persistence of this particular cultural form. My interest is rather in two questions that the book does not address, or addresses only to close off. One question pertains to the historicity of classical cinema, in particular its contemporaneity with twentieth-century modernisms and modern culture; the other question is to what extent and how the concept can be used to account for Hollywood's worldwide hegemony. To begin with, I am interested in the anachronism involved in asserting the priority of stylistic principles modelled on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neoclassicism. We are dealing with a cultural formation that was, after all, perceived as the incarnation of the modern, an aesthetic medium up-to-date with Fordist-Taylorist methods of industrial production and mass consumption, with drastic changes in social, sexual, and gender relations, in the material fabric of everyday life, in the organization of sensory perception and experience. For contemporaries, Hollywood at its presumably most classical red as the very symbol of contemporaneity, the present, modern times: "this our period," as Gertrude Stein famously put it, "was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production." 23 And it held that appeal not only for avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the United States and the modernizing capitals of the world (Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Bombay) but also for emerging mass publics both at home and abroad. Whatever the economic and ideological conditions of its hegemony--and I wish by no means to discount them--classical Hollywood cinema could be imagined as a cultural practice on a par with the experience of modernity, as an industrially-produced, mass-based, vernacular modernism.
In cinema studies, the juncture of the classical and the modern has, for the most part, been written as a bifurcated history. The critique of classical cinema in 1970s film theory took over a structuralist legacy of binarisms, such as Barthes's opposition between the "readerly" and "writerly," which translated into the binary conception of film practice as either "classical-idealist," that is, ideological, or "modernist-materialist," that is, self-reflexive and progressive. This is particularly the case for the theory and practice of "counter cinema" that David Rodowick has dubbed "political modernism"--from Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Gidal through Noel Burch, Peter Wollen, Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey and others--that owes much to the revival or belated reception of the 1920s and 1930s leftist avant-garde, notably Bertolt Brecht. 24 Moreover, the polarization of classical cinema and modernism seemed sufficiently warranted by skepticism vis-à-vis Hollywood's self-promotion as "international modern," considering how much the celebration of American cinema's contemporaneity, youth, vitality, and directness was part of the industry's own mythology deployed to legitimate cutthroat business practices and the relentless expansion of economic power worldwide.
While Bordwell and Thompson's neoformalist approach is to some extent indebted to the political-modernist tradition, The Classical Hollywood Cinema recasts the binarism of classicism and modernism in two ways. 25 At the level of industrial organization, the modernity of Hollywood's mode of production (Fordism) is subsumed under the goal of maintaining the stability of the system as a whole; thus major technological and economic changes, such as the transition to sound, are discussed in terms of a search for "functional equivalents" by which the institution ensures the overall continuity of the paradigm (CHC, 304). In a similar vein, any stylistic deviations of the modernist kind within classical cinema--whether imports from European avant-garde and art films, native films noir, or work of idiosyncratic auteurs like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger--are cited as proof of the system's amazing appropriative flexibility: "So powerful is the classical paradigm that it regulates what may violate it" (CHC, 81). 26
To be sure, there is ample precedent outside film history for the assimilation of the modern to classical or neoclassicist standards; after all, art historians speak of "classical modernism" (Picasso, de Chirico, Leger, Picabia) and there were related tendencies in music (Reger, Stravinsky, Poulenc, de Faya, to name just a few). 27 In modern architecture (LeCorbusier, Gropius, the Bauhaus), we can see the wedding of machine aesthetics to a notion of presumably natural functions, and in literary modernism, we have self-proclaimed neoclassicists such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Jünger, and Jean Cocteau. In the genealogy of film theory, one of the founding manifestos of classical cinema is Hugo Münsterberg's The Psychology of the Photoplay , a treatise in neo-Kantian aesthetics applied to the cinema. Its author was actually better known for books on psychology and industrial efficiency that became standard works for modern advertising and management. Yet, these examples should be all the more reason for the historian to step back and consider the implications of these junctures that reveal themselves as increasingly less disjunctive with the passing of modernity, the disintegration of hegemonic or high modernism, and the emergence of alternative modernisms from the perspective of postmodernity.
A key problem seems to lie in the very concept of the "classical"--as a historical category that implies the transcendence of mere historicity, as a hegemonic form that claims transcultural appeal and universality. Already in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages, the neoclassicist recourse to tradition, in whatever way it may misread or invent a prior original, does not take us through history, but instead to a transhistorical ideal, a timeless sense of beauty, proportion, harmony, and balance derived from nature. It is no coincidence that the neoformalist account of classical cinema is linked and elaborated in Bordwell's work to the project of grounding film studies in the framework of cognitive psychology. 28 The Classical Hollywood Cinema offers an impressive account of a particular historical formation of the institution of American cinema, tracking its emergence in terms of the evolution of film style (Thompson) and mode of production (Staiger). But once "the system" is in place (from about 1917 on), its ingenuity and stability are attributed to the optimal engagement of mental structures and perceptual capacities that are, in Bordwell's words, "biologically hard-wired" and have been so for tens of thousands of years. 29 Classical narration ultimately amounts to a method of optimally guiding the viewer's attention and maximizing his or her response by way of more intricate plots and emotional tensions. The attempt to account for the efficacy of classical stylistic principles with recourse to cognitive psychology coincides with the effort to expand the reign of classical objectives to types of film practice outside Hollywood that had hitherto been perceived as alternative (most recently in Bordwell's work on Feuillade and other European traditions of staging-in-depth) as well as beyond the historical period demarcated in the book (that is, up to 1960). 30
How can we restore historical specificity to the concept of classical Hollywood cinema? How can we make the anachronistic tension in the combination of neoclassicist style and Fordist mass culture productive for an understanding of both classical Hollywood cinema and mass-mediated modernity? How do we distinguish, within the category of the classical, between natural norm, canonical cultural form, and a rhetorical strategy that perhaps enabled the articulation of something radically new and different under the guise of a continuity with tradition? Can there be an account of classicality that does not unwittingly reproduce, at the level of academic discourse, the universalist norms mobilized not least for purposes of profit, expansion, and ideological containment? Or wouldn't we do better to abandon the concept of classical cinema altogether and instead, as Philip Rosen and others have opted to do, use the more neutral term "mainstream cinema"? 31
For one thing, I don't think that the term "mainstream" is necessarily clearer, let alone neutral or innocent; in addition to the connotation of a quasi-natural flow, it suggests a homogeneity that locates side streams and countercurrents on the outside or margins rather than addressing the ways in which they at once become part of the institution and blur its boundaries. For another, I would argue that, for the time being, classical cinema is still a more precise term because it names a regime of productivity and intelligibility that is both historically and culturally specific, much as it gets passed off as timeless and natural (and the efforts to do so are part of its history). In that sense, however, I take the term to refer less to a system of functionally interrelated norms and a corresponding set of empirical objects than to a scaffold, matrix, or web that allows for a wide range of aesthetic effects and experiences--that is, for cultural conrations that are more complex and dynamic than the most accurate account of their function within any single system may convey and that require more open-ended, promiscuous, and imaginative types of inquiry. 32
From this perspective, one might argue that it would be more appropriate to consider classical Hollywood cinema within the framework of "American national cinema." Such a reframing would allow us, among other things, to include independent film practices outside and against the pull of Hollywood, such as "race films," regional, subcultural, and avant-garde film practices. While this strategy is important, especially for teaching American cinema, the issue of Hollywood's role in defining and negotiating American nationality strikes me as more complicated. If we wish to "provincialize Hollywood," to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty's injunction to "provincialize" European accounts of modernity, it is not enough to consider American cinema on a par with any other national cinema--inasmuch as that very category in many cases describes defensive formations shaped in competition with and resistance to Hollywood products. 33 In other words, the issue of classicality is bound up with the question of what constituted the hegemony of American movies worldwide and what assured them the historic impact they had, for better or for worse, within a wide range of different local contexts and diverse national cinemas.
The question of what constitutes Hollywood's power on a global scale returns us to the phenomenon of Americanism discussed earlier in connection with Soviet film. I am concerned with Americanism here less as a question of exceptionalism, consensus ideology, or crude economic power, though none of these aspects can be ignored, than as a practice of cultural circulation and hegemony. Victoria de Grazia has argued that Americanism still awaits analysis, beyond the polarized labels of, respectively, cultural imperialism and a worldwide spreading of the American Dream, as "the historical process by which the American experience was transformed into a universal model of business society based on advanced technology and promising formal equality and unlimited mass consumption." 34 However ideological these promises may, or may not, turn out to be, de Grazia observes that, unlike earlier imperial practices of colonial dumping, American cultural exports "were designed to go as far as the market would take them, starting at home." In other words, "cultural exports shared the basic features of American mass culture, intending by that term not only the cultural artifacts and associated forms, but also the civic values and social relations of the first capitalist mass society." 35
Regarding classical cinema, one could take this argument to suggest that the hegemonic mechanisms by which Hollywood succeeded in amalgamating a diversity of competing traditions, discourses, and interests on the domestic level may have accounted for at least some of the generalized appeal and robustness of Hollywood products abroad (a success in which the diasporic, relatively cosmopolitan profile of the Hollywood community no doubt played a part as well). In other words, by forging a mass market out of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous society, if often at the expense of racial others, American classical cinema had developed an idiom, or idioms, that travelled more easily than its national-popular rivals. I do not wish to resuscitate the myth of film as a new "universal language" whose early promoters included D. W. Griffith and Carl Laemmle, founder of the Universal Film Company, nor do I mean to gloss over the business practices by which the American film industry secured the dominance of its products on foreign markets, in particular through control of distribution and exhibition venues. 36 But I do think that, whether we like it or not, American movies of the classical period offered something like the first global vernacular. If this vernacular had a transnational and translatable resonance, it was not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates but, more important, because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience.
If classical Hollywood cinema succeeded as an international modernist idiom on a mass basis, it did so not because of its presumably universal narrative form but because it meant different things to different people and publics, both at home and abroad. We must not forget that these films, along with other mass-cultural exports, were consumed in locally quite specific, and unequally developed, contexts and conditions of reception; that they not only had a levelling impact on indigenous cultures but also challenged prevailing social and sexual arrangements and advanced new possibilities of social identity and cultural styles; and that the films were also changed in that process. Many films were literally changed, both for particular export markets (e.g., the conversion of American happy endings into tragic endings for Russian release) and by censorship, marketing, and programming practices in the countries in which they were distributed, not to mention practices of dubbing and subtitling. 37 As systematic as the effort to conquer foreign markets undoubtedly was, the actual reception of Hollywood films was likely a much more haphazard and eclectic process depending on a variety of factors. 38 How were the films programmed in the context of local film cultures, in particular conventions of exhibition and reception? Which genres were preferred in which places (for instance, slapstick in European and African countries, musical and historical costume dramas in India), and how were American genres dissolved and assimilated into different generic traditions, different concepts of genre? And how did American imports re within the public horizon of reception that might have included both indigenous products and films from other foreign countries? To write the international history of classical American cinema, therefore, is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of standardization and hegemony but also the diversity of ways in which this cinema was translated and reconred in both local and translocal contexts of reception.
Americanism, notwithstanding Antonio Gramsci (as well as recent critiques of Gramsci and left Fordism), cannot simply be reduced to a regime of mechanized production, an ideological veneer for discipline, abstraction, reification, for new hierarchies and routes of power. Nor can it be reduced to the machine aesthetics of intellectual and high modernism. 39 We cannot understand the appeal of Americanism unless we take seriously the promises of mass consumption and the dreams of a mass culture often in excess of and in conflict with the regime of production that spawned that mass culture (a phenomenon that has been dubbed "Americanization from below"). 40 In other words, we have to understand the material, sensory conditions under which American mass culture, including Hollywood, was received and could have functioned as a powerful matrix for modernity's liberatory impulses--its moments of abundance, play, and radical possibility, its glimpses of collectivity and gender equality (the latter signalled by its opponents' excoriation of Americanism as a "new matriarchy"). 41
The juncture of classical cinema and modernity reminds us, finally, that the cinema was not only part and symptom of modernity's experience and perception of crisis and upheaval; it was also, most importantly, the single most inclusive cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated. That the cinema was capable of a reflexive relation with modernity and modernization was registered by contemporaries early on, and I read Benjamin's and Siegfried Kracauer's writings of the 1920s and 1930s as, among other things, an effort to theorize this relation as a new mode of reflexivity. 42 Neither simply a medium for realistic representation (in the sense of marxist notions of reflection or Widerspiegelung), nor particularly concerned with formalist self-reflexivity, commercial cinema appeared to realize Johann Gottlieb Fichte's troping of reflection as "seeing with an added eye" in an almost literal sense, and it did so not just on the level of individual, philosophical cognition but on a mass scale. 43 I am also drawing on more recent sociological debates on "reflexive modernization" (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash), a concept deployed to distinguish the risk-conscious phase of current post- or second modernity from a presumably more single-minded, orthodox, and simple first modernity. However, I would argue (although I cannot do so in detail here) that modernization inevitably provokes the need for reflexivity and that, if sociologists considered the cinema in aesthetic and sensorial terms rather than as just another medium of information and communication, they would find ample evidence in both American and other cinemas of the interwar period of an at once modernist and vernacular reflexivity. 44
This dimension of reflexivity is key to the claim that the cinema not only represented a specifically modern type of public sphere, the public here understood as a "social horizon of experience," but also that this new mass public could have functioned as a discursive form in which individual experience could be articulated and find recognition by both subjects and others, including strangers. 45 Kracauer, in his more utopian moments, understood the cinema as an alternative public sphere--alternative to both bourgeois institutions of art, education, and culture, and the traditional arenas of politics--an imaginative horizon in which, however compromised by its capitalist foundations, something like an actual democratization of culture seemed to be taking shape, in his words, a "self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization." 46 The cinema suggested this possibility not only because it attracted and made visible to itself and society an emerging, heterogeneous mass public ignored and despised by dominant culture. The new medium also offered an alternative because it engaged the contradictions of modernity at the level of the senses, the level at which the impact of modern technology on human experience was most palpable and irreversible. In other words, the cinema not only traded in the mass production of the senses but also provided an aesthetic horizon for the experience of industrial mass society.
While Kracauer's observations were based on moviegoing in Weimar Germany, he attributed this sensory reflexivity more often than not to American film, in particular slapstick comedy with its well-choreographed orgies of demolition and clashes between people and things. The logic he discerned in slapstick films pointed up a disjuncture within Fordist mass culture, the possibility of an anarchic supplement generated on the same principles: "One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality. If in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully." 47 The reflexive potential of slapstick comedy can be, and has been, argued on a number of counts, at the levels of plot, performance, and mise-en-scene, and depending on the particular inflection of the genre. In addition to articulating and playing games with the violence of technological regimes, mechanization and clock time, slapstick films also specialized in deflating the terror of consumption, of a new culture of status and distinction. 48 Likewise, the genre was a vital site for engaging the conflicts and pressures of a multiethnic society (think of the many Jewish performers who thematized the discrepancies between diasporic identity and upward mobility, from Larry Semon through Max Davidson and George Sydney). And, not least, slapstick comedy allowed for a playful and physical expression of anxieties over changed gender roles and new forms of sexuality and intimacy.
But what about other genres? And what about popular narrative films that conform more closely to classical norms? Once we begin looking at Hollywood films as both a provincial response to modernization and a vernacular for different, diverse, yet also comparable experiences, we may find that genres such as the musical, horror, or melodrama may offer just as much reflexive potential as slapstick comedy, with appeals specific to those genres and specific resonances in different contexts of reception. This is to suggest that reflexivity can take different forms and different affective directions, both in individual films and directorial oeuvres and in the aesthetic division of labor among Hollywood genres, and that reflexivity does not always have to be critical or unequivocal. On the contrary, the reflexive dimension of these films may consist precisely in the ways in which they allow their viewers to confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity.
The reflexive dimension of Hollywood films in relation to modernity may take cognitive, discursive, and narrativized forms, but it is crucially anchored in sensory experience and sensational affect, in processes of mimetic identification that are more often than not partial and excessive in relation to narrative comprehension. Benjamin, writing about the elimination of distance in the new perceptual regimes of advertising and cinema, sees in the giant billboards that present things in new proportions and colors a backdrop for a "sentimentality . . . restored to health and liberated in American style," just as in the cinema "people whom nothing moves or touches any longer learn to cry again." 49 The reason slapstick comedy hit home and flourished worldwide was not critical reason but the films' propulsion of their viewers' bodies into laughter. And adventure serials succeeded because they conveyed a new immediacy, energy, and sexual economy, not only in Soviet Russia and not only among avant-garde intellectuals. Again and again, writings on the American cinema of the interwar period stress the new physicality, the exterior surface or "outer skin" of things (Antonin Artaud), the material presence of the quotidian, as Louis Aragon put it, "really common objects, everything that celebrates life, not some artificial convention that excludes corned beef and tins of polish." 50 I take such statements to suggest that the reflexive, modernist dimension of American cinema does not necessarily require that we demonstrate a cognitive, compensatory, or therapeutic function in relation to the experience of modernity but that, in a very basic sense, even the most ordinary commercial films were involved in producing a new sensory culture.
Hollywood did not just circulate images and sounds; it produced and globalized a new sensorium; it constituted, or tried to constitute, new subjectivities and subjects. The mass appeal of these films resided as much in their ability to engage viewers at the narrative-cognitive level or in their providing models of identification for being modern as it did in the register of what Benjamin troped as the "optical unconscious." 51 It was not just what these films showed, what they brought into optical consciousness, as it were, but the way they opened up hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience, their ability to suggest a different organization of the daily world. Whether this new visuality took the shape of dreams or of nightmares, it marked an aesthetic mode that was decidedly not classical--at least not if we literalize that term and reduce it to neoclassicist formal and stylistic principles. Yet, if we understand the classical in American cinema as a metaphor of a global sensory vernacular rather than a universal narrative idiom, then it might be possible to imagine the two Americanisms operating in the development of Soviet cinema--the modernist fascination with the "low," sensational, attractionist genres and the classicist ideal of formal and narrative efficiency--as two vectors of the same phenomenon, both contributing to the hegemony of Hollywood film. This may well be a fantasy: the fantasy of a cinema that could help its viewers negotiate the tension between reification and the aesthetic, strongly understood, the possibilities, anxieties, and costs of an expanded sensory and experiential horizon--the fantasy, in other words, of a mass-mediated public sphere capable of responding to modernity and its failed promises. Now that postmodern media culture is busy recycling the ruins of both classical cinema and modernity, we may be in a better position to see the residues of a dreamworld of mass culture that is no longer ours--and yet to some extent still is.
Miriam Hansen is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she also chairs the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies.This essay is forthcoming in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill (London: Edward Arnold, 2000).
* This essay appears here with the permission of Edward Arnold, publishers, and, along with the essays by Andreas Huyssen and Ann Douglas in 5, no. 3, derive from papers delivered at the conference "Modern Culture and Modernity Today" held at Brown University, 14-15 March 1997, organized by Professor Robert Scholes and sponsored by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center, the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and . Our gratitude to Professor Scholes and Mark Gaipa for their collaboration.--editors' note
** For critical readings, research, and suggestions I wish to thank Paula Amad, Dudley Andrew, Bill Brown, Susan Buck-Morss, Jean Comaroff, Michael Geyer, Tom Gunning, Lesley Stern, Yuri Tsivian, and Martha Ward, as well as inspiring audiences and commentators in various places where I presented versions of this paper.
1. See, for instance, Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); and Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). In addition, of course, there have been numerous studies on the impact of cinema on experimentation in other media, especially fiction, painting, and theater.
2. See, for instance, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Peter Wollen, "Out of the Past: Fashion/Orientalism/The Body" , in Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Richard Taruskin, "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'Music Itself,'" 2, no. 1 (January 1995): 1-26; Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Pollock, Vision and Difference (London: Routledge, 1988), 50-90; Molly Nesbit, "The Rat's Ass," October 56 (spring 1991): 6-20; Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life 1919-1942 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), ch. 12; Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, eds., Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Néstor García Canclini, "Latin American Contradictions: Modernism without Modernization?" in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. C. L. Chiappari and S. L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 41-65; and Sharan A. Minichiello, ed., Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998).
3. Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg, "Editorial/Introduction," 1, no. 1 (January 1994): 1.
4. Peter Bürger, following Adorno, asserts that the very category of "style" is rendered problematic by the advanced commodification of art in the twentieth century and considers the refusal to develop a coherent style (as in dada and surrealism) a salient feature of avant-gardist, as distinct from modernist, aesthetics; see Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. ch. 2, "The Historicity of Aesthetic Categories." The opening up of both modernist and avant-garde canons, however, shows a great overlap between the two, just as the effort on the part of particular modernist artists and movements to restore the institutional status of art may well go along with avant-gardist modes of behavior and publicity; see my Ezra Pounds frühe Poetik zwischen Aufklärung und Avantgarde (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979). See also Huyssen, After the Great Divide, esp. ch. 2, "Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner."
5. In the second version of his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" , Benjamin wrote of the "the theory [die Lehre] of perception that the Greeks called aesthetics" (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989], 7:381; my translation). He conceived of the politics of this essay very much as an effort to confront the aesthetic tradition narrowly understood, in particular the persistence of aestheticism in contemporary literature and art, with the changes wrought upon the human sensorium by industrial and military technology. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (fall 1992): 3-41; see also my "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street," Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (winter 1999): 306-43.
6. On the cinema of the Czarist period, see Yuri Tsivian, "Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema," in Testimoni silenziosi: Filmi russi 1908-1919/Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai et al. (Pordenone, London: British Film Institute, 1989); idem, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception , trans. Alan Bodger (1994; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); also see the contributions of Paolo Cherchi Usai, Mary Ann Doane, Heide Schlüpmann, and myself to two special issues of the journal Cinefocus 2, no. 1 (fall 1991) and 2, no. 2 (spring 1992).
7. See Yuri Tsivian, "Between the Old and the New: Soviet Film Culture in 1918-1924," Griffithiana 55/56 : 15-63; hereafter abbreviated "BON"; idem, "Cutting and Framing in Bauer's and Kuleshov's Films," Kintop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 1 : 103-13; and Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 130.
8. See, for instance, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), section 15; and Antonio Gramsci's famous essay, "Americanism and Fordism," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1929-1935], ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277-318. See also Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. chs. 4 and 5; Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marßolek, Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996); and Jean-Louis Cohen and Humbert Damisch, eds., Américanisme et modernité: L'idéal américain dans l'architecture (Paris: EHESS, Flammarion, 1993).
9. See "BON," 39-45.
10. A related recruiting of "low" popular culture for the programmatic attack on the institution of art can be found in western European avant-garde movements, in particular dada and surrealism.
11. See Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (London: Blackwell, 1991), 4.
12. See Thomas Elsaesser, "What Makes Hollywood Run?" American Film 10, no. 7 (May 1985): 52-5, 68; Renoir quoted on 52.
13. Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche, Histoire du cinéma, 2nd ed. (Paris: Denoël, 1943), 369, quoted in David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 47. With regard to the earlier edition , which bestows the term "classic" on international silent film of the period 1924-1929, Bordwell remarks that the invocation of the term recalls "the common art-historical conception of classicism as a dynamic stability in which innovations submit to an overall balance of form and function" . On the political stance of the authors, in particular Brasillach, see Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), chs. 6 and 7, and Bordwell, ibid., 38-41.
14. André Bazin, "The Evolution of the Western," in What Is Cinema? sel. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:149. In "The Western: Or the American Film Par Excellence," Bazin invokes Corneille to describe the "simplicity" of western scripts as a quality that both lends them "naive greatness" and makes them a subject for parody (2:147). Also see Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What Is Cinema? 1:29. Dudley Andrew has drawn my attention to Eric Rohmer who during the same period developed a notion of cinematic classicism that more broadly linked "modern" cinema to the eighteenth-century tradition. See Rohmer, Le Gout de la beauté, ed. Jean Narboni (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile, 1984), esp. "L'Age classique de cinéma," 25-99; see also Bordwell, History of Film Style, 77.
15. André Bazin, "La Politique des auteurs," in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 143, 154.
16. See, for example, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," in Screen Reader 1 (London: SEFT, 1977); Janet Bergstrom, "Enunciation and Sexual Difference (Part I)," Camera Obscura 3-4 ; as well as writings by Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey, and Colin MacCabe in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
17. See Judith Mayne, "S/Z and Film Theory," Jump Cut 12-13 (December 1976): 41-5. A notable exception to this tendency is Raymond Bellour who stresses the formal and stylistic principles at work in classical cinema (patterns of repetition-resolution, rhyming, symmetry, redundancy, interlacing of micro- and macrostructures) by which classical films produce their conscious and unconscious meanings and effects. See Bellour, L'Analyse du Film (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1979), which includes the texts translated as "Segmenting/Analyzing" and "The Obvious and the Code," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 66-92, 93-101.
18. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); hereafter abbreviated CHC. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, "realism" is equated with verisimilitude and, as such, res as one of four types of narrative motivation--compositional, realistic, intertextual, artistic (CHC, 19). While this qualification seems appropriate vis-à-vis the diversity of Hollywood genres (think of the musical, for instance), it does not make the issue of cinematic "realism" go away, whether as rhetorical claim, ideological fiction, or aesthetic possibility. In this context, see Christine Gledhill's interesting attempt to understand "realism" as American cinema's way of facilitating the "modernization of melodrama" (Gledhill, "Between Melodrama and Realism: Anthony Asquith's Underground and King Vidor's The Crowd," in Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Jane Gaines [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992], 131).
19. See Rick Altman, "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today," in Classical Hollywood Narrative, 15-17, discusses the problematic relationship of Bordwell's concept of cinematic classicism with its French literary antecedents.
20. Stendhal, quoted in CHC, 367-8.
21. Altman, "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today," 14.
22. The debate on melodrama in cinema studies is extensive; for an exemplary collection see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), especially Gledhill's introduction, "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," 5-39; Gledhill, "Between Melodrama and Realism: Anthony Asquith's Underground and King Vidor's The Crowd," in Classical Hollywood Narrative; and Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Rering American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On genres that involve the body in nonclassical ways, see Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (summer 1991): 2-13. On the mutually competing aesthetics of slapstick comedy, see Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy," in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1994), 106-119; see also William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
23. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition," in Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), 177. For a critical account of the industrial, political, and cultural dimensions of Fordism, see Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
24. See D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); see also Sylvia Harvey, May '68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978), ch. 2; and Martin Walsh, The Brechtian Aspects of Radical Cinema, ed. Keith M. Griffiths (London: British Film Institute, 1981). For an example of the binary construction of this approach, see Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d'est" , in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 120-9.
25. See, for instance, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, "Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu," Screen 17, no. 2 (summer 1976): 41-73; Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), part 6; and Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), ch. 12.
26. Such statements bear an uncanny similarity with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's analysis of the "Culture Industry" as an all-absorbing totality in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47), though obviously without the despair and pessimism that prompted that analysis.
27. The Basel Kunstmuseum mounted an impressive exhibition of classicist modernism in music and the arts; see the catalogue, Canto d'Amore: Klassizistische Moderne in Musik und bildernder Kunst 1914-1935, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 1996); and the collection of essays and sources accompanying the concurrent concert series, Klassizistische Moderne, ed. Felix Meyer (Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag, 1996).
28. See CHC, 7-9, 58-9; Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, ch. 3 and passim; and idem, "A Case for Cognitivism," Iris 5, no. 2 : 11-40. See also Dudley Andrew's introduction to this issue of Iris, devoted to "Cinema and Cognitive Psychology," 1-10; and the continuation of the debate between Bordwell and Andrew in Iris 6, no. 2 (summer 1990): 107-16. In the effort to make cognitivism a central paradigm in film studies, Bordwell is joined by, among others, Noël Carroll; see Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 37-70; and Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
29. Bordwell, "La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?," The Velvet Light Trap 37 (spring 1996): 23; see also idem, On the History of Film Style, 142; and idem, "Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision," in Post-Theory, 87-107.
30. See Bordwell, "La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade"; On the History of Film Style, ch. 6; and Classical Hollywood Cinema, ch. 30. Kristin Thompson's new study is concerned with the persistence of classical principles past 1960, see her "Storytelling in the New Hollywood: The Case of Groundhog Day," paper presented at the Chicago Film Seminar, 3 October 1996.
31. Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 8.
32. Patrice Petro, drawing on the work of Karsten Witte and Eric Rentschler, contrasts this centrifugal quality of Hollywood cinema with the literalization of classical norms in Nazi cinema: "The Nazi cinema [in its strategies of visual enticement and simultaneous narrative containment] represents the theory (of classical Hollywood narrative) put into practice rather than the practice (of Hollywood filmmaking) put into theory" (Petro, "Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular," New German Critique 74 [spring-summer 1998]: 54).
33. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (winter 1992): 20.
34. Victoria de Grazia, "Americanism for Export," Wedge 7-8 (winter-spring 1985): 73. See also de Grazia, "Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920-1960," Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1 (March 1989): 53-87.
35. De Grazia, "Americanism for Export," 77. Mica Nava, "The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango 1911-1914," International Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (August 1998): 163-96, argues for a similar distinction, that is, between a commercial culture of cosmopolitan modernism shaped in the United States and the cultural imperialism of colonial regimes.
36. On the role of foreign markets for the American film industry, see Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment (London: British Film Institute, 1985); Ian Jarvie, Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994); and Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). On the celebration of film as a new "universal language" during the 1910s, see my Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76-81, 183-7.
37. On the practice of converting happy endings of American films into "Russian endings," see Yuri Tsivian, "Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema," Silent Witnesses, 24; see also Mary Ann Doane, "Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema," Cinefocus 2, no. 1 (fall 1991): 13-26.
38. See, for instance, Rosie Thomas, "Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity," Screen 26, no. 1 (January-February 1985): 116-31; Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stephen Putnam Hughes, "'Is There Anyone out There?': Exhibition and the Formation of Silent Film Audiences in South India," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996; Onookome Okome and Jonathan Haynes, Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (Jos, Nigeria: Nigerian Film Corporation, 1995), ch. 6; see also Hamid Naficy, "Theorizing 'Third World' Film Spectatorship," Wide Angle 18, no. 4 (October 1996): 3-26.
39. For an example of such a critique, see Peter Wollen, "Modern Times: Cinema/ Americanism/The Robot" , in Raiding the Icebox, 35-71.
40. The phrase "Americanization from below" is used by Kaspar Maase in his study of West-German youth culture of the 1950s, BRAVO Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur der Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren (Hamburg: Junius, 1992), 19.
41. On the different economy of gender relations connoted by American culture in Weimar Germany, see Nolan, Visions of Modernity, 120-7; and Eve Rosenhaft, "Lesewut, Kinosucht, Radiotismus: Zur (geschlechter-)politischen Relevanz neuer Massenmedien in den 1920er Jahren," in Lüdtke, Marßolek, von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung, 119-43.
42. See my essays "Benjamin and Cinema," and "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity," in Charney and Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 362-402.
43. J. G. Fichte, quoted in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 175.
44. See Beck, Giddens, Lash, Reflexive Modernization; see also Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Lash, "Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension," Theory, Culture and Society 10, no. 1 : 1-23, criticizes his coauthors for both the notion of a "high" or "simple" modernity and for their neglect of the "aesthetic dimension," but he does not develop the latter in terms of changes in the institution of art and the new regimes of sensory perception emerging with mass-mediated modernity.
45. This is not to say that the cinema was unique or original in forging a modern type of publicness. It was part of, and borrowed from, a whole array of institutions--department stores, world fairs, tourism, amusement parks, vaudeville, etc.--that involved new regimes of sensory perception and new forms of sociability. At the same time, the cinema represented, multiplied, and deterritorialized these new experiential regimes. My understanding of the public sphere as a general, social "horizon of experience" is indebted to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience , trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Daniel, Assenka Oksiloff, intr. Miriam Hansen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
46. [Siegfried Kracauer], "Berliner Nebeneinander: Kara-Iki-- Scala-Ball im Savoy--Menschen im Hotel," Frankfurter Zeitung 17 February 1933, my translation; see also "Cult of Distraction" and other essays in: Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed., and intr. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
47. [Siegfried Kracauer], "Artistisches und Amerikanisches," Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 January 1926, my translation.
48. See, for instance, Eileen Bowser, "Subverting the Conventions: Slapstick as Genre," in The Slapstick Symposium, ed. Bowser (Brussels: Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film, 1988) 13-17; Crafton, "Pie and Chase"; and Charles Musser, "Work, Ideology and Chaplin's Tramp," Radical History 41 (April 1988): 37-66.
49. Benjamin, "One-Way Street" , trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 476 (translation modified).
50. Antonin Artaud, "The Shell and the Clergyman: Film Scenario," transition 29-30 (June 1930): 65, quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (1960; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 189; Louis Aragon, "On Decor" in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:165. See also Colette, "Cinema: The Cheat"; Louis Delluc, "Beauty in the Cinema" and "From Orestes to Rio Jim" ; Blaise Cendrars, "The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema" ; and Jean Epstein, "Magnification" in ibid. See also "Bonjour cinéma and Other Writings by Jean Epstein," trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage, 10 [n.d.], esp. 9-16; and Philippe Soupault, "Cinema U.S.A." , in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 32-3.
51. Benjamin develops the notion of an "optical unconscious" in "A Short History of Photography" , trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13 (spring 1972): 7-8; and in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" , in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 235-7. See also his defense of Battleship Potemkin, "A Discussion of Russian Filmic Art and Collectivist Art in General" , in Kaes, Jay, Dimendberg, eds., Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 627.
"[I]ch bin unpolitisch."
--Else Lasker-Schüler, 1937
"[T]hat [Lasker-Schüler] places members of the fascist regime of Germany on stage does not demonstrate her ability to think politically. She is as incapable of this [in her drama Ichundich (1941 IandI)] as earlier. Political thought has to be realistic. . . ."
--Sigrid Bauschinger
For most readers, lyric poetry stands on the farthest end of the literary continuum from politics. On the other hand, feminist and marxist readers identify all literature as political in the sense that all texts participate in cultural ideologies and hence in structures of discourse and power. Else Lasker-Schüler's 1914 publication of Hebrew Ballads (Hebräische Balladen) provides an interesting case for thinking about how both positions function; this volume of lyric poetry contains no public or social "political" references and the poet herself claims not to be "political," but its repeated themes and structure as a volume suggest a radical critique of the assumptions underlying the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. Because such a critique is merely suggested and because it is formulated largely through mythic, religious narrative and love poems, readers who, like Bauschinger, believe that "Political thought has to be realistic" remain confirmed in their conviction that the volume's significance is instead biographical, spiritual, or aesthetic. Like many of her contemporaries, however, Lasker-Schüler saw no dissonance between the fantastic or utopian and the political. Expressionist philosopher and essayist Ernst Bloch, in particular, defends what he calls the "utopian function" inherent in all great works of art or social visions as being responsible for whatever humanizing the world has experienced. The intensity of excess or surplus in utopian creations causes a "mobilization of those contradictions inherent in the bad existence in order to overcome that existence, in order to bring it to the point of collapse." 1 He argues that the imaginative power of anticipation or consciously directed hope is more real than any sociological or bourgeois realism and that all great art aspires to such power. While distinctly less utopian than Bloch, as well as less grounded in a specific political ideology, Lasker-Schüler does construct mythical-religious fictions that critique early-twentieth-century Wilhelmine culture through their celebration of relationships defying its conventions and norms. 2
Most poems in Hebrew Ballads portray intimate moments in the lives of biblical res, but instead of celebrating same-class, same-nation, heterosexual love or partnership, much of the volume's love and communication occurs between social unequals and between men. As a consequence, love appears instructional, not sentimental or weakly ideal. To use Bloch's terms, these poems display the "unimpaired reason of a militant optimism," personally, not socially, cast. 3 Complex responses to dominant gender constructions underlie these portraits of intimacy and imply another kind of instruction. All the relationships Lasker-Schüler portrays suggest principles and practices that stereotypically would have been seen as feminine but that in her poetry also partake of a power and expressiveness associated with men. Moreover, Lasker-Schüler attributes these qualities and practices both to women and to the great patriarchs of Jewish and Christian tradition--Joseph, David, and even God himself. In an era characterized by extreme gender essentialism and misogyny, such portraits imply a protest by demonstrating alternative possibilities. Through their characterization of rulers and powerful men, these poems also implicitly protest the nationalism and militarism characterizing the age of Wilhelm II and more generally the ethos of a military-industrial state as experienced in Berlin, a city with extensive slums, huge factories, and rigid class divisions. Lasker-Schüler modifies the anticipatory or hopeful aspects of the volume, however, by placing its utopian moments in a mythic past that itself also contains treachery, death, and isolation. Consequently, Hebrew Ballads seems to mix elements of nostalgia and mourning with the sharper edge of its utopian social critique.
Else Lasker-Schüler was a German Jewish poet born in the industrial town of Elberfeld (Wuppertal) in 1869; she moved to Berlin in 1894; and her publications span the years 1902-1943. In 1933, she fled to Switzerland and in 1939 was forced into further exile in Palestine where she died in 1945. With her publication of Hebrew Ballads in 1913, followed by an expanded volume in 1914, she was at the height of her writing powers. 4 Also by 1914, Lasker-Schüler was twice-divorced, impoverished, the mother of a (for all purposes) fatherless adolescent son, and strongly linked with the Berlin bohemian community. 5 In 1932, after three decades of writing poetry, experimental fiction, and dramas, circulating her paintings and sketches, and playing an influential role in German Expressionist circles, Lasker-Schüler won the Kleist prize for outstanding literary achievement in Germany. Her work, however, never received broad public acclaim, and the bestowal of the prize set off angry criticism. While the political nature of her other publications was debated, both the poet's supporters and defamers regarded Hebrew Ballads primarily as a volume of otherworldly spiritual and lyric expression that distanced its author from modern daily life rather than constructing her response to it.
In a 1937 letter from Palestine, Lasker-Schüler declared "I am unpolitical," a statement that would have been believable to many of her contemporaries. This letter, however, was written under the circumstances of her wanting desperately to return to Switzerland where she felt less isolated than in Jerusalem; Lasker-Schüler had an immediate stake in asserting that her work did not criticize Europe's current political structures. 6 Her work would soon be banned by the Nazis, and critics already had been debating whether it was political for more than two decades. 7 Typical of one side of this debate was Ernst Lissauer's 1913 description: "this poetry lives surrounded by Central Europe's machines 'like a heavenly stranger,'" or Camill Hoffman's 1919 reference to Lasker-Schüler as "the absolute poet, completely unbourgeois, untroubled, fairy tale being!" 8 Yet others represented her as significantly political. For example, Wieland Herzfelde writes that Lasker-Schüler
did not want to create a new mythology; she strove instead far more against the widespread myth of the Hohenzollern regime: "One becomes human at the rank of Lieutenant." Her full elevation of the artist to self-ruler was a manifestation against the spirit of submission, against the division of society and of the races into super- and subhumans, against the worthlessness not only of artists and poets but no less of the "common people." 9
In a different medium, Hannah Höch makes a similar claim; by placing a picture of Lasker-Schüler's head directly across from the wheel of machinery on Wilhelm II's breast in a 1916 photomontage, Höch suggests that the poet stands in opposition to the military industrialism of the Kaiser's reign. Below her and in the middle of the montage, Käthe Kollwitz's head floats above the headless body of the famous dancer Nidda Impekoven, suggesting that Höch linked these female artists in opposing Wilhelmine values and life--a battle, as it were, of art against patriarchal, monarchical militarism. The women's decapitation suggests the violence of this opposition (and perhaps of contemporary misogyny), and the title of Höch's photomontage, "Cut with the Kitchen Knife," suggests the disparity in weapons available to the two genders (and to artists in contrast to the military): kitchen knives rather than military weaponry. 10
The question of Lasker-Schüler's politics was not merely academic or internal to the artistic community. The poet was frequently beaten on account of her bohemian, male-female clothing, her principles, and her Judaism, a combination that made her an easy target for the radical right. The Marbacher Magazin gives evidence of particular beatings in 1923, 1931, 1933, 1934, and 1936, and there is strong evidence that these were not isolated occasions, even in the 1920s. 11 Closer to the time of Hebrew Ballads, on a trip to Munich shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lasker-Schüler wore Arabian pants and a turban (as well as a sash in the colors of the German flag), knowing that the "mass hysteria" in the city against the Turks could make this dangerous. While it seems unlikely that she was indicating direct sympathy with Turkey (her ostensible reason would have been her personification as "Tino of Baghdad" or "Prince Yussuf"), such clothing also marked her chosen identification with a population that at the time was even more marginalized than the Jews. 12 According to Wieland Herzfelde, she was heckled constantly in Munich because of her clothing and arrested four times. 13 Throughout her life, Lasker-Schüler faced ridicule and physical punishment for manifesting her principles openly, but despite bruises and even broken bones, she did not modify her dress, behavior, or values to fit others' norms.
Not surprisingly, the debate about Lasker-Schüler's political positioning has continued to thrive. During the 1960s, Werner Kraft claimed Lasker-Schüler "was basically an unpolitical being" while Paul Pörtner argued that "She was political in the same way she wrote: spontaneously and with fantasy." 14 Writing in the 1980s, Bauschinger provides evidence for both sides. She claims there is no evidence of the poet's protest against the monarchy or of her political leanings, but also argues that Lasker-Schüler's Der Malik (1919 [The king]) and her poems to friends who died in military service did indirectly protest against World War I. She also notes that the poet published regularly in Die Aktion, a leftist journal critical of the monarchy and the war. Bauschinger distinguishes, however, between the poet's revolutionary ideas and acts. 15
Critics who note Lasker-Schüler's lack of political involvement argue on the basis of her writing's content, while those who maintain that her work was political argue on the basis of her general principles and life or her prose works. No discussion has focused on Lasker-Schüler's critique of the dominant ideologies of her era within her poetry or considered any aspect of social critique central to Hebrew Ballads. Generally, Lasker-Schüler's poetry has been read as exceptional, different in intent as well as form from that of her contemporaries whose critiques were more pointed or were explicitly theorized in essays. As stated previously, however, I find that in particular the 1914 Hebrew Ballads constructs an implied social structure pointedly alternative to that of Wilhelmine Germany. 16
In the opening poem of this volume, Lasker-Schüler asserts her dissatisfaction with the degeneracy and passionlessness of bourgeois culture through the irregular rhyming, aural echoing, and highly compressed syntax of a lament "sung" by a poet fleeing her connection with an unidentified "decaying" people who are referred to in the poem's title as "My People" (Mein Volk):
The rock is decaying
From which I spring
And sing my songs of God . . .
Steep I rush from the path
And trickle wholly in me
Far away, alone over the complaining stone
To the sea.
Have diverted my stream so far
From my blood's
Fermenting must.
And yet again and again the echo
In me
When full of dread, t'ards East
The rotten cliff-bone
My folk
To God cries. 17
This is a poem of both community and alienation; the speaker sings "songs of God" (Gotteslieder) that stem from and echo the crumbling rock of "My People" even as she rushes from it and its stream of "blood."  This syntactic ambiguity restates the poet's ambivalent positioning, since she, like the rock, literally cries "Mein Volk" (the poem itself) even while the rock serves primarily as a metaphor for the people the poet flees. Especially in a period of intense nationalism, the poem suggests the poet's ambivalence about belonging to that archetypal German body, "das Volk," at the same time that it may redefine her "Volk" as Jewish. Hebrew Ballads begins, then, with a speaker singing songs that are her own but that echo those of a people to whom she both does and does not belong. The other poems of the volume can be read as representing these echoes of the tradition she honors and flees, whether it is Hebrew as indicated by the volume's title or German as suggested by the language. Despite this echoing, the volume's later poems also construct an alternative ancestral past, apparently undecayed, to which the poet can give full allegiance--in this case, a pacifist, creative, loving, erotic, and German Judaism. 18 Nonetheless, the first poem's images of decay suggest loss and encroaching death rather than the beginning of anything.
Hebrew Ballads ends with a poem similarly lamenting loss, although this poem is paradoxically called "In the Beginning" (Im Anfang), which recalls a playfulness that suggests a more vital past, and hence perhaps a more hopeful future than "My People." In a move that could be read as a sign either of the degeneracy of the present or of hope for a progression toward the future different from that of the scriptural past, Lasker-Schüler also contrasts the speaker of her poem to Genesis, which its title echoes. In her "In the Beginning," no omnipotent, omniscient God speaks but rather a roguish poet who is coeval with the creator:
Hung on a golden spring cloud
When the world was still a child
And God still a young father.
Swung, hey!
On the ether-ay,
And my wooly hair fluttered in ringel-ray.
Teased the tottering moon Grandpa,
Snacked on gold dust of the sun Mama,
I locked Satan into heaven
And God in smokey hell.
They threatened with their biggest finger
And made "klummbumm! klummbumm!"
And so raced the whip-winds.
But afterwards God laughed two thunders
With the devil about my mortal sin.
Would give ten thousand times earthly happiness
To live once more so god-begotten,
So god-protected, so open.
Oh yes,
As when I was still God's rascal.  And in this childhood of the world, God enjoys such games. Together, Satan and God shake their finger, repeat a nonsense sound, and laugh at "mortal sin," but with that word the tone of the poem changes. The past tense becomes conditional and playfulness becomes nostalgia for that earlier, protected, rhyming ("gottgeboren"- "gottgeborgen") time of manifest being.
Above all, the speaker seems to look back to a period without strict rules and authoritarian control where radical reversal is possible. While God is a father who controls punishing winds and thunder, he is also mutable and at least temporarily vulnerable: he has an age, can be locked up, and laughs with both his rascal and the devil. This is no God of punishment, anger, and jealous control. The reversal of God with Satan, moreover, is repeated structurally at other levels; the adult female poet (herself a mother, perhaps in parallel to God the young father) speaks as a male youth (a Schlingel), and the mythically male sun and female moon are reversed and familiarized respectively as mama and grandpa, completing a family in which there is no traditional patriarch. 20 Clearly not bourgeois, the speaker is hatless, uninhibited, indecorous, without fear of reprisal. He is a rogue but was with God "in the beginning" and has the freedom to tease God and the planets like a favorite son.
Both "My People" and "In the Beginning," with their isolated speakers and historical perspectives of loss or nostalgia, remind readers of the "decaying" social fabric or "cliff" of the present world and these speakers's isolation in it, thereby framing the rest of the volume's representations of the past with this starkly inadequate present. In some ways the loss expressed in these poems remains the dominant note of the volume. Both poems are also typical of Lasker-Schüler's verse in their compression to the point of occasional ungrammaticality or grammatical coinage. 21 This effect of extreme density suggests the shorthand of internal monologue or speech to a familiar audience. In both poems, the compressed sharpness of the paratactic progressions from one image or aspect of metaphor to the next, combined with the extravagance of the metaphors themselves, prevent potentially sentimental images from falling into banality. These are poems of rich aural resonance, shifting rhythms, and the expressive density of multiple syntactic deletions. 22 With none of the looseness or narrative clarity of a traditional "ballad," these poems present cryptic pieces of a story, but not the story Jewish or Christian readers might expect, given the titles of the poems and of the volume. Similarly, the well-known speakers and subjects of many other poems in the volume--Abraham, Joseph, Ruth, David, Eve--present a moment or aspect of their stories generally quite different from the emphasis of the scriptural tales through which they are known.
While never in the foreground of Hebrew Ballads, gender issues are central to its unexpected formulations, and it is in the realm of gender that Lasker-Schüler herself fits least into the prescribed categories of her time. As suggested by her first-person "Schlingel" in "In the Beginning," Lasker-Schüler is as likely to speak in a masculine as in a feminine guise and celebrates aspects of what in her time was considered "feminine" behavior through both male and female speakers. Gender, for her, was a flexible category while in Wilhelmine Germany, generally, gender norms were rigidly essentialized. To take an extreme but influential example, in Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter), Otto Weininger writes that woman's entire meaning and purpose (Bedeutung and Zweck) lie in sexuality, specifically in coupling (in der Kuppelei). 23 Whereas men are characterized primarily by spirit/mind (Geist), women have no free will, no soul, no ego, in fact no consciousness at all ("M[an] lives consciously, w[oman] lives unconsciously" [M[ann] lebt bewußt, W[eib] lebt unbewußt]) (GC, 144). "Genius," Weininger writes, "presents itself as a type of higher masculinity, and therefore women cannot be geniuses" (GC, 142); moreoever, because the historical sense is linked to consciousness and genius, women also do not have the property of historical perspective. One sees the broad concern with this topic and the significance of Weininger's work in a five-part 1918 essay by Ford Madox Ford, "Women and Men," one part of which discusses Weininger's claims. Ford finds Weininger's work largely "nonsensical," but he states that as early as 1906 it was talked about as a "new gospel" in "men's clubs" of England, France, Germany, and the U.S. 24
Ford was critical of this "gospel," but many were not. For example, Herwarth Walden, one of the most influential editors and supporters of experimental arts in Berlin and Lasker-Schüler's husband from 1903 to 1913, published misogynistic material in The Storm (Der Sturm), including pieces written by Weininger and by Lasker-Schüler's friends. 25 Foremost among these was Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist, whom Bauschinger notes was among the most trusted of Lasker-Schüler's friends and whose enthusiastic support of Weininger was key to Weininger's popularity among the avant-garde. 26 Lasker-Schüler dedicated both the 1913 and 1914 editions of Hebrew Ballads to Kraus and called his journal The Torch (Die Fackel) "a Bible für sich." 27 Kraus was an important supporter of Lasker-Schüler's poetry; in 1911, for example, he called her "An Old Tibetan Rug"
the strongest and greatest lyric event of modern Germany . . . I find the poem cited here from the Berlin weekly The Storm among the most delightful and moving that I have ever read, and there is little from Goethe down that interweaves so effectively meaning and sound, word and image, language and soul as this "Tibetan Rug." 28
In 1927, Kraus wrote that Lasker-Schüler was "the most significant lyric poet in Germany today." 29 Yet Kraus also wrote that "the female has as much mind as a mirror has body," and Barbara Wright considers Kraus's Die Fackel one of the most virulent journals publishing against women's emancipation during the 1910s. 30 According to Wright, especially from 1911 to 1914, Expressionists wrote enthusiastically about women's "nature"; these essays, she finds, reveal a "clear perception of the need for reform in numerous areas of contact between the sexes" but the majority "stand in open or implicit disagreement with the goals of the women's movement" ("NM," 587). 31 In the Expressionist community, which included her (ex)husband and friends, Lasker-Schüler would have been surrounded by men who believed in women's spiritual, mental, and moral inferiority, no matter how highly they praised her sketches, painting, and literary production.
The prevailing essentialized attitudes toward gender were reflected in the legal and social circumstances of women's lives. For example, women in Germany were prohibited from higher public education for much longer than in England or the United States: the first girls' Gymnasium, a high school granting a pre-university degree (Abitur), was not founded until 1893, and women were not admitted into degree programs at German universities until 1908. 32 Similarly, until 1908, women were legally barred from all forms of public political activity. Women's daily circulation in the public realm was also circumscribed; a much disputed law gave police the right to arrest and jail any woman alone on the streets after dark and to examine her to determine whether she carried communicable diseases. 33 Lasker-Schüler, who spent much of each day and nearly every evening in cafes or at gatherings or performances, openly flouted the bourgeois conventions underlying such legislation.
It is no coincidence that such attitudes coincided with a high point of activity in German women's movements. Yet, while bourgeois and working class women's leagues had successfully promoted various legal and educational reforms, even radical leagues tended to maintain the concept of essential difference, in contrast with similar groups in the United States and England at the time. The Jewish Women's League, while more liberal in some respects than Protestant and Catholic leagues, was also decidedly bourgeois and focused on activities women might perform to strengthen the Jewish community that were appropriate to their gender role. 34 Consequently and paradoxically, while their positions were dramatically opposed on particular issues having to do with women's rights and sexuality, most women's leagues, popular culture, and the Expressionist community were in broad agreement about the fact of essential gender differences. No major female artist wrote essays in support of full psychological and spiritual, as well as the more frequently debated sexual and civil, equality for women to counter the din of misogynistic voices. 35
Given her determined rejection of a bourgeois life and values and her open flexibility about gender boundaries in several aspects of her behavior and in her artistic self-understanding, it is not surprising that Lasker-Schüler manifested little sympathy for either Christian or Jewish women's leagues or general bonding with women as a community. Rather than joining other women in struggling for education, social reform, and legal rights, she constructed her own rules for behavior. In the predominantly masculine bohemian spheres, she appeared as the regal, foreign, adolescent, either androgynous or male "Prince Yussuf of Thebes." 36 Between 1910 and 1917, this role dominated Lasker-Schüler's fiction and letters, and although Yussuf does not appear in Hebrew Ballads, the poet wrote to Jethro Bithell that she was both its David and its Joseph. 37 At the same time, Lasker-Schüler wrote poems celebrating the work of female friends, for example the sculptor Milly Steger and the painter Marianne von Werefkin, and in many letters she describes herself as interchangeably male and female or admires such flexibility in others--for example a maid "who used to be a boy." 38
The increasing nationalism and militarism of the early 1910s was as pervasive as gender essentialism in determining the social and political fabric of the time and certainly emphasized that the public realm was male. Moreover, most liberal German women's groups supported both the nationalistic prewar enthusiasm for military expansion and the war itself. The League of Jewish Women participated in such support as did the Jewish middle and upper classes generally. Before the outbreak of the war, much of the artistic avant-garde was similarly militaristic. 39 Ernst Bloch, for example, saw war as desirable since it would lead to an apocalyptic redemption of German and Jewish society through the destruction of the bourgeois mentality; to his mind, chaos and fragmentation (whether aesthetic or actual) prompted the viewer to "imagine and desire a new utopian future." 40 In a general study of Expressionist visions of apocalypse, Klaus Vondung sees several Expressionists writing before 1914 about their "aesthetic desire for power and destruction"; for example, in "Feeling Cramped" ("Beengung," 1910) Johannes R. Becher states that "we . . . laze around on high desk chairs / And crumble anxiously into flour dust in waiting rooms . . . and wish thereby for a great world war." 41 In 1914, Thomas Mann writes, "How the artist, the soldier in the artist, would have praised God for the collapse of the peaceful world, with which he was so fed up, so utterly fed up. War! We found it cleansing, freeing, and a monstrous hope. Of this the poets spoke, only of this." 42 This enthusiasm also took pragmatic form; among others, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Leonhard, Franz Marc, and Ernst Toller volunteered for military service once the war began. Although not isolated in her pacifism while writing Hebrew Ballads, Lasker-Schüler was clearly at odds with the prevailing attitudes among fellow artists and in German and Jewish popular culture.
Once the brutality of the war made itself evident, few Expressionists continued to support the war. Interestingly, however, both their prewar militaristic visions and their later opposition assumed a community of like-minded, implicitly or explicitly male comrades and frequently used military language. One sees such brotherhood in the quotations above. Since relatively small numbers of women attended universities in Germany in 1911, the "we" lazing around on desk chairs in Becher's poem would most likely be male, just as Mann's "soldier in the artist" was. Using much the same language, in 1917, Alfred Henschke writes to "the silver sons" of God, "legionnaires of the holy army" who must bring "a new humanity" and peace. 43 Whether for peace or war, brotherhoods would both carry out and benefit from this sense of purpose and spiritual cleansing in the name of God or some other spirit or power higher than their own. In 1917, Ernst Wilhelm Lotz coined the term "brother poetry" (Bruderverse) for intense poems of masculine comradeship. 44 Hermann Korte describes the "verse of the 'brother-poetry'" as "celebrat[ing] the men's club of sworn cameraderie in the light of visions of human and world redemption" ("MH," 28). 45 In contrast, he sees Lasker-Schüler's dedication poems and poems of male love as opposing "the bloody seriousness of the 'Bruderverse'" ("MH," 28). 46 Eschewing the proclamation style reminiscent of the "all too masculine ritual of shoulder slapping," the "ex-cathedra tone," and "grandstanding rhetoric," Lasker-Schüler's speakers are playful, tender, and intimate. Her portraits "strive to be poems, not monuments" ("MH," 29). 47
Not surprisingly given the widespread Jewish acculturation in Germany, Jewish writing of the period outside the Expressionist community also tended towards apocalyptic and monumental brotherhood. Particularly through Zionism, as promoted by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, one saw the rise of a distinctively masculine re of a "New Jew," created in part as a counterimage to the anti-Semitic equation of Jewishness with femininity (GA, 142). According to Hyman, the Zionists promoted "male solidarity as an essential precondition for nation building" (GA, 143). 48 While Zionism represented an extreme form of such beliefs, many Jewish men constructed similar notions of gender division "through a more oblique version of sexual politics" (GA, 150). It is relevant to remember in this context that Otto Weininger was Jewish and that his notion of the Jew as "feminine" and the "feminine," or woman, as inferior stemmed from related cultural beliefs of essentialism and natural hierarchy. Bruderverse and Zionist brotherhood were outgrowths of and responses to linked ideologies of race, gender, and nationhood.
While the first two decades of the twentieth century were relatively open to Jewish assimilation, the depression of the 1890s, along with the extremely rapid modernization and industrialization of the 1870s and 1880s, had occasioned a wave of anti-Semitism in the 1890s, which was most strongly felt in Berlin and certainly reminded the Jewish community of its marginal status in Germany. In 1893, Adolf Stoecker's anti-Semitic political party, centered in Berlin but stemming from Lasker-Schüler's native Westfalia and active during her youth, won several seats in the legislature. 49 As Jakob Hessing writes and as one sees in Lasker-Schüler's play Arthur Aronymous and essay "Anti-Semitism," local anti-Semitic enthusiasm was a part of her childhood. According to Hessing, it was in part for this reason that Lasker-Schüler was more sensitive to anti-Semitism and Jewish marginality than many other Jews. At the same time, she identified too closely with German culture to be satisfied with the boundaries of traditional Judaism. 50 Ironically, then, this greater sensitivity to her Jewishness was one of the factors distancing the poet from assimilated Jews as well as from the Christian-German community.
Situated among these multiple and overlapping communities tolerating or supporting doctrines of female intellectual and spiritual inferiority, essentialized gender difference, powerful male bonding, militarism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, Else Lasker-Schüler wrote and published Hebrew Ballads. With this context in mind, its patterns of unhierarchical relationships are striking. Immediately following "My People" in the volume, Lasker-Schüler turns to the theme of human relationships to God depicting three types of blessed being, each constructing an aspect of her mythologized past. First, in "Abraham und Isaac," the patriarch "practice[s] talking with God" ("übte sich mit Gott zu reden") and enjoys regular visits from angels (WB, 157). When these angels are disturbed by the "bleating of the tortured rams / With which Isaac played at sacrifice behind the licorice trees," God admonishes Abraham, who in response readies an altar and carries Isaac there (WB, 157). At this point the poem breaks off with a dash, providing only the final cadenced line: "But God loved his servant" ("-- / Der aber liebte seinen Knecht") (WB, 158). The presumed ensuing conversation between God and Abraham at the altar, each "practiced" in communication, is left to the imagination. Although the hierarchy is preserved (Abraham remains a "servant"), the poem stresses the love between God and Abraham rather than that between Abraham and his thoughtless or cruel son.
Unlike Abraham, Jacob--in the poem called "Jacob"--is presented wholly mythically. He is the wild "buffalo of his herd," who "ran to the ancient forest on the rivers / Stilled there the blood of his monkey bites" and then, "Through the tired ache in his bones / Sank low before the heavens, feverish / And his ox-face created the smile" (WB, 158). 51 Here the power of both the torment and Jacob's response to it is suggested by the significance of his creation--a smile, an expressive sign that distinguishes humans from other animals. Jacob gives birth, as it were, to the human through his creation of an expression only humans can make. "Esther," like "Jacob," describes its protagonist in ways only peripherally related to scripture. Unlike the wild and primitive Jacob, however, Esther is a social creature, manifesting a beauty so intense that wheat and spiritual celebration borrow their scent from her presence: "slender like a date palm / Her lips provide the scent of the wheat stalks / And the holidays that occur in Judah" (WB, 158-9). 52 In the poem, Esther's stereotypically feminine distinction is to be desired and wondered at, a distinction that gives no sense of her courage in requesting that the king take back his order to kill the Jews, although it does suggest her beauty's power. While Jacob creates the smile, Esther's approach prompts a smile from the king--as the poet explains it, "Because God watches over Esther everywhere" (WB, 158). These three poems model relationships with God involving various forms of communication and various levels of independence: as a dutiful patriarch open to verbal negotiation, as a wild man able to communicate originally and expressively even in feverish exhaustion, and a woman embodying a harmony with the natural and spiritual worlds so pervasive that it lends them her fragrance, perhaps both a cause and result of her success in saving the Jewish people from slaughter. God honors all three, suggesting that there is no single model, or gender, of chosenness.
These poems are uncharacteristic of Hebrew Ballads, however, since none presents erotic or passionate love. Moreover, all are written in the past tense, as though they present a historical backdrop for the immediacy of more intense relationships. More typical is "Pharaoh und Joseph," where, in the present tense, Joseph proudly relates that Pharaoh has sent his women away and "rests [his king's head] on my shoulder / That smells of grain" (WB, 159). Although "His eyes go and come," "His heart lies in my blood" and
murmurs in my depths.Therefore my lips create poems
Great sweets
In the wheat of our mornings. 53 [WB, 159]
In "David und Jonathan" again Lasker-Schüler portrays passionate love between men. David laments that he cannot prevent Jonathan's departure:
You always take your leave quietly while kissing.And what shall your heart do
Still without mine--
Your sweet night
Without my songs. [WB, 161] 54
The lack of concluding question marks contributes to the final lines' heaviness, suggesting that there is nothing Jonathan can do without David's heart and songs, and indeed in the biblical story he will soon die. This death in battle clearly does not result from his loss of David's songs, but one might conclude that Jonathan's choice to be loyal to his father Saul (who seeks David's death) rather than to his companion (in Lasker-Schüler's poem, his lover) suggests the consequences of inadequate commitment to the values of loving, friendship, and creativity: while kissing, one should not also depart for battle. The poem may challenge its readers to ponder how many Jonathans will soon be asked to take leave of their Davids.