Dieser Ausspruch des geistvollen musikalischen Denkers Hans v. Rhythm characterizes every human activity; it is the first law of every expression of our being. And it is more clearly recognizable in youthful individuals, and in primitive cultures, than in more advanced developmental stages. Curtius, , 1. Verlag von Julius Beltz, , 3. Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity Berkeley: University of California Press, , — On the role of rhythm studies in work science, see pp.
A Symposium for Gerhard Neumann] Freiburg: Rombach, , 83— Seeking Safety in an Insecure World Cambridge: Polity, , 1—7.
Rhythmical gymnastics, pupil from the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Hellerau time]. As Susannah Broughton describes it at one point, echoing the earlier body-culture theorists, one of the main goals of dance instruction is precisely to build self-confidence through bodily control: Jaques-Dalcroze in Dresden- Hellerau. Ein Bericht mit 8 Abbildungen [The E. A Report with Eight Illustrations] Jena: Eugen Diederichs, , 4. Pennsylvania State University Press, , — When I began to conduct, I began to face the problems [of Le Sacre du printemps], and the problems are mainly rhythmical problems. In a normal way, you beat , , but nothing exceptional.
It does not change all the time. But in some parts of Stravinsky, especially the final dance, the danse sacrale, the metre changes constantly. Houghton Mifflin, , 37, 51— And so you have to adapt yourself to this constant change. Contemporary observers clearly understood such pulsating polyrhythms as a return to primitive vitality. As one observer described it: For Jaques-Dalcroze and his associates, as for many invested in the rhythm debates around , the most authoritative formulation of the problem could be found in a study largely forgotten today but widely influential in the early twentieth century: Hirzel, , Der Rhythmus 2, Nr 1 Jena: Diederichs, , 7—8.
John Murray, , Der Rhythmus entspringt dem organischen Wesen des Menschen. It regulates all the natural movements of the animal body to generate the most efficient use of energy. Trotting horses and loaded camels move rhythmically no less than oarsman in a ship or blacksmiths wielding the hammer. Akademische Verlags- buchhandlung von J. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze [Folk Psychology.
A Study of the Laws of Development], vol. Er ist es, der die einzelnen Bewegungen erleichtert, indem er sie automatisiert. Rhythm is what facilitates individual movements by rendering them automatic. It both arouses energy and saves it, thus increasing productivity. It enables the worker to perform his tasks with joy and without reluctance. Evidence for this theory can be found in work songs, which play an important role in all manual trades.
As Michael Golston has shown, moreover, it was underpinned by a wide industry of physiological and psychological research. According to one American psychologist writing in Cultural and Technological Incubations of Fascism Wilhelm Engelmann, , — Writers and intellectuals often reflected on precisely this paradox. It appears to constitute the essential ingredient of all those cultures opposed to our own — cultures of the south and the east — and from which we like to distinguish ourselves.
But within those cultures, rhythm spurs the body on to achievements that we cannot that we cannot hope to match, achievements whose rigid and inimitable uniformity can only be compared to our own speciality, technology. Schmidt, , But with the advancement of industrial machinery, one strove to eliminate the idle backstroke usually associated with rhythmical machine motion and […] thus exchanged this horizontal or vertical movement for uniform rotation, which avoids that loss of energy.
His tools no longer act as his servants, as enhanced bodily limbs.
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Rather, the tools now lord it over him. They dictate to him the measure of his movements. The speed and duration of his labour no longer obeys his will. He has been chained to a mechanism that is dead and yet seems so alive. As he explained in a later passage from the text already cited, rhythmical gymnastics were meant to compensate for the loss of rhythm and of the human in labour: In the modern urban habitat, on the other hand, such periodicity of tension and relaxation is replaced by a world in which factory technology, industrial transportation and — not least — the modern banking economy have made possible constant and uninterrupted activity.
Thus the general conditions of existence are freed from rhythm. Rather than controlling the work process, man is now the slave of the latter]. However, inasmuch as these structures bind the worker to the stringent requirement of performing repetitive identical movements, they have a completely different subjective meaning from the old work rhythms. For the latter followed the inner demands of physiological-psychological energies, while the new rhythms conform either to the indifferent and objective movement of the machines or to the compulsory requirement for the individual worker to keep up with the other workers in the group, each of whom performs only a small part of the work process.
Delphin-Verlag, , The metropolis controls us; technology controls us; the economy controls us — not the other way round! This is one of the most interesting social developments and the tragedy of a creator whose children have outgrown him. In his study First Principles , Herbert Spencer had argued that rhythm arises wherever forces come into conflict, but especially in vital phenomena: Niels Kampmann Verlag, Appleton, , That all life is traversed by one pulse, one rhythm], W.
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Grundlegungen zur exakten Biologie [The Cycle of Life. Fundaments of a Precise Biology] Leipzig: Franz Dueticke, , 2. See Klages, Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft. A Foundation of the Science of Expression], 3rd edn Leipzig: Johann Ambrusius Barth, , — In particular, Klages argued that rhythm manifested itself not in the repetition of identical elements, but rather in the deviations and irregularities that interrupt serial repetition: And the same can be said for the alternation of waking and sleeping states, energy and fatigue, hunger and satiation, thirst and the aversion to fluids — and in primitive people even the alternation of mating seasons and periods of sexual indifference.
If the dividing activity teilen of Takt manifested itself most clearly in the punctual beats of clocks and metronomes, Rhythmus was most directly perceptible in the gradual ebb and flow of waves: Mediated by an unquantifiable succession of intermediary phases, the upward movement glides into the downward movement and vice versa, so that no hard edges arise on either the upper or the lower transitions between waves. Rather, what we see is a curve, which clearly reveals the undivided continuity of an unmistakeably organized movement — organized on account of the continual alternation of opposing weights on either side of the balance.
In his treatise Stufen des Organischen [The Stages of the Organic], Plessner sees rhythm as key to vital phenomena and defines it as follows: This phenomenon is so widespread that we can easily understand how rhythm could be declared the central characteristic of all life], Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen , Gesammelte Schriften 4, ed.
Surkamp, , Thus the above passage continues: At stake in this dichotomy was precisely the desire to draw a strict distinction between the experience of the body and that of the machine: Gallimard, , — —67, — Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um [Streams and Rays. The Gradual Disappearance of Matter c. Isadora Duncan photographed by Arnold Genthe c. But just as the mere imitation of an already present structure never deserves to be called a creation, no more does a bodily movement merit being called originary inasmuch as it offers nothing more than the execution of a predetermined rule].
The more the handwriting deviated from acquired, mechanical techniques, the more vitality Klages claimed to find in it. As creator, I cannot achieve rhythm by the power of my will, even if the will allows me to produce measure and metre. At one point, for example, he asks why the very regularized rattling of a train car rolling over evenly spaced tracks — a symbol of industrial modernity if ever there was one — is able to put passengers into a trance-like state no less than the irregular lapping of waves.
In order to explain the problem, Klages speculates that what lulls the passengers to sleep are not the percussive noises themselves, marking as they do dividing intervals, but rather the uninterrupted forward movement of the train that these noises indicate. But despite this explanation, a philosophical doubt remains: It thus stands to reason that, for the intellectualized individual, the intellect can, in fortunate cases, assume the role of an adversary to life, and that it is through overcoming this adversary that life first unfolds its rhythmical possibilities.
Minuit, , — Eugen Dietrichs, , See Inge Baxmann, Mythos: Cultures of the Body and Dance in Modernity] Munich: Fink, , — Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme [Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism] Paris: Siegfried Behn, Der deutsche Rhythmus und sein eigenes Gesetz. An Experimental Investigation] Strassburg: Verlag von Karl J. Payot, , Character Building as an Aid to Health London: Holmes article appeared in Rhythm —13 , a journal founded by the British writer Middelton Murray to cover the latest movements in literature and art.
In Germany and Austria, rhythm was also a central topic of debate in the burgeoning field of art history. On the other hand, this discussion — both within and outside Germany — stretched across the political and ideological spectrum. Luchterhand, , , , As such, rhythm would designate a volitional, instrumental activity: Rather, since all movements are bound to time and space, each one must be driven by a law and a will, which requires us to execute it self-consciously, carefully applying our energies according to our aims and purposes.
And while some observers of these new interfaces might have sought an imaginary restoration of natural purity through phenomenological ein Druck und Gegendruck. Conceiving of rhythm in this way, we perceive all of its essential characteristics, namely the expenditure of energy, the collection of energy, lifting and lowering, effect and counter-effect, push and pull, tension and relaxation].
However, if I have reviewed several pre- Weimar discourses on rhythm here, this is because I do not believe that the discourses and representations concerning rhythm in the s appeared on the scene out of nowhere in In setting out to examine some of the key stations of this rhythm discussion in the s and s, this study joins a great deal of research on rhythm in recent scholarship, particularly from Germany and France. Rhythm in Art, Culture and Nature] Bielefeld: Transcript, ; and for a similar multidisciplinary collection of rhythm studies, see Barbara Naumann ed.
Sauvanet, in particular, has published a series of monographs and essay collections dedicated to the philosophy and aesthetics of rhythm.
In North America, several recent works have focused on the intersections between rhythm in modern physiology and modernist aesthetics. Unlike some recent scholarly studies of rhythm, I do not make any claims about what rhythm is objectively or engage in philosophical debates with modern thinkers such as Bergson or Nietzsche. Nor does this study set out to provide an empirical history of modern scientific physiological, psychological or otherwise research on rhythm, or of any particular rhythmical practices.
In particular, readers expecting a history of modern dance or dance schools will be disappointed. Although both science and dance figure in my analyses as key domains for conceptualizing and visualizing different models of rhythm, this book is by no means a catalogue of such practices. Rather, it attempts, through a select number of close analyses, to examine how people imagined, talked about and represented rhythm at a certain pivotal moment in an effort to come to terms with industrial modernity.
More specifically, I am concerned with the ramifications of this preoccupation with rhythm for the understanding of temporal media and art-forms in the German modernism of the s and s. To put the argument on the table: In recent decades, media historians such as Friedrich Kittler and Jonathan Crary have highlighted the extent to which the experience of media became an increasingly embodied affair in the nineteenth century, when media were largely reconceived in terms of their material effects on the bodies of receivers.
Fink, ]; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. Chapter 2 focuses on a representative effort to refashion a traditional form — that of lyric poetry — in terms of this new understanding of artistic media. Like many other expressionist writers, Engelke was fascinated by the phenomenon of rhythm, which he saw as the source of a primitive vitality utilizable for both artistic and cultural renewal. Unlike other poets of his generation such as Georg Heym , however, he saw poetry as a means not to critique or mythologize the urban environment, but rather to come to terms with it.
Sie sollen sie lieben lernen! But they should learn to love it! And this is why poets speak to them].
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Building on my arguments from Chapter 2, the third chapter turns to the s to examine the impact of debates on rhythm for the understanding of its newest temporal medium: Film, I argue here, was also understood as an interface between primal and technological rhythms. Das Gesamtwerk [Rhythm of the New Europe. Postskriptum, , The Symphony of a Great City] imagined film as an eminently technological art form, serving to submit primal rhythm to the precise order of technology.
Mediating between technology and nature by submitting the power of primal rhythm to the order of a technological will, the pumping heart machine offers a metaphor both for industry and for film understood as an industrial art form. Having explored the impact of rhythm debates on writing and film in Chapters 2 and 3, I then go on to consider in Chapter 4 their interaction in theories of advertising and advertising film from the s. The Movement Image] Paris: PUF, [] , — Specifically, I offer an extended reading of the famous avant-garde film Kipho , which Pinschewer made together with cinematographer Guido Seeber as an advertisement for a major exhibition of the film industry in Berlin in On the other hand, the film also attempts to absorb spectators into this same rhythmical apparatus with its final injunction: The filmmakers explicitly adapted this phrase from the expressionist thriller Das Cabinet des Dr.
New York University Press, , — Although many practitioners of eurhythmics and vitalist dance categorically rejected jazz, intellectuals such as Max Brod or Fritz Giese saw jazz as providing answers to specific questions of German modernity in the s. For these thinkers, I argue, the figure of the African-American dancer or jazz drummer, who displayed a remarkable ability to manipulate rhythm through syncopation, embodied a fantasy of survival among and adaptation to the inhuman rhythms of Americanist rationality. Despite the persistence of obvious racial stereotypes in jazz reception, this engagement with rhythm marks a different kind of negotiation of race from those which the monological narratives of proto-fascism can account for.
No doubt, reactionary modernists in the Third Reich had every reason to take an interest in rhythm, which held out the promise of lending to technological modernity an aura of primitive ritual, inducing an ecstatic sense of participation in the performance of the nation and, not least, controlling mass movements. Moreover, as I explore in my epoligue to this book, this preoccupation with rhythm extends — albeit with varying degrees of intensity — from the era of industrialization to our own post-industrial society.
Not least on account of its diachronic presentational mode and metred structure, poetry, like music and dance, appeared as an obvious medium in which to work through or counter the new temporal experiences associated with technology, labour and the urban environment.
In Germany, this project found its most prominent spokesman in Arno Holz. Such a non-mechanical rhythm, he argued, constituted the one universal element in poetry and the utopian object of a future verse-form freed from all historical constraints of metrical, rhyming or accent schemas: For if the effort to access primal rhythm required the destruction of mechanical metre, it was at the same time dependent upon that metre.
Indeed, conceived by definition as a force that interrupts mechanical succession, primal rhythm could only appear through and by means of such a mechanized medium. Dietz, , X: Rather, modernist explorations in rhythm should be seen as part of a broad effort to come to terms with the transformed temporal experience of industrial modernity in the temporal medium of poetry — and more specifically to mediate between two poles of modern and traditional mechanical and vital rhythms.
Eine wissenssoziologische Untersuchung [Ideology of Proletarian Poetry — See Kurt Morawietz, et. Gerrit Engelke —] Hannover: Like Holz and the theoreticians of dance, Engelke saw rhythm not simply as a component of poetic aesthetics, but as a primordial natural force. Engelke [Rhythm From the element from which all things great and small Begin their apparently solid growth, From the element that has given rise to everything since the beginning From the ground of which concept and being grow: From rhythm, the form life gives to itself, Which flows, invisible, through all weighty matter, Rolling it, melting it, in a great burst of energy, Continually pouring it into changing forms: Along with Holz and many expressionist poets, Engelke sought to revitalize modern poetry by accessing such organic rhythms.
He experimented with middle axis poetry like that of Holz, and he also sought to differentiate the aesthetics of rhythm from any slavish adherence to metre.
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As he wrote in a journal entry in The new poet must rely on his blood-feeling to balance out the entire poem and every word precisely before the poem can exist as a well-modulated tonal ensemble. Thus [what is needed is] not haphazard formlessness, but rather a compulsory form.
And yet, as this passage also suggests, Engelke did not strive to undo form altogether. This regularity, as I will further elucidate below, serves in Engelke above all to convey the sense of a consistent and unitary vital force behind the manifold sensations of modern life. And should Death whisk away one hundred each day, The thundering noise continues all around as before. Should Death drag the smith from his hammer-block, Or the train conductor from the sinuous tracks: The train car rolls on, and the hammer keeps pounding.
Unrelentingly, the Moloch house Bleeds out steel and streams of people. The noisy city steams in unrest without time. World in Freedom], in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 64— Suhrkamp, , 16— Once again, sixty rapid-transit minutes crash and clatter Through my blood — overtake my steps: Only midnight provides the comfort of respite; Its hours hum by slowly, flooded with stars, Blue; then, in my dream, I do not know That I am only an atom of the hours in the cosmos. Otto Salle, , Indeed, this sense of lurching from one sensation to the next is borne out formally in the enjambment that erases the boundary between the first two stanzas.
But these moments are few and far between in Engelke. Theoretische Schriften [Theoretical Writings], ed. Rolf-Peter Janz Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker, , — Der ganze Wagen, mit den Menschen drinnen Saust und summt und singt mit meinen Sinnen.
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Das Wagensingen sausebraust, es schwillt! The whole tram, with the people inside, swishes, hums and sings with my senses. The car-song roars, speeds and swells up! In der Ferne, Automobile knattern Hart vorbei: They become giants, which yoke the individual and the group to their energies]. Garnier, , — Suhrkamp, , — Like Simmel and Giese, Benjamin saw the traffic-laden city as an environment characterized by new technological rhythms, which found their paradigmatic incarnation in the conveyer-belt. The day came when film corresponded to a new and urgent need for stimulation.
In film, the experience of shock came into its own as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on the conveyor belt forms the basis of reception in film]. A good example can be seen in contemporary self-help manuals for overcoming neurasthenia. The author of one manual entitled Wie werde ich energisch?
Similarly, in his popular treatise Gymnastik des Willens [Gymnastics of the Will], the neurologist Reinholt Gerling insisted that life and rest were incompatible: Life is like a rippling stream that flows over sticks and stones; if the water stands still, it turns into a dirty marsh. For this reason, we should consider rest a necessary evil, intended only to provide us with new thoughts and new energy], Reinholt Gerling. Die Gymnastik des Willens, 5th edn Oranienburg bei Berlin: For they have at their disposal more agile, mobile and copious means than visual artists. Largely inherited from the 18th-century aesthetics of G.
Nor was Futurism alone in this respect: Lessing, Laokoon, Gesammelte Werke 5, ed. Aufbau, , Marcel Duchamps — sought to translate temporal experience into spatial media. Models for Redesigning Life and Art around ], vol. Wien entdeckt die Avantgarde [Kinetismus. Vienna Discovers the Avant- Garde] Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, The latter painting is reprinted in Kinetismus.
Wien entdeckt die Avantgarde, Even the medium of sculpture was dynamized, as it were, to facilitate the focus on rhythm; the sculpture Wiedergabe des rhythmischen Ablaufs einer Bewegung [Representation of the Rhythmical Progression of a Movement] by the Austrian artist Franziska Kantor, for example, would be Fig 2. Clearly, then, Engelke had many affinities with the futurists and their avant-garde successors, and his project for a poetry of modern rhythms can hardly be understood outside this context.
It would seem, moreover, that Engelke was well aware of these connections, as he makes repeated references to Futurism and Cubism in his notebooks. Despite their proximity, however, Engelke sought to distinguish his own urban aesthetic from that of the artistic avant- garde. The problem with such movements, as he understood them, had to do specifically with the question of mimesis: Warum solch ein Geschrei um die Futuristen und Kubisten? Sie geben chaotischen Inhalt ohne zusammenzwingende Form. They render chaotic content without containing it through form. Behind this aesthetic affinity with Expressionism, there is, I think, a more consequential question at stake here.
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. Probleme des Realismus [Works 4: Problems of Realism] Berlin: Luchterhand, , — Cited in Thomas Anz and Michael Stark eds. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur [Expressionism: Manifestoes and Documents of German Literature] — Stuttgart: Metzler, , In early expressionist theory, the creative poet was understood as someone who could master the new world of shocks and hyperstimulation rather than being mastered by it.
The human being wishes to find itself once more. Like other expressionist poets, moreover, he associated this emphasis on external details with mechanistic materialism and called for a counter- turn inward toward the spirit: Ferdinand Hodler, Eurythmie Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Bern [We construct astounding wonders of technology, mile-long bridges, skyscrapers, aeroplanes and other means of rapid transit, but we never stop to think that living faster will not make us happier — and that all this material, this steel, steam and electricity, these new means of creating new needs, which we have amassed unnecessarily and aimlessly, is enslaving us more and more.
When will we turn all the powers today applied to our external lives towards inner life? For Engelke, such a turn inward was tantamout to an effort to reconnect with the vital flows of rhythm, the underlying principle animating all matter. The task of modern art, as he understood it, was first and foremost to access the primal rhythms behind the chaotic surface-culture of urban modernity. Thus to the surface aesthetics of Futurism, Engelke opposes, in his notebooks, the ritual-rhythmical compositions of the Swiss Symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler: Der Mann hat Rhythmus im Leibe! This man has rhythm in his body!
More precisely, Engelke sought — here by contrast with the futurists — to invest urban and technological modernity with a new spiritual significance. Darum wollen wir nicht: Georg Olms Verlag, , 37— Ein Freund sagt mir: Alle Millliarden von bunten und wirbelnden Erscheinungen des Daseins sind nur Variationen des einen Themas vom Leben, vom Lebensrhythmus!
For this reason, we do not seek to overcome materialism, but rather to permeate it with spirit. We desperately need this. A friend tells me: Der Rhythmus, der Rhythmus! All occurences in the world — variations on a divine theme. Musik, die zu den tausend Nerven, mitunter gar nur zu den Trommelfellen spricht — statt zur Seele. Music that speaks to a thousand nerves, and sometimes only to the ear-drums, instead of speaking to the soul. Would that a single all-encompassing feeling might soon suffuse our overly technologized age with soul]. Denn in Dir ist Gott! For God is within you!
Blut durch Leib- und Stadt-Atom. Schwerer Qualm aus Bahnsteigshallen: Wellend, schwellend, fort und fort. Pocht und treibt die Herz-Turbine. Es ruht das Kraftgewelle eine Nacht. Das Herz- und Stadt-Getrieb auf volle Macht. It melts the walls of the arteries with lava-fire, Swelling, undulating, on and on: It leaps as sound: Resounds as the crack of whips on the backs of packhorses, Swells up as a work taking form.
Pulsing, pulsing, on and on, The energy-machine turns in a circle. Pulsing, pulsing, on and on, The heart-turbine turns in a circle. Blood through the atoms of the body and city The warm stream flows and flows: Flows as light from arc-lamps: Hisses from the whistles of elevated trains: Heavy steam from railway stations: The buzzing of sales in department stores: The sounding of hours from church bell towers: Then the all-powerful hand Turns the sucking and spitting machine, The lever, To low power.
The energy waves rest for a night. On the other hand, however, the metaphor of the heart and blood seems to imbue technology itself with the force of organic rhythm. Absent from this poem is any notion of a cold, rational modernity of the type propagated by Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity]. What Engelke hopes his readers will detect underneath all the multifarious and teeming energies perceptible in the urban environment is the universal living pulse that makes and unmakes forms and holds all things together. Rhythm is blood feeling]. Hear in the billion things One heart beat oscillating?
The world resounds in all hearts! Wellen um Wellen schleudert die Welt um dich auf: Die Spurensuche unterhalb der Kultur diente der Verarbeitung der Herausforderungen der Moderne, an deren erster Stelle die technologische Herausforderung stand. Gemeinschaft, [In order to understand the specificity of the experience of modernity, theorists thus looked back to those practices which, since the beginning of human history, have involved perceptions beyond the confines of linear and geometric space and time: The search for traces below culture served to work through the challenges of modernity, the most significant of which was the challenge of technology.
This was the goal of those reflections that seem at first to amount to a flight from modernity]. Pounding waves, hissing foam race toward you, Roaring about you like a flood. Waves upon waves hurl the world up all around you: Factories, rocked by churning trains, People running, people yelling, Horses and cars shoved into one another, Trams, Cathedral towers ripped open, musical parades, The noise of boats, Steamers with howling sirens, And steam, noise, steam, hammer noise — Everything Collapses together And hammering, rattling, flashing, screaming, Tumbles around you!
Within this context, Engelke takes up a classic image of stoicism and spiritual hygiene: Es gibt keine absolute Einheit in Welt und All. There is no absolute unity in the world or the universe. Everywhere conflicting lines and counter-movements in ever new variations: The great thinkers are [ Harvard University Press, , Higher — A final splash of foam licks your foot And — then you hover, released, in heavenly clarity Above the world of steam, Above the world of struggle below, deep below — Sink down once again In the world, Poet and thinker.
Let them recognize, these people, The world-driving-spirit The divine spirit. For Isadora Duncan, the very goal of dance was to absorb the movement of waves, which she saw as the universal structure of vital and cosmic rhythms: Like many of her contemporaries, moreover, Duncan associated such wave-like movement not only with nature, but also with modern forms of energy such the x-ray, electricity, light and sound waves. For does not sound travel in waves, and light also? Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, , 75— Like the dancer, the poet must become porous to the energies of the modern world.
Like the modern dancer, the poet was supposed to absorb the streams and flows of an energetic world. At the same time, lest he be overwhelmed and submerged in this new sea of energy, he was also supposed to recognize the universal rhythm underlying those flows. For Engelke, then, the task of the modern poet involves a delicate balancing-act: Gallimard, , Here, in the irreducible plenitude of water that seems to pose no resistence to their movement, these creatures enjoy the ideal of mobility, extending and retracting their radiant symmetry. Darum reden die Dichter zu ihnen, zu allen!
And this is why the poet speaks to them and to everyone! Rather than fleeing the rhythms of modernity, it conveyed an ecstatic experience of swimming within modern rhythm, one that would help readers overcome the gulf between subjective and objective culture through participation in the universal creative force behind appearances. Vittorio Klostermann, , — Es klopft an deines Leibes Wandung Die monotone Brandung: And all the force that still thunders in submission, Makes your blood tremble in a new rhythm!
Steam That feeds from rivers, Steam That increases power, Power That turns on axes, Power That roars with rhythm, That resounds from well-worn tracks of trains, And with the pounding violence of savage muscles Welds hot embers to your fire, Thrusts you into the throng of brimming life. The hours here race Through the work joining all men together. Forged through rhythmical poetry, that sense of community would be established not in opposition to modernity but rather in and through modern technology itself.
As we saw in the last chapter, there was in fact no shortage of artists attempting to capture rhythmical perception in traditionally static visual media. To the examples from painting and sculpture discussed in chapter 2, one might add the indexical medium at the basis of film: Snapshot photography played an essential role in disseminating the iconography of modern dance and eurhythmics from Duncan to Jaques-Dalcroze and Bode and beyond.
Snapshot of dancers from Rudolf von Laban, Gymnastik und Tanz arbitrary cut into the flow of time. Minuit, , 13— Harvard University Press, , — If visual art gained a new impetus from the ability of photography to capture a world in motion, however, it was above all the medium of motion pictures, as Laurent Guido has shown in the French context, that inspired artists and theorists to reflect on the possibility of a new rhythmical art for a new age obsessed with the presence of oscillating energies. Hatje Cantz Verlag, , Eine Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte der Geschwindigkeit im Anabas, , — As he puts it summarizing futurist doctrine: Thus film could be seen at once as the quintessential embodiment of technological precision and as a revival of the most primitive vitality.
The desire to construct a specificity of cinematic aesthetics has often been cited to explain the vehemence with which directors sought to valorize abstract form over concrete content, defining avant-garde cinema effectively as an anti-mimetic art and severing it from the realm of referentiality. The significance of the new film resides in the details of the plastic object and its movement — that is, precisely in those elements that previously existed haphazardly and unconsciously alongside the story, the actors and the scenery.
On the debates concerning abstract filmmaking in France and on Dulac in particular, see Guido — Film ist Rhythmus [Hans Richter: Film is Rhythm] Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, , Film ist Rhythmus, In what follows, I wish to examine this connection more closely, particularly as it played out among German filmmakers in the s. After exploring the broader interactions between discourses on rhythm and the body and discourses on rhythm in film, I will turn to an extended reading of one film that encapsulates some of the central stakes of the rhythm debates: See for example M.
Smith, Rhythmus und Arbeit; D. Awramoff, Arbeit und Rhythmus. This sense of an increasing and increasingly uncontrollable velocity informed the imagination of many of the rhythmical gymnastics groups from the first decades of the twentieth century. It played a particularly prominent role in anthroposophical and theosophical thought.
In his book The Rhythm of Life: Character Building as an Aid to Health , translated into German in , the theosophist Archibald Keightley broadly summarized the understanding of the rhythm problem among cultural reformers when he asked: I think that we have not done so. A very large number — almost a majority — of people at the present day are sufferers in one way or another from physical, nervous or mental instability.
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Der Rhythmus des Lebens, trans. Paul Raatz Verlag, The entire passage reads: Recalling the ubiquitous association of natural rhythms with the movement of waves, Ruttmann opens the film with an establishing shot of a watery surface distinguished above all by its slowly lapping ripples. In a graphic match- cut, these figures then morph into an accelerated montage sequence of a train on its way to Berlin, in which shots of furiously spinning wheels, speeding tracks and telephone lines alternate to the pace of a pounding rhythmical score by Edmund Meisel.
Ein Vortragszyklus vom Juli im Goetheanum [Eurythmics as a Visible Language. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, , ii. Nonetheless, they shared the motivation of countering the nervousness pervasive in modern life. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, , i—xi. Seghers, , Poster for Walter Ruttmann, Berlin. Through such interfilmic references, Berlin: It also lays the groundwork for a number of montage sequences that will centre on the motif of acceleration and mechanical rhythms.
To take one example: Essays Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, , 50— Anton Kaes has proposed a similar reading of this opening sequence as a condensed narrative of modernity specifically with reference to the experience of dislocation that had characterized the lives of millions of immigrants to Berlin in the early twentieth century.
As Joachim Radkau has shown, the nervous system itself was often compared to a vast system of telephone or telegraph wires, and telephone operators were thought to be particularly susceptible to neurasthenia and hysteria. As the pace of this montage sequence continues to accelerate, Ruttmann drives the point home by inserting shots of screaming monkeys and fighting dogs in a textbook example of intellectual montage. Unable to exert any self-control, the animals here function as symbols for the nervous inhabitants of the metropolis, in a manner analogous to the slaughtered cows Eisenstein inserted into the final scene of Strike as a stand-in for the hapless workers.
If the montage of telephone operators represents the height of acceleration during the morning shift, another key image of speed will come after the lunch break. This is then followed by another sequence of symbolic montage, unfolding in an ever-increasing tempo and associating images of a gathering storm, whirling shots taken from within a moving roller coaster, and the panic-stricken eyes of a woman who looks down from a city bridge as she prepares to jump to her death. Germany Between Bismarck and Hitler] Munich: Carl Hanser, , , Harvard University Press, , 51— In staging modernity as the overcoming of Klagesian rhythm, Berlin: Camden House, , Here too we find a Klagesian subtext when Prager introduces this sequence with a shot of ocean waves and flowing wheat fields — both paradigmatic manifestations of rhythm for Klages — followed by an intertitle reading: This is a law of nature].
Most of the exercises shown consist of flowing bodily movements, and some performances are even staged at the edge of a lake in front of the lapping waves figure 4. But they are all nervous]. Only eurhythmical gymnastics, he argued, could liberate the flow of primal rhythm. Moving Images as Interface On one level, then, both Berlin. The Symphony of the City and Paths to Strength and Beauty were really about the opposition between machinic movement and organic rhythm, even if the films opted, as it were, for different sides of the opposition.
But the stakes of this opposition and of the broader discourse on rhythm extend well beyond the content of these two films to touch upon one of the central questions behind s thinking about the cinema as a time-based medium. Examining writings on the cinema from the period, one is struck by the extent to which the body-cultural discourses I have been exploring here serve as a point of reference in discussions about filmic rhythm. A case in point can be seen in the figure of Sergei Eisenstein.
In formulating his model of rhythmical montage, Eisenstein draws an explicit analogy with the debates already under way in body-cultural circles. Essays in Film Theory, ed. Harcourt, , In this, Eisenstein was hardly alone. While not everyone shared his dialectally informed montage theory, many s film theorists did attempt to think rhythm in opposition to metre.
It escapes all numerical formulas]. As we saw above, Richter considered rhythm the essence of emotional expression. At stake in that opposition was a question of movement and time already foreshadowed in the philosophy of Bergson. Blackwell, , — Essay on the relation between body and spirit] Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [] , 11— Hence the importance of water as a visual and auditory element in rhythmical experiments.
What [Abel] Gance had begun with his images of iron and railways would be developed, transmitted and disseminated in all directions by the liquid element. In his experiments, Jean Mitry started by filming the railway in Pacific and then turned to water in Images pour Debussy as the image that could better capture reality as vibration. Cerf, , — Because of this distinction, Mitry rejects the analogy of filmic rhythm to musical rhythm which he sees as defined by regular cadence , arguing instead that filmic rhythm is akin to the free rhythms of prose poetry.
But I do wish to emphasize the ongoing pertinence of a question about the filmic medium that I have been attempting to delineate from films and film theory in the s. In this ambiguity, the cinema seemed to embody, during the s, what Christine Lubkoll has identified as the general function of rhythm in the modern imagination since Bergson: Writing two years after Richter, the critic Rudolf Kurz laid out a similar vision of abstract film in his famous study Expressionismus und Film [Expressionism and Film].
In a discussion of the rhythmical experiments of Richter and Eggeling, Kurz argued that such films served to tap into the elemental rhythms of organic life: The patterns by which they grow, disappear, spread or wither away are in no way arbitrary; rather they follow mathematically calculated tempi]. In this way, the medium of film could be understood as an eminently industrial apparatus, which both taps into the vital force of rhythm and also renders it calculable for productive ends: Rhythm in Metropolis On its release in , Metropolis was widely criticized for its histrionic acting style as well as its contrived plot: How the engines sing amidst wonderful transparent triumphal arches formed by electric charges!
In its attempt to articulate those limits, moreover, the film employs a thoroughly Klagesian opposition. After an initial montage of pistons, flywheels and gears in repetitive motion, the film zeroes in on a shot of the ten-hour work-clock that organizes the time of the city. In fact, what we see are two clocks: Below it, however, the face of the rationalized ten-hour clock looms five times as large.
By contrast to the diurnal clock, which features only the hour- and minute-hands, the ten-hour clock is distinguished by the marked presence of two rapidly flashing lights and the addition of a second-hand, which races around the clock face in a jerky, staccato movement. Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear Rochester: Clearly associated with Taylorization and its obsession with micro- managing the seconds of labour time, the deathly second-hand in Metropolis also constitutes a potent metaphor for Klagesian Takt in its cadenced, non-flowing movement.
Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, 10— Ozeanische Bibliothek, [] , Still from Fritz Lang, Metropolis , courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek As the film continues, moreover, that staccato movement finds a direct echo in the choreography of working bodies. In the sequence immediately following the shot of the two clocks, the film cuts to the machine halls underground, where two geometric groups of workers, serialized by their identical uniforms, can be seen walking in different directions, the highly stylized, staccato gait of one group recalling the movement of the second-hand from the previous scene.
Through this meticulous choreography of cadenced bodily movement, Metropolis depicts modernization in a manner similar to that of Klages and the proponents of eurhythmical body culture. Choreographies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Stanford: Stanford University Press, , While this motif of the city as body comes out most distinctly in the famous allegory of the head and the hands, it is also inscribed into the very structure and history of the city.
In this, the city undergoes a process directly parallel to Joh Fredersen himself. Eine Quelle mit salzschwerem Wasser und rot von Blut. As your father stood here, it was as if I could hear a spring rumbling beneath the stone. The water was heavy with salt and red with blood. And I knew that if this spring gained enough strength to break through the stone, it would be sweeter than dew and whiter than light. In an earlier scene in the novel, Rotwang describes himself to the robot Maria by means of the same allegory of water and stone used to describe Fredersen: Ich glaubte, sie seien tot; aber sie sind nur Lebendig-Begrabene.
Mein Ich ist ein Felsen- Finsternis. I thought they were dead, but they have only been buried alive. My conscious self is a stony darkness. But deep within the sad stone, I can hear the sound of flowing springs. If I go against the will ruling over you and me, if I destroy the work I created in your image It would serve Joh Fredersen right, and I would feel better!
Ob die Woge kommt, ob sie hoch genug schlagen wird, wissen wir nicht. Bode 33 [All we can do is clear the way in case the wave of life should rise up again to assault the fortress of rationalism, flooding it with the forms of rhythmically moving life. We can only point to symptoms which perhaps suggest that the flood is rising. A dancing girl led the masses forward]. Like the novel, the film draws a direct parallel between the images of flooding water and the movement of the workers in revolt as they tear down every barrier on their unstoppable flow towards the machine rooms.
A wide stream flowed bubbling down into the shafts of the underground railway]. Still from Fritz Lang, Metropolis , courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek Gustave Le Bon,60 it also recalls the understanding of primal rhythm by reformers like Bode, who championed the rhythms of nature as a feminine, fluid element opposed to the hyper-masculine activity of rational segmentation. For Bode, modern men had become — like Fredersen in Metropolis — nothing but intellect: Both the novel and film versions of Metropolis code the flood similarly as a manifestation of a feminized nature: And yet, the film does attempt to imagine a productive relation between the two poles: This gives rise to those types that populate cities today.
On the other hand, as the material flows of the soul diminish in women, their instinct for motherliness dies out and they also succumb to the intellect. This gives rise to those types which, once again, can only be brought forth by the civilized city: For on the screens of all cinemas of all countries, the first international language is developing: Der Film ist der Rhapsode des Der Wanderprediger, der zu Millionen spricht.
But it could be much more for humanity; it could be the travelling preacher who speaks to millions. With the silent eloquence of its moving images, whose language is equally comprehensible in all latitudes, film can make a genuine contribution to overcoming the chaos that has prevented peoples from seeing each other as they really are ever since the Tower of Babel.
It is this mediating function, I will argue, that finds its objective correlative in the film in the figure of the pulsating heart. Suhrkamp, , Spectatorship in American Silent Film Cambridge: Harvard University Press, This interpretation becomes even more plausible when one considers the design for the heart-machine in Metropolis. In a description of Maria being pursued by Rotwang, for example, the narrator states: Allegories of Vision and Modernity London: British Film Institute, , The First Wave — Princeton: Princeton University Press, , The terms were first applied to Metropolis by Andreas Huyssen.
As Siegfried Kracauer recognized, this exorcism occurs not only through the burning of the bad Maria, but also through the re- ordering of the mass flood into a perfectly geometric mass ornament. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture Berkeley: Neal's Musings on Historical Classical Recordings. Classical Performance podcast Audio Podcast. Piano Quartet in G minor, Op Strange Magic — On quantifying the sound of the Stradivarius - After threatening poor editors for some years with word exegeses when they barely had room for a listicle, I finally got a yes.
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