Reconfiguring the Hierarchies of the Senses
Murnau’s Der Gang in Die Nacht and Discourses of Vision
-Christian Buss, UC Berkeley
The ophthalmologist Eigil Boerne is affianced to the bourgeois Helene, the wedding is near at hand. But the revue-dancer Lily throws a wrench in the plans, and walks off with the man. With her, at a house by the sea, a blind artist is cured, and the dancer vacillates between the two men. “A minimum of a minimum. Two women, two men. A play of passion which drives one to his other, and again drives him away. Here in the subtlest differentiation of human life, this person becomes mad, murderous: demanding suicide. A shortsighted person would call these mere inconsequences.”(Haas, 109).” Instead, the indescribable is wrought on film; suggestiveness is filmically arranged and framed within the problematic of vision and sight. But these men are arranged not simply as competing, desiring masculine subjects, the ophthalmologist is the blasé city intellectual, the artist impossible to view as anything other than the traumatized soldier returned from the war.
Through its treatment of a blind artist/war veteran and eye doctor/blasé intellectual Der Gang in Die Nacht reframes the functions of vision, locating vision not as a passive, authoritative camera, but rather implicitly figuring it within a larger cognitive framework, in which the act of interpretation is brought into the logic of vision itself. But in so much as seeing is hyper-emphasized in the film, Vision demands integration into cognition, but in a way that flies against the biology and psychology of vision in the early 20th century. Within the unstable balance negotiated between the Ophthalmologist and the blind man, Murnau implicitly objects to the binaries of then raging scientific debates between nativist and empiricist ontologies of vision in which vision is either innate (Hering) or learned (Helmholtz), but always framed within the dominant subject.
Instead Murnau’s problematic of
vision antedates and prefigures early 21st Century cognitive neuroscience’s
conception of visual intelligence which, as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman
writes, is the power that people use to "construct an experience of
objects out of colors, lines, and motions." Far from being a passive recorder of a
pre-existing world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual
experience-from the strut of a peacock to the nuances of light in a forest at
dusk. And this process is wrought with failings, unlike the autonomous eye of
Hering and even the eye/mind of Helmholtz. Instead, vision is marked by what
Mack and Rock have referred to as Inattentional
Blindness, the hypothesis that there is no
perception without attention. What Mack and Rock implicitly argue for
within the cognitive system is that the perceptual object to which attention is
directed becomes an object of conscious perception only if attention is
directed to it, and that this object is not a single feature but rather a
complex and meaningful scene. Hence, the object may exist before attention, but
only with attention does is it created as an object of perception. This split
implies a constructed-ness of visual objects within what Posner (1980) has
described as the spotlight of the mind. The question, then is not one of “what
has the eye seen?”, but rather one of “what has captured the attention of the
mind to allow it to be seen?”
Within a parallel logic, Murnau unveils the question of how to define a grammar of vision as the supreme task of the audience. For Murnau all vision is constructed between subjects and object, and misperception is the fundamental nature of this relationship. In the film, vision then becomes process. The unstable, fallible process of interpretation between subjects and objects is left to his audience.
I. Calling for Attention
A female dancer, Lily, stands behind a stage and waits for her curtain call. But before she begins her performance, she sneaks a peak at tonight’s crowd. The camera closes in on the dancer, the screen blacks out, and the images return peephole-like in the center of the screen. But three quarters of the screen remains blacked out. We are looking through the hole in the curtain that Lily has just made. Or perhaps we are seeing out of her eye. She scans the audience, before stopping at a group of patrons in an upper box. All are standing, engaged in conversation, save one. He sits facing perpendicular to the stage, his posture slumped, a look of gruff resignation on his face. He looks up, but away from the stage. The dancer appears. He looks up, frowns, and stares down forlornly at the hands he is wringing. The other audience members are entranced but he looks away, even tries to engage his companion in conversation. She merely looks over the top of his head and at the dancer. The dance is finished. Lily heads off stage. She looks through the crack in the curtain again. He is not looking at her. A disembodied leg is revealed from behind the curtain. The Doctor looks up, frowns and shakes his head. She looks out of her peephole, and also frowns and shakes her head, but in frustration. The dancer comes out again. She is dressed as a blossoming flower. She pirouettes across the stage, the Doctor remains uninterested. She twirls again, but now falls in pain. A look of concern passes over the Doctor’s face. The Doctor stands up consternation showing in his whole body. He heads backstage to attend to the hurt dancer.
What then are we to make of this scene? I argue that it calls the reconciliation of multiple teleologies of visions impossible to maintain within the same space. The ophthalmologist is shown to be the blasé intellectual, unable to pay attention to anything, bored, un-watching, what Georg Simmel has described as the following:
In the same way, through the rapidity
and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such
violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their
last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they
have no time to gather new strength. An
incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy.
This constitutes that blasé attitude. (Simmel, 6)
Her vision on the other hand demands attention, demands a respondent. She looks through the peephole, seeing only fragments of the scene around her, she is capable of discrimination. But towards what end? Towards calling the attention of the male gaze. Her coquettish glance through the curtain is a failed glance if all eyes are not turned towards her. Her desiring vision requires a desiring other. In her subjective glance she concommitantly calls for her sublimation into the object being desired. The frustration of her inability to gain his attention reveals the gap between his blasé sightlessness and her dance for attention. Who then has control of that gaze? Who controls that relationality between desired and desiring?
The key lies in her trickery. She
feigns injury. How does she ultimately gain his vision? With a call not to the
erotic, but rather with a call to objective vision, the realm of the
scientific. With his sight as a doctor, he appears to regain control of his
environment. The objective gaze upon the injured female places him above, and
her meekly below. It is through this empirical gaze that the Doctor is brought
back into the logic of desire. He now looks at her from his position of
engagement, of selectivity, of knowledge. He looks not because she is dancing
for his attention, but looks because he knows
what to do. However, his medical eye is false, it is not required. She is not actually injured, and his
objective vision is unnecessary, superfluous. What he believes is at odds with
what she knows. And his visit to her
chambers is thereby followed by gleeful laughter and ecstatic dancing. What he
conceives of as his aide, is instead her luring him into her narrative of
erotic vision.
However, there is an interloper in this scene: the audience. The mechanical eye that is called attention to by the half-closed iris of the camera, the iris-in-iris-out of the cuts between shots and the lengthy black-screen wipes between scenes. It rips the audience out of its fairy tale and into the constructed-ness of the filmic engagement. As Comolli has stated: “The visible part of the technology of cinema (camera, shooting, crew, lighting, screen) and its ‘invisible’ part (black between frames, chemical processing, baths and laboratory work, negative film, cuts, joins of editing, sound track, projector etc.), the latter repressed by the former, generally relegated to the un-thought, the ‘unconscious’ of cinema.” (Jean-Louis Comolli, 125). Here the unconscious is made conscious, we are placed on a border-line. Through the choice of shot and its insistence on calling out the mechanical that is generally effaced by cinematic editing, the mechanical unconscious is made complicit with her vision; we are told our vision is that of the camera and that of her desiring/desired eye.
But how is Lily/the audience to gain the attention through mere sight? Is it not the dance and subsequently her false, injuring fall that enacts the call for attention? True, but it is the eye, the scanning and locking-in of her vision that serves as the trigger the precipitates what is to follow. Her eye demands attention, demands its respondent. Cinematically, the audience is given what it desires, a moving picture. Diegetically, Lily’s visual demand for the Doctor’s attention is impossible, for the object of her vision is blasé, is unable to focus his gaze. Her desiring eye presents an impossibility that is the very requirement of silent cinema:
Wenn der
Körper nicht im Slapstick zappelt sondern Auskunft von Seelentiefen geben muss,
konzentriert sich dise last des Stummen Wortes auf den Blick. Aber das ist, so
als müsse man mit den Augen singen, oder mit den Ohren sprechen, oder mit dem
Mund Hören. (Brückner,
117)
But through her
deception, Lily accomplishes the impossible. Her eyes touch, and his eyes see.
II. Helmholtz-Hering and the Discourses of
Vision
From the 1870s to the 1930s, a controversy marked German and European biological discourses: the Helmholtz- Hering vision controversy. At the root of this controversy is an account of the formation of a debate between nativist and empiricist scientists, staged in the realm of vision science. While Helmholtz and Hering disagreed over the minutiae of vision science as practiced in the 19th century, primarily beginning with disagreements over theories of spatial and color perception, the key of their bitter strife was that question of “the proper sense in which the eye may be said to possess and to require a mind with which to see” (Turner,3). On this issue they disputed the basis of the human capacity to visually perceive space and to locate objects within that space. The empiricists argued that this ability is gradually acquired through learning and individual experience.
The sensations of the
senses are tokens for consciousness, it being left to our intelligence to learn
how to comprehend their meaning .... The only psychic
activity required for this purpose is the regularly recurrent association
between two ideas which have often been connected before. (Helmholtz, 533--535).
The nativists insisted that this was akin to `spiritualism' and anything but biological empiricism. Hering instead was moving towards a physiological grounding of sensation and consciousness studies. This “would replace the descriptive tradition of `philosophical psychology' which investigates the phenomena of sensation without regard for their organic basis” (Turner, 6)
Throughout his career, Helmholtz believed that the processes that define sensory perception are psychological, inferred, and occur as a function of the brain and not in the eyes and furthermore depend heavily on acquired learning. Hering’s views of Helmholtz’s work reveal that “this criticism encapsulated his lifelong hostility to explanations that portrayed the processes of sensory perception as analogous to higher, intellectualistic functions of the mind, rather than as immediate expressions of the life forces in the sense organs themselves” (Helmholtz, 63). Turner in his treatise on the structures of the Helmholtz-Hering debate ultimately suggests that it served to shift the direction of vision science along lines that have “no single, unambiguous ending at all in the twentieth century” (8) and that the multiplicity of present-day theories regarding the role of vision within the self cannot be isolated from the terms of the nativist-empiricist controversy of the late 19th century. Their insistence on the empirical questions surrounding vision frame all conceptions of vision within a narrative of the subject. Where Crary has emphasized the shift in vision science claiming “an extensive amount of work in science, philosophy, psychology and art involved coming to terms in various ways with the understanding that vision, or any of the senses could no longer claim and essential objectivity or certainty” (Jonathan Crary, “Suspensions of Perception”, 12) Turner argues instead, based upon the work of Martin Rudwick, that the contested debate of subjectivity of vision within the frame of mind or organs did not merely serve to act as a selection mechanism for the one or the other scientific approach, but rather that the debate was constitutive in the research agenda. Thereby, scientific discourse is comprised in the framework of the debate, and implicit within this debate is a framing of the subject at the center of perception. For Crary, then “the idea of a subjective vision – was one of the conditions for the historical emergence of notions of autonomous vision, that is for a severing of perceptual experience from a necessary relation to an exterior world.” (ibid, 12). Instead, Turner argues that this debate was not a pre-condition, but rather served as a constitutive mechanism to sever perceptual experience from the exterior world.
III. But the Blind Can See and the Sighted
Cannot.
On the screen a rowboat approaches land. A tall, unmoving man dressed in black, stands uncannily upright in the center of the rowboat as a porter brings him to shore. The waves lap at the dock, the oars twist in their locks, and the boat sweeps over glass-still water. The landscape dominates the scene, but as the boat approaches the figure of this mysteriously static man takes over the screen. But, as he approaches, and his size on screen increases, his visage begins to push up against the upper third of the screen. And it appears that there is an error in the print. The iris of the camera has not fully opened, the upper third of the screen is covered by the blackened proscenium arch of unexposed film negative. A pastoral is interrupted by the mechanical eye. The boat touches the dock, the porter attempts to assist the dark man whose eyes are closed, he must be a blind man. The dark man takes the porter’s hand, but moves ahead of him, gliding apparition-like over the hull of the boat and onto the land. His motions are crisp, smooth, unhurried even. The iris closes on the scene.
Later, the shot of the artist’s entry is repeated, but it is the Doctor who is returning home. The camera’s iris is now fully opened. The speed of the scene is increased, the oarsman is paddling furiously, the waves lap at the side of the boat hungrily, the Doctor moves with an almost robotic frenzy, caused by the frames that have been removed to allow the motion to appear more rapid on screen. As the boat reaches land, the Doctor loses his balance, rushes over the railing, trips on the side of the boat, and stumbles as he walks to land.
Now we find that a blind can see even with eyes closed. He is provided with a guide, but the guide is meaningless to him. Similarly, he walks zombie-like past Lily as she bats her eyelashes and smiles coyly at him. “Lily hat angst vor ihm, er ist ihr unheimlich. Der blicklose Maler kann ihren (verführer-) Blick nicht sehen, und das heisst sie hat keine macht über ihn” (Heidi Schlüppmann, 46). As Heidi Schlüpmann argues „clearly his is the war-blind of daily life, who return here to the cinema.” (Shlüpmann, 38). In the face of the blindness accompanying whatever trauma is at its source, his eye is entirely within the mind, it requires no referent to bring order and meaning upon his world. Such blind sight was no mere construction of Murnau’s imagination. This conception of vision without external referent is pervasive in 1920s European discourses of vision. In fact, he appears to exhibit what Jules Romains has called eyeless sight. “Our experiments place beyond doubt the existence in man of a para-optic function, that is, of a function of visual perception of exterior objects without the intervention of the ordinary mechanism of vision through the eyes.” (Romains, 203). This uncanny sighted blindness, though, stands also in dialogue with the ophthalmologist and his love affair. As the blackened negative imposes itself on the screen, the audience is requested to pay attention for we are again at a moment of narrative rupture. Murnau is quoting Lily’s peephole shot from before. Will this interloper be brought within Lily’s fold? Ultimately, yes. But only after the blind man is cured and brought within the economy of medical vision. There is an operation and his eyes are given to him.
Conversely the sighted Doctor, an ophthalmologist no less, is unable to see what is directly in front of him. His vision has been destabilized, fragmented, un-hinged. The vision of our Doctor, in which he is in control, he chooses what to see, has been exposed as false. We, the audience, know that the Doctor is being cuckolded, but he is only unconsciously, dimly aware that something is amiss. What has caused this inversion? It is his engagement in the binary of vision with his dancing coquette. His eyes for her, masked initially under the ruse of scientific vision have blinded him to what is there. It is not merely that his vision is unstable, unreliable. It is also that the required relationality between Lily and Brüne, between the seeing and the seen obscures the potential dominance of his self. If her attention did not call for its double, his acknowledgement, then there would be no collapse of the perceptual illusion. Instead it does collapse, precipitated by the confrontation with his objective blindness and the recognition of sexual replacement by his other, the blind artist. The Doctor has been unable to conceive of his relationship with Lily beyond its apparently objective sources, and it is his destruction. However, it is not the subjectivity of his vision that is the root cause of this failure. It is the failures between him and his lover that mark the gap. She has called attention, he has responded and in this logic of a binary sight, and in the impossibility of his supposedly objective vision, the Doctor loses control.
IV.
Inattentional
Blindness
In recent years, cognitive psychologists have been much interested in questions regarding the relationship between perception and attention. In studies of visual perception the question is formulated in the work of Rock and Brosgole, Treisman, Neisser, and Gelade, as one of “How much within our visual world do we perceive when we are not attending to it?” This research centers on the Gestalt theory of perception in which perception can be separated into two primary stages, pre-attentive and post-attentive. The Gestalt theory of perception generally assumes that the organization of the visual field into separate object occurs automatically, at an early stage in the processing of visual information, before attention has been engaged. For example, when viewing a sunset at the beach, the distinct elements, the visual percepts: the sun, the sea, the beach, the waves, are all pre-attentively established, serving as the selective mechanism from which the attention may draw its information. As such, attention is directed at cognitively unprocessed inputs, with attention relegated to the role of selection.
Mack
and Rock instead make the radical claim that there is no perception without attention. Under conditions of inattention, in which the
individual is asked to perform one task (say the identification of a cross
within the ocular field), while another visual artifact is introduced to the
field without the subjects knowledge (hence introduced under conditions of
inattention to that percept) properties such as color, motion and simple shape
were examined. The end result is that Mack and Rock believe that the evidence
of their experiments is that there is no conscious perception without active
attention to a visual task. However, familiar lexical distracters, such as the
subject’s own name presented within the visual field are able to be perceived
under conditions of inattention. Ultimately, these findings shift the question
how vision functions away from a model of retinal input but onto
Extensive processing, and only those
object to which attention is either voluntarily directed or that capture
attention at a late stage of processing are perceived. It is as if attention
provides the key that unlocks the door of dividing unconscious from conscious
perception. Without this key, there is no awareness of the stimulus. (21)
This research then provides some of the first evidence of what William James has theorized, that “everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.” (1983, 381). A theory of vision must therefore turn to theories of attention in order to provide insight into its processes.
What
Mack and Rock implicitly argue for within the cognitive system is that the
perceptual object to which attention is directed becomes an object of conscious
perception only if attention is directed to it, and that this object is not a
single feature but rather a complex and meaningful scene. Hence, the object may
exist before attention, but only with attention does is it created as an object
of perception. This split implies a constructed-ness of visual objects within
what Posner (1980) has described as the spotlight of the mind. The question,
then is not one of “what has the eye seen?”, but rather one of “what has
captured the attention of the mind to allow it to be seen?” A finding of the
research is that the “meaning” or signal value, (such as the lexical
representation of the subjects name presented within the field of vision) of
the object to be perceived is of critical importance in whether attention
allows perception to occur. As such, vision exists not as the selection of
visual information pre-cognitively, but rather as an interaction between the perceptual
process of attention and the object to be seen, between the viewer and the
viewed then. Questions of vision thereby ultimately come down to “whether the
object will break through into conscious awareness” (284). This raises the
question of whether attention is voluntary or captured by the object, and what
the conditions are for object capture of attention. These experiments, then
suggest that cinema is device to help you attend, a process whose mechanics are
theorized not as unified whole, but rather as a complex web of interactions
between subjects and objects. This is
precisely the vision that Lily calls for.
V. Who
Can See?
From the screenplay:
“Larger, He
looks long at Lilly, Unrelated.
Ultimately, Börne decides to help his former lover’s man. But only under the condition that she kill herself. This is the only way out for him. He is cured, she dies, and Börne ends the film in regret. How is this option a way out for Börne? It is his way of trying to reestablish a pre-war, pre city world. He can only restore objective vision if she dies. She is the symbol of a new vision in which the subject and the object share responsibility for creating vision. This vision is a vision that can be manipulated, falsified, refigured. It is a vision that denies masculine control. The example of vision that she and he shared as object/subject in dialogue, in constructedness, is ultimately unstable and threatening. The ophthalmologist is not in control of his vision and as such his cuckolding is its consequence. He desires a return to the world of his stable masculine gaze, the objective gaze, in which his eyes can be trusted. And so she must die. But the feminine of the gaze that requires recognition and its double, acknowledgement is unavoidable. Vision it cannot be denied. Despite his maniacal laughter, he knows that he has erred. Instead, when she dies, he is broken, relegated to the status of the invalid.
So what do we make of her need for Börne to restore the vision of her blinded lover? The artist’s trauma-centered lack of vision is equally unacceptable, it is closed off. There is no way to restore it without recourse to a return through objective vision, analytical vision. But this is an unstable recourse, as its success is dependent upon the subject/object vision of Lily’s destruction. If he is to see again, her sight, the power of her vision must be denied. The film then, ends in a double bind. She is dead, the Doctor returns to his previous blasé role. He sits slumped in a chair, a frown on his face, his arm dangling limply from his side. The artist, although apparently cured, leaves the room where his dead love lies as a blind man, hands zombie-like in front of him his gait smooth, yet lifeless. He too returns to the unsighted vision that is his war trauma. What then is the status of a vision where the war and the experiences of city life require the death of the objective and even the singular subjective eye? It is as if all now say: “we have seen so much that we now refuse to see.”
Ultimately, the only vision that is considered stable, that is presented as a possibility, is the vision of the audience. The vision presented by the artist to his audience is the future of vision, a future that is equivalent to Lily’s sight. Filmic sight, then is the sight of Lily, she is the future of vision, a sight that acknowledged is fallibility, and requires the negotiation between the object and the subject in which narratives of control are impossible, but narratives of creation are potential. The viewer of film, as the viewer in modern life must be the analysts, refusing complicity while acknowledging it necessity. The audience sees what is called attention to by the object in unstable coalition with what the eye’s mind desires to see: “I see you and acknowledge your presence in my eye’s mind.”