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Cinematic Vitalism
 Film Theory in Media History

Film Theory in Media History explores the epistemological and theoretical

foundations of the study of film through texts by classical authors as well as
anthologies and monographs on key issues and developments in film theory.
Adopting a historical perspective, but with a firm eye to the further development
of the field, the series provides a platform for ground-breaking new research into
film theory and media history and features high-profile editorial projects that
offer resources for teaching and scholarship. Combining the book form with
open access online publishing the series reaches the broadest possible audience
of scholars, students, and other readers with a passion for film and theory.

Series editors
Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany), Weihong
Bao (University of California, Berkeley, United States), Dr. Trond Lundemo
(Stockholm University, Sweden).

Editorial Board Members

Dudley Andrew, Yale University, United States
Raymond Bellour, CNRS Paris, France
Chris Berry, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Francesco Casetti, Yale University, United States
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States
Andre Gaudreault, University of Montreal, Canada
Gertrud Koch, Free University of Berlin, Germany
John MacKay, Yale University, United States
Markus Nornes, University of Michigan, United States
Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Leonardo Quaresima, University of Udine, Italy
David Rodowick, University of Chicago, United States
Philip Rosen, Brown University, United States
Petr Szczepanik, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic
Brian Winston, Lincoln University, United Kingdom

Film Theory in Media History is published in cooperation with the Permanent

Seminar for the History of Film Theories
 Cinematic Vitalism
Film Theory and the Question of Life

Inga Pollmann

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Diorama ‘A Dog’s World’, American Museum of Natural History, New York
(1937).

Cover design: Suzan Beijer

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.

isbn 978 94 6298 365 6

e-isbn 978 90 4853 400 5
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I. Pollmann / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018

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 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction: ‘The sanguine, pulsating, enterprising modern life’:

Cinema and Vitalism
Taking Life for a Spin 9
Turn-of-the-century Vitalism and Philosophy of Life 20
Early Film Theory 27
Cinematic Vitalism 34

1. Vitalism and Abstraction 47

Rhythm and Non-Organic Life from Hans Richter to Sergei
Eisenstein
The Reinvention of Cinema in Abstract Film 47
A Universal Language 50
Bergson, Intuition, and Art 59
Setting Form into Motion: Scroll Paintings and Empathy 65
The Transition to Film 78
Back into Matter: from Abstraction to Montage 86

2. New Worlds 97
Uexküll’s Umwelt Theory at the Movies
Forays 97
A Meditation on Mediated Dogs 103
The Agony of the Starfish: Uexküll’s Chronophotography 114
Of Ticks and Humans 123
Against Anthropocentrism: Umwelt and Cinema 127
A Necessary Field of Action: Benjamin, Umwelt, and Play 136
Painlevé’s Cinema of Bewilderment 147

3. The Interweaving of World and Self 163

Transformations of Mood in Expressionist and Kammerspiel Film
The Mediation of a Dog’s World 163
A Brief Aesthetic History of Stimmung 168
Turn-of-the-Century Stimmung and Cinema: Georg Simmel and
Hugo von Hofmannsthal 174
Balázs, Kammerspielfilm, and Expressionism 182
The Kammerspiel Film: Naturalist Plots and Progressive Aesthetics195
4. Open Bodies, Open Stories 207
Evolution, Narration, and Spectatorship in Post-war Film Theory
The Axolotl and Cinema: Bazin, Bergson, and Evolution 209
Cinema’s Milieu 221
Life and the Temporalities of Film and Painting 229
Post-Apocalyptic Life: Kracauer’s Theory of Film 237

Conclusion 257
Vital Media

Bibliography 269

Index of Films 287

Index of Names 289

Index of Subjects 293

 Acknowledgments

Academic writing is love and labor: a laborious love, an at times painful

love affair, labor enriched and complicated by love. This love and this labor
do not end with a book; the latter is simply a product of labor and a child of
love, and as such, finishing it—and writing the acknowledgments—comes
with both increasing alienation and parting pains. I have been fortunate
to have been surrounded and supported by many scholars who love their
work, my work, and/or me; by loving and supporting friends and family; and
by people and things indifferent to me, yet offering so much. The trees and
PhDs of North Carolina have played a significant role in this.
I am especially grateful to my colleagues at my home institution at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I count myself very fortunate
to work at a university and within a department defined by collegiality,
intellectual exchange, and institutional support. Many of my colleagues
have become dear friends. I thank Ruth von Bernuth, Eric Downing, Gregg
Flaxman, Julia Haslett, Jonathan Hess, Clayton Koelb, Dick Langston,
Radislav Lapushin, Priscilla Layne, Eleonora Magomedova, Paul Roberge,
Tony Perucci, Hana Pichova, Aleks Prica, Sarah Sharma, Gabe Trop, David
Pike, Stanislav Shvrabin, Ewa Wampuszyc, and Tin Wegel. Many smart
students have crossed my path here and enriched both me and my work.
I also thank my other colleagues in the Triangle, at Duke University and
at North Carolina State University, in particular Stefani Engelstein, Kata
Gellen, Markos Hadjiouannou, Toil Moi, Jakob Norberg, Thomas Pfau, and
Henry Pickford. Rick Warner has been my film studies brother at UNC, and
Ora Gelley a caring friend and film studies force at NCSU.
This project began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago. I
remain very thankful to my committee chairs, Tom Gunning and Miriam
Hansen, whose intellectual curiosity and openness, breadth of knowledge
and critical rigor influenced my thinking tremendously, Jim Lastra, David
Levin, and Yuri Tsivian. I also thank fellow graduate students and friends
Mara Fortes, Matt Hauske, Jim Hodge, Nathan Holmes, Andrew Johnston,
Katharina Loew, Sarah Keller, Dan Morgan, Scott Richmond, Ariel Rogers,
Julie Turnock, and especially Michelle Puetz for friendship, support, criti-
cism, and helping me find my bearings.
The writing of this book was supported by several institutions and indi-
viduals. I thank Brigitte Berg at the Jean Painlevé archive Les Documents
Cinématographiques in Paris and Torsten Rüting at the Uexküll Archive
at the University of Hamburg. I have also benefitted from the resources
8 Cinematic Vitalism

at the Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, the Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv Berlin,

the Cinémathèque Française, the archives at the Collège de France, and
the archive at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. My
sincerest thanks go to the series editors of “Film Theory in Media History”,
especially Vinzenz Hediger, since I certainly cannot think of a better place
for this book, and to my editors Jeroen Sondervan, Maryse Elliott, and
Chantal Nicolaes for their professional work and guidance along the way.
I am further indebted to a large number of smart and generous colleagues
on both sides of the Atlantic who have enriched my work through con-
versations, written exchanges, invitations, and comments on presented
or written work. I am very thankful to Marco Abel, Jaimey Fisher, Gerd
Gemünden, and the members of the German Studies Association seminar
on ‘The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts’; Dudley Andrew; Weihong
Bao; Robert Bird; Scott Bukatman; James Cahill; Francesco Casetti; Oksana
Chefranova; Scott Curtis and the participants of the symposium ‘Science/
Film’ at Northwestern University; Robin Curtis, Reinhold Görling, Bettina
Papenburg, and the audience at the lecture series ‘Faith in the World’ at the
University of Düsseldorf; Noam Elcott; Yuriko Furuhata; Oliver Gaycken;
Eckart Göbel, Klaus Sachs-Hombach, and Lily Tonger-Erk at the Unviersity
of Tübingen; Tony Kaes, Rick Rentschler, and the members of the German
Film Institute; Gertrud Koch; Lutz Koepnick and the participants of the Film
Theory and Visual Cultures Seminar at Vanderbilt; Johannes von Moltke
and the members of the German Studies Colloquium at the University
of Michigan; Drehli Robnik; Antonio Somaini; Noa Steimatsky; Wolfgang
Struck, Bernard Geoghegan, and the members of the Graduate Research
program ‘Media Historiographies’ in Weimar; and Chris Tedjasukmana.
A heartfelt thank-you goes to my fellow traveler in life, Johanna Göb.
Despite the miles between us, we continue to live and learn together. Erika,
Wilfried, Tomke and Anneke Pollmann have always been supportive from
afar and provided anchoring whenever I needed it. Rob Mitchell’s ideas
and comments pervade this book. He is my friend, lover, fellow adventurer
in parenting, and most important source of inspiration, and makes me a
better and wiser person. Kaia Pollmann Mitchell’s energy, wit and love of
the physical world, movements, ideas, pictures, and words has opened up
new worlds to me.
This book is for my grandmothers, Meta Schulte and Gerta Pollmann,
who passed away while I was writing the dissertation and the book. I
continue to feel their gaze and presence, and continue to benefit from
their love and wisdom.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 2 appeared in Critical Inquiry.
 Introduction
‘The sanguine, pulsating, enterprising modern life’: Cinema
and Vitalism

Taking Life for a Spin

For a moment, the world still seems stable. Two men, a general and a baron,
are sitting next to each other at a table; the reflection in the mirror behind
them shows a woman dancing in the mirror’s separate, contained environ-
ment. They speak about her in that familiar male language that suggests
connoisseurship, aesthetic pleasure, and indulgence, without betraying
the abyss of emotion, consuming desire, or loss of self that lurks behind the
woman’s attraction; an abyss that would collapse the stability, the double
framing, the identified places. The nameless ‘Madame de…’ is the one man’s
wife and the other man’s future mistress. Movement sets in when, after
a cut, the camera suddenly pursues an older gentleman rushing to the
right. The camera tracks swiftly to follow him past endless rows of tables,
along the perimeters of the dance floor. The man approaches the general.
Despite the general’s attempt to shake off the intruder, who turns out to
be a journalist, he remains insistent. The baron, with a quick glance at the
dance floor, avails himself of the opportunity to excuse himself and leaves.
The following minutes constitute the crucial moment in Max Ophuls’ The
Earrings of Madame de (1953), during which Madame de and Baron Donati
fall in love; dancing, turning around and around one another while the
camera dances with them. The image centers on the dancing couple and
follows them through a whole line of balls connected by cross-dissolves,
leaving the perimeters of determined time and space. During these minutes,
spatiotemporal and narrative forward-movement is suspended, or rather
diverted, into the ornamental flourish and rotation of the dance and its
affective impact. Over the course of the dances, the couple’s playful, ironic
banter slowly falls silent in the face of the increasing seriousness of their
mutual feelings; the growing intensity is conveyed by the accelerated
rhythm of their and the camera’s circling movements and the punctuation
of returning phrases, such as Donati’s ‘Quatre jours sans vous voir (Four days
without seeing you)’, ‘Deux jours sans vous voir (Two days without seeing
you)’, and finally ‘Vingt-quatre heures sans vous voir (Twenty-four hours
without seeing you)’, as well as an increasingly reticent conversation about
the absent general’s well-being. The dance resembles the slow turn of a
10  Cinematic Vitalism

screw. As the camera loosens up and freely circles, pans and tracks across
the dance floor, the movement of the dancing couple it is pursuing also
changes from being a fairly stationary rotation into a forward-marching
twist past the other couples, and then into a somewhat jagged zigzagging
in which the previous momentum is lost again. Madame’s and Donati’s final
dance in coat and jacket on an empty dance floor, while the musicians pack
up and the servants extinguish the candles, is almost motionless.
In a melodrama such as Ophuls’, there is a close correspondence between
motion and emotion. The moment the protagonists fall in love, the film
enters a different register of movement. The dance sequence is framed
by scenes with linear movement and clear demarcations: in the previous
scene, we had the frame-within-a-frame of the mirror behind the general
and Donati that showed the dance floor, the table separating the two men
from the foreground, and the straight movement of the journalist joining
the dance floor and the seating area; the scene following the dances begins
abruptly with a hunter’s horn and a tracking shot from right to left of the
general at a military hunt. During the dances, boundaries increasingly
break down as the camera joins the motion of the dance and cross-dissolves
create a temporality that is dependent on Donati’s and Madame’s feelings
alone. This purely cinematic time and space in which motion and emotion
become entwined, with the spectator caught in this entwinement, is an
example of cinema’s vital aesthetic.
In the dramatic context of the film, the irregular twirling motion of the
dance has the form not of a closed circle, but rather a spiral. Two social
butterflies and ‘incorrigible flirts’ perform the movement that is best suited
to their temper: a tête-à-tête in public, a play with intimacy in the limelight,
an attitude that is directed outward even as it tends to the dance partner.
Over the course of these dances, this attitude changes; the balance of forces
shifts and the public stage becomes the lovers’ prison. The butterflies flutter
around one another in circles that represent their enclosure by the same
moral standards that originally gave them their playful freedom. Madame’s
and Donati’s desire for more privacy and more time cannot be fulfilled;
rather than radiating outward, they retreat into one another, dancing
centripetally rather than centrifugally, forming a spiral inward and down,
rather than outward and up.
The forces that simultaneously visualize the drama and formulate a
social critique in The Earrings of Madame de are the same as those that
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe identified as the two vital tendencies in
plants: a vertical force and a spiral force that complement one another
and, when in balance, produce the most perfect development. While the
Introduc tion 11

vertical tendency lends support and stability to the plant and is long-lasting,
the spiral tendency, according to Goethe, is the nourishing, short-lived
element that ‘develops, expands, nourishes’; if its effect ‘predominates, it
soon grows weak and begins to decay’.1 In Ophuls’ film, the melodramatic
conflict is staged as a conflict between these two tendencies, even though
the vertical and spiral forces ultimately depend on one another. This conflict
is emotionally wrenching and tied to social critique, because the balance of
vertical and spiral tendencies in Ophuls’ rendering of the militarized upper
classes of late nineteenth-century France is a false one, kept in check by
means of a social and moral code that stunts and inhibits all of its adherents.
The balance that upholds social norms and values is one of artificial stability
and rigidity versus artificial spiral nourishment. Both tendencies are merely
formal, rather than aspects of organic growth. The vertical element is the
stiff, unemotional military culture, personified by Madame’s husband,
who keeps his rigidity in check by means of his uniform, and whose body
language is stiff and impersonal, even while a softness in his expression
or a tenderness in his voice betrays his longing for a different mode in
which to engage with his wife. The spiral tendency is the social flirtation in
which Madame engages and the men’s obligatory affairs —a vital element
lacking the nourishing satisfaction of deep emotions. The interplay of both
tendencies also finds expression in the circulation of commodities, most
notoriously the circulation of the eponymous earrings that Madame origi-
nally received from her husband as a wedding gift.2 Madame and Donati
transgress social boundaries both externally—they allow themselves to be
seen, which ultimately leads to a deadly duel—and internally, by allowing
their affection to run freely, which puts their emotions at odds with the
social order. In this spiral into a desire for something that does not have
a place in this society, the utopian moment—and its immediate thwart-
ing—manifested in the dance marks an instance of cinematic vitalism in
which the emotional intensity onscreen and the affection of the spectator
are both heightened by means of formal elements that can be tied to a
larger aesthetic of vitality.

1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Excerpt from “The Spiral Tendency in Vegetation”,’ 105-06.
2 She sells them to pay off a debt, whereupon they are bought back by the general, who gives
them to a mistress when parting for Constantinople. There, the baron acquires them as a chance
purchase and gives them to Madame as a token of love. Madame then tells her husband that she
has found the earrings she claimed to have lost, so that she will be able to wear them in public.
Her husband confronts her about this lie and forces her to give the earrings to her niece, who
likewise sells them to the jeweler. After the duel with the general, in which Donati is killed,
Madame gives all she has to buy back the earrings, which have increased exponentially in value.
12  Cinematic Vitalism

If I speak of a vitalist aesthetic in cinema, this by no means relates to

nature and organicity alone. Rather, vitalism in film and film perception
combines an aesthetic of nature with a machinic aesthetic; both elements
are always present. This is what distinguishes a cinematic vitalism from
vitalist theories proper. Film’s moving images, temporality, and sensorial
qualities grip the embodied spectator, who integrates the film’s gestalt into
her life, into the world she continually re-constitutes every moment she
lives, simply by perceiving, acting, being. This malleable, organic temporal-
ity and sense-making must reckon with the forceful linearity of the film
undulating from the spool, pulling the spectator along mercilessly. A flicker
betrays the stop-motion animation of 24 frames per second that lies behind
the illusion of movement. The film reel, propped up on the projector and
turning smoothly at a steady pace, translated by means of a forgiving loop
into the stutter of the frame-by-frame exposure to the projecting light in
the aperture gate, gives the forward movement to the film. Its cylindrical
shape is in keeping with what Helmut Müller-Sievers has identified as the
central kinematic form of the nineteenth century: the cylinder of the steam
engine, the printing press, the carousel, and the phonograph; a form that
‘allows the isolation, transmission, conversion, and application of rotational
and translational (straight-line) motion in machines’.3 Cinematic vitalism,
we might say, combines the undulation of the organically winding spiral
with the mechanic rotation of the cylinder and its steady, unchanging pace.
Ophuls’ image of rotational dance motion, which is so central to many
of his films, including Liebelei (Flirtation, 1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola
Montès (1955), may thus serve as an emblematic figure for the inquiry of
this study. Many scholars have turned to Ophuls’ dance sequences because
of the virtuosity of his alignment of camera and on-screen movement,
the attunement of camera and subject that this dramaturgical alignment
reveals or puts forth, and the relationship of these sequences and their
undoing of temporal and spatial coordinates to questions of genre, that is,
melodrama. 4 The formalism of Ophuls’ direction and the seeming excess
of camera and onscreen choreography have inspired scholars to consider
questions concerning the function and expressive value of movement in
his film. For some, this has led to an investigation of the role of desire as a

3 Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder, 3.

4 See, for example, Susan M. White, The Cinema of Max Ophuls; Alan Larson Williams, Max
Ophuls and the Cinema of Desire; Daniel Morgan, ‘Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On
the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement’; George M. Wilson, Narration in Light; and
Laura Mulvey, ‘Love, History, and Max Ophuls’.
Introduc tion 13

driving force; others have explored the role of economic circulation. A vital-
ist lens connects these questions of form and content to the properties of
the medium by asking: what is the nature of the movement depicted? What
kind of vitality is presented? What kind of life? How is this life lived, what
are its qualities? These questions tie the ontological and phenomenological
dimensions of cinema to matters of form and content.
While The Earrings of Madame de stands at the end-point of the period
under consideration in this book, the rotation of the dances in Ophuls’
films takes us back to the visual constellations in early cinema and even
pre-cinematic devices, and thus also to the early alliance of moving images
and life. Instead of the spiral created by the entwinement of rotation and
fatal progression in Ophuls’ films, optical toys such as the phenakisticope
and the zoetrope were based on rotation and repetition without progression;
their temporality was experienced as delightful for its pure mechanicity
and in sharp contrast to narrative development. Their spirit haunts Ophuls’
films like a specter. Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudréault write that

[t]he phenakisticope’s format and the way it functioned suggested a

‘world’ in which everything was governed by circularity and repetition,
a world which annihilated any hint of temporal progression. The subjects
are like Sisyphus, condemned ad infinitum to turn about, jump, and
dance. In another sense, the figures are machine-like: untiring and un-
alterable, they are ‘acted-upon subjects’ rather than ‘acting-out subjects.’5

The circularity, repetition, and objectification associated with images in

mechanical rotation reappears as a haunting threat to the protagonists in
Ophuls’ film-worlds, be it the dancing Madame and Donati, or Christine
and Fritz, whose dance in Liebelei is accompanied by the tinny sound of
a pianola that requires the repeated insertion of pennies to work, or the
couples forming in La Ronde, where it is unclear whether it is the allegorical
carousel that sets the roundelay of desire into motion or vice versa.
Many early film reviewers found in the moving images on the screen a
combination of unbridled vital movement and the inscription of the ma-
chine haunting the (re-)presentation. As I discuss in more detail below, crit-
ics from Maxim Gorky to Rémy de Gourmont, Max Brod and Georg Lukács
described the vital pull of the moving image and the strange experience of
being an onlooker to life. This rift was experienced in one’s own body; the

5 Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudréault, ‘Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of Attraction’,
232.
14  Cinematic Vitalism

pure reproduction of movement sent shivers down early spectators’ spines.

In the spectacle of a ‘living picture’, the mechanically reproduced movement
of characters, animals, and the entire background rendered everything in
the frame animate. As spectators, we react with heightened affect: this
mediated view is presented to us, for our eyes and ears, and we pay attention
to it, searching the image and sound for cues. The movement on the screen
pulls us along, and our senses seek to find a way to align themselves with the
rhythm of image and sound. This process is different from aligning with our
natural environment—the moving image is artificial, limited, and usually
two-dimensional, and we need to adjust to its spatio-temporality without
the aid of complete physical immersion. It is precisely in this difference,
in the ‘almost-as-if’, that we encounter cinematic vitality: in experiencing
and bridging the gap between our natural being-in-the world and the film
world, the immersion in a film punctuated by moments of reflection or
self-awareness, and the conjoining of our fleeting time with the determined
time-flight of the film, which, despite a continuous 24 frames per second,
is full of lags, gaps, retardations, and accelerations. It is an attitude of love.
Over the course of the history of film theory, this attitude of love has
been described in a variety of ways, and despite important differences, it
has a lot in common with historical attitudes towards other media. Most of
these descriptions are vitalist in the sense that they start from the way in
which the spectator’s (reader’s, beholder’s) lively engagement interacts with
the life force of the artwork. There is, for example, the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century conception of empathy (Einfühlung) in art history
and psychology, which maintains that the beholder invests artworks with
her own vitality. Or one could take theories of animation, which became
fashionable around the same time, as part of a renewed interest in primitive
art, and work the other way around: namely, endowing things with a vitality
of their own that confronts the beholder. Both of these theories, which will
be addressed in Chapter 1, became significant for early film theory, and
yet needed alterations to account for cinema’s temporal form and force of
movement. Aesthetic theory from Romanticism onward was also interested
in the way in which subjects are vitally engaged with their environment,
in ways that dissolve the boundaries not only of self and other, but also of
self and world. Terms such as Stimmung (attunement, mood, tonality), aura,
mood, and atmosphere became crucial tools in defining the lively interac-
tion with both nature and art (Chapter 3). Dynamic aesthetic concepts such
as empathy, animation, and Stimmung have a counterpart in biological
ideas that concern the interstice between inside and outside, internal and
external milieu, subject and environment, nerve and stimulation, and
Introduc tion 15

expand their understanding of life to include a body’s sensorial environ-

ment, such as Jakob von Uexküll’s conception of Umwelt (surrounding world,
Chapter 2). These expanded notions of life find an artistic corollary in the
moving image, which flattens out figure-ground distinctions and with its
vibratory energy imparts vital expression to everything in the frame. When
Madame and Donati dance in a mobile frame, the entire image is caught
up in the whirl.
By considering film theory and practice in the light of vitalist theories of
life, this book performs two crucial inquiries: first, it places cinema in close
contact with philosophy and the sciences, especially the theory of biology
and psycho-physiology, for in these disciplines, the question of what life was
and was not, and whether vitalism had a place, was the matter of heated
debate around the turn of the century and well into the twentieth century.
And second, this book seeks to reframe the place of film in modernity,
understood here as the process of social, cultural, political, and technologi-
cal upheaval that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to WWII. In
accounts of the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
cinema has long been understood as an exemplary instance of what we
might call the mechanistic understanding of modernity: that is, modernity
understood as a consequence of an ever-expanding application of modern
sciences and technologies to the human condition.6 From this perspec-
tive, all of the developments that we associate with late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century modernity, such as the increasing urbanization of
Western populations, the emergence of mass culture, and the electrification
of urban and rural spaces, are a consequence of the application of modern
scientific principles of materialism and mechanism to the environments
in which humans live, as well as those ‘conditions’ that develop alongside,
arguably as properly human reactions to these institutions (e.g. ‘modern
man’ as nervous, blasé, anomic, distracted, or hysterical).
According to this account, modernity was a consequence of the triumph
of the mechanistic worldview over its competitors, which include religion,
but also scientific paradigms that sought to hold on to some essential
distinction between living beings and the non-living world of matter, such
as vitalist conceptions of natural science or the humanities. As one of the
technological innovations produced—or at least enabled—by modern
science, cinema has been aligned with this triumph of the mechanistic sci-
entific and philosophical framework of modernity. Moreover, as a cultural
product of modernity, cinema was at the same time seen to enable critical

6 Examples include Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor; Stephen Kern, Time and Space.
16  Cinematic Vitalism

reflection on the forces that engendered it—industrialization, urbanization,

mass culture, technology, and mechanization. Yet this mutual definition
of cinema as a modern medium and modernity as cinematic has led, at
times, to a narrow rendering of both, thus excluding a more dialectical
understanding that would allow us to take into account the roles played
by conservative, alternative, ‘old-fashioned’, and seemingly anti- or pre-
modern movements. And because cinema—as apparatus, public space,
and dispositif—has been understood as emblematic of the mechanization
and technologization of modern life, cinema has almost invariably been
related primarily to mechanist paradigms for understanding both organic
life and social processes, rather than vitalist approaches, which seem like
atavistic specters from the past.
Over the past decade, scholars have complicated and complemented
this account of both modernity and cinema as a modern medium
by emphasizing the need to comprehend artworks, movements, and
theories that are conservative, holistic, or pastoral as part and parcel
of modernity—and not only dialectically so. Important contributions
that have done so by reevaluating, reinterpreting, and recontextualizing
classical f ilm theory include Michael Cowan’s work on the cult of the
will, on the ubiquitous and ambivalent role of rhythm, and on the work of
abstract filmmakers like Walter Ruttmann as not only a cipher of, but also
formative of, the interaction of aesthetic discourses, artistic movements,
institutions, and markets; Scott Curtis’ work on the influence of scientific,
medical, educational and aesthetic discourses on the formation of cinema
spectatorship; Miriam Hansen’s elucidation of Walter Benjamin’s and
Siegfried Kracauer’s work on the profound historical, cultural, and political
changes in modernity, their impact on the senses, and their reflection in
cinema as an existential playground of experience, as well as Johannes
von Moltke’s analysis of the changed stakes for Kracauer in the context of
the intellectual climate in the US after the war; and many edited volumes,
compilations, and translations that have made crucial film-theoretical
texts available and provided context.7 The surge of interest in classical film

7 Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will; Cowan, ‘Advertising, Rhythm, and the Filmic Avant-Garde’;
Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity; Cowan, ‘The Heart Machine’; Scott
Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship; Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience; Johannes von Moltke,
The Curious Humanist (see also Moltke and Gerd Gemünden, eds., Culture in the Anteroom).
Additional important publications on cinema and modernity, and on classical film theory in
particular, include Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back; Dudley Andrew and Hervé
Joubert-Laurencin, eds., Opening Bazin; Andrew, What Cinema Is!; Francesco Cassetti, Eye of the
Century; David Rodowick, Elegy for Theory; Tami M. Williams, Germaine Dulac. New editions,
Introduc tion 17

theory is invariably either explicitly or implicitly linked to the dissolution

of ‘film’ or ‘cinema’ as stable frames of reference in the light of new media
technologies, new screens, and viewing practices, and the digitization of
film and film projection.
This book participates in this more general return to classical film theory
in the wake of our current post-medial and post-modernist challenge, but
does so in order to locate constellations of moving images, living bodies,
and technology that also have relevance for the present. All of the film
theorists and filmmakers under consideration in the recent revival of clas-
sical film theory, I argue, have a stake in the conjunction of cinema and life.
Attending to their engagement with vitalism changes the map of influences,
intersections, and affinities not only in the film community, but also of the
role of film theory and practice within larger cultural (and, in particular,
scientific and philosophical) discourses on life. My inquiry seeks to add the
movie theater as a modern locale par excellence to the centers of discussion
about what life is and is not. The movie theater is, I claim, a discursive place
that incorporated and transformed vitalist ideas. This book is asking: what
happens when the (intellectual and embodied) insistence on the specificity
of life encounters mechanically-produced vitality? What happens when
different discourses on the specificity of life—scientific, philosophical,
aesthetic—intersect? I argue that we can only answer these questions by
attending to three distinct, yet interrelated debates about the role of life in
and for cinema in turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century sources
and accompanying critical literature.
The first debate pertains to the French vitalist philosopher Henri Berg-
son and the film-theoretical, critical, and philosophical work inspired by
his philosophy. Bergson’s works contain a number of direct references
to photography and cinema, but they were also part of a much larger
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century vitalist movement that
encompassed the sciences as well as philosophy and cultural theory.

translations and compilations of notes include Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory; Anton Kaes,
Nicholas Baer and Cowan, eds., The Promise of Cinema; Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean
Epstein; Tami M. Williams, ed., Pure Cinema. Books that examine the inherent modernity of the
Nazi regime and its use of mass media, while not central to this book, have also done important
work in this respect; for example, Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror and Eric Rentschler, The
Ministry of Illusion. Several other works that include cinema in broader reflections on modernity
and modernism have likewise been helpful; of particular note here is Laura Marcus, who has
argued that ‘[w]riting about the cinema thus not only upheld, but also displaced and reworked,
cultural and conceptual distinctions between mechanism and organism’. See Laura Marcus,
The Tenth Muse, 4.
18  Cinematic Vitalism

Vitalism, as well as the closely related ‘philosophy of life’ (Lebensphiloso-

phie) of, for example, Wilhelm Dilthey, operates under the assumption
that living matter is fundamentally different from inanimate matter,
and scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics committed to—or even
just intrigued by—vitalist principles sought to redefine time, space, and
organization in the light of the specif icity of life. Cinema emerged as
a technology and phenomenon at precisely the time when biologists
and philosophers were debating the nature of life and how life could be
represented, and cultural critics were seeking to develop methodologies
for adequately describing the specificity of life in contrast to inanimate
matter, especially machines.
Even though Bergson himself referenced f ilm and photography am-
bivalently in his writings, since the 1910s, his philosophy has become an
important reference point for critics to understand and frame cinema
and the film experience.8 In Creative Evolution (1911), Bergson famously
described the workings of the intellect, namely its tendency to abstract,
rationalize, conceptualize, and to break up time (duration) into compre-
hensible units, by calling it ‘cinematographic perception’. While the film
camera subtracts time from an event by recording only static shots in
short succession, the projector reintroduces a general, machinic move-
ment of the second order. The result, Bergson maintained, is a general
temporality of a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, nature. Thus, for
him, the cinematographic apparatus illustrates the pitfalls of intellectual
abstraction and the loss of the embeddedness in the fabric of life and lived
time that instinctual animals (and, in a different way, humans relying on
intuition) possess.
What Bergson called cinematographic perception, however, should
not be taken to mean perception of cinema; rather, it is a modern mode
of perception akin to the workings of the cinematographic apparatus.
Cinema as technology, according to him, is paradigmatic of a mechanist
understanding of the world that determines not only scientific and cultural
practices and beliefs, but even governs the very structure of our perception.
The perception of a film—that is, film reception—is an entirely different
matter. Bergson himself admitted as much in an interview in 1914, in which
he suggested that cinema ‘could be an aid to the synthesis of memory, or
even of thought itself. If the circumference [of a circle] is composed of a
series of points, memory is, like cinema, a series of images. Immobile, it is

8 For an account of Bergson’s positions on the cinema, see Paul Douglass, ‘Bergson and Cinema:
Friends or Foes?’.
Introduc tion 19

in a neutral state; in movement, it is life itself’.9 The cinematograph’s re-

constituted movement perceived by a spectator mobilizes memory-images
which integrate the mechanical, spatialized temporality of a film into the
durée of life and organic experience.
The second debate with which I am concerned here relates to the many
pre-WWI accounts of f ilm experience, as well as the f irst attempts to
formulate an aesthetic of film, in which the term ‘life’ was invoked fre-
quently and with particular emphasis. ‘Life’ appeared as a name for what
the technical apparatus wrote or inscribed—for example, in company
names such as Vitagraph or Biograph (‘life-writer’)—but commentators
also employed the term in their attempts to def ine more closely the
aesthetic of the cinematic image or the peculiar sensual experience of
seeing moving images. Even if some writers used terms such as ‘life’ and
‘vitality’ without much consideration or reflexive awareness, the occur-
rence of such terms should not be seen simply as off-hand references;
authors such as Maxim Gorky, O. Winter, Rémy de Gourmont, Max Brod,
Walter Hasenclever, and Georg Lukács employed these terms when trying
to find a critical language that could grasp the unprecedented properties
and experience of this new medium. The initial experience of cinema,
in other words, was not purely that of a mechanical technology that
confirmed a mechanistic approach to the world, but rather of a living
medium that quickened and expanded the writer’s sense of what life
might be.
Finally—and this is the third debate in which I engage—there is the
intriguing fact that Bergson and other philosophers of life, such as Georg
Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey, played a peculiar and arguably ambiguous
role in texts by members of the Frankfurt School, especially Walter Ben-
jamin and Siegfried Kracauer. While a number of the terms and ideas that
Benjamin and Kracauer used seem to be indebted to these life-philosophers,
Benjamin and Kracauer did not always openly acknowledge this legacy. On
the contrary, if they discussed life-philosophy or vitalism explicitly, they
often did so in dismissive fashion (one of the most notorious examples of
such ambivalent citation is Benjamin’s use/critique of Bergson in his 1938
essay, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’).10 A similar, though less pervasive
pattern of reference to vitalist ideas and thinkers can also be detected
in French film criticism of the 1920s. While a few of these critics (such as
Émile Vuillermoz) explicitly sought to base their thoughts on the medium

9 Henri Bergson and Louis-Georges Schwartz, ‘“Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema”‘.
10 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’.
20  Cinematic Vitalism

of cinema on Bergson, others, including Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Epstein,

sought to distance themselves from Bergson, describing him (in curiously
vital terms) as ‘old metaphysical plantstock’.11
The three discussions that I have outlined above suggest that we ought to
reconsider the relationship between cinema and vitalism. Perhaps neither
cinema nor modernity should be automatically aligned with mechanistic
approaches to life and the world, for it may be the case that both emerge as
much—or perhaps even more—from approaches to living beings and their
environments developed in vitalist and life-philosophical contexts. This
book asserts that attending to what I call ‘cinematic vitalism’ will enable us
to improve our understanding not only of how cinema was understood and
theorized when it first emerged, but also how its formal and stylistic features
bear upon our understanding of life, human or otherwise, and how it can
even function as a kind of vital orientation. The relevance of form and style
is not restricted to films that one might think would privilege questions
of life, such as nature documentaries or popular scientific films. Vibrancy
and concern for life, including the vitality of the spectator, can be found in
a variety of films, from avant-garde films to melodramas to realist cinema
to various new waves; we might even say it becomes an issue whenever
style matters. In the following two sections, I outline both the concept and
virtues of cinematic vitalism, first by discussing what was at stake in the
vitalist and life-philosophical debate around the turn of the century in both
Germany and France, and then by explaining the relationship of this debate
to early cinema by isolating vitalist themes in a few key early texts on film.

Turn-of-the-century Vitalism and Philosophy of Life

It is no coincidence that the concept of ‘life’ was ready to hand for early
twentieth-century film theorists. The nature of life—what life is and what
it is not, how living matter can be differentiated from non-living matter,
and so forth—had been an issue of heated debate from the second half
of the nineteenth century through the first few decades of the twentieth
century, and often focused on theories and discoveries in the f ield of
epigenesist, that is, the development of organisms from egg, seed or spore.

11 Marcel L’Herbier, ‘Hermes and Silence (1918)’. Interestingly enough, this reference occurs in
an essay that is itself part of a heated debate about Bergsonism and cinema, between Paul Souday,
L’Herbier, and Emile Vuillermoz. See Vuillermoz, ‘Before the Screen’, and Souday, ‘Bergsonnisme
et le cinéma’.
Introduc tion 21

In the late nineteenth century, scientific theories of life fell more or less
squarely into one of two camps: the mechanist and vitalist understandings
of organic life. According to mechanist biologists and psycho-physicists—
well-known examples of whom included Hermann Helmholtz, Wilhelm
Wundt, and Etienne-Jules Marey—living matter is subject to the same
mechanical, physical, and chemical laws as non-living matter, and these
laws are sufficient to explain the phenomenon of life. Where seventeenth
and eighteenth century vitalists had invoked a ‘life force’ or ‘vital principle’
(Lebenskraft or Lebensprinzip), Helmholtz and fellow scientists such as
Emil Du Bois-Reymond turned to terms drawn from mechanics, such as
force or power, energy, and electricity. Helmholtz’s discovery of the laws
of thermodynamics, and his and Wundt’s investigations into the workings
of the nervous system, made the mechanist model of the body extremely
popular. This mechanistic model informed an understanding of the body
as electric or automated, and thus of living bodies as ‘animal-machines’:
according to Helmholtz, ‘[t]he animal body therefore does not differ from
the steam-engine as regards the manner in which it obtains heat and force,
but does differ from it in the purpose for, and manner in which the force
is gained or employed’.12 This mechanist conception of life also underlies
Marey’s studies of efficient movement and fatigue, and the importance of
these studies for Taylorist work practices.
In reaction to the experimental and theoretical advances made by
mechanists, vitalist biologists by contrast insisted that there was a
qualitative difference between living and non-living matter. For vitalists,
the ability of living matter to create more living matter, change its state,
and self-organize was proof of the fact that in addition to physical and
chemical laws, there must be a vital force, or at least a set of determinants
particular to life. By distinguishing life as a defining factor (and not simply
as an epiphenomenon of physical or chemical laws), biologists were able to
isolate orchestrated, qualitative changes over time, which they observed in
living organisms. Whereas mechanist explanatory models provided tools
for observing linear and continuous changes over time, vitalist biologists,
by contrast, focused on qualitative leaps which occurred within time, and
which led to quite different conceptions of temporality. Eighteenth and
nineteenth-century vitalists such as Georg Wilhelm Stahl, Johann Christian
Reil, Marie François Xavier Bichat, Johannes Müller, and Karl Ernst von

12 Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘Wechselwirkung der Naturkräfte (1876),’ quoted from Rabinbach,
The Human Motor, 61. See also Driesch’s discussion of Helmholtz’s comments on vitalism in Hans
Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism, 144-47.
22  Cinematic Vitalism

Baer had isolated a life force, or life principle, which they took as distinct
from matter (in turn, they saw living matter as passive and directed by this
force). Most turn-of-the-century ‘neo-vitalists’, by contrast, saw life as an
intrinsic quality of organic matter, and they were particularly interested
in embryology, regeneration, development, and the reactions of the living
being to its environment. Neo-vitalism’s most prominent advocate, the Ger-
man biologist Hans Driesch, focused on the relationship between cells and
organs within a developing living being, while vitalist ‘fellow-travelers’ such
as Jakob von Uexküll investigated the relationship between the subjective
perception of animals and their environments.
Driesch, in fact, developed an elaborate theory of vitalism that was
grounded in the biological experiments that he performed around the
turn of the century. Driesch manipulated sea urchin embryos by remov-
ing part of the embryo, and discovered that the remaining parts of the
embryo nevertheless developed into a complete (albeit smaller) sea urchin.
Ascidians (sea squirts) were another animal of interest for Driesch. These
organisms retain the capacity for self-initiated self-organization found in sea
urchin embryos—a capacity that Driesch called harmonious-equipotential,
since every part of the whole seemed to have the same potential to work
harmoniously with the other parts—even in the adult stage. If a body part
is cut off an ascidian, the animal is able to regenerate the body part. ‘How’,
Driesch asked, ‘could a machine be divided innumerable times and yet remain
what it was?’13 To him, these organisms revealed the existence of a causality
that differed from mechanic causality; namely, a unifying causality that
is specific to life. This unifying causality acts in the mode of ‘entelechy’,
a term Driesch derived from Aristotle. Entelechy suspends the infinite
number of potential ways in which a given organism could develop, and
then, by relaxing this suspension in a certain way, transforms this potential
of homogenous matter into specific realities in heterogeneous matter.14 Yet
the relatively meager experimental foundation upon which Driesch based
his theory also illustrated—and Driesch admitted as much—that vital-
ists could only show that there was something that exceeded mechanical
causality, but they could not directly prove what, precisely, it was that
distinguished life.
While biologists in Germany developed a theory of vitalism that sought
to counter the then-prevalent mechanist and naturalist conceptions, phi-
losophers of life waged a related polemic against positivist understandings

13 Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism, 211-12.

14 See Ibid., 203.
Introduc tion 23

of both nature and culture. German Lebensphilosophie, or philosophy of life,

is based on vitalist principles, and the roster of life-philosophers includes
Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Ludwig Klages. As
much as their work varies, it is based on the notion that life is qualitatively
distinct from non-living matter; a distinction that Arthur Schopenhauer
sought to capture through the notion of ‘will’; Nietzsche, through the notion
of the ‘will to power’; Dilthey, by stressing the importance of experience
and history for the humanities or the ‘sciences of the spirit’; and Klages,
through his claim that the ‘soul’ grounds life in blood and soil. Dilthey
coined the term Lebensphilosophie, in fact, in order to distinguish what he
called the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit), from
the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), arguing that literature, history,
and the arts are based on a historic and holistic notion of life as experience.
In many ways, Dilthey’s work reads like the humanist counterpoint to
Driesch’s biological theories. Driesch, for example, used the example of a
phonograph to describe the difference between life and machine:

[A]ction of any kind whatever […] rests upon an historical basis of reaction.
That is to say, every action is determined—though not exclusively—by
everything that has occurred to the acting person until this very mo-
ment of his life. Had we not decided to put aside all psychology in our
argument, we might say that ‘experience’ based upon ‘memory’ is one of
the chief features of all acting. But—does not the phonograph ‘act’ upon
an historical basis of reaction? Certainly it does, and it is especially in
order to distinguish the acting organism from machines of the type of
the phonograph that a second criterion must be added to the first. The
phonograph only gives off what it has received, in its very specificity;
in the organism the occurrences of individual life have only created a
general stock of possibilities for further acting, but have not determined
all further reactions quite in detail.15

For Dilthey, the invocation of the concept of Geisteswissenschaften or the

humanities distinguishes human activity from mechanical reaction, and
human memory and experience from mechanical inscription. In the realms
of life and spirit, reasoning, as well as acting, is determined by history,
experience, and memory, and based on comprehension and decision. The
humanities consequently need their own methods—their own systems
of deduction, conclusion and results—that are separate from those of the

15 Ibid., 212-13.
24  Cinematic Vitalism

natural sciences, and which can translate subjective experience into objec-
tive claims. Dilthey eventually developed a theory of hermeneutics that
started from subjective experiences, took account of the vital expression
of, for example, a literary text, and, in a final step, aimed at understanding
(Verstehen) on the basis of expression and experience.16
An implicit concern with experience also lay at the heart of the work of
the best-known of the philosophical vitalists, Bergson, who turned against a
mechanical and intellectualist understanding of time, both by contrasting
mechanical time with the notion of duration as lived time and by reevaluat-
ing the concept of intuition from an evolutionary perspective. In Matter
and Memory, Bergson developed a theory of perception that broke up the
perceptual process into pure perception (which is part of, or partakes in,
matter) and memory (in which we find expressed spirit). What we call the
‘present’ is, according to Bergson, not a point in time dividing past and
future, but rather has duration itself, because it takes time to perceive and
process; the past and the future participate in the ‘present’. In this duration
of the present moment, pure perception and pure memory combine in the
interval between action and reaction (i.e., this is where matter and memory
come into contact). Additionally, in lived reality, perception is made ‘impure’
by affections—either the invocation of mechanical, automatic memory
(habit) or of memory-images—which have been unconscious and which
are called up to consciousness when they become relevant for the present.17
In Creative Evolution, Bergson applied these ideas to the evolution of life
forms. The two main lines of evolution that are expressed in the animal and
the human being, respectively, are the development of instinct and intel-
lect. Since evolution entails specification and the development of certain
faculties over others, human intellectual knowledge is necessarily partial
and incomplete—it is only a part of the Whole of life. Intellect, for Bergson,
is a bright nucleus, ‘a contraction, by condensation, of a more extensive
power’ surrounded by a fringe of instinct, or intuition; the latter is ‘that part
of the evolving principle which has not shrunk to the peculiar form of our
organization, but has settled around it unasked for, unwanted’.18 Bergson
contended that by turning our attention to this fringe, we gain access to
those aspects of life in which we participate, but which are not part of our
individuation as human beings.

16 See Ferdinand Fellmann, Geschichte der Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert, 316-35; Herbert
Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1831-1933.
17 See Bergson, Matter and Memory.
18 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 46, 49.
Introduc tion 25

For Bergson, one consequence of this evolutionary ‘intellectualization’

of the human being is the human focus on action and fabrication, since
intellect enables humans to find solutions to the problems posed by life by
means of fabricating tools. In order to facilitate the discovery of solutions,
intellectual perception transforms ‘matter into an instrument of action, that
is, in the etymological sense of the word, into an organ’.19 Intellectual percep-
tion is thus a utilitarian perception that turns what it sees into distinct
spatial phenomena upon which it can act; it perceives only in the light of
anticipated results; that is, end-points. As intellectual beings, humans have
spatialized time and grasp change—whether it is qualitative, extensive, or
evolutionary change—as a series of scientifically determinable states. The
intellectual approach is thus the method whereby science proceeds, and (as
a consequence) it also provides the basis for the way in which mechanistic
scientific theories seek to explain phenomena of life and growth. Bergson
explicitly referred to Marey’s chronophotography—Marey was his col-
league at the Collège de France—and serial photography, as well as to the
cinematographic apparatus, in order to describe the shortcomings and
consequences of intellectual perception, claiming that ‘the mechanism of
our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind’ (in Chapter 1, I will
discuss in more detail the complicated relationship between mechanism,
duration, and cinema in Bergson’s work).20
The work of the following generation of life philosophers in Germany—in
particular, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler, and Helmuth Plessner—illustrates
the ways in which the vitalist approach ramified into sociological and
anthropological domains. Simmel not only initiated the translation of
Bergson into German, but also related life-philosophical ideas to sociology
and applied them to modern urban life. Fundamental to his philosophy of
life was the idea of a contradiction inherent in life: on the one hand, life is
flowing, creative, rhythmic becoming that is characterized by continual
change (a notion he took from Bergson); on the other hand, life—as soon
as it is not just animal life, but also has a spiritual dimension, as in the
case of humans—continually creates expressive forms, such as art. While
such forms are necessary for life to express itself and become visible, these
distinct, stable forms simultaneously separate from the dynamic flow of
life and eventually end up in conflict with life. They are then overthrown
and substituted by new forms. There is thus ‘a fight of life against form
more generally, against the principle of form’ that is constitutive of spiritual

19 Ibid., 161.
20 Ibid., 306.
26  Cinematic Vitalism

life.21 In philosophical anthropology, both Max Scheler and Helmuth Pless-

ner—the former a student of Dilthey’s, the latter a student of Driesch’s
and Uexküll’s—sought to redefine human being-in-the-world from a life-
philosophical perspective. A central aspect of Plessner’s anthropology was
the division of the body into something we are—that we are physically, that
is, an existential part of our being—and something we have—that we can
relate to and reflect upon, look at, and separate from ourselves as spiritual
beings. (This distinction is expressed in German as the distinction between
body as Leib—a word not coincidentally related to ‘life’, Leben—and body as
Körper, which is derived from the Latin corpus and denotes a more rational
approach to the body).22
The approaches I have described above do not fall into a single category,
and of the authors I have cited, only Driesch and Bergson are invariably
classified by historians as vitalists. Nor am I the first to suggest affinities
between these different thinkers, although previous accounts have tended
to employ terms such as ‘holism’ or ‘biocentrism’ as ways of capturing the
elective affinities between various related movements at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.23 However, thinking
of all of the authors I have described above as part of a vitalist stream
draws attention to the importance that all of them attached to the term
‘life’, an emphasis that is lost in a term such as ‘holism’. And while the term
biocentric does maintain this focus on life, it does not in the end help us
to capture what was at stake in the confrontation between cinema and
these life-philosophies, for (as I shall describe in further detail below) the
intersection of cinema and life-philosophies tended to reject precisely
that notion of a centripetal center around which everything revolved
which is implicit in the term biocentrism, and instead figured life as a
centrifugal force that led viewers in wandering, errant paths outward to
larger, non-organic forces of life. Vitalism is a term that better captures
this more expansive sense of life, even if it means wresting the term away
from its narrow appropriation by Driesch and Bergson. My understanding
of vitalism is indebted to Georges Canguilhem, who argued that, if it were
not to be reductionist, a vitalist position was a necessary stance for a
philosophical inquiry into biological matters. Furthermore, for him, life
itself conditions philosophical knowledge; as Charles T. Wolfe puts it, for

21 Georg Simmel, ‘Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur’, 185. See also Chapter 3.
22 See Helmuth Plessner, Stufen des Organischen; Plessner, Laughing and Crying.
23 For a focus on holism, see Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science; on the notion of biocen-
trism, see Oliver A. I. Botar, ‘Notes Towards a Study of Jakob von Uexküll’s Reception’.
Introduc tion 27

Canguilhem, ‘[t]here is something about Life that places the knower in

a special relation to it’.24 Life, for him, is ‘the form and potential of the
living’, and thus all philosophical engagement with life is necessarily
vitalist.

Early Film Theory

It was in the cultural context that I have sketched above that the first
moving images flickered across public screens. Not only did the first film
companies bear names that highlighted cinema’s relationship to life, but
early advertisements also deployed descriptions such as ‘living pictures’ or
‘pictures come to life’ for the moving image, expressions that appear in many
early texts on cinema.25 The reasons behind this linkage seem fairly obvious:
the spectacular appeal of cinema lay in the combination of photography
and movement, which animated, or re-animated, the image and seemed
to make visible life itself. At the same time, many early commentators
on cinema exclaimed that they were able to see ‘life itself’ on the screen
(for example, Rémy de Gourmont, Hermann Häfker, and Georg Lukács, to
mention just a few). In all three invocations of the word ‘life’, life is qualified
at the same time as it is invoked. For example, the term ‘living pictures’
imparts life to pictures, which themselves are in a safe, separate realm,
carefully segregated from real life by a frame. The expression ‘pictures
come to life’ foregrounds an original separation of picture and life and thus
invokes the technical working of the cinematic apparatus: a series of still
images, on the one hand, and the movement generated by the mechanism
of the apparatus, on the other. In the notion of ‘seeing life itself’, by contrast,
life as a referent is emphasized by the intensifying pronoun ‘itself’ (which is
included in most accounts, whether they are French, German, or English).
This emphasis seems to be necessary to express the feeling of astonishment,
the extraordinariness, that is produced through this combination of ‘seeing’
and ‘life’.
These first expressions already hint that there was something about the
experience of moving images that made it seem that life was at stake; that
only by opening up the question of life could one come to terms with this

24 Charles T. Wolfe, ‘The Return of Vitalism’, 5. See also Georges Canguilhem, La connaissance
de la vie.
25 In the first years of cinema, the expression ‘living pictures’ was a common term for the
moving image. See, for example, Henry V. Hopwood, Living Pictures.
28  Cinematic Vitalism

new medium and this new aesthetic experience. But applying the term ‘life’
to cinema meant not only that the concept of life was opened up and made
vulnerable to the new medium—that is, that cinema could become part
of the answer to questions about what constituted life, how life could be
defined, and how life could be identified or perceived—but this move also
affected the concepts of picture or image and of seeing or perception. The
turn to the notion of life to explain cinema as an aesthetic and technological
phenomenon indicates that a struggle took place as to how, conceptually,
to ‘contain’ pictures if they somehow partake in life (through movement
and duration). If life and images become connected, how then can one
establish distinctions between what is in the frame/on the screen and what
is outside of it? Where does this merging of life and image leave the idea of
the frame itself? How do we have to redefine ‘the picture’, and how do we
have to redefine ‘life’?
Vision, for its part, becomes a medium that sensually relays life to us
in cinema. In cinema, life turns into something one encounters from the
outside—we are ourselves outside of this framed life that the moving
image conveys to us. Such a perception of life at a distance, so to speak,
can end up feeling uncanny, insofar as life is usually something that
remains opaque to us precisely because we are situated within it and
cannot be outside of it. Given our embeddedness in life, in fact, it would
seem that to see life from the outside would also necessarily mean the end
of perception itself. Cinema, however, conveys life to us via perception,
in a picture that, as a picture, is separate from our regular environment,
our regular life. Fleshing out what is implicit in these three common
usages of the term ‘life’ in early texts on cinema thus illustrates that the
term not only contributed to a qualification (and hence, a better grasp)
of what cinema itself was, but that cinema also seemed to perform the
same operation for life. At the same time, these reflections on life and
moving images are directly linked to Simmel’s idea that life is engaged in
an inherent and necessary conflict with form, Plessner’s division between
being and having a body, and Bergson’s thoughts on lived time. When
early film critics explained cinema in terms of life, and life in terms of
cinema, they did not reduce one term to the other, but rather used one
term as a way of deepening and complicating our understanding of the
other.
Rémy de Gourmont’s 1907 article ‘Epilogues: Cinematograph’ is a para-
digmatic example of an early text on film that makes recourse to the notion
of life in order to describe both the aesthetic experience of film and what
seems to be the medium’s specific aesthetic quality. He located the real
Introduc tion 29

potential of film in so-called ‘outdoor spectacles’.26 The following passage

describes the components of such a spectacle:

Yesterday [the cinematograph] showed me the Rocky Mountains and the

Zambezi Falls: the wind bent the fir trees on the mountains; the water
sprang up at the bottom of the falls. I saw life stirring. At the Zambezi,
a small bush, partially caught in a whirlpool, wavered constantly on
the brink of the abyss; and its trembling, come from such a distance
away, inspired in me a previously unknown emotion [ je ne sais quelle
émotion]. I became entranced by this battle; when they give us a new
view of this spectacular foaming falls, I will be looking for that bush
which is courageously resisting the force of water: perhaps it will have
been vanquished, or perhaps it will have become a tree.27

In this description of a landscape, picturesque scenery, movement and

emotion combine to create a powerful impression. De Gourmont’s height-
ened sensitivity to the movement of the trees and water foregrounds the
animation of the landscape. His description also suggests that cinema
is transforming movement; that cinema allows him to see and relate to
movement differently. ‘Natural’ movement, by being mediated through
film, becomes both the object of reflexive observation and something that
subjectively reverberates in one’s own body. The movement de Gourmont
describes is not itself organic or self-directed, but the result of a more general
animation produced by the forces of gravity and wind; it is an animated
view.
On the one hand, de Gourmont’s description of the trembling of the bush
is reminiscent of texts on the excessive, nervous movements of actors such
as Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, movements that film critics of the
1920s were to hail as cinematic par excellence.28 In this vein, one could read

26 For de Gourmont, these outdoor spectacles can be natural, such as landscapes, or contrived,
such as a hippopotamus hunt (which de Gourmont describes as ‘posed certainly, but posed on
the very banks of the Upper Nile with the local people and animals performing in their own
environment’). What is important for de Gourmont is only that the spectacle includes the
setting in order to make full use of cinema’s potential, whether this setting is understood as
‘landscape’ (paysage) or ‘environment’ (milieu). By ‘landscape’, de Gourmont means panoramic
scenery without human characters, while ‘environment’ denotes the surroundings of human
characters involved in a foregrounded action.
27 Rémy de Gourmont, ‘Épilogues: Cinématographe’, 124 . Translated as de Gourmont, ‘Epi-
logues: Cinematograph (1907)’, 47.
28 See, for example, Jean Epstein, ‘Magnification’, 238. On the nervous body in French film
culture more generally, see Rae Beth Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’.
30  Cinematic Vitalism

de Gourmont’s account as describing a feeling Walter Benjamin termed

‘innervation’ with respect to cinema. According to Benjamin, cinematic
innervation provides a chance not only to incorporate technology play-
fully, but also to encounter somatically a nature that is not antithetical
to technology (or to humanity).29 On the other hand, the transference of a
movement ‘from such a distance away’—that is, the physical and emotional
connection that the film is able to establish between the viewer in Paris and
the bush in Zambia—is so strong that it forms a tie that persists beyond
the duration of the film. De Gourmont’s feeling of being entranced is the
result of a new sense of movement made possible by the mediation of the
cinematograph, and by the fact that this cinematic movement allows for a
haptic and kinesthetic empathy with a bush. He sums up the movement on
the screen with the notion of ‘life stirring’ (vie remuer), since this cinematic
movement literally animates both organic and inorganic matter; that is, it
confers on it a different, and differently experienced, life and soul (anima).
In many advertisements for the cinematograph, the term ‘life’ referred
to the astonishing effect of the cinematographic apparatus’ technology,
namely the generation of movement by means of discrete images that
replaced one another at a certain speed. Accounts such as de Gourmont’s,
however, obviously go beyond the usages of the word ‘life’ we f ind in
accounts that foreground the technological marvel. In de Gourmont’s
description, life encompasses both the film’s movement and the embodied,
moved spectator—a combination at which his choice of the expression ‘vie
remuer’ also hints, since remuer can refer to external as well as internal
motion. De Gourmont’s text emphasizes that cinema creates a peculiar
bond between what has been filmed (the really existing bush in Zambia),
the cinematic ‘view’ itself, and the moved spectator, a bond that revolves
around movement, temporality, and a strange sense of life.30
If, in de Gourmont’s text, life refers to an external movement that is seen
differently because of its mediation through the screen, in other texts the
term is used reflexively, as a way of emphasizing one’s own sense of vitality.

29 On innervation, see Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, esp. 124 n10; as well as Benjamin, ‘One-Way
Street’. Miriam Hansen discusses the importance of the concept of innervation for Benjamin in
Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’.
30 De Gourmont’s text seems to fall squarely on one side of the binary distinction in classical
film theory, from André Bazin to Siegfried Kracauer, which Dudley Andrew has long emphasized:
namely, the distinction (which Kracauer traces back to the Lumières, on the one hand, and
George Méliès, on the other hand) between a ‘realist’ and a ‘formative’ tendency; that is, an
aesthetic that is concerned with content and stylistic means such as the long take, versus an
aesthetic that prioritizes form and montage. I take up this distinction critically in Chapter 1.
Introduc tion 31

In his short essay ‘Cinematographic Theater’ (1909), for example, Max Brod
writes that he was overwhelmed by cinema’s life force, and he felt ‘shaken
out of [his] semi-somnolent state’ by the ‘vitality of such a wealth of events’
on the screen.31 While Brod thus felt vitalized by cinema and empowered
to ‘become an inventor myself and think up a few new pictures for the
Biograph’ on his way home, other literary commentators on cinema felt
that cinema’s vitality surpassed their own. Walter Hasenclever—like Brod,
a modernist author—claimed that in the ‘Kientopp’,

space and temporality serve to hypnotize the spectator; where is there

any vitality, where is there a single dimension on this earth that it cannot
reach in its unlimited capacity? It is as though the Kientopp were the most
extreme consequence of human expansion, and only in it, as in a final form
of reflection, can the horror of being appear. When we place the chaos at
a distance by seemingly having reproduced it, we renounce its reality.32

The exuberant vitality of cinema seems to come at the expense of that of the
audience, which, as Alfred Döblin put it, is ‘spellbound by the fixed stare’ of
the film screen’s ‘white eye’.33 For Hasenclever, cinema was the most extreme
consequence of ‘human expansion’, understood not only as geographical
reach, but also as including other dimensions and an exponential increase in
vitality. His comment suggests the excitement about new vistas in actualities,
travelogues, dramas, and popular scientific films, but also the overwhelming
sensorial impact of films that seem to surpass human capacities for seeing,
feeling and experiencing; for living. Hasenclever made explicit what many
early film commentators addressed only implicitly: in its enlargement of
life, cinema reflects life—’the horror of being’ (die Ungeheuerlichkeit des
Daseins)—back to us, enlarged and under altered conditions, such that we
may comprehend something about it that was not graspable before.34

31 Max Brod, ‘Cinematographic Theater (1909)’, 17.

32 Walter Hasenclever, ‘The Kintopp as Educator’, 40.
33 Alfred Döblin, ‘Theater of the Little People’, 150.
34 Hasenclever’s comment seems to prefigure Siegfried Kracauer’s image, in his 1960 Theory
of Film, of the film screen as equivalent to Athena’s polished shield, which allowed Perseus to
bear the sight of the Gorgon Medusa without turning into stone, such that he could cut off her
head. ‘[W]e do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear’;
since ‘of all the existing media cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature’, we depend on it ‘for
the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life’
(Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, 305). Miriam Hansen and others have pointed out that this
is only a thinly veiled reference to the atrocities of WWII and the holocaust (made only more
explicit by Kracauer’s reference to Georges Franju’s holocaust allegory Le sang des bêtes (1949)
32  Cinematic Vitalism

The painter Gustav Melcher also belonged to the group of critics who
attributed an excess of life to cinema: ‘one single cinematographic theater
program leaves world and life in the dust’.35 Prefiguring the idea of cinema
as a technological prosthetic device that extends human faculties—an idea
we find in Dziga Vertov’s notion of kino-eye, for example—life, for Melcher,
was encompassed by technology. The cinematograph, as a ‘new visual or-
gan’, enjoyed a kinship with life that was denied to theory and philosophy,
privileging it to reveal life’s secrets. ‘Criticism is just as powerless against the
cinematograph’s shows as the philosopher is with regard to life. They are
too much.’36 Both the distant (‘stars’) and the microscopic (‘bacteria’) can
come into view; both the spatially (the ‘streets of New York, London, and
Paris’) and temporally (‘depths of the past’) far-away can come into reach.
This new visibility changes our understanding of life, because our access to
life is no longer limited to human vision and human life: ‘The fly has more
than ten thousand eyes. The flounder’s eyes can wander across its body. But
twentieth-century man has the cinematograph. He sees more than the visual
world: he sees what he desires. . . He sees the timelessness and imperishability
of life.’37 In this environment, in which life and technology are so thoroughly
imbricated with one another, production—the work of the actor—is not an
accumulation of dead labor, but makes visible modern life: ‘The sanguine,
pulsating, enterprising modern life, which even before birth takes on its cheer-
ful automobile rhythm, is put on display without prejudice in film acting.’38
Another group of critics reacted more ambivalently to the cinematograph;
for them, cinematic life was signified by lack. For Maxim Gorky, responding
to an 1896 screening of Lumière films, the films presented a shadowy half-
life, or the shadow of life; even though everything on the screen teemed with
life and with movements that were full of energy, the smiles were lifeless and
the life that was presented was bleak and dismal, for it was deprived of color,
sound and smell.39 That same year, O. Winter likewise described ‘the terrify-
ing effect of life, but of life with a difference’ in cinema: ‘Here, then, is life; life
it must be because a machine knows not how to invent; but it is life which

in the same paragraph); see Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 257, as well as Gertrud Koch, ‘“Not
Yet Accepted Anywhere”‘. But like Kracauer’s film theory, Hasenclever’s comment betrays the
fascination with the combination of depiction of reality and distortion of (perceptual) reality
in the cinema.
35 Gustav Melcher, ‘On Living Photography’, 17.
36 Ibid., 18.
37 Ibid., 19.
38 Ibid., 19-20.
39 Maxim Gorky, ‘Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows’.
Introduc tion 33

you may only contemplate through a mechanical medium, life which eludes
you in your daily pilgrimage.’40 The life cinema gives us, Winter continued,
is ‘all true’ and ‘all false’, since its faithful recording is accomplished by an
unintelligent machine that does not know how to privilege certain objects
and vistas over others and thus order, select, and revise visual impressions
as a ‘human brain’ would. For Winter, this ‘life moving without purpose,
without beauty, with no better impulse than a foolish curiosity’ mirrored
the concurrent ill-fated tendencies in realist and naturalist literature and
painting, where ‘imagination’ became ‘crippled by sight’, and he denied that
the cinematograph had an ability for revealing reflection (aside from the
realm of science): ‘The master quality of the world is human invention, whose
liberal exercise demonstrates the fatuity of a near approach to “life”.’41 In this
text, as in many others, the relationship between life, reality, and realism
is at stake, and the answer depends on the role of human perception in the
face of a machine’s moving images.
In ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema’ (1913), Georg Lukács also
described ‘eerily life-like’ film images as lacking, but characterized them
as primarily fantastic, rather than realistic. The fantastic, however, is ‘not
the opposite of living life, it is only a new aspect of it: it is a life without
presence, fate, reason, or motives, one in which everything is possible . . .
a life without soul, a life of pure surface’.42 Yet it is exactly for this reason
that the monumental weight of fate ‘flourishes into rich and abundant life’
in cinema, and the animate in nature ‘acquires artistic form for the first
time’.43 In Theory of the Novel, which he wrote around the same time, Lukács
analyzed various literary forms with respect to their relationship to life, a
pursuit that reflected Simmel’s and Dilthey’s influence on Lukács before
the latter’s Hegelian-Marxist turn.44 As Scott Curtis has emphasized, Lukács
turned against contemplation and inwardness as bourgeois attitudes in both
his text on film and in Theory of the Novel, qualities on which Winter sought
to insist. For many other early film commentators, it was the quick, restless,
modern life to which film corresponded, rather than the contemplative,
idyllic life associated with earlier styles and epochs. The Austrian author
Karl Hans Strobl evoked this contrast when he wrote: ‘[The cinematograph’s]
quick, distracting tempo corresponds to the nervousness of our lives; the

40 O. Winter, ‘Article in New Review (February 1896)’, 13, 14.

41 Ibid., 16.
42 Georg Lukács, ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema’, 12-13.
43 Ibid., 14.
44 See Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 11: ‘The first draft of this study was written in the summer
of 1914 and the final version in the winter of 1914-15.’
34  Cinematic Vitalism

restless flickering of the scenes flitting by lies at the opposite end of the
spectrum from the confident persistence of a regular stride. Before these
wild images, it becomes apparent that the present has no room for the
idyllic.’45 Lukács, by contrast, realized that the conflict between form and
life is not the same as in other media, since cinema, in contrast to the stage,
is characterized by a ‘temporality and flow’ that ‘is movement in itself, the
eternal transience, the never-resting change of things’.46 Rather than making
life visible as a rigid form that separates itself from life’s flow, it is exactly this
flow, this eternal becoming, that cinema makes visible. As a consequence,
cinema lacks the depth, the ‘soul’, of other art forms. The medium’s technol-
ogy enables an expression of life that creates a new balance between body
and soul, since cinema foregrounds the corporeal, moving aspect of life. 47
These early texts on cinema revealed three aspects of the relationship
between moving images and ‘life’. First, the notion of life, when applied to
cinema, could refer to a quality of the cinematic image itself, as a technologi-
cally produced and reproduced moving image. However, ‘life’ could also
signify a quality of vitality, or animated-ness, that characterized the objects
on screen, which seemed to possess either an excessive vitality (Brod) or
another, uncanny kind of life (Lukács). Third, and finally, these authors
used the term ‘life’ to qualify that which transpired between spectator and
moving image: that magical bond of which de Gourmont spoke.

Cinematic Vitalism

From the early days of the medium onward, as these commentaries on

cinema indicate, the movie theater became a privileged place to think about
‘life’. Cinema allowed for theoretical reflection on life, since it seemed to
present life as such, as a distinct object; yet at the same time, on account
of its sensual impact on the spectator’s own living body, it forced these
theoretical considerations back into matter. By the late 1910s and throughout
the 1920s, we witness a much broader discussion of life-philosophical and

45 Karl Hans Strobl, ‘The Cinematograph’, 26.

46 Lukács, ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema,’ 13.
47 There have been several excellent readings and contextualizations of Lukács’ essay. A
foundational reading is Tom Levin, ‘From Dialectical to Normative Specificity’; more recently,
Janelle Blankenship and Scott Curtis have analyzed the text in the context of Lukács’ overall
work and early film theory more generally; see Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship, 235-41 and
Janelle Blankenship, ‘Futurist Fantasies’. See also Katharina Loew, ‘The Spirit of Technology:
Early German Thinking about Film’, 141-43.
Introduc tion 35

vitalist ideas in the arts more generally, especially in music and dance, but
also in literature, painting, and photography.48 Vitalist ideas began to thrive
in various art movements and contexts as a way to formulate and partake in
a new aesthetic that was by no means simply a regressive reaction to moder-
nity. Rather, these vitalist ideas not only actively shaped modern thought,
but they also continue to circulate and inform the way that we conceive of
ourselves, our relationship to others, and our environment. Vitalist ideas,
moreover, can be found across a number of very different—and in some
cases even opposed—artistic movements, such as Expressionism, cubism,
futurism, Dada and surrealism. Though some of these movements, such
as futurism, embraced a machine aesthetic that might seem antithetical
to vitalism, there were nevertheless a number of vitalist ideas—even if
fewer explicit references—that were amalgamated with technology, urban
velocity, and automatism; as in, for example, Antonio Giulio Bragaglia’s
photodynamism. 49 Yet it was in film as time-based and technological art
that these ideas found their greatest application and transformation.
In encountering the technologically-produced temporality, and natu-
ralistic, yet ephemeral images, of cinema, however, vitalist ideas about the
nature of life and its relationship to technology were modified to such an
extent that we can (and should) speak of ‘cinematic vitalism’. Cinematic
vitalism incorporates certain vitalist ideas drawn from biology and phi-
losophy, while rejecting others, and combines the vitalist ideas that it
does accept with mechanist ideas. Vitalist ideas, in other words, changed
as they were incorporated into films and theories of film, just as in any
experimental setting in which ideas are put to the test. In contrast to the
often quite rigid conceptions and distinctions that characterized scientific
vitalism, vitalist ideas in cinema were literally put into motion and took
on a life of their own. This became especially evident in the films and
writings by the first avant-garde in the 1920s, which form the core of my
inquiry. Vitalist conceptions of temporality, movement, and embodiment
appeared in texts by film theorists and filmmakers such as Hans Richter,
Jean Epstein, Jean Painlevé, Kracauer, and Benjamin, and these conceptions
had a major influence on their theories of cinematic perception, montage,
and the ontology of the cinematic image.
This book aims at more than simply to map the mutual influences be-
tween cinema and vitalism (with the latter understood as either a clearly

48 See, for example, Hilary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism; Mark Antliff, Inventing
Bergson; and Tom Gunning, ‘Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion’.
49 See Bragaglia’s manifesto: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, ‘Futurist Photodynamism’.
36  Cinematic Vitalism

definable movement or theoretical position). By focusing on what I call

cinematic vitalism, I seek to show that, and how, vitalist ideas in biology and
philosophy addressed concerns about the value and characteristics of life in
modernity; that is, in a climate of increasing rationalization, urbanization,
technologization, and scientification. As many film scholars have shown,
these are, of course, precisely the same concerns that also characterized
the reactions to and theorizations of cinema. The cinema, as an actual place
and a discursive field, became a place for thinking about the correlation
of life and technology—or, to put it differently, the relationship between
the human and technology on the one hand, and with nature, especially
non-human life (from animals to cells), on the other.
As I noted at the start of the introduction, the significance of vitalist
philosophy for film aesthetics has long been underestimated, primarily as
a consequence of the association of vitalism and life-philosophy with an
anti-modernist, conservative, and anti-technological stance. In the German
context, a number of life-philosophical conceptions of organic unity, holism,
and life force were incorporated into National Socialist ideology, and while
some life philosophers, most prominently Nietzsche, were stylized by Nazis
into ideological godfathers, others, notably Ludwig Klages and Oswald
Spengler, were in fact directly involved with the fascist regime and were
among the National Socialists’ main ideologues. Even though Uexküll had a
much more ambiguous relationship to the Nazi regime and his Institute for
Umwelt Research came under permanent threat after 1933, Uexküll likewise
outlined a conservative and elitist biological theory of the state, with the
family, the Volk, and the state as the natural building blocks.50 And until
his grand revival in the early 1990s, Bergson’s philosophy, which was so
popular at the beginning of the century, had been largely forgotten, in part
because of the antagonistic redirection of French philosophy in the 1920s
toward Hegel (Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre), and in part because of
a Catholic, anti-Semitic and/or ‘masculinist’ reaction against Bergsonism
(Julien Benda, Wyndham Lewis).51 Even though they borrowed heavily
from Bergson, early film theorists themselves tended to avoid any explicit
mention of him, since by the early 1920s, Bergsonism—which had turned

50 See Harrington, Reenchanted Science, esp. 56-71.

51 Bergson, like Simmel, was Jewish, and their work presents the most liberal versions of
life-philosophy. Bergson’s focus on intuition (versus intellect)—as well as, most likely, the fact
that his philosophy lectures were indeed attended by many women—led others to decry his
philosophy as a feminization of philosophy. See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy,
9-54; and Heike Klippel, Gedächtnis und Kino .
Introduc tion 37

into a popular mainstream philosophy—seemed already to belong to the

previous, established generation.
As a consequence of these ideological associations and personal entangle-
ments, many cultural historians have discussed vitalism and life-philosophy
from an all too narrow teleological-historical perspective, as not only pre-
modern, but also anti-modern.52 Accordingly, the majority of film scholars
have considered vitalism and life-philosophy to be at odds with a medium
that is inextricably part of an urban mass culture, because of the way the
latter integrated various machines and technologies into everyday life. Even
though scholars such as Stephen Kern and Anson Rabinbach have discussed
the rise of new cultural conceptions of space and time as fundamental para-
digm shifts that accompanied the process of industrialization, urbanization,
and changes in social structures, these conceptions are generally restricted
to mechanist models of explanation that compared living beings and ma-
chines.53 By contrast, I maintain that vitalist conceptions of life not only
provided a foundation for new approaches to temporality and movement,
but were also transformed as a consequence of their confrontation with
cinema as a technical apparatus, and thereby directly came to incorporate
the cultural and technological reality of modernity.
To date, the bulk of scholarship on Bergson and cinema has followed in
the footsteps of Gilles Deleuze, though a few more historically-oriented
texts have also traced Bergson’s influence on film theory and practice.54
While in his two books on cinema, The Movement-Image and The Time-
Image, Deleuze discusses Bergson’s own comments on cinema, he is not
primarily interested in pursuing the historical question of the relationship
between cinema and vitalism. Rather, Bergson’s work provided Deleuze with
a theoretical framework and vocabulary with which to grasp the relation-
ship between time, movement, body, and action in cinema. Though it is
of course possible to see cinema as part of the mechanistic vanguard of
modernity while its contemporary, vitalism, was simply part of a fading

52 Examples include Harrington, Reenchanted Science; Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology; and
Hans-Joachim Lieber, Kulturkritik und Lebensphilosophie. A good counter-example is Frederick
Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism.
53 Rabinbach, The Human Motor and Kern, Time and Space.
54 See, for example, Malcolm Turvey, ‘Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine’, and
Klippel, Gedächtnis und Kino. In art-historical scholarship, however, there are a number of
publications that delineate the influence of Bergsonism on various art movements, in particular
national contexts, historically, rather than theoretically; for example, on French avant-garde art,
on Russian modernism, or on British modernism. See Antliff, Inventing Bergson; Fink, Bergson
and Russian Modernism; Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism.
38  Cinematic Vitalism

past, Deleuze’s reappropriation of a vitalist philosopher such as Bergson

to rethink cinema gave scholars pause for thought before prematurely
accepting this linear account of historical change. Deleuze’s Bergsonian
film-philosophy, like Bergson, seeks to understand the human mind via
cinema, but undertakes a systematic analysis of film form to investigate and
illuminate ways of being and thinking. A number of publications since have
elucidated, expanded upon, and criticized Deleuze’s approach to cinema.55
For this project, Deleuze’s work is of interest to me primarily for the ways in
which it develops further a tradition of primarily French vitalist film theory,
beginning with Émile Vuillermoz, Elie Faure and others, and continuing
with André Bazin.
In outlining the importance of vitalism and life-philosophy for cinema,
my project further engages with recent contributions to film scholarship
that deal with questions, movements, or theories that are closely related to
the issue of vitalism, such as cinematic temporality, film phenomenology,
and affect theory. Mary Ann Doane has sought to explore the historical
genesis of cinematic temporality. Temporality and its nexus with economics,
culture and politics has also become a central issue in works on global art
cinema, particularly with respect to so-called slow cinema.56 In the wake
of the renewed attention to the body and thus to theories of spectator-
ship that counter the psychoanalytic and structuralist approaches that
dominated film scholarship up to the early 1990s, a number of scholars have
turned to phenomenology, which is closely related to life-philosophy, and
have noted important cross-influences between authors such as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simmel, Dilthey, and Bergson. And by
emphasizing the lived body, affect, perception, and sensation, work by
Vivian Sobchack, Mark Hansen, and others has redirected film and media
theory in a direction that is in many ways consonant with that of a vitalist
account.57
The book as a whole is organized around the four key aesthetic axes of
cinematic vitalism as it was developed in films, by film theorists, and in
philosophical-biological theories: 1) rhythm (duration, lived temporality),

55 Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen; Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze; Patricia Pisters,
ed., Micropolitics; David Rodowick, ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’; Mirjam Schaub, Deleuze.
56 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time; Lee Carruthers, Doing Time. On slow-
ness, see Koepnick, On Slowness; Tiego de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema; Ira
Jaffe, Slow Movies.
57 Vivian Sobchack has provided the most comprehensive phenomenological account of film
spectatorship in Sobchack, Address of the Eye; while Mark Hansen’s New Philosophy for a New
Media has introduced phenomenology into new media theory.
Introduc tion 39

2) environment (Umwelt, milieu), 3) attunement (Stimmung, mood), and

4) development (evolution, behavior). Each of these terms depends on and
expresses those relationships between the human organism, its milieux,
and technologies such as cinema that can be organized vitally, dynamically,
and non-teleologically. As I note at several points in the book, however,
this vision of cinematic vitalism articulated by classical film theorists
and filmmakers is not simply of historical interest, but it also maps out
connections among human beings, milieux, and technologies that have
persisted throughout the history of cinema in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, and which have come to the fore especially in recent discus-
sions about the emergence of a fully digital cinema and alternative screen
practices and installations. By contextualizing early twentieth-century film
theories within debates about vitalism and life-philosophy, I aim to present
cinema—both then and now—not simply as an echo of the dynamics of
mechanization and modernization, but also as a site where film theorists,
philosophers, filmmakers, scientists, and the everyday moviegoer could
reflect on, negotiate, and even reorient themselves toward questions of life
in the face of modernity, rationalization, and technologization.
Though the chapters are organized primarily around these four key
concepts of cinematic vitalism, I argue that we can also locate four historic
stages of the cinematic engagement with vitalism. For the first generation
of film critics and filmmakers, the word ‘life’ signaled the profound way in
which films called on the spectator as a living, sensing being, even as the use
of this term also complicated earlier notions of life by providing spectators
an opportunity to witness a technologically produced liveliness; that is, the
experience of seeing life outside itself. In the second stage, what we now call
‘classical’ film theorists of the 1920s pursued these early intuitions about
the vitality of film by developing a more full-fledged aesthetics of cinema
that reflected on cinema’s complex relationship with various conceptions
of life in philosophy, biology, and aesthetic theory. The third stage took
place in the immediate post-WWII period, characterized both by further
scientific and technological advances and by the experience of systematic
mass annihilation and destruction, which shifted cinematic engagement
with life from an emphatic to a restorative or even redemptive (Siegfried
Kracauer) project.
Finally, and not coincidentally, in the recent past we have witnessed
resurgent interest in life and vitalism in contemporary theory, cultural
studies, and the history of science; a resurgence into which this book also
taps. This interest includes reflections on the imbrication of life, power
and politics in the wake of Michel Foucault’s elaborations on ‘biopolitics’,
40  Cinematic Vitalism

work on ‘non-organic life’, work on forms of life that appear in particular

historical constellations (such as Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ or Judith
Butler’s ‘precarious life’), work based on a renewed interest in (media)
ecology, materiality, and environmentalism, and work on the history of
vitalism in the light of contemporary biological developments.58 My focus
on the ongoing engagement of filmmakers and film theorists with vitalist
ideas aims to put this contemporary neo-vitalist thought into historical
perspective, by linking it to a continuous historical thread of experimental
vitalist ideas inspired by the moving image.
While this book focuses on the first three stages, it is very much in dia-
logue with the contemporary engagement with life and ecology in various
disciplinary contexts. It seeks to add a historical background to current
debates while also providing historically-grounded key terms with very
specific, yet historically variable definitions, such as Umwelt or Stimmung.
The focus on the moving image as a technological medium with a special
affinity to life should be understood as case study of the interrelationship,
or rather mutual conditioning, of natural and cultural geneses. Following
the description of this book’s chapters, I will briefly outline the current
debates on which the book’s contents draw and inform.
Chapter 1 grounds cinematic vitalism in a medium specificity that is
not simply based on photographic indexicality, but rather on temporality,
movement, and spectatorial engagement. In the writings of the vitalist
philosophers Henri Bergson, Georg Simmel, and Ludwig Klages, rhythm is a
natural, flowing, and embodied temporality that is expressive of the internal
living body of the performer, listener, or spectator, and is presented by these
writers as in opposition to modern, urban, and capitalist temporality. The
film theorists and filmmakers Hans Richter and Sergei Eisenstein engaged
this discourse on rhythm in order to understand the dynamic challenge put
to the spectator’s lived temporality that is posed by cinema’s mechanical
temporality—a challenge prefigured in nineteenth century discourses
in art history about Einfühlung (empathy) as well as vitalist-scientif ic
discourses on intuition and instinct. Hans Richter’s scroll paintings and
abstract Rhythm films (1921-25) present an attempt to develop a non-organic
aesthetic that combines life and machine, merging the temporality and

58 On biopolitics, see Roberto Esposito, Bios; Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus; on non-organic
life, see Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History; on ‘bare life’, see Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer; on ‘precarious life’, Judith Butler, Precarious Life; on an expanded notion
of ecology and materiality, see Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature; Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter; and Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies; and on the contemporary revisiting of vitalism,
Sebastian Normandin and Charles T. Wolfe, eds., Vitalism and the Scientific Image.
Introduc tion 41

formal properties of cinema with the rhythm of the embodied spectator.

Whereas the abstract films of Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger were
based on an aesthetic of organic forms, Richter’s films sought a non-organic
aesthetic that combined life and machine, merging the temporality and
formal properties of cinema with the embodied spectator. This non-organic
formal aesthetic found its equivalent in Richter’s writings, which likewise
expressed the dynamic challenge put to the spectator’s lived temporality
by cinema’s mechanical temporality. Richter’s work thus constitutes an
example of a formalist cinematic vitalism based on movement, composi-
tion, and embodied perception rather than the realism of cinema’s moving
photographic images. I conclude by noting that Soviet montage filmmaker
Eisenstein’s theory of montage from the 1920s and 1930s transferred this
formalist vitalism to the film technique of montage, which for Eisenstein
is cinema’s way of engaging with the inherent vitality of all matter.
Moving away from the organizing capacities of life internal to organisms,
such as rhythm, Chapter 2 shifts the focus to the external organization of the
world by a living being. I discuss how, in both biology and the avant-garde
film of the 1910s and 1920s, there was a new conception of life as radiating
outward into the environment of living beings. The biologist Jakob von
Uexküll serves as the protagonist of this chapter, for his interest in the
way in which the perceptual abilities of different living beings ‘created’ or
determined that being’s world proved inspirational to many theorists of
early cinema and, in its use of photographic and cinematic techniques, as
well as the idea of perceptual worlds, itself constitutes a kind of cinematic
biology. In contrast to prior understandings of the environment as a ‘milieu’
influencing and shaping largely passive living beings, Uexküll’s theory
of Umwelt (the ‘surrounding world’) describes the active creation of the
environment by a living being. The chapter begins by tracing the central
role played by chronophotography, cinema, and aesthetic theory (especially
that of Kant and that developed under the term Einfühlung) in both the
development of Uexküll’s theory of biology and for his literary and pictorial
imaginations of various Umwelten. The literary and imaginative qualities of
Uexküll’s work—the idea that there was not one common world, but rather
a multitude of worlds—in turn inspired avant-garde artists and filmmakers
from the Dada and Bauhaus movements, as well as Walter Benjamin, who
drew upon Umwelt theory in his most seminal writings on film. Unearthing
the role of Umwelt theory is thus not only a matter of recovering a lost
context of cinema’s early history, but it is also a means of theorizing how
cinema provided a blueprint for imagining life, life forms, other bodies,
and other sensations, both animal and machinic. The chapter concludes
42  Cinematic Vitalism

with an analysis of the work of the surrealist documentary filmmaker

Jean Painlevé, to discuss how the spectator’s negotiation of film as Umwelt
and the technological mediation of animals enables an encounter with
non-human senses and sensibilities.
In Chapter 3, I turn to the aesthetic implications of the modernist con-
cepts of subject-environment interaction outlined in the previous chapter.
German Expressionist and Kammerspiel (‘chamberplay’) film of the 1920s,
as well as accompanying f ilm-theoretical texts, located the vitality of
film in its ability to create a dense, atmospheric surrounding world that
a spectator might inhabit by attuning herself to its qualities. Lupu Pick’s
and F.W. Murnau’s films in particular were able to create intense moods
by means of stylistic choices pertaining to the mise en scène (close shot
ranges, lighting, etc.) that vivified landscapes, locales, and things, and
dynamize the relationship between protagonists and their environment. In
discussions of these films, filmmakers, scriptwriters, critics, and theorists
turned to the aesthetic concept of Stimmung (mood, attunement, tonality),
which captures simultaneously the tonal quality of what surrounds us
(atmosphere), our own tonality (mood), and the process of attuning to
a mood or atmosphere. In the long history of Stimmung as an aesthetic
term, philosophers, writers, and art historians, including Kant, Friedrich
Schiller, J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Alois Riegl,
made recourse to Stimmung to think about the relationship between subject
and environment, objectivity and subjectivity, imagination and reason, and
sensation and thought. Expressionist and Kammerspiel film of the 1920s
continued this aesthetic inquiry, but infused it with a vitalist dynamic,
as evidenced in texts on these f ilms by Béla Balázs, Willy Haas, Lotte
Eisner, Mayer and Pick. I show how the aesthetics of cinematic Stimmung
intervenes in broader debates about the role of ‘environment’ in social,
cultural, and scientific debates, and does so by counteracting the notion
of a rigidly determining milieu developed in realist and naturalist novels
and plays (and, by extension, in the scientific debates upon which those
literary discourses drew).
The focus of Chapter 4 is the return (and, in some cases, the continua-
tion) of specific vitalist motifs in immediate post-WWII film theory, in a
context in which scientists had abandoned the opposition of vitalism and
mechanism in favor of more integrative models of how dynamic-organic
qualities and physico-chemical forces interact. Vitalism was especially
unpopular after the war, for many vitalist ideas had merged with Nazi
ideology in the Third Reich, as holism and the idea of the state as organism
served to justify an aggressive foreign policy and racial ideologies. Yet a
Introduc tion 43

progressive strand of vitalist thought persisted throughout this period,

particularly in France, appearing both in the work of a few individuals
in disciplines such as philosophy (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Helmuth
Plessner), but also, significantly, in film theory. Rather than concentrat-
ing on holistic notions of the body and, by extension, communities,
authors such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer focused on the idea
of a (vulnerable) open body; instead of the eternal temporality of the
Third Reich and the ecstasy of its well-orchestrated mass festivals, they
maintained an open temporality of the everyday (which, for them, was
exemplified by Italian neorealist cinema). This chapter examines Bazin’s
film essays and Kracauer’s Theory of Film, and in particular the conceptions
of nature, life, and evolution in these texts, as well as their connection
to post-catastrophic narrative forms and visual styles in cinema, from
neorealism to modernist and new wave films from the 1950s and 1960s.
The questions of vitality, emergence, evolution, and development that are
central to Bazin’s and Kracauer’s film theories build on the discussions
of rhythm, mood, and environment in chapters 1-3, but also reflect the
post-vitalist debates about behavior, evolution and cybernetics of the 1950s
and 1960s. In the conclusion, I reflect on the ways in which the contours
of cinematic vitalism outlined in this book relate to recent ‘neo-vitalist’
theories of materiality, media, and affect.
Insofar as the goal of my project is to trace the affinity between cinema
and vitalist concepts of life, it also serves as a necessary corrective to many
current ideas about the relationship between cinema and science, which
often cast this relationship in terms of transmission: either the transmission
of scientific concepts and methods into cinema, or the transmission of
cinematic concepts and methods into science. Focusing on affinities, by
contrast, means considering the ways in which cinema alters and draws
out new points of interest from scientific ideas even as it incorporates them,
and it means looking at the ways in which cinematic technologies and
concepts of cinema facilitate new modes of science. Focusing on the affini-
ties between film and vitalism is thus a means for developing a different
historical, ontological lens for looking at film, and it provides a way both
to break up narrow ideological conceptions of vitalism and life-philosophy
and to illuminate the all-too-familiar contours of classical film theoretical
texts from an unusual angle, which in turn enables us to draw new insights
and interrelations.
In describing the relationship between film and life in terms of affinity, I
am borrowing from Siegfried Kracauer, who claims that cinema harbors an
44  Cinematic Vitalism

‘affinity’ for ‘the “flow of life”‘.59 Affinity is a term that Kracauer never con-
ceptualizes or explains. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can
describe a connection both ‘by inclination or attraction’, be it voluntary and
social, natural, chemical, or spiritual; and ‘by position’, that is, by marriage,
by kinship, or by structural resemblance between languages, animals, or
plants.60 For our present purposes, the term ‘affinity’ thus encompasses both
the notion that cinema and vitalist conceptions of life may be connected
by position (because they blossomed historically around the same time;
because they are indeed structurally related; etc.) and the notion that they
are connected by inclination (they are drawn to one another since they
are similar, and thus mutually complement one another, or reaffirm one
another). Additionally, the term ‘affinity’ encompasses both a scientific-
analytic meaning (as in, for example, the chemical affinity between atoms)
and a cultural, emotional meaning. This double sense, both scientific and
cultural, is something that the term affinity also has in common with
cinema, which from its inception has been grounded in both science and
art, analysis and synthesis, fact and fabrication.
It was upon this double meaning of affinity that Goethe also built his
novel Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften). The novel explores mar-
riage, attraction, and free will from the perspective of chemical reaction, by
describing the experiment whereby a married couple add another man and
woman to their household.61 Joseph Vogl has embedded Goethe’s novel in the
context of the then-current scientific debates about chemical affinity. Louis
Berthollet had discovered that attraction between elements is an unstable
system, constantly producing new divisions and leaving a remainder that
ensures the continuation of chemical processes ad infinitum. The scientist
Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a friend of Goethe’s, subsequently reduced chemical
affinity—and along with it, every organic process—to the electric polarity

59 Kracauer mentions four ‘aff inities’ of photography: an ‘aff inity for unstaged reality’, a
tendency ‘to stress the fortuitous’, a tendency ‘to suggest endlessness’, and ‘an affinity for the
indeterminate’. Film has a fifth affinity: ‘Now films tend to capture physical existence in its
endlessness. Accordingly, one may also say that they have an aff inity, evidently denied to
photography, for the continuum of life or the “flow of life,” which of course is identical with
open-ended life. The concept “flow of life,” then, covers the stream of material situations and
happenings with all that they intimate in terms of emotions, values, thoughts.’ Kracauer, Theory
of Film, 18-20, 71.
60 ‘Affinity’, in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2016). http://www.oed.
com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/Entry/3417?redirectedFrom=Affinity& (accessed March 15th,
2016).
61 Goethe, Elective Affinities. On the wider implications of the term ‘affinity’ in Goethe, see
Andrew McKinnon, ‘Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethics’.
Introduc tion 45

of hydrogen and oxygen, a process that does not merely combine, join and
divide separate entities, but also creates a new ‘product’ by consuming the
joined elements.62 As the four characters in the novel embark on their social
experiment (‘Description is inadequate’, after all), one of them, a captain
possessing chemical knowledge, explains:

One has to have these entities before one’s eyes, and see how, although
they appear to be lifeless, they are in fact perpetually ready to spring into
activity; one has to watch sympathetically how they seek one another out,
attract, seize, destroy, devour, consume one another, and then emerge
again from this most intimate union in renewed, novel and unexpected
shape: it is only then that one credits them with an eternal life, yes,
with possessing mind and reason, because our own minds seem scarcely
adequate to observing them properly and our understanding scarcely
sufficient to comprehend them.63

Film is reflected in this quote in two ways. The experience and witnessing
of a chemical reaction bears no relation to its lifeless description. By viewing
the elements and the unstable forces of attraction themselves, we grant
them life, mind and reason, a phenomenon reflected in film theorists’
description of the vivification of things. But film and life are elements
like these, too, such that description of the medium becomes theory of the
medium. Both film and life, I argue in this book, react to one another under
various conditions and in the context of different additional elements in the
various films and film-theoretical texts under consideration. The result is
never an ‘essence’ (of the medium, of life), but an unstable, temporary state
that seeks to name a fleeting state before it changes shape again.

62 Joseph Vogl, ‘Nomos der Ökonomie’, 519-24.

63 Goethe, Elective Affinities, 47.
1. Vitalism and Abstraction
Rhythm and Non-Organic Life from Hans Richter to Sergei
Eisenstein

The Reinvention of Cinema in Abstract Film

A number of early film and cultural critics, such as Rémy de Gourmont,

Alfred Döblin, and Hermann Häfker, discussed cinema’s fascination and
potential in terms of the lifelikeness of its images. They sought to find
words for the peculiar nature of the relationship in time, via movement,
between the spectator and the moving image. It might seem that what I
have called ‘cinematic vitalism’ relies on indexicality and the vitality of
the photographed world. Cinematic vitalism would then be an aspect of a
particular trajectory of film theory, namely the one that Siegfried Kracauer
in his Theory of Film called the ‘realistic tendency’, which he privileged
over the formalist tendency. This binary distinction was subsequently
picked up in film theory, most notably by Dudley Andrew in The Major
Film Theories, and has long shaped our understanding of film history.1
According to Kracauer, a film’s aesthetic validity, the consequence of a
‘cinematic approach’ to matter, needs to be led by an engagement with the
physical world and only secondarily informed by formal interventions of
framing, montage, narrative, and so forth.2 Like Kracauer, Andrew traced
the opposition of realism and formalism back to the films of the Lumière
brothers versus those of George Méliès. However, he organized the history
of film theory and practice as a whole chronologically around the two poles,
by claiming that pre-WWII film theory, in reaction to early cinema’s ‘crude’
realism, was by and large formalist (Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim,
and Sergei Eisenstein serve as his prime examples), while Kracauer and
André Bazin spearheaded post-WWII realist film theory.
Other early film critics, however, who play a central role in my inquiry
into cinematic vitalism—including Georg Lukács and Béla Balázs—actu-
ally built their thoughts on cinema on the difference between the film
image and reality; or rather, the difference between the image and unmedi-
ated perception. Both Bazin’s and Kracauer’s work, as well as early Lumière
films and the ‘Lumière aesthetic’, are indeed central touchstones of this

1 See Andrew, Major Film Theories.

2 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 37-39.
48  Cinematic Vitalism

book, yet the interaction with vitalism on the part of filmmakers and film
theorists is by no means restricted to realist film and film theory—not
least because (as both Kracauer and Andrew readily admit) the binary
division between realism and formalism is itself too rigid and artificial to
be useful as a means of orientation.3 The distinction between a tendency
toward the photographic and a tendency toward the non-photographic,
formal aspects of film can help us, however, to sketch out a particular aspect
of cinematic vitalism that, rather than relying on photographic realism,
emerges from a consideration of the formal and formative properties of
the cinematographic apparatus and of film itself, including mechanical
movement, projection, and montage. A cine-vitalist approach is thus not
restricted to the ‘recording’ and ‘revealing’ of the visible world, but also
considers the vital exchange between the embodied spectator and the
film body.
This chapter traces the role of vitalist conceptions of life in and for
abstract film, on the one hand—that is, films that seem to be diametri-
cally opposed to photographic realism and a depiction of ‘life itself’—and
montage theory, on the other hand. Early abstract film includes the work
of filmmakers such as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann,
Germaine Dulac, and Fernand Léger. A number of these films were created
in the context of broader art movements, especially Dada (Eggeling, Richter,
Léger), and connected to attempts to distill something like cinema’s essence
by means of a pure or absolute film (Dulac, Richter). The elements of this
essence were movement, rhythm, and light, and a peculiarly dynamic,
intuitive connection between spectator and image. These filmmakers and
theorists were concerned with re-building cinema from the ground up,
starting with its literal body, its matter, and developing cinema’s ‘physical
expression’, its capacity to express and transmit ideas, on the basis of this
physiognomy.
In the first and longest part of this chapter, I focus on Hans Richter’s
collaborative work with Viking Eggeling and the eventual production
of Richter’s f irst abstract f ilm, Rhythm 21 (the exact date of the f ilm
is unknown, but Richter seems to have begun work on it in 1921 and
completed it in 1923/24). I argue that we ought to see Rhythm 21 as a

3 A case in point of the limitations of this distinction is Andrew’s classification of Béla Balázs
as a formalist. Sergei Eisenstein, a ‘formalist’ filmmaker par excellence, formulated the sharpest
critique of Balázs in this respect (avant la lettre): see Eisenstein, ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’. Dan
Morgan has made a powerful argument for a reconsideration of classical ‘realist’ film theory
and the role of style; see Morgan, ‘Rethinking Bazin.’
Vitalism and Abstr ac tion 49

‘reinvention’ of cinema. Cinema had become a well-established medium

by this point, with abundant nickelodeons dotting city streets and an
increasing number of picture palaces—grand cinemas in the style of
theaters—accompanying efforts to reach bourgeois audiences and raise
the medium’s artistic profile. Yet Richter and Eggeling turned to cinema
in order to solve a set of vitalist-aesthetic issues and problems that they
had initially addressed in scroll painting, but that—at least, so Richter be-
lieved—could only be fully pursued by exploiting the capacity of cinema
to merge the living temporality of the spectator with the mechanical tem-
porality of the film apparatus. They tried to find an abstract expressive
film language that could capture the potential of the new, mechanical
vitality they felt the cinematograph possessed. In the second, shorter part
of this chapter, I turn to montage theory, in particular Sergei Eisenstein’s
writings. I argue that Russian montage theory, especially Eisenstein’s
later conception of montage, presents a translation of the sensual-formal
principles employed by Richter in Rhythm 21 into photographic, narrative
film, and can be seen as a continuation of a certain approach to film as
vitalized matter.
None of the artists and filmmakers that I consider in this chapter were
vitalists in the sense that biologist Hans Driesch was; that is, none of
these artists and filmmakers felt the need to commit him- or herself to a
specific set of ontological claims about the relationship between life and
physical-chemical explanations of the natural world. However, all of the
artists and filmmakers that I consider addressed a topic that was central
to vitalist accounts of life, namely, the importance of vital rhythm; and
for most of them, this seems to have been a function of reading vitalist
philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Ludwig Klages, or Georg Simmel. The
importance of vitalist conceptions of life to these authors and filmmak-
ers is thus related to their belief in the ability of the medium of film to
structure, that is, rhythmicize, time, and create a temporal organization.
Rhythm paired with Einfühlung (‘empathy’), abstraction, and animation,
I am suggesting, provided a formula for a ‘vitalist formalism’. A projected
film, according to this line of thought, has an affinity for life not because
it presents the living duration of the natural world, but rather because it is
itself a temporal, organized body, an organism changing over time, whose
rhythmic temporality—a result of flicker, the mechanical motion of the
filmstrip, the movement in the image, mise en scène, and montage—is
expressive of the film’s life. The distinction between this vitalist formalism
and a vitalist materialism in film theory and practice is just one of several
tendencies, however, since both directions converge in a consideration of
50  Cinematic Vitalism

the spectator’s perception and sensations. This chapter thus also turns
to painting and music, because it was by rethinking cinema with the help
of other arts—and in particular music’s temporal gestalt and painting’s
planar expressivity—that Richter and others sought to conceive of a vital
expressivity specific to film.

A Universal Language

The 1910s and early 1920s saw the creation of a number of abstract films,
especially in the context of futurist, constructivist, or Dadaist art move-
ments. The non-representative, non-photographic images of these early
abstract films challenged dominant ideas about the nature of cinema: while
these films emphasized movement and rhythm, they also rendered the
cinematic image independent from photographic realism. Some of these
abstract films—for example, those of Oskar Fischinger (who later went to
Hollywood and worked briefly for Disney on Fantasia, 1940) and Walter
Ruttmann (who created the abstract Opus 1-4 films before his famous film
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from 1927)—emphasized forms and move-
ments that were organic, pulsating, reminiscent of natural movement, and
intended to facilitate a mimetic response in the spectator. The early abstract
films of Hans Richter and his friend Viking Eggeling, by contrast, lacked
forms that would encourage a mimetic response, for their films featured
geometrical, inorganic forms, such as lines, squares, and rectangles.
Yet I argue that it is precisely the inorganic quality of these films’ formal
language that demonstrates the amalgamation of vitalist ideas and techno-
logical medium. This amalgamation was the result of a work process over
the course of several years on the part of Richter and Eggeling, and I thus
develop my argument by retracing their steps in four stages. I first describe
Richter’s collaborative work with Viking Eggeling, which began with an
attempt to create a universal sign language. Then, in part two, I discuss
Richter’s and Eggeling’s move to the medium of painting on long scrolls, and,
in part three, their move to the medium of film. In following this trajectory,
I am especially interested in the different conceptions of the temporality of
the aesthetic object and its relationship to the temporality of the beholder
or spectator that accompanied their shift from one medium to another. 4

4 One could argue that alongside this theoretical and aesthetic adjustment, there is a third
one, namely the adjustment from the paradigm of artistic exclusive production and the artist-
as-creator to the cinematic paradigm of a popular, democratic, mass-cultural medium and the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD SIXTH

REGIMENT, ITS WAR RECORD, 1861-5 ***
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 THE

Old Sixth Regiment,

ITS

WAR RECORD, 1861-5,

BY

CHARLES K. CADWELL,
Late Sergeant of Co. F.

NEW HAVEN, CONN., 1875.

NEW HAVEN:
TUTTLE, MOREHOUSE & TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
1875.
 TO
THE LOYAL WOMEN,
WHOSE

HUSBANDS, BROTHERS AND FRIENDS

CAST THEIR LOT WITH THE OLD SIXTH

IN
DEFENCE OF THE FLAG,
THIS MEMORIAL OF PATRIOTIC SERVICE IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

By the Author.
 INTRODUCTORY.

The object of this work is to give a true and impartial record of the
old Sixth Regiment during the war. The author collected the facts
from a private diary kept by himself while in the service. Less has
been known of the Sixth by our citizens than most of the other
regiments; perhaps this is due partly to the fact that when we
arrived in Washington Colonel Chatfield instructed officers and men
that it was unmilitary to write letters for the press; he desired that
the War Record should know the record of the Sixth, and not the
newspapers only. Its history is less full on this account; yet none can
say that the record of the Sixth is sullied. In many trying places the
regiment proved itself honorably and gained confidence from its
corps and department commanders.
There may be errors in this work, and if any are inclined to censure,
I trust they will remember that very few histories are without them;
yet they are errors of the head and not of the heart. If what is here
written meets the approval of the old members and the intelligent
readers in general, I shall feel that my labors have been amply
rewarded.
 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
In camp at New Haven.—Fall in for rations.—Uncle Sam’s
“Tanyards.”—Squad drills.—An old man’s blessing.

CHAPTER II.
Off for the conflict.—Reception at Philadelphia.—Through Baltimore
at night.—Cattle cars to Washington.—“Soldiers’ Retreat” in
Washington.—Fat pork and muddy coffee.—Visit the Capitol.—
Camp at Meridian Hill.—At Annapolis, Md.—Embark on an
Expedition.—Terrible storm at sea.—Incidents, &c.

CHAPTER III.
In Port Royal harbor.—The ball opens.—First naval engagement of
the war.—Forts Walker and Beauregard.—Union fleet bombard the
rebels.—Complete rout of the enemy.—Triumphant victory for the
Union.—Great enthusiasm.—Connecticut lands the first troops.—
Terrible scenes on land.—Rebel pigs and chickens.—Uncle Sam’s
rations at a discount.—Warsaw Sound, Ga.—“Greybacks
accumulate.”—“Sketch for special artist.”—Spotted fever.—Deaths
daily.—The old Sixth unfit for duty.— Ordered to Hilton Head.—
Dawfuski Island Camp.—Jones Island on Savannah river.—Fort
Vulcan built of mud.—Yankee ingenuity and cunning displayed.—
High tides, &c.
 CHAPTER IV.
Capture of Fort Pulaski.—Heavy bombardment.—Back to Dawfuski
Island.—North Edisto Island blackberries help Uncle Sam’s pork to
digest.—Across John’s Island.—Col. Chatfield’s speech, victory or
death.—Tedious rain.—Guerillas cut off our supplies.—Three days
without food.—50 cents for a “hard tack.”—Arrive at Legareville on
the Stono river.—Cook rations.—Across the river to James Island.—
Tom Grimball’s Plantation.—Rebel advance.—Battle of
Secessionville.—Evacuation of James Island.—Go to Beaufort.—
Band of the Sixth mustered out.—Expedition to Mackay’s point.—
Battle of Pocotaligo.—Col. Chatfield and Lieut. Col. Speidel
wounded.—Whole command return to Hilton Head.—The Sixth at
Beaufort.—Death of our department commander Maj. Gen.
Mitchell.

CHAPTER V.
Off for Florida.—Land at Jacksonville.—Occupy houses instead of
tents.—Skirmish with the enemy.—Streets barricaded to prevent
incursions of the rebel cavalry.—Sermon by Rev. Mr. French.—
Evacuation of Jacksonville by Union troops.—Town fired by the 8th
Maine and a colored regiment.—Back to Beaufort.—Thirty-five
hours in the town.—Embark again—a fizzle.—Back to Hilton Head.
—Off again; land at Folly Island.—Battery building at night.—
Speak in whispers.—Up Folly river.—Capture of the southern
portion of Morris Island.—Brilliant charge of the Sixth.—Capture a
rebel flag.—Assault on Fort Wagner.—Terrible scene at night.—
Awful carnage.—Col. Chatfield twice wounded.—Union force
repulsed.—The ranks of the Sixth terribly shattered.—Ordered to
Hilton Head.—Death of Col. Chatfield.

CHAPTER VI.
Our new Colonel.—Great dissatisfaction thereby.—Part of the Sixth
re-enlist.—Deserters shot.—Death of Captain Allen.—Up to Virginia
under Butler.—Ascend the James river.—Bermuda Hundred.—
Skirmish with the enemy.—Battle of Chester Station.—Death of
Captain Wilcox.—Advance on Drury’s Bluff.—One of Butler’s
“masterly movements.”—Battle of Drury’s Bluff.—Union forces
“change front to the rear.”—Resignation of our new Colonel.—
Appointment of Captain Rockwell as Colonel of the Sixth.—
President Lincoln rides by.—“What mean those cheers.”—Battle of
Strawberry Plains.—Hancock’s works.—Battle of Deep Run.—In
holes around Petersburg.—Discharge of the non re-enlisted men.—
Their reception in New Haven.

CHAPTER VII.
Around Petersburg.—Advance toward Richmond.—Attack on Battery
Harrison.—Draft riots in New York.—The Sixth ordered there until
after election.—Back again to Virginia.—Embark on expedition
down the James.—Capture of Fort Fisher.—Advance on
Wilmington.—Skirmishing with the “Johnnies.”—Enemy driven
across North East river.—At Goldsboro, N. C.—Surrender of Lee’s
army.—Muster out of the Veteran Sixth at New Haven.

APPENDIX.
Association of the Old Sixth meet in New Haven in May, 1868.—Its
object.—Permanent organization effected.—Choice of officers.—
Yearly reunions, their character, &c.—Pleasant occasions.

ROSTER OF THE OLD REGIMENT.

Names of officers.—Residence.—Date of muster.—General remarks.—
Names of enlisted men.—Substitutes and drafted.—Date of muster.
—Residence.—General remarks concerning all.—Unassigned
recruits.
 ROLL OF HONOR.

CASUALTIES OF THE SIXTH.

 PRINCIPAL ENGAGEMENTS.

Hilton Head, S. C., November 7, 1861.

Pocotaligo, S. C., October 22, 1862.
James Island, S. C., June 10, 1862.
Secessionville, S. C., June 16, 1862.
Jacksonville, Florida, March 20, 1863.
Morris Island, S. C., July 10, 1863.
Fort Wagner, S. C., July 18, 1863.
Bermuda Hundred, Va., May 6, 1864.
Chester Station, Va., May 10, 1864.
Drury’s Bluff, Va., May 16, 1864.
Strawberry Plains, Va., August 14, 1864.
Deep Run, Va., August 15, 1864.
Fort Fisher, N. C., January 14, 1864.
 THE

SIXTH REGIMENT,
Connecticut Volunteer Infantry.

CHAPTER I.

Early Spring in the year 1861, was an eventful one in American

history. Troops were organizing in all the loyal States to go forth and
suppress the unequal war that was waged upon the people of the
North. Deeply was it overshadowing our land and threatening to
destroy our liberties as a nation. The shot against Sumpter’s wall
was the key note of the Rebellion, and its echo was heard in every
town and hamlet, uniting all loyal hearts and inspiring all the people
with a zeal which had hitherto remained dormant—a zeal to avenge
the insult offered to our flag and to vindicate the nation’s honor.
Traitors had been arrogant in our land and had openly defied any
power of the national government to suppress their actions, but the
shot from Charleston directed against a federal fort aroused the
people to a stern sense of duty. The call for brave men was nobly
responded to, and regiment after regiment took their place in line,
and in due time was off for the conflict. The disaster that befell the
three months’ troops in the memorable Bull Run campaign, is widely
known and needs no repetition here. Then the call for three years’
men was issued and again the ranks of the army were rapidly filled.
None heeded the call with greater alacrity than the men who
composed the members of the Sixth Regiment. A finer regiment or a
more patriotic one, I venture to say, never entered the Union army;
and that they maintained the honor of the State of Connecticut and
reflected credit on their organization, subsequent events will prove.
The Sixth was sworn into the State service on the 3d of September,
in camp at Oyster Point, New Haven, and on the 12th of the same
month Uncle Sam made us secure for three years or the war. The
ranks of the Sixth were filled with men who represented almost
every avocation in life. There were to be found professional men,
others who had made science a study, as well as a number who
were skilled mechanics in those higher grades of industry. The
merchant left his counting room, the student his books, the
mechanic his workshop, the farmer his plow, and stood shoulder to
shoulder in the ranks for the one grand object—the suppression of
the Rebellion and the restoration of the old flag. The field officers of
the Sixth, with one exception, had already been baptized with fire,
and quite a large number of the rank and file had seen active service
in the three months’ campaign. John L. Chatfield of Waterbury was
commissioned as Colonel; Wm. G. Ely of Norwich, Lieut. Colonel;
John Speidel of Bridgeport, as Major.
The first company that reported on the ground was from Windham
County—Thomas K. Bates of Brooklyn, Conn., as Captain. Three
companies were furnished from New Haven, viz: Company “C,” Capt.
Daniel Klein; Company “F,” Captain Lewis C. Allen, Jr.; Company “K,”
Captain Henry G. Gerrish. Company “B,” Captain Benjamin F. Prouty,
was from Hartford and the adjoining towns. Company “D,” Captain
Lorenzo Meeker, was recruited principally from Stamford and
Greenwich. Waterbury and the towns along the Naugatuck Valley
furnished the members of Company “E,” Captain Edward P. Hudson.
Company “G,” Captain John N. Tracy, was mainly from New Britain.
Company “H,” Captain Henry Biebel, was called a Bridgeport
company, although most of the members were recruited in towns
and cities north of New Haven. Company “I,” Captain Thomas
Boudren, was from Bridgeport, yet the adjoining towns contributed
largely to her quota.
The companies, although formed under each letter, were not full
when they reported in camp, yet recruits rapidly arriving soon
swelled the ranks to the maximum number. The camp at Oyster
Point was but the primary school that was to fit us for the more
stern duties of the field, and very little care was bestowed upon our
future movements, nor did we deem it wise to dwell upon the
hardships of the soldier’s life when in the enemy’s country. We had
some faint ideas of what might be, and while we could exclude these
thoughts from our minds we considered it best to do so, knowing full
well that trials would come soon enough. Our duties in camp were
not arduous, and we patrolled our “beat” with unloaded muskets
and kept a vigilant watch over the commissary stores at night,
exercising as much care as in guarding the outposts in an enemy’s
land. We would occasionally glance at the future and try to study its
mysteries. There was considerable pleasure in the camp of the old
Sixth, as well as its sorrows, and the time was well occupied in
various ways and the days glided swiftly by. Friends were not
wanting to regale our palates with choice food to supercede the
rations of Uncle Sam, and to ply all manner of questions regarding
our general health and condition. Such questions as “Did we sleep
on feather beds?” and “We surely could not be expected to keep
awake all night on guard?” and “Don’t they furnish butter on bread
and milk in coffee?” All these questions met with a ready response,
and we informed our careful friends that there was nothing like
getting used to these things, and Uncle Sam would not probably see
us suffer while so many patriots wanted a contract to furnish
supplies. Our drilling was not very proficient during the first few days
of camp life, from the fact that the camp was filled every day with
the friends of the regiment, and the soldiers not having their
uniforms, it was rather hard to determine who were enlisted in the
service and who were the visitors. It is nothing detrimental to say
that perhaps we “smelt the battle afar off,” and anticipated a
succession of drills when we were removed from our friends and the
pleasant scenes that surrounded us in New Haven. But after we
received our uniforms and rifles, which was a few days before our
departure, it gave a new impetus. Then the boys began to feel that
they were really soldiers. We would don the army blue, and with a
pair of Uncle Sam’s brogans upon our feet, the boys would respond
to the order to “fall in,” with great alacrity; and then such a tramp
with the “tan-yards” upon the parade ground was a sight amusing to
behold; and woe be to that individual who had corns upon his feet
when such a piece of sole leather happened to light upon them.
Under the efficient leadership of our beloved Colonel, a brief period
sufficed to acquaint us with a soldier’s varied duties. Each soldier
received from Uncle Sam the usual equipment of kitchen utensils,
which consisted of tin cup and plate, together with a knife, fork and
spoon, and the men require no drilling to learn their use. If the order
to capture a rebel fort was responded to with as much speed as the
boys obeyed the call to “fall in for rations,” the cause of the Union
would not suffer defeat at the hands of its defenders.
But all things have an end, and so it was with our pleasant camp at
Oyster Point. After receiving the usual articles necessary for
transportation, we received our marching orders. There was the
usual bustle and excitement incident to breaking up a camp of
soldiers, and each one felt that the time for parting with friends had
come. Friendly greetings were heard on every hand. Many hearty
hand-shakes and “God bless you,” were given with a will, and not a
few were bathed in tears as the last good-bye was said. Many fond
parents bade farewell to sons for the last time on earth. Lovers
greeted those whose ties of affection and sympathy endeared them
to each other, and fondly cherished the hope that they would meet
again when the war was over. Our city fathers were not lacking in
their praise at our soldierly bearing, and extended a prayerful wish
for a speedy and triumphant return to our home and loved ones.
One good old man, the Hon. James Brewster, from whose name
Company “F” Was called Brewster Rifles, appeared in camp to the
company he was so endeared to, and made them a speech,
recounting the hardships and perils of a soldier’s life, and expressing
a wish to hear a good report from Company “F.” As we gazed upon
the venerable aspect of this good man, whose counsel and judgment
were entitled to so much respect, we could not but inwardly resolve
that our best efforts should be put forth in defense of the sacred
liberties which had been such a strong bulwark to our nation. Many
were affected to tears during his address, and I doubt not the
memory of that hour made a lasting impression on many hearts
present as he closed with an old man’s blessing.
 CHAPTER II.

Tuesday, Sept. 17, was ushered in by a warm sun and a genial

atmosphere, which only served to increase our interest in the busy
scenes that were before us, for we were all aware that the old Sixth
would soon be en route for the seat of war. The colonel and staff
were busy issuing orders, captains of companies were instructed to
issue no passes to leave camp, and so far as was practicable all
visitors were excluded from the precincts of the camp proper. The
cooks were busy preparing our rations, and every one seemed to
think himself an important personage around the cook’s tent. As the
day wore on the clouds began to thicken, portending a storm, and
as the call was sounded by the drummers at 2 o’clock to “strike
tents,” the rain came down copiously. We rolled up the wet canvass
as expeditiously as possible, which was quickly loaded on our army
wagons, together with other camp equipage.
We received two days’ rations for our haversacks, consisting of
boiled ham and hard bread, to nourish the inner man, and were
soon in line for our departure, but the usual delays incident to such
an occasion kept us in line about three hours. 5 o’clock came, and
with it the order to “Forward, march.” The band struck up “The gal I
left behind me,” and we marched through the rain and mud to Belle
Dock. The rain did not dampen the ardor of the boys nor decrease
the patriotism of the citizens of the Elm City. Handkerchiefs from fair
ones waved us adieu; men shouted “God bless the boys,” together
with the martial music of the band to increase the enthusiasm, made
our departure from New Haven pleasant to contemplate. Pleasant,
from the fact that we felt that the prayers and best wishes of our
good people would go with us, as incentives to noble principles and
holy action. We embarked on the steamer Elm City and soon
stretched ourselves on the several decks and in the cabin, glad
enough for a chance to rest ourselves, for the rain had drenched us
through to the skin. The boat left her moorings at 8 o’clock, and
when we awoke we found ourselves alongside the dock at Jersey
City. For some unknown reason we did not disembark till about
noon. At 2 P. M. we left by rail for the capital of the nation. Arriving at
Philadelphia we were entertained at the Union Refreshment Rooms
with a bountiful collation, which was indeed refreshing to the inner
man, and it also gave evidence of a large stock of loyalty on the part
of the good people of that city. Every regiment passing through the
city were made heartily welcome to their hospitality, and none will
ever forget the hearty cheers and the “God speed” which was heard
on every hand.
Leaving Philadelphia, our next stopping place was at Perryville,
where we arrived at 8 o’clock in the evening. We were delayed here
about two hours, and were then ferried across the river to Havre-de-
Grace, when we again started by rail for Baltimore, arriving there at
10 P. M. No cheers for the Union soldier startled our ears at this place.
No demonstration of delight at our arrival, but all seemed sullen, and
their actions showed more of a secession spirit than otherwise. We
were ordered to fix bayonets before we crossed the city, for the
memory of the Massachusetts Sixth who had preceded us was not
forgotten, and a repetition of those scenes would not have found us
unprepared. The spilled blood of the Massachusetts Sixth will ever
be a stain upon the records of the Monumental City while this
generation inhabits this mundane sphere.
We crossed the city to the depot where we found cars waiting to
transport us to Washington. We were huddled aboard cars that we
understood were used to transport cattle the day previous, and we
had no reason to disbelieve the report, for the muck and filth
covered the floors to such a depth that anything short of a pair of
Uncle Sam’s “tan-yards” would have been lost sight of in a short
time. However, we accepted the situation, believing that it all made
up the three years of a soldier’s life. We arrived in Washington on
the 19th, at 6 o’clock in the morning, very much fatigued by our
wearisome ride in the cattle cars, wishing, longing, hoping, for what
the soldier calls “a good square meal.” We expected Washington
would not be behind Philadelphia in this respect, and after stacking
our arms and waiting patiently for about two hours our ears were
startled by that sound so welcome to every soldier, “Fall in for
rations.” They marched us into a building having a sign over the door
reading “Soldiers’ Retreat.” Visions of cold ham and soft bread
appeared unto us, and that beverage, which always cheers but does
not inebriate, we thought we smelt afar off; but alas, for a soldier’s
hopes. What a sight greeted our eyes as we filed into that building.
Three long rows of tables, running the length of the building, were
piled up with chunks of half boiled pork which looked as if they had
been cut from the hog when just killed, for the bristles were long
enough to lift up each piece by. A quantity of stale and musty bread
and some very muddy coffee, completed our bill of fare. We had not
anticipated such a re-treat as this; however, we felt that it was
nothing like getting used to these things, and we did retreat and got
our breakfast at the eating houses. We had a few hours to see the
sights of the city, and improved them by a visit to the Capitol and
House of Representatives, also the Senate chamber, where some of
the boys sat down in the chair which Jeff. Davis had vacated, just to
see how it would seem. Others made impromptu speeches on the
great questions which were agitating our country.
The camp which was assigned to us was out to Meridian Hill, about
four miles from the capitol, and thither we marched and pitched our
tents, and were quite willing to enjoy a comfortable snooze when
the drums beat the tatoo.
The Sixth was brigaded with the Fourth and Seventh New Hampshire
and the Seventh Connecticut, which arrived the next day, all under
command of Brig. Gen. H. G. Wright.
A member of Co. “B” was taken ill when but a few days in camp, and
was removed to Columbia Hospital, where he died of congestion of
the brain on the 26th of September. This was the first death since
our organization. Death claimed another victim in a member of Co.
“F,” Theodore Gibbons by name. He died on the 7th of October.
The twenty days of our camp life in Washington was one unceasing
drill: morning drills by the sergeants, before breakfast; company drill
after that meal was over; then the brigade drill after dinner, taken
with our other duties, made our time pretty much all occupied. We
began to see in these extra duties the inner life of a soldier, and our
proficiency in drill was manifest from day to day, yet as we heard of
the clash of war and read the accounts of skirmishes, we longed to
be at the front where we might participate in those stirring scenes.
Several times during our camp life here, we were called into line and
extra rounds of cartridges given us, with the orders to hold ourselves
in readiness to move at a moment’s notice, but as often dismissed to
await the next call.
On the 8th day of October we left Washington by rail for Annapolis,
Maryland, and arrived there after a wearisome ride of twelve hours.
We were quartered in the Navy Yard for a few days, which gave us
an opportunity of seeing a few of the relics of the war of 1812. Many
ancient looking swords, old flintlock muskets and wooden canteens
were among the collection. A few days passed and we went outside
the town and pitched our tents near a grove of fine old trees, where
we might have better facilities for drilling, &c. We were inspected
several times by prominent officers of the regular army, which gave
evidence of some movement or other on foot, and a short time
elapsed ere it was noised abroad that we were going on an
expedition.
The 19th of October found us all packed up and tramping up the
gang-planks of the steamers to sail on the great expedition, with
sealed orders, under Gen. Sherman. The right wing of our regiment
was assigned to the steamship Marion, the left wing to the steamer
Parkersburg. There were seventeen regiments in all, and thirty-three
steam transports to hold us, besides quite a fleet of gunboats, made
up the entire fleet. Such formidable looking boats presented to our
vision, gave evidence of something else beside a mere excursion.
We knew that hard work and fighting were before us and that only a
few days would elapse ere we should see the rebel soil.
Weighing anchor, we passed down the bay to Hampton Roads, Va.,
where we remained several days, waiting like Micawber, for
something to turn up. Finally, the union jack gave the signal for
sailing, and glad enough were we at the prospect of soon being able
to step on terra firma once more. Two days out from Hampton
Roads we experienced a terrible storm at sea, and for several hours
the prospects of seeing anything but a broken wreck and finding a
watery grave, were exceedingly dubious. Wave after wave poured
over us. The hatches were fastened and everything on deck was
lashed tight to prevent being washed away. The red glare of the
lightning, with the terrific peals of thunder, made the scene awfully
grand. Now in the trough of the sea and another moment upon the
crest of the waves, with all on board terribly sea-sick, was a picture
not very pleasant to dwell upon. Our fleet became scattered and two
vessels were sunk; others had horses washed overboard; while
another was forced to throw into the deep her entire armament,
which consisted of some improved guns which we expected would
do some very effective service. A merciful Providence permitted us
to outride the storm and once more see the scattered fleet all
together again, save those that went to the bottom. Many a prayer
of thankfulness went up to God for our safe deliverance from such a
storm.
A day or two of pleasant sailing brought us at anchor in the harbor
of Port Royal, South Carolina, with two very formidable looking rebel
batteries on either side of the harbor. Here we saw that our mission
was to reduce these works and gain a foothold on South Carolina
soil. The rebel soldiers gazed at us from their strongholds, and two
very scaly looking gunboats ventured down from their hiding place a
short distance above the batteries, and sent us their compliments in
the shape of a few shells for about the space of half an hour, but
with no damage to our fleet; but as soon as one of Uncle Sam’s
boats gave them a few messengers of war, they were glad enough
to change front to the rear and troubled us no more that day.
 CHAPTER III.

The 7th of November, 1861, will ever remain in the history of the
war as one in which a grand victory perched upon the banner of the
Union; when treason and rebellion received a blow from which they
never fully recovered. The members of the old Sixth will not soon
forget the events that transpired. Our gunboats were occupied
several hours in getting into position to do the most effective
service, and after forming into a circle, with the grand old frigate
Wabash taking the lead, they sailed around once and then opened
fire upon those strongholds of rebellion. The enemy were evidently
expecting something of the kind, for they returned the fire with
great promptness. Fort Walker, on Hilton Head, seemed determined
to drive the Union fleet away from the harbor, while Fort
Beauregard, on Bay Point, which was opposite, played comparatively
a small part, for all her shell fell short of the mark. As the boats
moved nearer and nearer the engagement became more general,
and shot and shell flew like hail through the air; those of the enemy
doing little execution, while our shells seemed to stir up the sand
around and in their batteries at almost every fire. The troops on the
transports watched the engagement with intense interest, while
broadside after broadside were poured into those doomed works of
treason. Orders were signalled to have the troops prepare, in light
marching order, to land at short notice. We were confident the battle
would be short and decisive, as the rebels could not withstand such
terrible odds. As the battle raged, our boats directed a part of their
fire into the woods that skirted the shore on Hilton Head. What
could that be for? was the query; when it was announced that the
rebels were routed and were retreating through the woods; and
such we learned to be a fact, as they could easily be discerned by
the glass, making their escape in that direction. A few more well-
directed shots, and the firing ceased; then we knew the victory was
ours. A boat was lowered and manned by a picked crew of man-of-
wars men, who pulled for the shore with great speed, landed and
made their way into the fort on Hilton Head and raised the glorious
stars and stripes on the rebel flag staff. Words cannot describe the
events that followed in a few brief moments. The battle had been
waged precisely five hours when the victory was announced. Liberty
was triumphant over the despotism of slavery. The different bands
on the steamers struck up the national airs, songs were sung, and
cheer after cheer rent the air from thousands of throats, while the
loud huzzas swept through the fleet like a whirlwind, and not a few
prayers arose to the God of battles for giving us such a signal
victory.
Thus was witnessed the first naval engagement of the war.
Preparations were now made to land the troops, as it was feared the
rebels would rally and contest the possession. The Connecticut
troops were selected to land first, and the Sixth, with Lieut.Col. Ely
in command, were put aboard the steamer Winfield Scott, while the
Seventh, under Col. Terry, was in boats in tow of the steamer. The
steamer ran as near the beach as she could, when we got into
lighters and jumped into the swelling surf—a cold bath for us at 10
o’clock at night, with water up to armpits, our arms upstretched,
with our rifles and cartridge boxes to “keep our powder dry;” but all
were in good spirits and seemed willing to undergo any hardship to
save the Union and the suppression of the infernal Rebellion.
We took possession of the rebel works after we landed, without
making any formal demand therefor, and not until we landed did we
know what dreadful havoc our shells had made; the sight beggars
description. The dead and wounded lay in heaps, and the air
resounded with groans and petitions for help. We built huge fires to
dry ourselves, stationed our pickets and lay upon our arms, not
daring to explore the island very far the first night, for fear of an
ambuscade. The night was spent without sleep, as we were
thoroughly drenched through, and we were glad to hail the morning
light. A detachment of three companies under Lieut.Col. Ely explored
the lower part of the island, and met a few of the enemy who had
not succeeded in getting away; had a brisk skirmish with them, in
which they retreated. The detachment brought into camp two fine
brass howitzers, with a valuable pair of horses, besides seventy
other horses, six mules, six wagons, two yoke of oxen, together with
other valuable property of a total value of $50,000; but no credit
was ever given us, not even a quartermaster’s receipt.
The island of Hilton Head was very rich and fertile; the cotton fields
were ripe, waiting for the second picking. The palmetto tree was
green and the air as balmy as June. Sweet potatoes were plenty, to
be had for the digging. Every building near the fort was riddled by
our shells, while the tents were torn into shreds. Our surgeons
provided for the wounded as well as they could with the means at
hand. Many of the dead were literally torn to atoms, and some were
half buried where they fell; guns were dismounted, army wagons
smashed, and many fine horses and mules lay in heaps. During the
bombardment, a rebel gunner, wearing a red shirt, was noticed by
our fleet to occupy a very prominent position on the parapet, and
was seen to pat his gun every time he fired it, and we found one
arm with a piece of red flannel upon it near the gun, which seemed
to be all that was left of him; he was evidently blown to atoms.
Those who succeeded in getting away alive must have beat a hasty
retreat, for knapsacks, blankets and rifles lay in confusion all around,
and were found at almost every step for miles through the woods.
The armament of the fort was 22 heavy guns, most of which were
rifled and of the most approved pattern; and two heavy globe-sight
rifled cannon, the gift of some neutral English friends to the
Confederate States.
For a short time Uncle Sam’s rations were at a discount, as the
trophies of war in live stock seemed abundant. Pigs were roaming at
will, only to be confiscated by a soldier; chickens and geese were
found in large numbers, and we regaled our palates with sweet
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