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Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany

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Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany Nosferatu , dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1922. © Friedrich- Wilhelm-Murnau- Stiftung . 68 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00252 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany MATTHEW VOLLGRAFF 1. HalfWaY through Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic Vampire film Nosferatu (1922), the gripping narratiVe is brought to an abrupt halt bY a Visit to the laboratorY of Professor BulWer. The audience plaYs VoYeur as the Paracelsian doctor inducts his pupils into the “mYsterious essence of nature” With a lesson on carniVorous plants. Murnau here inserts footage taken bY his friend, the science cinematographer Ulrich K.T. SchulZ, of a Dion aea muscipula —otherWise knoWn as the Venus flYtrap. 1 In the scene, an unsuspecting flY lands on the plant’s open lobe, and Within the blink of an eYe it is deVoured, to be digested bY the gastric juices of its Vegetal crYpt. “Isn’t it,” the professor asks his students With a deVious glance, “just like a Vampire?” 2 WhY should the Venus flYtrap proVoke horror and dread in the VieWer, as if it Were some monstrositY in defiance of nature? Let us suppose that What unsettles is not just the plant’s carniVorous diet but its sudden, jerkY motion and subtle sensitiVitY. The plant’s uncannY aspect lies preciselY in this miXture of kinesis and aesthesis , like the disquieting liVeliness of the undead. Since antiquitY, Vegetal life has occupied an ambiguous position in classifications of nature, Vacillating betWeen life and death, organic and inorganic, animal and mineral. 3 Throughout the historY of Western philosophY it crops up again and again as a threshold and a limit to knoWledge. “Soulless Yet liVing,” Writes the philosopher Michael Marder, “the plant seems to muddle conceptual distinctions and to defY all indeXes for discerning different classes of beings in keeping With the metaphYsi - cal logic of ‘either/or.’” 4 (Or, as Thomas Aquinas long ago declared, “the acts of the VegetatiVe soul do not obeY reason.”) 5 The plant’s unstable claim to VitalitY is radicallY interWoVen With questions of semblance and appearance: In the absence of certain Visible signs, plants onlY “seem to liVe.” 6 Aristotle, in the HistorY of Animals , asserts that “the Whole genus of plants, While it is deVoid of life as compared With an animal, is endoWed With life as compared With other Grey Room 72, Summer 2018, pp. 68–93. © 2018 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 69 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 corporeal entities.” 7 In this light one could saY that plants possess a rela - tiVe life, a spectral VitalitY that ebbs and fades according to the obserVer’s changing perspectiVe. To the eXtent We conceiVe of Vegetables as passiVe and inert, then the rapacious animal moVements of an insectiVorous plant like the Dion aea muscipula Will alWaYs appear to disturb the order of nature—like Murnau’s Vampire, a kind of parasitic perVersion Within the hierarchY of the liVing. 8 “Vita in plantis est occulta,” Aquinas Wrote in the thirteenth centurY. 9 Life in plants is hidden. It is hidden because plants supposedlY lack the faculties that distinguish the animate from the inanimate: sensation and locomotion. Aristotle, Aquinas’s authoritY in matters of natural historY, defined plant life in terms of this lack; all that remained to the “Vegetable soul” Were the faculties of nutrition, generation, and reproduction. 10 And Yet this obscene psYche , this parte maudite of natural historY seems to all but beg to be eXposed, to be VisualiZed. In Aquinas’s adage that plant life is hidden, We maY hear the echo of Heraclitus’s aphorism that “Nature likes to hide,” and recall that this recondite nature— phYsis— shares its root With phYton , the Greek Word for plant. 2. Scientists, artists, and philosophers haVe long been fascinated bY the “inner life” of plants. 11 In the earlY tWentieth centurY, hoWeVer, the ancient notion of the anima VegetatiVa Was reViVed With an unprecedented Viru - lence. This came about in large part thanks to the emergence of cinematic media and the epiphanY of Vegetal moVement it reVealed. 12 At the same time, major epistemic shifts in the natural sciences ensured that the nature of plant life at the turn of the centurY hardlY resembled the con - ceptions of the ancients. Among other things, DarWinism had oVerturned the theonomic order of Aristotle’s classes of being. Replacing the antique model of a laYered, hierarchical pYramid of life With a fluid, arboreallY branching rhiZome, Charles DarWin’s eVolutionarY paradigm posited the eXistence of “missing links” not onlY betWeen animal and human but also betWeen plant and animal. 13 The hunt for these missing links motiVated DarWin’s oWn, still under - appreciated botanical research. “It has alWaYs pleased me to eXalt plants in the scale of organised beings,” he Writes in his autobiographY. 14 DarWin did giVe plants a boost further up the eVolutionarY ladder, lifting them onto the loWer rungs of animal life. OVer a period of tWentY Years the great naturalist focused his attention on Vegetable specimens in Which motion predominated, such as climbing plants or insectiVorous species such as the Drosera .15 His last published Work, The PoWer of MoVement in Plants (1880) emploYs eXacting graphical methods to transcribe their 70 Grey Room 72 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Wilhelm Pfeffer. Cinematographic study of geotropic curvature in Impatiens glanduligera , 1898–1900. Reproduced with permission of the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (DOI: 10.3203/IWF/B–450). moVements. Such “time-lapse media” helped conVince laY read - ers that “apparentlY inert plants could moVe, sleep and Were sensitiVe and therefore much like animals.” 16 ObserVing that the plant’s radicle, or root tip, appeared to receiVe impressions from sensorY organs and to direct motor responses, DarWin compared it With an animal brain. 17 The Wider botanical communitY of his time VieWed DarWin as an isolated amateur Who carried out hobbY eXperiments in his countrY house in DoWn. GermanY Was Where the most important deVelopments in botanY Were taking place in the late nineteenth centurY, plant phYsiologY haVing been professionaliZed in German research uniVersities long before it Was consolidated in England and France. Though most of this research folloWed mechanistic guidelines, eXplaining Vital processes eXclusiVelY in phYsico - chemical terms, some German botanists commended and eXtended DarWin’s research into Vegetal sensation and moVe - ment. In 1901 GustaV Haberlandt controVersiallY proclaimed the eXistence of sensorY organs in the plant kingdom, and botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer replicated DarWin’s countrY-house eXperiments in his state-of-the-art LeipZig laboratorY. 18 Not long before, Pfeffer had produced one of the first time-lapse films of plant groWth, furnishing undeniable eVidence of the prodigious “poWer of moVement” in plants. 19 Around the same time, Ernst Haeckel’s monistic eVolutionism eXerted an inescapable influence in GermanY and abroad on pop - ular understandings of life. 20 Haeckel proposed the eXistence of a host of hYbrid single-celled organisms, “ MischWesen ” suspended betWeen the plant and animal kingdoms. 21 Increased attention to these microorganisms also contributed to reshaping the idea of plant life. In 1895, the botanist Ferdinand Cohn argued that if Aristotle had onlY knoWn about the Zoospores of algae or fungi, Which moVe about freelY in search of light and sustenance and Whose sensorY organs are independent of their organs of moVe - ment, then the Greek philosopher Would surelY not haVe denied poWers of moVement and sensation to the Vegetal soul. 22 The Hungarian-born German naturalist Raoul Francé, a stu - dent of both Haeckel and Cohn, stretched this idea to its logical limit. According to Francé, plants possessed not onlY sensation and moVement but a rudimentarY intelligence, memorY, and unconscious driVes. Together With August PaulY and Adolf Wagner, Francé formed a faction of biologists knoWn as the “psYchoVitalists,” Who maintained that the onlY logical VieW of nature Was a form of teleological animism. 23 Vollgraff | Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany 71 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 “Kinetogramm of a hop shoot, which illustrates the progression of a nutation movement.” From Raoul Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , vol. 2 (1907). Where DarWin’s mechanism of natural selection emphasiZed the role of eXternal enVironmental factors on eVolutionarY change, the psYchoVitalists faVored the transformist model of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in Which the internal impulses of the organism Were held to driVe adaptation. 24 BY fulfilling a giVen “need,” the psYchoVitalists belieVed, eVerY creature, doWn to the smallest paramaecium, proVed its abilitY to enact “ratio - nal” purposiVe judgments. 25 The roots of human psYchologY, Francé thus hinted, could be found in the substance of protoplasm. 26 In a roundabout return to Aristotle’s doctrine, the psYchoVitalists made self-moVement the cri - terion of ensoulment, resolutelY blurring all distinctions betWeen plant and animal. 27 In his 1905 book Das Sinnesleben der PflanZen (The sensorY life of plants), Francé stated that, in terms of its sensorY life, the loWest animal . is WhollY comparable With the highest plant. The difference, Which at first glance causes animals to appear as liVing and plants as lifeless, is due onlY to the tempo of eVents. [Vegetal] moVements haVe been photographed and transferred to a cinematograph, and then reproduced at the tempo of animal moVe - ments. TheY haVe a fantastic picture of some fabulous being in tremendous agitation. 28 TWo Years later, in the second Volume of his magnum opus Das Leben der PflanZe (The life of the plant), Francé additionallY claimed that plants eXpressed their passions through moVement.
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