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Animistic Fictions: German Modernism, Film, and the Animation of Things

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Animistic Fictions: German Modernism, Film, and the Animation of Things Animistic Fictions: German Modernism, Film, and the Animation of Things Brook Henkel Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Brook Henkel All rights reserved ABSTRACT Animistic Fictions: German Modernism, Film, and the Animation of Things Brook Henkel This dissertation investigates representations of animated objects in German modernist literature and film between roughly 1900 and 1930. Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1902 remark that “all community has withdrawn from things and humans” corresponds to a more general reflection in German literary modernism on a new estrangement and distance between human subjects and the external object-world. Responding to this perceived crisis, modernist texts by Rilke, Franz Kafka, and others present an animated life of things as a highly ambivalent fiction, posing both a distorted and potentially recuperative relationship between humans and things. Alongside textual representations of animated things in Kafka’s stories and Rilke’s poetry and prose, the new medium of cinema also presented a visual life of things in early stop-motion animation films around 1910 as well as in the experimental films of the 1920s avant-garde. In contrast to nineteenth-century theories on the subjective, psychological origins of animistic experience, literature and film after 1900 approached the animation of things as a matter of external, artificial production. Focusing on the literary works of Rilke and Kafka, and the writings and films of German avant-garde artist Hans Richter, this dissertation argues for an understanding of modernist representations of animated things as “animistic fictions,” aimed at producing the effects of animistic experience, while also foregrounding and self- reflecting upon their artificial status. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction / 1 1. A Kinship of Things: On Rilke’s Mimetics, Poetry, and the Thingness of Art / 29 The Poet of Things / 46 A Kinship of Things / 59 Rodin and the City / 76 The Thing-Poem / 90 2. The Urban Uncanny, 1910: Modernist Literature, Animation Films, and Animistic Anxieties / 108 Nerves and Noises / 117 Object Animations / 125 Literary Animations and Cinematic Aesthetics / 146 3. On Kafka’s Things: Between Animation and Reification / 169 Animated Things and Reified Humans / 178 The Case of Odradek / 195 Animistic Fictions / 209 A Responsibility for Things / 216 i 4. Avant-Garde Animations: Hans Richter, Rhythm, and the Cinematic Lives of Things / 224 Der absolute Film / 235 Things and Cinema / 247 Avant-Garde Animation / 254 Animating Rhythms / 270 Conclusion / 287 Bibliography / 306 ii LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 James Stuart Blackton. The Haunted Hotel, 1907. Film stills. / 131 2.2 Émile Cohl. Le Mobilier fidèle, 1910. Film stills. / 140 2.3. Segundo de Chomón. El Hotel eléctrico, 1907. Film stills. / 142 2.4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1556. Drawing. / 158 4.1. Hans Richter. Filmgegner von heute – Filmfreunde von morgen, 1929, pp. 27 and 89. Page reproductions. / 226 4.2. Hans Richter. Filmgegner von heute, 1929, pp. 94–95. Page reproductions. / 228 4.3. Hans Richter. Vormittagsspuk, 1928. Film stills. / 243 4.4. Hans Richter. Filmgegner von heute, 1929, p. 38. Page reproduction. / 244 4.5. Sergei Eisenstein. Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Film stills. / 246 4.6a. Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. Ballet mécanique, 1924. Film stills. / 255 4.6b. Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. Ballet mécanique, 1924. Film stills. / 258 4.7. Man Ray. Retour à la raison, 1923. Film stills. / 262 4.8. Hans Richter. Filmgegner von heute, 1929, p. 24. Page reproduction. / 267 4.9. Hans Richter. Vormittagsspuk, 1928. Film stills. / 274 4.10. Hans Richter. Vormittagsspuk, 1928. Film stills. / 275 4.11. Hans Richter. Vormittagsspuk, 1928 and Rhythmus 21, 1923. Film stills. / 281 iii Animation of what presents itself, fr[om] the thing on outwards … –– Charles Olson iv INTRODUCTION A story about German modernism inevitably begins with a crisis. The story told here is no exception and takes as its starting point the well-known ruptures proclaimed by German and Austrian modernist literature around the turn of the century. In numerous texts after 1900, the more familiar crises of language, narration, and visual perception coincide with an even more basic rift in the very relationship between humans and things. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s pivotal 1902 text “Ein Brief,” for example, introduces a literary subject, who experiences not only a failure of conceptual language to grasp external realities, but also a related estrangement and fragmentation in his perception of individual things.1 Around 1900, Robert Musil would begin a journal with the declaration of a frozen “isolation” from his “organic” surroundings; and a similar state of detachment would characterize the protagonist of his 1906 novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, a young military-school student, who perceives external objects as if “through a veil” or as though a “fine net were dancing before his eyes.”2 Perhaps the most emphatic claims that the external world of things had somehow receded from the vicinity of humans can be found in the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. In a short 1902 piece on 1 See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” first published in the Berlin daily Der Tag (October 18–19, 1902) and collected in Hofmannsthal, Erzählungen, Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, Reisen, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, vol. 7, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), pp. 461–72, here p. 466: “Mein Geist zwang mich, alle Dinge [...] in einer unheimlichen Nähe zu sehen [...]. Es gelang mir nicht mehr, sie mit dem vereinfachenden Blick der Gewohnheit zu erfassen. Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile, und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß.” 2 See Robert Musil, Tagebücher, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), p. 1: “Es ist um mich eine organische Isolation, ich ruhe wie unter einer 100 m tiefen Decke von Eis.” Quoted above as well, see Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß [1906] (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), pp. 9 and 22, respectively. 1 landscape painting, to offer just one example, Rilke describes that, in the art and culture of the time, “all community has withdrawn from things and humans.”3 While many of the central protagonists in the development of German and Austrian modernist literature would articulate a radical rupture in relations between humans and things, the very same authors would also seek to represent a strangely autonomous and animated life of external objects. The crisis of language and visual perception in Hofmannsthal’s “Ein Brief” is expressed in explicit contrast to an alternative mode of experiencing the world, with intimations of an overflowing “life” or silent “language” of things just beyond one’s ability to comprehend.4 In a related manner, Musil’s Törleß struggles to account for his sense of the “silent voices” and “questioning eyes” of inanimate objects, and describes, toward the end of the novel, what he terms a “secret, unnoticed life of things” (geheimes, unbeachtetes Leben der Dinge).5 Beyond the mere speculations of literary figures, one finds in the poetry and prose of Rilke as well as the experimental narratives of Franz Kafka even more interesting occurrences, presented directly to the reader, of inanimate objects coming alive with their own autonomous movements and affecting a profound influence over their human counterparts––the reader 3 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Von der Landschaft” [1902], in Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, vol. 4: Schriften, ed. Horst Nalewski (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1996), pp. 208–13, here pp. 212–13: “eine Zukunft [hat] begonnen mitten in unserer Zeit: [...] Daß [der Mensch] unter die Dinge gestellt ist wie ein Ding, unendlich allein und daß alle Gemeinschaft aus Dingen und Menschen sich zurückgezogen hat.” 4 In recounting his near-ecstatic experiences, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos describes everyday objects as if they were filled with a “flood of higher life” (Flut höheren Lebens) or possessed of their own silent language: “eine Sprache, in welcher die stummen Dinge zu mir sprechen.” Quoted here, “Ein Brief,” pp. 467 and 472, respectively. 5 See Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, pp. 126, 129, and 195, respectively. 2 included. Here, the so-called “thing-poems” (Dinggedichte) in Rilke’s two-volume Neue Gedichte from 1907/08 and the strange Odradek figure from Kafka’s 1919 story, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” are only the most famous examples. In all of these cases, the “life of things” represented in modernist texts bears little resemblance to the marvelous, animated objects of the fairy tale or even the magical artifacts and uncanny automata of Romanticism. To speak of an animation of things in German modernism is to speak of animation with a difference. It is a “life of things” that appears utterly estranged and detached from the desires, control, and signification of humans.6 To be sure, this estrangement of relations between humans and the external world of things has long been understood as part of a broad shift in German literary production after 1900, involving the rejection of nineteenth-century realism, a decentering of the bourgeois subject, and a move toward the literary representation of alternative,
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