PHELPS on Mabuse

THE MEDIUM’S RE-VISION

(Or The Doctor as Disease, Diagnostic, and Cure)

Dispelled Spells

The first and final revelation of The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) could serve as the film’s revision of itself into an allegory of its own producti­­­on: instead of the mystic Mabuse who once turned the world into his own mega-studio, an impersonator-fan has been adapting his franchise’s pulpiest acts of violence to the realities of postwar Germany. The fan Mabuse, however, not only impersonates Mabuse but Mabuse characters—and thus inherits the first Mabuse’s lack of genuineness so fully that “genuine” can hardly serve as a standard to distinguish these Mabuses apart. Any suspicion that Mabuse has shifted, like Lang, from visionary to hack, might start with the question of which one offers the more valid portrait of his time. As the differences between a Mabuse impersonator and Mabuse “himself,” the greatest impersonator of all, can only amount to a degree of conviction, even here, it is the less convincing impersonator who gains authenticity, the only type possible here, for divesting himself of his illusion.

In Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922), Lang’s Mabuse could fabricate visions for the viewers of his film and in it, both staring stupefied in his eyes; by 1960, the film’s viewers and subjects alike would only see the cheap prop of white contact-lenses worn by a blind man who isn’t even blind. Yet Lang’s disillusion as an open impersonator of the world he once contrived might seem like the only logical response to the other shift suggested here: that a postwar reality had not only adapted his technological networks of terror into state apparatuses, and so reclaimed a visionary art as institutional procedure, but had done so with such success that in the new, surveillance state, men would become functionaries of the state’s visions without any possibility of recourse to their own. Adrift in a world where an invisible camera without human agency now carried determining powers far beyond any director’s choreography of thousands, Lang, would find himself with the problem, The Thousand Eyes suggests, of not only how to imitate his old direction, but how to imitate a world that had become a bad Lang imitation.

The Hysterical State

“Within repressive society the individual’s emancipation not only benefits but damages him. Freedom from society robs him of the strength for freedom. For however real he may be in his relations to others, he is, considered absolutely, a mere abstraction. He has no content that is not socially constituted, no impulse transcending society that is not directed at assisting the social situation to transcend itself.” — Adorno, Minima Moralia, 149-150

Here, we might float a tentative paradigm for the Lang film—if only to measure the modulations in moral emphasis and social critique over a 40-year passage into concerted disenchantment. When mobilized beyond Lang’s beloved spy-ring intrigue, this prototypical plotline, almost inevitably of heroes or heroines generating their own demises, might seem cast in classic tragic mode: it’s precisely by trying to attain some long-desired end that the heroes ensure its eternal unattainability. In any case, the quest turns bloodthirsty, lustful for a one-time possibility that only seems to recede into the horizon the closer it’s approached, until the protagonists, from Destiny to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, are faced with the comprehension that their lives have been determined by a quest for phantoms. In Destiny this phantom is Love itself; by Doubt, it’s simply a mirage of a perfect murder that has been nothing more than a motivating plot device all along. Both films end with their protagonists’ hopes squandered—Destiny with the heroine’s willful acquiescence to a Fate she didn’t choose, and Doubt with Dana Andrews’ powerless submission to one he provoked—but between these two poles, Lang will again and again pivot his films on a gap, on the moment desires are thwarted, and the idyllic image, a fiction never to be realized, moves the hero to action against a reality that’s just as false. Die Nibelugen, Metropolis, Liliom, Fury, You Only Live Once, Man Hunt, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Rancho Notorious, The Big Heat, and even House By the River and Ministry of Fear all share something of this bifurcated structure, often turning more outwardly visionary at just the moment they’re supposed to be confronting reality. The many Langs that don’t often generate themselves out of gaps of images that seem equally inescapable as irretrievable—the memory blips of Four Around a Woman and The Blue Gardenia, or the kaleidoscopic explanations Gloria Grahame offers for her liaison in Human Desire—or follow another kind of rhyme, not of Love and Revenge, but of the state and the criminal, the hunter and the prey, in contrapuntal pursuits. Likewise, their own gap between them is what will let them be seen, also, as prismatic variations off one another. In any case, this gap is rarely so simple a mark of personal fantasy against social reality, but something more like a personal fantasy that realizes itself in collective hysteria. One character’s illusion seems to overturn the whole world as a simulated reality, against which he typically has no choice but to contrive himself as a criminal, an engaged anti-hero.

Mad with desire, these heroes now become, often at all at once, 1) victims of a social system they might have thought they were attacking, 2) outcasts of this same social system and exceptions to its norms, and 3) warped reflections of this social system as they return its impassively systematic violence in frenzied, personal vendettas. Lang’s reputation could rest on the spatial oppositions between these forces: the recessive planes of boxed-out hotel suites and palaces, stages of power for crooked bureaucrats and kings, against the shamanic circles of underground gangsters, lepers, and Resistance fighters, as coordinated throughout M and Hangmen Also Die, or by the gradual trajectory of Man Hunt from a verbal dual in Nazi headquarters at the film’s start to its physical resolution a cave by the end. In Die Nibelungen, the film’s internal split will clinch these energies into their clearest formulations: the polygonal symmetries of its foundation myth first half forcing a grid of ritualistic parallels onto the action; the makeshift hovels of the Huns in part II precipitating the giddy dismemberment of this civilization’s fearful symmetries.

Yet the tension between the world of law and the world of mad desire, sanitized civilization and its subterranean shadow world, will facilitate Lang’s counterpointed structures not only through open dissonances but hidden harmonies as well. The idea of a pleasure dome built on the systematic deportation of an underclass to punishing lairs, far from the sights of nice society, would have carried a different historical inflection by the time Lang filmed the Indian diptych (1959) than it had in Metropolis in 1928, or when he and Thea von Harbou were writing the script in the 20s. But Lang’s structural approach, so fundamentally Langian, continues to exert the parallels between the ceremonial splendors of the rich, inhabiting a private movie-set purged of historical intrusions, and the rampaging of the horny masses, let loose like a contamination into the same society that’s fostered their mania. As each group offers itself up to the ecstasy of its own depravities, and vies violently for force, they begin to offer alternate symptoms of the same phenomenon: a kind of Dionysian madness born out of their exceptionalism—or exemption—to a civilized standard that represses its foundations in sex and violence and allows them no expression except a redoubled violence against the status quo. Throughout Lang, madness is simply the alienation from society that society enjoins; the negative image can only be expressed in terms of the positive, and only exists as a reaction to it.

You and Me will both carry the distinction to logical absurdity—the glitz of department store promotions counterpointed by an oracle of prisoners rattling themselves into an orgiastic chant of “Stick to the Mob!”—as well as point toward the ways these worlds reflect and contaminate each other. For the world of law, the shining palace or two-story store, is also a site and even object of mad desire (window displays playing much the same baiting role as femme fatales in Lang, the two even conflated in Woman in the Window), just as the subterranean world maintains its own ceremonies of violence and exclusion as determinedly as the one above. You and Me’s basic thesis, that the only real difference between capitalism and gangsterism is that one works as an impersonal force of law imposed through the threats of facts and figures, while the other is extemporized by the rhythms of the mob and animated by collective instinct, articulates a whole pedagogy that civilization’s foundational fraud is not only its invention of false, moral binaries—good and evil, reason and madness—but its constant self-publicity that it’s on the right side of the two.

Again and again in Lang, the powerful will be seen thriving, like Odysseus tied to the mast, on the same madness their despotism has engendered. The exotic respite of gyrating dancers in Mabuse, Metropolis, Moonfleet, and The Indian Tomb, the sexualized women’s total otherness to working stiffs, works not simply as a patriarchal-Orientalist fantasy of a prodigal striptease, but as an indictment of a moneyed world that has excluded and repressed the same fantasies to which it most aspires. The lewd jolts of pleasure which Lang’s rulers and racketeers afford themselves only seem so licentious within the repressive social framework they’ve imposed: their dens of pleasure are exceptions to the social rules on which they’re founded, even as the striptease itself provides a sublimated image of the very same exploitation that pays the dancer’s costs. And so the men become, like the underworld they’ve criminalized, alienable products of their world’s systematized desire.

But what of the system itself, mediating relations between the powerful and the powerless, that spawns these two poles of madness? Its rationalism throughout Lang, articulated most clearly in his courtroom films, turns out to be a worse sort of madness—a system of logic whose terms turn out to be illogically arbitrary. As a machine of interpretation, Lang’s judicial system relies as much on circumstantial evidence (Scarlet Street, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt) as presumptuous context (Fury, The Return of Frank James), and opens itself to error, then, as much through rational deduction as emotional bias. Only the cannier of Lang’s self-fashioned madmen, like Mabuse, Joe Wilson in Fury, or Tom Garrett in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, know that to overturn the power of the state they must incarnate its procedures, or rather, play a part (a gambler, a dead man, an actor himself) whose very legibility will be systematically misjudged. Only by playing into the inescapable system, by feeding it false information and terms, can they subvert it—and unmask justice to be as pre-judiced an executioner as they are.

But their trial is also, of course, a trial played out for the judgmental viewer, who, exulting in Lang’s finely-etched caricatures of good and evil, and trained by genre to interpret them as such, happily watches the system condemn an “innocent” man to the chair (Scarlet Street) or liberate a murderer (Frank James). Lang’s most radical films, M, Fury, The Big Heat, famously undermine the film’s own system of judge-jury-executioner by horrifically granting viewers’ sentences of revenge—following sympathy to the point of no return. Only the Mabuse films and, to some degree, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, go so far as to indict the film as the enunciator of its universe, in Tom Gunning’s phrase (87), that has called its own world into being. Here, not only does the truth become open to the misinterpretation of justice (You Only Live Once, or the first half of Fury, as the characters are condemned to the evil of righteous moralists), or conflicting interpretations of justice (Scarlet Street, Frank James, as viewer sympathy is pitted against the facts of the case), or even an impossibility of moral interpretation (M, Fury, The Big Heat, as the criminal who sabotages the system only extends its methods and even defines its purpose, so that the viewer is left without a moral position to stake). Only here do the foundations of truth-value itself come into question—or rather play.

Which is to say that only Mabuse seems capable of reinventing the rules by which he plays. The others are merely symptoms of the system: for Lang’s machines of interpretation, be they courtrooms or cameras, can only misread information because they belong to the systems of its inscription and encoding, a behavioral code, in Metropolis as much as in The Big Heat, to which even emotional responses are expected to conform. Again, even the deviants of these social structures, like Hans Beckert (M) or Tom Garrett (twice over), only deviate methodically as counter-images of the state: they are, again, only the negatives of a positive image that nevertheless continues to determine their existence and every act even in inversion of the norm.

So Lang’s career-long counterpointing between civilization and the underworld, slick modernity and Druidic mythology, institutional procedure and paranormal activity—maybe best encapsulated by the intersection of an Indian arrow and a telegraph wire in Western Union—only suggests alternating currents of the same phenomenon, differences of kind rather than degree. Lang’s technologies, ultimately, function as alternate means of mystic transmissions, oracular dispatches that seem to be inscribing the same dictums that they register. His states operate alternately like séances, channeling concealed realities into messages, information, and secret plans, like the warnings of an Elizabethan ghost, and voodoo-doll rituals, pronouncing these messages back on reality through the puppeteering of unwitting civilians and synchronized coordination of their movements. By the end of his career—as Lang himself would turn prophet—even the human agency to exercise one’s will seems to have vanished from a world in which the characters move as if possessed by phantom powers; systems beget systems as each piece of data about a case is processed into counter-data and counter-plans to re-impose on reality. The chess game itself at the empty center of the films (While the City Sleeps, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt) becomes something like an excuse to ponder the tactics of the players in the cold comforts of their offices.

Yet as Lang’s systems decode even pathological behavior into comprehensible procedures (M), their own procedures—we’ve seen—turn pathological as well, so that the logician Lang of information technologies and the visionary Lang of brimstone parables become nearly indistinguishable according to the terms of their system: Lang’s films are, after all, founded in a logic that will ultimately burst itself open by the end. Another paradigm would be needed to see how the process occurs: how the difference between the powerful and powerless is enacted by one claiming the mantle of reason against the other; and how Lang’s civilization, like a giant, haunted movie theater, continues to generate images (consumer items, gyrating women) it can’t substantiate, and to generate desire for these images it never can fulfill.

Lang himself provides one intermittent paradigm himself for this economy of images as empty currency: the story of how one man seeking power rationally deploys the image of a beautiful girl to unleash other men from reason altogether—and drive them helplessly mad. It goes something like this: a mastermind exploits the girl to snare a dupe into his scheme, while the dupe, losing all sense of law and logic, softens to putty in the hands of power; eventually, however, the dupe loses himself so completely that he lashes out apocalyptically against his masters. The paradoxical notion that powerful would consolidate their control by driving their subjects out of control altogether only offers Lang a favorite narrative fulcrum by which the madmen eventually erupt; Metropolis draws this paradigm neatly in the story of the politicians (masterminds) whose mechanized Venus, the false Maria (girl), will provide their own undoing by impelling the laboring masses (dupes) first to a stupor and finally to rage. But it also lacks the stress so many of the later Langs lay on the pawned-off woman to clinch the plot and decide which man to make her pawn instead.

[Image 1: The men’s chorus of Metropolis reacting to Debra Paget’s writhing in The Indian Tomb]

So Mabuse’s employment of a dancer to lure a playboy into prostrate bliss in the first Mabuse will be reenacted by Haghi on Agent 326 and Doctor Masimoto in Spione, and the arch-villains of Metropolis on the city masses, as Dan Duryea will exploit Joan Bennett to fleece Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street, Broderick Crawford will secure Gloria Grahame to do the same to two men in Human Desire, and three reporters will use their girlfriends as bait for other men in While the City Sleeps before realizing that the publicity machine has used them similarly to get a story at any cost. But by this point, however, Lang’s men of power are starting to struggle for their own stimulation. By Moonfleet and The Indian Tomb, the men panting rapturously at the serpent contortions of an exotic dancer are also those who have engaged her to perform.

Nevertheless, this paradigm could be distilled even further into two interdependent, counterpointed images which the characters are expected to enact: the hypnotic spectacular image, of some consumable charm pulling men under its spell, and the operational image, of a map or screen plotting—both recording and inscribing—the movements the men must take according to hidden plans. Both are meant to be consumed, though in opposite ways. The spectacular image, meaningful only as it’s experienced as a kind of haptic eye-candy, exists only to be seen, and so is calculated for purely sensuous, instantaneous consumption at cost of rational thought. The operational image, by contrast, meaningful only for the information its yields, exists only to be decoded and discarded, and so holds no deliberate aesthetic qualities. Moreover, not only is it not made to be seen—as eventually its data may even be interpreted autonomously without human intervention—but as an all-seeing God-eye, it’s intended not to be seen, as its information and plans are the secret prerogatives of systems. So in short: one image, whose subject tailors itself to be seen, against another, whose subject is not only ignorant that he’s being seen, but of the system’s plans and extent of its knowledge about him altogether. Both are meant to keep men in the dark.

In other words, the dancer and the data log: just as it’s possible now, beyond the terms of a false social logic, to see even more distinctly those two sides of Lang, the erotic visionary and schematic logician, it’s also possible to see the two images of state power here, propaganda and surveillance. The latter serves the double purpose of formulating plans (as when the police in M strategize their tactics on a map) as well as registering data (as when the police record movements of their units on the map). And thus the spectacular image—propaganda—may only be one element in the scheme of the operational image, as a kind of Pavlovian goad, the witch’s apple as shampoo model, to ensure the compliance of men in playing the part desired of them. Moreover, the operational image—as surveillance—ensures not only that the plan (before the action) and the record of its execution (after) inform each other data in a perpetual feedback loop of self-adjusting plans, but that they match. For constant surveillance enables tight control of the action; but more importantly, it engenders a state whose civilians, knowing that they might be watched without ever knowing when, hew obediently to the protocol as they believe it should be followed. Employed fully, surveillance no longer records data but enacts it as a self-perpetuating ritual of people performing their parts to a phantom audience. And it’s this conceit that will provide the framework for The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, as well as provoke its counteraction in retroactive comedy: that all the characters, it turns out, have been performing in disguise for each other’s false personas.

A Medium is the Message

“If there is something like a common characteristic of great late works, it is to be sought in the breaking through of form by spirit. This is no aberration of art but rather its fatal corrective. Its highest products are condemned to a fragmentariness that is their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by the immanence of their form.

…Artworks have no truth without determinate negation.” — Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (90)

While so much of Lang’s work, both in plots and formal devices alike, might be structured on these two poles, it’s the Mabuse films that most obsessively show how spectacle and surveillance, through Mabuse’s avatars, create the world in their images: there might even lie the potential for the roots of a whole, cinematic praxis here, between an image of fascination, operative as a shot and reducible to an instant, and an image of process, a chart or grid whose data fluctuates over time, and thus operates as a montage over time in self-disseminating, causal sequences. The aporetic structure of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler will pit these two types of cinema against each other: Mabuse’ initial intervention into the stock market systematically rewires the system’s chains of cause and effect, perpetuated in a methodological montage whose synchronization of elements into intersecting movements actualizes Mabuse’s own—the elements less meaningful in of themselves than for the links the viewer draws between them. Yet it is followed by so many acts demonstrating Mabuse’s telepathic powers, filmed mostly in tableaux vivants as objects of fascination in of themselves, that the film poses an implicit question as to why Mabuse has bothered with his schematized subversions of the circuitry of capital when he might have just hypnotized the officers into following his will.

,The complication the Mabuse films—including Spione, an evident follow-up to the first film before Mabuse became a profitable franchise, and as much a progenitor of 1,000 Eyes as the other two Mabuse films—offer to any split of spectacular/operational strategies, is that Dr. Mabuse, both the clever incarnation of Power and mad criminal against the system, embodies, or rather disembodies, both. The man of masks in a time of masks, Weimar’s pulp Odysseus as flâneur-Ubermensch, this Mabuse channels some strange currents. On the one hand, as Sara Hall puts it, he is the grand operator, with a “cultural authority” that “is supposed to see without being seen and so bears the potential to parallel the position of the cinematic narrator as articulated by the camera” (385). Yet not only is he the author-authority behind the scenes analyzing the products of his own schemes as a “cinematic narrator,” but the hypnotist-actor who presents himself as an image to beguile men’s eyes. If Mabuse’s art seems completely cinematic—conjuring images to a live theater in single cuts—he is also, in the first movie, a pre-cinematic totem who must operate in the flesh on an individual basis, without recourse to technology to multiply his sound-image avatars. What might have seemed like a mystic marvel in an epoch of traveling circuses and fairs—memorialized even by 1933, the year of Testament, in films from State Fair to The Mind Reader—would probably seem impractical to the emerging era of mass-media. After all, couldn’t Mabuse just franchise himself through a chain of holographic doubles?

By Spione, the Mabuse-figure has neatly split into an operational (surveillance) figure, the mastermind Haghi, and a spectacular (hypnotic) figure, the clown Nemo, who even in his suicide, as Gunning says, “still has one thing he can control: the perception of the audience” (137). The final twist that these two characters are, in fact, one, plays in retrospect more as a revelation of the production itself, that both are played by Dr. Mabuse’s own performer, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, than a revelation of the plot, on which it has little bearing except to signal the reach of the spy network and excuse a spectacular finale whose theatrical contrivances are precisely its point. This twist does, however, foster some semantic confusion about the omnipotent source of power designated by the opening montage’s desperate attempt to make sense of its own hash of violent crimes: “Almighty God!” asks an official, “Whose Hand is this at play?” Haghi’s response from the beacon of power where he ostensibly sees and hears all in the world he has determined, “ICH”—“I!”—retroactively roots the montage in a central source that can link its shattered pieces together, and seems to distill power into a single, stable identity. Yet this naming of himself, “ICH,” also works, like the self-applied appellation of Nemo’s non-namesake, as a refusal to name himself altogether. Nothing more than a sop to legibility, this “ICH” provides the movie’s own assurance that its random acts of violence are somehow, inexplicably, connected; while the designated speaker, Haghi, turns out to have been neither handicapped nor goateed, so that he becomes as much a theatrical construct of an unseen “I” as Nemo’s clown. Unassimilable into each other, except for their in-corporation into the same body, these two character-actors signal that “I” somewhere in the synaptic gaps between their personalities. Like the acts announced in the film’s opening, they’re also agents and outcroppings of a now-motiveless source, a face behind the mask capable only of presenting itself through its disseminations; only when the Haghi-Nemo hydra kills himself, the interests of both Haghi and Nemo finally aligned in the ultimate spectacle of their careers, are the two personas finally unified.

 

Images 2 and 3: Spione/Man with a Movie Camera

“For what first mobilizes Lang is not a man, a singular being, but a phenomenon,” writes Nicole Brenez (pp), “rather…the name of a system,” adds Jonathan Crary (271). Haghi operates, mostly, as a hidden nexus point coordinating real-life characters into position with one another; his role is less inventor of evil schemes than a basic coordinator, playing with photographs on his desk as if they were voodoo dolls of reality below. The film’s own strategies to mobilize his plans, cutting from his photos to the people themselves within the movie’s diegesis, seem to actualize his operations into action, stillness into movement, and the image back into the reality from which it was derived: oracular tactics, parallel to those of Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera of the same year, to enunciate the hero’s orchestrations as the movie’s itself. That the “hero” in Vertov is the film’s own editor (and Vertov’s wife), Elizaveta Svilova, her desk marked mainly by a reel of film like Haghi’s own, might suggest how much less Haghi is a stand-in for the film’s Director-Conceiver figure than he is for the Editor, orchestrating the movements of the city as a Joyce-like “arranging presence” (Kenner 65). Even the same favorite figure for the real-life coordinator, the girl switchboard operator, serves to mediate the montage of each, as she will  through Lang’s career. At the height of the city symphony, Lang seems to share both Joyce and Vertov’s sense of the artwork’s mission simultaneously to code and decode an independent “reality” whose alteriority only marks its unassimilability into the terms of representation—yet which requires those representations to make some sense of it, to scheme rhymes and find meanings in these counterpointed arrangements, and even to facilitate its movements as the ghost of a world already facilitated almost entirely by technology. In other words, Lang, like Joyce and Vertov, seems to see the city here less as a series of determinate locations (as in the first Mabuse), and more, like his own art, as a coordinating process: a matrix of systematically shifting elements, each a node the artist can track in relation to one another. Like Man with a Movie Camera, Spione seems to structure its own montage off the modern city’s mediations between spaces: hence Lang’s endless phones, doors, cars, trains, and maps, even apart from his seers, neatly linking the spaces of the film’s universe to link the scenes of the movie. Spione will even include a Vertov-like cameraman spying down from a bridge after a train crash—though, unhelpful, he seems only interested in converting his sights to spectacle.

Image 4: Spione/Man with a Movie Camera

By Testament of Dr. Mabuse, as many commentators have said, the singular being of Mabuse has been emptied of all agency to become one more transmitter in the network of crime. As “the act of authorship and the death of the author merge in the blank screen” (Gunning 138) in Haghi/Nemo’s suicide, Mabuse is effectively dead at the start of Testament, nothing more than a tool of self-perpetuating terror whose author has vanished altogether. Even alive, this Mabuse acts possessed, scribbling incessantly as a kind of automatic-writer-as-automaton, while officially dead in the film’s second half, he possesses the body of Prof. Baum to continue channeling commands. Again, there is a neat split between the operative Mabuse, the living Mabuse-body scrawling its orders in total seclusion from society, and the spectacular Mabuse, the Expressionist ghost who pulls the professor under his spell in a spellbinding vision—for all the Prof. Baums of Lang’s public whose own senses will fall attendant upon the Dr.’s command.

The third Mabuse, however, begins to collapse these distinctions: for the mastermind giving information turns out himself to be a false spectacle, a phonograph behind a curtain. The unmasking of this cinematic apparatus as such, a loundspeaker behind a screen, sums up one postulate of the whole series that it is the operative ghost who must assume the form of spectacular, hypnotic visions. It is as if Haghi had removed his goatee to reveal nothing underneath, the complete invisibility of the ghost in the machine no longer employing its own body, but simply any body as an avatar for its work. Again, power itself becomes a hypnotic illusion for those who lose it altogether—not only to madness outside the system, but to the madness of the system itself. In Mabuse’s case, they are the same thing: “The system itself seems to invite both madness and corruption,” writes Gunning. “The illusion of power on the one hand; on the other, an identity reduced to being a relay within the system, a relay which can, in fact, lose its connection” (159).

For all three Mabuses—living, dead, and dispositif—merely relay commands to their captive audience of mercenary and power-hungry goons like incessant projection of predetermined material. In each case, the Mabuse is already a basic variation on the primitive dispositif, the silhouette and photograph behind a curtain that Testament’s lovers realize by the end of the film have constituted their “Mabuse” all along. Mabuse advances with the technology of his era. As Lang’s conceit seems to wink, he has become a kind of form of cinema in Testament, an apparatus for transmitting messages through infinitely replicable scripts, sounds, and images; so the words of the living Mabuse are reproduced unrelentingly, the ghost of the dead Mabuse reproduces itself unrelentingly, and, through the most basic technology of the time, the vinyl record of the Mabuse-dispositif can even be mass-reproduced as well. He is, as Erik Butler writes, “split into scattered visual and acoustic images that occasionally meet up but never produce a unified subject or object” (487). But he is also something like an early computer code, presaging the body snatchers of Red Scare Hollywood, an infinitely reproducible script that can reprogram its host body to continue its self-dissemination. “With each film,” writes Joe McElhaney, “the sense of Mabuse as a specific fiction character declines, increasingly replaced by Mabuse as a concept, a signifier insinuating itself into the fabric of vision in the films” (30).

Mabuse operates as movie apparatus, and it is critical orthodoxy to note how the film itself is just an extension of Mabuse’s industrial-illusion complex: a series of signs that are only mere, fragmented transmissions of the personality generating them beneath, the illusive simulacra of the Doctor himself.  “Lang’s Mabuse films testify to the power of the image as a reagent, not a representation,” writes Erik Butler, “especially the underappreciated masterpiece of 1932. In contrast to the literary version of the villain, the screen incarnations of Mabuse operate through a mediated presence that consists in equal measure of factual absence, virtual presence, and imminent threats of violence. The films show that Mabuse is at his most powerful qua image—when “he” operates by means of broken series of signs, decentralized chains of command, constantly shifting spheres of activity, and innumerable changes in appearance” (491). Yet as Butler notes, “It is misleading to speak of this entity in the singular, inasmuch as “his” constituent parts do not add up to a unified whole, but exert their power through diffracted multiplicity” (493).

As in the opening montage of Spione, but here over the course of two hours, it is the audience, like the investigators within the film, who must sustain Gunning’s “illusion of power,” as the police search for the author of these crimes in a world in which there isn’t one, and as the viewer ascribes the ghost to the machine to connect these disconnected clues. Where so much of the action of Spione seems actualized out of the image of the operation into the operation itself, Testament redoubles the links, as the sounds of an act or conversation topic cut to an image of its referent or a related sound—or the image can cut to the sounds of its content under discussion. But this associative montage, seemingly clairvoyant in its connections, is a ruse, as Gunning again points out: though the police officer’s roar of “Feuerzaber!” and Dr. Baum’s prognosis that “such cases are not unusual” seem to respond to their previous shots, of an explosion and psychotic, each of these officials is altogether unacquainted with the movie’s preceding revelations. Gunning: “Instead of connecting scenes and actions back to Mabuse (or Haghi), in Testament these cuts refer us only to the film’s own omniscient and playful narration. The narrative force remains disembodied, like the opening camera movement, strongly sensed, but not tied to an enunciator character” (144). As the lovers project a living figure of Mabuse out of household technology near the story’s end, the film exposes the illusion of its associations as the viewer’s own.

And yet—the realization that the film itself not only relates these unrelated shards but seems to sublimate its own horrors into the pontifications of off-target experts, only reinforces this clairvoyance of the montage that seems to perpetuate its preoccupations through the subconscious of the city. Soon, the experts will consider these subjects themselves, and though the film stresses their ignorance, it also relays a teasing prophesy of the issues to consume them. These cuts serve as double conjurations—ostensibly transmitting its own material into topics of contemplation; foretelling the issues to come—as well as negative cuts, undoing their own associations to expose the basic heterogeneity of each shot independent from any causal scheme. A surrogate for the audience as well as its master in his first vehicle, Mabuse has displaced himself to the self-perpetuating montage of the film itself by Testament: this collection of Mabuse-clues that lead nowhere but to each other. Where the synchronizations of the first Mabuse’s opening scene show off the kind of inexorable mechanics on which so much of Lang’s reputation ride, by Testament, this systematic choreography has become as much an animating illusion of the film’s Dada-logic as Mabuse’s ghost.

The Resurrected Vision

“And clearly enough, this very triviality of daily life in late capitalism is itself the desperate situation against which al the formal solutions, the strategies and subterfuges, of high culture as well as mass culture, emerge: how to project the illusion that things still happen, that events exist, that there are still stories to tell, in a situation in which the uniqueness and the irrevocability of private destinies and of individuality itself seem to have evaporated? This impossibility of realism—and more generally, the impossibility of a living culture which might speak to a unified public about shared experience—determines the metageneric solutions with which we began. It also accounts for the emergence of what might be called false or imitation narrative, for the illusionistic transformation into a seemingly unified and linear narrative surface of what is in reality a collage of heterogeneous materials and fragments.”— Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining” (88)

As Mabuse becomes progressively dispossessed, his all-inscribing gaze seems to erase itself out of any sort of perspective that his audience in or out of the film might assume; what seems to wither successively across the Mabuse films is Lang’s own commitment to hypnotizing the audience to believe his delusions. This disillusionment might be charted through his treatment of the paradigmatic love triangles between mad doctors, spy femme fatales, and guileless patsies. In der Spieler, Mabuse commissions a dancer to skip over the phallus-noses of two floating skulls in a chi-chi-tribal revue, and the playboy is instantly smitten; the plot unfolds according to the mastermind’s plans. When Haghi, however, cedes agency to the girl to seduce the man on her own in Spione, he loses control of both altogether, their romance cinched with audience-friendly preposterousness as he hides her from the police without having any idea who she is. By Testament, in which the guy is now the agent turned turncoat for love, the doctor’s plans themselves only become more fantastical after the revelation of their material basis in a phonograph: the film’s overdetermined explanation for itself is that this phonograph, like the cutting in the film, only seems respond to the comments of its agents, but in fact unfolds independently. The ultra-Langian premise revealed here, that the technological system of this universe can prophesize the responses of its human agents—both prompting these and incorporating them back into the system as another foretold, self-perpetuating conversation—will come to its breaking point in The 1,000 Eyes. It’s Lang’s least supernatural, most material Mabuse that will expose its own in-credibility as a marker of its own disenchantment. Here, in a scene which recapitulates all the plot twists of Vertigo into a two-minute summarization, the Aryan playboy Henry Travers, 1) leaping through a two-way mirror into a room 2) to shoot his beloved’s menacing, club-footed husband 3) whom he trusts a local doctor to steal away to a nearby ambulance, 4) fails to realize for some time that he has played into Mabuse’s nefarious scheme by enacting exactly the procedure expected of him.

There is a very good argument that 1,000 Eyes, in its resurrection of old plots as hoary structuring devices, not only regresses to the theatrical conceits of Spione, but, in its own cardboard clichés, crassly commercializes that movie’s Victorian ethos of human agency against the system; here, characters become legible as iconography at the expense of all fluctuating of feeling. Mabuse, as an individual human being, is visible once again in 1,000 Eyes: as in Spione, one spectacular avatar staging coups of mise-en-scène for a knowing audience contends against another, operational avatar whose own stagings from a concealed room go entirely unnoticed by his pawns, only for these two men to be the same, as he pulls off his make-up before an elevator mirror. And as in Spione, much of the montage operates by a presentation of signs that will be actualized as the diegesis of the film: where Spione cuts from photos of characters to the characters themselves, 1,000 Eyes cuts from business cards, placards, and casual references of a place or name to the thing they represent. When one officer mentions that “there must be files on the Mabuse case,” the film cuts to the files in a surveillance van. When one man calls a meeting for 20 minutes later, or a man asks a girl out for the evening, the film skips to the envisaged place and time, as if activating these plans—or, alternately, fulfilling a prophecy—and realizing the film’s logic as a straightforward, causal mechanism enacting the character’s operations as its own.

Yet although every shot here could be that of an operative image enacted on-screen according to the plans of a mastermind who, it’s repeatedly suggested, lies not only behind the image (in a control room) but behind the camera itself—nevertheless “the cuts that seem to connect to one another,” as McElhaney writes, “actually point toward gaps” (52). McElhaney and Gunning detail a number of cases: gimmicky cuts, as in Testament, of a character ostensibly responding to dialogue from another scene altogether but doing nothing of the sort, as well as insistent associations of, for example, Mabuse with a club-footed man who is actually just one of his goons. “This is the function of montage,” Adorno would write in Aesthetic Theory soon after, “which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity” (154). Where Testament exposes its own illusion, 1,000 Eyes happily dupes its audience with false links that not only fail to make sense of a nonsensical plotline, but that will, along with the disguises and personations of all but one of the characters, be undone by the movie’s end to leave nothing but a piece of hollow legerdemain. “The humor of Lang, unique in the cinema,” Serge Daney would write about Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, “consists of supplying the spectator all the information he needs to understand everything. But of supplying it in disorder, so that he can make nothing of it” (Daney “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt”). The revelations by the end of 1,000 Eyes, that everyone but the billionaire has been staging their own threadbare spectacles, could serve as Lang’s admission of purpose, despite his propulsive montage, to make nothing of his own scenario after all. Not only “Mabuse,” but everyone, it turns out, has been putting on a Fritz Lang movie.

In the shift from Weimar hedonism to vanilla Capitalism, something of Lang’s own view of his medium—reflected in his arch-criminal’s progressive manipulations of theater in der Spieler to photography in Spione to radio/cinema in Testament to television in 1,000 Eyes, each a kind of mise en abîme of Lang’s own shifting modes from stagy tableaux to live-action tracking shots—has enervated. After a career spent prophesying a regime of televisual jurisdiction, Lang seems to systematically recall his own, televisual control at the moment he recognizes it as the operative system of the postwar state, the basis for its power. It’s as if he’s recoiled at the monster he’s generated. Adorno continues: “Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-à-vis late-capitalist totality and to initiate its abrogation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of art to what stands heterogenerously opposed to it. The negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form” (154). But it’s by integrating a number of unrelated, entirely heterogeneous elements into the semblance of a coherent, synthetic system, by aligning himself with the perspectives of the surveillance state as well as the dupe, that Lang, as if determined to lose determination of his own film, leaves the viewer to see the gaps, the void on and in which this seemingly self-contained system of homogenized spaces and sequential causality is sustained. It’s not only the cuts that open gaps but the entire plot of the film, which follows the developments of old Lang projects without any of their logic: what purpose is served by Mabuse’s spectacular avatar, Cornelius, whom nobody even trusts? What is meant by the delayed clock at Cornelius’ séance that, it’s improbably suggested, might have killed Cornelius if correctly timed? Does Mabuse want to kill any of these people, and why doesn’t he? How does the phony insurance agent, Mistelzeig, beat and steal a dog into the hotel lobby? And couldn’t Mabuse find an easier way to destroy the world than than restaging scenes from classic Lang films and making a millionaire fall in love? Until Mistelzeig steals the dog, barely a single strategy employed by the other characters—neither the commissioner’s fake photo of his wife, nor Mabuse’s killing of the commissioner’s colleague—will have any significant bearing on the development of the film. They exist no longer in a causal scheme but instead, it seems, for the fact of their own sensation.

But what response other than disillusionment could a director have to this disillusioned universe, where mysticism has become a business tool of salesmen and cons? Critics might complain that Lang’s pockets of intimacy are no longer leveraged so sensuously or convincingly against a world of terror, but that both have been subsumed into the flat sheen of the hotel. But Lang’s alternatives might be wondered at. Of course, he might have tried to fulfill the false promises of supernatural spookiness and romantic intrigue presented by this otherwise nondescript hotel: a historical burial ground as historical anesthetic, as the film notes. Here, the bar serves as office, insurance men broker with seers for maximum profits, and the romantic hero responds to the news of “many casualties” at his nuclear power plant that: “The explosion in the Taran plant is hardly harmful to me. A business transaction that didn’t materialize. That’s all.” Any notion that genuine intimacy could challenge or even underlie the public treacheries of this postwar universe would be as much a monstrous lie—that private relations are possible in this wholly public space—as a spectacular bromide of its own. That counterpoint becomes impossible: until the miraculous final shot, the lovers are no longer, Griffith-like, the romantic counter-reaction to this rationalist hell, but its logical extension. Travers, like the newspaper men in While the City Sleeps or Garrett in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is simply exploited by the exploitative system he’s happily ridden to power.

No negative image is admitted here to counterbalance this totalizing space or offer some yardstick by which to measure its atrocities. Madness—the response that Kubrick and Lynch’s culturally prefabricated personalities will have again just a few years later as they transgress the system that created them—is absent the film’s cabal of functionaries, and even Mabuse’s apocalyptic proposition to launch nuclear war is presented as a logicial-enough facilitation of humanity’s own, newfound functions; chaos has been incorporated systematically into the new order of the nuclear world. Gone too with the corporate era are Lang’s dank, beloved lairs of lewd and lecherous counterfeiters giving the lie to the upperworld they’ve underwritten. Where the City Hotel, Four Around a Woman’s elite forum for businessmen to swap diamonds, dinner parties, lovers, and even personalities, is a site of exclusion from the soot-stained, subterranean den of thieves where the criminal means of these men’s pasts lay buried (“It is hotel policy that men without bags pay in advance,” a hotel desk clerk tells one supposed vagabond), 1,000 Eyes offers only a single pre-war highway at the end of the film to counterpoint its faraway, self-enclosed space of the Luxor Hotel. The hidden, subterranean lair here—the control room that is Mabuse’s headquarters—is not only part of the hotel but its operational nucleus, no longer a Dickensian locus of self-fashioned goons, but the very site of disembodiment, as predetermined schemes play out across television screens, realizing themselves as the same scripted movies their mastermind conceived them to be.

Yet a second editing scheme arises intermittently here, that, like Lang’s false cuts, seems to retract the director’s illusionary powers only by exposing them flagrantly. As Lang’s camera pans across the security monitors of control room, it seems to lead the characters on the monitors from one space to another across two TV screens, as if summoning them, Mabuse-like, through predetermined maneuvers. Indeed, the only human intrusion here is a hand, reaching from beyond or even behind Lang’s camera to turn these screens on and off . “Every scene possesses another side, but instead of penetrating to a depth of truth and revelation, this other side reveals only another observer, threatening exposure and blackmail,” writes Gunning (470). But “Mabuse,” the figure who, according to an ever-shaky narrative, provides the other side of the image, goes unfilmed in the control room until the finale, presumably because his secret identity is supposed to be the mystery of the film, but perhaps equally because he’s little more than an avatar for Lang’s camera simply to watch the action unfold. As in so many later horror films, the camera assumes his perspective to avoid revealing him, and yet the viewer, finally, is left to watch the surveillance system playing out on its own, as if the director no longer will assume the images of his film as his own. The shot that dispossesses the images of the movie itself, that abandons them to the mediation of a 1,000 television screens, is also the presumed gaze of the invisible eye watching over all; the perfect operational image, it’s passive witness and active manipulator as one, disclaiming and proclaiming Mabuse’s vision at once.

The method here, of showing spectacular images as mere operational procedures—almost a recognition of just how generic so much of the material is here—might be traced back through all the Mabuse films. But it’s in the moments that Lang confronts his characters with films of their own actions, in Liliom and Fury, that these two approaches, the synthetic (spectacular image) and analytical (operational image), become conflated, testifying to the characters’ sins in the visionary mode of the silent films, even while dissecting a scene of the very same movie they’re in for critical comprehension. Where the visionary sequences of the silent films occur in hallucinatory states of delirium (hypnosis, dreams), the film in Fury is only a representation of delirium—the lynch-mob hoisting torches, crying for blood—in the cold freeze-frames of “documentary” footage projected in a courtroom. The terms of subjectivity and objectivity collapse here as the characters are confronted with their actions in the past: forced to relive horrors but also to see more clearly what they’re doing. These screenings, indicting theirs viewers in a social mechanism by estranging them into recognition of how the mechanism works, surely stems from the same Brecht influence at work in Sylvia Sydney’s chalkboard dissertation on the laws of capital in You and Me; however winkingly each film confronts its own viewers with its foundational artifice, it also, at least in Fury and You and Me, leaves them facing a social world operating on laws as strange and contrived as those of genre itself. The notion that the movie screen can mediate these two modes—letting the viewer hypnotically escape the present through a vision that only ultimately suggests its roots in a corrupted past—suggests an entire ethos of genre that, in 1,000 Eyes, is not only on display but seemingly on trial. By the television era, paraphrased most succinctly in 1,000 by Travers’ live viewing of a model on the other side of a mirror, the viewer forced to confront faraway horrors between soap commercials can simply press a button to turn it off: if all images become images of consumption, plush hotels as much dastardly evil-doers, each homogenized into a new, comprehensible iconography of postwar iconography, what do any of them reveal?

Again in this corporate-hotel universe, seemingly without traces—in contrast to the flamboyant weaponry of earlier Lang films, the steel needle bullet that provided Lang’s inspiration for 1,000 Eyes seems to vanish as soon as it’s transmitted, a more fatal kind of TV signal—there are, nevertheless, these strange, flash-signals of the film’s own production. As these top-secret headquarters are laid out like an editing bay of a television studio, an update of Haghi’s table, it seems clear here, more in than any other Lang films, that the reverse-shot of the hand, is not only Lang’s audience, or Mabuse, but Lang himself, filming and editing staged, anticipated images off a screen. Yet without any alternative world to counterpoint its own, Lang’s adaptation of old material as consumable cliché only  continues challenging the terms of its self-contained universe by clarifying them. The entirety of the movie we’ve been watching, 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, has presumably transpired across the monitors of this single space alongside an infinity of alternate versions. But absences become conspicuous by the failure of these terms—the cuts, the plot, the anodyne spaces—to reveal anything, even and especially upon subsequent viewings. The film’s development becomes a mystery of its own, marking out the gaps of what it refuses to articulate: the reverse-shot of the invisible eye, the “actual” identity of the nameless figure pretending to be Mabuse as anything more than a MacGuffin, the personalities of any of the other characters beyond the disguises they wear as narrative placeholders, the Nazi history that laid the foundations for its own suppression, etc.

The only possible truth-content this simulated universe could possibly present would be a simulation of its own production; in the same gesture that the film seems to assume the perspective of the invisible, God-like eye of the director, the cuts become displaced into the image, as another type of negative montage, in the absence of any negatives within the world itself, that leaves it to the viewer to stitch together the shots. No longer, evidently, are these images to be interrogated through the kind of analytical, rhythmic montage between different visionary states, that Lang had mastered in the 20s—and that would now sow an industry of TV commercials, and go on to estrange so many post-classical filmmakers from dominant culture. Instead, Lang takes exactly the opposite tact, as if to opt for the methods of closed circuit TV (operational) over those of commercial TV (spectacular): the impassivity of a durational shot that generates many more within. As in Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again and Godard’s Numéro Deux in the 70s, the film’s own images as such become its subject, and are even restored to some kind of materiality through their treatment as intractable, found objects, monitors and screens. And yet as Lang moves his camera, the images are clearly his to manipulate—as much as they are clearly his work in the first place.

Images 5, 6, 7, and 8: Successive cuts in Cordelier/1,000 Eyes

Two types of montage now become possible within the editing bay: first, traditional, sharp cuts from a scene in the movie to its visualization on a monitor (and vice-versa), as Renoir would attempt simultaneously in his own, metageneric, TV-modeled reportage, Le testament du Docteur Cordelier; and second, an internal montage of a zooming camera gradually slipping in and out of the visions of screens, as if fluidly assuming and shedding diegeses. The zoom-out that introduces the control room, from a dinner-date to its presentation on a monitor, reveals that we’re not inhabiting the scene we thought we were, but have assumed Mabuse’s place in front of a screen—a memento of our own place watching a movie. So just as we might recall, once again, that Mabuse himself is in so many ways just an image simulated on a screen, both outside of the movie as its grand manipulator watching 1,000 Eyes unfold on live TV, and inside as its secret star, we’re left inhabiting his own position in and out of the film at once. The following shot’s use of the same the trackback, but here from within the scene, from Travers’ date to Travers himself, might suggest just how systematically the film is deploying these fluid shifts from a kind of presumed objectivity to an at-once embodied and disembodied perspective. But as Lang’s films, at least from the collective memories of Four Around a Woman if not two-way mirror of Spiders, almost all seem to shift through a kind of intersubjectivity of a community’s willed hallucinations and reanimated memories, “objectivity” is probably not too useful a term here. Already in Lang’s earliest films, per Raymond Bellour, objects teeter in a kind of subjective indeterminancy, as supposed POV shots seldom cut back to the subject gazing on them; “between an embodied gaze and any object, there is the camera’s gaze, or the virtual eye of the director, that reclaims whatever appeared to have been offered up to our attention,”[1] writes Bellour (pp), as if the only perspectival certainty is that of the director who planted these objects there in the first place. But by that standard, the fluid shifts of 1,000 Eyes, deployed from the opening shot of two cars jockeying ahead of one another, their movements inseparable from the camera’s, no longer even offer the possibility of detaching the object itself nor the subject’s gaze from the filmic system alternatively registering them and plotting their place.

Two cases: first, a 45 second shot of the of the commissioner’s office, post-explosion, the camera tracking forward through the rubble, before settling on a note overturned from behind the camera by the hand, a back-tracking camera now reveals, of the commissioner whose perspective the camera evidently approximated; second, from behind a two-way mirror, Travers watching his half-dressed Marion as she preens, the camera steadily pressing in to make the vision of the mirror—Travers’ vision—its own. The search for clues in the first case reveals not only case evidence but its own perspective, though only by shedding this perspective while stressing its own, physical place in the scene; the willful voyeurism of the second offers the spectacle of Travers’ mock-TV, broadcasting live, as that of Lang’s movie and everyone watching it. Any potentially useful distinctions of embodiment/disembodiment, objective/subjective, and spectacular/operational become useless dichotomies. Travers finds his hypnotic image through surveillance, not in a physical presence he can touch or look at eye-to-eye, as Lang’s dupes before him, but in the pornographic possibilities of seeing without being seen, a frisson of the spectacle itself as much as its means. With TV, consumers at last become operators of their own pleasure, each a mini-Mabuse doing no more than pushing a button—as Mabuse glosses his ultimate act of destruction. Of course the irony is that Travers—also like consumers—is the system’s own object of surveillance, as this promise of live-action broadcasting is all part of the ruse to keep him acting as planned.

The preposterousness of Travers actually actualizing Mabuse’s plan, then, suggests another shift throughout the Mabuse films: the rise of interfacing, of mock-interactivity with the system as the Mabuses cede personalized control of their targets and agents across the four films. Any notion that Travers, like the lovers in Testament before him, is determining the outcome or prompting the responses of those around him will be neatly reversed by the revelation that the system itself has prompted his responses so exactly that he becomes only another puppet performing a predetermined role, different only from Mabuse’s stooges beside him for thinking he’s governing his own actions. Such an illusion is only possible, of course, because of his ignorance of the system altogether; the system can synthesize its actions into its own only as long as he doesn’t see it’s there. His subjugation is only founded on an illusion of free will—it is precisely by conceiving himself as an international action hero that he stays supine to the expectations of the genre that Mabuse, ever Lang’s surrogate, has set out. Only by admitting his own powerlessness to the system—in Adorno’s earlier terms—could he distinguish himself from a system to which he’s become powerless precisely by an inability to distinguish it at all. And yet the whole Travers episode is so ludicrous as a screenwriter’s conceit that it only seems to reinforce its own lesson, not to trust spectacle as anything other than the master plan of an illusionist.

Travers’ mistake, to think himself master of a system he helps perpetuate as agent and which will discard him in the end, is not so different from Mabuse’s to the same effect; both are merely agents of the system who conceive themselves as its master. While the notion that Mabuse personifies that invisible eye as a visible presence would seem to affirm the film’s concessions to classicism, to drama that can be comprehended on a human scale, the drama, nevertheless, is elsewhere. For these clairvoyant systems of control are no more extensions of his phenomenal powers—as they have been to varying extents in the other Mabuse films—than his name and identity is Mabuse: a self-bestowed title, it eventually turns out, that already has been little more than a floating signifier for our dispossessed position, inhabiting his vision of screens only as a reminder that it’s also just one more vision that can’t be inhabited. Like Lang, it’s all this non-Mabuse could do to adopt a ready-made cultural icon and a ready-made system of surveillance, perfectly operative already without human intervention, and follow the instructions of the prototypes before him as an agent of the system. A poser without any legible identity beyond his mask, he is a functionary of the Mabuse-machine: a walking, intentional fallacy for anyone who wants to believe these series of sensational events form any sort of coherent network like those of Lang’s former cities and films. But unlike in the opening of Spione or the entirety of Testament, 1,000 Eyes no more offers the viewer a way to sustain such an illusion than it offers a point of authenticity from which it could be questioned. Mabuse’s self-subjugation to the system becomes the closest thing here to an assertion of free will.

Still, however much Mabuse is a stand-in for Lang throughout the films—here more than ever as little more than a vehicle for the camera’s all-seeing eye—Lang adapts his own, creaky mechanisms as such. As the movie suggests that its scenes no longer seem to need to be plotted, directed, or even viewed in the self-fulfilling interface of the Mabuse-machine, which will now continue to mass-manufacture clichéd capitalists and madmen of Langian iconography from the cold war forward, the images on the monitor, like the open spaces of the hotel, like the multiple Mabuses, seem to proliferate as an endless hall of mirrors covering any sign of an author. Lang’s monstrous accusation that this fully-stocked, post-war capitalist universe is nothing more than a sanitized adaptation of Nazi infrastructure, entrenches his own film in the same terms of a self-contained system that it has to oppose; yet the inability of this entirely unbelievable universe to locate its own origins or even a stable subject in its public vaudeville of impenetrable masks becomes, in some way, its one blatant subject throughout. Like Mabuse, a kind of cultural capital having no form but whatever it trades itself in for, Lang leeches onto this historically-generated system whose self-perpetuating clichés have suppressed its roots altogether, and records a totalizing system in which characters have become nothing more than a standardized series of signs. What’s left? As a film of its own absences, 1,000 Eyes plays like a parody of Lang’s career-long mission to see better by seeing what isn’t there. By the panoptic universe of 1,000 Eyes, in which everything is visible, and not even a Langian shadow can be found, a spectacular array of entirely unconvincing material can only turn back on itself by becoming, somehow, its own negative.

The Eternal Return Doodad

“In the end, objects bear witness to their producers, who reveal something of themselves in the act of production. But the producers do not appear with their objects. When you look at objects, the people who produce them remain unimaginable. The spectator who understands this becomes unimaginable to himself.”

In the spatio-temporal freefall of the hotel in Jerry Lewis’ The Bellboy (1960), these character-signs become capable of propagating, vanishing, and swapping places like nothing more than masks without an identity underneath; the universe shifts out from them or actualizes their commands at every cut. In that sense, the montage of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is not so different: like shards of collective memories mobilized voluntarily, the image suppress whatever it is that’s not being remembered, somewhere between in their gaps, as they become an infinite loop of flashbacks onto each other, signs without a trace. By The Shining (1980), a haunted hotel, some specter of capitalism, seems to have sublimated all its horrors into the consumer iconography of cartoons and Ed McMahon. As the latter two also center on a homogenous site of eternal luxury erected over one of historical suppression—an Indian burial ground in The Shining, and, more complicated, Dachau’s concentration camp, just six miles outside Resnais’ castle, though never mentioned in a film whose title references a favorite Jewish spa of the 30s, as if the film’s rotating time schemes were shifting in a perpetual pre-war-post-war opulence around the war’s missing center—both partake of similar metageneric conceits, as if genre itself, even enervated to cliché, were a screen image for a trauma that never found any other adequate expression in movies at all.

But it’s probably possible, most clearly, to see post-war German cinema adopting this onus to make a film that could dismantle its own terms, become the object of its own critique—for the filmmaker to quit playing the visionary and play critic instead, to acknowledge one’s inheritance of old mechanisms and try to reveal whatever they’ve suppressed. From Syberberg to Fassbinder to Schroeter to Straub, and between them, from Wagernian opera to stiffly generic social realism, it’s possible to trace souvenirs of old, inescapable ideologies will be adapted as if to exorcise old ghosts: ideologies that at best might appear like beauties incommensurate with the modern world they’ve begotten; and at worst, like modern images of an unchanging infrastructure. But it would be a few German documentarians, most likely divorced from any conscious Mabuse influence, who develop Lang’s late strategies in displacing these images to TV monitors—only to emphasize their inescapability, and their films’ own position as one more image in the system.

In Thomas Harlan’s mock-documentary Wundkanal (1984), an ex-Nazi (played by Albert Filbert, an ex-Nazi himself) being interrogated by revolutionaries that itself stands in for the actual, absent documentary, here, of Harlan interrogating the ex-Nazi Filbert. The self-evident truth-value of any traditional documentary is nowhere permissible here: the truth is rather in how these encounters have been staged. So Harlan’s film mainly lingers on its own staginess, as Filbert gazes off towards his bunker’s TVs, alternately playing Nazi romances and closed-caption footage; Harlan’s camera moves over these, making their movies his own, as if to admit complicity in their systems, even while displacing them to monitors signaling from another world, as if they were channels Harlan can flip through by panning his camera from one to the next. As in 1,000 Eyes, this bunker, with its plain evocation of the last days of Nazism, is a nucleus of collective memories, each suppressing its own history, that marks even its own suppression from the outside world the monitors broadcast in. With the problem of recovering an irrecoverable past is added the problem of coming to grips with the present with only the old terms to do so: a struggle that Wundkanal, however cold, stages just sympathetically enough that human sympathy itself comes to seem like as an abomination.

The panning shots over old movies and photographs in the films of Hartmut Bitomsky move so steadily that they sometimes seem almost unmotivated by any human agency at all. But, as in Lang, they also suggest their own gaps—not only between their relationship to their materials, but within the making of the film itself. From Deutschlandbilder (1984) to Playback (1995), Bitomsky’s great essay films tend to transpire across three levels of filmic timeframes: that of the images being filmed, that of the continuous diegetic time filming them, and that of the production itself which has had to fake a continuous diegesis. The even-paced shrinking of Bitomsky’s cigarettes across shots of Das Kino und der Tod, for example, marks out a narrative time of his discussion of images of cinematic death directly at odds with the disjunctive times of the clock on his wall that indicate when these fragments were filmed, as a continuous screening of 1910s footage across different screens in Playback allows Bitomsky to bridge the moments and materials of his own production (TV sets, 16mm, post-production inserts) through a mock-continuity that mainly stresses the shifts in its own modes. But these “documentary” gaps only point towards the filmmaker’s complicity in staging his images to be caught in certain valences—even as he tries to grapple on-screen with undoing the inscribed readings of genre and propaganda imagery to make it reveal itself to some purer perception. As in Harlan’s glimpses of these monitors-as-portholes, the documentary value lies beyond the cold abstraction of the images themselves, but rather off-screen. This off-screen is suggested both spatially within the shot, as the monitors continue signaling as if from a void, as well as temporally, the montage pointing to the moment of the film’s own production of which the final product bears entirely inadequate traces. In Bitomsky’s films on Nazi propaganda, Reichsautobahn (1986), Der VW-Komplex (1990), and Die UFA (1992), the failure of the images to document its time is turned into the subject of a documentary forcing each of their own images to represent exactly what it’s always tried to suppress; once again, their production’s suppression of itself becomes their fullest meaning. The documentary becomes what isn’t there.

Finally, it’s Harun Farocki—whose proposed dichotomy of operative and propaganda imagery in Eye-Machine (2001-2003) would generate this piece—who lobs Lang’s question back at postwar Germany not only of how society produces its images, but of how images produce society. Farocki’s career might be divided into two types of films, the live-action film and found-footage film, that each implicate themselves in the mechanisms they’re supposed to reveal. Inevitably in the first, in films from Ein Bild (1993, following the operations to stage a Playboy photo) to Interface (1995, Farocki watching and filming himself simultaneously in an editing studio) to Interview (1996, men training to interview by rehearsing a pedagogical naturalness), the subjects will perform to be seen, which is to say that they must watch their own performances as masks to align them as neatly as possible with the fabricated standards of an all-seeing eye that includes Farocki’s film. As spectators, they all take part in this classifying eye that, like Lang’s, can only discern stereotypes and archetypes; the question of whether they’ve erected the eye or the eye has erected them remains secondary to the consideration that postwar systems of behavior have consolidated their command even by promising greater self-determination, interactivity, and interfacing to consumers who perhaps see themselves as freest when driving on a straight-ahead, Nazi-built highway imposed efficiently over its natural surroundings (Wie man sieht, 1986). In Farocki’s found-footage films, the world of signs seems to enact itself free of all human impersonators: from Farocki’s city symphony composed entirely from popular commercials (A Day in the Life of a Consumer, 1993) to his constructivist documentaries on industrial process (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1989; How to Live in the German Federal Republic, 1990), Farocki not only makes a systematic distinction between spectacular consumer propaganda and operational industrial recordings, but one between consumer operations of private industry, “production,” and war operations of the government, “destruction.” What all these images have in common—Farocki is explicit again and again—is their capacity to code any and all historical and physical realities into autonomous signs.

The distinction between the spectacular and the operative becomes a dangerous one, then, for two reasons. First, because, as Adorno had already recognized, not only are spectacles themselves produced according to systemic operations (as in Das Bild), but may be modeled on them. Even quantifying operations can carry spectacular appeal to Enlightenment consumers as a sequence of signs:

“The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quantity of the material processed, which has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience, ceaselessly enforces an archaic representation into sensuous signs. The little silhouettes of men or houses that pervade statistics like hieroglyphics may appear in each particular case accidental, mere auxiliary means. But it is not by chance that they have such a resemblance to countless advertisements, newspaper stereotypes, toys. In them representation triumphs over what is represented. Their outsize, simplistic and therefore false comprehensibility corroborates the incomprehensibility of the intellectual processes themselves, from which their falseness—their blind, unthinking subsumption—is inseparable. The omnipresent images are none, because they present the wholly general, the average, the standard model, as something unique or special, and so deride it… Just as the reflective onlooker, meeting the laughing placard of a toothpaste beauty, discerns in her flashlight grin the grimace of torture, so from every joke, even from every pictorial representation, he is assailed by the death sentence on the subject, which is implicit in the universal triumph of subjective reason” (Minima Moralia 140).

But this only points to the second reason, that the strategies of surveillance themselves become a pornographic spectacle of their own, replacing that of any content of the images themselves: when images connect only to other images, their relationship to any outside reality no longer needs to be repressed but simply overlooked for their value within a scheme. On the occasion of watching Gulf War TV coverage, at best cliché and at worst absent, Serge Daney would note this simple loss of the images’ abilities to capture anything;

“To make life simpler, I decided to make a clear distinction between ‘the image’ and ‘the visual’. The visual would be the optical verification of a purely technical operation. The visual is without reverse shot, it lacks nothing, it is closed, looped, a little like the image of pornographic spectacle, which is only the ecstatic verification of the working of organs (and nothing more). As for the image – this image we loved in cinema to the point of obscenity – the situation would be rather the contrary. The image always takes place at the border of two force fields, it is meant to bear witness to a certain otherness; and although it always has a hard core, it always lacks something. The image is always more and less than itself” (“Montage Obligatory”).

Like Adorno, Daney would conflate the terms of the spectacular and operational: the visual is both a “pornographic spectacle” as well as the “optical verification of a purely technical operation.” Nevertheless, Farocki, treating the Gulf War in Eye-Machine, would still mark the difference between images of surveillance produced by robots for robots—

 “These images lacked plasticity / The human scale was missing / The war soon became forgotten / Industrial production abolishes manual work / and also visual work / The machines perform the task blindly / These images are devoid of social intent / They are not for edification / Not for reflection / In the age of flow production— / images to monitor the predetermined.”

—and images of propaganda:

“A promotional film with music / These images have no operational function.”

Yet by 2012, as the New York MTA was advertising that it was “installing surveillance cameras on 1,150 more buses. Smile.” The great, suppressed image of war exorcised by so many Farocki films—a bomber filming a target, its camera both determining the action and recording it as it happens, writing and reading the reality below it as a single act of “inscription” to ensure it follows the image’s plans—would go widely public, as the IDF posted its assassination of Ahmen Jabari on twitter as propaganda. The image would look like nothing so much as an old, neatly schematized visualization from Frogger or, more recently, Grand Theft Auto.

The Secret of the Open Door

And yet—

Most pivotal in Lang’s orchestrated momentum across shots is the body, even as a vehicle for the montage’s propulsive energy: besides ample dancing girls and leering men, there’s the henchman swiveling on the back of his foot at the start of Testament and, most wonderfully, Howard Vernon rapping his machine gun case with a single roll of his fingers to which Lang’s camera pans down moments before he executes his hit. To the end, Lang embellishes his characters with systematic quirks of movement: Hieronymus B. Mistelzeig’s belly laugh and Cornelius’ slow, summoning hands, betrayed when he instinctively catches a pack of cigarettes before remembering to play blind. Just as distinctly Langian is the notion that these gestures are all characters’ own embellishments of the role they each are playing: an idea that’s probably closer to Shakespeare’s comedies than Farocki’s, and in any case diametrically opposed to the acting of Marienbad or The Shining in which, per Jameson, “these depthless people, whether on their way to the moon, or coming to the end of another season in the great hotel at the end of the world, are standardized and without interest, their rhythmic smiles as habituated as the recurrence of a radio-announcer’s drawn breath” (87). If, as Jameson suggests, there is some historical shift in schtick from the classical era’s idiosyncratic tics, by which characters fashion themselves as individuals, to the post-genre era’s iconographic accoutrements of coffee cups or lumber jack hats (Kubrick, Lynch), typifying their characters as archetypical clichés inheriting culturally-sanctioned roles, 1,000 Eyes can appear like classical cinema’s last breath. Its accreted gestures are expressive for nothing so much as the fact of their existence.

***

But what mobilizes them? So key to Lang’s forward momentum is his conception of every shot as a transition, a hinge from one to the next, at best from one body to another across public spaces, that a sad, historical trajectory could be drawn in the shift from the dance halls, stock markets, and gambling dens at the start of Lang’s career, to the lobbies, stairwells, and glass-window hallways by the end. From spaces designed to be seen at the start of his career, Lang ends with spaces designed to be invisible altogether. And yet he also nearly ends with a character, Mistelzeig, planting himself in the hotel lobby precisely to watch this calculatingly imperceptible space in order to see what it reveals. Lang’s films are full of character’s sights as visionary transmissions—hallucinated sights, conjured sights, recalled sights, enacted sights—but they are not full of characters simply waiting around to see if blandly ingratiating public forums will suddenly throw up their suppressed origins. Mistelzeig, however, has little trouble spotting the suppression behind the most transitional space of all: the elevator, with its basement floor unmarked. Mistelzeig’s lesson here, that all it might take to oppose a homogenizing system is to see what it is doing, is as much the film’s throughout—the film does no more in the end than watch him watching.

***

Characters disappear into its open doors, Mistelzeig realizes, without coming out; the doors open onto emptiness. For all the permeable spaces of this hotel, the doors of the elevator hide something terrible, for once in Lang, not by being closed, but by being open. So a cut nagged at me with some power I couldn’t quite place: a gunshot in the control room to the elevator doors opening to an empty space above. This cut from sudden violence to a tidy world above, veiled even by its semblance of transparency, returns at long last traditional Langian counterpoints as violence is unrooted from within the system—against it. And as usual in Lang, the cut is motivated by a transitional shift in space as the elevator returns from the lower realm of the gunfight to the lobby above. As a structuring device, the elevator, probably a symbol of corporate anonymity for any other director, here becomes far more crucial than the somewhat superfluous control room. All the final twists will transpire here: the lovers will be spied on and caught as Travers mistakes the elevator for a private space where he can talk; the non-Mabuse will unmask himself in the oversized elevator mirror to reveal an anonymous man underneath; and Mistelzeig, who’s also not Mistelzeig but an agent, will unravel the system. It’s precisely the space that characters think they can control that traps them; when its doors are open, it conceals the subterranean action, while when its doors are closed, it unveils its passengers to a network of spies. Like the elevator of Pedro Costa’s Sweet Exorcist (2012) many years later, it is the ultimate collective space as repressive space, where people gather to say nothing. Mistelzeig defeats the system, however, by letting loose Mabuse’s German Shepherd. Breaking all these designs, thankfully, is this dog, like Ulysses’, who has no sense of masks, or of the reification of the sign, or of capitalism’s suppression of its own production, but knows his owner’s scent, unlike any of the humans, and comes running.

With very special thanks to Sam Di Iorio, Ken Jacobs, Joe McElhaney, Ashley Swinnerton, and Gina Telaroli.

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Ed. Gretel Adorno. Trans. Robert Huillot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Print.

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. 1951. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974. Print.

Bellour, Raymond. “On Fritz Lang.” SubStance 3.9 (1974): 25-34. Print.

Bellour, Raymond. “Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock.” A Companion to Fritz Lang. Ed. Joe McElhaney. Trans. David Phelps. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. Print.

Brenez, Nicole. “Symptom, Exhibition, Anxiety.” A Companion to Fritz Lang. Ed. Joe McElhaney. Trans. David Phelps. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. Print.

Butler, Erik. “Dr. Mabuse: Terror and Deception of the Image.” The German Quarterly 78.4 (2005): 481-495.

Crary, Jonathan. “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison.” Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. Ed. Kerry Brougher. New York: Monacelli Press, 1996. 262-279. Print.

Daney, Serge. “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.” Chronicle of a Passion, n.d. Trans. Steve Erickson. Web. 11 March 2013.

Daney, Serge. “Montage Obligatory: The War, the Gulf and the Small Screen.” Rouge 8. Trans. Laurent Kretzshmar and Rouge. Web. 11 March 2013.

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Print.

Hall, Sara. "Trading Places: "Dr. Mabuse" and the Pleasure of Role Play." The German Quarterly 76.4 (2003): 381-97. Print.

Kalat, David. The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2001. Print.

Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Historicism in The Shining.” Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990. 82-98. Print.

McElhaney, Joe. The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Print.

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[1] See also Bellour’s “On Fritz Lang”: “There is one strictly univocal manner of framing a character's vision: to enclose the shot of the seen object between two identical shots of the seeing subject. Lang seldom does more than indicate the possibility of such certitude, and then only to challenge it immediately and to plunge it into an equivocality” (28).

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DAVID PHELPS

quarta-feira, 14 de janeiro de 2015

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