The Heart Machine: "Rhythm" and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang's Metropolis

"Schließlich gibt es ja auch nur ein Thema. Alle Milliarden von bunten und wirbelnden Erscheinungen des Daseins sind nur Variationen des einen Themas vom Leben, vom Lebensrhythmus!"

—Gerrit Engelke, Gottheit, Zeit und Ich (1913).

Introduction

When the Austrian critic René Fülöp-Miller set out to account for the increasing appeal of Hollywood film in his 1931 study Die Phantasiemaschine (The Fantasy Machine), one explanation that seemed to lie ready-at-hand was that of film's "optical rhythms" (optische Rhythmik). Pointing both to the physiological rhythm constituted by the succession of twenty-four frames per second and to the rhythms represented on the screen, Fülöp-Miller argued that rhythm in the cinema acted as a subliminal, suggestive force: "How difficult it is to turn your eyes from the screen!"² But while the cinema might represent a new technology, its irresistible rhythms in fact constituted a modern manifestation of a much more primitive and vital Urrhythmus, a primal rhythm that had animated all art forms from Homeric times to the present: "From the dawn of time, the primal rhythm created by the embrace of the sexes has brought forth all art, and this primal rhythm is now said to celebrate its resurrection—in a form corresponding to our own epoch—in film."³

For anyone familiar with the discussions of avant-garde filmmakers and critics from the 1920s, Fülöp-Miller's euphoric celebration of filmic rhythm no doubt evokes a whole host of utopian associations. Like other key concepts from the early cinema debates such as that of a "universal language" or an art of "hieroglyphs," the notion of cinema as an art of "rhythm" was suffused with the sorts of progressive aspirations that broadly defined what Gilles Deleuze called the cinema of the "movement image" in the years before the Second World War.⁴ By the time Fülöp-Miller published Die Phantasiemaschine (1931), the notion of film as an art of rhythm already had a long history among the filmic avant-garde of the 1920s. Most specifically, as Standish Lawder demonstrated in his seminal book The Cubist Cinema, it emerged in the wake of Abel Gance's 1922 film La roue, in which Gance and then editor, Blaise Cendrars, introduced the accelerated montage sequences that would come to characterize French filmmaking throughout the decade.⁵ For younger filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Fernand Léger and Marcel L'Herbier, the real "story" of La roue lay not in the narrative of a train conductor's illicit desire for his adoptive daughter, but rather in the film's rhythmical editing itself, which they saw as a demonstration of the cinema's unique ability to capture modern experience. Léger, in particular, as Lawder has shown, seems to have drawn upon the montage of the train in La roue for his own famous experiments in rhythmical filmmaking in Ballet mécanique (1924), in which the rhythmical movements of human bodies and industrial objects are juxtaposed in an effort to underscore "the reaction of man to his mechanical environment."⁶

Certainly, the appeal exerted by the very fantasy of a rhythmical cinema on avant-garde artists stemmed in large part from a problem of legitimacy: the cinema's ability to visualize movement differentiated it not only from literature, but also from painting and static photography and so seemed to offer a key to claiming a unique aesthetic domain. This desire to construct a specificity of cinematic aesthetics has often been cited to explain the vehemence with which directors sought to valorize abstract form over concrete content, defining avant-garde cinema effectively as an anti-mimetic art and severing it from the realm of referentiality. But the excitement about "rhythm" in the 1920s cannot be explained by aesthetic concerns alone. In what follows, I wish to show this by examining the relationship between "rhythm" as a term of filmic aesthetics and a much broader discussion of rhythm, the body and modernity in the early 20^th century. While such a cultural...