Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

Introduction

1 Movies are crowd machines. They doubtless do other things as well, but most of them excel at gathering crowds and presenting images of them. Like all mass media, film creates, communicates with, and represents masses. Having seen specific movies and having opinions about them constitutes an all-but-indispensable credential for joining or counting oneself among certain groups. Obviously, all films made in hopes of wide distribution seek to attract audiences; that is, to generate crowds. Film companies, stars, directors, and the industry at large desire not only to attract as large an audience as possible but also to maintain it through time, to keep people coming back. A great many films prominently represent crowds in their plots, sounds, and images. Within moving pictures, indeed, the representation of crowds is commonplace, and the stories of many narrative films, like other stories, establish for the protagonists a central goal of joining, creating, or restoring a sympathetic crowd. Even movies that lack crowds frequently make implicit appeals to a fictional crowd off-camera or to an assumed real audience in the theater. Simultaneously, films invoke crowds through the sort of imagery that Elias Canetti called “crowd symbols,” multitudinous natural or man-made objects like flocks of birds, forests, or rows of houses.1 Both through crowd symbols and through direct representations of masses of people, cinema shows its audiences reflections of themselves (however idealized or otherwise distorted), not just as individuals but also as groups. As Canetti discovered in creating his monumental Crowds and Power (the central ideas of which loom large in this study), to discuss crowds in a revealing way one needs to understand their psyIntroduction INTRODUCTION 2 chological and social components. As regards the psychology of crowds, Canetti inquired what in the human psyche makes crowds possible and what other expressions those psychic predispositions might produce. His answers, respectively, supply the other two central concerns of this study: transformation and power. Transformation , the imaginative ability to feel oneself as another, makes possible one of the fundamental qualities of all crowds, equality. In a crowd, Canetti writes, “Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body” (16). There is no difference of station, status, age, or even sex. The ultimate motive for the formation of crowds, the deep fear that all humans have of suffering an unknown, unexpected touch, can give rise not only to the impulse to form crowds but, pathologically, to a profoundly dangerous alternative response, the drive to seek and exercise power. I go into these matters more deeply in the afterword on Crowds and Power, but for the moment the point is that Canetti’s comprehension of crowds cannot be separated from his ideas of transformation and power. Those concepts are as important to crowds as understanding mediums of transmission and the possibility of distortion are to the reproduction of music. As regards social contexts, for Canetti they are extremely broad, encompassing all the human societies with which this massively erudite man was acquainted and extending into their most durable institutions. The variations that masses exhibit in different times and places are critical to completing the picture of crowds as a fundamental human quality. The basic kinds of crowds and their metamorphoses from one kind to another may be especially well seen in the precursor of crowds, namely, packs. The twentieth century, by many accounts the century of the crowd, was also a century of motion pictures, encompassing virtually all the history of cinema and its growth into a dominant global medium. Movies are so full of crowds that one is tempted to suppose that cinema is suited by its very materials to their representation . So thought Felix Mesguich, a cameraman for Lumière, about “the true domain of the cinema,” in which he prominently includes “the crowd and its eddies.”2 Siegfried Kracauer, to whom I owe the Mesguich quotation, notes “the attraction which masses exerted on still and motion picture cameras from the outset,”3 and Stanley Cavell writes of “film’s . . . natural attraction to crowds.”4 My wife, a painter, imagines the pleasure of early photographers when they understood that they could portray multitudes of people without having to invent and draw each individual. A some- INTRODUCTION 3 time photographer, I visualize the rushing, jerky stream of individual exposures—approximately 150,000 to 175,000 for feature films of average length—along with the clumps...