Dust to Dust: The Figure-Ground Problem of Readymade Realism in Film

The Age of Insight, Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.