Repressed Light: Cinema, Technics, and the Uncanny

Before electric light was what Marshall McLuhan would call "pure information," audiences were taught to see light.¹ When Thomas Edison debuted the incandescent bulb in Menlo Park in December 1880 after several years of experimentation, it was a grand display.² For days in advance, newspaper articles and advertisements directed attention to the newest marvel from the inventor of the phonograph, promising an event that would make incandescent light personally visible to a large public, a calculated gamble on Edison's part because the system was still in development but one well worth taking, in the eyes of the showman, in the effort to impress the hearts and minds of the buying masses. Through the publicity and experimental displays at Menlo Park and later in several world capitals, people were made to see electric light. Electric light was in effect all they could see, and they saw it for its star quality, for its contrast to gaslight.³

Ten years later in May 1891 at Edison's West Orange Laboratory, 147 members of the National Federation of Women's Clubs of America had the privilege of being the first public to peer through a small aperture in a pine box and see a succession of moving images.⁴ It probably hardly occurred to these first moviegoers to take notice of the electric lights illuminating the demonstration room. Only ten years after the light bulb had been a deliberate sensation, it was for all intents and purposes invisible. The extent of this invisibility comes into focus when we consider the virtual invisibility of even the brilliant signage on a theater marquee when it announces the name of the theater and the coming attraction. More immediately, though, it probably hardly occurred to even the earliest film spectators, let alone modern filmgoers, that electric light stands behind every film projection.⁵ Such is the story of the light bulb that even as its reach expanded, even as it illuminated all these new contents, its fame diminished. The more light it shed, the more invisible it became.

For one very famous filmgoer, however, the light bulb erupted uncannily in the movies in the form of its opposite. Against the life-affirming astonishment felt by many in the early film experience, Maxim Gorky saw instead shadows:

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.⁶

The light bulb's passage from spectacle to familiarity opened up the unique technical possibility of a return whereby the medium's entry into movement showed forth one of its component technologies, reversing on its familiar luminescence in the figure of shadows. As Gorky sat in the darkness of Charles Aumont's tent that day in 1896 at the Nizhny-Novgorod All-Russian Exhibition, the shadows he saw forming a kingdom of specters were, among all the shadows in cinema, those at the very basis of photography as, literally, writing with light. In a recent and foundational essay on the shadow in cinema, Jacques Aumont explains of the early films by Auguste and Louis Lumière that the capturing of movement also necessarily entailed the capturing of "a luminous situation, with all its details and accidents": "The Lumière brothers wanted to fix movement with the Cinématographe; they fixed it in a photographic image. They were not mistaken in wanting to write motion; but at the same time, they also wrote light."⁷ Thus, when Gorky reassures himself in his review with the comforting idea that the passing train he sees "is but a train of shadows,"⁸ he is right to say that he indulges not at all in symbolism: the projected images he recounts were nothing other...