On Not Knowing Knausgaard

The Ghost in the Machine

My children were the first to notice the trucks pulling into a lot that stands empty throughout most of the year. Soon the space was filled with beams painted a chipping blue and cords to carry electricity and, in the course of a day, the summer carnival appeared out of dust. We bought our tickets and I watched them strapping themselves into seats, gripping grimy bars, and looking around until the machines began to move and whirl amid the moving lights, color, and sound. Their expressions tightened with waiting as the machine lifted or swung until it stopped and went the other way. At the center of an oscillating platform, the wheels and pistons were at work, tracing and retracing the circumference that was carved into the metal for them. The rotating cycle of the Ferris wheel lit up the sky. Everything that was put together to make this motion would be taken apart tomorrow and, by the afternoon, gone once again.

The spectacle reminded me of Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt (1927), the silent composition of a city pared down to its elements of motion with a special fixation upon mechanical speed. The film, in five acts, spans a day and begins with the empty streets of early morning, moving through an array of unscripted objects, animals, and people at work with their everyday activities. Machines that hardly look as though they belong to the early 20^th century mass-produce bottles, as the early morning cattle are herded through factory doors to produce the milk that will fill them. Children with satchels walk alone to school. Fat dachshunds hustle across streets with their owners while house servants with kerchiefs across their heads and mouths beat hanging oriental rugs with brooms. Zoo animals pace the concrete or lie upon it with resignation. Grotesque personifications canvas the streets hawking household wares or wave for attention from shop windows. The well-heeled dine upon buffets, as a mother with children on the street looks on, a man on a ledge sleeps, and women with cloches so low you cannot see their eyes clip by, holding the arms of their lovers. A German shepherd rests from pulling a cart as newspapers whip through reels and are packaged and sealed—everything is done with efficiency and speed, and everything is fine but for a suicide (whose face with its staring eyes is the closest we come to anyone’s in the film) who jumps into the Spree and disappears as a crowd gathers above with passing interest before each is swept back into the current of motion crossing the bridge. A few images provide counterpoint—a whirling bag drifting in the wind, leaves tracing spirals across the sidewalk, the river gently featuring empty boats, streetlamps in early evening—but these are exceptions to the general velocity of the piece. Races proliferate: horseraces, rowing races, swimming races, dog races, ski races, though we are never permitted to watch long enough to see the victors emerge. The night is filled with characters who could be on their way to their own anticipations of Der blaue Engel. The view is impersonal throughout, striving for omniscience, reliant upon chance, largely apolitical, secular, and preoccupied with the expressive qualities of ordinary things.

About 90 years before this, Karl Ove Knausgaard reminds us in a meditation from Autumn: Letter to an Unborn Daughter, Louis Daguerre captures the first image of a human being in a photograph. From his room overlooking the Boulevard du Temple, Daguerre took a photograph of the busy daytime street below him. Are we, Knausgaard asks, to think of the photographer’s work as a distant gesture toward God’s viewpoint for a secular world—a new form of omniscience to replace the old? Not so: the difference is the division between the scene Daguerre saw unfolding below him and what would ultimately be recorded upon the plate inside his camera. Due to the long exposure time, the image featured only the motionless objects of the street scene—buildings, trees, lampposts—and at...