Document View

Grasping allegory as a semiotic process that simultaneously engages in self-reference and reference to other representations, Andriopoulos undertakes a contextualized reading of Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Galigari" and of Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. He traces the intermedial appropriation of medical theories in these films, showing how the filmic representations of hypnosis function as allegory.

n the 18th of April 1921 Victor Klemperer notes in his diary: "Been to the cinema twice already. On Thursday with Eva in the elegant Prinzesstheater. The drama itself-the most popular subject: crime and suggestion. The criminal's eye in a single shot, enlarged, the one eye, as the piece was called `The One-Eyed Man."1

These brief remarks on a now-forgotten film allude to the decisive role of the close-up within the cinematic representation of hypnosis. In addition to this, however, Klemperer's description of "crime and suggestion" as "the most popular subject" of early cinema documents the astonishing number of films that represent the "tremendous power of suggestion" (die ungeheure Macht der Suggestion).2 In enacting "hypnotic fascination," Maurice Tourneur's Trilby (1915), Louis Feuillades's Les yeux qui fascinent (1916), Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919), Arthur Robison's Schatten. Eine nachtliche Halluzination (1922), Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and Rex Ingram's The Magician (1926) testify to a structural affinity between cinema and hypnotism in the early twentieth century.

Grasping allegory as a semiotic process that simultaneously engages in selfreference and reference to other (visual or discursive) representations, I undertake in this essay a contextualized reading of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler-a reading that, in tracing the intermedial appropriation of medical theories in these films, also shows how the filmic representations of hypnosis function as allegories of early cinema itself. Concurrently, a close reading of contemporary medical representations of suggestion uncovers within the medical discussions of hypnosis an implicit theory of film already formulated at the end of the nineteenth century.

On the level of cinematic diegesis, the "most popular subject" of criminal suggestion appropriates an intensive medical and legal debate, which produced a flood of publications on The Forensic Significance of Suggestion between 1885 and 1900.3 Above all, the so-called "school of Nancy" conjured the "terrifying specter of hypnotic crime" (das Schreckgespenst des hypnotischen Verbrechens).4 In contrast to Charcot, the leading representative of that school, Hippolyte Bernheim did not conceive of the process of hypnosis as a somatic epiphenomenon of hysteria. Instead, he believed it to be a general psychological mechanism relying on the mental process of suggestion. In a circular equation of both categories, Bernheim writes: "I prefer to define hypnosis in a different manner, namely as the creation of a specific psychological state of heightened suggestibility. [. . .] The decisive factor, the essence of hypnosis is suggestion."5 Bernheim's theories were imported into Germany mainly by Albert Moll and August Forel, who-like Bernheim-described the "rapport" between the hypnotist and the hypnotized person as a relationship in which the hypnotist had unlimited power over his medium. That power could go so far as to force the hypnotized person to commit crimes against his or her own will. Given the lack of definitely proven cases of crimes committed under hypnosis, numerous physicians staged fictitious "hypnotic crimes" in order to prove their feasibility:

I gave a revolver, loaded with blank bullets by Mister Hofelt, to an elderly man, whom I had just hypnotized. Pointing at H., I explained to the hypnotized person that H. was an evil man, whom he ought to shoot. With great determination, he picked up the revolver and fired straight at Mister H. Mister H. fell over, simulating an injured man. I then explained to the hypnotized that the guy was not quite dead yet, he should fire another shot at him, which he did without hesitation.6

In addition to Forel, the physicians Bernheim, Beaunis, Schrenck-Notzing, and the young Arthur Schnitzler staged similar "performances" (Vorstellungen)7 to prove the possibility of hypnotic crimes to their largely juridical audiences. Forel saw an even greater danger in so-called posthypnotic suggestions, which would be enacted after awaking from hypnosis. According to Forel, these posthypnotic suggestions would allow for a crime and its execution at a specific time to be "implanted," while creating the illusion of a "free-willed decision." The hypnotized person, then, would believe to be acting on his or her own accord while executing the previously dictated crime: "One of the most intricate ruses of suggestion consists in date-entry combined with the simultaneous implantation of amnesia and free-willed decision, in order to force a person to carry out a criminal act. He then finds himself in circumstances that delude him and all others into believing in his free will, and yet he is acting purely on the command of another person."8

The belief in the possibility of perfectly camouflaged suggestions produced the paranoia that there might be an unlimited number of unknown hypnotic crimes, which simply could not be recognized as such. Simultaneously, the members of the school of Nancy relied on literary case-stories which, along with staged fake crimes, became further pseudoempirical pieces of evidence, replacing real cases. Only Charcot and his disciples questioned the possibility of "criminal suggestion," denouncing the case-stories that circulated in medicine and literature as "unclear and unscientific narratives" or as "novel."9

After 1900, scientific interest in the "uncanny" phenomenon of hypnosis subsided,10 due to the emergence of psychoanalysis and a renewed focus on physiology within the medical field. In the course of World War I, however, hypnosis and suggestion resurfaced in connection with the treatment of "war neuroses" and shell shock. That resurgence of hypnotism manifested itself in the reprinting of Forel's and Moll's medical textbooks, as well as in the literature of the fantastic.11 Books such as Gustav Meyrink's Der weisse Dominikaner (1921) or Bachem-Tonger's Im Banne der Hypnose (1922) continued and expanded on that novel of hypnotic crime that had emerged at the borderlines of law, literature, and medicine in the late nineteenth century.

I

The extent to which cinematic representations of criminal suggestions relied on the medical debates on hypnotic crimes becomes especially evident in Robert Wiene's famous film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919). The first scene of the film shows, in a medium shot, two men with white faces, sitting on a bench. As if referring to his own status as a "phantom" on the screen,12 the older man says to Franzis: "There are ghosts-they are all around us." A female figure dressed in white appears, gliding past the two men in a somnambulist trance, and is referred to by Franzis as his "bride." "What I experienced with her is much stranger still than what you experienced-I will tell you all about it."13 And the camera cuts to the angled scenery of a small town made of papier-mache.

From the start, the film makes clear that the moving images on the screen are simulations similar to "phantom(s)" or "vision(s)."14 Furthermore, the interior plot proves to be a second-order simulation: The spectator watches the unreliable narrative told by Franzis, who concurrently appears as a protagonist. The pronounced artificiality of the decoration, in which both frame and interior plot unfold, equally undercuts realistic conventions. Painted shadows, strangely distorted rooms, and dagger-shaped windows construct a cinematic space of paranoia and distrust. In this manner the film creates an artificial world that matches precisely those hallucinations produced by the French physician Bernheim in his hypnotized patients through verbal suggestion-hallucinations that, according to Bernheim, "populate" the imagination of the hypnotized person as "phantoms and chimaeras."15

In another reference to its own status as spectacle, the film features the showman Caligari displaying a clairvoyant somnambulist at the fairground in the small town of Holstenwall. Aside from freak shows and cabarets exhibiting somnambulists, the fairground was also the site of the early "cinema of attractions," which toured from city to city.16 In these so-called Wanderkinos it was not an elaborate plot but, rather, the "perfection" of the cinematographic apparatus itself that chained the attention of the "spellbound" audience.17

Caligari awakens his hypnotized medium Cesare from a state of lethargy into a state of somnambulism before the audience's eyes. In this state, Cesare becomes "a veritable automaton."18 The androgynous medium moves like a marionette pulled by invisible strings. Cesare's widely dilated eyes remind the spectator of Hofmannsthal's stage directions in Elektra: "Clytamnestra's eyes and lids appear over-- dimensionally large, and it seems to require a great effort on her part to keep them open."19 Furthermore, the representation of Cesare's "awakening" corresponds to Charcot's medical nosography of hypnotism, which underscores the opened eyes of sleepwalkers in both artificial and spontaneous somnambulism.20 Under Caligari's suggestive influence, Franzis's friend Alan asks Cesare how much longer he has to live. The clairvoyant medium answers, "Until Dawn."21

A "chain of mysterious crimes" ensues, committed not by the initial suspect but by Caligari's somnambulist medium Cesare. Franzis pursues the fleeing showman to an insane asylum to discover in shock that Caligari and the director of the asylum are one and the same. While Dr. Caligari is asleep, Franzis and three other doctors search his office and discover a book. The title page is shown on screen and reads: "Somnambulism. An anthology by the University of Upsala. Published in 1726." Franzis skims the book and comes across the following story, shown on title-cards in the film:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

In the year 1703, a mystic by the name of Dr. Caligari, together with a somnambulist called Cesare, roamed the fairgrounds in northern Italy and for months he kept town after town in a state of panic by a series of murders, all of them perpetrated in similar circumstances ... for he forced a somnambulist, whom he had entirely subjected to his will, to carry out his fantastic plans.22

The story within the story, which seems to clarify the previous turns of the interior plot, proves to be a clear reference to those "fantastic narratives" that were produced by late-nineteenth-century medical discourse on the question of hypnotic crimes.23 Interspersed flashbacks show in detail how the director of the insane asylum develops the compulsive idea of transforming himself into the historical figure of Caligari. "You must become Caligari," claims an autosuggestion repeatedly visualized in the film by letters that run through the actual screen image.

The peculiar reversal to writing, which does not remain limited to the usual intertitles, shows to what degree the visual sign system of the film relies on the medical and literary narratives on hypnotic crimes. Yet in addition to appropriating the "novel" of hypnotic crime, Wiene's film also refers to "the strange spectacle" (das selfsame Schauspiel) of criminal suggestions that were artificially staged by late-nineteenth-century physicians.24

While the doctors of medicine Hippolyte Bernheim and August Forel regarded their experiments with wooden daggers and blank bullets as authentic evidence for the possibility of criminal suggestions, Sigmund Freud's review of Forel's Der Hypnotismus discarded these experiments as "fake crimes" (Scheinverbrechen), lacking any scientific merit.25 In the same way, the German psychiatrist Binswanger criticized such experiments as "childish show-pieces" (kindliche Schaustucke), allowing no real-life conclusions: One hands the hypnotized woman a wooden paper-knife and commands her to stab the supposed opponent. One lets loved relatives be poisoned with powdered sugar. The patients perform these acts with a greater or lesser resistance, during hypnosis or under the influence of such criminal suggestions for a shorter or longer period after leaving the state of hypnosis. What we are dealing with are invented crimes, whose purely dramatic meaning [rein schauspielerische Bedeutung] the hypnotized persons fully grasp.26

Binswanger's accusation that the hypnotized mediums are very much able to discern between true and invented crimes was seconded by Fuchs, Gilles de la Tourette, and Delboeuf, for whom "these arranged dramas [ ...] lack truth and fail to delude the actor just as much as the audience and the inventor."27

The theatricality of the staged hypnotic crime was therefore conceded by Bernheim for the cases of "certain somnambulists." According to Bernheim, those cases in which the somnambulist is aware that the doctor "merely performs a spectacle with him" differ, however, from other cases in which the sleeping person can no longer distinguish between performance and reality.28 The accusation of mere simulation that was mounted by his critics was further increased in its complexity by Bernheim. Since it was impossible to conduct experiments that ended with dead bodies, simulations were unavoidable. Yet, according to Bernheim, there existed the possibility of second-order simulations. That means that the hypnotized person clings to the belief of performing the suggested action merely as a favor to the hypnotist. However, despite a belief in his or her free will, the hypnotized medium nonetheless lacks the ability to resist the criminal suggestion: "There are many people who believe not to have been influenced, because they remember hearing everything, they truly believe to have been simulating, and one faces a great challenge in convincing them that they did not possess the freedom not [sic] to simulate".29

This perfect immunization enabled Bernheim to reveal the semblance of freedom as a second-order simulation or, in effect, as a simulation of simulation. Medical experiments cannot circumvent the status of simulation. But, according to Bernheim, the hypnotized mediums are forced into dissimulation, thereby attesting to the unlimited power of hypnosis. They "did not possess the freedom, not to simulate." It therefore remains undecidable whether the staged hypnotic crime is merely a scientifically useless spectacle, or whether it has to be considered an authentic proof, which paradoxically consists in second-order simulation. This undecidability becomes the structuring principle of Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. There, the final scenes of the film make clear that the narrator and protagonist Franzis is actually an inmate of the insane asylum under the auspices of the Caligari figure. Franzis's story might thus be nothing more than a maniac's paranoid hallucination.

This differend between interior plot and external frame is by no means a glorification of authoritarian violence, transforming an initially "revolutionary" screenplay into a "conformist" affirmation of totalitarian power, as it has been interpreted by Siegfried Kracauer.30 Rather, the complex narrative structure of Wiene's Caligari functions as a metacommentary on those artificially staged "fake crimes," whose status remains equally undecidable, as they are only enacted with blank bullets and wooden daggers. On the level of interior plot, Caligari implements the medical dream of the real, truly scientific experiment that "ends with dead bodies," thus undeniably proving the unlimited power of hypnosis.31 Aside from the scientific treatise on somnambulism, Franzis finds a diary in Caligari's office in which the director of the asylum lauds the admission of a somnambulist: "Now I will solve the psychiatric secret of that Caligari!! Now I will fathom, whether it is true that a somnambulist can be forced into performing certain actions, which he would never commit while awake.... whether it is true that a somnambulist can be driven all the way to murder."32

The question of whether hypnotic crimes are actually possible remained unsolvable for the physicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as their experiments could not circumvent the status of simulation: "You can see how diverging the opinions on this question are currently. A question which, for easily comprehensible reasons, could not be resolved through one decisive experiment:"33 Doctor Caligari, in contrast, conducts the "decisive experiment" that seeks to resolve this question, by driving a somnambulist all the way to murder. He carries out the trial that haunts late-nineteenth-century medicine as a cultural fantasy, thus giving rise to the peculiar interpretation of an accident in the Salpetriere: When Bernheim's critic Gilles de la Tourette is attacked and severely injured by a female patient of the Salpetriere in 1892, the rumor immediately arises that the attack was in fact a real hypnotic crime, intended to prove to the skeptic Tourette the possibility of criminal suggestions: "The attack performed against Mr. Gilles de la Tourette has incited the most diverse commentaries. Among other things, it is said that our venerated colleague was the victim of a `criminal suggestion' intended to convince him of the possibility of realizing similar suggestions."34

In having the city secretary and Alan murdered by his medium, Caligari brings forth an undeniable proof that ought to convince all skeptics-a proof that is called into question again, however, as frame and interior plot denounce each other, in parallel fashion, as paranoid hallucinations. While the medical spectacle of the staged hypnotic crime oscillates between first-order and second-order simulation, in Wiene's film it remains uncertain whether it is Franzis or Caligari who is insane. Franzis's claim that the asylum's director is insane and that he himself is not is just as credible as the director's assurance that he will heal his deluded patient. This differend cannot be resolved by a coherent interpretation that arrives at a "correct" decision.35 Instead, the tension between interior plot and frame functions as a self-referential allegory, commenting on the undecidable status of those medical simulations out of which the film emerges. The undecidability inherent to the medical spectacle of simulated hypnotic crimes is transformed into a conflict between frame and interior plot. Simultaneously, the paradoxical narrative structure of Wiene's Caligari can be read as a self-reference to the suspension of disbelief produced by the suggestive power of film. In Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, that self-reference to the hypnotic effects of cinematography becomes even more evident.

II

Norbert Jacques's serial novel Dr Mabuse, der Spieler initially appeared in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, which, as a result of the story's publication, reached its highest circulation since the paper's founding. Upon its publication in February 1922, the book became one of Ullstein Publishing's greatest successes. The number of copies sold exceeded half a million.36 Fritz Lang's adaptation of Jacques's novel-that is, the transition from literature to film-enabled an increase in complexity: In a metacinematic turn, Lang's film comments on the peculiar parallels between visual cinematic simulation and the hypnotic production of visual hallucinations, as practiced predominantly by Bernheim.

In contrast to Wiene's Caligari, Lang's Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) does not introduce the scientific belief in the possibility of criminal suggestions by displaying a book.37 Instead, Mabuse gives a lecture, in one of his numerous disguises, entitled "Psychoanalysis as a Factor in Modern Medicine." In this lecture, Mabuse equates the transference between patient and analyst with hypnotic rapport: "If I succeed in establishing the contact between doctor and patient in such a way as to completely exclude all disturbing external influences, then I am absolutely convinced that in the future, 80% of all neurological diseases will be cured through psychoanalysis."

A review from April 1922 rightly points out that the film "abolishes the differences between suggestion, hypnosis and psychoanalysis."38 Nevertheless, Fritz Lang's and Norbert Jacques's perverse reading of psychoanalysis strikes a vulnerable chord in analytic therapy. According to Freud, "transference," in which the "unconscious thoughts" of the patient "relate to the doctor,"39 forms the functional equivalent (Gegenstuck) to the hypnotic rapport, which Freud himself describes as "Alleinschatzung des Hypnotiseurs," as the exclusive attention paid to the hypnotist by his hypnotized medium.40 Yet, it is not only the therapeutic effects of suggestion that rely on such an exclusion of disturbing external influences. After all, the success of Mabuse's criminal suggestions also becomes possible through an "Alleinschatzung," or "exclusive attention." This process is presented to the spectator in a compelling manner in the fourth hypnosis scene of the film, in which Dr. Mabuse hypnotizes the disguised District Attorney Wenk with a pair of shining glasses and the magic word "Tsi-Nan-Fu."

The camera initially establishes the confrontation between Wenk and Mabuse, thereafter assuming primarily Wenk's perspective while Mabuse enters into "contact" with him. For a few seconds, an extreme and dramatically side-lit close-up shows Mabuse's eyes, taking up or controlling Wenk's entire field of vision. After a short cut to Mabuse's assistants, who admonish each other to watch the procedure with great attention, another shot of Mabuse follows. The background around Mabuse's brightly lit head gradually fades out-a striking visualization of the complete exclusion of "disturbing external influences." Mabuse's eyes fix on Wenk and the audience respectively, as his head moves forward until it occupies the entire screen. His hypnotic command "YOU TAKE!" appears as an intertitle that also becomes increasingly large and irresistible.

Fritz Lang's use of close-up and point-of-view shots forces the spectator to identify with Mabuse's hypnotized victim. The filmic representation of hypnosis is transformed into a celebration of the hypnotic power of film-an effect which is not only pointed out by Raymond Bellour,41 but already emphasized by the initial reviews, printed one day after the film's opening night. Accordingly, Eugen Tannenbaum writes in the Berliner Zeitung: "Surprising also the way in which Dr. Mabuse's hypnotizing gaze subjects not only his victims but also the audience to his powers."42

That "Mabuse's power of suggestion is transferred directly onto the audience"43 stems from Lang's combination of camera perspective and camera movement, which elevate Mabuse's eyes to the sole center of attention for the audience. Lang employs a genuinely filmic mode of representing the exclusive attention paid to the hypnotist by the hypnotized person. That mode of representation, which is not available to any other medium but film, is anticipated to a certain extent in Louis Feuillade's Les yeux qui fascinent (1916). At one point in Feuillade's film, a medium-close shot shows the criminal and hypnotist Moreno, who stares into the camera, thus directly addressing the audience with his "terrible hypnotic power."44 Yet, the subsequent hypnotization of the helpless victim Laure is only filmed in profile, thereby precluding the identification of audience and hypnotized medium that is produced by Lang's extended employment of point-of-view shots. Thus it almost seems as if, aside from Feuillade's film, Fritz Lang relied on the instructions given for a cinematic representation of hypnosis in Hugo Munsterberg's The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916). In his treatise, Munsterberg defines the close-up as the cinematic equivalent of the mental process of attention. "If we see on the screen a man hypnotized in the doctor's office," writes Munsterberg, "the patient himself may lie there with closed eyes, nothing in his features expressing his emotional setting and nothing radiating to us. But if now only the doctor and the patient remain unchanged and steady, while everything else in the whole room begins [. . .] to move and to change its form more and more rapidly so that a feeling of dizziness comes over us and an uncanny ghastly unnaturalness overcomes the whole surrounding of the hypnotized person, we ourselves become seized by the strange emotion."45 In 1916, Munsterberg ascribed these possibilities oa a cinematic representation of hypnosis that concurrently hypnotizes its audience to the future of the "photo-play." Six years later, Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler compellingly enacts these hypnotic effects of cinema.

Departing from Lang's Mabuse, the French film theoretic ian Bellour postulates a universal, seemingly timeless relationship between film and hypnosis by describing filmic representations of hypnosis as "manifestations of a fundamental relationship between the cinematographic and the hypnotic apparatus."46 Fritz Lang's film, however, refers to a historically specific interrelation of cinema and hypnosis, which can be captured more precisely by engaging in a cultural history of medicine and cinema around 1900. Bellour's purely "formalist" parallel between the hypnotic and cinematic simulation appears more forceful than the frequently strained analogy between film and dream. However, his abstract argument is informed by a totalizing tendency, which becomes particularly evident in his equation of Lang's Mabuse with Jacques Tourneur's The Curse of the Demon (1957).47 Yet in order to historicize and particularize the interaction between the emergence of cinema and hypnotism, it is necessary to combine a formalist analysis that is attuned to the visuality of filmic images with a contextualizing exploration of contemporary discursive representations. For it is only by investigating the intermedial circulation of cultural signs among cinematic representations of hypnosis, medical theories of suggestion, and medical accounts of film that it becomes possible to analyze the culturally contingent invention and appropriation of the new technological medium of cinema.

III

A cultural history of media and medicine that undertakes a close reading of medical texts uncovers within the medical discussions of hypnosis an implicit theory of film that has already been formulated at the end of the nineteenth century. As I would like to argue, the medical theories of hypnotism develop a theory of film avant la lettre and simultaneously anticipate and render possible the invention of cinema. In 1888, Bernheim inserts the curious concept of a "nervous light" into his representation of the relationship between hypnotic sleep and amnesia in the waking state. According to Bernheim, the state of amnesia arising after awakening from hypnosis is to be explained in analogy with the disappearance of images that are no longer illuminated:

What happens then in waking up? The hypnotized person becomes conscious of himself and his previously concentrated nervous activity once again spreads out to the entire upper area of his brain. The impressions perceived while asleep have now disappeared, they were received under a great extent of nervous power, of nervous light, if I may say so, and since the brightness of this light has been reduced, they are now no longer sufficiently illuminated. They have become latent, like an image that is too dimly lit.48

Bernheim's figure of a "nervous light," which lacks a literal equivalent on the conceptual level of his medical treatise, is borrowed from the cultural knowledge about the projection of images that seven years later allows the Lumiere brothers to invent an apparatus for projecting moving images. According to Bernheim, the state of hypnosis relies on "exposing the inner images to light".49 During the waking state, in contrast, our attention "projects the light of nervous activity to the outside" (89). Amnesia, in which the impressions received under hypnosis are forgotten, thus corresponds to the disappearance of the projected images as soon as the cinematic screen is no longer sufficiently lit.

Bernheim not only employs visual terms borrowed from technologies of projection, such as the Magic Lantern, to represent the mental processes of hypnosis. He also experiments with the hypnotic production of visual hallucinations perceived by his somnambulist mediums, as if they were watching a film. Though no material reality corresponds to these hallucinations, the hypnotized mediums succumb to the "vividness" of the hypnotically created images, which they "see with their own eyes, in the full sense of the word."50 The hypnotized person experiences the "scene evoked by his powers of imagination, without his body" taking part in it: "He views the suggested scenes as a second 'Ego' while sitting in his chair motionless."51

This hypnotic production of visual hallucinations, corresponding to a cinema in which the spectator sits in his or her chair without any motion, is directly taken up in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. Accordingly, the second part of the film represents "experiments in mass suggestion, waking hypnosis and trance,"52 experiments that are carried out by Mabuse under the pseudonym Sandor Weltmann. Weltmann creates collective hallucinations in the audience of his "experimental evening," hallucinations which the audience perceives as if they were watching a movie.

Standing at the edge of an empty stage, Weltmann suggests to his audience the image of a tropical country covering the empty stage in front of the audience like a film screen. Mabuse, standing to the right of the hypnotically created screen, assumes the role of narrator who, through his oral commentary, accompanies the moving images of the first decade of cinema.

Within the discursive sphere of medicine, Bernheim defines the relationship between hypnosis and the waking state as a change of "nervous light" and further describes the hypnotic production of visual hallucinations as cinema. In the cultural domain of film, on the other hand, Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler depicts the hypnotic creation of images, thereby producing a meta-filmic allegory of vision that represents cinema as hypnosis. Concurrently, Lang's self-referential representation of cinema as a suggestive production of images appropriates a comprehensive medical debate that also describes film as a form of hypnosis.

Writers such as Jean Cocteau or Walter Hasenclever were not the only ones to speak of the "collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shadow."53 The "tremendous suggestive power of the photo-play" (die ungeheure Suggestivkraft des Lichtspiels)54 was also emphasized by numerous doctors of the early twentieth century. Hugo MUnsterberg, for example, explicitly employed the analogy of the "hypnotist whose word awakens in the mind of the hypnotized person ideas which he cannot resist,"55 in order to demonstrate cinema's superiority over theater. The German neurologist Robert Gaupp relied on almost identical terms in order to describe the "deep and often sustained suggestive power" of the new medium: "The darkened room, the monotonous noise, the imposing nature of the scenes rapidly following each other beat by beat put to sleep all critical faculties in the receptive soul. We know that all suggestions are imprinted more deeply when our critical faculties are asleep."56

A comparison between cinema and hypnotic suggestion is also formulated by Konrad Lange, Albert Hellwig, and Hans Buchner, who emphasizes in his study Im Banne des Films (1927) [Spellbound by Film] that the "cinema person" is subject to "the hypnosis of cinema.57 Gaupp's warning that the "content of the drama" often becomes a "fateful suggestion for the helplessly subjected soul, which is robbed of its own will," makes clear that many supporters of "cinema reform" regard the so-called Schundfilms as "dangerous incentives for crime."58

Numerous texts describe the movie audience as the victim of criminal posthypnotic suggestion. The spectator is controlled by the movie's suggestive powers, even after leaving the theater and without being aware of this irresistible influence. The alleged dangers of the new medium's hypnotic powers come to the fore most saliently in the discussions of the so-called "Child-Murder of Borbeck" (Borbecker Knabenmond). As Albert Hellwig and Hans Buchner report, in the autumn of 1913 a sixteen-year-old farm hand in Borbeck murders his master's four-year-old son, "without any apparent motive for such a horrific act."59 The culprit is "very moderate in his drinking" and "equally restrainful in his sexual practices." However, he frequents movie theaters "once a week, and sometimes even more often." The judge thus arrives at the astonishing verdict that a cowboy movie and the cinematic adaptation of the fairy tale "Tom Thumb" (Der kleine Daumling), which the accused had seen immediately prior to committing the murder, were the "actual authors" of that "mysterious deed." These two films, which evinced "in some characterizing detail a conspicuous similarity" to the crime, had "so profound a suggestive influence on the accused [... ] that, unconsciously being under their influence and without any other motive, the accused threw the otherwise well-liked little boy to the ground while alone with him in a hayloft on that fateful afternoon."60

The legal representation of the "hypnotic power" of film, which continues to control the spectator even after leaving the cinema, forcing him to commit criminal acts that he would never perform while awake, coincides with Forel's previously mentioned warning of posthypnotic suggestions. Their special "ruse," according to Forel, consisted in the fact that the acting person, committing the crime only after waking up from hypnosis, is not even aware of being manipulated by the hypnotist or the film.61 Simultaneously, it becomes evident-and this takes us back to Victor Klemperer's diary entry-that "crime and suggestion" do not merely become the "most popular subject" of early cinema, given the intensive debate on the "unlimited power" of hypnosis around 1900. Instead, contemporary representations of the new medium are predicated on a structural affinity between cinema itself and hypnosis, turning the cinematic representations of hypnosis into allegorical commentaries on their own mediality-a self-reference that becomes even more apparent in the repeated censorship of cinematic representations of hypnosis up to 1918.62 Such censorship of hypnosis as a cinematic topic was explicitly based on the fear that audience members might succumb to an irresistible hypnotic influence emanating from the cinematographic apparatus-very much like Dr. Mabuse's hypnotized victims or Caligari's somnambulist medium Cesare.

[Footnote]

26. Otto Binswanger, "Gutachten fiber Hypnose und Suggestion;" Die Suggestion und die Dichtung. Gutachten fiber Hypnose and Suggestion von Otto Binswanger, Emil du Boys-Reymond et al, ed. Karl Emil Franzos (Berlin: Fontane, 1892) 3-11: 9.

27. Joseph Delboeuf, "Die verbrecherischen Suggestionen," Zeitschrift far Hypnotismus 2 (1893/1894): 177-98, 221-40, 247-68: 192, my italics. See also Friedrich Fuchs, "Die Komodie der Hypnose," Ueber die Bedeutung der Hypnose in forensischer Hinsicht (Bonn 1895) 7-22: 10 and Gilles de la Tourette, Der Hypnotismus, passim.

28. Bernheim, Neue Studien 95.

29. H[ippolyte] Bernheim, Die Suggestion 173, my italics.

30. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film [1947] (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974) 70.

31. Delboeuf, "Die verbrecherischen Suggestionen" 198.

32. Caligari, Schriftgutarchiv 12 and 13, my italics.

33. Bernheim, Neue Studien 94f, my italics.

34. "Mittheilung vermischten Inhalts," Zeitschrift fir Hypnotismus 2 (1893/1894): 176.

35. For a compelling analysis that relates this tension between interior plot and frame to the question of malingering war neuroses see Anton Kaes, Shell Shock.

36. See Gunter Scholdt, "Mabuse, ein deutscher Mythos," Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, eds. Michael Farin and Gunter Scholdt (Hamburg: Rogner and Bernhard, 1994) 359-82: 372.