Synthetic Emotions from Synthetic Amusements - Friedrich Georg Jünger

All amusements in which the machine plays a part are somehow empty. They have no gaiety. They show that they are dominated by some compulsion which affects the freedom of human motion. Life within the technical organization means that the individual is not gay, and cannot be gay because he is overstrained and no longer has leisure. Enjoyment has departed from his work as well. It is precisely because the joy has gone out of work that work is being praised and exalted with growing ethical fanaticism. The picture proffered by our great industrial cities with their human masses streaming back and forth mechanically is grim and joyless. The great masters of the festive spirit, Apollo and Dionysus, no longer find room in this picture.

The rhythm of things mechanical is one of automatic lifelessness and rigidity. Where it dominates, it displaces man's rhythmically rounded motion. The periodicity which is basic to all rhythm and all measured motion becomes mechanical and ordered by dead time. The yearly cycle of the holidays, which used to be holy days of a higher order, decays as technology advances to perfection. Popular celebrations change their character. Where festivals or fairs are still rooted in the hearts of the people, we shall always find that the farmers flock to them, for peasants are that portion of the people who follow with the greatest assurance the cyclic sequence of the year and its feast days. But if we witness a festival as ancient and as popular as the October Fest in Munich, we can see at a glance how the inroads of technical organization have profoundly altered its old rural character. Everywhere we find mechanically operated swings, Ferris wheels, power rides and other power-driven gadgets of the amusement park, which with mechanical music invite us to buy their mechanical thrills. And just as in the field of sports we already noted the lack of free improvisation, so in amusements, too, all free improvisation and spontaneity are lost as they become mechanized. Increasingly our amusements are becoming a business subject to technical organization. It appears that man has lost the faculty of amusing and entertaining himself, that for his enjoyment some apparatus is indispensable – and this means that even our spare time must needs be filled with automatic regulation. The modern idea of recreation is the relaxation that follows the tension of mechanical work. That is why our amusements show a kind of hectic mobility, a spasmodic tenseness for the loosening of which a long succession of gymnastic systems has been invented. When we look at an art as free as the dance, be it artistic or social, it becomes very noticeable how mechanical it appears. The music for it is furnished either by machines or by musicians who have mechanized rhythm. The radio and the films are among the great automatons whose share in popular entertainment is constantly expanding.

In studying the movies, we see the human figures on the screen moving within a mechanical theater, caught in an optical mechanism from which they cannot escape, since it is this mechanism which makes the whole performance possible. No matter how perfected, be it by technicolor or by three-dimensional effects in order to heighten the illusion created in the audience – all this perfection is mechanical and it ends where the laws of mechanics ends. Motion, voices, and background music are reproduced mechanically. The illusion of the audience plays an important part, for they really think that the fleeting mirages are real human beings and that the words are really spoken by them. The spectator is not disillusioned by the fact that what he sees is not people of flesh and blood, that what he hears is not live voices but mechanical sounds. He is never disturbed by the mechanical side of the spectacle, only by mechanical imperfections.

Everyone knows that one cannot see a movie as often as a stage play, that the effectiveness of a movie wears off far more quickly, and that time in particular turns a movie rapidly stale and obsolete. A stage play in contrast may be performed as often as you wish, yet each performance is different from all others, whereas all showings of a movie are mechanically identical. The stage play is constantly varied by the performance of the actors, while the screen play remains rigid and unchanged. Because the screen play is so rigid, it cannot be endured without music. The more often we see a movie, the less effective becomes its illusion, the more does its mechanical rigidity show through. Moreover, we discover the screen drama's comical side, that unintentional comedy which is the stamp of all the melodramas and horror pictures of the early days of the films, and makes them ludicrous. All screen drama seems to become comical as time goes by.

The technician's answer to this problem is to try to assist the illusion of the audience still more vigorously by camouflaging the apparatus still better, by making the illusion so convincing and lifelike that we forget the apparatus. But since the mechanism cannot be eliminated, such efforts have their limits. As a matter of fact, such efforts go in the wrong direction, since movies can be improved technically only by improving their mechanism without attempting to conceal it. A genuine improvement, for example, is the animated cartoon which turns all living things into machines, including human figures. The cartoonist does not attempt to imitate life, but invents little automatons specifically for the technical medium of the film. This idea may to some seem paradoxical. But the Americans, from whom the world has still much to learn in this respect, have long since introduced such films and they enjoy great popularity. At present these films still lack coherence and consistency, since there are not enough cartoonists who have the necessary intelligence to master this new art. But even what has already been achieved gives an inkling of what can be expected in the future.

Note: When Jünger wrote this, such ''masterpieces'' as Disney's "Snow 'White" and "Fantasia" had not yet been produced, not to speak of the latest productions in 3D computer animation, such as “Toy Story” etc. These works fully warrant his prediction (Editor 's note).