"Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism" by Daniel Morgan

“Play with Danger”: Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism

Daniel Morgan

When Miriam Hansen first put forward the idea of vernacular modernism in her 1999 essay, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” she had two main polemical targets. The first was a tradition of high modernism, exemplified by the later writings of Clement Greenberg, in which modernist art was explicitly separated from mass culture on grounds of artistic autonomy, reflexive practices, and formal experimentation. The notion of a vernacular modernism, especially applied to cinema, was meant to show how a mass cultural form could be modernist, and it did so by redefining the basic scope of what modernism meant. Not high art as such, or a specific kind of aes-thetic practice, but any cultural form that responds to and engages with fea-tures of social modernity happening in the world. Among various “cultural practices,” Hansen includes “fashion, design, advertising, architecture, and urban environment . . . photography, radio, and cinema.” These practices “both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity” to a public that consumed them.1

Hansen’s second target was the claim that classical Hollywood cinema, in the years of (roughly) 1920–50, became the most popular global form of cinema because its mode of storytelling and formal patterns best fit universal,

New German Critique 122, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 2014DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2680783 © 2014 by New German Critique, Inc.

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1. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 333. Hereafter cited as MPS.

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hardwired features of viewers’ minds. Arguing most explicitly against the work of David Bordwell, and drawing on the legacy of critical theory, Hansen proposed an alternate interpretation: what made Hollywood cinema so suc-cessful was not its smooth flow, its “classical” style, but rather the sense of newness, shock, and excitation it carried with it. “Situations over plot,” she noted, claiming that the appeal of American cinema at the time was that it provided a compelling image of what it was like to be modern, to be up-to-date with the most advanced trends in the modernizing world. Hollywood cin-ema not only showed this; it was this.

On Hansen’s account, the two polemics go together. American cinema achieved its global appeal precisely because it responded to the changing and changed conditions in the world around it, and so enabled other national cine-mas to imagine their own world differently. The success of American cinema, that is, had to do with how its films “brought into optical consciousness . . . and disseminated a particular historical experience.”2 For Hansen, this hap-pens in terms of the represented content—the depiction of a world undergoing changes and transformations, the focus on new configurations of gender, work, and amusement—but also at a formal level. Following Walter Benjamin’s remarks on film and the assembly line, Hansen claims that the patterns, rhythms, and appeals of cinema moved in accord with the emerging modern world.3 It is this insight, that an engagement with modernity and mass culture is the foundation of cinema’s global appeal—that American cinema was “the first global vernacular” (MPS, 340)—that forms the core of vernacular mod-ernism as a theory and a historiographical method. Hansen would develop this argument in essays and talks over the next decade, focusing largely on East Asian cinemas of the 1920s and 1930s.

At the same time, the explanatory ambitions of vernacular modernism raise a problem basic to the interrelation of critical theory and mass culture: how to bring a set of wide-ranging and highly abstract theoretical models—for example, collective innervation; play and second technology; image and body space; counterpublic spheres; aura; the mimetic faculty; and, not least, experi-ence itself—into contact with the details of media history. This is not a small problem. Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are both happy to discuss the intricacies, formal and thematic, of works of literature, poetry, and music, but

2. Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Ver-nacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 12. Hereafter cited as FW.

3. See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 4:313–55.

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they pay little attention to such questions when it comes to the cinema. Benja-min usually stays at a fairly abstract level, talking about cinema as a techno-logical medium engaged in the sensorial transformations of the human. His most famous lines on cinema, in which he praises the “dynamite of the split second” for exploding the prisonlike structure of our world, even describe the wrong movie: Battleship Potemkin instead of The Man with the Movie Cam-era.4 Adorno, in his few remarks on cinema, stays with characters—Betty Boop, Greta Garbo, Daffy Duck—or provides gnomic pronouncements about form, as in his advocacy of a “montage akin to writing” in his late essay on cinema. This is technique divorced from its realization.5

Hansen is by no means immune to this problem. At some points, she speaks of vernacular modernism as if it were a claim about the value of cinema as a medium—that it responds to modernity by definition, simply because it is a medium that emerged in the context of modern life—rather than a histori-cally specified set of practices. Perhaps even more telling, her theoretical study of Siegfried Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, Cinema and Experience, is remarkable for the absence of sustained analyses of films, something all the more noticeable given that Hansen’s other work is so full of detailed readings, from Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith to King Vidor and Max Ophüls to Alexander Kluge and Ulrike Ottinger.6

At its most emphatic, the promise of vernacular modernism is to make the complex theoretical claims and positions that Hansen drew out of critical theory resonate with, and help explain, the intricacies of film history. What I want to argue here is that vernacular modernism, while it overtly describes a large-scale relation between cinema and the modern world, goes more deeply into the details of this history than Hansen is often willing to admit. In short, vernacular modernism—as a historical claim and a historiographical method—is based on an engagement with individual films, including their specific his-torical contexts. (More broadly, I argue that Hansen’s theoretical work on the legacy of critical theory makes sense for thinking about cinema only at this level.) Vernacular modernism is—it has to be—grounded in criticism, in all its

4. The phrase, commonly associated with the “Artwork” essay, in fact comes from his earlier review of Battleship Potemkin (“Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” in Selected Writings, 2:16–19).

5. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique, nos. 24–25 (1981): 199–205. One reason that Hansen is so drawn to Siegfried Kracauer is that he provides arguments about films and film history, historically sensitive treatments of existing objects rather than pronouncements about the possibilities of the medium as such.

6. One rare exception is a brief discussion of Touch of Evil; see Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 247–48. Hereafter cited as CE.

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contradictory and contingent appeals, and in all its successes and failures. This is not just a matter of shifting orientation or spending more time filling out examples. As we get closer to the fluid life of films, we find that the basic terms of vernacular modernism shift as well and that what emerges is a radical con-tingency for both the method and the content of analysis. This process changes some assumptions about vernacular modernism, and about the way it connects to critical theory, but on Hansen’s model, criticism provides a necessary and inescapable link between films, history, and theory.

As I indicated above, vernacular modernism works along two axes. One is vertical and has to do with the relation between modernism and modernity. The other axis is horizontal and involves the way cinema moves across national boundaries and the fact that American cinema achieved “a transna-tional and global currency” (MPS, 333).

The problem that comes up, one that will raise the importance of criti-cism to Hansen’s project, emerges from the moments where Hansen suggests that what constitutes vernacular modernism is just a cultural practice, espe-cially cinema, that in some way responds to or articulates the conditions of a changing modernity. This is a familiar kind of argument. Because cinema is a technology that arose amid modernization and industrialization, it is necessar-ily caught up in those trends and therefore is automatically modernist (in this way) because of its technological base. If that is the case, however, it leads to an unsettling conclusion. Every film, by definition, would then be vernacular modernist: to be a film simply means to carry along the associations of moder-nity; a film—any film—could not help but respond to or articulate some fea-tures of modernity. Such a position may be helpful in delineating the vertical axis of vernacular modernism, a way to show how a medium that is not a fine art can nonetheless be thought of under the aegis of modernism. But it also means that the appeal of vernacular modernism as theoretical tool would be severely limited. If vernacular modernism is going to be useful for talking about film history, there needs to be a way to make distinctions; vernacular modernism cannot be a claim about the medium itself.7

The problem with the broader approach can be illustrated fairly easily. Both Abel Gance’s La roue (1923) and Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) feature trains as a prominent subject of their narrative and formal structures.

7. Note the hesitation in one of Hansen’s own formulations: “If my claim that the cinema, a certain kind of cinema, offered a sensory-reflexive horizon for the contradictory experience of modernity has any merit” (FW, 13).

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Trains are natural figures in a vernacular modernist project, a form of trans-portation that emerged in the nineteenth century and, as has been described over and over again, profoundly transformed the way people experienced the world around them.8 Their presence in both films, then, seems to require saying that each film is vernacular modernist: an instance of a modern medium (film) depicting a modern technological feature (trains) that shaped the way moder-nity was lived and experienced. Moreover, the films are distanced from a high modernist aesthetic tendency simply by virtue of their medium and their pre-occupation with the intersection of technology and human life.

The case, however, is not that straightforward. While it makes sense to say that Keaton’s film is vernacular modernist, the same is not true for Gance’s film. This is an act of criticism, a judgment, and one with implications. It means, not least, accepting that a film with trains set in the nineteenth century (The General) is vernacular modernist, while a film with trains set in the twen-tieth century and with sequences that contain much more rapid cutting (La roue) is not. Or take a different example. Both André Antoine’s La terre (1921) and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) are concerned with the destruction of a rural way of life by the increased presence of industrial technologies; both films, that is, are responses to a central aspect of modernity and moderniza-tion. I think our intuition is to say that Dovzhenko qualifies as vernacular mod-ernism—he is an interesting case study in this regard—but Antoine does not. On what grounds can these claims be made?

A natural response is to add normative constraints. Hansen sometimes does this, arguing that what matters is that a film responds to or articulates modernity in the right way, that it not regress to traditional solutions or con-ventional formulas but understand that changed historical conditions require new (aesthetic) responses. “What makes these films modern, or, more pre-cisely, modernist, is that they dramatize conflicts and contradictions that may be phrased in traditional terms but cannot be resolved with recourse to or by restoring a traditional social order” (FW, 15). This gives us some reasons for disqualifying La roue as vernacular modernist. Gance’s interest in classical tragedy—the name of “Sisif” is merely a particularly overt example—and motifs of fate are far removed from the new social and gender norms of the world he ostensibly depicts. Take the opening shots of the single rail, for

8. The key text is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); see also Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

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example, which clearly mark the film as being about the railroad; these shots, however, also suggest the presence of a suprahuman force, a guiding logic that will not allow an alternate route to be taken, a tragedy averted. If this force is not directly associated with trains, it evokes something like a meta-physic of fate around them. Further, we might note that Gance is more com-fortably at home in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. The train is almost always associated with catastrophic destruction, a connection more familiar to initial encounters with it,9 and the film’s story and preoccupations (alcoholism, incest, etc.) are familiar to the universe of Zola. Last, the film culminates in picturesque mountain landscapes that suggest a retreat to a loca-tion in which it is possible to live among a premodern social order (even with the presence of modern technologies).

Contrast this with the opening of The General. The initial title reads: “The Western and Atlantic Flyer speeding into Marietta, Ga., in the Spring of 1861,” yet, while an association of trains with speed is present, the sense of catastrophe is not. The film’s first image is a long shot that pans with a train moving through a landscape, after which there is a cut to a medium shot of the locomotive, with Keaton and another engineer at the controls; the camera tracks parallel to the train, moving forward to reveal the name General on the side of the engine. The third shot shows the town square, with small groups of people on its edges, as the train enters the frame from the left and slows to a stop. What we are given in these shots is the arrival of a train as an ordinary part of life; the very banality is noteworthy. This logic continues as Keaton climbs down, is greeted by two boys, parts from his coworker, and starts to examine the pistons on the engine. Passengers leave the train, a few waving in his direction, and Keaton greets them in return. Again, the film emphasizes ordinariness. It is not just that the train does not crash: it is smoothly integrated into the basic parameters of continuity editing (no bursts of montage are needed), and, though train and engineer are accorded a prominent status—the train is described as one of Keaton’s two loves, two boys strive to imitate his actions and mannerisms, and so on—this is not done with any sense of danger

9. Here is how Charles Dickens describes a train accident: “He heard a shout—another—saw the face change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror—felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air” (Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982], 653).

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or threat. Keaton’s film may be set in the 1860s, but it has a much more modern feel, a displaced reflection on contemporary life.10

These are grounds on which to make a distinction between Gance and Keaton. But it is also where things get a little trickier. After all, we could easily point to other features of The General that avoid engagement with the new norms and experiences of a modernizing world: the gender relations stay rela-tively static, with the heroine figured less as the new woman (much less a flap-per) than as a part of a patriarchal aristocracy; the train as a technology is isolated from any other features of modernity; and, perhaps most damning, the issue of race is never acknowledged in the film (still less the fact that Keaton is fighting for the South). In the opposite direction, we could focus on how La roue’s montage sequences were seen at the time as the most up-to-date cine-matic style, a modern technique lurking within more conventional editing pat-terns. Regardless of motifs of fate, the film’s cinematic features are empathi-cally modern; as Hansen emphasizes, a key feature of vernacular modernism in cinema is the privileging of “excesses” like the bursts of montage that inter-rupt and transform the slow tempo of the rest of the film. Or, following a dif-ferent line of thought, we could even argue that Sisif’s position as operator of the rural train anticipates a transformation of industrial to service economies, so that the film in fact documents the beginning of a shift away from a nine-teenth-century modernity to luxury tourism.

My point is not that La roue is a vexed case of vernacular modernism or that it is somehow undecidable. Far from it. The argument about the film antici-pating a later shift in the economy is not convincing: little about Gance’s depic-tion of the final scenes involves the future, a sense of things to come, but rather the misery into which Sisif and the others have been placed. Gance’s montage sequences are a more compelling example, but they seem to fit better within a lineage of high art, an attempt to give cinema the status of the other arts. We might think of them as traditionally modernist rather than vernacular modernist, not least because of the way trauma is replayed in the rapid-fire montage; it is not taken up to be worked through, incorporated, lessened—this is not a way to make

10. This is a common trope in Keaton’s work. In Our Hospitality (1923), a series of jokes are built out of themes from the 1920s placed a century earlier. At the corner of Broadway Avenue and Forty-Second Street, where in 1830 only a few vehicles cross, the sheriff remarks, “This is gettin’ to be a dangerous crossing.” The rudimentary train Keaton will take to his ancestral estate is described as “the out-bound limited,” as if it occupied a definite position on a large schedule of departures and arrivals. As Kirby notes, “With Keaton . . . [the train] already could be figured nostalgically, but as an allegory for the contemporary United States, not for past history” (Parallel Tracks, 201–2).

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modern technological transformations available for an audience, to makes them usable, but to emphasize their ultimately destructive force (see MPS, 341–42).

Rather, what the comparison between the films shows is that it is not possible to assume that a film is or is not vernacular modernist simply because of a set of features it has. To an extent, any film can be given a description on which it could be construed as vernacular modernist, but that cannot mean that it thereby qualifies as such. Vernacular modernism inescapably—and, I think, inevitably—boils down to questions of interpretation: no appeal to medium, country of origin, or genre, the presence of which guarantees membership in the theoretical class, can be used to short-circuit this process. Vernacular mod-ernism is not a feature of a film, an intrinsic quality it carries; it has to do with a critical recognition of and debate about how a film functions and what it does with the material of which it is composed. This makes everything much less certain. It also provides an orientation to vernacular modernism as a method: we have to look to the details of each film—its subjects, its look and feel, its form, its historical context—if we are to see how it responds to and uses the features of modernity with which it is (potentially) engaged. Nothing guaran-tees success in advance.11

If this were all, vernacular modernism might succeed as a framework for criticism, a guiding structure for critics, but it would not achieve the success in explaining the broader features of film history that Hansen claims for it.12 After all, vernacular modernism is supposed to explain not only that cinema can be construed as a form of modernism but that its response to modernity was central to its appeal. It is in this space, of moving from individual films to larger film historical claims, that the second, horizontal axis of vernacular modernism becomes especially important, not only practically in determining how American films were taken up in new context but also as a lesson in method.

The role of criticism in Hansen’s project comes to the fore in the way she uses East Asian cinemas of the 1930s as primary examples of vernacular mod-ernism. Clearly, a range of factors motivates her interest in these films: the negotiation of an urban modernity in a non-Western context; charged political

11. This is connected to a line of modernist interpretation; see Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Prob-lems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 73–96. On similar problems, see Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 221–37.

12. It might then be a version of Noël Carroll’s assessment of André Bazin: “What fails as theory may excel as criticism” (Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988], 171).

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stakes, both right and left; and varying types of industrial modes of production. But the fact of criticism is explicitly present in these essays, and present pre-cisely as a problem. Hansen notes, several times, that not every film made and circulated within an industrialized and modernized world is going to be ver-nacular modernist—not even if that film explicitly refers to or depicts scenes of “everyday modernity.”13 Though she does not say how to determine this, she does provide some indications, and we can use her discussion of these particu-lar cases to think about broader issues that vernacular modernism raises.

Hansen’s study of Shanghai cinema in “Fallen Women, Rising Stars” explores how Hollywood cinema helped articulate an experience of a new and politically unstable modernity. While part of that essay is a restatement, slightly modified, of the original theoretical framework of “The Mass Produc-tion of the Senses,” much of it focuses on how individual films were taken up and reworked for various ends. A central example is the citation of the closing scenes of Dishonored (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1931) at the end of Daybreak (dir. Sun Yu, 1933). In the latter, as the heroine is about to be shot, she says, “Finish me—but the revolution will never be finished!” As Hansen points out, this phrase, with the heroine’s body “superimposed over shots of marching revolutionary soldiers [creates] a sacrificial-redemptive pathos that the Diet-rich figure in Dishonored is denied” (FW, 19). When von Sternberg’s film is used by Daybreak as a reference, it is changed into something that responds to the different political and social context into which it is now placed. Such an act of translation is fundamental to vernacular modernism.

There are two major problems with giving translation this role. First, the style and story of Daybreak alone seem sufficient to say that it responds to a local modernity. As Hansen notes, the film follows two people “from a mass exodus from their [rural] village, through their encounters with attractions of city life and the hell of industrial-capitalist labor and prostitution,” to the hero-ine’s eventual execution and the hero’s “participation in the victorious struggle of the Nationalist revolution” (FW, 18). Daybreak, moreover, tracks this shift through the star’s changing acting style, moving from naturalism to artifice as she becomes increasingly caught up in a modern and modernizing world. Why is the connection to Dishonored needed to tell whether Daybreak is an exam-ple of vernacular modernism? Yet, throughout her writings on East Asian cinema, Hansen defines vernacular modernism through instances in which

13. Miriam Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 301.

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particular aspects of cinematic practices find homes in new locations: Holly-wood and Shanghai is one, so is Shanghai and Japan. Second, moments of citation or reference, even of détournement, are prominent throughout the his-tory of cinema, operating in a wide range of ways and directions. Hollywood filmmakers of the classical era, for example, made liberal use of European actors, styles, and personnel; the influx of German directors and technicians throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, for example, shaped the kind of cinema being made at studios like Universal—and, later, of postwar film noir. One might also look to the way that avant-garde films cite Hollywood films, or the reverse: the way the TV montage sequence at the beginning of Bye Bye Birdie (1963) resembles the cut-out animation of Stan VanDerBeek, or the radically disorienting montage of found footage in The Parallax View (1974). It cannot be the case that all instances of citation, or translation, are sufficient to bring the relevant films under the heading of vernacular modernism.

Translation bears weight for Hansen partly because of the theoretical frame behind vernacular modernism, in particular the crucial but difficult con-cept of innervation that structures her account. Hansen’s use of innervation largely depends on the specific reading of “mimesis” given in critical theory.14 Mimesis here has less to do with visual resemblance than with a “becoming like” relation, a form of experience, of relating to and engaging the external world in which the distinction between subject and object collapses; the sub-ject, as Adorno put it, is effectively “guided by the logic of the object.” Mime-sis, he says, is “a process of making oneself similar to the environment” in which “the outside serves as a model onto which the inside molds itself.”15 Mimesis can have bad effects—think of Charlie Chaplin’s responses to the assembly line in Modern Times (1936)—but it can also generate renewed capacities for experience. It is this latter, positive outcome that innervation marks out: a mental and somatic process by which a mimetic relation to the external world is converted into productive action on it. (Put succinctly, innervation is mimesis when it goes right.) When innervation gets taken up by vernacular modernism, it is to describe how the reception of a film by an audience—and by the filmmakers who potentially constitute part of that audience—turns into the production of new cultural objects. A film succeeds as vernacular modernism when it enables an appropriate response to take

14. The literature on the topic is vast; see Hansen, CE, chap. 5.15. Quoted in Michael Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern

Impasse of Critique,” in The Literary and Philosophical Debate, vol. 1 of Mimesis in Contempo-rary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1984), 34, 31.

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place, one of creative and productive reception. Fashion, behavior, patterns of speech, and so on: these are areas in which such a response can be discerned.16 So are films. For Hansen, a film is vernacular modernist when it enables the production of new cultural and social objects or forms of life that are explicitly oriented toward the context of their reception.

We can see, then, why translation, the use of a film by a later one, has an important role for Hansen’s project: quite simply, it provides evidence to show that a creative response has occurred. For Hansen, translation is itself a form of reception, a confirmation that innervation has taken place. Thus the production of Daybreak confirms that Dishonored was found to articulate an experience (of modernity) that could be translated to a new context: “The question is not whether [translatability] proves the identity, universality, and superiority of the classical Hollywood model, but to which uses [its] lessons were put, what hap-pened in the process of cultural transformation, and what did the reinscriptions do within a fast-transforming, at once cosmopolitan and local public sphere” (FW, 13). The source film gave insight into how local problems could be artic-ulated. Even more: both films, because they are caught up in this mutual proj-ect of translation, thereby come under the heading of vernacular modernism.

There is, still, a historiographical problem: is Dishonored an instance of vernacular modernism only when, and just because, it is translated by Day-break? Is the act of translation sufficient to say that a film is—that it has been confirmed as—vernacular modernist? One objection is that even recognizing Dishonored at the end of Daybreak requires a degree of interpretation. Allu-sions rarely come with a stamp of certification, however obvious they may seem; an audience must discern what was put there, even, or especially, if the citation is, as it were, unconscious. (Authors are themselves often unaware of this process.) So, one might ask, when a critic, looking back, believes that he or she spots an act of translation in a given film, is that all that matters? What if the initial citation was not meant but instead read into the film? Does intention matter to the practice of vernacular modernism?

There is another, more serious objection to the use of translation to specify instances of vernacular modernism. Given the vagaries of distribu-tion and exhibition, it is to some extent contingent which films were taken up in new contexts: perhaps there was a restriction on showing Hollywood films in an area, perhaps a film was never exported, perhaps nascent filmmakers

16. Cf. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film.” The presence of innervation at the center of ver-nacular modernism suggests that it might be a worthwhile addition to the catalog of film-mind analogies.

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(or cultural actors) simply missed going to see something. Looking for the hard evidence of translation may lead us to overlook films that, given different historical exigencies, would have been translated into new contexts. In a differ-ent direction, there may have been instances of actual translation that are now lost, destroyed, or simply overlooked. Do we disqualify all those films as ver-nacular modernist where we do not have a recognizable instance of transla-tion? If so, vernacular modernism would then describe work that did take place, and nothing more—and if a film, genre, or national cinema missed its opportunity, there is not much more to be said. But that cannot be right; more is at stake. Hansen, after all, wants to talk about slapstick as a vernacular mod-ernist genre within its American context—before looking to see how, and whether, it was translated. And she does the same thing with Frank Tashlin, whose films articulate an emphatically American response to the local dynamic of their media environment (this, despite the French love of Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models). At a deep level, we want to be able to call a film vernacular modernist even when we do not know whether it was adapted within a different national context—even without having to search for acts of translation. Hansen herself says something like this: “Shanghai cinema must have allowed its viewers to come away from the film and imagine their own strategies of survival, performance, and sociality, to make sense of living in the interstices of radically unequal times, places, and conditions” (FW, 20; my emphasis). The “must have,” as I read it, registers an anxiety about how we can tell if a film is being innervated, expressing a hope rather than a definite way to determine whether such a response has taken place.

This does not mean that translation should be ignored, but it does mean not having to wait for it. Hansen, in a sense, reads instances of transnational translation speculatively, almost allegorically, seeing in them guidelines for moving from particular acts of translation to the general features or tenden-cies that indicate potential for a film to be translated (in the right way). Read-ing backward from the recognizable instances of translation, we can look to the way a film responds to its own national context, to the features of its local modernity, and determine how widely it might be taken up by films, film-makers, and audiences in other national contexts. The horizontal axis is the aid to determining how the vertical axis works.17

17. Cavell speaks of such acts of criticism as projecting existing uses “into further contexts. Noth-ing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same pro-jections. . . . It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrify-ing” (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Late Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 52).

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The central criterion by which this happens involves a process that resembles play. Play, as employed in the tradition Hansen draws on, denotes a mode of engagement with the world that looks for possibilities, fissures, idio-syncrasies, that creates new objects through acts of transformation, reworking, revision, reshaping—or undoing.18 Play is manifested by the act of translation, the ability to render a given film in a new form, but it is also in the way a film responds to its local conditions. This means that there is the play Daybreak performs with Dishonored and the norms of the classical Hollywood cinema: while accepting the given aesthetic paradigm, Daybreak modifies its terms so that they are given new valences and functions. But there is also a play within each film as well, in which they take up and transform the experience of their own modernity. So we could say that Dishonored, even before it is translated in Daybreak, is already vernacular modernist. Making this claim involves pointing to the interplay between individual passion and nationalist ideology, the avowedly sexual agency of Dietrich’s character, and even the parody of twelve-tone music as a nonsensical code used to transmit messages—high art burlesqued and transvalued for other purposes.

We can see how play helps through the example of trains and the differ-ence between Gance and Keaton. At the beginning of La roue, we see two trains coming together. As the first begins to exit toward the bottom left of the screen, the second enters from the bottom right. It may not be a terribly plau-sible situation, but it works like an illustration of Newtonian mechanics: the two appear to be on a collision course, so that the second engine will hit the passenger cars toward the rear of the first train. This is exactly what happens. The initial shot of the single rail at the film’s outset suggested an allegory of fate and destiny, that whatever is on the train’s path cannot be avoided—an action, once started, cannot escape its outcome. (This is the logic of classical tragedy, if not nineteenth-century naturalism.) The shot of the two trains pro-vides the concrete example.

Curiously, Keaton creates an almost identical situation. Setting a trap for the trains pursuing him on his escape to the South, he is accidentally left behind as the heroine is unable to stop the train’s forward movement. Trying to head it off, he scrambles down a hill to get in front of it as it comes around a bend, only to see it reverse and go back up the tracks. As he finally climbs up onto the engine, the train is still going in reverse in the direction of their pursuers. At this moment, there is a cut to a long shot of the train, traveling

18. While Roger Caillois and Johan Huizinga are important references here, the specific line of thinking emerges from Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Marcuse.

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backward, as it heads from the right toward the left of the frame. One of the pursuing trains suddenly enters from the left, seemingly on a collision course; at the last moment, however, it climbs up a ramp (the trap Keaton had earlier arranged), going over and past the first train—and almost off the edge of the ramp itself. The gag emerges from the way the distance from which the shot is taken, in combination with a flattened perspective, makes us see the trains as if they were going through each other.

The General may present the same apparently catastrophic situation, but Keaton transforms it via the logic of play. Within the terms of vernacular modernism, Keaton’s film counts as play and La roue does not, because the former takes the laws to which it is subject and plays with them, making a game out of them.19 It takes the logic of inevitability—“you can’t steer a train”—and turns it into a joke, a source of visual humor. As Hansen puts it, such examples are valuable for “the way they opened up hitherto unper-ceived modes of sensory perception and experience, their ability to suggest a different organization of the world”—one in which the traumatic effects of modernity, the logic of industrial machines, were not repeated but worked through (MPS, 344).

Keaton takes up the train in another film, the short titled The Electric House (1922). The film depicts the transformation of a bourgeois house by a series of inventions (supposedly) designed to ease life: an escalator, a bathtub on tracks that slides from bathroom to bedroom, and the like. One device is a miniature train that carries food from the kitchen, over a plank, and onto the dining table, where it circles around and allows each member of the family to take a plate. The controls are on the table, operated by Keaton, the “engineer” who designed the gadgets. Everything works perfectly the first time. As Keaton rises to thank the family for their appreciation of his work, however, he accidentally pulls the track apart. The next course then arrives on the train, which promptly rides off the track, runs across the table, and (predictably) falls into the mother’s lap. Here in miniature form is a catastrophe that, precisely because the crash is harmless (it is not a “real” train), appears as play.

Moments like this exemplify how classical cinema became, as Hansen writes, “the single most inclusive, cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated. . . . The cinema was capable of a reflexive relation with modernity and modernization” (MPS, 341–42). By engaging the icons of modernity

19. Gilberto Perez develops this point more extensively in The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 92–122.

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directly, it suggests a different organization of the daily world, one in which technology is not always threatening. Even when things go wrong, they do not necessarily do so as tragedy. Through play, the aesthetic mastery over the logic of an increasingly rule-bound and mechanized reality, catastrophe becomes comedy, and in doing so becomes available for new negotiations with a mod-ernizing world.

It is in this way that vernacular modernism forces a “problem of criti-cism”: its theoretical scope and operation cannot be determined unless detailed criticism of individual films comes to the fore. Hansen, as I see it, needs this ground level to determine the general rules by which the larger process func-tions; the range of critical discussions in her writing on Shanghai and Japanese cinema attests to a process of discovery, of looking to the specifics of films to discover their negotiations both with their locally defined modernity and with the norms and values of Hollywood cinema. Criticism is also present, as we begin to look back to Hollywood cinema itself and how genres like slapstick work with a set of distinctly modern problems and anxieties. As we have seen, a film cannot be brought under the heading of vernacular modernism simply because of the presence of certain objects, categories, practices, or styles. What matters is how such features are taken up and deployed, how they are used. And determining this requires judgments that speak to whether a particular usage operates in a way that qualifies as vernacular modernist, judgments that track the changes as a film circulates, modifies, and in turn is modified by other films.

Such judgments are, of course, fallible; they go wrong or are later revised—this is what it means for them to be acts of criticism. A film, or an aspect of a film, that at first appears to fall under vernacular modernism may turn out on further reflection to fail to develop those terms. Or the reverse may happen.20 Plausible arguments might be made that Dishonored, or Day-break for that matter, is not in fact vernacular modernist, or that the valences of La roue and The General should be reversed. Nothing internal to any film guarantees that it is or is not an instance of vernacular modernism; this is not a property a film simply has.21

Pressing vernacular modernism into the orbit of criticism does not sim-ply give us a better understanding of its operation, a more precise account of

20. Could La roue become an instance of vernacular modernism if it is shown that later films saw its formal and thematic features as a productive way to think about aspects of modern experience?

21. An interesting case in this regard is Terrence Malick’s New World (2005), in which the seemingly anachronistic and nostalgic immersion in an earlier time is put in tension with a sus-tained investigation into the very idea of the “new,” defined not just by America but, ultimately, by the modern economic and political world of London.

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how theory links to its objects (although it certainly does that). When Hansen quotes Kracauer to say that the best modern art, from painting to literature to cinema to revues, involves a “play with danger,” she means that modernity itself has an aspect that causes worry. But she is talking as well about method. The point of vernacular modernism is to ward off programmatic accounts of the appeal of cinema, and Hollywood cinema in particular: not universal, hardwired structures or the simple presence of the modern world. Neither dystopian nor utopian. It is a model for this world, the world where failure—narrative, formal, thematic . . . and political—is always at stake: this is what it means to play with danger. Vernacular modernism is contingent in the way that criticism is; the very contingency of its success, the fact that any film may fail or succeed as vernacular modernism, is central to the form of its engagement—political and cinematic, political because cinematic—with modernity.

Throughout her work Hansen insists that no engagement with modernity or its technological forms is ever final, that there is always a second chance. Hope does not end with the failure of Kracauer’s “va-banque game” with pho-tography or with Benjamin’s gamble with cinema in the 1930s (even Adorno, after all, turned to film at the end of his life). Hansen herself became interested in new digital media in her effort to think through the potential of a more appropriate reception of technology in the present situation.22 This open-end-edness runs through the idea of vernacular modernism. Perhaps like moder-nity itself, vernacular modernism describes an unfinished—and unfinishable—project, the vicissitudes of media history that are perpetually being taken up in new and reconfigured forms. Hansen’s legacy is not least to articulate some of the terms, and also the fault lines, of that possibility.

22. See Miriam Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (2004): 3–45.

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"Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism" by Daniel Morgan

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