Animating Goethe

1155546 ANM0010.1177/17468477231155546animation: an interdisciplinary journalSaber research-article2023 Article Animating Goethe Zeke Saber animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2023, Vol. 18(1) 7–22 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477231155546 DOI: 10.1177/17468477231155546 journals.sagepub.com/home/anm University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Abstract Metamorphosis is frequently cited as an inherent feature of animation, but scholars who make this claim have routinely disregarded the influence of Goethean morphology on animation practice and theory. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s initial conception of morphology, as outlined in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has had a significant effect on our understanding of the transformative nature of animation. In this article, the author engages with the theory and practice of figures including Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Alla Gadassik, Caroline Leaf and others in order to insist upon animation’s critical but hitherto unacknowledged role in an ongoing history of morphological reception. Morphology’s sensitivity to the continuous coming-into-being of form allows us to think through, in newly productive ways, the intrinsic practices, aims and intimations of animation, not to mention the sometimes vexed discourse about its place in cinema studies. Keywords animation, Bazin, Caroline Leaf, Eisenstein, Gadassik, Goethe, metamorphosis, morphology, ontology We ought to talk less and draw more. I, personally, should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. (Goethe, 1949: 9) A faint outline Considering he wrote enough to fill over 140 volumes, it seems safe to say Goethe never got around to talking less. He did, however, produce a number of sketches to accompany his many words. The most remarkable of these were produced during Goethe’s morphological studies – studies that typically involved sketching a plant in successive stages of development before intuiting from this sequence a sense of transformation across time. Scientists still use Goethean morphology to understand phenomenal metamorphosis but, in this article, I will insist that the varied methods and insights of Goethean morphology find their most comprehensive synthesis in the animation Corresponding author: Zeke Saber, Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, University Park, SCA 319, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211, USA. Email: esaber@usc.edu 8 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) tradition. My goal here is not to interpret Goethean morphology from a distanced, contemporary perspective, implying that it was refined and expanded in a process of inexorable technical progress; rather, my goal is to emphasize ‘the topicality of what has passed’ while also revelling in its continued ‘radiance and luminescence’ (Zielinski, 2006: 2–3). I therefore begin by examining Goethean morphology as an historical phenomenon on its own terms, paying particular attention to its conceptions of form, movement and seeing. After this historical/philosophical preamble, I argue that morphology represents not only a proleptic film theory, but one that rigorously attends to the intrinsic practices, aims, and intimations of animation. In support of this argument, I move into an analysis of Caroline Leaf’s film Two Sisters (1991), the theory/practice of Alla Gadassik, and the writings of Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin, among others. I conclude by contending that animation’s engagement with the morphological tradition bears more fruit than certain strands of arthistorical engagement, and ultimately I suggest that bringing morphology and animation into explicit dialogue will help de-familiarize the field of cinema studies, relativizing it while intimating that its object of study remains a phenomenon in flux. From morphology to animation Metamorphosis is frequently cited as an inherent feature of animation, but scholars who make this claim (Furniss, 1998; Gunning, 2013; Pierson, 2015; Sobchack, 2000; Torre, 2014; Wells, 1998) have routinely disregarded the influence of Goethean morphology on animation practice and theory.1 Goethe’s initial conception of morphology, as outlined in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has had a significant effect on our understanding of the transformative nature of animation. Animation may even constitute a formal response to Goethe’s (1976: 12:36) desire for ‘an artificial discursive practice’ (ein künstlicher Vortrag) equal to nature’s perpetual transformations. As with natural form, animated form is restless, inchoate and labile, shaped at all times by the rhythm of organic movement. Elucidating the logic of that kind of ceaseless fluctuation is precisely the task of morphology. As Goethe (1840: 71) explains, the goal of his artful science is ‘to describe all phenomena in continuous succession as they develop out of each other, transform into each other’. Phenomena are, in Goethe’s view, inseparable from their potency for change; in fact, they change in order to remain themselves. Though something like a plant may take on different forms, its ontological consistency is not violated by mere shape-change. From the morphological perspective, shapechange actually ensures ontological consistency. A plant can remain itself, even during phases of dramatic phenomenal transformation, thanks to the underlying structure provided by what Goethe called the Urpflanze, or primal plant. Goethe did not mean “primal plant” in the sense of an ancestral organism; rather, he thought of it as an underlying premise that both accounts for change and motivates it in the first place. The Urpflanze serves as a plant’s animating spirit, endowing it with the potential to move . . . to have both origin and future . . . to remain itself by continually changing. If morphology has an abiding lesson, it is this: ontology cannot be guaranteed in the absence of perpetual alteration. But if change is the index of being, then phenomena must alter their forms in a way that is not particularly well described by a notion like teleology; nor, for that matter, any belief system that would assume a rigid distinction between being and becoming. Goethean morphology abides by no such notion and assumes no such distinction. Instead, it insists that phenomena, in order to remain animate, undergo continual formal change as they negotiate between the persistence of their inherent drive and the constraints of their immediate context: their specificity of being is ensured by their endless becoming.2 Morphology’s sensitivity to the continuous coming-into-being of form helped inaugurate an approach to metamorphosis that, over time, found its way into animation practice/theory and film Saber 9 discourse more broadly. From the start, Goethe (2009: 48) held that morphology would one day supplement other disciplines. This article lends credence to his intuition by demonstrating the extent to which morphology supplements cinema studies – a discipline not yet in existence during Goethe’s time, but one that no doubt would have captured his interest. Ultimately, while I do not necessarily intend to align myself here with the project of Goethean science or provide an extended introduction to this field, I do feel compelled to broach the subject of morphology’s continued relevance to cinema studies – to a discipline still trying to find its form. Morphology as methodology To be clear, I am referring to a conception of morphology that inhered prior to its establishment as a science in the strictest sense. Upon its introduction, morphology emphasized a particular way of regarding things, an accomplishment of seeing the natural world in all its flux and evanescence. Goethe (1952: 49) himself coined the term: ‘If we would introduce a morphology’, he proposed, we should think thereby only of an abstraction – a notion of something held fast in experience but for an instant. What has been formed is immediately transformed again, and if we would succeed, to some degree, to a living view of Nature, we must attempt to remain as active and as plastic as the example she sets for us. Goethean morphology embraces the study of phenomena in the broadest sense, observing things at every stage of their development – from their clearest form to their most flickering. But, in Goethean morphology, form (morphe) describes both the linear contours of a phenomenon and the idea within it. In morphology, form therefore refers to an eidetic structure that is also sensuous: a condition of possibility immanent to the phenomenon itself (Don, 1996; Pinotti, 2012, 2016). Otherwise known as the urphaenomen, this condition of possibility is a never-given theme that can be ascertained only through a phenomenon’s infinite variations. In the botanic realm, Goethe referred to such an urphaenomen as the Urpflanze, or primal plant. Far from an ancestral plant, the Urpflanze was to Goethe a metamorphic condition that grants botanic phenomena their possibility (Pinotti, 2012, 2016). Insofar as morphology has a goal, it is the accomplishment of ‘seeing’ the Urpflanze, but this is a most peculiar way of seeing, for there is nothing empirically visible about the primal plant, and this way of seeing arises only after the observer has undergone a thorough education of the gaze – and, crucially, the hand. After all, the morphological process, as Goethe envisioned it, starts with a sketch: an onlooker draws a given plant in a series of developmental stages to represent an ensemble of temporal relations (Goethe, 2009: 56). Then the onlooker compares these static forms in the mind, glancing at them quickly in succession until the flickering images blur into a supersensible archetype – one that ‘is transparent in the transient empirical forms of the members in the series’ (Bjelić, 1992: 232). This series of still images ‘molds the witnessing gaze from one form to another’, and, once caught up in this stream of form, the onlooker ‘suddenly witnesses’ the formerly concealed archetype as ‘a mobile image’ (see Brady, 1987: 276–278). Insofar as morphology has an ultimate objective, it is nothing less than the discovery of a moving image. The praxis of Goethean morphology – in which a botanical observer intuits from a series of static images the full, motile process of organic formation – has even been described as ‘a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants’ (Miller, 2009: xix). This intersection of moving imagery and biological process would not surprise the many film scholars who have shown how cinema has long functioned not only aesthetically, but also as a tool for measurement and examination (Toropova, 2020). It is well known, moreover, that two physiologists – Étienne-Jules Marey and 10 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) Eadweard Muybridge – developed the first sustained attempts at serial photography. They found that they could more effectively study a figure’s movement through space by breaking up that movement into discrete images or, in Marey’s case, by practising chronophotography. At first blush, morphology appears to subscribe to a similar logic, but Goethe (1981: 492) would insist that the process of separation and analysis remains antithetical to morphology’s aim: the proper accounting of aesthetic experience and form. Hence, while the praxis of morphology begins by illustrating discrete moments within an entity’s formal trajectory, it ultimately sets out to discover the unifying movement that effectuates such a trajectory – the abstract gesture whose principle is fluctuation rather than stasis. ‘Seeing’ this unifying movement, which has been dispersed across sensate particulars, remains the overarching goal of Goethe’s artful science (Weik, 2017: 354). In fact, the Urpflanze is not a physically occurring phenomenon that can be witnessed in material form; it is this unifying movement. It is the virtual gesture that determines and accounts for a plant’s varying transformations (Amrine, 2015; Brady, 1987). This inversion of causality (movement as a form-generating principle) changes the way we see the static images drawn by a botanical observer. We see them now as arrested stages in the transit of a miraculous and formgenerating movement. In Goethe’s telling, the Urpflanze does not exist materially as some remote, stable entity; rather, it inhabits empirical vegetal phenomena as a never fully given theme, unifying their countless variations (Pinotti, 2012, 2016). Seeing the Urpflanze amounts to recognizing it through such variations, which is to say through the infinitely nuanced compressions and expansions of vegetal phenomena. Whereas conventional empirical inquiry separates ‘the living thing . . . into its elements, but one cannot put these elements together again’, morphology instead seeks to recognize ‘living forms as such, to understand their outwardly visible and tangible parts in relation to one another, and to lay hold of them as indicia of the inner parts’ (Goethe, 1981: 55). Goethe sought, therefore, to ascertain the presence of an inherently virtual, ontological movement – the enduring yet supersensible typicality to which each visible form refers – with recourse to a phenomenally concrete and dynamic methodology (Goethe, 1981: 55, Pfau, 2010: 41). This methodology of ‘delicate empiricism’, as he called it, requires the rigorous application of ‘exact sensory imagination’ (exakte sinnliche Phantasie), which allows the morphologist to see each stage of an organism’s development as a fleeting manifestation of a unifying gesture – one that guides and integrates the multitudinous expressions of organic metamorphosis (Goethe, 1988: 307). Goethe’s morphological perspective exerted a certain influence on the natural sciences, but also on the humanities, where it eventually became something of a methodological model. Especially in and around the 1920s, figures like Oswald Spengler, Lucian Vlaga, Leo Frobenius, Ernst Cassirer, Andre Jolles, Vladimir Propp and even Ludwig Wittgenstein produced studies that bear traces of Goethe’s morphological philosophy (Pinotti, 2012, 2016). Edmund Husserl was developing a similarly morphological approach around the same time, and it has been convincingly argued that Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin belong to the same chapter of this cultural history (DidiHuberman, 2016; Pinotti, 2012, 2016). For the most part, the task of accounting for this cultural history has fallen to art historians. Their work has accounted for the ways in which certain figures (Warburg and Benjamin, in particular) used Goethean morphology as a methodological approach to the questions of art history (DidiHuberman, 2016; Pinotti, 2012, 2016). While these figures were not aligned theoretically, they did share a desire to deploy Goethe’s morphological tradition as a fundamental epistemological tool within the humanities. This genealogy still needs to be reconstructed and accounted for, and in this article I contribute to that ongoing work by exploring the ways in which Goethean morphology was used as a methodological approach to the questions of animation practice/theory. The discipline of cinema studies bears unmistakable traces of Goethe’s morphological tradition and, in the Saber 11 remainder of this article, I would like to consider how the discipline – to a degree that has not been sufficiently countenanced – helped secure Goethean morphology as an heuristic paradigm for the humanities. Metamorphic animation The technology of animation – understood as the illusion of movement synthesized from a succession of still images – is foundational to cinema history, but the discipline of cinema studies has sometimes situated animation at its margins. In fact, Tom Gunning (2010: 261) once averred that, of all the ‘great scandals’ of film theory, ‘the marginalization of animation’ looms largest. Even though animation has always been foundational to cinema, and even though the field has come a long way since Gunning’s proclamation, animation occasionally gets neglected by those making broad proclamations about the nature of film. But is this a problem with film theory or our view of film theory? In other words, could the occasional marginalization of animation be remedied by enlarging our view of what constitutes film theory? Sensitive to these questions, my article proffers Goethean morphology as something of a proleptic film theory – and one that might allow us to re-centre animation within the history of moving image production. Following Gadassik (2015: 293) (who follows Alexandre Alexeieff), I consider animation to be ‘an approach to moving-image production that pays particular heed to the structure and synthesis of movement’: of anima, the vital principle, the force of life. While broad, this definition has a number of salutary effects. First, it does justice to the chief pursuit of many animators: attuning themselves to the virtual gesture that undergirds sensate transformation. Secondly, it draws animation practices and scientific motion studies together under the aegis of a shared desire to understand the nature of movement. But, most importantly, Gadassik’s definition of animation is capacious enough to include an approach to moving-image production – Goethean morphology – that preceded the formality of cinema’s actual occurrence. One of the notable features of Goethean morphology is that it can be considered both an animation practice and a scientific motion study. Whereas André Bazin claimed that early scientists of motion, such as Marey and Muybridge, could never be considered inventors of the cinema because their work was propelled by an interest in analysing movement, as opposed to the cinema’s interest in synthesizing motion, Goethean morphology is propelled by both interests. In that sense, Goethe might himself be considered an inventor of cinema. This is going too far, of course, since we know from Bazin himself that cinema has not yet been invented – and it is anyway unwise to imagine linear patterns of development or specific loci of derivation (Bazin, 1967: 21). Still, it is worth recognizing Goethe’s interest in both the analysis and synthesis of motion. His morphological insights expand the field of animation studies and, to adopt Gunning’s (2010: 261) words, they give us an opportunity to ‘reformulate a number of theoretical and aesthetic issues, including film spectatorship, film style, and the confluence of a variety of new media’. It must be acknowledged, moreover, that despite its apparent remoteness, Goethean morphology is not entirely divorced from classical or contemporary film theory. In fact, its tendrils extend into a great many works, and while these works would be too variegated to explicate in full, they do share an abiding interest in one concept: metamorphosis. More specifically, they understand the highly mutable, plastic character of animated form to be uniquely in tune with the metamorphic process at work in organic phenomena. The most famous example of this perspective would have to be Eisenstein’s discussion of the ‘plasmaticness’ of Disney’s drawn animation, which is to say its permissiveness, instability and transformative potential. This elusive concept has been much discussed in the field, and sustained engagement with it has led scholars like Torre (2014: 48) to claim that the ‘normally undetectable events of metamorphosis’ can be uniquely visualized 12 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) through animation. Many other scholars have advanced metamorphosis as the fundamental structure/fantasy that unites animation’s many forms, from cel to stop-motion to digital motion-capture (Furniss, 1998; Gunning, 2013; Pierson, 2015; Sobchack, 2000; Wells, 1998). Each, I would argue, is an unwitting inheritor – and refiner – of key tenets in Goethean morphology, which outlined a method for seeing the nature of a phenomenon in the dynamic process of its animation, of its coming into being. Animation avant la lettre Precisely because it undertakes such a comprehensive theorization of the Urpflanze’s miraculous emergence – the surfacing of a virtual motility that occasions our ingratiation into a transforming world – Goethean morphology represents, in my view, a preemptive practice of animation.3 Animation was missing but desired prior to its appearance, an interval in the morphological tradition that exerted a mysterious pressure, as if from the future, on Goethe’s efforts to study the metamorphosis of plants. Goethe designed his process so that he might become attuned to pure motion, or the virtual gesture that accounts for sensate perception; this process may strike us now as something of a fledgling animation practice. As Torre (2014: 52) writes: even in the case of exclusively drawn animation, in which the animator must encode each new drawing with motion rather than overtly add to it, the animator must at least have an awareness of . . . pure motion . . . in order to create a convincing movement of . . . form. Moreover, in her study of animation practices, Gadassik (2015: 271) notes that animators increasingly sought to attune themselves to some form-generating, virtual gesture: Driving the development of motion-capture techniques in both the life sciences and in studio animation was their shared interest in mining the movements of specific bodies (specimens, models, characters) for encrypted signs of some kind of essential or archetypal patterns. The pursuit of such embedded universal patterns . . . led to a coincident transition away from tracking movement through a series of discrete instances and toward the development of abstracted linear movement notation strategies. Such ‘action analysis’ would eventually become, in places like Walt Disney Studios, a veritable training programme, with managers seeking to automate the process by which images, felt to be mobile, exhibit animating force. ‘The main task of the animator’, notes Gadassik, became ‘not to render detailed key frames of sequential poses but rather to indicate the underlying trajectory of a gesture by using’ an animated line ‘as a kind of movement-notation system’ (p. 288). In lock-step with this development in animation practice, advancements in the field of scientific motion visualization adopted the figure of the fluid line as a symbol for hidden movement . . . In stilling and fixing the line of activity, [these scientific advancements] turned the dynamic arc of a gesture into a fixed and determined figure, ready for analysis, interpretation, and comparison across different fields . . . Movement was [assumed to be] not just a mechanical property of the body but . . . also a revealing trace of personality or essence, whether it was the essence of the individual or the essence of an activity, such as a state of mind or an ideal pattern for performing a labor task. (pp. 288–291) It is worth noting that Goethean morphology, while engaged in a similar process of movement divination, was not committed to tracing lines in this manner. A less overtly industrialized process, it maintained that the Urpflanze – as a virtual gesture – could never be fully visualized. Unlike the Saber 13 industrial motion science of chronocyclegraphy, morphology refused to still and fix the line of a phenomenon’s movement; it never turned an abstract dynamism into a concrete fixity, ready for analysis and interpretation. Technology like the cinematograph, however, permitted extraction and rendering of the ‘ineffable properties of motion’ (p. 293). It might even be argued that cinema industrialized the method of Goethean morphology, rerouting it into studio animation ‘action analysis’. Goethe (1998) would have been suspicious of this industrialization – dependent as it was on instruments that make formal change legible and interpretable – for he maintained that the human being is already the most perfect instrument, and he felt that any non-human device would inevitably be constructed in such a way as to distort the form that nature takes (p. 120). Nature, he felt, would reveal nothing, or at least nothing truthful, under the torture of such devices. All is (Caroline) Leaf This same suspicion has motivated artisanal animators like Caroline Leaf – an artist who, over her career, has increasingly sought to eliminate everything between her and animated movement, to find some ‘technique of immediacy’ (Leaf, 2003). One of her most remarkable works, Two Sisters, was even scratched directly into 70mm IMAX film emulsion. This particular work attends to the ever-shifting and codependent relationship between a writerly, deformed sister named Viola and her sibling, who derives fulfillment from taking care of Viola and sheltering her from the outside world. They live together in a darkened room on a remote island, seemingly accessible only by water, and one day their guarded lifestyle is upended by the introduction of a man who has read Viola’s writing and wants to meet her and express his appreciation for it. The first sound we hear in the film is this man swimming to the island – a fitting sonic introduction to a work that will soon foreground the fluidity of Leaf’s visuals. Indeed, Leaf’s animations are generally known for their fluid transitions, or ‘sustained metamorphoses’ (Wells, 2002: 101–111). Although she animates in a variety of ways – sand on glass, oil paint on glass, scratching on film stock – each of these techniques shares a property of fluid spatial construction. Leaf’s perpetually swirling figures abide by a shape-shifting logic according to which any point in the frame can change at any time. This aesthetic is reinforced by an absence of cuts. As she notes: All my animating life I did not know how to make an edited cut, and found my way around the problem by making morphed scene changes. Some would say my animation is noteworthy for its moving camera and morphing scene changes. (Leaf, 2012). Her use of painstakingly manipulated traveling zooms leads to a remarkably metamorphic image, and the result of this style of direct animation, especially in Two Sisters, is a disarmingly simultaneous sense of, on one hand, surface form and, on the other hand, something that moves below the surface without ever quite obtruding into appearance. Still, despite never fully offering itself to our visual faculties, this never-quite-given movement gets contracted into our senses as we witness the film’s metamorphic movements. Two Sisters thus attunes us to an abstract dynamism that grants the images their potential for transformation. Leaf herself, who studied visual arts at Harvard followed by a period at the National Film Board of Canada, has explicitly described her animation practice in such terms: at Harvard, she says, ‘the main goal was to make [our animations] move, and we believed Norman McLaren’s observation that what happens between the frames is more important than what happens on each frame’ (Leaf, 2012). Leaf’s abiding interest in movement gels with most other animators who tend to work in camera-less animation, as they often explore ‘qualities of movement in a general sense’ (Furniss, 1998: 41). Perhaps what distinguishes Leaf is her visual memory, which focuses assiduously on ‘things that pass quickly by’ 14 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) (Leaf, 2020). This attunement to evanescence seems inextricably tied to her chosen medium of fluid materials, which result in elusive and non-replicable forms. Moreover, because she cannot go back and reshoot as in cel animation, her films are, she claims, ‘full of mistakes’ (Leaf, 2020), and her method of animation is ill-suited to commercial production since she cannot create storyboards to preemptively alert the client of her plans. Leaf’s highly Romantic, artisanal method of animation, in which change can occur at any moment, retains a sense of immanent identity through the very consistency of its metamorphic form. We get a better sense of this by paying attention to the way that Leaf intertwines story and aesthetic in Two Sisters. For instance, the man’s sudden introduction into the sheltered world of the two sisters alters the film’s aesthetic, turning inveterate darkness into unexpected illumination – a change reflected within the sisters’ home, which until that point has been a stygian world of barely visible business. When the man finally leaves, Viola returns to the care of her sister but insists upon keeping their door open, allowing light to pervade the room in a way it never did before. Their structural environment – not to mention the structure of their relationship – has retained its identity even as the form of that identity has shifted. This morphological conclusion – organisms change to remain themselves – is reflected in the consistently shifting quality of the film’s form. When we watch Two Sisters, we are really looking at a consistently shifting process of imagistic development; Bildung rather than Gestalt (a difference discussed in more detail below). Through its unremittingly fluidic shifts, the film attunes us to the underlying law of its development rather than to its discrete, isolated frames. In that sense, Leaf’s animation style resonates with Eisenstein’s animation theory, which is similarly interested in ‘infinite changeability, modulation, transitivity and the continuous coming into being of images’ (Eisenstein, 1988: 45). And, as we will see in the next section, insofar as Leaf and Eisenstein share a reference point, it would have to be Goethe’s study of phenomenal metamorphosis. Eisenstein and morphological film form Metamorphosis, in Goethe’s (1981: 60) view, constitutes the formal catalyst for a process of Bildung that he characterizes as ‘perpetual transfiguration’ (fortwährendes Umbilden), or in Pfau’s (2010: 37) words, ‘a self-organizing, differential play of forces over time’. Goethe distinguishes between this fluid notion of Bildung and the more static notion of Gestalt: while Bildung refers to a formative process, Gestalt refers to an already finished form. For that reason, Goethe uses the term Bildung to refer to the originary ‘leaf’ as it moves through its various phases of metamorphosis in the growth of a plant. Moreover, according to Goethe (1981: 48), the plant’s metamorphosis follows an eternal rhythm of expansion and contraction through the phases of plant development. What we see is a gradual intensification of the plant as it moves through the various metamorphic forms of the originary ‘leaf’, which gradually reaches its highest state of intensification in the flower and the fruit, and the seed within the fruit. This organic process, in which polarities are generated and then overcome, might remind us not only of Hegelian dialectics, but also of Eisenstein’s conception of dialectical montage. But, if this is dialectics, it is a decidedly emergent version of it, indebted to the organicist belief that the interactions of various elemental parts within an organism lead to properties and behaviors that are fundamentally different from those previously observed within that organism. Eisenstein eagerly folds this organicist perspective into his theory of film form and, at times, he seems to desire a film theory equal to Goethe’s morphological perspective. Goethe is even explicitly quoted in Eisenstein’s essay ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’: ‘In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it’ (quoted in Eisenstein, 1977: 45). Eisenstein’s notion of dialectical montage – which he Saber 15 describes as an ‘organic secret: a leaping imagist movement from quality to quality’, and which is ‘not a mere formula of growth, but is more, a formula of development’ (p. 172) – becomes in his film theory the formal catalyst for a Goethean process of Bildung. ‘Within a scheme of mutual relations’, Eisenstein writes, the various methods of montage echo and conflict with one another until they ‘move to a more and more strongly defined type of montage, each one organically growing from the other’ (p. 79). The spectator, having become attuned to the eternal systole and diastole of dialectical montage, attains in Eisenstein’s view a ‘dynamic perception of phenomena’ (p. 142) indistinguishable from Goethe’s ‘delicate empiricism’. These twin methods of perception describe a kind of permissiveness and plasticity in the presence of the observed; in fact, they envisage an encounter in which the observed works upon the observer at least as much as the other way around. Delicate empiricism, as Goethe outlined it, forces observer and observed into a relationship of constant adaptation and feedback, which suggests to Amanda Jo Goldstein (2017: 131) that Goethe’s empirical method attends to ‘the forms not of unity or identity, but of interactivity and transfiguration’. So, when Goethe (1823: 309) notes that delicate empiricism requires ‘objectively active’ (gegenständlich tätig) thinking, he means to convey that the method involves an object’s activity as much as a subject’s. For him, objectivity connotes the very opposite of uninvolved neutrality. As Goldstein (2017: 124–125) explains, he hijacks the term to advocate the observer’s susceptibility to transformation by the objects under view, casting that transformation as an indispensible register of those objects’ efficacy and activity, even though it requires abandoning every claim to universality for the knowledge produced in their cooperation. In other words, during the morphological encounter, an observer’s identity is produced cooperatively; immanently vulnerable to contracting the world’s happenings and fluctuations, the observer becomes indistinguishable from phenomena and equal to their ceaseless transformations. In nature, this might look like the landscape researcher Isis Brook (1998: 68) walking through the woods, having insights ‘given’ to her by ‘alien’ phenomena like trees; in a theater, this might look like Maxim Gorky (1960[1896]) attending his first film, forgetting where he is and having ‘strange imaginings invade [his] mind’ (p. 409). This cooperatively transfigurative modality of encounter was attainable, according to Eisenstein (1977: 172), through dialectical montage, which he framed as an inherently involving process during which we participate in the organic development of film form. Crucial to the notion of passive entanglement is an unconventional conception, shared by Eisenstein and Goethe, of movement’s relationship to form. For them, movement determines form. We have already seen as much in Goethe’s writing, and for Eisenstein too, motion was a force that does not simply propel forms but actually creates them, [making] clear the multiple nature of the participation that motion invokes, from . . . perceptual identity . . . to the realm of anticipation, speculation, and imagination of the possibly transforming aspects of line. (Gunning, 2010: 266) This view of causality, which has also been espoused by animators and animation theorists (Alexeieff, 1976: 96; Lye, 1963: 66–69; Torre, 2014: 52), can be traced back to Goethe, or at least beyond Bergson (Brady, 1987: 257). Small wonder, then, that Goethe would be expressly relied upon in Eisenstein’s theory of film form and implicitly relied upon in Eisenstein on Disney (Eisenstein, 1988).4 If Eisenstein’s theory of film form helped launch Goethean morphology as an heuristic paradigm for the humanities, then Eisenstein on Disney helped secure morphology as a conceptual key for understanding the transformative nature of animation. 16 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) In this extended and effusive love-letter to the malleable, liberated forms of 1920s Disney animation – rubber-hose animation in particular – Eisenstein unveils his celebrated concept of ‘plasmaticness’. Here, he defines plasmaticness as a quality of unfettered form, a certain elasticity of contour that fluidly rejects norms of stability and ossification. In addition to singing its praises as an aesthetic achievement, he claims that plasmaticness can involve us, as viewers, in ‘the traits of a transformed world, a world going out of itself’ (p. 10). The forms within that self-differentiating and self-exiting world continually transmogrify, underscoring the eternal power of changeability and endless mobility. But Eisenstein’s ebullient praise of aesthetic plasmaticness cannot be neatly sundered from its political connotations, for in describing plasmaticness as ‘a displacement, an upheaval, a unique protest against the metaphysical immobility of the once-and-forever given’ (p. 33), he none-too-subtly imagines this writhing plasticity as something of an organizing principle. In addition to being visually satisfying, plasmaticness has the capacity to invigorate a certain ‘coming into being’ of collective and social units. In other words, this quality of visual transformation has transformative power because it is capable of disturbing the sometimes tyrannically imposed notions of unity, stillness, and coherence. There is, as Eisenstein says, a certain ‘ecstasy’ in ‘sensing and experiencing . . . the primal “omnipotence” – the element of “coming into being” – the “plastmaticness” of existence, from which everything can arise . . . This power . . . is beyond any image, without an image, beyond tangibility – like a pure sensation’ (p. 46). But, following Goethe, he maintains that this pure, never totally given sensation can be ascertained only through the ‘tremor of contour’. This tremor is, for Eisenstein, authorial in its capacity to make visible a ‘pure aspect’ (p. 47). So, not unlike the Urpflanze, this ‘pure aspect’ is brought forth through the dynamic process of its coming into being. Ultimately, Eisenstein’s remarks on (1920s) Disney reveal the extent to which the highly mutable character of drawn animation – or at least critical commentary on it – iterates upon morphology’s insight into the metamorphic process of simultaneously being and becoming. Bazin and total morphology Eisenstein was not the only classical film theorist seemingly influenced by morphological ideas. We can see similarly morphological ideas making their way into the thought of André Bazin, a figure sometimes – and rashly, in my view – set up to be Eisenstein’s foil, mainly on the basis of a facile dichotomy: Eisenstein’s investment in formalism and animation vs. Bazin’s investment in realism and live-action. Of this dichotomy, however, it must be said that while Bazin (1956) may have seen Disney’s genius as more industrial than artistic (p. 1), he actually aligned with Eisenstein on the subject of animation’s inherent inventiveness and transformative nature. In one of his most sustained meditations on the subject, Bazin (1997: 215) likens animation to an emergent flower: ‘It is a germination, a budding; form engenders form without ever justifying its existence.’ This organicist language dovetails with his belief that animation discovers, through a continuous vision of flux and evanescence, the fundamental rhythm of reality, ‘a sort of first, abstract principle . . . an essential musicality’ (Bazin, 1951: 59). Just as a melody moves between the notes, and just as Goethe’s Urpflanze moves between the empirical particulars of a plant’s sensate transformations, animation moves between the vagaries of each film frame (recall here the observation, made by McLaren and upheld by Leaf, 2012, ‘that what happens between the frames is more important than what happens on each frame’). For Bazin, animation attunes us to an originary, abstract dynamism that we somehow intuit as we witness the shifting states of formal metamorphosis. As if to bolster Bazin’s point, Torre (2014: 59) claims that, while watching metamorphic animation, ‘we “know” already what the end state will be before we go through the mental morphing process; we are therefore able to comprehend the transformation phase from one thing to Saber 17 another.’ Each varying transformation comes to seem inevitable ‘in the beseeming infinity of torqued rippling’, as Stan Brakhage (1996: 59) once put it.5 Bazin’s perspective on animation (i.e. the aesthetic discovers an originary, abstract dynamism that grants sensate particulars their capacity for transformation) locates his broader film theory within the remit of Goethean morphology. In fact, in a subterranean fashion, Bazin’s conception of cinema as an historical phenomenon executes a rigorous transposition of Goethean morphology into the domain of film theory. Bazin frames the becoming of cinema as a metamorphic variation on an intrinsic theme – referring to this intrinsic theme as total cinema – even as he avoids exploring the historical/chronological genesis of cinema (i.e. starting from the appearance of a first example). Instead, just as Goethe’s morphological gaze tends toward a nonlinear, radial structure, as if every empirical stage of a plant’s development is a sort of irradiation from its originary, nonempirical form (Pinotti, 2012), Bazin’s (1967: 17) film theory interests itself in the structural origin of a never-given theme that unifies all of cinema’s historical variations. His writings aim always toward a principle of recognition: how can we recognize, he asks, cinema qua cinema? Each new technological development of cinema is, to him, a manifestation, variation, or transformation of the same core – though one that is never given in itself. Just as the Urpflanze would cease to be the condition of possibility for all botanic instantiations if it became an empirical phenomenon, total cinema, fully realized and entirely immanent, would cease to be cinema at all. Like the Urpflanze, which can only be sensed through phenomenal transformation, total cinema is ‘externally so manysided and internally so manifold and inexhaustible that we cannot choose enough points of view to behold it’ (Steiger, 1977: 12). The idea of total cinema expresses something fundamental about cinema while also assimilating its unexpected transformations, establishing a measure of inner coherence while also being amenable to what cinema could have been and what it may yet become. In seeking to explain total cinema, Bazin seems to have inherited the central problem that Goethe concerned himself with: how to ‘see’ an originary but evolving phenomenon that choreographs formal change in a non-restrictive manner. Animation theorists/practitioners have inherited the same problem. We see it being attended to by figures like Hans Richter (1976[1952]), who claimed that ‘one of the main distinctions’ of animation, ‘this new plastic expression’, is how ‘the orchestration of all stages of development of form is seen and felt simultaneously – backwards and forwards’ (p. 52). We also see it being attended to in work like Gadassik’s (2011) Meryl Strip, which dissects the body of Meryl Streep in her cinematic incarnations, looking for traces of a single skeleton beneath the diverse landscape of her personas and narratives . . . an always recurring and familiar set of gestures and movements that could only belong to Meryl. With this film, Gadassik – in a way that we now recognize as deeply morphological – explores the historical/chronological genesis of Meryl Streep by divining the structural origin of a never given theme that unifies all of the actor’s gestural variations while remaining flexible to changing circumstances. Goethe adopted the same method in seeking to recognize a specific plant as a specific plant. The morphologist sees the historical becoming of every phenomenon through the metamorphic variations of an intuitable – but never completely given – theme. Goethe advanced this idea, Eisenstein and Bazin took it up implicitly in their comments on animated film and total cinema, and Leaf and Gadassik eventually extended it into their film practice and animation theory. This schematic lineage, while by no means exhaustive of every possible through-line between morphology and animation,6 is nevertheless illustrative of the ways in which morphology was taken up as an heuristic paradigm by those committed to producing/studying moving images. 18 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) Morphing away from the index Animation theory boasts a continual engagement with the notion of metamorphosis and its realization through technological means. As such, it should be considered part of a longer cultural history of morphological reception. Moreover, I would contend that, in some ways, animation’s engagement with the morphological tradition bears more fruit than certain strands of art historical engagement. To wit, why should Aby Warburg’s atlas serve as a more fitting exemplification of Goethean morphology than animated film, which more readily and effectively expresses the fluid metamorphosis of form? Goethe, after all, placed the idea of transformation – not simply arrested form – at the center of his reflections on nature. At all times, Goethe describes formation as a dynamic process (Bildung) rather than a static, determinate structure (Gestalt), so it is not altogether clear why Warburg’s atlas of unsynthesized static images has been figured as the clearest distillation of Goethe’s ideas (Didi-Huberman, 2016; Pinotti, 2012, 2016) – unless, of course, we accept that conceptual inheritance must be explicitly remarked upon by the inheritor. This is a fallacy I would like to reject. Warburg’s atlas may have claimed inheritance of Goethe’s ideas, but an animation like Two Sisters actually mobilizes them. If the metamorphosis of the organism is mirrored in Goethe’s metamorphic model of thought, then it culminates in animation, which more than anything engages and conveys the morphological quality of fluid transformation. To bring Goethean morphology into dialogue with animation scholarship, as I have done in this article, is to chart a new direction for film theory, which too often fails to engage with the very form of cinema that most fully realizes the medium’s inherently transformative nature. This reticence can probably be attributed to animation’s apparent sundering of instance and effect: its unfamiliar version of indexicality. Yet, as Gunning has suggested, this unfamiliar version of indexicality can be dismissed only if one accepts the popular yet impoverished view of the cinematic index that has calcified in the discipline (in this popular view, since photographs are the result of a chemical fixation of rays of light emanated by the portrayed object, cinema can be characterized as indexical since its photographic image and the portrayed object are adjoining in a causal, existential way). He suggests, instead, that motion constitutes the structure of indexicality: ‘To think of cinema’s indexical function as gestural, as a dynamic relation within the world, may allow us to attend to a different aspect of the cinema than the pictorial’ (Gunning, 2014). Or, as Gadassik (2015: 284) puts it, the type of indexicality that interests animators is ‘the appearance of identifiable, believable movement, not some faithful impression of a concrete body’. Freed from the impoverished view of the index, cinema escapes ‘the straitjacket of exclusive correspondence or reference to any preexisting reality’ (Gunning, 2010: 266). Affirming cinema’s specificity of being through recourse to this impoverished view of the index freezes the phenomenon in place and ignores its vitality for the sake of convenient if superannuated analysis. Goethean morphology, meanwhile, frees cinema from the straitjacket of exclusive correspondence to preexisting reality and offers a more capacious and motile manner of approach to the question of cinematic specificity. Rather than looking for a particular part of cinema that would differentiate it, we need to understand its differentiations – analog, digital, animation, live-action, theatrical, home-theatrical, etc. – in a more holistic way. Were we to countenance a morphological perspective, we would see in cinema’s evolution the same originary, virtual gesture coming into view, unifying each expression of cinema through (rather than despite) the fact of its sensuous, perpetual shape-change. Some underlying dynamism guides and integrates the multitudinous expressions of the phenomenon we agree to call cinema. Cinema’s very protean nature performs a sort of signifying work, pointing toward its beingness by transpiring into new forms. Goethe’s science of morphology remains the premier elucidator of this logic of ontological evanescence and transfiguration, and animation remains its most convenient exemplar. Saber 19 This, I believe, is one reason why figures like Eisenstein expropriate morphology’s key tenets in their writings on animation. Goethean morphology represents not only a proleptic film theory, but one that rigorously attends to the intrinsic practices, aims, and intimations of animation. Above all, it offers a way to visualize the normally undetectable events of metamorphosis, but so too does it represent, in and of itself, ‘an approach to moving-image production that pays particular heed to the structure and synthesis of movement’ (Gadassik, 2015: 293). In that sense it is both a form of scientific motion study and a form of animation practice. The Goethean morphologist can be seen as a theorist/practitioner of animation, and animation scholarship invariably demonstrates how morphology not only resonates with animation, but that it has already, in a subterranean manner, influenced the course of its development. Ultimately, by suggesting that Goethean morphology represents a key inflection point in the history of motion visualization, my article has also sought to support Gadassik’s (2015: 271) argument that ‘early animators . . . drew influence (directly or indirectly) from techniques developed by the life sciences in order to visually compose and communicate movement.’ Yet, if Goethe’s commitment to drawing is any indication, we may need to add the original morphologist to this hallowed group of ‘early animators’. Declaration of conflicting interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article. Notes 1. 2. I am indebted to Suzanne Buchan not only for pointing out a rare (perhaps the only) exception – Dennis Dollens’ article, ‘The Cathedral is alive: Animating biomimetic architecture’, which discusses Goethe’s writings on plants – but also because her personal correspondence with Dollens prompted him to invoke Goethean morphology in the first place (Dollens, 2006: 111). If this account of Goethean morphology sounds somewhat Deleuzian, it is because Deleuze’s writing is often Goethean in spirit if not always in nomenclature (see Amrine, 2015: 45–72). The constellation of Goethean morphology, Deleuzian philosophy, and animation practice deserves its own article, and in this space I can only gesture toward what might be covered in those pages. Suffice to say, however, that Deleuze’s conception of contemplation as passive, synthetic, and contractile owes a great deal to Goethe’s conception of the morphological encounter, and at the very least, Goethe’s Urpflanze and Deleuze’s “spiritual automaton” share certain commonalities. Both, after all, irrupt in the subject’s mind to unsettle received knowledge and reflexes of thought; seeming to emerge in the recesses of the observing mind, the Urpflanze and the spiritual automaton inject into it thoughts from the outside. For some people, this type of possession results in psychical damage, but possession is the only way the Urpflanze and spiritual automaton can properly connect mind and matter, synchronising a stream of images in the world with a stream of ideas in the mind. Perhaps cinema functions in this way as well, serving, like the spiritual automaton, as ‘a strange kind of agent in that it is less the cause of a new seeing than the produced locus within which such seeing arises’ (Bogue, 2010: 125–127; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 61–83), and like the Urpflanze, perhaps it seeds in the viewer a process of innovative visualization, supplanting habitual ways of seeing with thought from the outside. As a final note on this topic, I should also point out that animators like Viking Eggeling (1976[1924]: 52) have expressed a perspective on their craft that resonates with Goethean morphology and Deleuzian philosophy: ‘Becoming and duration are not in any way a diminution of unchanging eternity; they are its expression . . . Being and becoming are one . . . What should be grasped and given form are things in flux.’ 20 3. 4. 5. 6. animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18(1) Again I am grateful to Suzanne Buchan for directing me to Dollens (2006: 111), who makes a similar claim: ‘Essentially, in 1790, Goethe articulated a theory of graphic transition of plant-form development seen in morphological growth and development that may now be looked at as proto-animation.’ I would even propose that Bergson has been privileged in the discourse of film theory merely because he mentions cinema explicitly, and that his historical coincidence with the medium has elided Goethean morphology in discussions of cinema and its relation to concepts like perception, movement, and becoming. Brakhage’s so-called ‘eye adventures’ – during which he informally investigated seeing in all its physiological and psychological forms – culminated in a series of abstract, hand-painted films in the 1980s and 1990s, each of which reflect his longstanding interest in prelinguistic vision. But these ‘eye adventures’ also replicated Goethe’s morphological studies in that they discovered an ‘aura of non-shape’ within which ‘shapes reshape’ and ‘continue their transformatory dance until [the observer] is involved purely with the innards of what one once knew only as outline’ (Brakhage, 2001: 34). Elsewhere referring to this ‘aura of non-shape’ as ‘a spaceless entity containing a timeless evolution’ (p. 35), Brakhage seems to be describing what Goethe called the Urpflanze, and, to an extent, what Deleuze called the ‘plane of immanence’. Seeking to connect the plane of immanence to Brakhage’s overall project, Tyrus Miller (2005: 184) once described Deleuze’s concept as ‘the horizon of chaos, which is the limit of discernible figuration . . . the mobile background which does not appear, but so that the forming and collapsing patterns of Brakhage’s hand-painted films can be perceived’. This description, which could refer to the plane of immanence, the Urpflanze, or the premise underlying Two Sisters, hints at a deeply morphological philosophy running throughout Brakhage’s project. It deserves more attention than I can afford it here, but Alexeieff’s (1976) short essay, ‘Illusory Solids in the Motion Picture Synthesis’, contains tantalizingly Goethean (and sneakily Bazinian) remarks on animation (pp. 95–96), and future research would have to consider the theory/work of William Kentridge and Jürgen Reble as well. References Alexeieff A (1976) Illusory solids in the motion picture. 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