GERTRUD KOCH

Benjamin’s Mass at the Cinema

W ith the introduction of letterpress printing, if

not even earlier, we can speak of media in which mechanical reproduction
enables the generation of networks of communication on a mass scale that
can function on an anonymous basis. With this genealogy in mind, we can
nonetheless consider the cinema the first genuine mass medium to the extent
that it consciously addresses and engages the masses as such. The established
discourses on the masses paint a diffuse and shapeless crowd; lest the masses
turn into a mob, they must be led, organized, channeled. Their power, which
is universally acknowledged and described as primarily affective, must be
ordered and tended—whether by the ‘good shepherd’ or the authoritarian
leader, the pliable masses are led by an external will to which they must
submit. The analogy between this picture and the misogynistic stereotype is
clear. The emancipated masses cease to be masses, become a community, the
proletariat, a nation, an electorate. The masses are always the other, “those
folks all over the country,” as politicians like to say when they are worried
about elections and voter turnouts. In the 19th century, writers still directly
lamented the feminization of the reading public: Madame Bovary, an avid

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reader in Flaubert’s novel, is suspected to be both a pernicious heroine and
a perverted reader. The reasoning public of the bourgeois salon, thus the
hypothesis of Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is
superseded by the expansion of the mass media, which no longer form and
inform a homogeneous public. The masses, both as a subject of address and
as an agent that defies synoptic comprehension, become a visual topos:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population explosion
was described by contemporaries in terms of the social form of “the
masses.” Even then, the phenomenon was not an entirely new one.
Well before Le Bon became interested in the “psychology of the mass,”
nineteenth-century novelists were already well acquainted with mass
concentrations of people in cities, housing blocks, factory buildings,
offices, and barracks, as well as with the mass mobilization of workers
and immigrants, demonstrators, strikers, and revolutionaries. But it
was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that massive
flows of people, mass organizations, and mass actions began to appear
intrusive enough to give rise to the vision of the “revolt of the masses”
(Ortega y Gasset).1
The masses become an aesthetic phenomenon that is impossible to ignore;
from now on, however latent, they will be always on the minds of those who
seek to describe life in the big cities and to transpose art into life and take it
out into the street. Yet the transformation of the masses into a vision or, in
Benjamin, a phantasmagoria must first and foremost create the possibility of
a vantage point from which they can be savored as a theatrical spectacle and
illusion. It is from this point that the masses become aesthetic.2
The aesthetics of the masses in this sense emerges as early as the late
18th century, in the grand portraits of the revolutionary masses during the
French revolution. Once this iconography has been established, the masses
themselves become an aesthetic motif—yet even where they recede into the
background are they active as a suppressed ground. Walter Benjamin unfolds
this development in a triangular constellation: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Charles Baudelaire. The series begins with the tale “My Cousin’s
Corner Window,” which E.T.A. Hoffmann, already paralyzed, dictated in 1822;
it was to be his last. It narrates a visit to an ailing man, whose attic apartment
has a corner window that surveys the market square. It is at this window that
the cousin takes up his observer’s post, becoming the director of the hustle
and bustle of the masses, which engender in him all sorts of narratives. The
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visitor remarks on the view from the window:
The view was indeed strange and surprising. The entire market seemed
like a single mass of people squeezed tightly together, so that one
would have thought that an apple thrown into it would never reach
the ground.3
Here, the masses indeed become a “strange” image, for the theatrical gaze
fuses an aesthetic aspect with a categorically different conception of mass: that
of physics. It is this physical and impenetrable mass that appears as an extended,
opaque, and viscous substance. This image of the masses, which the cousin’s
visitor finds “tiring,” fearing even that it “might give over-sensitive people a
slight feeling of giddiness,” could not be further removed from the cousin’s
own gaze, to which the masses appear as a generic form out of which an infinite
number of stories can be unfolded. As he lectures his visitor in glowing words:
Cousin, cousin! I now see clearly that you haven’t the tiniest spark
of literary talent. You lack the first prerequisite for treading in the
footsteps of your worthy paralysed cousin: an eye that can really see.
The market down there offers you nothing but the sight of a motley,
bewildering throng of people animated by meaningless activity. Ho, ho,
my friend! I can derive from it the most varied scenery of town life,
and my mind, an honest Callot, or a modern Chodowiecki, dashes off
a whole series of sketches, some of them very bold in their outlines.
Come on cousin! Let me see if I can’t teach you at least the rudiments
of the art of seeing. Look directly down into the street – here are my
field-glasses – do you see the somewhat strangely dressed person with
a large shopping-basket on her arm who is deep in conversation with
a brush-maker […]4
And so stories upon stories proliferate wildly; one, for instance, begins
with a “bright yellow dot” that “forces its way through the crowd [Masse].”5
The aesthetics of the masses that begins to take shape here constitutes
its object as a theatrical event; it is not by accident that it takes place, in
Hoffmann’s tale, in front of the theater’s doors and on the market square. In
brief words, the astonished visitor summarizes the effects these stories about
a visible object of the outside world have on him:
It may be, dear cousin, that not one word of all your conjectures is
true, but as I look at the old women your vivid description sounds so

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 plausible that I am compelled to believe it, willy-nilly.6
The masses provide the material out of which the theatrical illusion is
fashioned; the aesthetic gaze on the masses is what tautens their factual physical
presence into the spring that propels us into the fiction of narrative and hence
into illusion, with its peculiar status, its ‘compulsion to believe.’ The masses
form the ground on which the figural image rises.
The second historic piece of literature that has given shape to this ground-
figure relationship in an aesthetics of the masses is Edgar Allan Poe’s short
story The Man of the Crowd (1840), in which a man, sitting at a coffeehouse
window, seeks distraction from his worries by observing the masses that are
in constant motion outside his window:
At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a
similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me,
therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all
care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation
of the scene without.7
In his great essay on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin recalls that
Baudelaire translated this story and points out the similarity to Baudelaire’s
famous poem “À une passante.” Benjamin sketches the genealogy from
Hoffmann via Poe to Baudelaire as a process of growing condensation
and interiorization: “In Tableaux parisiens the secret presence of a crowd is
demonstrable almost everywhere.”8 “The masses,” Benjamin writes, “were an
agitated veil, and Baudelaire views Paris through this veil.”9 I read Benjamin’s
essays on Baudelaire and on Paris decidedly as contributions to an aesthetics of
the masses, one that is predicated on their becoming visible but then renders
them a ‘ground figure,’ a form suspended between invisibility and a presence
that crowds into the image. The masses that, as an ‘agitated veil,’ become the
medium of an aesthetic perception are, I would argue, already a fusion of
the image of the revolutionary masses during the French revolution with the
physical concept of mass. For this latter concept already contains in nuce an
aesthetic motif that we can read in conjunction with Kant’s conception of the
sublime in natural beauty: the opacity of the impenetrable mass that strikes the
eye as “strange and surprising” is the description of a natural spectacle defined
by the matrix of magnitude and density. The transformation of the beautiful
of nature into artistic beauty proceeds via a figure-ground form. Where the
masses have entered into visibility and moved from the rank of inert physical

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mass to that of a subject, they occupy the modern double position that has
established them as a concealed agent and an open addressee. The political
mass has been supplemented by the aesthetic one. Hoffmann’s tale concludes,
after the lesson on aesthetic perception, with an assertion of the political
figuration: the market square itself is ultimately established as the political
site of the recognition of difference in liberal exchange, a site that must be
defended against the authoritarian tendencies among the reactionaries of the
day. A turn to which Benjamin will give yet another radical twist by arresting
this exchange in the commodity fetish and displacing, with Baudelaire, the
masses onto the boulevard and into the arcades.
The modern political theory of the masses is founded in Spinoza, and it is
to his concept of multitudo that the most recent theories of the masses, such as
Hardt and Negri’s, refer—a reference that is, in this particular case, only partly
justified, as Spinoza’s vision aims primarily at the inseparability of the state and
the masses and not at a bipolar relationship between the two. Spinoza, turning
Hobbes on his head, makes the ability of the masses to develop collective affects
precisely the basis, the force that sustains the state—which, in Hobbes, is a
sort of damage-control mechanism of human nature, since the latter, by itself,
seeks not communion but combat. Spinoza’s theory of the affectively excitable
masses explicitly draws on the Scholastic idea of man as a “social animal.” Yet
the masses, tied together by affect, though capable of productive socialization,
require that purely formal reason be presented to them in an imaginative
medium. The medium of religion engenders the imagery out of which those
narratives grow that define the life of the community in its concrete details:
Ceremonies, by virtue of their specific imaginative form, can make
man confess in all his actions and thoughts that he is subject not to his
own but to an alien power; the narratives of Scripture move the masses
to the same obedience by teaching them not by means of reason but by
invoking experience. This is the force religious ceremonies and texts
exercise: they can move man’s imagination and thus teach obedience in
a pre-rational fashion. Yet as men are of different imaginative capacity,
and as different visual traditions shape their imaginations, different
cults and narrative beliefs emerge.10
It would seem to be an immediate adoption of this Spinozist conception
of the affective masses when Sigmund Freud, drawing on LeBon, claims that
the masses “[think] in images, which call one another up by association.”11
His assessment of this basis of the masses in the imagination, however, is less
JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE 17
positive than Spinoza’s. Hardt/Negri, lending extraordinary emphasis to these
features of the masses, elaborate them into the movement of a global potestas
multitudinis against Empire. The romantic-enthusiastic image they paint of the
masses contains a highly aesthetic component; they wish to shift the masses
back into visibility, installing them, in a quasi-post-Marxist move, in the
position of the class subject, as whose immature and undeveloped precursory
stage they ultimately also appear in the Hegelian matrix.
Kracauer, like Benjamin and in contradistinction to Adorno and Horkheimer,
stakes his theory on a type of saving critique of a mass culture Adorno and
Horkheimer consider ‘deceptive,’ a critique in which the “Dialectics of the
Enlightenment” takes place once more in conjunction with the disenchantment
of world and subject so insistently invoked by Freud and Max Weber. At
the same time that the conservative Kulturkritik recognized in the rise of the
masses the Decline of the West, however, this rise rendered the masses the
new sovereign. The ambivalent cover illustration of Hobbes’s Leviathan saw
this clearly: the masses superinscribe themselves upon the sovereign just as
they themselves become the body politic. The masses became an ambiguous
phenomenon, acting, in the eyes of some observers, as a “bad object,” the
mob or lumpenproletariat that has run rampant in the streets since the French
Revolution, while others recognized in them the repressed alter ego of the
republican elites, the genie in the bottle of democratic sovereignty: how to
represent them? The problem of political representation goes hand in hand
with that of cultural representation: how are the masses to give rise to a public
will? Can the mass, once it has learnt to read itself, speak as well; does it develop
a ‘culture’ in which it represents itself in the way the bourgeoisie was said to
represent itself in its art? At the same time, the question of representation
becomes central to the efforts to form a theory of democracy, for the question
of how the political will and the accompanying process of opinion-formation
develops presupposes the transformation of the masses into a public that
participates in debate. The blind masses are now to become a participatory
public that takes an active interest in, and makes decisions regarding, public
affairs, the matters of the res publica.
The aesthetics of the masses more strictly conceived, whose fundamental
features are delineated in the 19th-century literary documents, continues
in a fascinating fashion in the history and the medium of film, where both
aspects, the aesthetic and the political masses, converge. The consequence is a
double—even a doppelganger-like—modality of film: it is, in its very origins,
almost at once an object of the political and the aesthetic avant-gardes. Let
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me quote briefly from a historical description that indicates this coincidence
of pictorial and political representation.
The visit of the German Kaiser to Vienna provided the occasion for the
following observations by Berthold Viertel. At the end of his trip, the Kaiser
joined the Austrian monarch to a cinema, where they saw a newsreel in which
the Kaiser himself appeared on the screen. Berthold Viertel describes this as
an encounter between the two bodies of the king that Ernst Kantorowicz would
distinguish in his discussion of the symbolic and the biological body of the
medieval sovereign:
I can no longer rid myself of the thought of this horrible
doppelgangerdom of representation. […] High above, in the picture,
he performs his high duties, while below, among the spectators, the
same person sits, just a human, and takes human delight in the likeness
of his rank? Or is he thus merely performing his duties once more?
Where does the representation begin, and where does it end? And the
people, twice present here and therefore twice happy, cheering along
with its own cheers, welcoming its own naïve existence as a people
in the mirror. Is not this dangerous? Could not this alarm the people
as though it saw its own ghost?12
Yet the figure of reflection art produces, what Viertel conjures here as the
terror of facing one’s own representation, is only one side of the story. The
other side is epistemic: without developing an idea of themselves as a collective
self, the masses cannot become an agent subject; they must, thus Kracauer’s
conception in The Mass Ornament, acquire the ability to read themselves,
which is to say, to face themselves as a sign, rather than disappearing into the
ornament they form in accordance with rules that remain opaque. Kracauer’s
political aesthetics is invested in the cathartic moment of self-recognition in
the image, in the difference between being and sign. We can hear in Kracauer’s
concept of the masses echoes of the tradition that wanted to move the masses
to recognize themselves as form and, in this becoming-form, to shed their
indeterminate character. So Kracauer remains within the discourse of the
dialectical sublation of the masses into a self-determined subject that is
then no longer the masses but becomes, depending on an author’s political
preferences, a ‘people,’ a ‘nation,’ a ‘class,’ or the ‘multitude.’ This requires
that the ‘masses’ gain a perspective on themselves; they must adopt a vantage
point vis-à-vis themselves. The concept of the masses, unless translated into a
dialectical evolution of transformation, contains a logical aporia this dialectic
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 is supposed to ‘sublate.’
Yet we should ask whether this
aporia might not be overcome in
other ways. To the extent that the
‘masses’ are necessarily defined
by their indeterminate size and
their expanding and dynamic
shapelessness, they defy assignation
to any closed form; their margins
King Vidor, The Crowd
remain blurry, requiring projection
into visibility. The masses, to put my hypothesis succinctly, function as an
aesthetic illusion in the sense that they come to the observer’s consciousness
only as an appearance, a flash-mob of sorts, as the ground from which a figure
emerges: as a generic principle. If the masses, as Benjamin’s metaphor of the
veil suggests, form a medium that enables urbanity to come to the fore, the next
question is: which medium in turn mediates the medium that are the masses?
In the cinema, the masses are undeniably given a new medium that
accommodates their undefinability. But in which aspect and how does it do
so? The literary evocations of the masses I have quoted depict the masses as a
‘street picture,’ an ‘urban landscape’ through which the narrative protagonist
rambles, his gaze wandering. The lack of direction characteristic of the masses
becomes a movement of heaving and surging through the infinitely ramified
streets of the ‘big’ city; the city comes to serve as the medium of the masses,
and the masses, as the medium of urbanity, which is defined by the lack of
spatial closure. Images of the masses, by contrast, inevitably operate with a pars
pro toto technique to the extent that the image is constrained by the frame, and
the flat expanse of the horizonless masses must be made to fit into the depth
of pictorial space. With film’s moving images, a medium now appears on the
stage that is characterized by fluid shifts of horizon which leave the frame
of painting behind. Instead of the frame that definitively circumscribes the
extension of the image, the projection screen of the filmic image is regulated
by a ‘cache’ that ‘covers’ or, literally, ‘conceals’ something. Christian Metz has
described this concealment as follows:
Film consists of a multitude of images, as well as camera movements,
so that the object that was off-screen can reenter the camera’s field
of view and leave it once more, etc. (that is Bazin’s theory of the
cache). The off-screen space is subject to an alternating ebb and flow:

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 it is off-screen, but it is not located outside the film. Sound and a
character’s voice moreover enable that character to remain present
even while being outside the field of view […] To summarize, we can
say […] that the cinematic off-screen space is occupied: something
incessantly takes place in it of which we know something, and there are
innumerable connections to what happens within the picture frame.13
The picture on the screen is determined by what is off-screen: by being
potentially visible, it incessantly accompanies the viewer’s imagination, affecting
our imaginative capacity, as it were, from its hiding-place. Metz describes this
influence in metaphors of the masses, speaking of a “multitude,” of “ebb and
flow.” Film is here defined by its “movable frame,” by “variable and forever
renewed selections of detail,” by a process of “framing that changes between
shots and within the shots themselves.”14 This incessant opening and closing
of horizons and spaces conceived in the metaphor of “ebb and flow” bears
within it the features of the shapeless masses that, in appearing from out of a
‘hiding-place,’ behind the “veil,” become a figure of the sublime: at once far and
close, touching and austere. In their formal structure, the multi-perspectival
montages of film are designed to produce an illusionistic evocation of an
endless unframing of the world: at its core, we begin to see, this is an aesthetic
of the masses. Metz’s argument is based on a comparison between film and
photography; he also relates both to the formation of fetishes, a reference
that I will not pursue further. Metz emphasizes the sheer ‘magnitude’ of
film, the mobilization of “many different perceptions”; he speaks of a “flood
wave passing before us” that renders the isolation of any individual picture
impossible.15 If we sever Metz’s metaphors from their immediate structural
context in a psychoanalytical theory of the fetish and place them in the context
of an aesthetic of the masses, his formal descriptions of filmic techniques
suddenly turn into metaphors of the masses. Film, in this definition, becomes
a medium of the desire for the masses that, while inevitably remaining in the
background, flash up on ever new horizons.
Yet this construction restores the masses to their ambiguous status.
In the objectivity of film, they are materialized into a motif, into pictorial
content; newly enframed, they are confronted with the mass audience as that
audience’s own image. In many movies, this dimension of mirroring—Berthold
Viertel had already addressed it, in the register of anecdote, as an unsettling
experience—becomes itself thematic. The images of the masses that have been
created over the course of the history of film encompass the entire bandwidth

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of forms and formations the masses can adopt in various constellations. Elias
Canetti’s famous study of the masses elaborates the problem that the concept
of the masses itself cannot be referred to a single phenomenon; the masses
are empirically found in an infinite variety of forms, each of which implies
different attitudes and valuations. This would seem to suggest the conclusion
either that ‘the masses’ is a fairly empty umbrella term used to subsume all
instances of large gatherings and movements of crowds; or that we cannot
speak of ‘the masses’ at all since the phenomena covered by the term are
in fact unrelated. ‘The masses’ would then be defined by, and functionally
related to, their various specific contexts, and not an independent magnitude.
Seen in this perspective, we would have to distinguish the lynch mob, the
revolutionary masses, and the masses that are the mass media’s audience in
functional terms, rather than comprising them under the term ‘the masses’
as a sort of smallest common denominator. The scholarly literature on film
evinces a clear preference for the empirical list; most studies examine different
images of the masses as presented by corpora such as genres, the oeuvres of
directors, films on certain subjects, etc.16
Benjamin’s evocation of the
masses, by contrast, is that of a
media-based episteme that occupies
the position of a percept as defined
by Deleuze, and it gestures back to
Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art
and the concept of the masses that
earlier work proposes. Benjamin
links the cinema to the masses on
Leni Reifenstahl, Triumph of the Will a unified stage. We might even say
that the primary interest of film for Benjamin is this possibility it offers of
conceiving the masses in a new way. The masses become episteme, percept,
and subject at once. The philosophical determination of the masses becomes
more than the logically unambiguous definition of a concept: a perennially
oscillating movement between the aesthetic contouring of a percept and the
affectively charged evocation of a moment in time in which episteme, percept
and affect might coincide once more.
In a 1988 interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, Deleuze
describes his attitude toward film using a philosophical method that recalls
Benjamin’s style of thinking:

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 Then let’s suppose there’s a third period when I worked on painting
and cinema: images, on the face of it. But I was writing philosophy
books. You see, I think concepts involve two other dimensions,
percepts and affects. That’s what interests me, not images. Percepts
aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live
on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings,
they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them
(thereby becoming someone else).17
To become someone else in living through something also means to undergo
further individuation by means of division, to become different from oneself,
to become involved in processes of living-on and survival. ‘Conceptions’ or
‘concepts’ then no longer designate logical determinations that are meant
to identify identities; they are themselves swept along by this process of
temporalization that is interwoven with sensations and interrelations. Images,
sounds, films can return as philosophy; philosophy can become images,
sounds, films.
In Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art, the cinematic masses become
a revolutionary subject precisely because they no longer represent a unified
subject, nor will they become one in the future. Benjamin’s dream is not of the
masses turning into the victorious proletariat and thereby leaving indeterminacy
behind; to the contrary, to Benjamin’s eyes the masses are what Deleuze would
describe as a formation of openness and indeterminacy that precisely therein
gains the aesthetic and political power to exercise incessant negation.

References:
1
Jürgen Habermas, “Learning from Catastrophe? A Look Back at the Short Twentieth
Century,” in The Postnational Constellation. Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, 38-57, 39.
2
This aspect is already explored by Diderot with this conception of the imaginary fourth
wall of the theatrical space; only by enabling a clear separation of the space of fiction from
the auditorium can it engender effects of immersion and aesthetic illusions that can be
experienced as aesthetic pleasure.
3
E.T.A. Hoffmann, Des Vetters Eckfenster, zitiert aus: Digitale Bibliothek, Deutsche Literatur
von Lessing bis Kafka, S.91.182 (Konkordanz Hoffmann-PW Bd.6, 745) [Hoffmann, The
Golden Pot and Other Tales, Penguin, 379]
4
Ebenda, S. [Penguin, 380]

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5
Ebenda, S. [Penguin, 380]
6
Ebenda, S. [Penguin, 383]
7
Edgar Allen Poe, The Man of The Crowd, in: ders., Poetry, Tales and Selected Essays, College
Editions. The Library of America, S.388 f.
8
Walter Benjamin, Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, in ders., Gesammelte Schriften Bd.I.2,
Frankfurt a. M. 1974, S.621 f. [Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1938–1940, 323]
9
A.a.O., S. 622 [Selected Writings, 323]
10
Gunnar Hindrichs , Der Grundgedanke in Spinozas politischer Philosophie, in:
Gunnar Hindrichs (HG.), Die Macht der Menge. Über die Aktualität einer Denkfigur Spinozas,
Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006, p.33
11
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 65-144, 78.
12
Quoted from Hätte ich das Kino, Sonderausstellungen des Schiller Nationalmuseums
Marbach a. N., ed. Bernhard Zeller (Munich: Kösel Verlang, 1976), p. 26. [Trans. DF]
13
Christian Metz: Foto, Fetisch. In: Herta Wolf (Hg.): Diskurse der Fotografie. Frankfurt a. M.
2003, S. 222. The German translation is based on the French manuscript that is not entirely
identical with the English version published as “Photography and Fetish” in: October, Vol. 34.
(Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90. The translation quoted here is made from the German version.
14
Ebenda, S. 224
15
Ebenda, S. 223
16
A noteworthy book in this context is Lesley Brill’s study Crowds, Power, and Transformation in
Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, which directly draws on Elias Canetti’s
typology of the masses; in an appendix, Brill offers a summary of, and extensive commentary
on, Canetti’s types. Brill’s seven analyses examine individual films, groups of works by
directors, and motifs that generate very different images of the masses. There has been a
recent surge in interest in the masses as an object of film-scholarly scrutiny; see e.g. Michael
Tratner, Crowd Scenes. Movies and Politics, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. The
collection of essays Masses et culture de masse dans les années trente, Régine Robin (ed.), Paris: Les
éditions ouvrières, 1991, by contrast, focuses on a specific timeframe, defining the thirties
as a hinge decade during which mass movements and directed forms of the public come to
be established in different countries and cultures.
17
Gilles Deleuze, “On Philosophy,” in Negotiations. 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 137. (First in Magazine littéraire 257 [September
1988].)

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