Haunted houses of the first 20th century
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
How can we think about, and illustrate with concrete examples, the phenomenon of visual hauntings - the circulation of what Aby Warburg called "formulas of pathos" - when the thing is woven on the scale of millions of images? Our VisualContagions/Explore platform, intended to order this chaos, in fact sucks us from the first display into a world as strange and disturbing as it may seem ordinary. It is a world of ghosts from the past, sometimes close to the ghosts of today, but even more often foreign to our time.
The images pile up on our atlas. In onion rows, they follow logics generated by a blind machine -- blind but fed by the visual culture conveyed by thousands of periodicals printed all over the world.
In the spring of 2022, we had recovered three million images from the past; now, in the fall, we have collected 6.8 million. They are magically ordered according to their similarities, from the oldest to the most recent, with an idea of their places and contexts of reproduction.
Although ordered, these images all play dissonant melodies at the same time, the cacophony of which quickly becomes tiresome.
Architectures that are all more or less similar, countless portraits of unknown women wearing an immobile smile, or of men who are too serious, but so well known in their time, fans by the hundreds, photographs of forgotten landscapes, advertisements for obsolete cameras, bottles of wine, shots of cars or typewriters - can we apply to this deluge of images the calm, slow and meticulous methods of the Mnemosyne Atlas? Certainly not.
In any case, we can look for hauntings.
The analysis therefore focuses on certain more or less evanescent ghosts, on the stories they bring to light, leaving us free to project our own concerns onto the results of our work.
At the doors of the haunted house
Among the first and most numerous results of our image matching platform, building facades and portals are the most frequent. This is a nice way to start; these images, as well as being access routes to very concrete buildings, are also for us the first approach to the past world that we study through images.
These images of doors and gates arranged by the machine seem to be an invitation: come in!
Between the facades of houses, palaces and public or religious buildings, the doors of churches, the portals of private mansions and the porticoes of castles, the illustrations of the periodicals of the past were obviously concerned with questions of access. But access to what? Let's continue our visit.
The occupants
The second most common set of images in our initial results are portraits - as we saw in an earlier episode. Are they the inhabitants of the haunted house? These heads, busts, faces and postures of the past, we no longer come across in the visual productions of our time. Nor do we adopt them. Most of these faces seem fixed in the past. All of them are dead, certainly, leaving perhaps only these images as a trace. Some could barely afford to be painted, while others mingled and posed with the princes of the world; others were of sufficient interest to their time to have their portrait featured in a magazine article; others were merely the anonymous models of the artists and photographers for whom they posed.
A large part of the portraits are paintings.
A closer look at the historically typical clothing of their models, or the captions that accompany these images in the pages of the magazines that published them, also reveals that these people, if they existed, were probably all already dead when their portraits were printed.
Our past was, in fact, already living in the past.
The first twentieth century was already interested, as we still are today, in the figures that had preceded it. The inhabitants these portraits tell us about were perhaps not so much those who lived in the buildings of our prints, as the ghosts of those homes.
Rather than bringing together for us the successful images of the first twentieth century, the Explore platform thus makes us discover their flaws; and first of all, the one that Nietzsche contemptuously called historicism[1].
"On the Utility and Disadvantage of Historical Studies for Life," a text written by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1874, advocates a proper balance between historical consciousness and forgetting the past, in favor of a greater ability of individuals to make history and act in the present. When he attacks his own era for being too much (or badly) oriented towards the past, however, Nietzsche suggests that modern printing techniques and the multiplication of testimonies about the past are pushing people to paralysis. The man of the 19th century, whom he castigates, "is constantly offered the spectacle of a World's Fair. He has become a wandering and enjoying spectator, transported in conditions that great wars or great revolutions could hardly change for a moment. A war is not over when it is already transformed into printed paper, multiplied to a hundred thousand copies, and presented as a new stimulant to the tired gullet of the man eager for history [2].".
Nietzsche then praises "blindness". Wasn't the solution precisely the fact to not see anything anymore, to not undergo the accumulation of memories and the images that feed them?
It is possible that all these images of the past of the past testify not only to a too strong interest in history, but also to something else. Continuing the exploration of the most frequent images of our corpus, the haunted house is discovered a little more, and in particular by its interiors.
Dreamed interiors of the past
A wall of wallpaper, a table and a few pieces of furniture, a chandelier on the ceiling, carpets on the floor - it is the same type of furnishings that in the nineteenth and first twentieth centuries circulated between the magazines of Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, New York, Munich, Amsterdam and Brussels, as far as Halle, Hamburg, Toulouse and Madrid. There is, here, a globalization; perhaps not so much of images as of ways of life.
People used chairs for conversation; they did not sit on the floor; they ate sitting down, on plates, with cutlery; they all slept in beds. The images in our corpus obviously speak of a Western culture whose unity is not to be questioned, despite its diversity. The illustrated periodicals speak first of all of the practices of the people who publish them.
But more than common interiors, or real lifestyles, the images probably also indicate many dreams and desires.
The interiors reproduced from one magazine to another - their captions testify to this, as do the longer texts that accompany them - are interiors to be rented, bought, imitated, envied - images of desire and for desire.
In Berlin in 1924, furniture sets were offered for sale (Fig. 1), or four years earlier, the layout of the Reial Aeri Club in Barcelona, to which only an elite could gain access (Fig. 2).
Some illustrations even bring back images of theater sets - such as this view of Act II of the play Le réveil, reproduced by the Parisian magazine L’art du Théatre in 1906. The West of the past dreamed of itself in princely interiors. It is perhaps initially by these dreams that the Western territories were known of those which had never visited them.
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Fig. 1. Der Kunstwanderer, Berlin, 1924
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Fig. 2.
Haunted houses make a lot of noise.
The instruments are numerous - organs, harps, guitars, accordeons. Add to this the liners, Zeppelin et and automobiles in great numbers: the house is as much a beehive as a haunted castle.
The visual hauntings of the past speak as much about the living conditions of the past (the buildings, their facades and their interiors), about the characters of the past, as about their past (monuments, historical characters (or not), old styles staged in the interiors...) or about their dreams. When the images multiply and repeat themselves before our eyes, they actually make us feel that the past was alive. And that the printers from which the periodicals that we are dealing with came out were making archives as well as objects of desire.
Notes
[1] Voir Jacques Le Rider, « Oubli, mémoire, histoire dans la « Deuxième Considération inactuelle » », Revue germanique internationale [En ligne], 11 | 1999, mis en ligne le 21 septembre 2011, consulté le 19 octobre 2022. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rgi/725 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.725
[2] Frédéric Nietzsche, Considérations inactuelles, T.1, "De l'utilité et de l'inconvénient des études historiques pour la vie", Paris, Mercure de France, 1907-1922, trad. Henri Albert, p. 171.