Introduction

In the last chapter, I argued that Ruttmann's cross-sectional montage functioned above all as a means of ordering the images of the world that proliferated in the visual media of the 1920s according to a “statistical” epistemology, one that suggested higher laws even as it acknowledged the particular and the idiosyncratic. As we saw, such a project, while lending itself to the immediate goal of an advertisement for world cruises, also resonated with broader questions of Weimar modernism and with a broader understanding of film as a medium existing at the border between contingency and order. But statistics was not only a conceptual or epistemological tool of mass modernity; like experimental psychology, it was also a mode of knowledge created and practiced within a horizon of applications. More specifically, it was bound up with what Foucault has famously called “governmentality,” the modern form of power that conceives of mass society as a “population” with its own laws and regularities (birth and death rates, rates of disease, economic activities, etc.). If statistics offered the central means of conceptualizing such biopolitical phenomena, it always operated within a horizon of applications meant to influence them: of private and public campaigns for increasing birth rates, curbing alcoholism, reducing disease and “degeneration,” enhancing public whealth and welfare, avoiding accidents, “directing the flow of population into certain regions or activities,” etc. As Ian Hacking puts it: “Statistics may think of itself as providing only information, but it is itself part of the technology of power in a modern state.” With the emergence of biopolitics, statistics became the key intermediary within a power relation no longer conceived of in terms of sovereign rights, but rather in terms of a population to be guided and influenced.

Given the horizon of applicability in which statistics operated, it should hardly come as a surprise that a filmmaker such as Ruttmann, whose filmic experiments drew upon such forms of expertise, would employ “statistical montage” to fashion film as a tool for biopolitical intervention. He did this, from the beginning of the 1930s on, through a number of sponsored “cultural films” (Kulturfilme), including FEIND IM BLUT (ENEMY IN THE BLOOD, 1931), BLUT UND BODEN. GRUNDLAGEN ZUM NEUEN REICH (BLOOD AND SOIL. FOUNDATIONS FOR THE NEW REICH, 1933), ABERGLAUBE (SUPERSTITION, 1940) and EIN FILM GEGEN DIE VOLKSKRANKHEIT KREBS (A FILM AGAINST THE EPIDEMIC OF CANCER, 1941).