KENNETH S. CALHOON

THE EYE OF THE PANTHER:  RILKE AND THE MACHINE OF CINEMA

THE ASSORTED OBJECTS described in Rilke’s Neue Gedichte make up a collection whose variety and opulence are reminiscent of the Baroque, as are the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin du Luxembourg, respective settings of two of the most famous of these poems, "Der Panther" and "Das Karussell."  These and other of Rilke’s so-called "thing poems" (Dinggedichte) are fraught with a "baroque" tension between the economy of form and the unstable worldly economies that poetic closure works to exclude. Figures of precarious control, panther and carousel alike gyrate, defining an empty center that exists solely in relation to a periphery. The accelerating carousel in particular illustrates how this geometry dissolves into entropy and how the periphery threatens to triumph as empty though dazzling façade. The panther too, turning in circles on tensed loins, reveals form as energy held in reserve. It is no coincidence that these poems occur at a time when the formal dynamism of Baroque art and architecture was receiving new and unprecedented attention. This rediscovery of the Baroque projected modern anxieties onto an earlier epoch torn between containment and expansion. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Heinrich Wölfflin’s discussion of animated stone, of restless and unstable forms, and especially of a chiaroscuro that makes objects appear to leap out of the picture plane, might well have applied to the advent of cinema (ca. 1895), which placed the spectator in the path of oncoming locomotives, and whose own use of chiaroscuro helped fold the technological "monster" back into a more archaic fear of the outside. Monsters proper, such as Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, not only became commonplace in cinema but came to personify an often disquieting process of animation, a final violation of the law of beauty which, almost two centuries earlier, neoclassicism had installed as a bulwark against Baroque monstrosities. Likewise, if Rilke’s New Poems brim with classical relics, most notably a marble torso whose inner life makes itself felt as the uncanny ability to return the beholder’s gaze, his carousel, by contrast, is blind. An afterimage of Baroque spectacle as well as a proto-cinematic machine, its whirling menagerie uniquely demonstrates the crisis of modernist form.