In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTHENTICITY VS. ARTIFICIALITY
People are obsessed with seeing things as either authentic or artificial.
This absolute distinction seems to stem from a widespread insecurity
concerning the status of nature-not only nature as environment but also
nature as a norm for different modes of human life. Even a book as
academic as I. A. Richards' Science and Poetry evokes the problems
arising from this insecurity: "Day by day, in recent years, man is getting
more out of place in Nature-in the Nature which his ancient habitus of
thought formed for him. Where he is going to he does not yet know, he
has not yet decided. As a consequence he finds life more and more
bewildering, more and more difficult to live coherently" (Richards, 18).
For Siegfried Kracauer, this experience is symbolized by film studios-by
their clutter of random objects and the welter of scenes they produce.
Disorder then becomes an emblem for the prevailing state of contemporary
reality. Artificiality, however, is not disorder itself but the reconfiguration
of its elements into stories and plots that are not perceived as
unnatural: "There are many scenes, stuck next to one another like the
tiles of a mosaic. Instead of leaving the world in its fragmented state, one
is pulled back into it. With film, these pieces are newly reassembled, their
isolation eradicated and their grimace smoothed away. From out of the
tomb, they awaken to a semblance of life" (Kracauer, 277-278). A more
conventional way of describing the same impression is the motif of
mankind's growing isolation within nature-the main theme of Maurice
Maeterlinck's scientific-philosophical novel La vie des termites. The evo-
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