Historical Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter discusses the emergence of modern speed politics. Cinema, the most innovative medium of the early twentieth century, created a captivating visual imaginary for the energizing yet frightening experience of modern speed politics. Two of the most iconic films of the Weimar period—Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Fritz Lang's Metropolis—explored the city as a site of a contradictory modernity. On the one hand, these films celebrate modern technologies, the pleasure of speed, and the visual stimuli unleashed by a world that is constantly in motion; on the other hand, however, they bring into view the uncontrollable effects of a runaway world in which machines begin to transform human behavior. Released in 1927, both films created a striking visual aesthetic of urban modernity that exploited the technical opportunities of film to new effect. Meanwhile, from the 1870s, psychologists, philosophers, writers, and artists addressed the urgent question as to whether and how the modern subject would cope with the rate of change and the experience of social and technological acceleration. Attention, distraction, lateness, and slowness emerged as central tropes in a far-ranging discourse that foregrounded the precariousness of modern subjectivity, while also exploring modern reactions and coping mechanisms.