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I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.
- Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra1
Every kind of media of recording gets its moment in Hitchcock's films, but is always subordinated to the designs of cinema. There is the auction house and the monumental sculpture in North By Northwest. There are acrobats, an LP record and concerts in The Man Who Knew Too Much. There's fireworks and fancy dress in To Catch a Thief.
- McKenzie Wark,
"Vectoral Cinema"2
As Nietzsche put it, man is "a rope over an abyss," stretched between animal and "Übermensch." Brandon in Patrick Hamilton's theatrical version of Rope cites Nietzsche as the sponsor of adventure and danger. His name is not mentioned in Hitchcock's film. . . . Taut, tensed, that rope can be extended into a trapeze. The character played by Grant in To Catch a Thief is a veteran of the high wire.
- Peter Conrad,
The Hitchcock Murders*
Reading "Nietzsche" by way of media and the tele-archival era today raises issues about the political spell of the present, the mediacratic trance of a coming post- democratic era for which, perhaps, the "'global' war on terror" - without temporal or geographic horizon, a double chase of a specter that accelerates the self-canceling of an archival program (economic, ecological, and profoundly biopolitical). It might choose to pass by way of Walter Benjamin's remarks on the advent of cinema. By implying that the phenomenal world would be generated from mnemonic programs, Benjamin identifies in the cinematic event something like a model for historical intervention that he will finally name, by his practiced inversion of terms, "materialistic historiography." This early entanglement between Benjamin's revision of The Birth of Tragedy* in his Trauerspiel and "cinema" recalls that the "birth" of theater and discourse out of what is called the "spirit or ghost [Geist] of music" in Nietzsche's tract mimes something like a genealogy of media, the emergence of semiosis programming sense and the sensorium. While I will return to this later, The Birth performs an inversion of classical aesthetics that has long been avoided yet that cinema covertly exemplifies. Rather than "represent" or index in the mimetological sense, as though...