From the Photogeny of Poverty to the Cinegeny of Money

Abstract

This article analyzes changes in the relationship between society and money that are not yet reflected in economic and social theory but have already manifested in cinematic images. Interpreting the railway-station theft sequence from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the author highlights money as a special privileged object in cinema, where two concepts of cinematic photogeny converge. The first understands photogeny as an object’s attractiveness manifesting exclusively on the screen (Louis Delluc), and the second as the eradication of the object and the disclosure of speed, movement, and impulses generated by the very nature of cinema (Jean Epstein sometimes called this “photogeny” and sometimes “cinegeny”). This article shows that early cinema dealt constantly with money, which, being an unphotogenic object, nevertheless revealed a “photogeny of poverty,” expressed in sentimentality (sympathy for the oppressed) and in cruelty (injustice manifested in the world of capital). Moreover, “poverty” was inherent in the very earliest cinema, which was characterized by a lack of visual aids (sound and color). Once cinema acquires its pictorial plenitude (what Gilles Deleuze calls its optical-aural situation), the attitude toward money changes. It ceases to be a sign of poverty or injustice, becoming instead an attraction that introduces the viewer to the cinematic world of deception, theft, and fraud. The cinegeny of money establishes its imprescriptibility from the world of modern media, which prompts us to view money neither as an object nor as an economic tool, but as an element of the modern world, not unlike the pre-Socratic fire, air, or number.